After the Silence: Inspector Rykel Book 1 (Amsterdam Quartet) (4 page)

Monday, 2 January
10.16

‘I’ll call you when we get something, but to be honest, with that description you gave I wouldn’t hold my breath.’

Kees hung up on central dispatch.

Amateurs
, he thought as he made his way to the ambulance where the old man was being treated for shock. He’d got the call from Smit asking him to take over the case, at least temporarily, just as Jaap had left. Kees had agreed.

This is my chance
, he thought.

Ton was standing by the ambulance door, stopping any of the press who’d started rolling up getting to their only witness.

‘What have you got on him?’ said Kees.

‘Pieter Leenhouts, works as the verger at the Noorderkerk –’

‘That’s the one on Prinsengracht, shaped like a cross?’

‘Your local knowledge’s improving,’ said Ton as his radio shot out white noise. He turned it down.

‘Any sign of the pathologist?’ asked Kees.

Ton shook his head.

‘Call them again, I’m getting sick of waiting.’

A paramedic was having a furtive cigarette on the far side of the ambulance, the slow tendril of smoke giving
him away. Kees stepped round to ask him if the old man was ready to answer some questions.

‘I think so.’ He paused to blow smoke out over his shoulder. ‘But he’s a bit …’ He circled his ear lazily with his cigarette hand.

‘From the shock?’

The paramedic shrugged.

‘Probably like that to begin with.’

Kees clambered into the back of the ambulance, where Pieter Leenhouts was sitting up on a stretcher, inspecting his fingernails, head cocked like a bird. He had a thin face, round-framed glasses with bottle-end lenses, and wispy white hair which appeared to be moving even though the air was static. His teeth, on view from parted lips, required some drastic dental work, a craggy range of chiaroscuro.

He looked up, squinted at Kees and then went on with the inspection.

‘I’m Inspector Terpstra, and I’m in charge of this case.’
That sounds good
, he thought. ‘You okay to answer a couple of questions now?’

‘I was wondering when someone would want to talk to me.’

‘Well, you’ve had a shock, and we didn’t want to rush you –’

The old man snorted like a horse.

‘No need to treat me like I’m senile.’

‘Why don’t you tell me what happened,’ said Kees sitting down on the side bench, pushing a defibrillator tentacle away from him.

Pieter leant back slightly, assured that he was now being taken seriously. Antiseptic thickened the air.

‘I come along here every morning, I start early, you see, there’s so much of
his
work to be done.’

Kees groaned inside.

‘I’m sure there is. So you saw the body and called us.’

Pieter finished looking at the fingernails on his left hand and transferred his attention to the right.

‘The seagull.’

‘What?’ said Kees, thinking the paramedic was probably right.

‘The seagull. It was right over there’ – he pointed his finger – ‘and it flew up when it heard me, my bicycle can squeak a bit you see. And that’s when I saw it. At first I thought it was one of those … dummies. Like the ones they sell over in De Wallen.’

‘A sex toy.’

Pieter shuddered.

‘It’s disgusting, it really is, we’re letting the country turn into a cesspit, all this …’ He waved his hand around and then half whispered the word, ‘… 
sex
.’

Kees thought about the last time he and Marinette had tried to go through the motions, well over a month ago. He shook his head, trying to dislodge the memory. Which only brought to mind her earlier accusation.

How did she know?

‘It’s their fault,’ said Pieter, breaking into his thoughts.

‘Who?’ asked Kees.

‘The immigrants. They’re pouring in off the boats and trains every day.’ He threw Kees a look as if he personally spent time down at the docks, welcoming each and every one of them. ‘They’re the ones with these disgusting perversions.’

Kees could see Pieter was getting worked up.

So much for the brotherhood of man.

‘I know. But what made you decide to call it in?’ said Kees.

‘I looked at it again and it seemed so … real.’

Kees glanced towards the canal where a barge – a glass-topped tourist vessel devoid of tourists – floated by.

‘And you didn’t see anyone else in the house, anyone leave, or go in?’

‘No, and I’ve been here the whole time.’

Out of the corner of his eye he noticed Ton hovering.

‘Pathologist’s here,’ said Ton when Kees looked at him.

‘I think that’s it,’ Kees said, turning back to Pieter. ‘One of my colleagues took your address and phone number, didn’t they?’

Pieter nodded, his hands now limp in his lap.

‘So I can get on now?’ he asked.

