After the Silence: Inspector Rykel Book 1 (Amsterdam Quartet) Read online

How did she know?

  ‘It’s their fault,’ said Pieter, breaking into his thoughts.

  ‘Who?’ asked Kees.

  ‘The immigrants. They’re pouring in off the boats and trains every day.’ He threw Kees a look as if he personally spent time down at the docks, welcoming each and every one of them. ‘They’re the ones with these disgusting perversions.’

  Kees could see Pieter was getting worked up.

  So much for the brotherhood of man.

  ‘I know. But what made you decide to call it in?’ said Kees.

  ‘I looked at it again and it seemed so … real.’

  Kees glanced towards the canal where a barge – a glass-topped tourist vessel devoid of tourists – floated by.

  ‘And you didn’t see anyone else in the house, anyone leave, or go in?’

  ‘No, and I’ve been here the whole time.’

  Out of the corner of his eye he noticed Ton hovering.

  ‘Pathologist’s here,’ said Ton when Kees looked at him.

  ‘I think that’s it,’ Kees said, turning back to Pieter. ‘One of my colleagues took your address and phone number, didn’t they?’

  Pieter nodded, his hands now limp in his lap.

  ‘So I can get on now?’ he asked.

  ‘Absolutely.’ Kees got out of the ambulance. ‘And don’t talk to any journalists,’ he said over his shoulder before turning to Ton.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘She’s over there.’ Ton pointed to the front door, where a figure was just disappearing inside. ‘She really laid into Gerard.’

  Gerard, two years off retirement, had never made it above the lowest grade in the eighteen years he’d been on the force. Some people said it was because he really loved working the street and didn’t want to get promoted to an office, that his inertia was actually a noble thing.

  Kees reckoned he just wasn’t that bright.

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘Didn’t believe that she was the pathologist, said that women couldn’t even become pathologists.’

  Kees laughed and Ton joined in, several people in the crowd looking round at them, as if annoyed at their levity, inappropriate at a murder scene. Kees picked one out – the fat man from before – and gave him the stare until he looked away, cowed.

  Fucking fat people, he thought as he walked to the front door, should keep their disapproval to themselves.

  Inside he stopped off in the second-floor bathroom, locking it behind him. He’d been rattled that Marinette had accused him of starting again. If she could see it, what about anyone else?

  As he pulled the small bag out, scooped a fingernail and snorted it in one go, he figured he’d just have to take the risk.

  A filament of scent – floral, musky – led Kees up the stairs, giving a new rhythm to his pulse, and his boots, leather soles held in place by flat-head nails, scraped the wooden steps.

  The curved glass door of the stove gave him his first glimpse of her as it came into view at the top of the stairs. She’d squatted down by the body, her back to him, widened and distorted by the reflection.

  The forensics were packing up, the noise of their movement crackling in the air like radio static. He stood and watched as she snapped on some gloves and reached for the victim’s face, and the way she moved her fingers made him think of a dusty white tarantula.

  ‘Are you just going to stand there, Inspector?’ she asked without stopping her exploration, her fingers probing the neck.

  ‘I didn’t want to get in the way,’ he said, advancing. ‘And how –’

  ‘Did I know you were an Inspector? Well’ – she stood up and turned to him in one movement, peeling off her gloves at the same time – ‘I figured it was time one turned up.’

  The connoisseur in Kees ran a quick once over.

  Not bad, not bad at all.

  ‘That’s funny, because here I was thinking that I’d been waiting for you.’

  She had a husky’s eyes, he read a challenge in them, and something else. Her face was lean, like her body, and her hair, pulled into a tight ponytail, shone like blonde lacquer.

  ‘How strange,’ she said as she tossed her gloves into one of the plastic bags. ‘I’m Carice Stultjens.’

  ‘Kees Terpstra.’

  Her hand was warm, and there was a soft residue of powder from the glove’s inside.

