UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia
India | New Zealand | South Africa
Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published 2015
Text copyright © Dark Sky Productions, 2015
Cover image © Alamy
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-1-405-91433-8
Day One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
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
Day Two
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
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 Three
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
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Day Four
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
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
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Follow Penguin
Let the conversation begin...
Follow the Penguin Twitter.com@penguinukbooks
Keep up-to-date with all our stories YouTube.com/penguinbooks
Pin ‘Penguin Books’ to your Pinterest
Like ‘Penguin Books’ on Facebook.com/penguinbooks
Listen to Penguin at SoundCloud.com/penguin-books
Find out more about the author and
discover more stories like this at Penguin.co.uk
For Zara
And for S.S, who didn’t make it
in this world
we walk on the roof of Hell
gazing at flowers
Issa
Saturday, 8 May
14.09
‘I can’t believe you’re doing this. You promised you’d look after her.’
Inspector Jaap Rykel stepped towards the edge of the roof, leaving a cluster of forensics fussing over the body behind him.
High in the gas-flame-blue sky a plane glinted its way towards the west coast.
He glanced down and wondered what it would be like to jump.
‘I know,’ he said, wishing he’d turned his phone off after leaving the message for Saskia, his ex. ‘But I’ve got a dead body here and—’
‘There’s a live body here. Your daughter, remember her?’
Behind him one of the forensics hiccuped, a burst of laughter following from his colleagues.
‘Of course I do, you know that. It’s just …’ he tailed off, unable to explain.
Below him, five storeys below, a patrol car pulled out, two officers lifting the red and white tape to let it pass. Sun sparked off the bonnet, a lone cloud cruised across the windscreen. A faint buzzing came on the line, highlighting the silence.
Which was kind of worse than Saskia shouting.
A breeze stroked his face, and he found his free hand in his pocket, fingers rubbing the smooth brass coins he kept there.
The ones he’d had made specially after his sister, Karin, had died.
Tomorrow would have been her thirty-fourth, he thought.
A distant siren wailed then cut off mid-swoop, and he glanced out north, over Amsterdam, his city.
‘Fine,’ he eventually heard her sigh, ‘but you’ll be picking up her therapy bills later on, right?’
Their little joke.
Which often felt too close to the bone.
‘I’ll do that,’ he said, relieved to have got through it. ‘Mind you, I might just need some myself.’
‘That bad?’
He turned back to the body, watched as the hiccuping forensic lowered something clasped in a pair of tweezers into an evidence bag.
‘Kind of. It’s … Honestly, you don’t want to know. I’ll call you later. And Saskia?’
‘Yeah?’
‘I’m going to make sure I can look after Floortje for when you start the trial.’
‘I’ll hold you to that.’
They signed off and he took one last glance over the edge. He got the feeling that after the first moments of panic the fall might be exhilarating; air rushing, limbs loose, the sensation of speed. He wondered if he’d keep his eyes open or closed.
Coins jangled softly as he drew his hand out of his pocket.
No more decisions to make once you’re on your way down, he thought as he turned and walked back to the body. No responsibilities either.
He got close and stopped, not wanting to look at it again. It lay there, dressed in expensive white trainers, jeans – ripped by use or design it was hard to tell – and a tight white T-shirt.
Which, considering the body had no head, the neck severed about a third of the way up from the shoulders, was still remarkably white.
He’d just promised Saskia he was going to be finished by Monday. Even as he’d said it he knew it was unlikely to be true.
Looking down at the body now, his own shadow spilling on to the torso, he knew just how big a lie it had been.
‘You finished?’
The forensic, on his knees, turned and looked up at him, squinting into the sun.
‘You kidding? And I’ve got a date tonight.’
‘Fascinating,’ said Jaap, moving to the opposite side of the body. ‘And anyway I meant the hiccuping.’
‘Bothering you?’
‘Kind of.’
The forensic shrugged, his plastic suit crackling like radio static.
‘Weird, isn’t it?’ he said, pointing to the body, another hiccup rupturing the end of his question, throwing the words up high into the air. The breeze whisked them away.
Jaap looked at the figure again and felt his stomach twitch. But he knew there was nothing left to come; he’d thrown it all up when he’d stepped on to the roof for the first time twenty minutes earlier and the forensic had whipped off the plastic sheet with a flourish worthy of a stage magician.
It was at that moment he’d understood the dispatcher’s comment about not losing his head on this case.
