Little Sister (42 page)

‘Why did you call him, Frank?’

‘That doesn’t matter now. His car’s been outside a bar in town since last night. I can’t raise Blom either. There’s no answer from his place in Edam.’

Vos was wondering what to say about the stash of leaks from Veerman. Nothing seemed best.

‘Perhaps they’ve gone on holiday together.’

‘This isn’t funny. If those two girls believe Haas and Blom were responsible for their family’s murder they could be prime targets. I really don’t want any more blood on
our hands. Nor do you.’

Sam wandered down the gangplank and looked up at him, hunger written on his inquisitive face.

‘Why would they think that?’

‘Jesus! Will you stop being obtuse? The officer responsible for the case is missing. So’s the man who was managing The Cupids at the time. I want them found. I want those girls back
inside where they belong.’

‘So you said. I need Aisha Refai. Snyder won’t want her.’

‘Done,’ De Groot said.

‘On it,’ Vos told him and that was that.

Ten minutes later he took Sam over to the bar and picked up a coffee on the way to the office.

They were there already, three of them around the desk.

‘So I gather we’re looking for four people now?’ Van der Berg said. ‘Not two?’

‘Sounds like it,’ Vos agreed as he scanned through the morning reports. ‘Dirk. Aisha. You two stay here. I’ve got some things I need you to check. Laura. Get us a
car.’

They spent the night gagged, hands tied in a dusty shed that smelled of diesel and chemicals. At dawn a single cock crowed and then came the sound of chickens clucking busily.
Animals were lowing somewhere, birds squawking. There was a distant buzz of traffic from time to time.

Haas kept mumbling through the rag around his mouth. He had scared eyes and struggled to piss in the corner once during the night. Jaap Blom checked his bonds, knew he couldn’t shift them.
Then crouched down by the corrugated iron wall to wait.

There’d been a few arguments with the Amsterdam gangs when The Cupids were starting to make money. Once one of the hood outfits had done this to him. Money sorted everything as usual.
Another time he’d done the same to a rival band manager who’d had the temerity to think he could tempt the band from him.

Plenty of stupid people in the world. Plenty of cowards too. He had both with him in that tiny, rusty cell.

They waited. A long time he thought. Then in a sudden rush the door opened and three men came in, grabbed them, bundled them into a bigger space where straw flecks hovered in the hot light air,
bound them to a couple of seats in the centre then went away.

It was a stage of a kind, Blom guessed. They wanted a performance.

If that was the case he’d give it to them.

When they came back it was Frans Lambert who removed their gags. Haas’s first and he just shook and begged. All the idiotic pleading phrases. The man was too dumb to realize: they wanted
something and wouldn’t stop until they got it.

Lambert came and untied the gag round Blom’s mouth. Jaap Blom looked up, grinned and said cheerfully, ‘Frans! You never gave me the chance to say it last night. But you’re
looking good. Aged well.’ A pause. All that time doing nothing out in nowhere I guess. Money gone now, has it?’

They were in a barn, the roof old and full of holes. Morning sunlight was working through the rusty gaps, casting shafts of yellow across the dusty interior. It was hard to work out how many
people were there. They were just shapes in the shadows.

Lambert was still tall and muscular, still wore black jeans, black T-shirt. His hair was shorter, going grey in places and there was a new, heavy beard, bold and thick enough to fool people who
didn’t know him well.

He bent down in front of the two tethered men.

‘Funny, Jaap. Any more jokes?’

Something swished through the air. It took a moment for Blom to realize what it was. A baseball bat in Lambert’s strong hands.

And you’ve taken up sport too. It’s good that a man should look after himself—’

‘Shut up!’ Ollie Haas shrieked. ‘For God’s sake, Jaap—’

The man in black pulled both arms back then beat the club through the air so close to Ollie Haas’s face he must have felt the sweep as it raced past. The old cop whimpered and fell
silent.

‘This cretin may be a sad bastard who lives on his own,’ Blom said. ‘I’m not. I’ve got a wife. An office in The Hague that’s waiting for me.’ He looked
up at Lambert. ‘Whatever nonsense this is, Frans, it’s a waste of time. You’ll go to jail. When they find out—’

Movement in the shadows, figures entering the light. One there that made his heart sink and his voice fall silent.

