The Wrong Girl (7 page)

‘No. I want you to work with us. So we bring Natalya Bublik home. This Alamy creature at the airport . . . that’s up to you. We—’

‘I can go over your head, De Groot.’

He nodded.

‘Yes. You can. And I wonder how that will look. However this falls out we’ll both be under scrutiny when it’s over. Do you want it said we started with a turf war? When a young girl’s life’s at stake?’

They didn’t like that. But they backed down and left for their own offices not long after.

‘We should have been told,’ Vos said when they were gone, and got a ‘damned right’ from Bakker straight away.

‘We should,’ De Groot agreed. ‘But we weren’t.’

The Kuypers were having dinner in their neat little terrace home by the Herenmarkt. A table by the window. Christmas lights, red and green and blue, blinking in a pattern against the glass.

Outside there were people dining in the West-Indisch Huis. A couple of drunks hanging around in the children’s playground, messing about on the swings.

Saskia had gone to bed, exhausted, morose. As if she’d been cheated of something.

Henk Kuyper said little and drank a lot. He couldn’t wait to get back to his computer.

Picking at the remains of a pizza she’d bought from the organic store round the corner she gently asked him about that afternoon.

‘It was a mistake,’ he said. ‘We were lucky.’

He poured more red wine and gazed at her. A handsome man with long, flowing dark hair. Didn’t smile much of late.

‘Where were you?’ she asked.

He groaned, glanced at his watch.

‘Do we have to go through this again? I had work to do. I’m sorry.’ He reached over and took her hand. This was the kind of look that softened her when they argued in the past. ‘You’ve no need to blame yourself.’

‘I wasn’t.’

‘Good.’

‘I meant where were you when that woman turned up?’

His mood could change so swiftly. It was black and cold again.

‘I told you. I had to make a call.’

‘But—’

‘No buts. I found Saskia. I went back into all that . . . damned mess and she was there. I saw that jacket I bought her. Then I got her out. What more . . . ?’

The doorbell saved them from an escalating argument. She went downstairs and answered. His father, Lucas, stood there, stiff and tall. More burly than his son. Just past sixty. Still the military officer, always smart, clean-shaven.

A decent man, his life had almost been destroyed by a single, flawed decision with terrible consequences. Henk and Lucas hadn’t been on good terms for years. Not that it stopped his father bankrolling their lives.

‘Will he speak to me?’

Henk came and stood behind her on the stairs and asked curtly, ‘What do you want?’

The older man stepped inside without being asked. His son scowled down at him.

‘I want to help. What do you think? You and Renata and Saskia . . . you need security. I can organize something.’

‘Security? You? Really?’

What happened in Bosnia twenty years before would never leave either of these two men. She understood and accepted that. Henk had been a child at boarding school. He’d had to live with taunts as the papers went to town on his father. Lucas was a major with a NATO mission at the time, caught between two sides, charged with keeping the peace but lacking the authority and force to impose his will. A mistake had been made. Thousands of innocent people had died as a result. An official inquiry had cleared Lucas Kuyper of any blame. But that didn’t stop the opprobrium and the hatred towards his family name.

‘Not again, Henk,’ the older man warned.

‘Why? Because you don’t want to hear it?’

‘I don’t. I’m happy to pay for some discreet security around the house . . .’

‘No thanks.’

‘Henk . . .’

He came all the way down the stairs and faced up to his father by the door.

‘We don’t need you. We’re Kuypers. Amsterdam aristocracy. Not some poverty-stricken Bosnian Muslim you should have been helping years ago.’

Lucas Kuyper closed his eyes for a second, a look of pain on his lined, grey face.

‘AIVD called. They told me what happened. And why.’

Henk folded his arms and grinned.

‘Well there’s a surprise. Those bastards never let you go, do they? Did they give you a file on me too?’

‘What you do with your life’s your own business. Saskia and Renata . . .’

Henk Kuyper walked up and held open the door.

‘I can look after my own family.’ He nodded at the dark street outside. ‘Next time call ahead. I’d like some notice. Even better . . . don’t bother.’

There was a brief flash of anger on Lucas Kuyper’s stern face.

‘Can’t I even see my own granddaughter?’

‘She’s in bed. Tired.’

