Wolf Angel

by Mark Hobson

Houseboat

  On occasion the two of them would head for the Western Islands for an amble around the old boatyards and wooden bridges which was fast becoming one of the up-and-coming parts of Amsterdam to live in. Or perhaps they would go down Singel to pop into Greenwoods English Café close to where Pieter lived.

  But today, even though it looked like it was set to be a nice and warm morning, Pieter was in a hurry and so had to call around on a flying visit by car, before doubling back to Police HQ over on Elandsgracht. On his way over he hurried into Albert Heijn, the small spar shop on the corner, to grab a few essentials for his dad.

  Parking his car in the parking bay on the far side of the road, Pieter skipped across, avoiding the cyclists scooting by, and bounced his way down the narrow gangplank. He let himself in with his own set of keys, hearing the morning news on the TV before he passed through into the boat’s living area.

  Dad was up – still in his pyjamas, but at least awake and in the land of the living, which these days was a bonus. He was slouched on the old couch, eating a slice of toasted French bread and drinking coffee.

  “Hi pops,” Pieter said with a slightly exaggerated gaiety (it was important always to appear positive with dad these days)

  “Son,” dad mumbled between bites, nodding at the TV. “How much do you reckon her teeth cost her?”

  Pieter glanced at the glamourous female news-anchor on the TV set, the one his dad had a crush on, the few perks that the randy old goat had. “More than my retirement fund probably,” he replied, stepping across to the kitchen area and taking the eggs, milk and croissants out of the carrier bag, noticing when he opened the fridge that dad was low on appelstroop. As he unpacked, he glanced down the narrow corridor towards the small bedroom at the end, seeing that the door was open. It seemed that Famke, dad’s lady friend, wasn’t around, which was always a relief. Famke, who was around about sixty he thought, although her wrinkled and haggard face made her appear much, much older, was a bad influence. Like his dad, she was an alcoholic, and although his dad was currently on the wagon having her about the place regularly was sometimes too much of a temptation for his old man. Their friendship was a sore point between father and son, and had resulted in too many blazing rows, but dad insisted on letting her pop over and occasionally staying the night. But thankfully there was no sign of her today.

  Pieter went back into the living area and handed the morning paper to his dad. Hansje turned straight to the sports page, a lit cigarette now in his mouth, checking the soccer results and grumbling, ash spilling down his pyjama top. Pieter noted the ashtray, which was one of those cheap plastic ones that his dad had stolen from a pub years ago, was filled to overflowing.

  Standing there and looking around at the mess, the threadbare rug and the dying plants, the plate of half-eaten supper from the night before on the coffee table, the grimy windows and so on, his dad looking all bony and shrivelled up with his grey hair and stubbly, unshaved chin, Pieter felt an almost overwhelming feeling of sadness. He sagged inside, and a bone-deep weariness of the soul gripped him.

  He glanced across to the wall by the small, round porthole, and at the framed photo there. It was a group shot of dad and his army buddies, all proud and healthy men in their uniforms with their blue UN Peacekeeping berets on. The photo had been taken at a Dutch base near the town of Potocari in Bosnia Herzegovina sometime in early 1995.

  Just a few months before Srebrenica.

  Driving over to the main police headquarters which was situated at the south end of the Jordaan district, Pieter pressed the button that lowered the side-window, the morning breeze ridding his nostrils of the stale smell of dad’s place. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as he navigated his way slowly through the morning cyclists and trams.

  Srebrenica. It always came back to Srebrenica.

  Pieter had only been around twelve years old at the time, and back then hadn’t really known too much about the whole mess. But what he did know was that when his dad had left as part of a six month tour to the hell-hole of war-torn Bosnia his dad had been a happy and carefree person, a loving husband, and the best father in the world. But he had returned a wreck of a man, an empty shell, a weak person who was prone to angry outbursts and bouts of heavy drinking and petty crime. Whatever he’d experienced out there had changed him seemingly overnight, until the boozing and violence first of all ended his marriage, and then for many years drove an irreparable wedge between father and son. He’d been unable to hold down a steady job after leaving the army, had drifted from rented home to rented home, hated everyone and everything around him, resulting in long periods in rehab for the drinking, not to mention a spell in prison for assaulting a gay guy inside Prik Nightclub (dad refused ever to explain why he was there in the first place). For nigh on fifteen years he had drifted through life as a total messed up alcoholic, before finally Pieter and his dad had reconciled following mum’s death, and Pieter was at last able to get him the help he needed. But even now, all of these years later, life for the two of them was a constant struggle with Pieter forever on guard for dad’s latest relapse (which happened frequently).

