Little Sister (17 page)

‘But . . .’

By the time she looked up he was already climbing into the Volvo. The car was moving when she reached it. Bakker opened the passenger door and leapt in.

‘Thanks for waiting for me!’

‘Call in to Marnixstraat,’ he ordered. ‘Get me an update on the Timmers girls. Say nothing else.’

‘You wanted to know how they could have moved the body,’ she pointed out. ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? They roped in their uncle.’

‘Nothing’s obvious here.’

Bakker didn’t argue. There was a look on his face that stopped her.

Koeman answered straight away. The conversation was brief and finished just as Vos drove the Volvo onto the main road, fighting to get ahead of a bus crawling towards the long stretch of dyke
that separated Marken from the mainland.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Not a thing.’

The white tower of the lighthouse rose ahead. Then, like a low forest appearing out of the ground, the timbered houses of the island. Vos asked her to call ahead to the institution and see if Dr
Visser was still at work.

It took less than a minute for her to get through to Veerman. He sounded more miserable than ever.

‘She went home early. Didn’t feel well.’

They reached the edge of the village. Kerkbuurt. The close near the church. It wouldn’t be hard to find.

Vos thought of something and pulled in by the side of the road.

‘What now?’ she asked.

He took out his phone and switched it off.

‘You too.’

‘Sorry?’ she asked.

‘I want some privacy for a while.’

‘We’re supposed to leave them on, Pieter. At all times.’

He folded his arms, leaned back in the driving seat, looked at her.

‘So Marnixstraat aren’t supposed to know we’re here. Fine,’ she said and did it.

Vera was still crying at the foot of the stairs, a miserable bundle of pain. Her right foot was turned at an angle. Furious, scared and in agony, she writhed on the carpet,
spitting out curses, pleading for help.

Kim bounced down from the last step.

‘Who’s boss now, Vera? Who’s telling us what to do?’

In a flash she crouched down and retrieved the house keys from the woman’s tatty grey jacket.

‘I need a doctor! Christ . . .’ She tried to get up, screamed the moment she put any weight on her foot. ‘You broke my bloody leg.’

‘Serves you right,’ Kim spat at her. ‘Asked for it.’

Mia went and fetched one of the chairs from the kitchen table, helped her up from the floor then held her arm as she sat down. Gently she rolled down the threadbare black sock on the
woman’s injured leg. The skin was going livid from a bruise. Gingerly she probed the swelling ankle.

‘I don’t think it’s broken,’ she said as Vera squealed. ‘Honestly.’

The woman’s fingers crept to the purple bruise.

‘Bloody painful anyway.’ She shot a savage look at Kim. ‘You could have killed me.’

‘Shouldn’t have tried to make us your slaves, should you?’

‘Don’t be stupid! I was doing what I was told. What I was paid for. I said. A million times. You two aren’t ready to go out there on your own. Not yet.’

‘Who told you? Who paid you?’ Mia asked.

‘Not talking about this now.’

Some items had fallen from her jacket as she tumbled down the stairs. Mia walked over and recovered them. Two bottles of pills and a cardboard box of tablets. She held them out.

‘Those are no bloody good,’ Vera yelled. ‘I want painkillers. I want a doctor.’

She took the medication anyway and stuffed it in her jacket.

‘You really are what they said, aren’t you? Couple of monsters that look like little angels.’

‘Not little,’ Mia pointed out, trying to stop herself getting angry. ‘Not any more.’

‘A doctor . . .’

Mia said, ‘You just twisted your ankle. It’ll be better in a day. I want you to hold on to the chair very tightly. That way it won’t hurt.’

‘What?’

‘Hold on to the chair. We’ll pull you upstairs. You can lie down in the bedroom. We won’t hurt you.’

‘I need a bloody doctor!’

‘No you don’t,’ Mia insisted and nodded at her sister.

The two of them positioned themselves around the chair.

‘We’re tugging you up here,’ Mia continued. ‘Either you hang on and stay safe until we’re in your room. Or you let go and fall down the stairs again. You
choose.’

She took hold of the back, Kim the side, and together they started to heave.

Vera screamed to start with. Then holding on became more important than yelling. Step by step they lugged her up the stairs. On the landing Mia helped her out of the chair, let her lean on her
as the two of them struggled towards the bed.

