After the Silence: Inspector Rykel Book 1 (Amsterdam Quartet) (23 page)

Thursday, 5 January
10.43

Kees now had proof.

Jaap was investigating Andreas’ death, and he reckoned that if he told Smit there was a good chance he’d be put back in charge of the case – there was no one else free to do it.

He glanced up at Sint Nicolaaskerk, one of the few Catholic churches in a city built by Puritans. It rose high over the surrounding buildings, its twin towers and massive cupola jutting up into the sky, thin fingers of cloud meshing together behind them. His head was beginning to ache again, and he thought back to the previous night, with Carice.

The sex, as far as he could remember, had been great. A real buzz, both of them high.

But he wasn’t high now.

Now he was in the crash.

And he needed something to help. He reached into his inside pocket and pulled out the tiny plastic bag.

Empty.

No wonder his head hurt, there’d been enough for four people. He looked around, and finding no one, licked his finger, ran it around the inside of the bag, and then rubbed his gums. He crumpled the bag up and
dropped it in a litter bin. Something rustled under the layers of trash.

Kees wondered if rats could get buzzed on coke.

He imagined a rat, eyes zoned out, rushing along the road at supersonic speed, neon lights blurring, people screaming. As he stepped forward towards the entrance he realized he was laughing.

Inside, the light was dim, the painted, gilded woodwork looking tired, old. A figure with a shawl over its head – kneeling in one of the dark wooden pews near the front – was so still it could have been a statue.

He could hear men’s voices, singing, and an organ weaving notes in between. There were three of them, by the chancel, wearing thick coats and scarves. They were clustered round a small portable wooden organ, where a fourth man was pressing the keys in a slow, solemn way. They broke off, and started discussing something before starting up again.

The church was physically different to the one his parents had dragged him to every Sunday throughout his childhood, but there was something about the atmosphere that was the same. Maybe it was the quiet, or the dusty smell of incense which was already pricking his still tender nostrils. The bleeding had stopped but he was feeling like it might start again.

Whatever it was, it brought back the long hours of boredom, the old women with hair on their chins and eyes which peered at you as if you were the devil incarnate. He remembered one time, after Mass, when one of the women caught him and a girlfriend at it, hiding in the hedge. She yanked him by the ear and told him that he was
a wicked child who would go to hell. Kees, hurting, tears forming from the pain, had looked up at her, the fanatical gaze, and said, and he didn’t know where the words came from, they just did, ‘Devil’s whore.’

His footsteps reverberated round the space, mixing with the music which kept stopping and starting, and a man, drawn by the sound, emerged from a door at the far end. He was wearing a black cassock with the obligatory white collar clasping his thin, fragile neck, and his face, akin to that of a medieval gargoyle, was all bones and hollows.

When they were close enough to talk he welcomed Kees – in whispered tones designed not to upset the singers – and introduced himself as Father Vegter. Kees responded by taking out his ID and asked for somewhere they could talk, not tempering his volume, making the man flinch.

Father Vegter turned and walked back to the door he’d come from and Kees followed him through to a corridor ending in a small, and surprisingly well-equipped, modern office.
Looks more like a business than a religion
, thought Kees.

‘Please, take a seat.’ He gestured to a swivel chair of black plastic and red fabric, and sat in an identical model on the far side of the desk. ‘So what can I help you with?’

‘I’m looking for someone who knows something about this man.’

The priest took the photo which Kees slid across the table and peered at it, holding it at arm’s length and squinting. He nodded slowly, but didn’t say anything.

‘What makes you think I would know anything about him?’

‘I think he may have been a priest. We found this at his
home.’ He passed over another picture, the stole laid out on a table. ‘So you do recognize him?’

Father Vegter studied the picture.

‘No, I can’t say I do, should I?’

‘His name was Jan Zwartberg.’

The priest paused, casting his eyes upwards for a few moments as if God would provide. But in this case he didn’t, as after a few moments more – moments in which Kees started to think about what De Waart had been asking him about yesterday, a niggling unease appearing from nowhere – he shook his head.

‘Sorry, it doesn’t ring any bells. If you could leave the photo I could show it to the other fathers here, someone else might remember.’

‘If someone does recognize him give me a call.’ He handed over his card. ‘So if he was a priest, how would I find out more about him. You must have records?’

‘There will be records, most likely they’ll be kept at the administrative centre, in Haarlem.’

Kees insisted on the phone number and wrote it down, then got up to leave.

Waste of time
, he thought.
I should tell Smit about the laptop, maybe then he’ll pull Jaap and put me in charge of the case.

