The Wrong Girl (29 page)

‘You think they’ve got a conscience, Vos?’

A long pause on the line. Then he said, ‘I think we have to chase every option. We can go through with this handover—’

‘With what? Toy money?’ she shrieked. Renata was outside now, watching, listening. ‘What happens when they find out?’

‘Please,’ Vos begged, his voice riddled with embarrassment. ‘Just come into the station. I need you here.’

He suspects, she thought. A clever man, he understood she might be pursuing other options.

‘I’ll be there,’ she said meekly then put the handset in her pocket.

Renata walked over.

‘I’ve got our thirty thousand,’ she said. ‘Henk’s father promised to match it. He should have the money within an hour or so. Just call me and tell me what to do.’

Silence.

‘Hanna?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I will.’

At three fifteen, while Vos was in De Groot’s office, engaged in one more phone plea to Mirjam Fransen for real money, Koeman got called to the station front desk. There was a small, frail Asian woman there. Old clothes. A supermarket carrier bag on her lap. A face that spoke of years of hard work, eyes that didn’t want to look straight at him.

She wanted to talk to someone about the kidnapping. Koeman took a deep breath, determined to hear out this visitor.

The woman was a cleaner for Smits, owner of the rented houseboat in Westerdok where Natalya had been kept the night she was seized. When Vos came on them, thinking the girl was still inside, she was close to finishing her work there.

‘You won’t tell Mr Smits I’m here, will you?’ she asked in a faint, scared voice.

‘I don’t see why I should,’ Koeman replied. ‘Would that be a problem?’

She didn’t exactly explain why it might be. But Koeman got the drift. Smits ran the boat rental on the side of his main business, a travel agency. The money he got from it all came in cash and probably didn’t go through the books.

‘So when the police called you wondered if it was about that?’ he said when he thought he had a little of her confidence.

The woman nodded.

‘I didn’t know there was a little girl missing. Not until I saw the news yesterday.’

‘And?’

‘I’d taken out most of the rubbish already. It was in the bin down the street. No one ever asked me about that.’ She shrugged her narrow shoulders. ‘You should have.’

‘We should,’ he agreed.

‘When I heard I went back and got some of the stuff I put in there.’

‘When was that?’ he asked.

She stared at him.

‘This morning.’ She looked round the waiting room. ‘Mr Smits doesn’t like the police. I thought you people might find her.’

Koeman folded his arms and told himself to keep calm.

‘And?’ he asked.

She reached into the bag and started to take things out.

A crushed orange juice carton.

Several screwed up tissues in a plastic bag.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Those I’ll take.’

‘No need to sound grateful,’ she muttered. And this.’

A kid’s colouring book. Again in a clear plastic bag. She’d been thinking about this.

‘Thanks,’ Koeman said without much feeling.

‘I went through it,’ the woman told him. ‘I got to . . .’

She showed him the inside back cover. He looked at it and said another thank you, meant it this time.

There was a sound at reception. Hanna Bublik was there, asking for Vos.

‘Is that her?’ the cleaner asked. ‘The mother? The woman who . . .’

‘Thank you,’ he repeated, smiled, got up, shook her hand. Extracted a name, a phone number and an address.

‘Mr Smits won’t know it came from me, will he?’ she asked again.

‘I’ll see to it,’ he said and went to the desk.

Twenty minutes to go before the call. Hanna Bublik sat in a side room with a woman uniform officer. Vos was with Bakker and Van der Berg in the morgue inventory office watching Aisha and her phone geek remove Ferdi Pijpers’s belongings from a storage box.

A small pile of bloody clothes built up on the desk. She was sifting through them with gloved hands. Thijs watched, wide-eyed, looking a little green at the gills.

The young forensic officer had requisitioned the on-board CCTV from the ambulance that had taken the dying Pijpers to the hospital. It was running on a PC at the end of the desk. Two medics had fought for Pijpers’s life in the race to the emergency department. Mirjam Fransen had watched them from a seat by the back all the way.

‘You’d think she’d be looking after her own man,’ Bakker wondered.

‘Thom Geerts was dead already,’ Aisha Refai suggested. ‘Pijpers . . . not quite. Our friend from AIVD doesn’t do anything but sit there. Not that I can see.’ She left the clothes for a moment and zoomed in on the video. Fransen leaned against the side of the ambulance glassy-eyed, in shock. ‘I’d say she looks in quite a state.’

