The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam (25 page)

“It did not change for a long time,” she said, hesitantly. “At
first, I almost could not breathe when we talked. But I learned to
control myself, to shut part of me off. And then I found that I
wanted to hear what he had to say.”

“Freud would have loved this.”

Kim stomped her feet into the ground and hugged herself more
closely. She seemed to be shivering.

“We could go inside,” I suggested. “You could tell me the rest
in there.”

“No. It is good out here.”

“You like discomfort?”

She shrugged.

“So when did you decide to take the diamonds? Because that was
the plan, right?”

She looked at me, horrified.

“Oh, maybe at first you thought about harming him in some way,
perhaps even killing him, but the way I see it that changed when
you started to like him. I’m guessing you convinced yourself that
the best way to spite him was to take the one thing he’d been
waiting twelve years to get his hands on. And, of course, it
couldn’t hurt that the diamonds were worth a small fortune.”

“No,” she said, and glanced at her feet.

“Oh, I think so. I think that’s exactly how it went. Only you
started asking too many questions and Michael got suspicious. And
then he got a friend to dig around and that friend happened to find
something truly shocking – the girl who’d become so attached to him
was the girl whose father he’d murdered.”

Kim shook her head slowly, as if trying to deny the logic behind
what I was saying.

“The thing I don’t get is why he left himself open to it all.
Why carry on with the charade?”

“He loved me,” she said, in a flat voice.

“Oh, I’m sure that’s what he told you. Question is, why did you
pretend to believe him?”

She started crying then, though not in a showy way. Tiny
convulsions took hold of her and she quivered by my side, face
lowered, mucus glistening in her nostrils. She bit down on her lip
again, harder this time, but I tried not to let it get to me.

“You didn’t kill him,” I said, suddenly sure of it now.

“No,” she whispered.

“Because you couldn’t. Even if part of you welcomed it when you
saw him that way. That’s why you lost it, I think, seeing that
something you’d wanted so badly had come to pass. And it’s okay. I
really think it is. Although the truth is I don’t altogether care.
All I want right now are the three monkeys. And I think you have
the third one.”

She looked at me, bewildered. “No.”

“You’re telling me it’s not in your apartment, that if we went
up there right now I wouldn’t find it in among your things?”

“I don’t have it. And what does it matter anyway? You told me
you do not have the others.”

She looked at me, her jaw set and her teeth clamped together,
and I saw some kind of challenge in her eyes. She suspected me, for
sure, and I couldn’t really blame her. But then I didn’t have time
to think anymore, because I heard a screech of brakes and turned
just in time to see a familiar white van lurching in my
direction.

“You called them?” I shouted. “Before you came out?”

Something in her eyes told me I was right. I glared at her, then
grabbed her by the arm and threw her towards the wide man just as
he jumped down from the driver’s cab with the baseball bat in his
hands. He stumbled, but pushed her aside and hurried on, raising
the bat over his shoulder and swinging hard as he stepped close to
me. This time I knew what was coming and I danced back, sucking my
stomach right in to avoid the blow, then rushed forwards and
slammed him into the bonnet of the van and bear-gripped him before
he could bring the bat back for a second swing. I hoisted my knee
into his gut, hoisted it again at his groin. He dropped the bat
with a groan and slumped down but still had enough fight to reach
up and grab for my neck, squeezing my throat in his gloved hands. I
tried to prise his fingers away, meanwhile pushing against his face
and poking at his eyes, but he arched his head back so that I
couldn’t quite reach and before I could get free the thin man had
joined in and forced my arm back at a wild angle, threatening to
break it near my shoulder. I gargled in pain, flailing uselessly
with my legs and stumbling backwards, in danger of toppling over
the edge of the bridge. I was just at the point of submission when
I heard a loud bang in the night sky and strained my eyes until I
could just glimpse Stuart holding the smoking handgun I’d taken
from the wide man’s apartment above his head.

“Let him go,” he yelled, doing a passable impression of a loose
cannon. “Let him go right now, God damn it.”

