Little Sister (46 page)

‘Don’t tell me these things, Frank. I shouldn’t hear them.’

De Groot was back to being commissaris again. Wily and in charge.

‘You’re out of your league. You can pursue this as far as you wish so long as it travels no higher than I allow. I’ll make sure Ollie Haas goes along with that. Blom’s
dead. Dump what you can on him. But there are limits and if you cross them I will know.’ A pause then, ‘You can’t put everyone in jail. If you try they’ll come for you.
Trust me. I’ve been there.’

The second custody van still hadn’t turned up so Frans Lambert and the Kok brothers were being bundled into the back of a patrol car, cuffed, the uniform officers pushing down their heads
the way they usually did. Laura Bakker was arguing with the men, demanding gentler treatment. Willy Kok had started crying openly, gazing round the wrecks of the farmyard as if he’d never see
them again.

‘We are fine on this?’ De Groot asked again. ‘I’m talking from experience here. You can only tilt at so many windmills, Pieter. Go too far and they start to tilt at
you.’

It took a while but finally Vos said, ‘We’re fine, Frank. Just get out of here.’

The commissaris squeezed his arm.

‘I know. It’s unpleasant. That’s life.’

‘Please go.’

De Groot didn’t move.

‘When this is under wraps we should have a chat. I’ll see what I can do for you. Quietly. Bakker too. Van der Berg . . . I don’t know. If only he could stay off the beer. There
are pay grades I can play with maybe. Leave it to me . . .’

He stopped. The atmosphere had changed.

‘Is that how it happens?’ Vos wondered. ‘Shred some files. Look the other way. When it’s all over we’ll hand you a pay rise and a promotion and everything will be
fine?’

‘You really have no idea how things work. That’s why you’re where you are.’

‘I’m just one of the little people too, Frank. Happy that way.’

‘This conversation’s going nowhere . . .’ De Groot sighed and looked at his watch. ‘Get this Arends woman in an interview room and charged. The Timmers girls somewhere
they won’t escape this time. Fill me in on where we are tomorrow. Big dinner tonight. Sandra’s coming home with her new husband. The honeymoon had to be delayed because of his work or
something. The young these days . . .’

The car with Lambert and the Kok brothers was leaving. Tonny and Willy were both in tears now. The ambulance had gone ahead. Three uniform officers were dealing with Lotte Haas and Gert
Brugman.

He couldn’t see Kim and Mia Timmers anywhere.

‘Did you hear me?’ De Groot demanded.

‘I did. This is what you have to do. Go back to the office and suspend yourself. If you don’t I’ll start the process for you.’ He smiled and wished he hadn’t.
‘Enjoy your dinner. I want a formal interview in Marnixstraat in the morning. Don’t make me come and arrest you. Choose the room you like best. You ought to bring a lawyer.’

De Groot raised his hand and prodded Vos hard in the chest.

‘You sanctimonious shit. All the times I’ve saved your skin. Do you really think you’re up to this? I can bury anything I want if you make me. Stuck-up brigadiers
included.’

Vos held up his phone.

‘No you can’t. Every piece of information Veerman sent me – every report, every list of names, all the photos and videos – is sitting in a folder out there on the web. I
can make that public with a single message. Give it to all the media. Let them have a field day.’

He’d got Bakker to forward him the text with the file location. Vos brought it up.

‘If you haven’t suspended yourself by the time I get back I’m putting this out there. Every last piece of it. Every—’

‘This is crazy,’ De Groot snapped. ‘All the things we’ve worked for. All the years—’

‘They don’t mean a thing, Frank. One last time . . . get out of here. If you don’t I’ll arrest you right now.’

He walked away and found Laura Bakker talking to the policewomen dealing with Brugman and Bea Arends.

Vos interrupted and took her to one side.

‘Kim and Mia Timmers. They’ve gone ahead already? We need to get some specialist people to look at them . . .’

‘Um . . .’ She looked round the farmyard. ‘Sorry. It was a real mess getting out of that place. De Groot’s toy soldiers didn’t help, poking their guns at everyone.
I haven’t dealt with them. Dirk?’