It was only when she got there that Vera realized what they’d done.

‘I can’t get down from here now,’ she moaned, collapsing on the duvet. ‘Not with this leg.’

‘No,’ Mia agreed. ‘Where do you keep the painkillers?’

The woman leaned back on the bed, dragged a pillow behind her so she could sit upright, and stared at them. Defeated.

‘Kitchen cabinet.’

Without a second thought Mia went downstairs to get them. Kim stayed in the room, grinning.

‘You’re stuffed without me,’ Vera told her. ‘You don’t know how much.’

She retrieved the bottles and the box from her jacket and, with unsteady fingers, started to shake out some tablets. Kim was there in a flash, seizing the pills, everything.

‘I need those, kiddo! I’m sick in case you hadn’t noticed.’

‘Drugs are bad for you,’ Kim said lightly. ‘We learned that in Marken. They’re there to keep you down. To make you something you’re not.’

‘I’m sick!’

Footsteps coming up the stairs. Kim walked quickly to the front, opened the window then lobbed everything out into the street. Vera started to scream. Kim closed the window and told her to shut
up.

Mia came in with some paracetamol and a cup of water.

‘What happened?’

‘That bitch only chucked my prescription away. I need that stuff. More than an aspirin . . .’

Kim threw up her arms and laughed.

‘Oh for God’s sake. If they’re that important I’ll get them back.’

She headed down the stairs, Vera’s keys in her hand. The door opened and then was slammed shut.

The woman in the bed was staring at Mia, pleading.

‘I know you’re not as bad as her, love. I know she’s the wicked one.’

Mia sat on the bed and gave her the water and the pills. So many people had done this same thing to them in Marken. Not with painkillers either. It felt odd to be on the other side of the
transaction. Good in a way.

‘No, Vera. We’re both the same. You’d best believe it.’

‘I can help you. You need me.’

‘And now you need us.’

‘That I do. So where do we start?’

‘By telling us the truth. Someone got us out of that place. Someone told us to run the moment we could.’

‘And how did they do that?’ Vera asked.

‘They left us messages. Inside Marken. A map. Some money. They said . . .’ This was crazy. Wrong. She knew, but Kim . . . she wasn’t sure. ‘They said we had to run. It
was the only way we’d be safe.’

‘And that nurse of yours? The police think you killed him.’

Simon Klerk was a bitter memory.

‘He said . . . he said he wanted his reward. We never hurt him. Just made him look a fool.’

‘Think they’ll believe that, girl?’

‘I’m not a child!’ Mia cried. ‘I don’t care what they believe. It’s true.’ And something else was more important. ‘The messages in Marken . . .
they said they were from Little Jo.’

A grim laugh came from the woman on the bed.

‘Snap,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Same here. Don’t you get it? I just got messages. I thought they were daft nonsense to begin with. Then money started to turn up, and you don’t ignore money, do you? I
don’t—’

‘They must have found you somehow!’ Mia cried. ‘Nothing happens by accident. I may be stupid but even I know that.’

‘Search me . . .’ Vera glanced at the door. There’d been no sound from downstairs. ‘I got cash through the post. Those texts telling me to look after you for a while. Get
you them wigs. Go and look at that bloke last night.’

‘And you just did it—’

A sudden vicious look then.

‘I’m sick. Don’t have two pennies to rub together. I never meant you no harm. Oh . . .’

She grimaced with pain and it might have been the ankle or something else.

Mia got up and paid no notice.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Wherever I like,’ she said. ‘You can’t stop us now, can you?’

‘It was for your own good!’

She could have been Kim at that moment, ready to hit the stricken woman in front of her.

‘Really? Do you know how many people have told us that over the years? Keep quiet. Do as you’re told. Tell no one. It’s all going to be fine in the end.’ A pause, then
softly she added, ‘It won’t hurt really.’

Vera screwed up her eyes in pain and gulped at the water.

‘All I can think of is . . . someone remembers me from Marken. I can’t imagine how else they got hold of me.’

‘Is that the truth?’ Mia demanded.

‘Yes, missy. It is.’

Still no sound from downstairs. Mia left the room, ignoring the Englishwoman’s squawks, and went down to the hall. Kim had to be still looking for the tablets.