The wide man and the thin man froze, still holding me by the
neck and the shoulder.

“Let him go,” Stuart repeated, this time cocking the gun and
levelling it on the thin man.

Slowly, the pressure on my neck and my arm began to ease and
before long they’d released me enough so that I was able to step
away from them. I swallowed cautiously and gingerly rotated my
shoulder in its socket.

“Let’s get out of here,” I croaked, waving my healthy arm at
Stuart.

But Stuart had other ideas. As I watched, he stepped across the
bridge and grabbed Kirn by the hair, yanking her head back and
pressing the gun muzzle against her forehead so that her skin
puckered around it. She stared at me, wide-eyed in alarm, and I
looked back the same way as Stuart hissed, “Where is it? Where’s
the third monkey?”

She shook her head, unable to speak.

“She doesn’t have it,” I told him, as calmly as I could.

“Where is it you bitch? Tell me or so help me I’ll pull the
fucking trigger.”

She whimpered, words failing her. By now, onlookers had spilled
out onto the street from the café and it wouldn’t be long before
one of them called the police or thought about playing the hero. I
couldn’t imagine trying to explain this one to Burggrave.

“She doesn’t have it,” I repeated, louder this time. “Let her
go. I know where it is. Believe me, there’s only one place it can
be.”

He looked around, beginning to register what I was saying to
him, and at last his grip started to loosen on her hair.

“Come with me,” I said. “We have to go now.”

He lowered the gun from Kirn’s temple and un-cocked it in an
almost trance-like way, as if the mechanics of what he was doing
could distract him from the mess he’d just made of the girl slumped
on the ground in front of him. He watched over her, unmoving, and I
stepped forwards to free the gun from his limp hand. I gave his
wrist a squeeze, motioned for him to come with me. When he still
didn’t budge, I tugged on his arm and dragged him away in the
direction of the nearest busy street.

∨
The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam
∧

A
t mid-morning the
following day, I followed two teenage girls in through the front
security door of a modern apartment building in the south of the
city. I paused by the mail boxes just long enough for them to step
into the elevator and for the elevator doors to close behind them,
and then I climbed a communal staircase up to the second floor of
the building where I walked through a fire safety door with a
reinforced glass portal in it and passed three identical-looking
wooden doors before I found the one I was after.

There was a peep-hole at eye-level in the centre of the door and
a brass mortise lock beside my hip. I rapped on the door twice and
when nobody came to answer it I checked both ways along the
corridor, making sure it was clear, and then I put on a pair of my
disposable gloves, removed my picks from my coat pocket and set to
work on the lock. It seemed a fair while since I’d tackled a really
up-to-date lock but it was no more difficult to coax open than any
of the others I’d dealt with recently. And aside from the low-level
hum of an air-conditioning unit housed somewhere above my head, the
corridor was very quiet, so I didn’t even need to lower my head to
hear the pins engage. When the final pin clicked into place, I
twisted the cam and the bolt snuck back obligingly. Then I eased
down on the handle, stepped inside the threshold and locked the
door behind me.

The apartment I’d entered was in near-darkness and I could
barely see a thing. I fumbled around on the wall for the main light
switch and when the overhead light came on I found myself at the
beginning of a magnolia painted hallway. There were several pairs
of shoes by my feet and a hooded top hanging from one of the
wallmounted coat hooks by my side. Just ahead and on the left was a
doorway that led into a compact, windowless kitchen. I turned on
the lights inside the kitchen and scanned the fitted ash units and
the chrome oven and hob. The kitchen surfaces were covered in dirty
plates and coffee mugs and there was a blender that still had the
residue from a breakfast smoothie congealed on its insides.

