Little Sister (11 page)

It was a rip-off. Everything to do with Blom was. But Gert Brugman needed money so he signed, took the cheque, banked some, invested the rest and hoped to live as best he could on the proceeds.
Not long after the financial crisis hit. Most of the investments plummeted or vanished altogether. The interest on the remainder wasn’t enough to pay his bar bills. Brugman did what came
naturally, dipped into the capital month after month. And now . . .

Most of the memorabilia was gone already . . . the golden discs, the original outfits from the Eighties, the stupid glitzy crap Blom had forced on them in the Nineties when their popularity
began to fade. All that was left was his instrument, a 1960 Fender Precision Bass he’d bought in New York when they were wealthy enough to record there.

The thing had sat in its case for the last three years. He wasn’t sure he could remember any of the bass lines any more. They didn’t want that when he sang in the Jordaan. They just
wanted to look at the last of The Cupids, Gert Brugman, a wreck of a man, reduced to singing cheesy folk songs for small change, strumming a cheap Korean electric guitar run through a puny
battery-powered amp.

He hadn’t let go of the bass out of pride. It was the last thing he had that connected him to the past. To the time when the three of them had been kings of Waterland. Of the Netherlands
too for a while.

Brugman rolled himself a cigarette, lit it, closed his eyes. Then he swore, walked over to the black flight case and lifted the lid.

He blew the dust off the cherry red Fender, cradled it on his lap and felt his fingers struggle for the places they’d once found so easily. The strings were old and worn. He didn’t
have a bass amp any more. So he just hugged the thing and tried to play a few notes with his fat, aching fingers.

‘This is shit,’ Brugman said, listening to the feeble rattle of the dead and dirty Ernie Ball strings.

The sound was gone. The action was too low. Nothing worked. And he needed beer.

He picked up his shopping bag and went downstairs.

The narrow lane outside his house was deserted. Just two odd-looking kids, a girl with purple hair, another in black, fidgeting in ill-fitting clothes across from his front door.

Brugman used to wind up the jerk who ran the shop with a simple, repetitive joke: if it was so smart why did the people coming and going always look like idiots?

Seemed he had some more.

His phone buzzed. The email sound.

Brugman swore and checked the message.

Nothing else but a photo he opened out of boredom, checked it then stuffed the phone back in his pocket. The picture was of three young girls on the Volendam waterfront, all fair-haired, all
pretty. He looked up. The two across the road were older but they’d turned blonde somehow. And that didn’t seem possible at all.

Three words came straight into Brugman’s head unbidden.

The Golden Angels.

The Timmers girls were part of the lost past not the desperate present. But now he looked and looked and two of them stared back at him across the quiet, cobbled street then shuffled off round
the corner.

It’ll all come back to haunt us one day.

Did he say that? Or was it someone else?

He didn’t remember things as well as he used to. But it was true all the same.

By nine Vos was back in the bar opposite his houseboat on the Prinsengracht. Sofia looked happy. Sam was up to his tricks, playing catch and tug with a customer Vos
didn’t recognize, an American by the sound of it, perched on a rickety stool at the counter sipping at a beer.

She came over with a drink and some food.

‘Take him home when you like. The little chap ought to be exhausted.’ She looked at Vos. ‘You are. Aren’t you?’

He tried to smile. Something had been bugging him all the way back into the city. So he’d found his way into the admin office, talked to the lone officer on duty and got what he wanted
transferred to one of the tablets the younger officers loved so much. The thing sat on the table now. Turned off. Vos didn’t like technology. All too often it seemed to serve up distraction
when what you wanted was focus.

‘Long day,’ he said and left it at that.

‘I know you hate it when I say this, Pieter. But I do watch the news. Marken. Those two girls from that case years back. The Cupids. They said they were on the run or something.’

‘I can’t—’

‘I know you can’t talk about it. I was trying to tell you something.’

He pulled up a chair and she sat down. They talked like this so rarely. He took her for granted. She didn’t seem to mind and he really couldn’t work out why.

‘Gert Brugman,’ Sofia said. ‘The singer. You know him?’

