The Wrong Girl (34 page)

‘We fouled up big time. Someone’s kicking down on Frank de Groot. So he’s doing what management do best. Kicking down on the first person he finds beneath him.’

He pushed the remaining egg over the table. She declined.

‘If Pieter was the usual brigadier he’d be kicking down on us right now. But he’s not.’

‘We can’t sit back and watch him take the blame. We all screwed up. Besides . . . those bastards in AIVD . . .’

The studious way he held up the glass of beer and admired it silenced her.

‘True,’ he said.

‘So?’

‘So we do what the commissaris asks. We turn up in his office tomorrow. We listen to what he wants. We try to find the Bublik girl. Maybe in a week or so De Groot will change his mind. This isn’t the first time we’ve had a few explosions.’

‘And we just leave Pieter on his own? Not a word of support? No—’

‘He was an aspirant under me when he joined up,’ Van der Berg broke in. ‘I was the one supposed to hit the heights. Pieter was just this smart, soft kid everyone liked. Felt sorry for really.’

‘What happened?’

Van der Berg smiled at her.

‘He was just the same then. You couldn’t really talk to him. Tell him anything. He went his own sweet way. Got the job done. Then in a couple of years he got promoted. I got . . . nowhere.’

The beer was finished. The barmaid came over with another without him asking.

‘What happens with him happens inside. When he’s on his own. I learned long ago. You have to leave him to it. With his little dog and that nagging conscience. There’s nothing we can do. You or me. Except wait.’

He poured some of the bottle into her glass then chinked it.

‘Are you willing?’

‘What’s the alternative?’ she asked.

‘We barge in there doe-eyed and full of sympathy and he shrinks back into his shell. Where you found him all those months ago. Remember?’

She knocked back some beer and loved it.

‘I hate feeling there’s nothing you can do.’

Van der Berg’s heavy eyebrows rose.

‘I said we’d wait. That’s not the same now, is it?’

No answer.

‘I’ll walk you home,’ he added. ‘It’s on my way.’

Two streets away Vos was sitting where Bakker said: at his usual table, dog at his feet, a beer and a glass of old jenever in front of him. Sofia Albers eyeing him from the bar.

Close to eleven. He was the Drie Vaten’s last customer and didn’t look ready to leave.

‘How’s your mother?’ Vos asked, knowing she was planning to throw him out.

‘A lot better thanks. How are you?’

He raised the glass, toasted her, then emptied it.

‘That’s enough,’ she said.

The dog, recognizing the words, stirred at his feet, got up, shook his wiry coat.

‘That’s for me to decide, isn’t it?’ Vos wondered.

‘Stop doing this, Pieter. You’re starting to worry me.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Looking like you used to.’

‘I could drink all night if I wanted.’

‘You could. Just not here.’

Vos glimpsed a shape outside by the boat. Slim, familiar. Furtive. Everything had a risk.

He got up and took Sam to the bar then held out his lead.

‘Things to do.’ He wrapped the loop of the leash around the nearest beer pump. ‘Sam’ll think he lives here pretty soon.’

‘That’s ridiculous! I just look after him. He’s yours.’

As always the dog knew when they were talking about him. He had his paws against the counter, tail wagging, hoping for some last scrap of food.

‘He can hear you walking down the street,’ she added. ‘Long before I can. You should see—’

‘I don’t have time for this,’ Vos said. ‘Not now.’ He pointed to the lead. ‘Please.’

She took Sam behind the bar. The dog seemed more puzzled than dejected.

‘This is about that girl, isn’t it? I know you can’t talk about work . . .’

‘Work. Yes.’

She was an attractive woman. Divorced. Alone a lot of the time. About his own age. Looking for someone, but not desperately. When his world fell apart and he retreated to the solitary cabin of the houseboat across the road she saved him after a fashion. Vos never said thanks. It seemed presumptuous somehow. And unnecessary. She was from the Jordaan. People like her helped others without a second thought, and with no expectation whatsoever of reward.

‘What about your daughter, Pieter?’ Sofia Albers asked. ‘Have you heard from her lately?’

He pulled a postcard out of his jacket pocket and handed it over. A beach in Aruba, where Anneliese now lived with her mother.

