Black Widow (32 page)

‘You should go and see Anita,’ he said afterwards.

‘You think she is guilty of something?’

‘No,’ van Kempen answered decisively. Perhaps
too
decisively; Pieter was confused by his reaction. ‘But you’re right – it’s a promising line of enquiry. See if there is anything linking Mikael Ruben to this Janis person.’

‘You want me to deal with this on my own?’

‘I thought you were looking for more responsibility,’ van Kempen said. ‘You’ll be fine.’

Strange the thoughts that were running through Pieter’s mind. It almost seemed that the KLPD man was trying to get rid of him. But he had no time to think of that as he took a bicycle from the store, to pedal across town to the cafe.

The Tasty Byte
was just closing. Anita Berger’s face was at the door, her eyes wild and tear-stained. When she saw Pieter, she put her hand to her mouth.

Let me in
, he mouthed.

Anita shook her head, locking the door as she did so. Pieter drew himself up to his full height, and pointed at the lock. Anita glared.

But then, as if all that anger had been no more substantial than the makeup which still covered just half of her face, she seemed to buckle, and crumple in on herself. Her shoulders slumped. The door opened. The sound of her hacking breath sounded loud over the hum of the computers.

‘Tell me about Cougar-Contacts,’ he instructed.

Anita sank back onto a chair. ‘You’ve seen?’

‘Yes.’

‘I told Sophia that we should wipe it!’

‘Sophia? Not Sophia Faruk?’

‘Yes,’ Anita confirmed. ‘She part owns this place with me. But she said it didn’t matter. That we hadn’t done anything wrong. That we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be bullied.’ She placed her head in her hands. ‘But I have done something wrong. Something terrible.’

‘What?’

‘Concerning Mikael Ruben,’ she said. Her voice was agonised.

‘What are you trying to tell me? That you killed him?’

‘No!’ Her colours were all faded; she was nothing now save grey. ‘Worse.’

‘What?’ said Pieter. ‘Oh!’

She started to shake. ‘I never planned it. But one night they came round, and Maria went out to get some cigarettes. We had been drinking. And I suppose there had been an attraction, right from the start; he was a good-looking boy. I knew it was wrong, but I couldn’t help myself. We kissed. I made arrangements to see him the next day. I didn’t think he would come, but he did. It escalated from there. I introduced him to The Den’

‘Do you know who killed him?’

‘No!’

‘Are you sad that he is dead?’

She started to nod her head, only to wince, and sigh. ‘Not at all, if I am honest. Isn’t that a terrible thing to admit? But all the while I was sleeping with him, I was asking myself, how could he do this to Maria? It was almost a relief, when he was killed. My only fear was that you would find out I had been seeing him, and that you would tell Maria.’ She seized Pieter by the arm. ‘You mustn’t tell her! She’s all I have!’

‘Do you think she will care, all things considered?’

‘Yes! I’m going to be there for her, during her time in prison. But I can only do that if she trusts me. Please!’

Pieter didn’t like leading people on. But he thought that he must, under the circumstances. ‘I will see what I can do,’ he said. ‘But first you must answer a few more questions.’

‘Anything.’

The poor woman’s eagerness was pitiful; did she really have any comprehension how things would be for her, with her daughter serving a life sentence? Trust or no trust, it was going to be awful.

‘Tell me more about your website,’ Pieter instructed. ‘How long has it been running?’

‘Six months, maybe? Mikael helped me to set it up. But it was Sophia’s idea.’

Pieter took a moment to get his head around that. ‘She’s quite the businesswoman.’

‘Well, she is now. Of course, she had a few troubles, a while back.’

‘Her conviction for arson, you mean?’

Anita wrung her hands. ‘Yes. But I probably shouldn’t talk about it. Sophia – she has a temper.’

‘As you wish,’ Pieter said carefully. ‘So, coming back to the website. I’ll need a list of all your users. Real names, contact details, that sort of thing.’

‘I don’t have anything like that. Sophia said that we should be as anonymous as possible. And we are – try and locate us via a search engine, and you’ll have no luck. It’s all word of mouth.’

‘I see. But what of your chatroom, and your message board?’