‘Who doesn’t? Has he been hanging round begging for work again?’

The Drie Vaten was too small to host musical evenings. There were better bars in the Jordaan for that. But it didn’t stop some of the local bums trying to pick up money. Sofia Albers was a
soft touch and everyone knew it.

She reached over and took a sip of his beer then retrieved a piece of the liver sausage on his plate.

‘He was in here half an hour ago. Asking for you.’

The man at the counter threw a rubber ball down the bar. Sam watched it bounce on the worn timber planks, gauging its trajectory, then set off after it, racing up and down the floor skidding on
his claws. Maybe he needed to be taken to the grooming shop for a clip, fur and nails.

‘Gert Brugman doesn’t know me.’

‘Not by name. But he knows there’s a police officer from Marnixstraat uses this place. A senior one. Everyone does. He seemed anxious to talk to you.’ She pulled a piece of
paper out of her pocket. ‘He left this.’

A mobile number. She read his face and left him then. Vos tried to call but there was no answer, not even voicemail. Sam got bored with the game and did what he always did when he was tired and
wanted to go home: came over and curled up in a ball beneath the table.

Vos tried the number again then gave up. His head hurt. The beer wasn’t helping. Sofia came back with another one and he couldn’t stop himself taking a swig.

‘He looked worse than usual,’ she said. ‘Which is saying something. I think . . .’

He reached out and put his hand on hers. She fell silent instantly. They didn’t touch like this.

‘Not now,’ Vos pleaded. ‘I need . . .’ Need what? ‘I need a line. A dividing line between what I do and who I am. This place is that line. Without it . .
.’

The terrier shuffled against his legs, sensing an awkward moment as always. Vos had never spoken to her quite like this before. She seemed surprised. Embarrassed too.

The American at the counter finished his beer, threw some money on the bar and came over. He was a big man, built like a boxer but with a broad and genial face. He wore a suit without a tie. A
businessman in town, Vos thought. Looking for a few quiet hours somewhere local.

‘Got to go, sweetheart,’ he said in good Dutch, with only the slightest accent. ‘See you tomorrow. Dinner in that place I told you.’ He glanced at Vos.
‘That’s still OK?’

Sofia got up and he kissed her cheek.

‘Sure, Michael,’ she said. He nodded at Vos then went out into the warm night, ambling along the canal like any other visitor. Whistling. Vos could hear that through the open
door.

‘I didn’t realize . . .’

‘He’s here for one of the banks. A nice man. Fun. From New York.’ She went to the bar and poured herself a small glass of wine. ‘A month. Maybe longer. He says he’s
not married.’ She laughed. ‘Maybe he isn’t.’ She took a sip. ‘But it’s just a month. What the hell?’

‘You deserve better,’ he blurted out.

Sofia Albers glared at him and said, ‘How would you know? Seriously, Pieter. How?’

He got up from the table, gently extricating himself from the half-slumbering dog. Sam stood too and yawned. A loud noise for such a small creature.

‘You so want to fix things, don’t you?’ she said.

‘Not really. Gave that up years ago. I just try . . . try to stop them getting worse.’

She came and picked up his glass and the empty plate.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said and couldn’t think of anything else. ‘Really. I just . . .’

There was a moment of self-knowledge then. One he didn’t know whether to welcome or hate. He could cope with his private life. He could cope with work. But he couldn’t manage both.
One part would always be falling to pieces somehow. He didn’t have the strength, the commitment or the patience to hold them all together.

‘Seven thirty in the morning, OK?’ he asked. ‘Breakfast? I can leave Sam then.’

‘Fine,’ she said and got her keys.

He watched her lock up as he crossed the road to the boat. It was a beautiful evening. The city was quiet under a starry sky and crescent moon. Half a kilometre away at the head of Elandsgracht
the corpse of Simon Klerk would be lying on a table in the Marnixstraat morgue, ready to be examined by the duty pathologist. A night team of officers would be scouring Waterland and Volendam to
try to locate the place where he died and work out how his body managed to wind up on a solitary shore in Marken. Others were looking throughout Amsterdam for some sign of two young sisters
who’d never set foot in the outside world in their adult lives.

