Black Widow (28 page)

Her strange attitude only put Pieter more on edge. ‘I really think we should call in for backup,’ he said as they crossed the Prinsengracht into Jordaan.

‘On what grounds?’ Tanja enquired.

‘On the grounds that killers by their nature tend to be a little dangerous?’

‘I’m sure you’ll be able to deal with any contingencies, Pieter.’

‘She could be armed!’ he protested.

‘
We’re
armed,’ Tanja pointed out.

Pieter looked away, so she wouldn’t see his expression. He was sure they were onto something. And now that he thought about it, wasn’t he deserving of a
little
praise? After all,
he
was the one to theorise that the killer had been a patient at Theo Gentz’s clinic. Van Kempen had thought to congratulate him on his reasoning, so why wouldn’t Tanja?

He turned back to her. ‘Why are you being like this, ma’am?’

Tanja frowned. ‘Because what we have here is a coincidence, nothing more.’

‘A pretty unlikely coincidence!’

‘We’ll see.’

They pulled into Palmstraat. Tanja exited the car, stretching unconcernedly. Greta Mach’s house was located at the far end of the street, overlooking the Brouwersgracht. It was as neatly tended as its neighbours, if a little more garish. Its whitewashed wooden frame was the cream to a punnet of strawberry coloured bricks, whilst the ivy which flanked its canal side aspect was perhaps more variegated than the norm.

‘Needs a make-under,’ Tanja observed as she walked up the path to the front door.

Pieter stepped in front of her, before she could ring the door buzzer. ‘If I might say so, ma’am, you’re being a little foolhardy.’

Tanja stared up at him. But she didn’t lose her temper. ‘Look,’ she said reasonably, ‘we don’t even know if she’s in.’

‘We don’t need a full team,’ Pieter said. ‘Just a little in the way of backup. I could call Chief Inspector Wever.’

‘You could do that,’ she said. ‘And we’d still be here this time tomorrow whilst he made up his mind what to do.’

‘Hoofdinspecteur van Kempen, then.’

‘If you speak to van Kempen without my express permission,’ she said levelly, ‘then I will not be responsible for my actions. You understand?’

She didn’t wait for an answer. She looked at the buzzer for a moment, before setting the palm of her hand to the door.

It swung back on its hinges.

Pieter reached for his gun. He saw a look of irritation cross Tanja’s face, but then she also placed her hand to her Walther. Finally!

‘You think she’s expecting us?’ Pieter queried.

‘Not us,’ Tanja answered, ‘but maybe a guest of
some
description.’

They set foot inside. Pieter quickly moved to investigate each of the ground floor rooms in turn, and found them empty.

But there was a sound coming from upstairs. Low, animal. He heard a woman’s voice. A man’s. Curses, grunting.

Pieter didn’t hesitate. He started to climb the stairs, deliberately placing himself in the vanguard, his pistol divining a path before him. One step. Another. His feet felt heavy, numb, as if his heart were hoarding his body’s blood. He felt a little dizzy.

‘Pieter, wait,’ Tanja hissed.

The landing was dark, but the telltale sounds were louder than before. He hesitated outside the bedroom door, his fingers pressed to the cold brass handle.

Pieter threw open the door, shouting the word
Politie!

The bedroom was a travesty of pink drapes and throws, but it wasn’t that which captured Pieter’s attention. A woman was lying on the four-poster bed, her legs entwined neatly around the back of a young man. There was no evidence of cuffs, nor anything else which might have been termed suspicious.

‘Ms. Mach?’ Tanja said calmly. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Pino. My colleague is Detective Kissin. Sorry to burst in on you and your friend at such a delicate time, but may we have a few words?

‘Oh God,’ the man groaned.

Tanja cleared her throat. ‘Would you mind getting off the lady, lad?’

The young man did so, rolling away in a mortified tangle of limbs and other appendages. The woman hurried over to the sideboard and snatched up a silk dressing gown. It was of the lacy variety, and didn’t do much to hide the unlikely scale and gravity-defying implacability of her breasts.

Pieter lowered his gun a fraction. The woman looked at it nervously. ‘God, is that really necessary? He’s twenty-two. It isn’t a crime!’

‘No,’ Tanja agreed.

Pieter glanced at Tanja, who nodded. He returned the pistol to its holster, though only reluctantly. He could hardly have felt more uncomfortable. Why didn’t they train for this sort of thing at the Academy?

