The House of Dolls
Read The House of Dolls Online
Authors: David Hewson
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #International Mystery & Crime, #Crime, #General
FOR EDDIE
CONTENTS
PART THREE: WEDNESDAY 19 APRIL
1
‘Vos?’
Laura Bakker walked through every room of the Rijksmuseum looking for him.
‘Pieter Vos?’
A slight man of medium height, hunched in a pale-green winter coat that had seen better days. Seated on a bench in front of the biggest doll’s house she’d ever seen, Vos seemed both young and old at the same time. His posture, his long brown hair, his creased and worn clothing spoke of middle age. Yet his face was unlined, interested, alert. That of a favourite teacher or a caring, patient priest. And his blue eyes, fixed entirely on the doll’s house opposite, had the bright, hard glint of a piece of pottery on the mantelpiece back home in Dokkum. Unwavering. Intelligent.
She’d read the file before De Groot dispatched her from the police station a short bike ride away in Marnixstraat. Pieter Vos, thirty-nine. Resigned from his position as Brigadier in that same station two years before after the failure of the investigation into the disappearance of his daughter Anneliese. Now living a downbeat bohemian existence on a houseboat in the Jordaan, struggling to survive on the paltry remains of his premature pension.
Bakker pulled out the folder she’d brought. Papers, photos scattered everywhere. She swore. Heads turned. Then she scooped up the strewn documents and pictures from the floor and crammed them back into place.
He was staring at her by then. A look she knew. It said . . .
that was clumsy.
‘Vos?’ she asked, glancing at the ID photo to make sure this was the right man. In the force Vos was even more boyish in appearance. Events had aged him.
De Groot was his boss. A personal friend too from what she could gather. Heartbroken by Vos’s resignation and the loss of a famed Amsterdam police officer to . . . what?
Trying to repair his ramshackle houseboat on the Prinsengracht no more than a five-minute walk from the desk he once occupied. The early newspaper cuttings lauded Vos as a scourge of the city’s underworld, a languid, modest detective who’d torn the city’s gangs to shreds with a shrug and a smile. Not that there was much to read. He’d shunned the limelight when he was in post. Fled from it when his own daughter went missing, shattered, or so the papers said, that his own diligence as a police officer may have brought about her abduction. A fruitless search followed and then Vos was out of the force. Anneliese was one more name in the missing persons files. A case in the archives, gathering digital dust.
He had a lead coming out of his pocket, earphones on. She leaned down, gently pulled them out, was surprised to hear the loud jazz-rock of ‘Willie the Pimp’ coming out of them.
‘Pieter Vos?’ she said again and found herself reaching out to touch his arm, not quite knowing why. The long, uncombed hair and shabby clothes . . . there was something fragile about the man. It was hard to associate this quiet, absorbed figure with the Brigadier who put so many in jail. ‘You haven’t got time to listen to Zappa. Commissaris de Groot wants to see you in your office. Pick up your stuff. We’re off.’
‘What do you know about Zappa?’ he asked in a kindly, amused voice.
‘My dad liked him. Used to play that stuff all night long if he could get away with it. Get moving. We’re off.’
‘Why does Frank send me children?’ he asked then put the earphones on again.
She sat down next to him on the bench, folded her arms, thought for a moment then reached into his pocket and yanked out the lead for phones.
The look on his face was a mixture of surprise and outrage.
‘That’s quite a thing,’ Bakker said, pointing at the display case in front of them.
The doll’s house of Petronella Oortman was complex and a good head taller than Pieter Vos. An Amsterdam canal mansion in miniature. Three floors, each with three rooms and an adjoining staircase corridor. A kitchen, a parlour, a nursery, furniture and paintings, crockery and delicate, miniature draperies. He couldn’t stop staring at it and she knew why.
‘My name’s Laura Bakker. Twenty-four years old and no child, thank you.’
When his bright blue eyes fell on her she had nothing else to say.
