Before the Dawn Read online

  Jake Woodhouse

  * * *

  BEFORE THE DAWN

  Contents

  DAY ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  DAY TWO

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  DAY THREE

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  DAY FOUR

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  DAY FIVE

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  DAY SIX

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  BEFORE THE DAWN

  Jake Woodhouse has worked as a musician, wine maker and entrepreneur. He now lives in London with his wife and their young gundog. Before the Dawn is the third thriller in his Amsterdam Quartet series, following After the Silence and Into the Night.

  For Zara

  Even on a fast day

  this world’s hell

  is hell

  Issa

  I can’t breathe I can’t breathe what’s this this thing in my mouth

  he’s behind me I can’t breathe my head’s

  expanding everything’s moving I can’t breathe I can’t breathe

  sand against

  skin why am I here all I I can feel the

  sand and I can’t

  breathe I can’t breathe I can’t—

  DAY ONE

  * * *

  1

  Inspector Jaap Rykel breathes in.

  ‘How can you have lost him?’ he says, watching a coot scan for food in the canal below. The bird’s beak flashes white as it dives, leaving ever-expanding circles on the water’s surface.

  ‘Nah, we’ve got him again,’ says the voice on the phone. ‘Just a temporary blip at changeover.’

  Jaap waits for the bird to reappear, marvelling at how long it can stay under, how long it can hold its breath. He turns and crosses the road, narrowly missing a determined woman on a bike. A small bug-eyed dog glares at him from the handlebar basket as it sails past.

  ‘How temporary?’

  ‘Couple of hours, but like I said, we’re on him now. No harm done.’

  He hopes that’s true. Because the man under surveillance drugged and then murdered two people, and it’s taken him three stress-fuelled months of painstaking, and often frustrating, work to get to this stage.

  He does not want a fuck-up.

  ‘Right, stay on him, and from now on keep me updated on every move,’ he says before pocketing his phone, wondering how a surveillance team, whose one job is to keep tabs on someone, messes up like that.

  He reaches the station and punches in his code, waiting for the click telling him he can enter. He’s anticipating the usual cool blast of air against his face, but as he steps through the door he finds it’s even hotter inside than out.

  ‘Bit cold,’ he says as he walks past the desk sergeant, ‘maybe we could turn the heating up?’

  ‘AC crapped out about an hour ago,’ the desk sergeant says, wiping away tiny beads of sweat dappling his face. ‘Someone’s on their way to fix it. Believe it when I see it, though.’

  Jaap takes two flights up, heat increasing with each step. The office itself, open plan and usually glacial, is no better. He walks over to his desk, nestled amongst several others at the far end of the oblong space, and avoids catching anyone’s eye, his mind on what’s to come.

  Three months he’s been working this case, and late yesterday evening he’d finally, after laying it all out to Station Chief Henk Smit and getting the official OK, put in the warrant request. In the normal scheme of things, and given the severity of the two crimes involved, he’d get a quick response.

  But here he is, the next afternoon, and still nothing.

  He checks his phone again, just in case, and then his email. Aside from an Exciting Investment Opportunity and a warning that his Paypal account will be suspended unless he clicks this link right now, there’s nothing. No warrant. And no communication explaining why that might be.

  Smit’s busy when he tries to reach him on the phone, his PA telling him he’s in a meeting for at least another hour, so he decides to go back over what he’d submitted, checking he hadn’t made some mistake which could be holding everything up.

  On 3 May he’d taken a call leading to the first victim, Dafne Koster, a twenty-seven-year-old classroom assistant from Alkmaar. She’d been found in a field, hands tied behind her back, her head wrapped tight in cling film. Even though she’d tried to rub her face against the ground, the many layers of plastic had held tight. Worse, from footprints round the body it looked like someone had stood and watched as she writhed, her desperate attempts to get air into her lungs, trying to cling onto a life rapidly receding.

  The investigation had been tough, all the usual avenues pulling blanks, and Jaap was starting to fear it was destined to be every inspector’s nightmare, an unsolvable case.

  But that was before the second body turned up a month and a half later. Nadine Adelaars, twenty-two, a trainee printmaker from Zwolle. Her body was found on a stretch of land just south of the city, hands tied behind her back, duct tape wrapped round her nose and mouth. In and of itself that wasn’t enough to definitive
ly link the two crimes, but a surprising detail emerged which went a long way to proving the killer of both women was the same.

  Jaap leans back in his chair, his body full of that pre-arrest anxiety which he always gets, a density in his stomach which will only grow and grow until it’s over.

