Little Sister (13 page)

Now these men – Rogier Glas with his Zapata moustache and pockets full of sweets, Gert Brugman grinning as he hugged his Fender bass, Frans Lambert, a tall and muscular man holding a pair
of drumsticks as if they were weapons – looked odd. Anachronistic. Out of place. Vos had a private theory that rock musicians ought to hang up their spurs when they turned thirty-five. Mostly
it just got demeaning after that. These three looked as if they could handle the embarrassment. Perhaps even welcome it.

Bakker pinned up another photo. Ollie Haas, an officer no one had ever liked, not least because he always seemed to get out from under his many failed investigations. Then, next to him, two
pictures of someone who didn’t seem to fit at all. Jaap Blom a decade before outside his cafe and recording studio in Volendam. More recently taking his deputy’s seat in The Hague.

She stuck up the last of the photos. Taken the day before on the strand at Marken, a naked body, head shot away, half-buried in the shingle.

‘More than one story here,’ Vos murmured, remembering what Dirk Van der Berg had said the previous day.

A sound behind and then a scream. Vos turned as Sara Klerk pushed past him, jabbing a finger at the pictures of her dead and bloodied husband. She began to shriek, no words, only fear and
anger.

‘Oh God,’ Bakker muttered. ‘I’m sorry . . .’

Vos said nothing, just got an arm in front of the woman, looked her in the eye.

‘Mrs Klerk . . . We need to talk. Please.’

She wasn’t crying. More mad than grieving.

‘I said I’m sorry,’ Bakker repeated.

‘You did,’ he agreed and coaxed the woman back into the interview room next door. There he sat her down and asked one of the uniformed officers to get her a coffee and anything she
wanted to eat.

‘I’ll be with you as soon as I can.’

‘Now—’ the woman demanded.

‘As soon as I can,’ he repeated.

Hour after hour they’d spent in Marken, hogging one of the two computers in the community room, hunting, hunting, hunting. That bright morning after breakfast they begged
Vera to let them try her old PC. They were bored. They wouldn’t do anything wrong. They needed some release.

She glanced at them over the bacon and eggs then said OK, once she’d put a few filters in place. The thing wasn’t broken at all.

They went upstairs while she did it. After fifteen minutes she called them down, told them to be good girls because that was in their nature. She had to go out for an hour or two. An appointment
with the doctor, she said with a scowl. She didn’t seem quite as stern. Or perhaps something worried her.

All the same she locked the front door when she left.

Straight away they went to the computer to see what was there. Mia typed, Kim gave the orders, same as she did in Marken. Lots of things seemed blocked as they had been there too. But they could
get to Wikipedia and for Kim, locked in the institution, that vast and rambling universe had become as real as the world itself.

‘Me,’ she said and ordered her sister out of the chair. Mia moved to the adjoining seat and watched her take the keyboard, knowing what she’d soon be searching for.

‘We’ve done all that,’ she complained.

Kim wasn’t listening. Searching, stumbling from link upon link, meandering byway followed by pointless dead end, only to retrace her steps once more and find somewhere new to become lost
in all that useless ocean of information.

She’d started the way she always did, by typing ‘three’ then seeing where serendipity took them.

Three blind mice.

Three primary colours.

The Rule of Thirds that gave a painting its perfect, pleasing visual form.

The trinity of three, Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

Jesus was visited by three wise men. He was thirty-three when he died and rose again on the third day.

There were twenty-seven books in the New Testament which is three times three times three. Three times Jesus prayed in Gethsemane before he was seized.

The pagans followed the three-fold law that stipulated everything a person put into the world, good or evil, positive or negative, would be returned to them three times over.

‘There,’ Kim said, catching sight of another link, pointing at it. ‘That’s new.’

‘Nothing’s new,’ Mia said with a sigh. ‘It’s all just . . .stuff.’

Kim’s busy fingers ran across the keys. Another entry. A form of poetry now, the tercet. Three lines of verse, rhyming in a triplet.

And this,’ she said, placing a pale, thin finger on the screen.

They read the text beneath. Alfred, Lord Tennyson. ‘The Eagle’.

