Little Sister (33 page)

They walked up the dusty lane. Mia rang the bell. No answer. Then she led Kim round the back. There was a barn there and a warm, fond sound that brought back so many pleasant memories.

Hens clucking round a grimy patch of enclosed grass and earth, a wooden house to keep them safe from foxes.

Kim laughed, crouched down and picked some fresh grass from the field to push through the wire.

Footsteps behind in the stifling day. Mia heard them first. They both turned.

‘Well, girls,’ Tonny Kok said. ‘We saw you getting off the bus and walking down the drive. To what do we owe . . . ?’

He was bigger and much older than they remembered. The second man larger still.

‘It’s them, isn’t it?’ Willy asked his brother. ‘Freya and Gus’s kids.’

‘Oh my,’ Tonny muttered. ‘Oh my.’

Mia stood up straight and said, very earnestly, ‘We didn’t do anything. Whatever they said. We never hurt anyone. Honest.’

‘Honest,’ Kim added.

The two men had their hands on their chins, watching them. They were brothers. Not twins. But maybe they had a bond too. They understood.

‘You
are
different. But . . .’ Tonny leaned down for a closer look. ‘Maybe not underneath. Not when I think about it. All grown up now. As much as any of us ever
gets.’

Mia took out all the money they had and held it in front of her, hands shaking.

‘We can pay,’ she said. ‘Take it all. No use to us.’

‘What do you want?’ Tonny asked.

Mia couldn’t think of a word to say.

It was Kim who spoke.

‘Mum used to bring us here to feed the chickens.’

‘You and your sister,’ Willy said. ‘Those were the days.’

‘Jo.’ Kim smiled. ‘Little Jo.’

She started to sing. A line from a Cupids song. Mia took her hand and told her to be quiet.

‘I bet you’re hungry,’ Tonny told them. ‘I know. How about you two go out back and find some eggs from them there hens?’

Kim was through the gate in a flash. Mia could picture this so clearly. Lifting the birds and finding that magical thing beneath them, warm and shiny, smelling of feathers, and the birds
didn’t seem to mind them taking their eggs at all.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘Nothing, girl,’ Tonny told her. ‘But best we get inside soon. So no one sees, eh?’

Vos insisted they visit the churchyard first. They parked in the narrow street of Kerkepad, a street back from the seafront. On one side a dense hedge next to the brown-brick
church hid the graves. On the other a small iron bridge crossed the canal to an alley leading to the Gouwzee. They were past the harbour with its cafes and seafood shops and the hordes of day
trippers hunting T-shirts and cheap gifts. Here Volendam was quiet and residential, small houses, most just about detached from one another, fronted by tiny gardens with neat flower beds competing
for attention.

Still they could smell the ever-present water, a briny tang hanging over everything. There was the distant sound of too-loud pop music from a bar somewhere. Along the narrow canal a grey heron
stood stiff on its stick-like legs, then jabbed its long spear beak into the weed and came out with a wriggling frog.

He checked his notebook. The Timmers had lived on the other side of town, in the cramped timber fishermen’s cottages. So did Bea Arends.

‘Let’s take a look at the grave first.’

Bakker didn’t move and he asked her why.

‘I’ve never liked churchyards. Not since I buried my mum and dad.’

‘We have to do this. We may have to come back and exhume that girl. I hope not. But . . .’

Still she didn’t move. The events of the previous day hadn’t left her, he guessed. No reason why they should. No more than a kilometre from here, in a hidden cabin now being probed
by forensic, she’d looked death straight in the face.

‘But if you really don’t want—’

‘Let’s do it. I’m just being stupid,’ she said, and led the way to the church.

The caretaker who’d talked to Van der Berg was in the nave, a small man in overalls, wielding a very old horsehair broom. He wasn’t so friendly now the police had turned up in
person.

Vos asked him about Maria Koops and whether he could check the records to see who’d paid for her grave.

‘I told your man,’ the caretaker replied, not even making a move for the office. ‘It was an anonymous donation. We don’t know. Why should we?’

‘Who puts flowers on her grave?’

He grunted something under his breath then said, ‘Lots of people come with flowers. You think I’ve got nothing better to do than follow them around the place?’

