After the Silence: Inspector Rykel Book 1 (Amsterdam Quartet) (6 page)

Monday, 2 January
11.49

‘Just there,’ said Tanya, pointing to the screen.

The screen paused and both of them, the tech guy and Lankhorst, leant forward. They were in Lankhorst’s office, a small room just off the main open-plan section. It smelt of bleach.

They studied the image in silence for a few moments.

‘It’s not much to go on really, unless we can get the plates,’ said Lankhorst.

‘No, but the very fact that he was there, heading in the right direction, at that time in the morning, has to count for something? And what kind of a freak drives around in a mask like that anyway?’ said Tanya.

He looked back at the screen. ‘That’s the only way to get there, isn’t it?’

‘The only other way would be by boat.’

‘Is there any way to get this magnified a bit?’ Lankhorst asked.

‘This isn’t the movies,’ said the tech guy. ‘You can’t just zoom in and get high-res images, those cameras just aren’t set up for it.’

He tapped a few keys, moved frames backward and forward until he settled on one and enlarged the image. But
they couldn’t really make out the plates, a smudge of letters and numbers. They spent a few minutes trying to work out the various combinations it could be before Tanya noticed something on the screen.

‘What’s that on his neck?’

‘A shadow?’

She leant in.

‘No, it’s more like …’

The heating clicked on, a radiator responding with a series of bangs, Morse code.

‘… it’s like a birthmark,’ Lankhorst finished, still peering intently.

Tanya moved closer to the screen.

‘It’s not a birthmark, it’s too …’

‘So what is it?’

‘A tattoo,’ she said still staring at the screen. ‘It’s a tattoo, shaped like a spider.’

‘Okay, check it out, then let’s meet in twenty minutes.’

Tanya made her way to her desk, pulling up the
Herkenningsdienstsysteem
, the national database that had a record of everyone who had ever been arrested. Which sounded great until you realized that all the info had been inputted in such a haphazard manner that finding people was far harder than it should have been.

She filtered for tattoos on the neck in distinguishing features as a first shot, result 127. Way too many to go through. She tried to narrow it down to Leeuwarden, which returned zero hits. By the time she had to meet Lankhorst she’d managed to get a list of twenty-five. She printed off their records and took the papers back to Lankhorst’s office, where he was waiting.

A ceiling light flickered.

‘So, let’s start. What do you think happened?’

‘Given that nobody was tied up and left to burn at any of the other fires,’ said Tanya as she sat down opposite him, ‘I think we’re safe to assume that it’s not the same people, unless they were doing trial runs.’

‘I think it’s unlikely.’

‘So do I.’

The door opened and she looked up into Bloem’s face. He was smiling.

‘Come in, Wim, we’ll go through this all in a minute, I’ve just got to make a call.’

‘So
that’s
where you are,’ said Bloem once Lankhorst had left. ‘I thought you were supposed to wait for me on Zeedijk?’

‘I found something,’ she said directing him to the screen. Bloem kept his eyes on her.

‘What is it?’ he finally asked.

As she explained, pointing out the tattoo on the man’s neck, she could feel Bloem’s eyes boring into her.

‘And?’ he said, fake yawning.

She thought about her ID card.

Don’t give him the satisfaction.

Instead she turned to the tech guy.

‘I think I lost my ID card, I can’t find it anywhere, could you get me another?’

He nodded as Lankhorst stepped back in.

‘Where are we at?’ he asked.

Tanya put her hand on the records she’d got from the database.

‘I’ve got twenty-five people here with prior arrests and tattoos on their neck.’

‘Any look right?’ asked Lankhorst.

‘I haven’t had a chance to look.’ She pulled them towards her, passing each one on to Lankhorst as she’d glanced at them.

‘Ugly bunch,’ remarked Bloem, who was looking over Lankhorst’s shoulder. ‘I wonder if anyone’s done a study on looks and criminality? It would certainly make it easier for us, just arrest all the ugly people.’

Thing is
, thought Tanya,
if we did arrest people for looks you’d be first to be pulled in.

She handed another sheet across and looked down at the next one.

The same spider tattoo, on the same side of the neck. She slid it over to Lankhorst. He held it up to get a better look.