Anita shook her head. ‘The hard drive is wiped every few hours if that’s what you are getting at. Automatically. To – how did Mikael describe it? – DOD standards. I don’t know what that means.’

‘Department of Defense. American. It basically means that the data is unrecoverable.’

No resolution, then. Pieter didn’t know whether to be disappointed, or relieved. But whatever his feelings, there was a lot to take in. Too much. Maybe it was a compliment, that van Kempen had allowed him to come alone. But it didn’t feel it. Pieter dearly wished that Tanja were with him.

Now there was an irony.

How was he going to tell her about this? He would need to.

He called for a car. ‘You’ll need to make an official statement,’ he said. ‘And we’ll need you to provide an alibi, so you’d best start thinking where you were on the nights of the murders.’

‘But I have to be with Maria. I only popped in here for a few minutes to bag the takings.’

‘I’m sorry, Ms Berger. But we have no choice. There is a lot more resting on this than your daughter’s state of mind. Or yours.’

Anita started to cry. It made for a bleak twenty minutes.

And all the while Pieter wanted to phone Tanja. And all the while he lacked the courage to do so.

With Anita safely stowed in the car, he cycled back to the station. He didn’t feel up to playing the cop any more. Not tonight.

He was greeted at the gates by van Kempen. ‘Go home,’ the superintendent said.

‘But Detective Inspector Pino –’

‘We’ll discuss it in the morning, Pieter. Go home.’

Chapter 23

Alex has betrayed me
…

The thought was set on a permanent loop, and Tanja couldn’t get it out of her head.

He sold me out, after everything we’ve been through.

The anger was building inside her all the while. And it wasn’t only directed at Alex.

Wever had suggested, as she left, that she might want to think about where she had been when the murders had been committed. Just in case anyone thought to ask. It occurred to Tanja that she only had an alibi for the time of James Anderson’s murder, when she’d been with Alex. Presumably she could still rely on him to corroborate her story.

So what the fuck was going on? The fact that Antje Scholten’s profile had steered the investigation towards the New Look Clinic could probably be dismissed as coincidence. But the death of Jasper Endqvist was harder to explain away.

Was someone looking to frame her? She laughed out loud. That was ridiculous!

Tanja’s phone rang. It was Wever. She ignored it. A second later, van Kempen’s number flashed up. She switched off her phone.

She headed towards Alex’s place. Not to apologise for threatening to kill him; rather to ask him what he was playing at. She saw how it was. If Balistraat was involved with the Jasper Endqvist case, then sooner or later everything would be in the open. Wever would have no choice but to suspend her. Or worse.

If Alex had just kept his mouth shut, then there wouldn’t have been any proof. One of the witnesses had subsequently had a stroke, and was beyond interview; the other was a junkie. And with Endqvist now dead – not that she wished that on him, of course – well, it was infuriating,

Tanja hadn’t cared about her job at the time. But she did now.

She steered a breakneck path through Jordaan to Alex’s place. She’d escaped the office just in time, and was a few minutes ahead of the rapidly building clot of rush-hour traffic. She could hear the sound of sirens in the distance, but for some reason it only prompted her to drive faster.

She screeched to a halt, and threw open the car door. She crossed the cobbles and stabbed at Alex’s buzzer. His car was there. It occurred to her that she was probably a bit lucky to find him in so early in the evening. Lucky for her; unlucky for him.

He came to the front door directly. He had a stack of papers in his hand. Tanja recognised the logo of the insurance company amongst them.

‘You’ve heard,’ he said without preamble.

Tanja held herself very still. ‘Can I come in?’

‘I don’t think that would be a very good idea, Tanja.’

‘All right, then. I’ll ask you right here: why did you do it? For revenge?’

‘Don’t be absurd.’

Tanja was furious, but anger wasn’t the only thing she felt. There was something else, something bright, that was nevertheless cast in the deepest shadow.

So much for the notion that she didn’t miss him.

‘You’ve betrayed me,’ she said, when all other words were beyond her.

‘You’ve betrayed yourself,’ he countered. ‘No one made you drink and drive.’

‘We had a pact!’

‘We had a lie,’ Alex disagreed.

‘Are you speaking about the fraud now, or us?’

‘Both! You’re unhinged, Tanja. Did I mention that last time? Now leave me alone!’

