Into the Night: Inspector Rykel Book 2 (Amsterdam Quartet) (2 page)

Saturday, 8 May
14.31

The bench creaked as Inspector Tanya van der Mark sat and glanced over towards the pond.

The stone she’d picked up was smooth, its surface pigeon-grey, with one chipped, rough edge. She ran her finger along it, testing the stone, testing her skin, then tossed it into the water, rippling up the calm surface.

Orange fish flickered like underwater flames.

Something, some insect, zoomed past her ear, and a crowd of tulips were just opening on the far side of the water, colour jostling in the breeze.

Her ears picked up surround-sound noise of a warm Saturday afternoon in the park; kids screeching, dogs barking, adults laughing.

It was the laughter that always got her.

But that was going to change. And it was going to change starting now, because she’d tracked him down. She’d been trying for months, unable to find him. Until she discovered the reason it had been so hard.

He’d changed his name to Ruud Staal.

She pulled out a photograph from her pocket and unfolded it, the crease running right through his face.

It’s like he knew I’d come after him
, she’d thought, noticing the faint tremor in her fingers.
Or does he have another motive for trying to hide? Has he done the same to others? Other girls?

She felt the soft buzz of her phone in her pocket. The
sun pushed gently against her face, and she put the photo away then leaned back and closed her eyes.

Since transferring down to Amsterdam she’d tried to forget about it all, tried to make a fresh start, tried to live a normal life.

And for a while it worked – new place, new colleagues, new crimes which were at the same time old.

But then the feelings crept back – the bleakness, the edginess, the waking at three in the morning with a wild heartbeat pulsing through her body like a dull electric shock – and she knew she had to do something.

Her phone started up again. She sighed and pulled it out, her eyes momentarily blinded as she opened them.

It was the station.

She really didn’t want to answer, she’d been up early on a dawn raid and had left Jaap’s houseboat well before sun up. Surveillance had clocked an illegal cannabis farm out in a house in Nieuw-West, the predominately immigrant area to the west of Amsterdam, and the team were short. Her boss, Smit, had volunteered her.

But they’d got there only to find the place had been cleared out in a hurry. According to the unit she’d been with, this was the third time in the last two months. They just kept getting there too late. It was as if the growers were able to move out before they were hit.

‘I’m on leave as of midday today, didn’t the log show that?’

She figured it was best to be direct, stop anything before it started.

‘I saw that, but the thing is something’s come up,’ said Frits.

Of course it had. It always did. In a city just shy of eight hundred thousand people shoved into two hundred square kilometres there was bound to be a bit of friction. And Amsterdam had the dubious honour of placing first in the list of Western Europe’s murder capitals.

‘Okay, but seriously I can’t do it because—’

‘Listen, it’s an open-and-shut case. Accident or suicide, and we just need someone to sign it off. Keep things on track and you’ll be finished and handing in the paperwork by no later than five tonight. I promise.’

Tanya almost laughed. Promises and the police.

She heard the
thwump
of a football being kicked somewhere close off to her left and instinctively flinched. The ball missed but hit the water just in front of her.

‘Uggh,’ she said as pond splashed up.

‘Hey, it’s not that bad. You should see the one Jaap caught a while ago. Guy without a head.’

Tanya didn’t want to know. The whole thing with Jaap was complicated. And if Frits, who seemed to have a thing for her, found out about them, well …

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Where is it?’

‘Centraal station. Patrol’s there at the moment. And the NS are hopping up and down as they want to get the trains moving again – all these people who’ve come up to town for the day are going to need to get home somehow.’

Great
, thought Tanya,
so I’m now responsible for the trains.

As she stood up she looked down at the wet patches on her clothes, a dribble ran down her right leg from a large dark area on her crotch. She started walking, hoping it would dry out.

‘I’m at Vondelpark. Get a car to pick me up at the Van Baerlestraat exit in five minutes,’ she said and hung up.

The car was waiting for her when she reached the pick-up point, and got her to Centraal quickly. She could see it was in chaos as they drove up Damrak, siren wailing. Blue and white trams were backed up in every direction, and she had to get out and walk the final stretch.