  But the ghosts from Bosnia never truly left him. It was obvious to Pieter those demons would be an ever-present shadow in both of their lives. Put simply, Srebrenica had seared his dad’s soul.

  He tried to shake off his melancholic mood about his father by listening to some music on his playlist, and when he finally pulled into the parking spot reserved for him by the side of the police building he had succeeded in putting aside his family concerns, at least temporarily.

  Walking around to the front of the large brick building Pieter entered by the main entrance, was buzzed in by the desk sergeant, and then headed up the stairs to the top floor, using his key card at each security door he passed through. Passing the desks in the main squad room Pieter entered his tiny corner office, booted up his PC and made a coffee whilst waiting.

  Just as he was sitting down and taking his first sip Sergeant Daan Beumers poked his head around the doorframe. Pieter saw he was still wearing the same clothes from last night. “You want the bad news first, or the even badder news?” he asked.

  “Let me guess. Our lottery syndicate came up with a winning number, but you forgot to put it on?”

  “I said bad news, not catastrophic news.” He moved into the office, lifted a pile of files off the spare chair beside the door and dumped them haphazardly onto the long table in the corner. Beumers sat with a groan, and then fished out a small note book from his breast pocket and flicked to the relevant page. When it came to smart phones or iPads Beumers was a bit of a wiz, but occasionally he still preferred the old-fashioned methods of being a copper.

  “Anyway boss, we still don’t have anything concrete on the girl’s identity other than what I messaged you last night. Everybody just knew her as Mila. Her pimp did tell us she was 22 years old but the girl in the next door room who was quite close to her has just revealed that she was actually 19, so underage since the law was changed. Also, she’d been working since she arrived from wherever about a year ago, so that makes her even younger when he first pimped her. But it’s fairly certain that she’s from Eastern Europe. All of the black girls work over past Oude Kerk and all of the trannies tend to congregate across towards Nieuwmarkt. Trompettersteeg is where all the stunners are put, and our Mila was said to be a real looker even by the usual standards in that alley. Not that you could tell last night, obviously,” he finished quietly.

  Pieter said nothing, just blew across the top of his steaming coffee.

  “Anyway, we checked the CCTV,” Beumers went on more brightly.

  Pieter looked up.

  “But the fuckers were switched off. The blokes over at Durty Nellies claim they were down for maintenance – at midnight? – but more likely they were just cutting down on costs as those cams are paid for by the girls’ enforcers rather than the coffers at city council. So basically we have nothing on film. And no witnesses, or at
least nobody willing to come forward and speak, which is nothing new I guess.”

  “What about inside the room itself?” Pieter asked quietly, opening up the file from last night’s murder on his computer.

  “Boss?”

  “Hidden cameras placed in her room? Usually right close to the bed? Some of the pimps put them in without the girls and their clients knowing, and they live-stream it over the internet.”

  “Really? Fuck me. How much does that cost?” Beumers enquired.

  “They accept payment by direct debit if you’re interested,” Pieter told him mischievously. “Anyway, check it out.”

  He leaned forward and started scrolling through the file, quickly skimming the crime scene photos that had been downloaded overnight, until he found the one’s of the writing on the wall near the end of the small alleyway. He motioned his colleague across, who came around the desk to get a better look, pocketing his notebook.

