The other option was that Rutte could have bought alibis for the times; if that was the case then Jaap figured he might as well know now, and start the work of breaking them down.
Rutte shrugged. ‘I’d have to check my diary, y’know?’
‘I think,’ said the lawyer leaning forward, pushing the photos away so he could lean his forearms on the desk, ‘we’re getting ahead of ourselves here a bit. My client doesn’t have anything to do with any of this; you’ve got the wrong man.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Jaap. ‘I know he was in charge of the grow operation.’
‘I don’t have an “operation”,’ said Rutte, making air quotes with his fingers, even though his hands were cuffed on the table.
‘My client,’ said the lawyer, reaching down to his ankle where a briefcase rested, ‘runs an entertainment venue in De Wallen. Here are the documents which show he is a partner in the business.’
Jaap took the sheets from the lawyer.
‘And this proves what?’ said Jaap, having glanced through the pile.
‘That my client is in full-time employment, and so can’t have been running a cannabis-growing operation.’
Jaap dropped the papers on to the table, smiled at them both.
‘This the best you got?’ he asked.
Silence.
Staring.
The smell of the lawyer’s expensive aftershave and the hum of an overhead light.
‘Good,’ said Jaap. ‘Because I’ve got something else to add to the charge sheet as well; the murder of a homeless woman at Centraal station.’
Tanya had told Jaap about her hunch and they’d checked the CCTV image last night. It wouldn’t stand up in court – his face wasn’t visible – but the hair and build were very similar. And if Tanya’s theory was correct – that the woman had somehow been spying on Rutte’s operation and selling the information on to Teeven – then it would make sense that Rutte would want her dead as well.
Rutte beckoned to his lawyer, who leaned towards him. The lawyer nodded after Rutte had whispered in his ear.
‘I was with someone, a friend of mine. We were away fishing all weekend down near Gouda,’ Rutte said, pointing to Jaap’s list and looking straight at him.
‘Really?’ said Jaap. ‘What took you so long?’
Rutte shrugged. ‘Guess I didn’t seriously think you’d imagine I was involved.’
‘So you’re denying that you had anything to do with these three deaths?’
‘You’re wasting time hassling innocent people like me when you could be out there catching real criminals,’ said Rutte.
The footsteps were back; they stopped outside the door.
The lawyer checked his watch.
The door opened. Smit was standing outside. He beckoned to Jaap.
Jaap didn’t like the look on his face. He got up from the table and stepped out, closing the door behind him.
‘What’s up?’
‘Message from Pieter van Dael. The Romanian man is dead.’
Jaap breathed out and leaned back against the wall.
‘How?’ he managed after a few seconds.
‘He got into a fight with someone in the holding cell and cracked his head against the bars as he went down.’
Jaap walked back into the room.
Rutte was smiling.
45
Monday, 10 May
07.41
Tanya stood by the window and thought there was something wrong with her eyes. Their focus wasn’t great, and she blinked them a few times.
Is this because of the pot?
She felt a flash of panic, before it slowly dawned on her; her vision was being distorted by rain hitting the window.
Nothing was right this morning. She didn’t even know why she was standing at the window, and she didn’t really remember getting out of bed and walking across the apartment to where she was now.
She could just make out the gold sickle moon placed on top of the mosque she passed every day on her way to the ferry, its walls covered in turquoise tiles. She turned her head, feeling sick, wondering if it was an after-effect of the two joints she’d smoked or the fact that she’d told Kees about Staal.
All those years the secret had eaten away at her. She was no longer who she could have been. She’d never told anyone before.
Now she had, and to Kees, of all people.
Regret seeped through her body.
Why had she not told Jaap? Was it because she was afraid he’d reject her when he found out what had happened?
She’d heard that unburdening yourself of a deep secret could help, the act of telling another human being what you’d been through could be cathartic, but she wasn’t feeling cathartisized, or whatever the word was. If anything she felt worse.
But that, she had to acknowledge, was probably something to do with what she’d done afterwards.
Why did you sleep with him? her brain demanded as she started moving, finally, and passed the spot where they’d done it. She averted her gaze as she walked past.
In the bathroom she ran the tap, letting the water run over her forefinger, waiting for it to get warm.
The mirror threw back her red eyes.
Jesus, she thought. I look as bad as I feel.
She thought back to the moment she’d pulled him to her, how he’d held back at first, but had then taken over. They’d done it up against the wall by the front door, the cream plastic entryphone right by her ear. She’d had a wild image of it going off, and her answering, Jaap’s voice coming over the phone.
The weird thing was it had made it even more exciting.
And she didn’t want to think about why that was.
The water was still not running warm, let alone hot, so she cupped her hands and splashed her face, the cold sting making her gasp. She dried her skin on a towel which had lost its softness about five years ago but she’d just never got round to replacing, and went back to the bedroom to get dressed.
