Little Sister
Authors: David Hewson
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #International Mystery & Crime, #Thrillers, #Crime, #General
LITTLE
SISTER
MACMILLAN
1
The prison, for such it seemed, was a dun-coloured two-storey block hidden away in a solitary wood on the edge of the island of Marken. Sixteen rooms for young patients with
nothing to do but listen to their handlers, read books, watch TV, walk the small enclosed garden and stare out at the still, grey waters surrounding them.
On this hot summer Monday swarms of insects rose like mist from the scrubland, swallows swooping through the teeming haze, darting, hungry. They hovered above the high electrified fence that
kept out any curious walkers who’d wandered away from the village’s cobbled streets and pretty timber-gabled houses. Security ran twenty-four hours a day with cameras at regular
intervals along the perimeter. At the end of the long drive stood a barred gate with an entry post, and beyond it a sign that indicated the presence of a justice ministry building.
People on the island village understood there was some kind of psychiatric institution on their doorstep. Only the few who worked there knew it housed a handful of the most disturbed female
juvenile criminals in the Netherlands. The positioning was deliberate. On one side was the Gouwzee lake stretching west to Waterland and the main road to Amsterdam. On the other the larger
Markermeer, part of a vast expanse of inland water that ran all the way out to the North Sea.
Nothing but a grassy dyke joined Marken to the outside world, a narrow lane above it. Any inmate who escaped would have to make their way along that. None had tried in the eighteen years of its
existence. Nor did many visitors come the other way. Certainly not for Mia and Kim Timmers, two orphaned sisters forgotten for the most part, out of convenience and an unspoken sense of communal
guilt.
They’d been there since they were eleven years old and detained for killing a man. That was a decade before. Since being committed they’d never set foot out of the place. Lately
though the atmosphere had changed. Irene Visser, the psychiatrist who’d been assigned to their care all the long decade they’d been incarcerated, had started putting them through a
variety of intelligence tests. Some were boring. Some funny. The sisters approached each steadfastly, earnestly, answering all of Visser’s questions in her office. It was a small, clinical
room looking out along the flat green dyke of marshy land that stretched out like a stubby finger towards Volendam across the
meer.
Four weeks before she’d called them for what they
assumed was another set of tests. Instead Visser told Kim and Mia they were getting too old for Marken and deserved better than to spend their days cooped up in a psychiatric institution for a
crime committed when they were children. An offence, furthermore, for which most citizens might excuse, if not pardon, them.
Simon Klerk, their ever-smiling personal day nurse, was there when Visser went through the results. Both he and the psychiatrist agreed. The sisters were easily bright enough to get a
scholarship to university if they wanted. Arts. Science. Whatever they felt like. The authorities could help with the exams. In the meantime they would provide books, computers, limited virtual
access to the outside world. This was all the start of what the medical team called the ‘process of rehabilitation’. A way of finding them a route back into a society they barely
knew.
But Visser frowned and shook her head when they asked for a visit home to Volendam by way of reward.
That was a step too far. Because the modest fishing town across the water was where they murdered Rogier Glas. Two young girls of eleven found in a back street next to the musician’s
savaged body, a bloody kitchen knife on the ground beside them.
So instead, when they weren’t at the computer burrowing, thinking, they’d sit in the garden beneath the trees, fingers wrapped in the iron mesh of the high fence, staring out towards
home, watching the propellers of the white wind turbines in the water turn like second hands on a gigantic, invisible clock. Volendam’s harbour, the boats, their tall masts taunted them.
Sometimes they clung to that perimeter fence so desperately, fingers hard through the gaps, noses pressed to the wire, they came away with its marks upon their flesh. Like stigmata, a reminder of
an earthly sin, impossible to dispel.
Marken smelled like home, salty from the brackish water around them, not fresh, not stale. Just how the placid, endless lake was meant to be. From March to November ferries ran from Volendam
taking tourists to and from the tiny port half a kilometre from the institution.
A thirty-five-minute crossing. They could still picture the waterfront even though they’d not set foot there for almost half their short lives.
A landing stage.
Flocks of tourists taking pictures of the few locals wearing traditional dress.
And in summer, the week of the talent contest, a temporary rostrum next to the museum where, once upon a time, they’d sung together with Jo, the third triplet, youngest by thirty minutes,
providing the high notes in their harmonies.
The Timmers Sisters. One day they’d be famous. Until death came visiting one night and stole Jo, their mother Freya and father Gus from them.
Two streets behind the picturesque harbour was their shabby black-timbered cottage, the place they died. Gus, a fisherman, worked all hours to pay the rent while Freya sang in local bars for
pennies and performed backing vocals for the local bands when she could.