  “We need to do a database check on this. Run it through ViCASnl to see if any links crop up.” He referred to the Netherlands’ new police software system, which was a powerful search engine that scoured every police crime report for similarities, whether it be weapons, types of injuries or victims, DNA and fingerprints, messages, vehicle matches, geographical links and a whole gamut of other stuff that the crime eggheads could come up with. ViCASnl stood for Violent Crime Analysis System (Netherlands) and was based on the FBI model, and was a relatively new concept on this side of the Atlantic. Pieter tapped the screen, thinking aloud. “This must mean something to someone,” he said, indicating the strange symbol. “And this here,” he pointed at the word werewolf in the message, “this suggests one person, the way it’s worded – Beware, Werewolf is watching – see if anything gets flagged up.”

  “How wide a search do you want?” Beumers asked.

  “European-wide. Ask our friends at Interpol to run a similar search on their system.” He sat back in his chair. “And bring her pimp in. Squeeze his balls and see if he reacts, at the very least he’s looking at five years for sex-trafficking and pimping out an underage girl, so see if you can use that as leverage. Also get those CCTV guys over here. It seems just too much of a coincidence that those security cameras were down at the exact time our guy was killing Mila. Either that, or he just had the luckiest break ever.”

  “You know, I just don’t get that,” Beumers told him, rubbing the back of his neck to ease the tenseness in his muscles. “Whoever did that to that girl, the stuff we saw, they’d have to be covered head-to-foot in blood. Literally dripping in it. Cameras or no cameras, somebody would have to spot a guy looking all messed like that, running through the streets. The place was packed with people. They’d be a trail of blood leading us right the way to the bastard’s front door.”

  “Yeah. We could put out an appeal for any members of the public to check their mobile phone or camcorder footage, see if anybody caught anything or anyone suspicious. But I don’t want to go down that route yet.” Pieter hit the print key on the computer to start printing out the crime scene pics. As the printer over on the long table whirred to life he asked: “Was there much on the news today? I wasn’t really paying much attention on the way over.”

  “A brief mention on the local TV channel, but no real details, just that the police are dealing with a suspicious death in De Wallen. Fucking suspicious? More like mysterious.”

  “Well let’s keep things low-key for now. I want to keep that message and symbol as hold-back evidence. Let’s just prey no members of the public noticed it amongst all of the graffiti, otherwise all of the crackpot copycats will be busy.”

  Pieter walked over to the printer and took out the sheaf of papers, and glanced through them with a grimace.

  “You know, what you said a moment ago? About the killer been drenched in blood and what he did to her? That to me didn’t feel like a first-kill. Most first time murders are fairly mundane, sometimes even accidental. Maybe an argument that went too far, or a crime of passion, perhaps just a single stab wound, before the murderer flees in a panic. But last night, that took time. You’d have to be very cool to spend maybe an hour or two butchering a person like that, knowing there are throngs of people walking past just a few feet away. It certainly doesn’t feel like the behaviour of someone taking a human life for the very first time.”

  Beumers took a moment for the implications of that to sink in. Then he remarked, “yeah, but if that was his first victim, what the hell is coming next?”

  CHAPTER 4

  MR SNAKEHIPS

  Oliver Monroe was jiving and jitterbugging his way down Warmoesstraat, feeling like the man, and out looking for some pussy to grind.

  Earlier at his hotel, which was conveniently positioned right beside Centraal Station, he had snorted some charlie to help stimulate his libido, and then on the walk over here he had scored a bit of angel dust from one of the tsk tsk drug dealers, sprinkling it on his spliff to inhale the rocket fuel directly into his system. The combination helped to mellow his mind but also to leave him highly sexed up almost to bursting point, and this floaty and disconnected sensation just on the edge of feeling trippy made the night around him dazzle and shine, so that the lights from the bars and the music and chatter pinged around inside his mind, and the paving stones glowed like in the Michael Jackson Billie Jean music video.

  Oliver was from London, and every two months his work called for a quick flight across to Amsterdam for face-to-face round-table conferences with the execs who paid his wages as a broker. The meetings usually lasted about a couple of hours, short enough for him to catch the evening flight back to Gatwick. However, Oliver always ensued that these trips involved a one-night stopover, which his very generous expenses paid for. And so, after a short call home to the wife in their Maida Vale apartment to assure her how much he loved her and their ten month old baby girl, the evenings inevitably found him out enjoying everything that Amsterdam’s infamous nightlife had to offer.