  ‘So, you working undercover?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The hair, not exactly the normal police cut.’

  Marinette had been hinting recently he did something about it. Which had made him even less likely to do so.

  ‘My hairdresser died, and I haven’t found another one I trust,’ he said.

  She gave him a look, her head tilted to one side. Kees read that as a positive.

  ‘How come we’ve not met before?’ he asked.

  She shrugged and then stepped back to the body. He joined her and looked down. The face seemed to have more colour than when he’d first seen it, the mouth was still gaping where the forensic had prised it open earlier.

  ‘I’m guessing he wasn’t like this when you pulled him in?’

  ‘How’d you mean?’

  ‘Looks like he died yawning.’

  ‘We had to get a phone out of his mouth,’ he said. She looked at him but didn’t ask.

  ‘How soon can you get the autopsy done?’

  Kees couldn’t see her doing it, cutting open corpses, viscera up to her elbows, the sheer foulness of the job. It all seemed wrong, only ugly middle-aged men did autopsies, not highly attractive women like this. He caught another wave of her perfume and despite the situation, something stirred inside him.

  ‘We’ve got a lot on, but I’ll try for first thing tomorrow. Looks fairly simple though, I don’t think there can be much doubt as to cause of death.’

  She started towards the stairs. Kees found himself following her.

  ‘Any chance of today?’

  ‘You Inspectors are all the same, you always want it now.’

  ‘Hey, we have needs.’

  She threw him a fed-up look over her shoulder, but he didn’t buy it and they carried on down the stairs.

  ‘I guess you should give me your phone number,’ he said as they made it out the front door like a famous couple leaving their own home, police holding back fans and paparazzi on either side.

  ‘That depends,’ she said, turning to him with a half-smile. He noticed her front teeth were slightly squint, one lapped over the other.

  Somehow that made him like her even more.

  ‘Depends on what?’ he asked.

  She reached out and brushed something off his sleeve.

  ‘It depends, Inspector, on what you’d do with it.’

  7

  Monday, 2 January

  10.45

  ‘We’re here.’

  Pulling up to a stop, gravel crunching under one of the tyres, the driver turned off the engine and waited. Silence filled the car’s interior. Jaap looked out at the trees lining both sides of the road, barren branches like hands clawing the sky.

  This was Amsterdamse Bos, a wooded area south of the city covering over a thousand hectares, with trees planted by twenty thousand citizens in the 1930s, a government attempt to raise employment after the knock-on effects of the Wall Street crash reached the Netherlands. By day it was frequented by ordinary people, walkers, dog lovers, young families.

  But at night the perverts, the drug addicts and weirdos roamed.

  His throat was Sahara-dry, a leg – left, right?, he wasn’t sure – had started to shake, and his stomach felt like he’d just swallowed a litre of live frogs, their slippery bodies writhing in a churning mass, desperately trying to escape his searing gastric juices.

  He tried to calm himself, slow his breathing down, count, anything to bring his body back under control. But nothing seemed to be working.

  The door, where his right hand had been gripping the handle, was opened with a soft click by the uni
formed officer who’d stepped forward as the car drew to a halt, and the Arctic air rushed in, ravaging his exposed face, hands and ears.

  And that helped, made it easier to force himself out of the cruiser which had brought him here, to this patch of land deep in the forest.

  Then he was standing, his leg – it was definitely the left, feeling like it had its own private earthquake, ten on the Richter scale – wobbled even more, and he had to steady himself with his hand on the raw metal of the car’s roof, before moving off towards the three men a few metres away.

  They were looking down, away from him, like they were comparing shoes, though they must have heard his arrival in the stillness of this deserted spot.

  His feet ground the frosty grass by the side of the verge, and they took that as their cue to turn and acknowledge his presence. The shorter of the three, and the only one not in uniform, stepped forward and held out his hand.