So many questions. So few answers.

Sam trotted down the gangplank, waited for him to open the door, then ambled inside and went straight to his basket in the bows.

‘Good boy,’ Vos whispered, watching the terrier turn round and round in his bed before settling down, curled up, nose to tail, to sleep. ‘Lucky boy.’

He picked up the tablet the admin officer had given him and, with no small amount of reluctance, switched it on. File deletion records from five years before. The narrative they seemed to tell
appeared both obvious and unbelievable.

There’s more than one story here.

Dirk Van der Berg said that. One of the smartest, most honest men in Marnixstraat. He was usually right.

Vos wondered what the sceptical, ever-inquisitive detective would make of the curious collection of records the office had come up with that evening.

‘Jesus, Frank,’ he whispered to no one in the half-dark. ‘What in God’s name were you thinking?’

And why?

Wednesday. Nine in the morning. A week getting worse by the hour. Henk Veerman sat at the desk in his office; he could think of no other place to be. A few months short of five
years he’d been in this job, promoted from deputy after the death of his predecessor. Five worthwhile years he thought, spent trying to put the place in order. He was fifty-eight. Another
twenty-one months – he’d been counting – and he’d be able to take retirement, spend time the way he loved, out on the water on his yacht.

His wife had succumbed to cancer two years earlier. There were no children, no real ties to keep him. In a sense there was nothing but the institution. Veerman lived in a wooden house in the
village not far from the harbour where he kept his beloved twelve-metre yacht, a classic, built in the Arsenale of Venice three decades before. When retirement came he’d promised himself the
dream he’d shared with his wife before she died. To sail the yacht across the Atlantic, all the way to the warm and sunny Caribbean. Perhaps they’d stay there for good, safe from
bureaucracy and recriminations.

The fantasy still lived on somewhere, though he knew he was not a good enough sailor to contemplate the crossing on his own. She was always better. Her strength and determination kept him
going.

Now, just when the light of release and freedom was due on the horizon, it seemed everything might be snatched from him. Veerman thought himself a good and decent man. He’d done his best
with Marken. It wasn’t easy. Hendriks, his late predecessor, had seen to that.

Stiff, feeling old and impotent, he got up and walked to the window. The spinney by the shore was still occupied by a small group from Marnixstraat’s forensic section. In the morning light
they were clearing up, dismantling the tent erected around the spot where Simon Klerk’s body had been found. The wood had been searched meticulously. Before long, Veerman knew, Vos and his
prying team would be back asking difficult questions, of staff and, at some stage, patients. There was a momentum to events. It felt as if a beast that had long slumbered was stirring. Marken was a
juvenile establishment. That meant most of the patients Hendriks had dealt with were elsewhere, some in other institutions, a few back in the community. Only the Timmers sisters and one other young
inmate had remained of late from the days of his predecessor.

He stared at the waving trees by the bare shore. Even now he could pinpoint the one where he first saw Hendriks’ body swinging like a pendulum in the spring breeze. The police had come out
and swiftly concluded the case was suicide. But that had been a different officer, quite unlike the sharp and persistent Vos. Ollie Haas, the one with local connections who’d handled the
Timmers case five years earlier.

Veerman hadn’t argued with the verdict. Hendriks, an aggressive, bad-tempered man, had been troubled, not that his deputy had fully understood why. Besides, he coveted the job. It paid
more. There was real work to be done. Damaged adolescents to be . . . improved, if not entirely cured.

A sudden movement caught his eye and he knew straight away who it was: the last remaining girl from Hendriks’ day. Kaatje Lammers, twenty years old now, incarcerated since she murdered her
mother with a kitchen knife at the age of twelve. A short, dark-haired young woman, lean and athletic. Forever trying to start affairs with the other girls. Trouble in waiting. They let her roam
the garden early in the morning, jogging, practising tai chi moves she’d learned from a book. The perimeter was safe. It was easier than keeping her cooped up. And even if she got out there
was that long, solitary road across the dyke back to Waterland. The best protection Marken had.