It was posted six weeks before. For some reason he kept it with him. There was one sentence on the reverse: a simple message, ‘Miss you, Dad. When are you coming to enjoy the sun?’

‘When are you?’

‘I don’t like . . .’ Vos hesitated, searching for an excuse. ‘I don’t like hot places so much. She’ll come back. When she’s ready.’

‘And in the meantime you beat yourself up trying to save others? All on your own?’

He pocketed the postcard.

‘I’m back in the police, aren’t I? It’s what I’m supposed to do.’

‘You won’t find that kid if you go down that old black road again, will you?’ Sofia Albers said.

Vos was taken aback by that. They were the most severe and damning words she’d ever uttered to him.

He looked around the dishevelled little bar, at the woman who ran it.

‘I’m not entirely on my own, am I?’ he said then smiled sheepishly, tipped an imaginary hat and wandered out into the night.

The lone figure who’d risked so much was waiting by the bridge. He took the thing she brought and said goodbye.

Cold winter rain was coming down steadily. It made pinpricks on the canal glittering under the street lights. A tourist boat went past, cleaving through the black water. Figures inside, men in evening suits, women in colourful party dresses. Glasses of champagne in their hands. Laughter and music around them. The city went about its business regardless. No time to worry about injured creatures like Hanna and Natalya Bublik. It wasn’t cruelty or want of sympathy. Just a simple practicality born of experience. When there was nothing to be done why worry? Let others do that if they could.

At the Berenstraat bridge the coloured street lights in the Nine Streets became visible, reflecting on the feathered, rippling waves left by the wake of the vanishing cruiser. The city had a strange and solitary beauty at that moment. One that wouldn’t last.

He pulled out his fisherman’s hat, wool, not much use against the wet. Then wandered the way he’d planned all along.

There were plenty of bars still busy if he wanted them. Though he couldn’t tell Sofia Albers drink wasn’t what he required, or the black road she suspected.

Ten minutes and he was in the narrow confines of Oude Nieuwstraat, searching out the address he had for Hanna Bublik. A young woman answered the door. She looked Malaysian or Filipina with the kind of fragile innocence the imported whores possessed, for a while anyway. Until time and the city took it away.

‘Hanna’s not here,’ the girl said. ‘Besides she don’t do business from home.’

He didn’t have an ID card to flash any more. It was an understandable mistake.

‘Where?’ Vos asked.

‘I don’t know. I’m here. I do,’ she said with a coy smile.

Something in his disappointed expression made her close the door in his face.

Down the street an argument was starting. A customer and a woman. A pimp involved maybe. Fights, drunks, shouting, screaming. It all kicked off long before midnight in these parts. Then, by the morning, was gone. Parents walked their children to school down the same street, not watching as the cleaner dealt with the sick and the rubbish, the syringes and spent condoms.

Vos wandered towards the racket, thinking perhaps he’d intervene. Try to calm things down. Persuade people to behave with the common sense he sometimes found so hard himself. His own life had retreated from the edge when an offer of redemption from Frank de Groot and Laura Bakker’s muscular persuasiveness drew him back into the police. But the precipice was always there. They knew it too.

His eyes strayed to the window on his left. Red light. Bright neon tube. A figure in the window, head down, eyes closed, face full of pain. An old scarf round her naked shoulders. Shiny satin bra and knickers, legs crossed, arms folded. The kind of pose that said, ‘Go away. Not now.’

Something you never saw around these parts.

Vos forgot about the argument down the street. Walked up to the glass. She still didn’t open her eyes. He pressed the bell. Hanna Bublik did look then and he struggled to interpret what he was seeing. A curious mix of hatred and despair. And perhaps a fearful touch of hope.

Her eyes flitted down the street, checking anxiously for someone.

Then she went to the intercom and said, ‘No, Vos. Go away. I beg you.’

In the persistent rain he opened his jacket, took out his wallet, removed all the notes there, maybe three hundred euros in all, and pressed them to the glass.

She didn’t move from the phone tethered to the wall. Hanna was glancing down the street. Someone was watching and he realized, to his dismay, he’d forced her into accepting him. To refuse would somehow cause her more pain.

‘Please . . .’ he begged.

