Black Widow (20 page)

But Christ, should love feel like this? A guilty little secret that should only be confessed to a priest? Maybe it was working with people like Janssen and the other detectives, being mired in their cynicism.

In all their times together, through all their troubles, she’d never once told Alex that she loved him.

Was it that simple? You say the words and things click into place? Alex wasn’t like other men, frightened at the thought of commitment, she’d known that from very early on, but still she’d resisted.

She quickened her step, the puddles snapping beneath her feet. She steered a path through a gaggle of street entertainers, men dressed as clowns, with monkeys on their shoulders and umbrellas in hand, which might as well have been lightning rods. But she approved of the risk they were taking; maybe it was time she took a risk of her own.

And before she knew it, she was at the little complex of houses, with the original seventeenth-century signs on the wall, proclaiming that the properties had first been allocated to butchers.

She fumbled for her key, and paused on the threshold. They loved each other. Yes, it was that simple.

The door to the courtyard opened, its familiar screech lost to a protracted rumble of thunder. Tanja moved inside, and up the inner steps, her feet as light as a girl’s. And she
felt
young. There was no shame in feeling like this, none at all.

She worried for a moment that Alex might not be home yet, but perhaps that would be better. She could cook some dinner, prepare more fully.

Inside. She kicked off her shoes and unfastened the top button of her blouse. The lounge was dark, but further down the hall the kitchen light was on. Tanja padded along the corridor towards it. She was a good cook; she could hardly wait to get started.

But as she passed the bedroom, she noticed that light was leaking from beneath the door. At the same moment her nostrils flared to the aroma of incense and her ears picked up a twist of entwined laughter.

She pushed open the door.

Candlelight played over the bed. She saw arms; she saw legs. Dark limbs and light.

But one of the shapes was too pale. Too soft in outline.

A young woman lay astride Alex. Her lustrous hair sheathed his face.

Alex saw her first. ‘Tanja?’

The woman twisted on top of him and screamed, pulling up the thin duvet.

Tanja recognised her from the front desk at the Diemen station. She was very pretty, thin in all the neutral areas, curved where it mattered. And
young
.

Tanja turned slowly on her heel, and pattered into the darkness of the lounge. She turned on the television, pushing up the volume, but it was never quite as loud as the white noise in her head.

A full minute passed. On the TV, a cheetah took down an antelope, returned to her lair, and found that her cubs had been murdered by a youthful lioness.

The light came on in the lounge.

‘Tanja?’

She looked up, to see Alex standing there, in his jeans and T-shirt and bare feet. The girl peeped out from behind him, one hand about his waist, the other on his shoulder. She was wearing the dressing gown Tanja had bought Alex for Christmas.

‘Tanja?’ he said again. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I don’t know,’ she answered vaguely. ‘I thought I had something to tell you.’

‘What?’

‘I can’t seem to remember. Women of my age – we can be a little forgetful.’

Alex whispered something to the girl, who nodded, and retreated to the bedroom. Though not before she’d fixed Tanja with a look that was at once quizzical, and faintly mocking. That was almost the worst part. Some detached portion of Tanja’s mind considered how false it was, the notion of
sisterhood
. The truth of it was that women had no option but to despise and distrust other women; it was the only safe course. Maybe that was why she’d become a cop; female officers had been a rarity when she’d joined.

She couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

Alex sighed, and ran a hand though his hair. He moved to the window, where he traced the passage of a raindrop with a delicate finger. He mumbled something about the storm clearing the air; how it would be for the best.

Tanja stood. ‘I’m not angry,’ she said hurriedly. She was; but her anger was so mangled with other emotions that her words didn’t feel like a lie. ‘It doesn’t mean anything, right?

Alex took a step towards her, and she thought he was going to embrace her, and opened her arms to meet him. But he placed his hands on her shoulders, and stood over her, looming.

‘Tanja. Listen to yourself. You’ve just seen me with another girl…’

‘We’ll work through it, Alex.’

He removed his hands and shook his head; there was no mercy in him.

‘Tanja, I had been meaning to tell you, I swear. The other night – it was a mistake.’