I moved back into the hallway and passed a bathroom, then turned
left and entered a relatively large, L-shaped living room with a
plush beige carpet, a state of the art flat-screen television, a
glass coffee table and a black leather couch. The floor to ceiling
curtains were drawn, which explained why it was so dark. I left the
curtains like that to avoid attracting any unwanted attention and
then I retraced my steps to investigate the final two doors in the
apartment. The first door contained a closet that was filled with
all manner of household junk: a vacuum cleaner, an ironing board,
more shoes, some coats, hats and scarves, and a step ladder. The
second door led into a bedroom that was just large enough to
contain a double bed and a flat-pack wardrobe and chest of drawers.
The bed was unmade and there was a pile of dirty clothes on the
floor. By the side of the bed was an alarm clock and a paperback
novel.

The bedroom struck me as being as good a place as any other to
begin and so it was there that I started my search. Dropping to my
knees, I pushed the duvet out of the way and shone my pocket torch
beneath the bed. There was a stray white sports sock and a world of
dust and carpet fluff but that was all. I felt all along the side
of the bed box, checking for storage spaces, but I didn’t find any.
After that, I felt inside the pillowcases and then inside the
duvet, and from the odour of stale sweat that hit me like a blow to
the nose, I was glad to be wearing my gloves. When I didn’t find
anything there either, I turned my attentions to the wardrobe and
after that the chest of drawers, removing each drawer and checking
behind and underneath them in the usual way. Then I pulled the
wardrobe and the drawer unit away from the wall and shone my torch
behind and after that I went and fetched the stepladder from the
hallway closet and scanned the top of the wardrobe. Finally, I
sorted through the dirty laundry on the floor, pockets and all,
until I was satisfied that the bedroom was a dead-end, and then I
went and put the step ladder back just where I’d found it.

From the bedroom, I moved onto the living room. On the surface,
at least, there wasn’t so much to search in the living room, and my
mind soon began to wander. Not unusually for me, I found myself
thinking about my-book again. It felt like a long time since I’d
thought about it properly and as I went calmly about my business, I
began to retread the plot twists that had led to my problems in the
first place. Before very long, I found myself wondering if there
wasn’t a simple way out of it after all. It would take some work,
but maybe I could rewrite the beginning of the story to make things
easier on myself. The problem with that, though, was that I didn’t
want to make it all too easy for Faulks or my readers to work out
who the killer was. But there had to be a balance to be struck, a
way to accommodate logic without killing the book altogether.
Perhaps I could dispense with the briefcase, I thought. It could be
replaced with a carrier bag from a well-known store and that way
Faulks could pick up a duplicate without any trouble. Or maybe the
butler’s hand was left at the scene in the first place. That wasn’t
as interesting, I guessed, because part of the mystery was how the
murderer had got into a safe guarded by a fingerprint scanner that
Faulks himself had been unable to access. Would Victoria go for it?
More to the point, would I be satisfied?

The honest answer was no. Really, I should have been looking for
ways to push myself and make things more difficult rather than
jumping at easy solutions. But I was so fed up with having an
almost-finished manuscript on my hands that it was a tempting
option. My publishers might not agree, though, and where would that
leave me? Back at square one with four months work written off and
not a bean to show for it.

A change of scene could help, mind. Italy still appealed to me
and if I went there maybe there was a chance I’d find the
inspiration I was looking for. And even if I didn’t, the weather
would be brighter and the winter nights less severe. Plus there
were Italian women to think about. Dark-haired, olive-skinned.
Wonderful legs, as a general rule. And I’d always wanted to pick up
a little of the language, ever since I’d seen Roman Holiday for the
first time. I could have my own Roman Holiday. I could maybe do
Gregory Peck, give or take a few degrees of smooth. And so far as I
was aware, there were no meaty Italians looking to swing a baseball
bat in my direction at any time soon.

I wondered how many times Gregory Peck had appeared on the
television that dominated the living room. Not enough probably,
which was a shame, because it was a fine machine, with something
like a 42-inch screen, and I supposed it could give Gregory a
pretty fair hearing. As great as it was, though, it didn’t help me
find what I was looking for and neither did the couch or the glass
coffee table or the pile of newspapers and magazines hidden behind
the door.