‘Oh, Inspector.’ Father Vegter waited until Kees turned back. ‘If you ever want to talk, about anything at all, then my door is always open.’

His eyes sought out Kees’, and for a moment Kees had the feeling that this man could see right into his mind.

Panic clutched his throat, and he turned and left without saying a word.

Outside in the freezing cold he noticed his palms were
still sweating. He should get back to the station, request a meeting with Smit. But he found himself heading towards an alleyway near the Oude Kerk, the old church in the centre of the red-light district.

An African stood, moving from leg to leg, coat bunched up round his shoulders. He saw Kees coming and acknowledged him with a brief flick of his eyebrows.

‘How much?’ he asked Kees, keeping his eyes roving up and down the alley.

‘The usual.’

‘Man, you’re getting through this shit. Not that I’m complaining.’

‘What can I say, you’ve got good stuff. Listen, I haven’t got any cash on me right now, I’ll pay you back tomorrow.’

His dark features tightened.

‘Uh uh. No can do. Payment up front or not at all.’

‘Hey, c’mon, you know me.’

‘Yeah, but it don’t matter. I can’t do that.’

Kees’ turn to look up and down the alley. He stepped closer.

‘You know what. You’re right. I won’t pay you back. You’re going to give me a free sample. Or would you like to have a trip down the station?’

‘And if I tell them you’re a customer of mine?’

Kees shrugged.

‘Who they gonna believe?’ he asked pointing a finger to his chest, imitating the man’s accent. ‘Me?’ Then jabbing it into the dealer’s, ‘Or you?’

Thursday, 5 January
11.02

Ludo Haak was occupying more and more of Tanya’s thoughts.

He was infecting her brain with a kind of hate she knew she should try and rein in before it became destructive. She was starting to see his image when she closed her eyes, the spider tattoo flexing its legs.

That’s not good
, she thought.

The possibility that someone may have got to him, extracted revenge for what he’d done, wasn’t worrying her, or not overly even though every sinew in her body wanted to get her hands on him herself. No, that was fine in itself, the revenge would be just.

What wasn’t fine was if her chance of finding Adrijana had expired with his last breath.

Of course, they had no proof that he was dead. He might have not turned up last night as he knew someone was out to get him – surely he’d be aware by now that Friedman and Zwartberg were dead – and had holed up somewhere, or some other business had taken him out of town. If he was willing to travel all the way up to Leeuwarden then anywhere else in the Netherlands wasn’t off limits.

Maybe there was another child he was going to abduct.

But that didn’t make sense; what use would he have for another one now that the porn business was broken, exposed? And that led her on to the most chilling thought of all,
What use would he have for Adrijana
?

She refocused on the screen, where she’d been trawling through the databases, hoping that there might be something, anything, to point her in the right direction, but so far she’d drawn a blank.

And then word had come back that the two unidentifieds weren’t Haak.

She ended up at the initial arrest report, the image of the tattoo showing in the profile photograph.

The full frontal showed his eyes.

Dark, evil eyes.

She wondered about his parents. Hard as it was to imagine that someone like this had parents, they might know where he was. If, that is, they were still alive. They could easily have died, of drug overdoses in some slum, stabbed in a drunken brawl over nothing, or maybe expired from the sheer wrenching shame of having produced a son like Haak.

Or maybe he was like me
, she thought,
maybe he had foster parents, or his own parents abused him, maybe he’s repeating a pattern.

But that didn’t excuse anything. Look what she’d been through, and you didn’t see her running round the countryside tying up old couples, burning them to death in their own homes and abducting their child, even if that child had been bought illegally.

And that was the other angle she needed to get into,
but if, as Jaap suspected, the Black Tulips were responsible for smuggling in children as well as sex workers and drugs and arms and god-knew-what-else, then Haak was still their best bet of putting a stop to this.

Right now he was their only link up the chain.

Parents. She’d focus on the parents first, even though the surname Haak was a dispiritingly common name she discovered when she typed it into the
Herkenningsdienstsysteem
. Haak’s record had a place of birth, just outside of Leiden, so she concentrated on any Haak living there now. It was a total long shot, there was no way of knowing if they still lived there, but she had to start somewhere.

Once the results were up she hit print, then picked up the phone.

Thursday, 5 January
11.39

Vice had a floor all to themselves.

They were cut off from the rest of the building as if what they dealt with needed to be contained.

Which in a way it did.