And like a thunderbolt he falls,’ Kim whispered. ‘“He”. Why’s it always a “he”?’

‘It’s just a stupid poem,’ Mia said.

Kim gazed at her and there was something new between them at that moment. Something hostile.

Are you done?’ Mia asked. ‘Can I try now?’

Kim got up. They swapped seats. Not a word spoken.

Mia sat down, closed Wikipedia, opened a new window. She wanted to know how far Vera’s filters worked and whether they could circumvent them.

‘What are you looking for?’ Kim asked.

‘Some news.’ They never followed that in Marken. There didn’t seem any point. That world ended at the pebble shore, the high wire fence, the guarded gate. Nothing outside
mattered.

Kim put her hands on the keyboard and stopped her sister typing.

‘Why?’ she asked. ‘What’s that to us?’

In Marken it was easy to pretend there were no differences between them. Two sisters, a third still alive in Kim’s head. In a way Little Jo had grown up while they stayed young. Not
innocent. Not quite.

‘Because we need to know,’ Mia said and forced her hands away.

Before Kim could object, Mia found what she wanted. A new site. Familiar pictures there.

Simon Klerk, smiling in his nurse’s uniform. A picture of them, ten years old. Perhaps Director Veerman had nothing better.

‘Dead,’ Mia whispered.

‘Best thing for him.’

Kim cocked her head, smiled the innocent, smug, cheeky smile of an eleven-year-old then said, in a high and childish voice, ‘Now we can do more than sing, big sister. Once we get rid of
Vera we can go where we like. Do what we like. The three of us. Together.’

Then she sang two lines from a long-lost hymn. Faltering soprano, so much higher than her customary range. The way Little Jo would have sung it once upon a time.

Praise the Lord through Sister Death,

From whose kiss no man may flee.

Again, even higher.
Praise the Lord through Sister Death . . .

Mia reached forward and gently placed her palm over her sister’s mouth.

The singing stopped.

‘Please,’ Mia begged. ‘No . . .’

With one wild jerk of her arm Kim swept her hand away.

‘Don’t do that again, Sister,’ she snarled. ‘Not to me.’

Go fishing, Vos had told him. So that’s what Dirk Van der Berg did. First thing that hot summer morning he drove out of the city into Waterland, following the Marken bus
all the way until it veered off to the right and left him with a clear run for Volendam.

Like most Amsterdammers he knew the place more through reputation than experience. It was somewhere for tourists and the fans who followed the Palingsound bands. Sometimes, if he and his wife
had visitors, they’d take them out to the quiet green pastures around the town and treat them to some cheese in its quieter, posher neighbour, Edam. But mostly it was a foreign spot. A place
where city police rarely ventured. There was reason enough, he guessed. Plenty of dope and the odd outbreak of violence from time to time. Some of the locals had a reputation for dealing with
trouble themselves, not leaving it to the authorities.

That suited both parties usually. But not now.

He parked his car as close to the waterfront as he could and read the file he’d brought with him. Since Marnixstraat’s documentation on the Timmers case was almost non-existent
he’d pulled out photocopies of the press coverage. It was wild. A well-known musician had been murdered. For a few days he was suspected of killing father, mother and daughter of a local
fishing family. Then that case petered out under Ollie Haas’s clumsy leadership. The only certainty that seemed to remain afterwards had to do with the two surviving triplets, Mia and Kim.
Just eleven years old and they’d murdered a fading pop star called Rogier Glas with a savagery that seemed impossible in children.

The paper said The Cupids were known throughout Waterland for their kindness, their support of local charities, the way they played for free at old people’s homes and hospitals. How Rogier
Glas was always helping at youth clubs and schools, pockets brimming with sweets, always ready with a kind donation. Their international careers may have vanished, but in Volendam they remained
local heroes. Not a sniff of scandal about them.

Van der Berg read that part and took it with a pinch of salt. Show business had a few saints in his experience, but they were rare. The idea three of them might be former fishermen from Volendam
. . .

He wasn’t a cynical man by nature. Still the idea seemed plain wrong.