  What happened in Amsterdam stays in Amsterdam.

  Oliver had visited quite a few of the world’s sex capitals. In Bangkok on holiday with his then fiancé, he’d managed to blag an evening by himself once when Jessica had been feeling unwell, and he’d headed straight for the Soi Cowboy district with its notorious girly bars. Naturally he had indulged himself fully (except the pre-teen kiddies, which didn’t really float his boat) and had found himself drifting through the streets, the warm and sultry night seeming to add to the sleazy nature of the place, everybody hot and sweaty, his clothes sticking to his body, the girls sitting on his lap and wriggling their cute asses. Years earlier he had gone along on a stag weekend to Ibiza with a bunch of friends from The City, and on both nights they had gone to Space nightclub, the largest nightclub in the world. With its 10,000 person capacity, the drugs and dance music throbbing through his veins, watching the sex show underneath the huge glass-domed roof, he had been buzzing and lusting at the women until seven in the morning. But for him, for the variety of experiences on offer, with every perverted taste catered for, plus the coffee-shops and the stunning-looking girls and the edgy feel to the red light district, nothing quite beat Amsterdam. It was the Sin City. And even better, it was only a 45 minute flight from the UK! Perfect for a bit of extra-marital horizontal extra-curricular activity!!

  So here he was, jinking and slinking along the street like Mr Snakehips, or strutting like a prize thoroughbred, horny as hell and out to lay waste to this town.

  Turning down Lange Niezel, Oliver paused from time to time to look into the sex shop windows, spying the dildos and love dolls and lube cream and anal ticklers and ball-gags, feeling his sexual frenzy start to build and grow, so that by the time he turned right past Oude Kerk and reached the heart of the Red Light District, heading into the maze of narrow alleyways with their red-lit windows, to Oliver it felt like his cock was so gargantuan it seemed like he’d grown an extra leg.

  Way to go, baby! He mouthed to the blondes and redheads and brunettes
through the glass windows, wait until you see what I’ve got for you!!

  Most of the girls ignored his antics, more interested in their mobile phones, which he found fucking annoying. Ok, but not to worry. Because one of you lucky girls is gonna get the ride of your life. Hubba hubba, cry for your momma! No mercy!!

  Oliver spent about half an hour wandering about and trying to choose a girl, heading into the indoor windows next to La Vie en Proost strip club, and then across the canal to the interconnecting streets between this and the next canal, his eyes ogling every woman he saw, even other tourists that caught his eye, up and down Bloedstraat, Stoofsteeg, Zeedijk. Until finally just around the corner from Sex Shop Caligula he spotted the one. A cute and petite brunette, eastern-European by the looks of her features, with a perfect set of tits and a humping perfect body. Oh la la, you gorgeous fitty, he nodded to himself, pleased with his choice. And so he stood directly opposite her window, legs apart like the Colossus of Rhodes, just waiting for her to see him and drag him lustily inside.

  After a minute, when she failed to glance up from her mobile and notice him, he hopped across and tapped on the glass.

  It didn’t take long to negotiate a transaction, her with the door open and people walking by listening in. How much for a suck and a fuck hun? – Fifty euros, or for two positions one hundred euros – ok babe let’s party, and make it good ok?

  Inside it was straight down to business. Money passed hands, off with their kit, a quick wash of his dick over by the bidet, on with the extra-large Johnny ha-ha! And Bob’s your uncle before he knew what’s what he was banging her doggy style like the end of the world was nigh and she was screaming for mercy like they always do!!

  For twenty minutes straight he fucked her like she was nothing but a piece of meat, the dirty little girl, slutty teeny-bopping whore, my sexy little nympho, Oliver for some reason unable to get the image of his wife out of his mind despite his best effort not to think about her. And just when it looked like the poor girl was about to pass out from exhaustion he finally finished with one last thrust and a slap on her bum for good measure.