He’s the one who needs therapy, thought Jaap as he looked away again. He sits there all day sending people out to things like this, and all he can do is crack sick jokes.
He turned back to look at the body, trying to keep his gaze on the torso. What was in front of him was just so wrong, he found it hard to believe it was real.
‘So, what have you got?’
‘Not much,’ said the forensic. ‘Whatever they used for the cut was pretty sharp – the pathologist will be able to tell you more – but I reckon it was serrated, like a saw maybe?’
Jaap wasn’t sure he wanted to know more.
‘Identity?’
‘Nothing on him except for these,’ the forensic said, pointing at two clear bags laid out by his kit bag. One had a phone and the other a set of keys.
‘Got any spares?’ asked Jaap, holding up his hands.
The forensic rustled around before shaking his head.
‘Any gloves for the poor inspector?’ he called out to his two colleagues, who were on their hands and knees, probing something a few feet away from the door which led back into the building. The nearer of the two tossed over a pair to Jaap; he caught one, the other fluttered down and landed on the body’s chest.
It looked like the glove was pointing out the missing head.
He snapped on the first then reached down for the other. He hated their feel, the way they made his hands sweat, the smell which lingered long after they’d been taken off. By now the smell had become synonymous with death.
‘I don’t like the lack of blood,’ he said, the thought of jumping off the building’s roof reappearing in his mind.
‘Unusual for you lot to want more gore,’ said the forensic, pulling off his own gloves and dropping them into a waste sack. ‘They must have done it elsewhere, but who the hell would be crazy enough to risk bringing a headless body up here?’
The building was new, brand new. There were still builders on site, fixing up the interior. The security cameras weren’t yet operational, and no one had seen anything.
As the foreman had told Jaap earlier, if someone had wanted to take a body to the roof all they’d have had to do was don a hi-vis and get on with it. As long as the body was in a box, or even a sack, no one would look twice.
And the only reason it had been discovered in the first place was an anonymous account had tweeted the official Twitter feed, giving an address where a body would be found. The police assumed it was a hoax and a passing patrol had been asked to check it out. Once the foreman had let them up onto the roof they realized it wasn’t a joke and called it in.
‘The way I see it,’ said Jaap, squatting down and checking the arms for needle marks, ‘if you’re crazy enough to take someone’s head off you’re crazy enough to do anything.’
‘It gets worse. Turn the right hand over.’
Jaap took hold of the wrist between his thumb and forefinger and twisted it. He hated the feel of dead people, the way the flesh gave without responding. Touching them always seemed like some kind of violation.
Or is it just fear? he thought.
The palm was badly burned, the flesh charred black.
‘Blowtorch, I reckon,’ said the forensic.
Jaap laid the wrist back down carefully, thinking about planned mutilation.
The worst type of killing.
Something moved off to his left, a flicker of light and shadow, and he turned to look above the door. A seagull stood on one leg, head cocked, its one visible eye electric-yellow with a glistening oily black drop at its centre.
It stared at Jaap for a second, then went back to jabbing something near its feet.
‘Those things will eat anything.’
‘Maybe,’ said Jaap standing back up, kneecaps firing. ‘But I doubt they’d take off a whole head.’
‘Would make it easier for you if it had,’ said the forensic as he mimicked a pistol shot at the bird, the recoil exaggerated. He blew across the top of his fingers. ‘Then we could all go home.’
Jaap turned to the bags laid out a few feet from the body and picked up the one containing keys. There were three on a plastic key fob, round with a corporate-looking logo embedded in it. When he flipped it over he could see the fob had the name of an estate agent and a number. He punched the number into his phone, saved it, then turned to the second bag.
It held a newish-model phone made by some global company which specialized in underpaying workers in poor countries. Or so he’d heard. He powered it on, expecting it to be locked.
The screen flashed up the fruit logo but didn’t ask for a passcode.
Stupid, he thought. Or arrogant.
He checked the call lists. Loads of numbers. Didn’t look like a drug phone where there’d only be a couple of contacts. A few apps, one for the weather, one for the stock market, and several games, most of them looking like they involved shooting or driving.
He was just about to drop it back into the bag – he’d get the phone company records to see if it was on a contract later – when he found himself hitting the pictures icon.
Behind him the gull squawked, flapped its wings and took off, flying so low Jaap had to duck. He could feel the air beating down on him as the bird passed overhead.
He went back to the phone, a picture on screen.
His lungs froze.