Volendam was where the Palingsound, the Netherlands equivalent of Beatlemania, began. For decades a bohemian oasis for musicians, far enough from Amsterdam to escape the attention of the
authorities. Freya had grown up surrounded by pop tunes and folk songs playing on the radio, in the cafes and bars. Her daughters had inherited their mother’s calm, clear singing voice,
matched to perfect pitch, and her beauty. The girls – they thought of themselves that way as did everyone in Marken – could still hear Jo in their heads ten years on from the black
night that took their family from them. That gift was, perhaps, the only satisfactory legacy they had from their mother, or so some people said when the smoke, the blood and the fury cleared and
the inevitable recriminations followed.
Now they sat in the office of the director Henk Veerman, a dour and bulky man in his late fifties forever playing with a pen over a notepad and glancing at his computer. Next to him was the
psychiatrist Visser, a thin, intense woman with cropped blonde hair and a craggy face that smiled too easily. She seemed interested as always, smartly dressed in a blue jacket and skirt. By her
side sat Simon Klerk, sweet, handsome, fair-haired Simon with his too-bright shirt and crumpled jeans, caring, curious, the closest thing either of them had to a friend. Or so he wished to
believe.
Mia and Kim had explored their own biological history in depth, going through the books in the library, checking on the web when they were finally allowed access to a limited number of reference
sites. Triplets were not unusual. One in five hundred births. They were rarely identical however and in this they were no exception.
Both tall with natural blonde hair long around their shoulders, cut themselves when necessary with a single pair of not very sharp scissors watched always by Simon. They wore similar cheap
clothes for this hot summer day. Cotton shirts, red and blue, jeans and sandals bought by Simon and Visser from a discount store in the city. Their faces as usual were set to neutral, not smiling,
not sad either. Mia’s the narrower, with high angular cheekbones, while Kim, the eldest, slower and heavier, possessed the soft round features of their mother.
Twenty-one, they looked all of seventeen. And they were beautiful. Of that they were certain. Freya, the loveliest woman in town, had said so, promising all three of them, even little Jo, the
loudest and most mischievous, that one day they’d be even more bewitching than her.
The Golden Angels
she dubbed them that first – and last – day they appeared on stage alone.
Three tiny saints from Volendam. Children of the lake.
They had that magnetic quality. It had been there from the start. The sisters saw it in the way people turned and stared as they walked down the street. They noticed it every day in Marken, in
the eyes of the nurses, of Irene Visser and Simon Klerk. There was something special about the two of them. A power in the way they looked, one handed down in their genes. It would have been
foolish not to use it.
‘Mia . . . Kim . . .’ Visser said in her quiet, pleasant city voice. ‘You know why you’re here?’
‘Because we killed Rogier Glas,’ Kim said straight out.
‘You’re sure of that?’ the director demanded. ‘No more arguments?’
‘There never were arguments. Only regrets,’ Mia added carefully, wishing her sister would think before she spoke, not that she would ever tell her this.
Simon sighed and glanced at them. This was the wrong answer.
‘That was a long time ago,’ the psychiatrist told them. ‘Almost a lifetime for you. And besides . . .’
‘We need the details again,’ Veerman intervened.
Things happened between them without a word exchanged. One would begin a sentence only for the other to finish it. When Mia got a headache Kim did too. Their clothes complemented one another and
they never spoke of it. And once a month they bled in unison, sharing the same grim fevered mood in angry silence.
That was over the week before. Now they were calm. Normal. Ready.
‘You’re here because we think it’s time you were given a chance,’ Visser said in that careful, attentive way she had. ‘We think you’re well enough to see more
of the outside world.’
‘We’re free?’ Kim whispered.
Visser laughed. Mia sighed.
‘Not free. Not yet. Just . . . more free than you have been. We’ve watched you. Both of you. The progress you’ve made this last year is—’
Veerman picked up a report on his desk, uttered an audible sigh and started to read.
‘It’s been wonderful,’ the psychiatrist added.
‘Where?’ Mia asked. ‘Where can we go? Home to Volendam?’
‘Not yet,’ Visser said. ‘One day, I’m sure. When you’re ready.’
‘Not that you have a home there any more,’ Veerman added, staring at his papers.
The sisters smiled at one another, then at the officials across the desk. Mia reached out and took Kim’s hands, toying with her fingers.
‘All we want is to be well, Mr Director. Just to be together. To sing. To be . . . like everyone else.’
‘That’s the idea,’ Veerman muttered.
‘We will do whatever you want. Where may we go?’
Simon leaned forward.
‘To a place we have in Amsterdam. A sheltered house. Near the museums. You won’t be on your own. I’ll visit you every weekday. There’ll be people there to help. You must
do as we say otherwise you’ll have to return to custody. Somewhere else probably. An adult institution.’