‘All the same . . .’

Bakker grabbed the mouse and scrolled backwards and forwards through the video. Fransen had sat and watched the medics working on the bleeding man on the gurney. She didn’t move a muscle until the ambulance came to a halt. Then the team took Pijpers out and she vanished with them.

‘We need to get footage from the hospital,’ she said.

‘Tried that,’ Aisha replied. ‘Not easy. There aren’t cameras in most places.’ She smiled at Vos. ‘You’re going to have to do it the old way I’m afraid. Go and talk to people.’

‘In good time,’ Vos said. ‘How did we get his things?’

She pulled up a log on the computer.

‘An AIVD desk officer phoned just before midnight and suggested we pick them up. Along with his body for a routine autopsy here in the morgue. Two hours. It could have been anyone in there.’ She hesitated then added, ‘Or here.’

‘It’s got to be AIVD,’ Bakker cried. ‘They’ve been jerking us around ever since this began. Before—’

‘Laura,’ Vos cut in.

‘This is all wrong. If I can see it I’m sure you can.’

He didn’t answer. Aisha Refai and the phone geek were getting embarrassed.

‘Or aren’t we supposed to question them? Are they above the law? They seem to think so.’

The sound of heavy feet and a smoker’s cough interrupted the argument. Koeman was at the door. He had a book in a plastic evidence bag.

‘I’m not interrupting something, am I?’

‘No,’ Vos said. ‘What is it?’

‘You remember the cleaner at that boat in Westerdok? She found something.’

Koeman placed the bag with the book in it on the desk. It had a picture of a cow jumping over the moon on the cover. Bright and colourful.

‘Aisha,’ the detective said. ‘You’re the one wearing gloves.’

They stood round her as she opened up the bag and started to turn the pages.

Most bore nothing but printed drawings. Cats and dogs. Mothers and fathers. Children playing happily in the sun.

‘The back,’ Koeman said.

She did as she was told.

The writing was careful and clear. Each letter printed as if it mattered deeply.

One of them is called Carleed or something. I think he’s a kind of boss.

He’s got dark skin, a big beard, all black and shiny, like a pirate.

I think he knows I’ve seen him.

‘How the hell did we miss this?’ Bakker wanted to know.

‘It was already in the bin by the time we turned up.’ Koeman glanced at the door. ‘The woman’s downstairs if anyone wants to talk to her. She’s scared as hell. Mr Smits isn’t the nicest of bosses apparently. I don’t think he declares his rent from that little boat. She’d rather we didn’t tell him she was here.’

‘Carleed,’ Bakker said. ‘Saif Khaled. The beard . . .’

‘It’s a really common name,’ Aisha pointed out. ‘I mean
really
common. Like Smits. And as for beards . . .’

‘I know,’ Koeman added. ‘I checked. But after I talked to her I got a call from the team in Chinatown.’

He checked his notebook.

‘They talked to a nosy old bird who lives down the street. She says she saw a little girl at the basement window last night. Long blonde hair. The window’s blacked out but the kid pulled back the sheeting apparently. Not long after she met our friend Khaled in the local shop. He was buying fruit juice and sweets. Oh and a colouring book and crayons. Did he mention that?’

Vos checked his watch. Ten minutes. He needed to talk to Hanna Bublik.

‘He said the place was empty. The only visitors he had were young Muslim men in trouble.’

Van der Berg took out his phone.

‘I’ll call De Groot and see if he can get us entry.’

Vos shook his head.

‘No time. We need to take this call. Put a team close to Khaled’s place and a control van around the corner.’

Van der Berg didn’t move.

‘Was I being cryptic?’ Vos asked.

‘It’s all there in black and white in the logs, Pieter. Saif Khaled’s on an AIVD watch list. We’re not supposed to go near him without their say-so.’

‘Just fix it, will you?’ Vos said, looking at his watch. ‘I need to take this call.’

There was a place to hide. A kind of alcove near the bottom of the steps.

The kid from Anatolia was weak and slow. She’d let him walk down the stone stairs, look around, food in his hand. Then come out and surprise him.

She was eight years old. He was maybe twice her age. But she had the sharpest of the utility knives from the box. She’d use it too.