Greta Mach settled back into a chair, drawing the dressing gown tightly about her. ‘Reminds me of a long-standing fantasy,’ she said to Tanja, her light tone in marked contrast to the hardness of her eyes. ‘Only in my vision, Detective Inspector, you don’t exist. It’s your young friend here who is in charge, if you catch my drift.’

‘Each to their own,’ Tanja responded. ‘But anyway, we are investigating a crime. A murder.’

‘Mikael Ruben’s?’

‘Yes,’ Tanja confirmed. ‘Amongst others.’

‘Oh, I couldn’t kill anyone,’ Greta said. ‘I have shockingly poor circulation, you see. The only time the blood reaches my extremities is when I have some kid inside me. If I don’t climax at least once a day, there’s a very real chance I will turn gangrenous.’

She smiled, but it was the sort of smile which might have been expected to preface an expensive lawsuit. Pieter felt his excitement dissipate. All right, so first impressions were not always to be trusted, but looking down at this increasingly calm, self-assured woman, he was starting to think that she was guilty of nothing more than being perpetually horny.

‘Would you mind if we have a look around?’ Tanja asked.

Greta ran a hand through her hair, which was short, and blonde, and clearly natural. ‘If you must,’ she said with a yawn. ‘Only try to put things back where you find them, will you?’

They didn’t find anything in their search of the flat. Certainly nothing in the way of a wig, nor anything which had obviously been used to strangle the dead men. There were plenty of stockings, but it would have been strange if there had not.

More than that, Greta had an alibi for the Mikael Ruben murder. She’d been in Spain, attending a bullfight at the Plaza de Toros de Ronda. Amongst other cultural activities.

‘I was staying at the Hotel Málaga from Tuesday until Friday morning,’ she advised. ‘Here, I’ll get you their number.’ She stood, and glanced at Pieter with a happy little shiver, which had him squirming. ‘You’re lovely. I think I shall probably dream of you for weeks.’

*

Antje Scholten kicked off her shoes beneath her desk, and poured a glass of wine. It had already been a long day, and whilst she was satisfied, generally, with the way things were progressing, she was still feeling in need of a little relaxation. Arguing with Tanja Pino like that –
in public
– it was unforgivable. She would need to keep a better hold of her temper in future.

Her criminal profiler’s head always sat heavily on her shoulders. And not only in a metaphorical sense. She had a pain in her neck, which was threatening to become a headache.

She selected a suitable pill from her cabinet, tossing it back with a further slug of tempranillo. Better. She was wholly dedicated to her work, and had taught herself a little pharmacology; she knew which pills to take.

She settled down at her desk, to read the final few pages of a book she was reviewing for the
American Journal of Psychology
. She was always busy. Even when there wasn’t a murder to solve!

But she liked it that way; she liked to feel that she was making a difference.

She thought about the case, even as she was red-inking the author’s third-rate effort. She was sure there was more she could give Wever and van Kempen. They were good cops, basically, but Wever, in particular, tended to flounder if not given a proper steer.

She rushed through the rest of the book as quickly as she could, then spent a few hours at her case histories, looking for suitable precedents.

*

At more or less the same time that Harald Janssen was arresting Maria Berger, and Tanja and Pieter were interviewing Greta Mach, Anders Wever was in his office, fuming. He’d spent the last hour with the
Hoofd
, essentially pleading Tanja’s case.

God that woman infuriated him! Of all the times to publicise her feelings towards Antje Scholten. Now he would have to speak to the professor, and beg her forgiveness. Anders wasn’t built to apologise, at least not where women were concerned. However hard he tried, they always seemed to divine criticism in his words. He might tell his wife, in the aftermath of a row, that she was looking particularly slim today, and she would burst into tears, certain that he was actually calling her fat.

Of course, Hilda was going through a sensitive phase. She was no longer the woman she had been, and was struggling to come to terms with it. Antje would probably be okay; she was made of more vibrant stuff.

God knows what Tanja was made of. Raw anger, maybe.

The Hoofd, Edwin Meijer, was generally a patient man, but he’d felt it necessary to bang his hand repeatedly on the oaken table which dominated his meeting room. Anders left under no illusions: if Tanja misbehaved again, she was off the case, or worse. It didn’t matter that she’d recently made it to twenty-five years’ service, when most officers struggled to last half that long; she was effectively on probation. And any further failure on her part would reflect badly on Anders.