The photo was slightly blurred, as if it had been taken on the move, and showed several people walking through Dam Square. The problem was, he recognized the person at the centre of the image.
He swiped back to see the previous photos, the screen not responding properly to his gloved finger. Then he realized there weren’t any more; it was just this one. Sweat oozed between his skin and the gloves, and he still couldn’t breathe.
He dropped the phone back into the bag, jammed it in his pocket along with the one containing the keys, and headed for the door.
‘Hey, you’ve got to sign for those if you’re taking them now,’ called the forensic as the door swung shut behind him and he started down the stairs, his footsteps clattering wildly through the concrete stairwell.
It must be a coincidence, he thought.
But his gut told him otherwise.
The image on the phone had been taken about seven hours earlier.
The face, in two-thirds profile, was his own.
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.
Saturday, 8 May
15.07
‘Get me whatever you’ve got on Jan Koopman, at this address,’ Jaap said as he shot the car out of the tunnel under the IJ, squinting until his eyes adjusted to the light. He yanked the wheel hard on a left-hander, tyres screaming in delight or protest, he couldn’t tell.
He was heading to an address in Amsterdam Noord – he’d got bogged down in the approach to Centraal, which had been totally jammed up with traffic and trams – but was now making up for it.
All the time the same thought had been slamming round his head.
Why did he have a picture of me?
The phone, he’d not been surprised to learn, was a pay as you go, no contract and no record of the owner. But the estate agents had been more helpful. He’d spoken to them, and they’d said there would be a code on the back of the key fob. Once he’d read it out they’d given him the name and the address he was headed to now.
‘Okay.’ Frits’ voice came back crackly over the hands-free. ‘I’m on it. You need backup?’
‘I doubt whoever chopped his head off is hanging out at the victim’s flat. But I’ll let you know.’
Minutes later he reached one of the estates right on the edge of Ringweg Noord, the ring road which marked the northernmost boundary of the city before flat fields took over. The address he needed was the third road in, and he skidded to a halt just outside the first of the building entrances, scanning for numbers.
Checking up on a victim’s identity wouldn’t normally require such a rush.
But this wasn’t normal.
All he could think about was the image of himself, taken earlier that morning as he walked to work.
He needed to find out why. If he told anyone about it he’d be off the case; Smit would assign someone else. And he figured no one else would have quite the same motivation to find out what was going on as he did.
He stood for a moment before entering the building, aware suddenly of the bleakness of the place, uniform concrete blocks designed by an architect with the express purpose of crushing people’s souls.
The flat was on the third floor of four. He rang the bell having taken the stairs two at a time – his muscles stiff from the six-minute Tabata workout he’d done the previous evening – but wasn’t surprised when no one came to the door. A baby was crying somewhere, possibly the flat next door, and he could smell spices being cooked up somewhere else in the building. Music pulsed through the ceiling, and he could hear voices, an argument behind closed doors.
He pulled out the bag with the keys in he’d taken from the crime scene, and shifted the keys round so he could unlock the door without touching the key itself. The lock clicked when the key turned.
Inside, boiled meat and cigarette smoke thickened the air. There was a small kitchen, a bedroom, bathroom and a living room which looked out on to the ring road, the dull roar of traffic noticeable despite the closed windows.
Everything was neat.
His phone rang; it was Frits.
‘What have you got?’ Jaap asked.
‘Forty-three years old. Works at the Dronken Brewery by Vondelpark. The only reason he’s on our system is a speeding ticket about three months back. Apart from that he’s clean as far as we’re concerned.’
‘There should be a copy of his driving licence on the file; get it scanned over to me.’
Jaap hung up and started going through the living room. A pillow lay crumpled up at one end of the sagging leather-effect sofa, shiny textured black nastiness, and a single bookshelf held a bunch of bootleg DVDs, mostly porn and an original Dr Zhivago.
Eclectic tastes, thought Jaap as he turned his attention to the bedroom.
The single bed was half made, the sheets a dirty yellow, and there was a bedside table with an ashtray full of ash and twisted butts. Inside the wardrobe was a bunch of clothes; mainly tatty tracksuits, one pair of jeans, and no white T-shirts.
Under the bed was more interesting. He pulled out a small metal box with a padlock. It was heavy, and something inside slid from one side to the other.
Jaap inspected the padlock. He tried the keys on the fob but none of them worked. He took it to the kitchen, placed it on the table and riffled through the drawers. He found a spatula, the plastic tip melted, but with a thick metal handle.
His phone started up again.