‘Henk . . .’ Renata intervened. ‘We can always—’

‘It’s been a long day. For all of us.’ He nodded at the street again. ‘We’ll cope.’

The stiff man in the long raincoat walked out into the drizzle. Widowed, he lived on his own in a mansion in the Canal Ring. Renata took Saskia to visit him regularly. He was lonely. Always pleased to see them. Henk never came.

‘We’d be screwed if he cut off the money,’ she said, and regretted immediately the mercenary tone of the remark. It wasn’t how she meant it.

Henk shooed her back up the stairs.

‘He’ll never do that. Imagine the shame. A Kuyper on the breadline.’

She followed him back into the dining room, watched as he sat down and reached for the wine bottle.

‘Saskia loves her grandfather. She doesn’t understand why you don’t.’

He nodded.

‘One day, when she’s older, I’ll tell her. About Srebrenica. About power and war and what soldiers like him do. Then she’ll understand.’

‘You’re too good for the rest of us,’ she said as he poured himself more wine.

‘You could drink with me,’ he suggested. ‘That might help.’

‘Would it?’ she asked.

‘Maybe not.’

She still didn’t understand why he’d found Saskia then made himself scarce.

‘Don’t open a second bottle,’ she said then went to the living room and turned on the TV.

A few minutes later she heard his footsteps clumping up the stairs to his little gable office.

There was only one story on the news. The outrage in Leidseplein. No mention of a missing girl at all. Did Henk care? Did anyone?

She steeled herself and tiptoed up the stairs. The door to the tiny office was ajar. He was at the computer, the pallid light of the monitor flooding his stolid face.

‘Can we talk?’

He sighed and got up from the desk.

‘Not now,’ he said and closed the door.

For thirty minutes De Groot listened to AIVD. Then another half hour was spent going through the logs. The commissaris set out what he wanted: an immediate review of the overnight investigation.

‘Mirjam Fransen’s right about one thing, Pieter. There are a lot of boats in Amsterdam. And we’ve nothing from this dead clown to point us in the right direction.’

Frank de Groot shook his head.

‘I want you all wide awake tomorrow when this call comes in. Talk to the mother. Tell her we’re doing everything we can. Check we’re on course. After that go home and get some sleep.’

Bakker didn’t move.

‘I’d like to run over the CCTV we’ve got of Leidseplein.’

De Groot frowned.

‘There are about forty different feeds. It’ll take days, weeks to go through all of them.’

She wasn’t happy with that. Any more than Vos. They had what seemed to be a version of events now, based on an initial interview with Saskia Kuyper and others in the square. Bouali had grabbed hold of the girl when she wandered off near the theatre then promised to find her parents. Saskia hadn’t liked the way he was acting. So when he was distracted she gave him the slip.

After that they were left with guesswork. The assumption was that Bouali alerted one of his accomplices, dressed as a Black Pete too, who picked up Natalya Bublik by mistake. The two girls did look similar and they had an identical pink jacket with a very specific design.

‘Timing,’ Bakker said. ‘It seems . . . confusing. And the Kuyper girl . . .’

‘What?’ Vos asked.

He’d sat in on that interview for a while. It seemed straightforward.

‘She sounded really vague,’ Bakker complained. ‘That was all.’

‘She’s eight years old,’ De Groot grumbled. ‘What do you expect?’

‘Just a touch more detail. It was almost as if she was telling a story.’

‘Enough of this,’ the commissaris insisted. ‘Leidseplein had something like ten thousand people in it at the time. What looked like bombs going off. The kid had just been snatched. No big surprise she can’t dictate a decent witness statement.’

‘That’s why I want to look at the video.’

De Groot glanced at Vos as if to say: this is your call.

‘We need to look,’ Vos agreed. ‘But in the morning.’

He got up, brushed down his blue jeans and shabby donkey jacket. It still bore dust from the chaos in the square.

Downstairs they discovered Hanna Bublik had left the station already. Nothing Van der Berg could say would keep her there.

‘I need to reconfirm the existence of beer on this planet,’ the detective said mournfully.

Silence.

‘Pieter?’ he asked.

‘Not tonight,’ Vos said then wandered out without another word, strolled alone down Elandsgracht, picked up Sam from the Drie Vaten and led the dog across the gangplank onto the cold, dark boat.