  His phone rings – months ago on a long stake-out he’d set it as the Mission Impossible theme, a kind of meta-joke which no one seems to get – and his hand shoots out, knocking it off the table in his haste.

  ‘Yeah?’ he says once he’s retrieved it from the floor.

  ‘Just heard, warrant’s going to be issued,’ Henk Smit says. ‘Might as well head over there so we can move the second it does.’

  As he puts the phone down Jaap wonders about the we not you, a small puzzle which is solved as he’s signing out an unmarked from the underground car pool and sees the door swing open to reveal his boss.

  Turns out Smit’s junked his meeting and is coming along for the ride, the scent of a high-profile arrest too tantalizing to pass up.

  Great, Jaap thinks. Just great.

  The house, midway down a tree-lined street, is innocent.

  It’s no different from any of the others – nothing, as far as Jaap can see, hinting that the four suburban walls house a man who in the recent past murdered two young women, stood over them as their lungs fought for air which wasn’t to come.

  His leg’s got that going-to-sleep tingle, and he shifts, trying to stretch it out as much as the footwell allows. Beside him Smit digs at something under his thumb nail. If it was anyone other than Smit, Jaap might think they were nervous.

  Unseen, a bunch of sparrows irritate the world with their incessant chirping. A kid freewheels loosely past on a bike way too small for him, white earbuds snaking down his cheeks, his oversize cap on sideways.

  ‘I thought you said it was due any minute?’ Jaap says, following the kid till he turns off the road at the far end, disappearing behind a parked SUV with blacked-out windows and a bad scuff on the passenger door.

  Smit shrugs. Because he doesn’t have to answer to someone he manages.

  Leaves flicker shadows onto the pavement. Jaap watches them, suddenly convinced there’s a message to their flighty movement, if only he can decipher what it is.

  Then he wonders why he always assumes there’s a mystery to solve, why he can’t just let it be.

  ‘Something funny?’ Smit asks.

  Jaap’s turn to shrug.

  He settles his eyes on the photo of the suspect, pinned squint to the dashboard between them. Francesco Kamp is mid-thirties, his name and curly black hair courtesy of his second-generation Italian mother, height from his Dutch father.

  Where he gets the propensity to kill young women is anyone’s guess.

  Kamp, a train driver for the NS, had a wife who died in childbirth just eight months ago, leaving him as the sole carer of their baby girl. It was through one of the social workers assigned to him that Jaap had got a feel for just how angry Kamp was. Jaap’s not a psychologist, but he knows first-hand how grief can unleash things you never knew you had inside. He’d been through the grieving process himself, his daughter Floortje dying two years ago, and if it wasn’t for Tanya helping him through it, then he doesn’t know what he might have done.

  And now he and Tanya are expecting their first child together.

  Sometimes he marvels at how fast things have happened between them, at how he’s now standing on the cusp of the rest of his life. There are days it makes him giddy. Others when the enormity of it almost makes him sick.

  His leg’s tingling less now, and he tenses the muscles for a few seconds before releasing them. It helps, so he does it again. And again.

  Their phones are stubbornly silent, and the sun’s bullying them from the sky. It’s starting to make Jaap feel smothered, suffocated. His finger finds the button, a little indent showing him which end means down, and he presses it, hoping for a breeze on his face, the cleanliness of it, a new beginning.

  But the air outside is humid and still, a solid, inescapable presence. Even the leaves have given up and are now hanging limp, as if exhausted from their wasted attempt to communicate.

  Smit’s phone buzzes. He takes it up to his ear, a puppet who’s just had a string jerked.

  ‘Talk to me,’ he says like this is his case, like he’s been the one working hours so long the days blurred into each other and he started waking at two in the morning terrified he couldn’t breathe.

  Jaap tunes out. He should feel resentful of Smit’s intrusion, but really, what’s the point? The police force is at heart no different to any other organization. As in, you take the shit, your superior takes the glory. That’s just how it is, how it always will be, for ever and ever. Amen.

  ‘Halle-fucking-lujah,’ Smit finally says, hanging up.

  Jaap takes a breath, expands his lungs and holds the air there, forcing calm, the pressure something to push against, anchor to, a moment of stability in an unstable world.

  ‘Let’s do it,’ he says, breathing out.

  It’s way too hot for stab vests, but they pull them out of the boot anyway and Velcro them on. Smit inspects his gun, pops the clip and Jaap hears the double click as the slide’s pumped. Satisfied, Smit slams it back together with the heel of his hand. He checks the sight, like there’s anything he can do about it if it’s not right, then ends his virtuoso performance with a nod and a quick purse of his lips.