Telling Kees had done something though: it had made her more determined than ever to confront the man who’d caused her so much pain, and as she pulled on some fresh jeans she stared at her tattoo – the two-headed snake she’d got when she’d finally escaped from Staal, one of the heads destroyed by the bullet wound she’d sustained last January – and started to plan how she was going to do it.
On the kitchen table her phone rang. She checked the screen and saw it was Jaap.
Guilt ruptured her stomach.
She should have told Jaap, not Kees.
She should have been sleeping with Jaap, not Kees.
What am I doing? she thought as she answered.
‘Hey, where are you?’ he asked.
‘Home. Something up?’ she said, hearing it in his voice.
‘Rutte had the Romanian who was going to testify against him killed. I can’t prove it, but I know he did it.’
‘Shit …’ she breathed out.
‘And he says he was with someone, a friend of his, all Saturday evening. I’m sure it’s some bullshit alibi, but it needs to be checked out.’
Tanya closed her eyes; the last thing she had right now was time.
Knowing what Kees’ involvement in her case was had only complicated things.
She was going to have to make a decision. But she didn’t like her options, and she had to brief Smit in a few hours’ time. Which would be the time to tell him about Kees.
And if it hadn’t been complicated enough before, what she’d done last night put it off the charts.
‘Yeah, I’ve got time,’ she said, knowing she was just putting off the inevitable. ‘What do you need?’
She listened as Jaap gave her the details, and she told him she’d report back as soon as she found out anything. All the time they were talking she kept thinking of what she and Kees had done, wondering how Jaap would react, hoping she’d never get to find out. By the time she hung up she felt like being sick.
Outside a car was revving, a deep throaty ro
ar repeated again and again. She went back to the window and looked down just as the car, a red middle-age-crisis-mobile, finally moved away. She’d not seen it parked in the street before and wondered what it was doing there.
As it turned the corner and disappeared she realized she’d been making a mental note of the number plate.
Seems like pot still makes me paranoid, she thought as she prepared to leave.
This was official business so she should be taking a car, but to get one she’d have to catch the ferry over to the city centre and sign one out of the station.
She decided on her bike. She’d not ridden it in ages, and as the address she’d got from Jaap wasn’t far away, this was her chance.
As she fired up the motor and started out, the mechanical purr comforting somehow, she wondered if she could just keep on going.
Ride away and never come back.
46
Monday, 10 May
08.17
Kees’ morning was being complicated by several things, and his head wasn’t able to cope, pain saturating the area round his left temple.
The first complication was that he was driving fast, way too fast, but he didn’t seem able to slow down; he felt gripped, locked in, like the accelerator had been glued to the floor and the brake deactivated.
His hand reached out, fumbling for the window button on the car door. His finger eventually found it, the fresh morning air ramming against his face as the glass dropped down. He hoped that would help clear things out a bit. Spots of rain hammered into his face and he was forced to close it again.
He found he was still going at speed.
When he’d received the call this morning, the man at the garage from Saturday giving him a possible lead on Krilic, and therefore Isovic, he’d jumped in the car and got going.
He knew he’d been taken off the case, Smit had made that quite clear in the debrief/bollocking session he’d had to endure, but this wasn’t about the case so much as wanting to get back at Isovic. He’d been fucked over by him, and Kees thought a little payback was in order. And he’d also figured if he could bring him in now then it might at least go some way to mitigating the second complication.
Which was that Tanya had worked out he’d placed the calls to the homeless woman.
The woman who’d managed to end up dead.
The woman who was his only link to finding Paul.
He’d had to tell Tanya what had gone on, hoping she’d be able to keep quiet. But he saw now that was going to be difficult for her to do.
Not for the first time he thought about how stupid he’d been to let himself get into debt in the first place. If he got through this then maybe he’d give those meetings Jaap had sent him to another go.
Chances of getting through this without being fired, thought Kees as he swerved, avoiding a truck which thought it owned the road, near to zero.
Wipers sluiced water manically, fighting a losing battle.
Not that it really matters, he thought, in the long term.
His thoughts funnelled down a route he didn’t want them to go, towards the third thing, towards what was happening to him, the disease which was slowly taking hold, creeping through his body.
Changing him from what he was into something he didn’t want to be.
He wound the window right down again and screamed into the wind and rain until his throat was raw.
By the time he hit the outskirts of Haarlem he was feeling more stable; his thoughts were more under control and he’d managed to reduce his speed to a level which would merely be considered dangerous.
He wondered again if bringing in Isovic could be used to help against the fact he’d been passing information on to criminals.
He thought not. And he knew that Tanya didn’t have a choice; she couldn’t keep what she knew secret. Which brought him on to yet another thing which was complicating his morning. And this was the one which was really burning a hole in his stomach.
Tanya’s foster father.
He’d got the joints as he’d figured he might be able to find out how much Tanya knew, find out if he was in danger or not. There was no way he’d been expecting her to break down and tell him things.