Van der Berg was on the far side of the yard talking to the medics. Vos and Bakker walked over and asked. He hadn’t seen the girls either.

‘They did come out of the barn, didn’t they?’ Vos demanded, getting worried.

The three of them went back to the rusty iron building. The big sliding doors were wide open. The place was empty. At the rear was a tiny exit leading out onto open meadow behind.

Through it they could just make out two small shapes scuttling across the pastures, fast-moving black dots past a couple of low hedges already.

‘Oh God,’ Bakker murmured.

Out in the fields, the green fields, places they knew from when they were small. From picnics and walks, countless pleasant, winding rambles. Freya and the three of them,
meandering across the meadows, listening to the larks that would lead them from their precious nests limping, pretending they had a broken wing only to rise into the blue sky trilling a song so
ornate and beautiful they had to stop and wonder.

Then walk on. Always walk on. Life was a journey, their mother said. You either went forward or went back. There was no in between.

The town with all its dark memories lay behind them. They couldn’t leave that for good though. Something black and evil lived there, lived inside them too. However much they tried to push
the beast down into the confused tangle of dreams and memories and delusions they thought of as the past.

What they’d always hoped was false proved true. They knew it really. Just as they understood there never would be a glittering golden prize for their harmonies and their precisely pretty
movements on the stage.

They were scum from the fishermen’s cottages and only men like The Cupids rose from that grim poverty to escape to a world that was bright and warm and new.

Hand in hand they went, black shapes, copper hair, pale faces, stumbling over the rich summer pasture. Somewhere ahead in the hidden dykes, beneath the low bridges the cows used to cross from
field to field, they heard ducks squabbling, webbed feet splashing through water.

Pylons crossed the distant horizon, stiff like giant iron herons seeking prey. Somewhere a duck would be leading her chicks to safety, the task she was born to, the way the world wanted. Birds
and animals were everywhere, watching them, judging them. By a rise of rushes a lone sparrowhawk perched on the edge of an old metal water trough gazing across with its beady yellow eye. Overhead a
perfect V-formation of geese flew against a line of puffy white clouds.

Then came grunts and the stamp of heavy feet. A herd of Friesians, black and white, bright doe eyes, long lashes, mouths that dripped water and slime as they followed the sisters’
lumbering progress with a look of offended bovine outrage as if to say
This place is ours, not yours.

But this was Waterland, their home too. The land that made them. The only place they belonged.

Behind, at some distance, they could hear a man’s voice pleading. The officer from the barn, the one with the sad face and long unkempt hair, half-angry, half-lost.

‘Mia! Kim! Please . . .’ he begged.

They didn’t listen after that last word, barked through the tinny metallic medium of a loudhailer. All the men said please. It never meant a thing and the memory of that fact only made
them scuttle more rapidly across the meadows, breaking into a jog when they heard the steady chop of a helicopter rotor cutting through the sky.

Jogging. Then sprinting.

A triplet of steps marked in their heads.

One, two, three . . .one, two, three.

Even the young cannot run forever. Out of breath, panting, they came to a halt by a larger bridge, crumbly red brick with a gentle hump back. Cowpats on the stones along with straw and dried
mud. Beneath it the channel was wider than most. Bulrushes grew in a dense forest at the edges. Mayflies and dragonflies, shiny blue and red and green, darted through buzzing swarms of smaller
insects hovering over the thick duckweed that covered the sluggish water below.

There was a narrow dirt path that led to a dry mud ledge by the low bank. They scrambled down and sat there in the shadow of the brick arch above them. The stone structure muffled the racket of
the helicopter, the frantic cries of the policeman with his loudhailer, behind him the yapping of eager dogs.

Next to each other on the hard ground, hands around their aching knees, they watched a coot scavenge through the green weed, stare at them, then skitter across the water, busy wings beating up
the surface until it fell cackling into the rushes in the daylight beyond the path.

‘It was me,’ Kim said and looked at her sister, eyes wide with shock and shame and wonder. Not crying. Not quite. ‘It was me all along.’

‘It was us,’ Mia told her. ‘You. Me. Little Jo . . .’