‘I love you.’

Alex stared, and for the briefest moment a look of indecision came into his eyes. But then he shook his head, and took a step back.

‘It’s too late for that, Tanja.’

There was a voice from the bedroom. ‘Is your grandmother still here? Christ, Alex!’

‘You have to leave now, Tanja,’ she heard Alex say.

Snap.

She lashed out blindly, her fist connecting with hardness. There was a crack, and an incongruous smell. Flowers.

‘I’ll kill you,’ she hissed.

She tried to slap him, but he caught her wrist easily. And now he was in her purse, taking back the key he’d given her. She no longer struggled as he steered her towards the door, and pushed her through. He kicked her shoes out after her.

She walked down the stairs heavily. Outside the rain was heavier than ever. She leant against the doors, and let it soak her.

A police officer approached on foot, eyed her suspiciously without recognising her, then ambled slowly on.

Chapter 14

Monday

Jasper Endqvist was on his early morning run. It had been a somewhat half-hearted pursuit, before, but now, with a sniff of romance on the breeze, he rather thought that it might pay to get in shape. He was hardly a vain man, but if there was even a slight possibility that Hester was going to see him naked, then he was determined that she wouldn’t be
too
disappointed.

So, up at six. Breakfast, if you could call it that, of muesli. Out on the streets at six-thirty, to follow a three-click route around the Oosterpark, which backed onto his house. Back for seven-thirty, time for a quick shower, and to work.

The park was largely empty. The recent storm, and subsequent showers, had turned portions of it into an unappealing bog. This, he supposed, was how his city would have looked in the Middle Ages, before the river had been damned and the polders cut.

His thoughts drifted, but when they returned, they inevitably carried with them the image of Hester Goldberg. So she was a little older than him; who cared? The more Jasper got on in the world, the more he immersed himself in the complexity and intrigue of his business life, the more he craved simple, transparent pleasures.

Women were soft, thoughtful, and good at so many things which men found difficult. There could be no balance, no completeness, without them. All Jasper wanted was a woman who would appreciate him for his financial wherewithal; who would work for the first year of their marriage, then give up her career in the time-honoured fashion. Who would gradually lose interest in the sexual aspect of their relationship, but that would be all right because Jasper would discover a hitherto unanticipated love of gardening, and there would be a shed, and vegetables.

Maybe it was pushing things to imagine that Hester Goldberg might be that woman, but the important thing was that Jasper was once more alive to the possibility that he wasn’t
completely
beyond the pale. It made him happy.

Pausing only to take a quick rest at the recently installed sculpture,
The Scream
(a memorial to the martyred filmmaker Theo van Gogh), he continued on his way, enjoying the feeling of coolness on his skin.

A car was parked on the service road, its lights shining bright through the gloomy dawn. It was moving slowly towards him. Jasper stepped to one side of the narrow road to let it pass.

The car gathered pace.

And swerved.

Jasper threw himself to one side, but the wing impacted against his shin.

There was a moment that was almost peaceful.

It passed.

Scrunched into some twisted shape, he found himself face to face with the splintered end of a bone, either the fibula or the tibia, he had no idea. And it was mad, the confusion that shock brought with it, because more than the pain, it was his inability to identify which bone it was that troubled him the most.

Jasper felt all the blood rush away from his limbs, as his body instinctively tried to gather warmth to his heart.

He tried to crawl, but found that he couldn’t move. His kneecap had been dislocated, too.

There was a crunch behind him, the sound of reverse gear being engaged.

*

It wasn’t much of a shop, Gus decided as he crossed the threshold. It seemed to deal mostly in an eclectic range of what might be termed crap. There were souvenir mugs, of Amsterdam, and the Queen’s sixtieth birthday. A range of clogs – who the fuck wore clogs, nowadays? Two electric guitars, a Strat-copy and something Japanese. Boiled sweets in jars. Postcards, cosmetics, and a rack of laughably unrealistic wigs.

It was the wigs which had drawn Gus here. He needed information.