The police had done their best to be friendly, especially the dishevelled, polite brigadier who seemed to be in charge. When they finally ran out of vague promises a friendly, bleary-eyed detective called Van der Berg took her to reception, gave her his card and one for the brigadier, Vos, then offered to find a lift home. While they were talking another man came up, miserable and guilty. He introduced himself as Koeman and said he was the officer dressed as Black Pete she’d first approached when Natalya went missing. The one who’d given her a hard time.

The moment he started a stuttering apology she just looked at him once then walked out.

November drizzle was putting a sheen on the broad street outside the police station. She didn’t want their lift any more than she craved an apology. All she needed was Natalya back home.

They seemed to understand the price of that. The release of a man she’d never heard of. And money perhaps. How much they didn’t know. Didn’t seem to want to discuss it either. She was a foreigner. On tourist papers. No right to work, even as a whore. All she had to her name was three and half thousand euros kept in cash, stuffed in an envelope beneath Natalya’s mattress, the pile steadily growing as she worked over the months.

As soon as it reached five she’d be able to put down a deposit on a place of her own. Try to find a real job. Hairdressing maybe. Or looking after little kids. She liked that idea. Felt she might be good at it. Perhaps overly protective but that would diminish with the years. One day they’d become normal, the way they used to be in Gori. One day she’d be able to walk down the street without feeling people were looking at her.

It took twenty minutes to get back to Oude Nieuwstraat. The red lights were on in the cabins running down from her house. Girls in the windows, sitting in their underwear, smiling, beckoning at the few men stumbling up and down the shiny cobblestones, hoods up, just looking mostly.

Chantal met her on the stairs. She looked shocked, worried. Younger than usual. No make-up either.

‘The police were here,’ the Filipina girl said. ‘They said someone took Nat.’

She always shortened her daughter’s name. It annoyed the hell out of her.

‘What do they want, Hanna?’

‘I don’t know,’ she replied and that was true.

‘But . . .’

‘Not now!’

She wasn’t going to discuss this with the girl. And that wasn’t because Marnixstraat told her not to talk to anyone about the case.

Chantal shifted on her bare feet. She was wearing girlish pyjamas with a flower pattern on them. No more work that day.

She glanced up the stairs in a way that meant something.

‘What is it?’

The girl ran a nervous hand through her dark hair.

‘I was out all afternoon. There was no one here. When I came back . . .’ She nodded at the door. ‘It was open. Someone’s been in our rooms. They pinched some of my clothes. I didn’t have . . .’

Hanna went up the narrow staircase, all the way to the little gable room at the top. The door was open. When she went in she could see straight away what had happened.

The few clothes they had were scattered around. Natalya’s single bed had been turned over, the mattress spilled on the floor.

The padded brown envelope which contained all their money was ripped open and empty. They’d even taken the necklace her husband had given her when they were married all those years before. It was cheap, an amber pendant on a silver chain. But she’d kept it, let Natalya wear the thing from time to time. A reminder of when they’d been a family. Together. In love. Seemingly secure.

Chantal stood behind her in the door and said, ‘I don’t know how they got in.’

As if that mattered.

‘They want the rent tomorrow,’ the Filipina kid added. ‘Will you be OK?’

‘Not now. Can I borrow some?’

She said nothing.

Hanna turned on her.

‘I’ve lent you money when you needed it. You know you’ll get it back. What with Natalya . . . I might need money there too.’

Her round, brown eyes grew wide.

‘What kind of money?’

‘I . . . I don’t know. They haven’t said. I don’t . . .’

No family. No friends. No one to turn to. That was the cost of coming all this way. Why it was so important nothing happened to them until she managed to find her feet.

She put Natalya’s bed back the right way and returned the mattress, tucking in the sheets without thinking. They needed washing. So did some of her clothes.

The pink jacket.

A sudden wave of regret brought tears to her eyes. According to the sympathetic detective in Marnixstraat that was all that caused this mistake. The fact that her daughter and the kid of some wealthy Dutch family shared the same piece of clothing. A jacket Hanna would never have bought in the first place. It was too expensive. The thing had come to her as an odd gift. A tip from a customer who’d seen the two of them later on the street then found her again in a cabin not long after.