Not for the first time in recent days, Anders found his thoughts drifting off in search of his mythical canal boat.

And then he thought, it needn’t be a myth, necessarily. He had no mortgage to worry about, and his wife’s tastes had grown more modest with each passing sweat; he could retire a few years early, and be comfortable.

It might have been nice to run with that daydream a while longer, but at this point his phone rang. The caller introduced himself as Jerome Bakker, one of the detectives on Balistraat Politiebureau, a smaller station in the eastern quadrant of the city.

‘How can I help you, Jerome?’

‘Well, thanks for finding time to speak with me, first of all, sir.’

‘It’s all right, son,’ Wever said. ‘You don’t have to ingratiate yourself with me. Worry about your own boss, eh? How is Chief Inspector Martens, by the way?’

‘He seems happy enough, sir.’

‘Good for him.’

‘So, sir, you may have heard that we’ve been investigating a hit-and-run out near the Oosterpark.’

‘Not really,’ Wever replied. ‘I’ve sort of had my hands full with a serial killer.’

‘Of course. Anyway, we’re treating the case as outright murder. The driver reversed back over the dead man, you see.’

‘That sounds pretty clear-cut. Any witnesses?’

‘None at all,’ Jerome answered.

‘So –?’

‘The victim is a certain Jasper Endqvist. Worked for an insurance company.’

‘Tough break,’ Wever sympathised. ‘He must have had plenty of enemies.’

‘Quite possibly. Anyway, we’ve been going through his files, trying to see if any of his recent cases stand out as being particularly contentious.’

‘And the insurance company was happy to give you what you needed?’

‘Not really,’ Jerome replied. ‘They seem to have given us little more than a vague summary, actually. There isn’t much detail.’

‘That’s fairly typical, I’m afraid. Insurers tend to be a paranoid bunch. But I still don’t see what any of this has to do with me, Jerome. The Oosterpark is just round the corner from your station. It’s within your jurisdiction.’

‘Of course, sir. But the thing is, well, there’s one case in particular that seems to have placed a strain on Endqvist’s time. A disputed motor claim. I believe the other parties are known to you. Alex Hoekstra.’ He paused. ‘And Tanja Pino.’

Anders sat back in his chair. As he did so, Dedrick van Kempen appeared. He didn’t ask permission to come in. He rather crossed the floor smoothly, and lowered himself into the other chair with similar grace. He crossed his legs, and folded his arms, his long fingers clasped to opposing elbows. He looked at Anders, and nodded once.

‘Sir?’ Jerome said. ‘Are you still there?’

‘I believe she mentioned something a while back, about her car being off the road,’ Anders noted vaguely. ‘But even police officers have accidents, don’t you think?’

‘Of course, sir,’ Jerome acknowledged. ‘But I – and CI Martens – thought that you might want to know.’

‘Fine,’ Anders said awkwardly. ‘Thanks for the tip-off.’

He cursed inwardly his choice of phrasing and turned to look at van Kempen.

‘Anders?’ Van Kempen said after a precisely calculated (as Anders saw it) pause.

‘Sir?’

‘Has it occurred to you that the woman in Antje Scholten’s profile sounds a little like Tanja Pino?’

Anders drummed his fingers on the desk. The thought had occurred to him in fact. And not only because of those ridiculous posters. It was stupid, doubtless fuelled by the natural pessimism and paranoia which came to a veteran police officer in his final years of service – yet still Anders had found himself, on more than one occasion, imaging how Tanja might look in a blonde wig.

‘Which parts are you referring to?’ he asked carefully.

Van Kempen shrugged, but there was nothing casual about him. ‘Well, she clearly has a thing about younger men. And a temper. And she does work in a high-stress environment.’

‘She is also a fine detective, with a peerless record.’ Wever glared, not knowing if his anger should be directed at van Kempen, or himself. ‘And besides, I bet there are a thousand women in the city who meet that description.’

‘What about the hit-and-run?’

Wever’s eyes narrowed. ‘You must have fantastic hearing, sir.’

‘I do, as it happens. But I also have a contact at Balistraat.’

Wever threw his arms out wide. ‘This is absurd. How can you even think of linking a hit-and-run with the Cougar Killer’s murders? The MO is totally different.’