‘Yeah?’
‘I’ve got the driving licence photo on the arrest report.’
‘And?’
‘You can’t see anything. It’s a really bad photocopy of a photocopy. Looks like the original got lost.’
‘Okay, get on to whoever issues them and try and get a better image. I want to see what this guy looked like.’
He hung up and worked the lid. It popped off. Inside, nestling among scrunched-up newspaper, was a stack of photos – and a gun.
Jaap didn’t like guns; he carried his own reluctantly and only when he had to. But he really hated to see them out in the wild. He didn’t trust half his colleagues with them, let alone random members of the public.
He recognized it, a Walther P5, the model he’d carried since first becoming an inspector, the same model he’d shot and killed with …
He stopped his thoughts there. That was past. He had to focus on the present.
The gun was old, but it had that oily smell which spoke of a recent reconditioning. He bent down and sniffed the muzzle, but there was no hint of a recent firing.
Maybe if he’d been carrying this, he thought, he’d still have his head.
He’d have to get a trace run on it, check the serial number, and he bagged it up, feeling from the weight of it that the clip was loaded.
He had a photo of me and a loaded gun, he thought. Why?
The first thing was the murder itself, the sheer brutality of it shocking. Why had the head been removed and the hand burned? What could it hide, seeing as whoever had done it had left the keys, allowing Jaap to find out the identity of the victim quickly? Or was it a message, a sign to someone else?
The only two groups who tended to use beheadings were jihadists, who periodically posted videos online of Western journalists, and the Mexican cartels.
There are people pushing for sharia law here, thought Jaap. Is that what this is about?
He turned to the photos, flicking through them. There were about fifteen, and they seemed to be of men with guns. In some photos they were hanging around some kind of old Land Rover, painted dark green and splattered with mud, and in others a few were shooting at targets. The background was always wooded, the trees a kind of conical pine.
He knew men who did this; went off at weekends to live out some childhood fantasy, or to escape the wife and kids and pretend to be heroes.
Men with guns.
Idiots.
The kitchen sink gurgled once. A shot of sun streamed through the window on to the table in front of him.
He put the photos down and pulled out his three brass coins and copy of the I Ching.
He thought of his tutor in Kyoto, Yuzuki Roshi, who would, in the quiet of the early evening before the last meditation session of the day, devote a few moments to the I Ching. He’d even shown Jaap how the I Ching worked, how to convert coin throws into the lines which made up the hexagrams, despite the fact Yuzuki Roshi’s fellow Zen monks thought the I Ching was not an appropriate topic of study, seeing it as little better than ancient Chinese superstition.
At first Jaap had been unimpressed, but just before he’d left Japan Yuzuki had slipped him a small parcel, telling him not to open it until he got home. Months later Jaap had rediscovered it on a shelf in his houseboat – he must have put it there while unpacking and forgotten about it – and he’d unwrapped the delicate plain paper to find a small cloth-bound copy of the I Ching.
He’d started using it, just for fun, and it quickly became a habit.
But ever since Karin had died, Jaap had been using it more and more.
Something told him he shouldn’t, and he’d started to feel uneasy every time he did it, but he still couldn’t stop himself.
The coins flashed in the light as he threw them up, and he let them clatter on to the table’s surface. He noted down the first line of the hexagram, then threw five more times until it was complete.
He looked up the hexagram in the I Ching. The bottom three lines represented Lake, the top three Fire.
He read the overview of Fire over Lake.
OPPOSITION.
Jaap stared at the word for a while.
I need to stop this, he thought as he scooped up the coins and replaced the I Ching in his pocket.
His phone rang again. It was Frits.
‘Yeah?’
‘You on Twitter?’
‘Twitter? Do I look like I have time for that kind of shit?’
I’ve got time to flip coins though, he thought.
‘I dunno, but I think you’re going to have to make time.’
‘I’ve got a headless body; why would I want to fuck around—’
‘There a TV where you are?’
‘Yeah …’
‘Turn it on. Channel 1.’
Jaap stepped back into the living room towards the TV. He hit the button on the top and the standby light came on but the screen stayed blank. He looked around for a remote but couldn’t find one.
‘Just tell me what it is.’
‘The news, they’ve got this story going. A tweet got picked up saying there’s a man without a head.’
‘Yeah, I’ve seen him already, remember?’
‘Not this one. The tweet says the body’s out towards Amstelveen, there’s a photo too. And the thing is, the journalists are at the scene already.’