  ‘Been a while since you fired one of those?’ Jaap asks, hoping Smit gets the implication, you desk-bound bureaucrat.

  Smit eyeballs him, is just opening his mouth to say something, when he’s interrupted by the whine of an engine pushed to the limit. Jaap’s head’s on a swivel, he sees a van from one of the major news networks sliding into the street so fast it’s close to two-wheeling. They watch as it straightens up, just misses a side-on with a parked car, and stops fast, front end dipping hard as the brakes bite.

  ‘You’re kidding. How did they know?’ Jaap asks.

  Smit shrugs, rubs a small area on the gun barrel with his finger, as if there’s some dirt there which needs removing.

  The engine cuts out.

  Sparrows chirp.

  Jaap suddenly sees the answer to his own question. He’s known Smit for over five years, so really he shouldn’t be surprised.

  He hears the rumble and hollow reverberating slam of a sliding door and glances over towards the TV crew. They’re setting up, a woman reporter and a bearded guy hefting a camera on his shoulder, looking for all the world like a dirty jihadist readying a bazooka.

  As the man turns Jaap feels like he’s in the firing line. He imagines cross-hairs on his chest.

  From a parked car one of the surveillance crew gets out, starts ushering them back.

  ‘Bad idea,’ Jaap says, nodding towards the reporters, the woman arguing with the surveillance guy.

  He knows it’s not going to achieve anything, but he can’t help himself, can’t help needling his boss. Sometimes it’s the only way to get through the day.

  But Smit, if anything, appears relaxed.

  Relaxed as in, doesn’t give a shit.

  ‘It’s called media relations,’ he says. ‘Maybe you didn’t notice but they’ve been all over this case. Now we need to show them the resolution. And it’s better if we’re in control of them.’

  Jaap checks his own weapon again, doesn’t say anything.

  ‘Yeah, I know you don’t give a fuck,’ Smit says, seeming to take offence at Jaap’s silence. ‘But that’s why I’m station chief and you’re not. From where I’m sitting I see a bigger picture.’

  ‘That management course you went on, how’d that work out?’

  Now it’s Smit’s turn to be silent.

  Jaap makes one more last-minute check on his gear, decides now is the time.

  ‘Stay in front of me where it’s safe,’ Jaap says as just across the street a woman steps out of the house next door to Kamp’s. She’s medium height, long
brown hair tied in a high ponytail which bounces as she neatly hops over the low wooden fence and presses the doorbell. She has an apron on, dusted with flour.

  ‘Fuck’s she doing?’ Smit asks.

  Jaap’s debating ducking back to the car or running forward, but before he can react the door opens, their target standing there in the newly opened gap. He’s obviously in the middle of some DIY, a screwdriver held in one hand.

  He looks at the woman, then quickly, almost involuntarily, his eyes search the street.

  Jaap and Smit don’t have time to get out of sight. Kamp sees them, and acts. He leaps forward, the door swinging closed behind him, and grabs the woman, spins her round so Jaap can see the shock and confusion on her face.

  Then, as she feels the tip of a screwdriver touch her neck, it turns to fear.

  Somewhere down the street a mower rips into life, a once familiar sound taking on a menacing cast.

  Menacing because Jaap doesn’t want anything to tip the balance of Kamp’s mind, anything which could destroy the delicate equilibrium of the moment, spur him into making the wrong choice.

  ‘Take it easy,’ Jaap calls across to Kamp. ‘We can work it out.’

  Out of the corner of his eye Jaap sees Smit, weapon out, edge one step closer. It’s been less than thirty seconds since Kamp grabbed the woman, thirty seconds in which he and Smit have got into position, backed up by the surveillance crew.

  Kamp’s breathing hard, he seems more panicked than the woman he’s holding, the hand with the screwdriver trembling.

  And Jaap knows that in situations like this, panic is a killer.

  ‘Just breathe,’ he says. ‘Breathe and it’ll be OK.’

  Smit takes another step, thinking he’s out of Kamp’s field of vision. But somehow Kamp senses the movement and zeroes his eyes in on him.

  Jaap thinks of the game they used to play as kids, the aim was to sneak up on someone and freeze in place when they turned. If they saw you moving, you were out.

  ‘Put it down,’ Jaap says, staying put for now. ‘Put it down, and we can talk.’

  Kamp’s not stupid. He knows the score, knows he’s not getting out of this. Knows that the word talk is code for arrest-and-prosecute-to-the-full-extent-of-the-law-you-dirty-piece-of-murdering-shit.