‘Follow this up,’ he said after he’d studied it for a moment. He handed it back to her. ‘Looks like most of his arrests have been in Amsterdam. If you need to go down there, let me know.’

He looked at Bloem and Tanya. ‘I’m sure you two will make a brilliant team. Give me an update by the end of the day?’

Tanya went back to her desk, Bloem telling her to write up her initial report. But she sat down and read record seventeen. The man with the tattoo was called Ludo Haak, prior arrests for aggravated assault, armed robbery, and extortion. There was nothing on arson or murder, and the last offence had been over eight years ago. Seems like Haak had cleaned up his act.

But as she scrolled further down she noticed the last time the record had been accessed.

Friday.

Last Friday.

She checked the name of the person who’d looked at the file, Inspector Andreas Hansen, from Amsterdam’s Western District Homicide Squad.

‘I thought I said do the report?’ Bloem’s voice shot out from behind her, making her jump.

‘Yeah, but I’ve got something interesting here –’

‘There’s this thing called chain of command, you heard of it?’

Tanya thought about her exam result. She felt sick.

Please can I have passed
, she offered up,
then I can transfer out of here.

Once she’d sensed that Bloem had stepped away she picked up the phone.

‘Hey, Sergeant van der Mark from the Leeuwarden station. I’m looking for Inspector Andreas Hansen? Yes, I’ll hold.’ She looked down at the photo of Haak. Was he the killer? Was this the guy who’d tied them up and burnt them to death?

‘Inspector Rykel, can I help?’

The man’s voice was deep, but soft. Tired maybe.

‘I was trying to get hold of Inspector Hansen.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘I’ve got a suspect in a case I’m working, they’re on file with several previous, and Inspector Hansen was the last person to look them up on the system.’

‘When?’

He sounded more interested now.

‘Last Friday.’

‘What’s the suspect called?’

‘Ludo Haak.’

‘And what’s he suspected of?’

‘Murder, two people got burned in their own house last night.’

‘Give me your number, I’m going to call you back.’

Once she’d given it to him he hung up. She didn’t need to have passed the Inspector exam to tell by his reaction that something was going on.

A phone was ringing in the office, no one was picking it up. The clock on the far wall said it was past eight, it must have stopped. Her early-morning start was catching up with her, the stale air of the office like some kind of narcotic, and she got up, figuring she’d get some more coffee before tackling the car, yawning as she did so.

‘So who is he?’

Tanya turned to see Marek, the most junior member of the team. Recently Tanya had got the feeling that he might have taken an interest in her. He kept appearing out of nowhere, and his eyes tended to linger on her longer than she felt comfortable with.

‘Who?’

‘The guy who’s keeping you up so late?’

The image of her foster father flashed into her brain.

That’s who keeps me awake at night
, she thought,
ruining my sleep.

‘Early start.’ She pulled her keys off the desk and put them in her pocket. ‘That’s all.’

The phone was still ringing.

‘Yeah, I hate those.’ He paused. Tanya had a sinking feeling that a question to which the answer was ‘no’ would soon be making an appearance. ‘Listen, I was wondering –’
The phone stopped ringing, fazing Marek slightly before he continued: ‘if you’d –’

‘Tanya?’

A shout from Roelf, sitting in the outer office.

‘Yeah?’

‘I’ve got someone called Geertje on the line for you, she says you spoke to her earlier, something about the fire?’

‘I’ll take it, transfer it here.’

She picked up her desk phone, feeling relief, sensing Marek’s disappointment. As she got the speaker to her ear Geertje was already talking, her voice agitated, breathless.

‘Geertje, it’s Sergeant van der Mark … I’m sorry, I missed that, could you start again?’

Tanya could hear Geertje’s kids in the background, screaming loudly at each other, no longer playfully.

‘I spoke to Arend, my husband? About what we talked about, and he said that he’d seen them in town, at the weekend’ – Tanya could see Bloem swaggering back into the room like he owned the place – ‘and they had a child with them, a little girl.’

Monday, 2 January
13.29

I can’t believe he’s still on the case
, thought Kees as he slammed the phone down on his desk.

When Jaap had been called away from the house on Herengracht Kees had been phoned by Smit, who’d asked him to take over.

