Black Widow (34 page)

Van Kempen was surprised. ‘You knew her, back then?’

‘Yes. She gave me my first job. She was against my plan, but I talked her into it. And
I
was the one to set the fire.’

‘It never mentioned any of that in the report,’ Van Kempen noted.

‘No, because Sophia took the blame. She didn’t once let on that she’d had an accomplice. She is loyal, you see. To a fault.’

Van Kempen nodded. ‘I suppose you are going to tell me categorically that she didn’t kill those men?’

‘Is that what this is about? Well of course she didn’t kill them!’

Van Kempen didn’t probe further; he already knew who to blame in that regard. He reached into his pocket, to hand Jacobus a photo. ‘Recognise him?’

‘Sure. That’s Mr Ruben.’

‘And do you remember seeing him last Wednesday?’

Jacobus shrugged. ‘I think so, but I can’t be certain.’

Van Kempen had one more question. And one more photo. He offered it.

‘And this woman?’ he asked. ‘Do you recognise her? Try and imagine her with
longer
hair.’

Jacobus studied the photo for a long moment, then leant back in his chair. ‘I’m sure I’ve seen her
somewhere
,’ was all he would say.

Van Kempen nodded. It was enough. He made his way up a steep flight of stairs, and onto a deserted street. Elandsgracht was only five minutes away. No one would notice he’d stepped out.

*

This is it
, Pieter thought,
the ultimate act of betrayal
. With everyone else out looking for Tanja, he was on his own in her apartment, going through her stuff in search of evidence he had no wish to find. He’d asked the uniform to stay outside.

His throat was dry. He poured himself a glass of water from the kitchen, almost treading on a litter tray in the process. It was in need of emptying, which tended to confirm that Tanja hadn’t been home in a while. There was no sign of the cat itself, and Pieter didn’t think to look for it.

He moved through the apartment. It was the stupid little details he found hardest to deal with: the degree certificate from UvA; the sanitary products (she was still fertile, by the look of things, not that it was any of his fucking business); a stack of letters from the families of past murder victims, thanking her for tracking down their loved ones’ killers; the self-help books (
De-Stress Your Life
, and
Learning to Love Again
); a letter of thanks from a charity, in relation to a recent donation; photos, of Tanja looking much younger, a man beside her, and a baby in her arms;
a white christening dress, neatly folded, tied up in pink ribbon
.

Tanja had never made any reference to children. Pieter shook his head, imagining a distant sadness which was almost unbearable.

‘I’m not built for this,’ he muttered.

In a dresser drawer, he found a glossy folder, the cover depicting a woman with the broadest, whitest smile Pieter had ever seen. It came from the New Look Clinic. With his throat dry, Pieter looked quickly to where the uniform was idling by the door, then opened the folder. There was a letter inside.

It was clearly addressed to Tanja. And it was signed by –
ah, shit
– Theo Gentz. The actual detail, of a proposed rhinoplasty, seemed almost irrelevant.

Pieter slid slowly down the wall, his hands fumbling at his jacket pocket. He had a photocopy of the list. He unfolded it, seeing for the first time that there was a slight gap between two of the entries. Between Ostramer and Raymer, specifically. Almost as though a single P name had been removed.

The water he’d just swallowed rose in his throat, acidic now. He choked it back, but still it burned.

She was guilty. Of all the murders. There could be no doubt. He didn’t hesitate this time. He dialled van Kempen’s number. The hoofdinspecteur congratulated him on his work, but still Pieter felt sick to his guts.

He was just leaving, when he received another call. He held the phone to his ear, his hand still trembling. ‘Hello?’

Chapter 26

She sat in the trophy room of her beautiful seventeenth century house, studying the contents of the apothecary’s jars. Something had been troubling her.

Colour. It was a question of colour. The irises had faded a little, becoming milky; and besides, only Ruben’s had been a suitable shade of blue to begin with. But she’d been thinking about it a great deal, and thought she might have the answer.

She had no real sympathy for the Nazis, but she had an idea that the solution to her problem might lie with them. She remembered seeing a documentary on Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz camp doctor. At the time she’d been shocked at the tales of human vivisection and so on, but now she felt obliged to at least acknowledge the man’s vision. One experiment in particular had captured her imagination, concerning the injection of various chemicals into Jewish children’s eyes, with a view to changing their colour. Mengele had largely failed, but that wasn’t to say that his idea was a bad one.