The front door was unlocked. Opening it, stepping outside, felt like coming out of prison. Daunting, liberating. Scary.

In the street she looked around. People on bikes. A woman pushing a pram. A couple of youths jogging to the music on their phones.

Vera’s pill bottles were on the pavement. The box was nowhere to be seen.

Nor was Kim.

It was close to five by the time they pulled into the lane by Irene Visser’s compact, white-painted wooden cottage near the church. The summer sun had lost its power. The
salt tang of the lake hung over the town, fanned by a light breeze. A gull perched on her roof, staring at them with beady yellow eyes as they drew up.

A red Alfa Romeo stood in the drive. The curtains were closed. Vos parked in the road and went to ring the bell, Bakker at his heels.

He wasn’t hopeful. But then hope had been elusive in this case ever since the Timmers girls went missing. He’d spent long enough in this job to know when – and how –
investigations turned intractable. Sometimes it was through a simple mistake. Too often, if he was honest. On other occasions they were quite deliberately misled. The police had an odd and
uncomfortable job in the complex, morally ambiguous modern world. They were supposed to deliver justice to a society that often cared for it in principle only. To detect wickedness within a
community that decried evil in public but was motivated largely by self-interest in private.

He kept his finger on the bell and waited, consumed by a single, depressing thought, a reminder of that awkward conversation with De Groot earlier. Whatever had happened to the Timmers sisters
– whether they were guilty of murder or not – the fault lay elsewhere. Innocence was the natural state of humanity and it did not poison itself. Mostly the search for justice was
defeated in the end by lies and silence. By people who cared more for themselves than the injured and the blameless around them.

A face behind the frosted glass. Irene Visser answered and immediately he was pulled out of his reverie. Something was different here. Very.

Then he smelled it. The floral aroma of gin, the English kind.

An observant woman, she spotted this and raised a tumbler to him. Full almost to the brim with ice and a piece of lemon.

‘I always wondered what psychiatrists did when they weren’t on the job,’ Bakker observed with her usual tact.

‘If you people ever stopped working you ought to give it a try.’

‘Can we come in?’ Vos asked.

She leaned on the door frame.

‘No. Busy.’

‘We need to know where you were the night before last,’ Bakker said.

Irene Visser groaned, closed her bleary eyes and sighed.

‘Why?’

‘Because that’s when Simon Klerk was murdered,’ Vos said. ‘Along with the sisters’ uncle. Stefan.’

To Vos’s surprise she laughed then said, ‘What?’

‘We found the place where Klerk was killed,’ Bakker told her. ‘Stefan Timmers was there too. Shot. We really need to talk to you .’

‘I didn’t even know the uncle. He never came to Marken.’

‘We can talk here,’ Vos said. ‘Or I can take you into Marnixstraat. Long journey.’ He nodded at the glass. ‘No time to finish your drink.’

She swore then took a long look back at the hallway behind her.

‘Fine,’ Irene Visser said in the end. ‘Come in.’

Back in Marnixstraat Frank de Groot wandered out of his office and went downstairs into the serious crimes unit. Koeman, a biddable man, seemed to be in charge. The commissaris
asked what news there was from Waterland and tried, with no great success, to hide his anger when he heard.

‘Where’s Vos?’ he demanded.

‘I don’t know. Bakker called in from that farmhouse to ask if we’d got anything on the sisters. That was almost an hour ago. Haven’t heard from him since. He’ll be
there, won’t he?’

De Groot leaned down and grumbled, ‘I don’t know. Call him.’

With stumbling fingers Koeman did.

‘Voicemail,’ he said. ‘Bakker too.’

Force handsets had GPS switched on permanently. It showed Control where officers were.

‘Get a location for them,’ De Groot ordered.

Koeman pulled up the map app and typed in their numbers. Two stars, stationary outside Marken. The colour indicated the position was thirty minutes old and the phones were currently turned
off.

‘I’m sick of his bloody tricks,’ De Groot moaned. ‘Keep trying. Tell him I want to talk to him. Now.’

Then he walked back to his office. Ollie Haas was there, grim-faced and angry.

‘This pisses me off no end,’ he muttered as the commissaris returned. ‘My pension—’

‘I told you! You keep your damned pension. We didn’t take it off you for screwing up the Timmers case, did we? Or that . . .that other thing.’