As she got close she could smell the IJ, the stretch of water just behind the station, which separated old Amsterdam from the modern Amsterdam Noord. She could also hear the frustrated noise of people whose journeys had been interrupted. Pushing through the crowd she came across hippies with large rucksacks and didgeridoos, half the population of Africa and a particularly obstinate old woman who refused to believe she was police, accusing her in a loud petulant bleat of trying to jump the queue.

Inside, past the fluttering red and white striped tape, things calmed down, and she walked through the subway, her footsteps echoing in a space normally crammed with a flurry of people dashing for trains.

On the platform itself she recognized one of the uniforms, Piet. He stepped over to greet her.

‘Hey, I thought you were supposed to be on leave?’

‘So did I,’ said Tanya as they walked to the front of the train and looked over the platform edge at the track.

A woman, who, despite the warm weather, was wearing several coats of varying sizes. Her body was crumpled up on one of the polished rails. Grey and white hair streaked over her face, and one arm was raised above her head along the ground as if she was reaching for something.

‘Driver?’

‘She’s in the main office. It’s only her first week.’

‘Shaken?’

‘Pretty bad, I’d say. And the thing is, if that doesn’t get her, all the jokes she’s going to hear about woman drivers probably will.’

Tanya shook her head. She’d got used to working in a male-dominated world. It hadn’t been easy, but she coped.

Usually.

She looked down at the body again.

I might just get away on time
, she thought.

Then she felt guilty. Here was a homeless woman who’d suffered who-knew-what in her life, and all she could think of was herself.

Something struck her.

‘Weird she’s on the further of the two lines from the platform,’ she said, edging closer. ‘Did she take a running jump or was she over the other side already?’

Piet looked across at the body and scratched his ear.

‘I’d just assumed she was on the other side anyway, looking for something down there. She seems quite the collector judging by her clothes.’

‘What did the driver say?’

‘She says she only saw her at the last minute. There was some kind of fight on the platform and she was watching that. She slammed the brakes on but …’

‘Too late.’

‘Yeah,’ said Piet.

‘You’ve got someone to check the CCTV, right?’

‘Bart’s supposed to be doing that now.’

Tanya looked up at the curved glass and cast-iron roof, the sun rainbowing parts of the glazing.

‘I’m going to take a look down there,’ she said, looking at the track again. ‘Can you go and chase the CCTV up?’

‘Sure. You might not want to be down there too long though.’ He pinched his nose before turning away.

She moved to the edge and dropped down, her feet crunching on the stones by the track. Stale urine burned her nostrils, and it only got stronger as she stepped closer to the body.

The woman was hard to age. Her face had the skin of someone used to sleeping rough, and her teeth, glimpsed through her open mouth, were standard-issue homeless; black and not many of them left.

Tanya tried to work out what she’d been doing, how she’d got in front of the train.

It can’t have been an accident
, she thought.
Unless she was drunk or high.

Tanya had seen colleagues sniff dead bodies for alcohol, but the thought made her feel sick.

I’ll leave that one for the pathologist.

Something moved, catching Tanya’s attention. A rat was sniffing round the woman’s outstretched hand, one paw raised as its nose oscillated, whiskers following suit. Tanya shifted round to see what it was, the rat scuttling off alongside the rail as she moved.

The hand held a phone. A very expensive one.

Tanya was hit by sadness. She could see what had happened; the woman had seen the phone on the tracks, maybe thought she could exchange it for food, drink, or drugs, and had gone down to get it.

‘Hey, there’s something you should see.’

Tanya was surprised that she had to wipe her eyes before turning to look up at Piet, catching the urgency in his voice.

‘What?’ she said, already moving back to the platform, springing up to where Piet was standing, agitated, weight shifting from leg to leg as if he really needed to go.

‘The CCTV, you’ve got to see it. C’mon.’

In the control room a fat NS employee sat at a bank of monitors; he gestured to one of them.

Aircon hummed, a radio talk show babbled on at low volume.

‘See there,’ said Piet, pointing to the lower left corner of the flickery screen, the scene playing out in monochrome.

Alive, the woman was walking on the far side of the track, holding her hand to her head. It took Tanya a moment to realize that she was talking. Talking on the phone she’d seen in the woman’s outstretched hand. The train was approaching her slowly, the woman had her back to it, and then, seconds before the train reached her, a figure, which must have been jogging along on the far side of the train, broke ahead and shoved the woman on to the track. The figure then turned and ducked back behind the train.