Lotte Blom came and stood next to the drummer then took his arm. She had the look of victory on her. That hadn’t been around for a while.

‘No one knows you’re missing, Jaap,’ she said. ‘I called your office and told them you’d gone away somewhere for a break. You could vanish off the face of the earth
right now and no one would know. Or care. I wonder. How does that feel?’

A memory from the previous night.
Two of them.
The metal barrel cold against his neck, a figure behind. He’d been slow and stupid. There was a handgun he’d kept from the old
days, for when the gangs came calling. Blom couldn’t even remember where they hid it. His wife clearly did.

‘Lotte,’ he replied, quietly, seriously, with all the sincerity he could muster. ‘Whatever we’ve been through . . . whatever you think I’ve done . . .’

She hung on Lambert’s arm, gazing at him, amused.

‘What I know you’ve done’s bad enough,’ she said. ‘What I think . . .’

The man in black stepped forward. The long wooden bat slashed through the air again.

Lotte Blom laughed at the way they shrank back.

‘Now’s the time to find out, I guess,’ she added.

‘What in God’s name do you want?’ Haas screeched. ‘Just say it.’

‘Girls,’ Lambert called.

Two shapes in black with hair the colour of burnished copper emerged from the shadows. Then Bea Arends. Gert Brugman, limping and looking sick. Finally the two yokel brothers Blom knew from his
Volendam days. They had broken shotguns in their arms.

It was Kim who came up first. She looked wild-eyed, crazy. The other one held back.

‘Hello, Mr Blom. Mr Haas,’ the girl said. ‘Remember me?’

He let Bakker drive for once and sat in the passenger seat making calls and reading messages on his phone. It was a calm summer day, pure blue sky the colour of a
starling’s egg, scarcely any traffic once they’d escaped the city.

Vos got through five emails and three texts before they’d reached the open fields of Waterland. Then he took a call from Aisha Refai. When it was over he stretched back in the car and
announced he was still hungry.

‘Isn’t this urgent?’ Bakker asked.

‘It would be if we knew where we were going. Why do people need computers of their own? I mean really . . . what’s wrong with a phone? We’ve got computers in the
office.’

Bakker told him he was in an odd and antediluvian mood.

‘What did Aisha have to say?’ she added.

‘We finally got something back on the call.’

That was it.

‘The . . . call. Any call in particular?’

‘The first one.’

‘Still struggling, maestro.’

He sighed and scanned the green horizon. They were past Broek headed for Monnickendam. Soon they’d be in Volendam and she’d no idea where exactly they were headed.

‘How did this start, Laura?’

She knew this game by now. Vos was challenging her to reconnect the pieces of a fragmented narrative. It was a bit like doing a jigsaw and she hated puzzles.

‘With Mia and Kim Timmers getting let out of Marken. After which they went with Simon Klerk to that farmhouse for some reason. His reason I guess. Then they overpowered him and left him
stark naked for his wife to discover.’

Things had been moving so quickly she hadn’t had time to put all that together in her head. But it seemed to make sense.

‘They can’t have known she’d be mad enough to kill him. All the same that’s what kicked it off.’

He frowned, looked at his watch then stared out of the window.

‘Didn’t it?’

‘You took the phone call,’ he said. ‘Supposedly from Ollie Haas’s old girlfriend.’

‘Ah.’ She remembered. ‘Yes. That.’

‘Who made it?’

‘His old girlfriend? I don’t know!’

‘Aisha finally got something back from the switchboard. It came from Marken. The institution. A landline.’

‘Visser?’ she asked.

‘Visser helped cover up whatever happened in that place. She was trying to hide things from us. No.’

Volendam was five kilometres away. He’d have to tell her where to go soon.

‘Bea Arends then. Or Koops. From the kitchen.’

‘That’s my guess too. What Bea didn’t tell us is that one of the places she worked ten years ago was the Waterland hospital in Purmerend. The Sampson woman was a staff nurse
there, dividing her time with Marken. They must have known each other.’

The hazy picture was starting to turn clearer. Eighteen months before, Bea had come back and got a job in Marken under an assumed name. She found out nothing about her daughter’s death.
But when the Timmers sisters were set for release she arranged for them to hide out in Amsterdam.