Jaap had done two months there, the minimum that any Inspector had to do before they were put on Homicide, and it was two months he’d hated, had almost made him question if he was doing the right thing, if he shouldn’t pack it all in and find a different line of work.

As he and Kees stood by the door, waiting for someone to answer, Jaap remembered that although the images had been a catalogue of human depravity, just about any strange act you could imagine, and mostly stuff that any normal person would struggle to ever dream up, he’d not seen any involving children. He had the feeling that would have changed in the intervening years.

Once they’d finally been let in – Kees’ joke about why it took the harassed-looking man so long to answer the door not going down well at all – they were shown to a smaller office off the main section. There was no natural light, all the windows blacked out, and the air felt dense with concentration, computer fans whirring.

Jaap knew the man who stood to greet them, the same man who’d run the department when he’d been there, Reinier van Oorschot. He had the same rugged face, though the two worry lines riding up his forehead seemed deeper, more canyon-like, and the blond hair which had covered his head was now a failed crop, patches of scalp showing through like bare earth. Jaap couldn’t believe he was still here; most people went crazy after a few years, if they could even stick it out that long.

‘Jaap, good to see you.’ His tone said otherwise.

They shook hands and Jaap introduced Kees, then explained what it was they needed.

‘I’m sure they’re all going to be thrilled to have a whole load of new images to look through,’ he said when Jaap had finished.

‘Yeah, I figured they would be.’

‘And you want to see if we’ve come across any of this stuff before?’

Kees made a noise which sounded like a snigger.

‘You were here before high-speed internet, or at least before it was widespread, weren’t you?’ Reinier asked, ignoring Kees, used to tasteless jokes about his work.

‘Yeah, it was pretty much all stills then.’

Kees rubbed his nose as if he was about to sneeze.

‘Well, now it’s videos, HD, and there are even some in 3D coming out of Asia. I mean, can you image some pervert beating himself off in front of his computer wearing 3D glasses? Sick, fucking sick is what it is.’

A mobile phone on his desk buzzed twice. Reinier checked his voicemail.

‘There are some videos here as well,’ said Jaap when
Reinier had finished listening to his phone. ‘The thing is we know where this stuff was being made, and we know it was being distributed on the web.’ He motioned to Kees, who brought out a card and handed it to Reinier. ‘If you try and log on to this it wipes your computer, like there’s a level of security built in. Gert Roemers is working on it, you might want to give him a call, check where he’s got to.’

Reinier snorted. He took the card and looked at it.

‘It’s a web address, use .nl,’ said Kees.

‘Roemers is useless,’ said Reinier dropping the card on to his desk. ‘I’ve got people here who can get round this kind of thing. This is mostly what we do now, track shit like this on the internet, we’re probably more advanced here than the tech unit. The thing is, the vast majority of stuff is hosted in places abroad we can’t get to, so even if we do get to the source there’s pretty much fuck all we can do about it.’

‘Yeah, I know … but it would still be really useful if your guys could see if any of this looks familiar.’

‘After a few weeks it all looks familiar, you know that, but we’ll give it a go. Anything in particular?’

Jaap’s phone buzzed into life. He looked at the screen, saw it was Karin. He stood up, stepped out of Reinier’s office as he answered.

‘Hey,’ he said, hoping that she didn’t need him to go round there right now. ‘You okay?’

‘Yeah, I’m doing okay,’ she said. ‘I was just wondering if we could meet. There’s something I’d like to talk to you about.’

‘I’m right in the middle of something, not sure I’m going to be able to get round there for a while. Is it urgent?’

‘No, we could maybe do tonight?’

‘Yeah, tonight would be good. I’ll call you when I’m free. And you’re sure you’re okay?’

‘I’m okay. It’s … never mind. I’ll tell you tonight.’

Jaap hung up and went back to Reinier’s office. Karin had sounded different, more like her old self. Maybe something had happened, maybe she’d turned a corner.

He walked over to Reinier’s desk.

‘I forgot to say, it looks like they were doing this over the darknet –’

‘Like TOR?’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a way of making sure no one can trace your movements online, basically the signal is sent through a number of –’

‘Yeah, the tech said it was something like that. But the worst thing is that they seemed to stream some of this live, and people could pay to have certain things done …’

Reiner shook his head.

‘Wish I could say I’d not heard of this before, but we’ve seen it more and more recently …’

Jaap reached into his coat.

‘These four here’ – he splayed the images of Friedman, Zwartberg, Haak and Korssen – ‘any of these show up, I’d like to know. Especially this one,’ he said tapping the photo of Korssen.