Love is like a chain that binds me.

The words, the notes flew out of Kim’s mouth with such ease it seemed as if they’d always lived there.

Begging company. The holy perfection. The magic number. Three.

Love is like a last goodbye.

Mia sang that solo and wondered . . . did they hear? Did she?

Love is all I have to keep you.

Two of them together, still waiting on a third.

Love is gone. And so am I.

All in melodious harmony. The low notes, the middle and a soprano faint yet as real as could be.

The coot came back, swimming quickly, curious to see them.

And here we sit, Mia whispered. Like ugly trolls trapped beneath a bridge.

The helicopter was nearer. So were the dogs and the policeman’s importunate cries.

She moved her sister’s copper hair to one side and tenderly kissed Kim’s cheek.

‘They’ll send you one place,’ Kim said. ‘Me another. Me the mad one. The bad one. So weak I started it. Me—’

‘No.’ Her hand pulled Kim’s face closer. ‘You didn’t start anything. It was there all along.’

And it always will be, she thought.

The bird with the gleaming black feathers and white beak leaned its head to one side and peered at them. Then squawked and paddled on its way.

A dog barked, so close now the violent sound of it made Kim jump and shudder against her sister.

Mia looked at the depthless stream, one more ever-circulating artery of Waterland leading through meadow and pasture down to the endless lake.

‘I won’t let them,’ she whispered.

The voices were getting nearer all the time. One louder yet more fragile than the rest. The man from the barn again, the one with the sad eyes and the downcast kindly face.

‘Mia! Kim!’ he cried. ‘Don’t worry. It’s fine.’

‘Not fine,’ she whispered. ‘Never fine.’

The sound of feet crashing through meadow. Above the bank by the field the long grass started to stir.

They saw just a glimpse of him, desperate as he looked around, not noticing two small shapes crouched together hiding beneath the brick hump.

‘Girls!’

Girls
.

He sounded broken, lost. He was wrong even if he didn’t know it.

‘We never were girls,’ Mia murmured. ‘Not really.’

On the sluggish surface something moved. Wild white roses, dislodged by the sullen summer breeze, floated gently downstream towards the
meer
. Yellow lilies, curved and beautiful,
followed like a scattered wild bouquet for a country funeral.

One step forward. A moment and their eyes met.

Then hand in hand, slowly, hearts in consummate harmony, under the water, the sweet green water, gracefully, joyously they slipped.

David Hewson is the author of ten novels in the highly acclaimed Detective Nic Costa series, set mostly in Rome. He has also written thrillers set in Seville, the USA and
Venice, and he is the author to bring the highly acclaimed Danish TV crime drama
The Killing
to the literary market. David’s new detective crime series is set in Amsterdam and
includes
The House of Dolls
and
The Wrong Girl
. Formerly a journalist working for the
Sunday Times
,
The Times
and the
Independent
, he lives in Kent.

Praise for the Nic Costa series

‘David Hewson has a superb sense of pace and place, his characters feel real, and he writes a page-turner detective story like no other’

Choice

‘The running heroes Costa and Peroni, like all the best fictional detectives, become more rounded and interesting with every episode . . . I was hooked’

Literary Review

‘If you haven’t already discovered this brilliant series featuring Nic Costa and a cast of Roman detectives, you have a treat in store’

Toronto Globe & Mail

‘The exciting story is laced with Roman history . . . A very intelligent and enthralling book, with a complex plot expertly handled’

Tangled Web

A thrilling tale of vengeance . . . chilling to the core . . . The plot develops at a steady pace, with the author’s captivating descriptions of long-forgotten
passageways and temples, and his skill in creating a sinister undertone keeping you hooked from the off. A highly dramatic tale for those who like a sprinkling of culture with their crime
thriller’

Woman

‘Very enjoyable Italian mysteries . . . cleverly worked out and sharply written. Hewson’s take on the secretive city [of Venice] is uncomfortable and
sinister’

Literary Review

‘[Hewson] is a talented writer with the gift of creating a good, old-fashioned page-turning thriller. His characters shine with real depth and conviction and the plot is
breathtakingly imaginative. A superb read’