‘Missing the green fields of Friesland, Laura?’
It was the accent that did it. Amsterdammers looked down on everything outside the capital. She came from the provinces. People there were simple, stupid even.
‘There’s more to Friesland than green fields,’ she said.
‘What does your father do when he’s not listening to Zappa?’
‘Farmer.’
She was tall. Lanky even. Her fine red hair was pulled back behind her head, a practical decision for work. Laura Bakker didn’t give much thought to how she looked. Her long face was pale and, she felt, unremarkable. Not much different from when she was seventeen.
‘Do you miss him?’ he asked.
‘Yes but he’s dead,’ she said. ‘Mum too. Not that this matters. Just get your stuff, will you?’
He didn’t move.
She took out another folder from her bag, almost spilled the contents of that on the floor. He looked at her, one dark eyebrow raised, then went back to gazing at the doll’s house.
‘That cost Petronella twenty, thirty thousand guilders. As much as her mansion on Warmoesstraat I guess. Which is probably a coffee shop now, selling bad marijuana to drunken Brits.’
‘You look like you were expecting me, Vos. How’s that?’
‘Magic. Didn’t you read the files?’
‘They don’t say anything about magic. Plenty else . . .’
‘Oortman was a wealthy widow. Her money came from the silk trade. Which kind of lived alongside slavery and spice. So maybe . . .’ He stroked his chin, trying to find the right word. ‘Maybe things aren’t that different.’
‘Warmoesstraat? Is that where you buy your dope?’
‘I said it was bad.’
‘It’s all bad, Vos.’
‘You’re young, Laura. What do you know?’
‘I know the daughter of the vice-mayor’s gone missing. Katja Prins. Not the first time apparently. But—’
‘Frank called me. He said he was sending their new aspirant. A simple country girl who thought she might catch drunk drivers in Dokkum. And when that didn’t happen felt she could make a difference in Amsterdam. He gave me your name.’
The blood rushed to her cheeks. Her fingers automatically clutched the simple, silver crucifix around her neck, over the plain black jumper.
‘By simple I’m sure he meant . . . unspoilt,’ Vos added in his quiet and diffident voice. ‘Nothing untoward. He said you crashed a squad car . . .’
She wasn’t going there.
‘Your daughter was snatched by a man obsessed with dolls. There’s something like that with the Prins girl . . .’
She placed the photo on his lap. An antique porcelain child’s doll in a white pinafore dress and a police evidence label next to it. There was a hank of blonde hair in its right hand. The pinafore had a large bloodstain covering most of the front.
Her long index finger jabbed at the gigantic model opposite.
‘Looks just like that one over there, in the Oortman house, doesn’t it? Just like the one he sent you? Except for the blood and the hair.’
Vos sighed.
‘The hair was in its left hand with me. The bloodstain was smaller.’
‘Katja was staying at a tenement in De Wallen . . .’
‘The daughter of the man who runs the city council living in the red-light district? Doesn’t that tell you something?’
‘She hasn’t been seen for a week. We’re testing to see if the blood and the hair are hers. The doll was left outside her father’s house last night. In a miniature cardboard coffin. Just like he did with you in Marnixstraat . . .’
No surprise. Just a sad, resigned smile. It seemed his natural expression.
‘Did Frank tell you Wim Prins’s wife was my partner for seventeen years? Anneliese’s mother?’
The heat fled her cheeks.
‘No.’
‘Amsterdam’s a small place. Not as small as Dokkum . . .’
Vos went back to looking at the little rooms, the furniture, the doll marooned in a tiny nursery four centuries before.
‘Katja’s a crazy little junkie,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘Her own mother was too. She killed herself. The girl hates her stepmother. What’s new there?’
‘Vos . . .’
‘She’s tried to extort money out of her father before. He always refuses to press a case. It seems she has a cruel imagination . . .’
‘And if you’re wrong? If this is the same man who took your daughter?’