‘What can you tell me about this?’ he said to the dark-skinned goblin behind the counter, as he removed the blood-spattered wig from the carrier bag. The man was of Turkish extraction by the look of things. The Turks had been in the city for centuries, mostly as merchants, now as terrorists. Before the Cougar Killer had come along, Gus had been in the process of plotting an exposé.

The man examined the hairpiece, and whistled. ‘Now that, sir, is a work of art.’

‘It is?’

The shopkeeper ran loving fingers over the golden strands. ‘This sort of craftsmanship – it makes your heart go, you know – boom!’

‘Boom,’ Gus echoed. ‘Really?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Well, okay. So, I was thinking I might get another made up. There’s to be a fancy dress party, you see. With an Abba theme.’

The goblin seemed to approve. ‘Really? Well, I have a sequinned costume out back you might be interested in. It’s based on the fat-Elvis wardrobe, but you might be able to adapt it.’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ Gus replied. ‘Really, it’s the wig that interests me. Is there anywhere in the city I might find something similar?’

‘Only one place I know of. “Big Wigs”. The owner is American, or Australian, something like that.’

‘Thanks,’ said Gus.

*

It had taken a great effort of will on Tanja’s part to stay sober. It would have been much easier to simply get drunk again, and so pass out. To wake with the familiar headache, and nausea, and itch of self-loathing.

Instead, she’d curled up on the sofa with Gember, to share a slice of sugarbread, letting the hypnotic sound of his purring finally carry her off into sleep.

So here it was, the morning after, and no pill to take. There was a residual ache: an anger, a sense of being betrayed; of being alone.

But – and here was perhaps the final mystery of it – none of these feelings were as extreme, as debilitating, as she might have expected. She almost felt distanced from it, as if she were a spectator to someone else’s misery.

‘Self-respect,’ she said. ‘It’s a question of self-respect.’

She’d had that, once, in abundance, only to lose it in her failed pursuit of the Butcher. Hard to be comfortable with yourself, when you’re late for the funeral of a murdered child, and her parents are staring at you, rather than the priest –

But maybe it was time she started to get it back. Her work, then. It was more important than ever. She would catch Mikael Ruben’s killer. James Anderson’s; she would make her
pay
.

She wasn’t due to start work until eleven. She had a secret appointment to keep first. At a clinic. If anything, splitting from Alex had increased her enthusiasm for the visit. And that was surely healthy: if she did decide to go through with the procedure, it would be for no one’s benefit save her own.

She still had an hour to kill before leaving for the clinic. So she went through her apartment, scooping up the dregs of Alex’s stuff, which she’d never previously had the strength to throw out. So – the signed photo of Ruud Gullit, taken just before his move from Feyenoord to PSV – in the bin. No matter that Tanja had also been a big fan of Ruud; the bin it was. Similarly the pair of Paul Smith socks, and also the Wii. Tanja hated computer games.

She threw the bag into the dustbin without ceremony, and when it was done, she was delighted at how little it had hurt. Humming all the while, she got in her car, and inserted one of the copied CDs into the player.

Great choice:
Alanis Morrisette
. Track two.
You Oughta Know
. She sang along, mumble, mumble, sing it now girl.

And it was still all right. A smile crept onto her face.

The New Look clinic was located in a modern, glass-fronted building, which overlooked the
Artis
, a recreational complex which housed such delights as a zoo, and a planetarium. Tanja had no particular problem with modern architecture, but the building didn’t sit well with the otherwise ubiquitous sandstone of the Plantage Quarter. It seemed to stand out like, hell, why not say it – a broken nose.

She stepped inside, feeling a chill as she did so. The air-con hadn’t yet woken up to the fact that the heat wave had ended, and continued to pump out a nipple-tweak of cold air. She was glad she was wearing her jacket; such displays might be considered a cry for help in a place like this.

She gave her name to the receptionist and took a seat. Two minutes later, she was accosted by one of the consultants, a Dr Voorhies. He glided up to her, smooth across the polished concrete floor, as if moving on a personal layer of lubrication. Like a slug. He was dark-skinned and bulbous and cylindrical, his neck as wide as his head. He shook her hand, looking at her variously in the eye, breast, and stomach, as if already plotting how he might turn her into something else.