Her godfather’s distant ancestry was Jewish, she considered idly, as she retrieved an eyeball from the gloop of formaldehyde. But that was a small matter. Certainly compared to everything else he’d been. So, to the colouring in. She had a syringe, containing cobalt in solution, topped up with a measure of antifreeze. She had no idea if it would work, but she wasn’t completely precious about her keepsakes. And hopefully she would have time to snatch a few more before it was over.

The surface of the eyeball puckered a little under the needle’s point, then gave noiselessly. She eased down the plunger. But she must have injected too deeply, and her prize seemed to deflate before her eye. Thick gobbets of aqueous humour ran down her fingers. Curious, she sucked at the juice. It didn’t taste of much.

She felt her precious coolness start to evaporate.

But no, she wouldn’t return to that other place; she would stay in control. She would feed the fury, and so manage it.

That being so, she needed another victim.

She picked up the old-fashioned phone, her fingers plucking at the dial, as if picking feathers from a carcass.

Pieter Kissin answered. ‘Hello?’

‘Detective Kissin? It’s me.’

‘Who?’

She wound the cord about her finger, around and around, tightening it all the while. ‘Antje Scholten.’

‘Ah! Sorry, Professor. It’s a bad line. I didn’t recognise you for a moment.’

‘Look, can we meet?’

‘Sure,’ he agreed. ‘Why not. I’m just on my way back to the station.’

There was a bitterness in his voice, which she hadn’t heard before. It wasn’t so hard to place. So he’d finally realised the kind of woman Tanja Pino was!

‘Not there,’ she said. ‘This is delicate.’ She looked at the creepers crowding her window. ‘Too many prying eyes.’

‘Oh? Then where?’

‘My office, at the university.’

‘Can I ask what it concerns?’

‘I think I have an idea how we might track her down,’ she breathed.

‘Right,’ Pieter said. ‘I’ll speak to van Kempen.’

‘No need. I already have. He’ll be joining us a little later. Wever, too.’

‘I’ll be there in a quarter of an hour, then,’ Kissin promised.

Scholten was just about to hang up, when something occurred. She checked her watch, cursing herself as she did so. She’d acted too quickly in calling Kissin; she’d forgotten that she had another appointment to keep. ‘Make it an hour,’ she said. ‘I have a few things to collate, first.’

She set down the phone. It was a shame, she considered vaguely, that Kissin had become caught up in all this. In truth, she’d never intended things to go this far. But her feelings of compassion amounted to very little, really. Beneath everything, as deep-set as the colour of a person’s eyes, lay the fury. It couldn’t be denied.

But maybe she just had time for one more experiment before she left.

There was a box. She reached into it, feeling two warm, furry bodies. One scratched at her finger. Ouch! She ignored that one; she didn’t have time for a fight. Anyway, she had something else in mind for Gember. Was that his name? She was sure she’d overheard Tanja mention him before, during one of her less guarded moments.

It was all working out so well. Tanja could have no defence against the evidence that was mounting up against her. She was going to suffer. For the rest of her life. She was going to assume the role of Cornelius; she would play it well.

Scholten withdrew the tortoiseshell by the scuff of her neck. The cat struggled, but only weakly; she was holding her just so, as a mother cat might. That old kitten reflex held her still.

Scholten made soft clucking sounds, then slowly pressed the syringe into the tortoiseshell’s eye. She squeezed the plunger.

The cat convulsed, and died. There was no indication that the colour had taken, so in that respect the experiment was a miserable failure. But Antje didn’t blame the cat. She felt sad for it.

She threw the dead creature in a black dustbin bag, and headed out into the morning. The recent storms had passed, and the weather was quite as it should be. More so. Mist skulked in from the North Sea in glittering pockets of silvered air, so that everyone who passed along the Jordaan’s streets, or its canals, seemed a ghost.

She didn’t feel that way herself. It was an irony, she supposed, that she should feel so relatively alive; as if she were the only living person in Amsterdam.