Bakker tried to recall what the Arends woman had said the day before when Vos had asked why she’d never come to the police with their suspicions. The answer was simple: they had. To Ollie
Haas. They’d been ignored.

‘Someone’s been dropping us breadcrumbs all along.’

‘Quite,’ Vos agreed. ‘And if Kim and Mia stayed missing they reasoned we’d be forced to take another look at Marken and what put them there.’

‘Maybe if Sara Klerk hadn’t killed her husband . . .’

‘No,’ he said in a low, aggrieved voice. ‘It wouldn’t have worked anyway. All the files were gone. In Marnixstraat. In Visser’s office too. If Veerman hadn’t
kept his own . . .’

‘God. We really failed those people.’

‘We did,’ he agreed.

‘So it’s back to Bea’s place?’

He shook his head.

‘She’s not there. I got a local car to check. Lotte Blom’s not at home. Gert Brugman neither. And Frans Lambert’s no more dead than you or me. It’s just . .
.’ He closed his eyes and looked ready to go to sleep. ‘We’ve been strung along from both sides and I was too idiotic to realize. I thought it was just one.’

Bakker stopped and waved at a smart red tractor waiting to cross the road and pull into a field by their side.

‘You’re so polite sometimes,’ Vos noted.

‘Country girl. Always give way to a farmer. Tractors are bigger than you for starters. So they’ve done a runner? Ollie Haas and Blom thought we might be on to them
finally—’

He groaned and she knew she’d said the wrong thing.

‘What—?’

‘They’ve had ten years to run away. These people think they’re untouchable. They know it. We’ve made them like that.’

Out of Marnixstraat, just the two of them ready to think out of the box, things were starting to make sense.

‘Do you know what happens if people expect justice and you don’t give it to them?’ he asked.

‘Mostly . . . nothing,’ she said. ‘Thank God. Otherwise we’d be knee deep in angry vigilantes.’

He roused himself in the seat and looked up. The town lay ahead, a collection of low roofs set against the placid silvery lake.

‘Mostly. There’s a white building coming up on the right. Before the roundabout. A bungalow cafe. Quaint place. White walls, black beams. Pancake house or something.’

‘I see it.’

‘Pull in there.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m hungry.’

‘A pancake house won’t be open at this time of day!’

‘I said. It’s a cafe too. People out here are . . . versatile. Independent. Strong-willed. I suppose you need lots of talents.’

‘It won’t be open.’

Vos held up his phone for her to see. There was a mobile page on the screen:
The Little Ducks Pancake House and Music Bar. We do breakfast too!

‘Thank you for keeping me in the picture as usual,’ she said then pulled off the road and into the empty car park.

There was a sign along the way. A poster for a music night: ‘Remembering The Cupids’.

Vos pointed it out.

‘Now there’s a coincidence, don’t you think?’

Bakker growled.

‘You can be really annoying sometimes, you know.’

In her black jeans and midnight T-shirt, sick of the cheap jewellery they’d bought, ashamed she’d got their beautiful hair dyed brown, Mia listened to her
sister.

This was the old Kim. The forceful, demanding creature she’d become in Marken. Ranting and raving. Throwing out accusations. Never listening much to the answers.

Here, in the dry, hot dusty interior of the Kok brothers’ barn, hens clucking happily outside and the faintest drone of traffic from the main road into Volendam, they might as well have
been seated in front of Irene Visser. It was never about confession there either. Their presence demanded nothing less than an act of release, a purging of all the pent-up fury inside them. And
then, in the exhausted aftermath, simple, blunt obedience.

Don’t tell. Never tell. You’ll only make things worse.

Kim kept screeching at the two bound men in front of her, Frans Lambert and the rest of the audience swallowing every word. Mia went to her side and whispered, ‘Please, love. Not
so—’

‘Shut it!’ the old Kim snapped. Then she bent her furious head into her sister’s ear and half-sang, half-whispered a single musical line.

Love is gone and so am I.

That was enough. Mia closed her eyes and found herself in the last place she’d ever wanted to be, even in the beginning. A young girl dressed in blue hot pants, sparkly scarlet shirt,
patent red leather shoes pinching her toes, yellow hair tied back in a bun, cheeks heavy with make-up, mascara stinging her eyes, lipstick thick and greasy on her mouth. Walking up the steps onto
the Volendam stage.