‘Absolutely.’ Kees got out of the ambulance. ‘And don’t talk to any journalists,’ he said over his shoulder before turning to Ton.

‘Where is he?’

‘
She’s
over there.’ Ton pointed to the front door, where a figure was just disappearing inside. ‘She really laid into Gerard.’

Gerard, two years off retirement, had never made it above the lowest grade in the eighteen years he’d been on the force. Some people said it was because he really loved working the street and didn’t want to get promoted to an office, that his inertia was actually a noble thing.

Kees reckoned he just wasn’t that bright.

‘What did he do?’

‘Didn’t believe that she was the pathologist, said that women couldn’t even become pathologists.’

Kees laughed and Ton joined in, several people in the crowd looking round at them, as if annoyed at their levity, inappropriate at a murder scene. Kees picked one out – the fat man from before – and gave him the stare until he looked away, cowed.

Fucking fat people
, he thought as he walked to the front door,
should keep their disapproval to themselves.

Inside he stopped off in the second-floor bathroom, locking it behind him. He’d been rattled that Marinette had accused him of starting again. If she could see it, what about anyone else?

As he pulled the small bag out, scooped a fingernail and snorted it in one go, he figured he’d just have to take the risk.

A filament of scent – floral, musky – led Kees up the stairs, giving a new rhythm to his pulse, and his boots, leather soles held in place by flat-head nails, scraped the wooden steps.

The curved glass door of the stove gave him his first glimpse of her as it came into view at the top of the stairs. She’d squatted down by the body, her back to him, widened and distorted by the reflection.

The forensics were packing up, the noise of their movement crackling in the air like radio static. He stood and watched as she snapped on some gloves and reached for the victim’s face, and the way she moved her fingers made him think of a dusty white tarantula.

‘Are you just going to stand there, Inspector?’ she asked without stopping her exploration, her fingers probing the neck.

‘I didn’t want to get in the way,’ he said, advancing. ‘And how –’

‘Did I know you were an Inspector? Well’ – she stood up and turned to him in one movement, peeling off her gloves at the same time – ‘I figured it was time one turned up.’

The connoisseur in Kees ran a quick once over.

Not bad, not bad at all.

‘That’s funny, because here I was thinking that I’d been waiting for you.’

She had a husky’s eyes, he read a challenge in them, and something else. Her face was lean, like her body, and her hair, pulled into a tight ponytail, shone like blonde lacquer.

‘How strange,’ she said as she tossed her gloves into one of the plastic bags. ‘I’m Carice Stultjens.’

‘Kees Terpstra.’

Her hand was warm, and there was a soft residue of powder from the glove’s inside.

‘So, you working undercover?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The hair, not exactly the normal police cut.’

Marinette had been hinting recently he did something about it. Which had made him even less likely to do so.

‘My hairdresser died, and I haven’t found another one I trust,’ he said.

She gave him a look, her head tilted to one side. Kees read that as a positive.

‘How come we’ve not met before?’ he asked.

She shrugged and then stepped back to the body. He joined her and looked down. The face seemed to have more colour than when he’d first seen it, the mouth was
still gaping where the forensic had prised it open earlier.

‘I’m guessing he wasn’t like this when you pulled him in?’

‘How’d you mean?’

‘Looks like he died yawning.’

‘We had to get a phone out of his mouth,’ he said. She looked at him but didn’t ask.

‘How soon can you get the autopsy done?’

Kees couldn’t see her doing it, cutting open corpses, viscera up to her elbows, the sheer foulness of the job. It all seemed wrong, only ugly middle-aged men did autopsies, not highly attractive women like this. He caught another wave of her perfume and despite the situation, something stirred inside him.

‘We’ve got a lot on, but I’ll try for first thing tomorrow. Looks fairly simple though, I don’t think there can be much doubt as to cause of death.’

She started towards the stairs. Kees found himself following her.

‘Any chance of today?’

‘You Inspectors are all the same, you always want it now.’

‘Hey, we have needs.’

She threw him a fed-up look over her shoulder, but he didn’t buy it and they carried on down the stairs.

‘I guess you should give me your phone number,’ he said as they made it out the front door like a famous couple leaving their own home, police holding back fans and paparazzi on either side.

‘That depends,’ she said, turning to him with a half-smile. He noticed her front teeth were slightly squint, one lapped over the other.

Somehow that made him like her even more.

‘Depends on what?’ he asked.

She reached out and brushed something off his sleeve.

‘It depends, Inspector, on what you’d do with it.’