Volendam, Vos thought. The locals were never going to be easy with strangers. He asked for directions and said thanks. Then the two of them went outside. The headstone was near the hedge of
shrubs close to where they’d parked. Recent, unstained by the years. The inscription in the cold grey stone seemed bolder than it appeared in Van der Berg’s snapshot. The lyrics of the
song especially.

There was a small bouquet of yellow roses next to the grave, a white label around the stems. Bakker bent down to take a look then shook her head. It was just the price tag from a
supermarket.

‘We don’t need to dig her up, do we?’

‘If I have to I will.’

‘To find out what? I read the report. She’d been in the water for two days. In the ground now for five years. Could there really be—?’

‘If we don’t look we won’t know, will we?’ he said, a touch peremptorily.

She went quiet.

‘I’m sorry,’ Vos added. ‘I didn’t mean to be abrupt. It’s just that . . .’ Laura Bakker had a way of bringing ideas and doubts and possibilities to the
surface. It was a talent she possessed without knowing it. A useful one. ‘The more we delve into this, the more you see people not looking. Just turning away. And if we don’t look . . .
who does?’

He gazed at the grave once more and then went back to the church, walked through the cool, quiet interior, didn’t bother the caretaker. If the man knew something he wasn’t
saying.

It was ten minutes to Bea Arends’ cottage. The place wasn’t easy to find in the tangle of old streets behind the harbour. Eventually they located the address: a black wooden shack,
tiny, with flowerpots on the front deck and white net curtains pulled back like curious eyebrows. The homes of both the Timmers family and their uncle Stefan couldn’t have been more than a
couple of minutes away on foot.

Bea Arends answered the door. She was about fifty, stocky with a ruddy face, greying brown hair, sad green eyes and the stance of someone used to years of manual work.

Vos showed his ID card and she scowled at it.

‘Did Sherlock send you then? I wondered when he’d finally catch something with all that fishing.’

‘Sherlock?’

‘That big bloke of yours. The one who got biffed.’

A dog barked, loud but friendly. The German shepherd went straight for Bakker who bent down and stroked his handsome head.

‘Funny that,’ she said, tugging at his collar. ‘I told the other one. Rex doesn’t normally like strangers.’

She looked the two of them up and down.

‘Best you come in, I suppose.’

Van der Berg bought two coffees, didn’t even touch his, looked at Aisha and said, ‘Let me guess. Stefan was busy churning out porn in that shack of his. Kiddie
porn, probably. I reckon—’

‘Possibly.’ She seemed upset and for the moment he didn’t want to know why. ‘But it wasn’t that.’

He opened his arms, grinned and pointed at the tablet in her bag.

‘Something to show me?’

‘Snyder kicked me out of the office.’

‘Oh.’ The young woman behind the counter put out some sandwiches. He wondered about a beer then decided against it. ‘If you want to wait for Vos to come back . . .’

‘I don’t. Dammit!’

She banged her fist on the table. The coffee cups jumped.

He went and bought two sandwiches. Then listened.

The VCR tapes they found in Stefan Timmers’ private studio had gone to a specialist lab that had managed to recreate the video from a few. Most of what they had recovered was
unremarkable.

‘The kind of stuff people took of their families,’ she said. ‘The seaside. Barbecues. Singing. A few things from the TV. Nothing sexual at all.’

‘You mean the Timmers family? Gus. Freya. The triplets.’

‘That’s some of it,’ she agreed. ‘The lab said the material came from two different cameras. I’m guessing, but I’d tend to think one of them belonged to Gus.
The other was Stefan’s. All the other material Stefan had was later. Maybe it was a hobby of his. Going round just videoing stuff that happened there as far as I can see. Carnivals. Christmas
parties. Harmless.’

The Timmers family were murdered. The videos they owned passed into the hands of the brother. He could see how that might happen.

‘The camera he was using recently was different. Digital. It didn’t use tape. He’d just plug it straight into the laptop. Not that we have that of course. It looks like he
burned DVDs and kept a backup drive underneath the desk. We found the cables. No drive. All gone.’

Van der Berg tried to follow this. There was no doubt Stefan Timmers was a criminal. He had a pretty hefty record, and that was probably just scratching the surface.

‘So he could have been making porn? We just didn’t find it?’

‘Correct.’