‘Rewind that,’ said Tanya. ‘Pause it there.’

She looked at the screen.

‘Shit …’

She couldn’t believe it.

‘Have you got any cameras which could pick him up elsewhere?’ she asked.

‘I’ve got over thirty cameras here,’ said the fat guy. ‘That would take me hours.’

‘Is this backed up on a disk, or a hard drive?’

‘Hard drive, the whole thing. We had it installed last—’

‘Get it for me. I’m going to get a team on to this right away.’

The fat guy looked unsure, didn’t move.

‘Yes?’ she asked.

‘It’s just that I’m not sure I’m allowed—’

‘You are allowed. I’ve just given you permission.’

He held her gaze for a second then shrugged.

‘Whatever,’ he said as he pulled himself up out of his chair and ambled across the floor. Tanya noticed one of his shoelaces was undone. He reached a cupboard, opened it up, fiddled with a computer for a few moments, then pulled the drive out and handed it over.

‘This is the only copy, right? There isn’t a backup somewhere?’

‘It gets backed up automatically online as well, but it stopped syncing yesterday morning and no one’s been able to sort it yet.’

‘Okay. You’re not to talk to anyone about this,’ she said to the fat guy. ‘It’s an ongoing investigation. The press will try to get you to talk but it’s really important you don’t. Is that clear?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. Somehow she wasn’t convinced he meant it, but she didn’t have time to waste, and as she dashed out the room she could feel her pulse pounding.

No one back at the station was picking up; eventually it rang out and she dialled again.

By the time she’d reached the front of Centraal and
pushed her way out through the crowds, she’d managed to get through to her boss’s office.

‘I need to talk to Smit,’ she said to his assistant as she ducked into the patrol car and told the uniform to get moving.

‘He’s tied up at the moment—’

‘This is Inspector van der Mark. Tell him it’s an emergency.’

More waiting. The car was heading down Damrak when Smit’s voice came on the line.

‘Van der Mark,’ he said. ‘What’s the problem.’

‘I’ve got a video showing a woman being pushed in front of a train.’

There was a deep, reverberating silence before he responded.

‘So?’

She looked out of the window as they passed through Dam Square. The funfair which had arrived for the King’s Day celebration was still there, the Ferris wheel turning slowly. Someone, a kid, was waving from near the top. People queued at a mobile food stall, many of them holding flags on short poles.

High above, an orange balloon powered skyward.

She thought of the man in the image, what was written on the back of his jacket.

The phone felt unreal in her hand.

‘The thing is,’ said Tanya, ‘whoever pushed her was one of us.’

Saturday, 8 May
14.46

‘So, I figure this is kind of a celebration,’ said Inspector Kees Terpstra as he lowered his head towards the table, guiding the rolled-up note to his nose. ‘Here’s to nailing the bastard.’

Zamir Isovic sat opposite him on a low 1960s-style chair and nodded. Then he grinned.

‘Exactly,’ he said as he took the note when Kees had finished.

Kees shook his head quickly as it hit, then relaxed back into the sofa and looked round the flat.

He’d been here pretty much the best part of five days now, someone relieving him for the night shifts only, and the end was in sight. He’d been bored stupid to begin with, and the coke was really a consolation prize for himself. With all the shit he’d been dealing with over the last couple of months he figured he deserved it.

Outside the tiny window he could just make out the tops of the houses on the far side of Herengracht, one of the main canals in Amsterdam with the most expensive real estate in the city.

The flat itself was tiny, nothing more than a studio with a separate bathroom and a damp problem in the low ceiling, and when he’d been told how he was to be spending the week he’d not been happy.

In the movies they always put witnesses up in hotel
suites, complete with a room-service tab, but here he was in an airless bolt-hole with scarcely enough room to move around in.

Not that there was anything he could do about it. Since the shooting – and the cover-up – he’d just not been given any breaks.

It’s that fucker Smit
, he thought as the coke revved his system up.
I did all that work for him and this is the reward.

Isovic leaned forward, a necklace with a crescent moon banging the table, and hoovered up his line.

‘You know, you’re not so bad,’ Isovic said, fiddling with his nose. ‘For a cop.’

They both laughed.