Monday, 2 January
10.45

‘We’re here.’

Pulling up to a stop, gravel crunching under one of the tyres, the driver turned off the engine and waited. Silence filled the car’s interior. Jaap looked out at the trees lining both sides of the road, barren branches like hands clawing the sky.

This was Amsterdamse Bos, a wooded area south of the city covering over a thousand hectares, with trees planted by twenty thousand citizens in the 1930s, a government attempt to raise employment after the knock-on effects of the Wall Street crash reached the Netherlands. By day it was frequented by ordinary people, walkers, dog lovers, young families.

But at night the perverts, the drug addicts and weirdos roamed.

His throat was Sahara-dry, a leg –
left, right?
, he wasn’t sure – had started to shake, and his stomach felt like he’d just swallowed a litre of live frogs, their slippery bodies writhing in a churning mass, desperately trying to escape his searing gastric juices.

He tried to calm himself, slow his breathing down,
count, anything to bring his body back under control. But nothing seemed to be working.

The door, where his right hand had been gripping the handle, was opened with a soft click by the uniformed officer who’d stepped forward as the car drew to a halt, and the Arctic air rushed in, ravaging his exposed face, hands and ears.

And that helped, made it easier to force himself out of the cruiser which had brought him here, to this patch of land deep in the forest.

Then he was standing, his leg – it was definitely the left, feeling like it had its own private earthquake, ten on the Richter scale – wobbled even more, and he had to steady himself with his hand on the raw metal of the car’s roof, before moving off towards the three men a few metres away.

They were looking down, away from him, like they were comparing shoes, though they must have heard his arrival in the stillness of this deserted spot.

His feet ground the frosty grass by the side of the verge, and they took that as their cue to turn and acknowledge his presence. The shorter of the three, and the only one not in uniform, stepped forward and held out his hand.

When Jaap took it in his own it was like it wasn’t there, almost as cold as the surrounding air, a slight roughness the only clue that he was touching anything at all. The man’s beard was starting to frost like the grass, his shoulders warming his ears.

‘Inspector Rykel?’

He spoke in a voice which was quiet, soft, but still held some authority, the same voice Jaap would use –
did use
– when breaking the bad news to the wife, or husband, or indeed any relation of a murder victim, anyone unlucky enough to open the door to a sombre-faced police officer.

This was slightly different of course, Andreas Hansen was not a relative at all, but he almost felt like one. They’d been working together for over nine years. Other Inspectors joked that they were like a married couple, only without the squabbling.

No longer.

Someone had decided to fire what looked like a single shot to the back of the head, creating a Pollockesque spray on the concrete incline. None of the dark drops had escaped the frost, each was coated with the same dusting of what looked like powdered glass, reflecting the pale sun which was climbing in the sky, shortening all their shadows.

‘When was he found?’

His own voice sounded strange to him, muted slightly, as if his throat was full of cotton wool.

‘A driver, first thing this morning.’

Maybe
, the hope rushed into his head,
it’s not Andreas at all.

The body was lying face down, arms at its sides like it was on a skeleton bob. The clothes looked familiar, the leather jacket like the one Andreas wore, and the blond hair, slightly too long, clumped together by blood. He wanted to say that this wasn’t Andreas, sure it looked like him, but it was someone else.

But as if reading his mind the Inspector handed him Andreas’ wallet and ID, the face still whole.

Jaap could hear his teacher in Kyoto, Yuzuki Roshi, saying life and death were the same thing. At the time he’d thought he’d understood. Or had convinced himself he had.

Now he knew he’d not understood at all.

‘What … what was he doing here?’

The short officer shuffled nervously with one of his feet.

‘Actually, we were hoping you might be able to tell us.’

Jaap looked down at the body again.

Did the Black Tulips bring him out here? Or was he here following one of them and got caught?
he wondered as another thought broke through.

God, I’m going to have to tell Saskia.

He started back towards the cruiser, trying not to think of what he had to do next. But as he reached out his hand to open the car door another thought hit him.

The break-in.

Andreas’ text.

What Andreas had discovered was dangerous to someone, most likely the Black Tulips.

So they’d killed him.

But what if they’d checked Andreas’ phone and saw the text? He shuddered and thought about what that meant. It could be that the Black Tulips had found out that Andreas was on to Friedman, and killed them both.

But if they’d seen Andreas’ text then they’d also know that he knew …

They didn’t steal anything
, he thought as he lowered himself into the car and nodded at the driver,
because they came to kill me too.