‘In that shack Laura found? The Flamingo Club?’

She took a deep breath then smiled at him.

‘I haven’t been entrusted with any details about that place. Snyder’s keeping it with his people.’

‘I thought you liked him?’

‘I thought so too. But I don’t. As I said. He sent me home. For pursuing avenues he didn’t know about.’ Her dark finger pointed across the table. ‘Your
avenues.’

There was a long silence between them then she sipped at her coffee and gave him a curious look.

‘I like my job. I worked damned hard to get it. I’m good. I could end up running that department, running it well too. Just a few years. A few quiet years.’

‘Ah.’

He went to the counter and got himself a beer. Which was wrong but he could live with it.

‘Ambition,’ he said, sitting down again. ‘The privilege of the young. An awkward thing, if I’m honest.’

‘Awkward? We’re supposed to aspire to something, aren’t we?’

‘We’re supposed to aspire to lots of things. Some of them a bit contradictory. Let me tell you a story.’

It was short on detail and entirely free of names. A tale of when he was a young detective, planning to take the promotion exams. Dreaming of when he’d be a brigadier like the smart and
well-paid men above him.

‘Then one day someone told me to go and talk to one of the local hoods. Shake him down, but nicely. It was different back then. A few of the guys were . . . over-friendly with the wrong
sort of people. The lines weren’t so clearly drawn. The man didn’t want shaking down. He was there to give me a present.’

She looked shocked.

‘What happened?’

He laughed and said, ‘I took it, of course.’

Aisha didn’t utter a word.

‘Then I went back to the office. Told my boss. Gave him the envelope. Asked what kind of report I should file.’

It was a long time ago. The brigadier was now dead. He’d seemed a decent enough man. Large family and all of them went to church on Sundays.

She waited. Finally she asked, ‘Then what?’

‘He took the money and said he’d deal with it. I told him I didn’t follow. I saw the hood. I took the envelope. If anyone was going to start dealing with it . . . should have
been me. But no. It wasn’t. After that nothing. Nothing at all.’

She waited again.

‘And?’

‘And that was it. Some people kept talking to me. Vos would have but he wasn’t around back then. Some of the others . . . not so much. After a while I realized I was standing at the
bottom of the ladder looking up. And it was going to stay that way. Forever.’

‘It’s not like that now, is it?’

He thought about that.

‘In the sense that we don’t send out junior officers to pick up bribes for their bosses and see which way they fall . . . no. But sometimes . . .’ This conversation was headed
in a direction he dreaded. It was too depressing. ‘The point is the world’s different. When I was your age people looked up to us. They were innocent civilians. On our side. We were
there to protect them. And their interests. Some of the guys who took those bribes were pretty good at that job if I’m honest. It wasn’t black and white but it was close. Now . .
.’

He took a long swig of the beer.

‘Now the civilians aren’t so innocent. They look at all the shit around them and think . . . if everyone else can get away with it . . . why can’t I? Makes life more
complicated. Back then it was money in a brown envelope. Now it could be a wink. A glance away. A file that just happens to get lost. Sorry . . .’ She looked so guilty it hit him too.
‘I don’t mean to burst your bubble.’

‘You didn’t.’

‘I just wanted you to know.’

‘So what do I do? Go in there, face up to Snyder, ask for the stuff back? I can do it now—’

‘No, no, no!’ He laughed. ‘He told you to go home, didn’t he?’

‘I can’t—’

‘Course you can. Go to the movies. Watch TV. Do some shopping. Forget about Marnixstraat for a while.’ He smiled at her. ‘Leave it to me.’

‘To you?’

‘Yes. Detective Van der Berg. Bottom of the ladder staring up and used to it. Nothing to lose.’

She was silent. Then she reached for his beer and took a sip. He didn’t know what to say. She didn’t drink.

‘The trouble is,’ Van der Berg added, ‘you’re thinking . . . but what if he buries this too? What if I can’t trust him . . .’

‘If I thought that I wouldn’t have asked you here, would I?’

‘So why the hesitation?’

Aisha reached into her bag and pulled out the tablet.

‘Because Snyder’s right to kick me out. I didn’t just take that stuff to one side to get a look without telling him. Before he got there I managed to sneak a picture off it
too.’