Isovic had turned out all right. Sure he was a bit cocky, and his accent was so irritating that half the time Kees wished they’d just sit there in silence. But then again, how many foreigners could actually speak Dutch? At least he’d made the effort. And although Kees had managed to find a bit of his background out, he suspected that Isovic had probably only told the half of it.

‘This guy, the one you’re testifying against, Matkovick—’

‘Matkovic.’

‘Yeah, Matkovic. So what did he actually do?’

Isovic breathed in deeply and leaned back in his chair, eyes scanning the ceiling.

‘He’s evil. There’s no other way to say it. He was the head of this group of soldiers, part of the Serb army which broke away and set up on their own. After Srebenica he probably realized that it was safer to be a small group. He called it the Black Hands, and one day they arrived at my village.’

Kees waited for more, but the expression on Isovic’s face stopped him from probing further.

‘So what are you going to do, after the trial?’ he finally asked.

Isovic waved his hand in the air, as if trying to catch a fly.

‘I don’t know really. Maybe some friends have got something lined up for me.’

‘Here?’

Isovic looked away.

‘I don’t think I’ll be going back.’

Kees didn’t blame him. He couldn’t remember which specific part of the old Yugoslavia Isovic had said he came from, but he was pretty sure it was a shit hole. Had to be, the whole area was. Not that he’d ever been.

‘Maybe I’ll become a cop,’ said Isovic. ‘You seem to have things sorted out pretty good.’

He motioned to the coke left on the table, enough for a couple of lines each.

Kees looked at it.

It struck him he had no idea what it really was.

Other than goods for services rendered.

And it looked like he was due some more tonight. Which would have to be the last lot. He’d left a message telling them he was out, it was getting too risky. All he’d got in response was a laugh and a reminder about just how much he owed.

And he needed more.

‘Man, the last thing you want to be is a cop. Especially on witness protection; you’d have to hang out with people like you.’

Isovic laughed again, then stopped.

‘Your nose,’ he said, touching his own as if Kees didn’t know what a nose was. ‘It’s blooding.’

‘Bleeding. Shit.’

Kees got up and went to the bathroom, ripped a couple of sheets of toilet paper off the roll and looked in the mirror.

It was his left, the trickle like something out of a cheap vampire movie, so he jammed the paper into a tight ball and inserted it into his nostril. He watched as blood blossomed, highlighting fine cellulose fibres.

Ever since the shooting – Kees had pulled his gun on a man who was holding Jaap and Tanya and then pulled the trigger, watching as his head exploded – Jaap had been trying to help him. He’d even got him into an anonymous drug dependency programme. And Jaap could have just shopped him, but he obviously felt indebted to him for saving his life.

They’d even worked a couple of cases together and had got along fine, though Kees got the feeling Jaap never really trusted him.

He would if I stopped
, he thought.
But I’m not ready to yet.

Kees had gone to the meetings Jaap had set up, but he’d not found it was helping. But that was probably as no one there knew what his problem was really stemming from. He’d not shared it with the group, unable to talk about it, and had pretended it was to do with the shooting. They’d bought that, nodding their heads like they knew what it was like, all the while getting some kind of kick out of the story.

He didn’t mention the real reason, the reason he’d been forced to up his coke intake.

Just to cope.

The disease, the pain of which seemed to be getting worse every day.

He stepped back into the room and felt anger surge in him. It was all so fucked up. Here he was getting high with a fucking immigrant witness, wasting what little he had left of his career, what little he had left of his life.

And his coke.

Isovic made some joke but Kees hardly heard him. He grabbed the rolled up note and took another line, through his right nostril. He felt the coke hit.

Then something else.

His face crashed into the table, his nose erupting into a flash of pain, the rolled-up note jabbed deep inside his nostril and everything went black.

When he came round his neck ached, and there was a tender spot right on the back of his head. His vision was blurred, and for a full five seconds he didn’t even know where he was. His hair was hanging down over his ears, spooling on to whatever surface his face was pressed against.

Then he lifted and turned his head, brushing hair away from his face.

Everything in the flat was the same, the furniture was as it had been. The fridge juddered off, leaving a ringing in Kees’ ears. Or maybe the ringing was an after-effect of the impact.

He gradually registered something.

No Isovic.

As he turned his head towards the door, the room swaying, the pulse at his temples like a series of explosions, he saw something he didn’t like.

The door to the flat was open.