  When Jaap took it in his own it was like it wasn’t there, almost as cold as the surrounding air, a slight roughness the only clue that he was touching anything at all. The man’s beard was starting to frost like the grass, his shoulders warming his ears.

  ‘Inspector Rykel?’

  He spoke in a voice which was quiet, soft, but still held some authority, the same voice Jaap would use – did use – when breaking the bad news to the wife, or husband, or indeed any relation of a murder victim, anyone unlucky enough to open the door to a sombre-faced police officer.

  This was slightly different of course, Andreas Hansen was not a relative at all, but he almost felt like one. They’d been working together for over nine years. Other Inspectors joked that they were like a married couple, only without the squabbling.

  No longer.

  Someone had decided to fire what looked like a single shot to the back of the head, creating a Pollockesque spray on the concrete incline. None of the dark drops had escaped the frost, each was coated with the same dusting of what looked like powdered glass, reflecting the pale sun which was climbing in the sky, shortening all their shadows.

  ‘When was he found?’

  His own voice sounded strange to him, muted slightly, as if his throat was full of cotton wool.

  ‘A driver, first thing this morning.’

  Maybe, the hope rushed into his head, it’s not Andreas at all.

  The body was lying face down, arms at its sides like it was on a skeleton bob. The clothes looked familiar, the leather jacket like the one Andreas wore, and the blond hair, slightly too long, clumped together by blood. He wanted to say that this wasn’t Andreas, sure it looked like him, but it was someone else.

  But as if reading his mind the Inspector handed him Andreas’ wallet and ID, the face still whole.

  Jaap could hear his teacher in Kyoto, Yuzuki Roshi, saying life and death were the same thing. At the time he’d thought he’d understood. Or had convinced himself he had.

  Now he knew he’d not understood at all.

  ‘What … what was he doing here?’

  The short officer shuffled nervously with one of his feet.

  ‘Actually, we were hoping you might be able to tell us.’

  Jaap looked down at the body again.

  Did the Black Tulips bring him out here? Or was he here following one of them and got caught? he wondered as another thought broke through.

  God, I’m going to have to tell Saskia.

  He started back towards the cruiser, trying not to think of what he had to do next. But as he reached out his hand to open the car door another thought hit him.

  The break-in.

  Andreas’ text.

  What Andreas had discovered was dangerous to someone, most likely the Black Tulips.

  So they’d killed him.

  But what if they’d checked Andreas’ phone and saw the text? He shuddered and thought about what that meant. It could be that the Black Tulips had found out that Andreas was on to Friedman, and killed them both.

  But if they’d seen Andreas’ text then they’d also know that he knew …

  They didn’t steal anything, he thought as he lowered himself into the car and nodded at the driver, because they came to kill me too.

  8

  Monday, 2 January

  10.51

  ‘Look, we’ve just finished, and if there was a child, or children, or whatever, we would have found them.’

  Tanya looked at the man, his thin face, thin body, a shiny round of pink crowning his grey hair, and knew that he didn’t really care. Didn’t care that there might have been a child in there, didn’t care about the pain or the fear or the despair.

  To him and his two colleagues the bodies were just another prop, a part of their job, something to be analysed, bagged up, then forgotten about. She’d got the forensics to check after the firemen had left, she didn’t want to leave anything to chance. And Bloem would be here soon; any authority she had now would disappear.

  ‘I still think we need to check,’ she said and could see the thoughts in his head, as if his eyes were a direct tunnel straight to his brain – Better humour her, don’t want a hysterical woman running around – before he nodded and walked over to his two colleagues, who’d been listening in. Tanya figured they were rolling eyes at each other.

  A wind had started, coming in off the sea to the north, lifting flecks of ash into the air like tiny feathers.

  As more ash blew and Tanya turned away she had a thought. There was a house, and a petrol station, about a kilometre back along Zeedijk, which she’d passed earlier.