‘Will you never leave me be?’

‘Not right now.’

‘Go home.’

‘I can’t . . .’

A curse. One in her own tongue he guessed.

He watched her walk across the narrow cabin. The scarf fell from her shoulders. A dressing was stuck to the top of her back, red flesh around it.

The long scarlet curtains at the window closed. The narrow glass door buzzed and fell open to the pressure of his fingers.

Vos entered, grateful to be out of the rain.

5

Henk Kuyper checked out of the hotel in Zeedijk at seven, shaved, got dressed, went for breakfast in one of the cafes on the edge of Chinatown.

Thursday. Bright cold morning. Hard winter knocking on the door.

The place was empty. He ordered coffee and two croissants. The previous night he’d kept the drinking at bay. Just a couple of beers in a sleazy bar near the Oude Kerk. Felt better for that. It had taken two hours to shake off the tail that had followed him from the house in the Herenmarkt. One man, one woman, working together in sequence.

He’d learned the technique himself. They weren’t that good. Mirjam Fransen ordered the cover he guessed. Pissed off he’d had the temerity to try to talk to her near the office.

As if any of it mattered any more. The operation to trap Barbone was in tatters. It would take a miracle to get that back on the rails. Natalya Bublik was different. His responsibility. An innocent put in harm’s way for no good reason. And Fransen didn’t care. She made sure she only saw the bigger picture, never the individual. That was the way they were taught. There was a little mantra he’d learned on training.

Ordinary people are the ones we’re trying to protect. They just need to stay out of our way.

He’d half believed it once.

Five hundred euros in his pocket, taken from the stash he’d withdrawn for Renata the previous day. Just a pittance left in the account to keep it open. Before falling into the flophouse he’d made his way into one of the cheap foreign shops in the red-light district, the kind that did anything for you.

There, for a hundred euros, he’d picked up a cheap mobile with a pay as you go SIM and some credit. He didn’t dare use his own phone. Didn’t even feel confident he could look at his emails. AIVD would be watching the way they always did.

Mirjam Fransen was good at all that. They’d fallen into bed together on one of those training courses. He’d never summoned the courage to tell Renata. It wasn’t an affair. It was an event. A way to ease the boredom, to scratch a curious itch. For him at least. For her it was a considered career move. One that made things so easy when she decided to pull him from AIVD and edge some bait out into the world, a renegade, an activist, looking to tug in interest from the people they wanted to penetrate.

No point arguing about the cost to him, to his family. It was a plea doomed to fall on deaf ears. And just to rub it in she fetched his father into the equation. Lucas Kuyper, the shamed coward of Srebrenica, pilloried by the press for no good reason. Now a reclusive, paid adviser to AIVD for a new, more secret war.

How did he say no to both of them?

Henk Kuyper got the waiter to turn on the TV. The news headlines were coming up. The lead item: economic news. Some fresh figures claiming the country was turning the corner. The slump was coming to an end. Good times on the way. For some, the reporter said, they were already here.

The report switched to footage of the Nine Streets. Moneyed people window-shopping, eyeing expensive clothes and novelties. Pointless glitzy luxuries they didn’t really need.

The missing Georgian girl was item three on the news behind trouble at a football match. Natalya Bublik was fading out of the public consciousness. The world had a short attention span. Life was easier that way.

He finished his breakfast then went outside, pulled his hood around his face, walked to the Nieuwmarkt and found a bench in the shadow of the castle-like building called the Waag.

Kuyper scanned the square. No one had followed him that he could see. He was alone. The way it was meant to be. Mirjam and his father told him from the start: he was a free agent. Allowed to make whatever arrangements he thought necessary. Answerable to the department for nothing except eventual results. And they might take years to come, if ever.

A week ago success seemed within reach. Sinterklaas and his Black Petes were supposed to herald a rare victory. Bring down the network that had haunted them for years.

Then Marnixstraat got overzealous and spoiled the party.

He took out the new handset, got data, pulled up Skype. Prayed she’d have her iPad with her.

A long pause as the call went through then Renata asked, voice booming as she spoke to the tablet, ‘Where the hell are you, Henk? Where’ve you been?’

‘Thinking.’

‘You can think at home, can’t you?’