Then, later, Smit had called again, bumping him back down to playing second …

Behind him the fax sprang to life, and he turned to see the phone logs he’d requested finally coming through.

I’m going to need a bit of help getting through these
, he thought, and headed to the toilets, taking a scrap of paper off his desk with him. He didn’t usually do this at the station, but what with Marinette, and getting knocked over, he figured he could use a boost.

It was payment – at least that’s what he told himself as he rolled up the paper and snorted the coke off the back of the toilet – for the disappointment of the situation. It hit his system and thirty seconds in he felt more positive, more focused. He crumpled and flushed the roll of paper, and rubbed clean the dirty porcelain.

He checked his phone, hoping for a message from
Carice Stultjens. He’d started a text conversation about having a drink.

Not strictly a top priority when it comes to the case
, he thought,
but hell, why not?

The bruise, witnessed in the harsh bathroom light, had been startling, and he thought about the woman who’d run away. Was fate playing some cruel trick on him, making him chase someone who, superficially at least, looked like Marinette? Someone he was starting to feel less and less inclined to see anything of at all?

It wasn’t his fault she’d changed since they got here, the move had been decided on by both of them, they’d agreed it was the right thing to do for his career, and she was excited about the prospect of moving somewhere else.

It wasn’t like he’d dragged her kicking and screaming against her will from the rural backwater they were living in before.

But it was true that she wasn’t the only one the city had changed. It had done something to him as well, exerted some pressure or influence which had made the pilot light of ambition flare.

And yes, he’d been working long hours, and maybe neglecting her a bit. But then it was easy to neglect a mopey bitch, which, in his eyes, was exactly what she’d become.

Back in the office the fax was still spooling slowly, so he turned to his computer, scanning through every female under the age of thirty-five arrested in the last year in the whole of Amsterdam. There were quite a few.

And, he reflected as he moved on to the next set, not many of them were very attractive, certainly nothing like
the pathologist, Stultjens. She didn’t seem the mopey type. In fact there was something about her, about the way she’d looked at him earlier …

This is hopeless
, he thought, reaching out and turning his computer off,
I’m never going to find her this way …

But he had to find her, she knew something, something which might well lead him to close the case down. And that was a result he’d like to get.

Maybe he should get someone to do an e-fit, he could ask the neighbours if they’d seen her.

‘Hey, Martijn.’ A man just on the unhealthy side of portly looked up. ‘Is there someone here who does e-fits?’

‘Yeah, there’s a guy in the tech department who’s good at them – can’t remember his name – but if you ask he can do all sorts of stuff.’

‘Like?’

‘Like, you know …’ He cupped his hands just under his chest. ‘Really top quality, you’d never know it had been done on a computer. Looks just like in a magazine. Any position you want.’

‘Seriously,’ said Kees as he got up, glancing at the phone records on the fax and deciding they could wait, ‘you need to get out more.’

Martijn’s laugh followed him into the corridor.

Kees called the tech department on his cell and got through to the guy Martijn had told him about. He was giggling when he answered the phone. Kees didn’t know why but he found it slightly sinister. They agreed to meet in twenty minutes. The tech department was in another building, and Kees decided to walk it, the coke giving a shine to the bright but freezing day.

He arrived and was directed to the first floor, where a man with long hair tied back in a ponytail nodded at him.

‘You the guy who does e-fits?’

He nodded. ‘Hope you haven’t got a difficult one for me?’

‘It’s a female at least.’

‘Thank god, I hate having to stare at men’s faces for hours on end.’ He motioned to the chair next to him. ‘So what does she look like?’

Kees described her as best he could, and the image took shape on screen, the changes morphing slowly as he requested them. But after twenty minutes he was getting frustrated, there was something wrong with the cheekbones, or was it the eyes? And the mouth, the mouth wasn’t right at all, or, come to think of it, the chin.

‘This doesn’t look anything like her.’

‘Hey, I’m not fucking Rembrandt you know, I’m just doing what you tell me to do.’

Kees’ phone buzzed in his pocket and he pulled it out, willing it to be Carice Stultjens. But it wasn’t.

‘Okay,’ he said holding up the phone for the e-fit guy to see the image of Marinette, taken in happier times, which lit up the screen. ‘She looks a bit like this, can you use that as a start?’