Things which he couldn’t get out of his head.
Things which didn’t just make him angry; they made him thermonuclear.
He’d listened to Tanya’s story, all the while trying to contain himself. And he’d realized something as she told him.
That despite the fact he’d tried to ignore it, he really liked her, and the way she’d dropped him all those years ago at the academy had hurt more than he’d admitted to himself.
Now he knew why she’d done it.
And after what she’d been through he could hardly blame her.
The fucker, thought Kees. If I ever get to meet him …
By the time he made it to Haarlem itself morning traffic was snarling up the roads and he had to part the wall of cars in front of him with the siren to make it to the garage. As the cars moved out of his way he had a flash of some religious guy parting a sea of metal.
He left the car in the forecourt and made his way to the back office where he’d been two days ago.
The same man was behind the same desk.
‘You said you know where Isovic is,’ said Kees.
The man nodded, fiddling a grease-covered bolt between his fingers.
‘I think maybe.’
‘Okay, so where maybe?’ said Kees.
The man put down the bolt and handed Kees a folded piece of paper, his fingers smudging its clean whiteness.
Kees opened it, looked at the address. It was on Oude Schans, just round the corner from the canal district’s main police station.
‘And why now?’
The man shrugged.
‘I don’t want trouble,’ he said, picking up the bolt again. He fished out a nut from a drawer and tried to screw them together. They weren’t compatible.
‘You should have told me this two days ago—’
‘No, I only know this now. I find out. For you.’
Kees looked at him. Had the guy taken his threat seriously? For a moment he almost felt bad.
But there wasn’t room left for any more bad feeling. And his head was really starting to kick off.
‘How sure are you he’s there?’
‘He’s there, I been told he’s there.’
Back on the road Kees felt like he should call Tanya. He pulled out his phone and hit dial. Then he shut down the call.
The thing is, he thought as he dropped the phone into his lap, what can I say? What can I say that’ll make any difference at all?
47
Monday, 10 May
08.28
‘Yeah, he works here,’ said the guy in answer to Tanya’s question. ‘Or rather he doesn’t. He runs the place.’
On the ride over she’d thought more about Kees, his involvement in her case. Kees had been stupid, letting himself get blackmailed, and she’d been wondering what had pushed him to compromise himself so badly. Was it just the drugs – was addiction that strong, overriding any kind of self-preservation? Or was there something else driving it?
‘Great. I need to talk to him.’
She’d found the place on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Amsterdam, a large mass of concrete buildings with corrugated-iron roofs showing various degrees of wear.
As she’d turned into the road a fox had darted in front of her bike.
She’d swerved and nearly lost control.
Now she was standing in the building’s entrance, walls of breeze block laid on a polished concrete floor. Two doors led out of the room, one going further into the building, from which she could hear the clink of bottles as they sped down a bottling line, and one with a glass window leading back out to the parking lot. The guy she was talking to was wearing a hairnet and a white overall.
A lorry pulled into the lot behind her. It looked like a petrol tanker but the wording on the side said
JUICE CONCENTRATES.
‘Ahh … that might be difficult,’ said the guy, watching the tanker as it turned in a large circle and started reversing back towards the building, beeping as it did so.
Tanya pulled the door shut, but it didn’t make much difference; the truck was still visible through the glass pane and the beeping wasn’t much quieter.
‘Why?’
‘I’ve not seen him today,’ said the guy, mid-fifties, stubble going grey, and a paunch that not even the loose white lab coat could hide.
She noticed he wasn’t looking at her eyes. Then again he’d not looked at them since she’d first stepped through the door; he’d trained them on her breasts, held tight in her bike leathers, and was keeping them there.
I guess he’s not getting any at home, thought Tanya. He’s just another dirty old man. Like Staal.
‘What time does he usually get in?’
‘Depends. And it’s not really my job to keep track of him,’ he said, still not making eye contact. ‘Plus, he gets to go in the swanky entrance, not get his feet dirty.’
The tanker had stopped beeping, and she watched as a man in overalls attached a large tube to a fitting on the back end. He then waved to someone she couldn’t see inside, jammed a lever sideways and a few seconds later the tube jerked, pulsing as the liquid flowed inside.
The man pointed out the way she needed to go, and she skirted the building, finding the entrance he’d talked about.
It turned out he was in, and a few minutes later Tanya walked into his office on the second floor, accessed by a metal walkway suspended over the main bottling hall. She’d had to wear a white hairnet; the receptionist had insisted for health and safety.
The man who let her in closed the door behind her, softening the sound of machinery. He was also wearing a hairnet, even though he was totally bald.
‘Stupid, I know,’ he said as he showed Tanya to a seat. ‘But we get unannounced inspections and the rule book says everyone has to wear one …’
His laugh sounded forced to Tanya.
Into the Night: Inspector Rykel Book 2 (Amsterdam Quartet) Page 18