  She glanced over, at the forensics back at work, and made a decision. It would take them at least another half-hour to go over everything again, more than enough time. And anyway, what was she going to do, stand here just to make frostbite a certainty? And was she going to confront Bloem when he arrived about her ID card? She knew it was him but of course had no proof.

  He’d already called and told her not to do anything until he got there.

  Well, tough.

  In the car she turned on the radio, the landscape so flat and desolate any distraction, even the inane chatter of the local radio, would be a comfort.

  ‘… was in fact a Homicide Inspector.’ She reached for the dial and cranked the radio up. ‘The police have so far neither officially confirmed nor denied this although we are expecting a statement shortly. Back to you in the studio.’

  ‘Thank you, Nicolotte, we’ll rejoin you for the official statement, but in the meantime let’s have some more music.’

  What was that about a Homicide Inspector? she wondered as she clicked the radio off. She thought about calling the station, but then told herself to concentrate on her own job.

  By the time she pulled off the main road, parked and got out of the car the wind had increased, slamming in off the sea, grabbing the car door from her hand before she had a chance to close it herself.

  Who’d want to live out here? she thought as she pressed the doorbell, and stood back waiting for someone to answer, pulling the collar of her coat closer round her throat. The door swung in, opened by a young woman with short blond hair and hyperthyroid eyes. From behind the woman Tanya could hear the shrieks and screams of children at play.

  She’s about my age, thought Tanya. Are those her kids?

  She was called Geertje, she said, and she lived here with her husband and three children. She didn’t know the neighbours that well, an old couple called Van Delft, and she was shocked that they were dead. But she was adamant they didn’t have a child. Tanya thanked her, got back in her car and headed to the petrol station.

  If they didn’t have children, she thought as she drove, then why have a brand-new doll? Maybe it was for a grandchild, when they visited?

  Whoever had set light to the house would have had to come past the petrol station; the western approach was nothing more than a dirt track which led to bleak sands, and the North Sea. There was a chance someone there had seen something.

  A slim chance, but then her job was built on s
lim chances.

  The station stood alone in the landscape, and she felt the desolation again.

  If I’ve passed I could transfer out of here, she thought as she hit the indicator.

  Turning into the forecourt she was checking for cameras, and yes, there were four. Judging by their angle and elevation at least three of them might just catch some of the road, enough to tell if a car passed sometime early in the morning. If she was really lucky they might even have had to fill up.

  Inside the shop a young man, teenager really – with hair his parents would consider way too long and the eyes of a stoner – sat flicking through a magazine dedicated to car tyres. He looked up as Tanya approached.

  ‘Which number?’

  ‘I didn’t get any petrol, I’m with the police, I wanted to ask you some questions.’

  He swallowed, and tried to look cool.

  ‘This place is open twenty-four hours right?’

  ‘No, we like close at ten? Hardly anyone passes this way after about nine-thirty, kind of dead really. But the guy who runs it wants us to be open, just, like, in case?’

  His tone of voice showed that he didn’t agree with that particular business decision.

  ‘What about the CCTV, I notice you’ve got cameras outside?’

  ‘They’re on’ – he scratched his head – ‘all of the time. Dunno why though, I don’t think we’ve ever been robbed.’

  It’s hardly worth doing, she tried to tell herself even as the words came out of her mouth.

  ‘I need to see the CCTV tapes.’

  ‘Errr … I’m not sure how to do that.’ His voice tightroped between the treble and bass of boy and manhood, his eyes blinking furiously.

  ‘Maybe your boss?’ she prompted.

  ‘Yeah, right. Yeah, he’ll know.’ He picked up the phone.

  ‘Yeah, it’s Harri, there’s like this policewoman here, she wants to see the CCTV tapes?’

  He listened, brows furrowed in concentration, slowly scratching a patch of red skin just by his right ear before holding the phone out to her, which she took, catching a wave of his damp odour as she did so.

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘I’m Gerrit Cloet, I run the petrol station. Who are you?’