A woman went past in traditional costume, clogs and hat, long black-and-white dress, headed for the photo station where the tourists were now assembling near the harbour. The locals here seemed
ordinary people. Bored people, the way they often were in areas that depended on the tourist dollar for survival. The only ones who got rich off the visitors were those who owned the hotels and
restaurants and controlled the local economy. The workers struggled by on minimum wage mostly, and benefits during the long, sparse winter.

‘All the same . . .You don’t get kids who kill people. Not like . . .’

The remaining scraps of files in Marnixstraat told the grim tale of Glas’s death. The man’s throat had been cut then, postmortem, his penis had been hacked off and stuffed down his
throat.

‘Not like that,’ he finished. He’d felt this way at the time and for some reason believed it more strongly now.

There was a cafe just opening up down the road. He wandered in, ordered a coffee and a pastry, and tried to converse with the youth behind the counter. All earrings and tattoos, the kid
didn’t seem interested in much except the music videos on the TV. If he knew about the Timmers case he wasn’t going to talk about it. That was obvious after the briefest of
conversations. Then a figure flitted past the door, a familiar one, a large dog by her side.

Bea Arends.

He was always good with names. Especially when they came with giant German shepherds who dug up corpses on the Marken shoreline. Van der Berg rushed outside, catching up with her as she fiddled
with her keys by a bedraggled old Hyundai.

‘We meet again,’ he said brightly.

She stared at him. An earnest middle-aged woman who worked as a cook in the institution. People in kitchens got to know everything about a place.

‘Found those girls yet?’ she asked.

‘Not yet.’

‘Any idea where they are?’

He smiled. She knew he couldn’t go there.

‘Oh well.’ She opened her door. He came closer and leaned against the front of the car. ‘Is there something you want, Sherlock?’

‘Just the usual. Answers.’

‘What’s the question?’

He laughed and said, ‘Lots. Did Mia and Kim really kill Rogier Glas?’

She scowled and looked more fierce when she did that.

‘Why ask someone like me? You lot said so. The courts did. Them doctors in Marken. Must be true, mustn’t it?’

‘People make mistakes,’ he said with a sigh.

‘They were just infants. I think that mother of theirs reckoned they’d be stars one day. Hoped that, anyway. Freya was a nice enough woman but a bit flighty. Pushy too. Pestered
everyone to help her. The boys in the band. That manager of theirs. None of what happened made a lot of sense to me. You got paid to sort that out. Are you saying you didn’t?’

‘I’m not sure what I’m saying,’ he admitted.

‘Are you going to look at it all again?’

He shrugged.

‘Got to find the girls first, haven’t we? You must have seen them in Marken.’

She closed the car door.

‘Course I did.’

‘What were they like?’

Without much thought she said, ‘Like . . . two kids who’d been kept in a kind of jail for most of their lives. No parents. No friends. So they were a bit weird. What do you expect?
They love one another. I know that. Close as peas in a pod. Sing like angels too.’ She hesitated. ‘Kim’s the awkward one. She thinks that dead sister of hers is still around. Or
pretends she does.’

‘And the other one?’

‘Mia? She has a name you know. She’s . . . kind. Thoughtful. A bit melancholy, I’d say. Who can blame her? I think she indulges her sister. I’m guessing mostly
though.’

She stared at him.

‘You haven’t asked me about Simon Klerk.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I haven’t.’

‘Did they really do that?’

‘We just need to find them.’ He looked down the street, towards the steps that led to the waterfront. ‘Is there anyone here who can help?’

‘Not that I can think of. Good luck,’ she said then climbed in without another word and got behind the wheel.

Van der Berg saluted and doffed an imaginary hat. He called Marnixstraat. Vos was in a meeting. Laura Bakker managed to tell him what he half-suspected: no one was any the wiser about anything
two days after the Timmers girls went missing, apparently after leaving the naked body of their nurse half-buried on the Marken shore.

‘You got anyone else to talk to out there?’ she asked.

Ollie Haas, he thought. He’d driven past the former cop’s house on the edge of the town. Vos had warned him off that encounter, but Van der Berg had stopped by all the same. It
didn’t matter. The house was empty. No car in the drive.