Chapter 27

Huddled in her hooded sweatshirt, her nose running and eyes red, looking not unlike a junkie, Tanja sat on a bench beside the Leidsegracht. She’d bought a packet of cigarettes. She’d already smoked half in the two hours she’d been ensconced here, and was feeling sick.

She hadn’t smoked in twenty years, but it was all part of the disguise.

She glanced over her shoulder. Behind her, lit here and there with golden shafts of sunlight, the Kerkstraat stretched away in a nudge and wink of shimmering pastels. A door opened on
Dag En Nacht
, followed soon after by the sound of raucous cheering. A comprehensively tanned lifeguard, an inflatable shark about his waist, tumbled back onto the pavement, only to be dragged back inside by a man dressed as Tonto. Some of the patrons, it seemed, were quite happy to play up to the stereotype.

She glanced up, towards the upstairs flat. No sign of life. The windows were dirty, and gave the impression that they hadn’t been opened in years.

Tanja stood. Two hours was enough; she would have noticed by now if her erstwhile colleagues had been keeping tabs on Hester Goldberg’s place.

Keeping her eyes downcast, she set off towards the bar. A man approached her, asking if she wanted to buy weed. She declined, and rang Hester’s buzzer.

The door opened, without question. Tanja hesitated, thinking that Hester might already have company (a woman on her own would surely have asked who it was, otherwise), but something drew her on.

Hester was alone. Her face was a mess, her blonde hair lank across her eyes. Their bewitching blue colour remained, but everything else about her was dark.

‘Detective Inspector,’ she said. ‘How pleasant.’

Tanja ignored that. She looked around the flat. It was as bare as she remembered. There was no evidence of luxury whatsoever, no sign that the owner allowed herself even the slightest indulgence. And maybe it was Tanja’s imagination, but there seemed something almost penitential in Hester’s ascetic demeanour.

Tanja set off on a tour of the room, her fingers running lightly across the cream walls. She always liked to touch a place, to let those tactile sensations feed into her analytical mind. She could sense Hester watching her intently. Good; let her worry about it for a while.

Tanja drew to a halt. There was something on the wall, a square of paler colour. She hadn’t noticed it, on her previous visit. But, patchy mist aside, the light was more revealing today.

‘What hung here?’ she asked.

Hester gave a little start. ‘A painting, I think. I don’t exactly remember.’

‘Or a photograph, perhaps?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Of your brother?’

‘No, not him,’ Hester said. ‘I think it was an Alpine scene. The Matterhorn, I think. Yes, that was it.’

‘So why take it down?’ Tanja enquired.

‘It faded, through the years. Besides, I am an Amsterdam girl. Everything is flat. We don’t do mountains.’

‘You’re lying,’ Tanja said absently. ‘What did he do, that you were so ashamed of?’

‘Nothing!’

‘But it
was
a photograph of Cornelius?’

‘I didn’t say that.’ She looked Tanja up and down, clearly desperate to change the subject. ‘Why are you dressed like that? You were so neat, when you came before.’

‘Day off,’ Tanja answered with a shrug.

‘Then I suggest you enjoy your leisure time. Elsewhere.
De Walletjes
, maybe.’

‘I am no prostitute,’ Tanja responded. ‘But even if I were I wouldn’t confine myself to the
Little Walls
. I have been all over the city, Hester, in these last few hours! Including the Nieuwe Ooster.’

Hester was generally so lifeless that even the slightest twitch spoke volumes. ‘The graveyard? You’ve been there?’

Tanja nodded. ‘And here’s something you should know,’ she said softly. ‘Your brother. I’ve visited his grave.’

She put her hand to her mouth. ‘You have?’

‘A girl was murdered right beside it. Isn’t that odd?’

Hester folded her arms across her chest, and shook her head stubbornly. But then her blue eyes met Tanja’s, and in that instant she was lost.

‘He was always difficult to get along with,’ she said haltingly. ‘Always a little self-preoccupied. And then, of course, he got into a little trouble. In England, where we were living at the time.’

‘What sort of trouble?’

‘I’d rather not say.’

‘No?’

Hester looked up, defiant now. ‘But whatever they said he did, there were only the two of us at his funeral. He lived the better part of sixty years, and that was all there was to show of it? Just me, and Hans?’

‘Hans?’

‘Cornelius’ godson. Hans Scholten.’

Chapter 28