Shivering in the pink jacket she could see it was getting dark through the tiny gap in the sheeting over the window. He’d come back before long, with food, to empty the bucket. She knew the routine for this place now.

A noisy key opened the door at the top of the steps. He never bothered to lock it behind him. Too lazy for that. Because there was only a little girl at the bottom, scared and silent in the cellar.

Natalya shuffled into the shadows at the foot of the steps and waited. Had no idea how long this would take. She didn’t have a watch. They’d removed that from her in the first place where she could hear the ducks outside and the water lapping against a timber hull.

Nothing now but black bricks and the sound of footsteps tap-tapping on the cobbles of the street above.

Voices. All kinds. Men and women. Children sometimes. Dutch. Foreign. Chinese maybe. Something else.

Waiting.

Nothing else to do.

She’d stay hidden as long as it took.

An interview room. Hot and stuffy. From the canteen below rose the smell of cooking fat and pungent steam.

Vos, Hanna Bublik, Bakker and Van der Berg. One of the specialist team from the snatch squad assembled for the ransom handover. The red suitcase, closed, ready to go. Vos was going to take it, a GPS tracker inside his jacket, another sewn into the lining of the case itself. Three pursuit teams ready to follow wherever the pickup was going to be. A helicopter would be in the air the moment they knew a location and time.

De Groot was in a meeting beyond Marnixstraat, out of contact. That was odd but not unwelcome.

The clock on the wall turned four. Vos stared at the old Samsung on the table, hooked to a charger, volume turned up to full. Four bars of signal. Everything ready.

He’d told Hanna what he could. The truth mostly, if not all of it. She’d listened and not said a word. There was something wrong here. She seemed in pain. Physical as well as mental. Bakker had noticed it too, asked if she was OK. Offered to fetch a doctor.

All she asked for was a glass of water. Vos thought there was a whiff of dope about her and didn’t want to think about that.

So they waited.

At five past four she looked at Vos and asked, ‘What’s happening?’

‘They don’t always keep to schedule,’ he said, making it up on the go as usual.

‘You told me he was adamant. It was four o’clock. On the dot.’

‘He said that.’

She watched him.

‘And what else?’

Decisions. The truth or a well-meant white lie. Vos felt they were beyond that now.

‘He said there’d be no phone call if he felt he couldn’t trust us.’

‘You’re the police. Of course they don’t trust you.’

‘What they mean,’ Bakker said, ‘is if they think we don’t intend to go through with the drop. If we . . .’

Hanna Bublik stood up, got to the suitcase before any of them could stop her. Quickly unzipped it and ran her fingers through the notes there.

One second and she was into the blank paper.

‘Shit,’ the woman from specialist operations said. ‘I wish you hadn’t done that. We’ve got ink on those things.’

‘Ink?’ Hanna shrieked. ‘What ink?’

The officer pulled a detection lamp out of her bag and shone it on the notes. A numeric code appeared on all of them, and the blank pieces of paper underneath.

‘We’ll get them,’ the officer insisted. ‘We’ll bring these bastards to justice.’

‘Justice?’ Hanna shrieked. ‘I don’t give a shit about justice. I want my daughter back. That’s what matters. Not . . .’

She shoved the case off the table. Real and fake money scattered everywhere. No one moved until Vos got to his feet. Persuaded her to sit down again. Then the operations woman took a deep breath and started to pick up the notes, trying to tidy them back into the case.

Hanna waved a dismissive hand at the mess.

‘So they won’t call if they think you’re going to screw them around? And this is what you do?’

‘Standard practice,’ the woman said.

‘Standard practice is you fuck up?’

Vos waited a moment then said, with the slightest of shrugs, ‘Sometimes.’

He hated lying. So did Laura Bakker. It was one of the few things they had in common.

And waiting. They both loathed that too, though in different ways. Bakker was young. For her it was just plain impatience. Vos, older, not wiser in his own eyes, just more experienced, found the empty hours simply increased his curiosity, his instinctive penchant to be mistrustful, occasionally about matters that were entirely innocent.

They watched the phone.

The phone didn’t ring.

‘We told you we couldn’t pay the full ransom,’ Bakker said as gently as she could.

Hanna ignored her, turned her fury on Vos again.

‘Did you do something? Something they might have found out about?’