Alex slammed the door in her face. Tanja moved back to her car. The blanket sound of sirens was a little louder than before. It seemed that something was going down; she could feel nervousness all around.

I can’t stand this. This place. This life…

She turned her car towards the south, until she joined the A1. She passed through Diemen, and Muiden, Naarden, and Bussum, until the streets finally gave way, and she came to a point where there were only fields of poppies, slowly going over as autumn came. She parked her car at the end of a lane, and closed her eyes.

*

Gus was thinking about calling Sophia Faruk when she rang him. He let it ring six times (it went to voicemail on the seventh), then answered in his usual fashion.

‘Go.’

‘Gus?’

‘The man himself. What I can do for you Sophia?’

‘I think we should probably talk.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘I shouldn’t have come to your office earlier,’ she said. ‘It was unprofessional of me. I’m sorry.’

‘Yeah.’ Gus for his part was loath to apologise for anything, but on the other hand, he was starting to feel horny. And Sophia might yet turn out to be an important witness; he hadn’t forgotten that. ‘Maybe I was a bit sharp with you,’ he mumbled.

‘Well, what say we meet up and apologise to each other properly?’

‘Well, okay,’ he agreed.

‘Want me to pick you up?’ she offered.

‘You’d have to find out where I live first, baby!’

‘Already have, Gus. Already have.’

‘What?’

‘Look out your window.’

Gus did so, drawing back the curtain a centimetre, like a man who lived in fear of a sniper’s bullet. Sure enough he saw Sophia Faruk, sitting demurely in a light grey Renault Mégane. It was the coupé-cabriolet version. The metal roof was folded back into the boot. Sophia’s hair was fluttering a little in the strong breeze, but not much. She was always a study in self-control, in public.

And the opposite in the bedroom. She would climb atop him – it was always that way, first, and they never did doggie – and she would wrap her fingers about his neck, and he would laugh, whilst secretly being terrified and turned on in equal measure.

Gus shut the curtain. ‘How did you find out where I live?’

‘I asked around. This journalistic lark – it’s fun, isn’t it?’

Gus struggled to remain calm. No one came round his place. No one. It was his fortress; he even had an iron grating over the front door.

‘Gus? Are you still there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you coming out, then?’

‘I’ll need a couple of hours, first, Sophia. I have things to do.’

‘Oh, me too!’ she enthused. ‘But at least come outside and say hello.’

‘Okay, then,’ he heard himself say. And as he did so, he thought,
who is playing who here
?

He was still feeling nervous as he climbed into her car, but only until he’d had time to reflect on her expression, which was as inviting as ever. The roof climbed overhead, fixing itself in place with a sigh of satisfied coupling. It was a fairly quiet street. He played with her breast for a while, and she indulged him with a rare sense of good humour. Women mostly took their tits for granted, the wasters, but not Sophia. And then, because Gus was suddenly feeling especially daring, he kissed her, on the lips.

For a moment it seemed as if Sophia was going to spit on him. But then she smiled, and tossed her hair again.

‘Tonight is going to be
fun
,’ she said, looking deep into his eyes as she did so. ‘I can hardly wait.’

‘Me neither,’ said Gus.

He squirmed his way back onto the street. Sophia was waving as she left.

Chapter 24

Alex had been planning to meet up with his new girlfriend, but the argument with Tanja had completely robbed him of his passion. He left a message for Femme on her phone, glad that she hadn’t been able to answer the call directly. She would be okay about it; she wasn’t as highly strung as Tanja.

Then again, who was?

He had a bottle of vodka. He wasn’t much of a drinker, but Christ, he needed something now. He poured himself a generous measure.

His phone rang. It was Wever. ‘Alex? Is Tanja there?’

‘No, sir. You’ve just missed her, actually.’

‘Shit. All right, sorry to have bothered you.’

Wever rang off without explaining why he needed to speak to Tanja. But Alex could guess. God, he didn’t need this. Whichever way he looked at it, he was certain that Tanja was going to suffer for her part in the insurance fraud. And he would suffer, too. He would probably demoted, perhaps worse than that.

But he was still sure he’d made the right choice in confessing. The secret had been dragging him down for weeks.

Time passed; he drank three more glasses.

His buzzer rang again.