The Devil's Playground (2 page)

had to admit to himself. But as he got older he was becoming

less and less tolerant of these people and the way they interfered with his work. Their foolish belief that they could learn

something in observing death. Their hunger for tragedy.

He lit a cigarette, postponing things for at least another

few minutes. He managed to smoke it a third of the way

down before the rain got to that too.

The man lay face-down between two sets of bushes in a

small hedged-in space, a pinprick of green amid the purples

and blues of Amsterdam’s red-light district. Van Hijn took a

deep breath that tasted of diesel and sweat and approached

the body.

The dead man wore a dirty brown overcoat, once expensive

perhaps but now rubbed and lined with street debris,

mud and rain. Blue jeans that were no longer blue but a

shade Van Hijn had never seen before, somewhere between

stone white and the colour of sea mist in late Ruisdael. No

shoes or socks.

Van Hijn knelt down and had a closer look. He felt the

cheesecake coming up and had to turn away, take a deep

breath of wet air, before he was able to continue. He cursed

the fact that he’d put a new battery in his beeper that morning.

Should have just let the damn thing run out.

There was something wrong about the man’s feet. The

dark and callused skin. The white flash of scars running up

and down, disappearing into the cuffs of his jeans. Van Hijn

took a sharp swallow of air, felt it crease into his stomach — not just another dead tramp then, but something else.

He looked back down. Took note. Small black spots that

he knew would prove, when measured, to be the exact

diameter of a cigarette end. He took out his pen and used it

to lift the trouser cuff. The marks continued up the man’s

hairless leg. Van Hijn remembered the body of the girl they’d

recently found near the Heineken factory. A similar pattern

of marks had decorated her body too. And there were others,

as every newspaper reader in the city knew, a whole row of

faces and mutilations stretching back nine months. His hand

was shaking. The pen clattered to the ground. Another one

then, he thought, and lit a cigarette to cover the smell that

was coming off the corpse and still his shaking hands. The

ninth so far. A man. The first time the killer had chosen

a man.

Van Hijn noted the position of the body. Its relation to

the shrubs that surrounded it. To the tiny park that it lay in

and the shadows of the Old Church beyond. He sketched

out the crime scene in a small notebook and then leaned

down once again, braced himself, and turned the body over.

He’d expected someone older from the withered state of

the feet, small husks wrinkled and torn, but the man lying

on the ground was only in his early sixties. Maybe younger.

Van Hijn drew back. A flutter of something echoed through

his chest, rumbling palpitations whispering: this is it, the

quirk, the crack and shift that would mark the break in this

case. A man. An old man this time. Maybe now they would

believe him.

He looked down. The white beard which had been

smeared across the man’s face by the rain held in it an

assortment of leaves and twigs, the wind’s things. The man’s

eyes were closed and his skin was blue.

He put his gloves on, stretching his fingers to loosen

the latex and carefully undid the buttons on the dead

man’s coat. A warm, dark smell came from underneath the

cloth, a smell of basements and stagnant water. He searched

for a wallet, some identification, but there was nothing. The

inside left pocket, the one covering the heart, had been

cut out.

It was when he pulled the coat back together that he

noticed the book. A tiny glint of white peeking from the

outside pocket, almost totally submerged in that brown funk.

He cautiously pulled it out, brushed some of the dirt and

leaves away. He called over one of the policemen and asked

him to hold up his umbrella while he studied the book.

It was an old Faber edition of Pound’s Selected Cantos. Worn, ribbed by water damage, it seemed as dead as the man on the ground. Van Hijn carefully opened it. He felt a slight

surge in his belly. On the inside front cover he saw a name

and a phone number. He could just make them out although

the rain had smudged the ink.

The number wasn’t local. The name wasn’t Dutch.

He flicked through the rest of the book, feeling the wet

bend and droop of the pages under the rubber skin of his

glove. On the third page, sunk halfway down, was a plain

white bookmark, a string of numbers written on it by a shaky

hand. They didn’t seem to mean anything but they were too

precise, too neatly spaced to have meant nothing, an idle

doodle while waiting for the phone to ring or the train to

pull in.

He forced himself not to think about these things. It was

too early. Nothing had any context. There was no point in

speculating. Evidence had to be gathered first, sifted and

comprehended.

He jotted the two sets of numbers down in his notebook,

then called over for an evidence bag and sealed the book

and bookmark away. It was time for others to take over. The

ones who would study the dirt with magnifying glasses. Spray

chemicals and fill test-tubes. Photograph the scene before

clearing it away. He could already see them making their way

towards the enclosure in their white boiler suits and plastic

gloves, the forensics team, setting up borders, marking their

territory like a ragged troop of Arctic explorers.

There was nothing else he could do at the scene. Some of

the younger officers were whispering, their eyes flicking in

Van Hijn’s direction every now and then.

He knew what they were saying. He’d heard it ever since

the canal incident; at the station, in a bar, passing on the

street. The whole gamut of Dirty Harry jokes. At times, it

seemed as though the whole of Amsterdam knew. Yet, it had

never reached the papers. The man had been given a cheap

burial. No one mentioned that he’d been killed by mistake.

The fact of his crimes was enough to keep things quiet and

discreet. The whole thing was buried. Elections were close

and bad publicity was bad publicity. No one wanted that

kind of thing to besmirch the department as a whole. They’d

struck a deal: a quiet transfer, a pension hearing, a desk — the

prospects of a belly, a bad back and endless cups of cheap

coffee awaited him.

‘Detective. I’m surprised to see you here.’

Van Hijn turned and saw Captain Beeuwers approaching,

shaking off the rain like an annoyed dog, trailing young

fresh-faced replacements in his stream.

‘I got the call,’ Van Hijn replied, wishing he hadn’t,

wondering how much of the film he’d missed.

‘That’s all fine, but you’ll hand the case over to Zeeman

now that he’s here.’ The captain’s eyes seemed to shift over

Van Hijn’s face, as if scanning for any weakness, ready to

target.

Van Hijn smiled. Perhaps it was just as well he’d had to

miss the film. Perhaps this little encounter would be worth

it. ‘I’m still the one in charge until the transfer comes

through,’ he said.

The captain’s face seemed to freeze almost as if someone

had pressed a button. ‘A deal was made, and besides, we

don’t want you going off all half-cocked again. It doesn’t

look good for the department.’

‘The man wasn’t innocent,’ Van Hijn drily replied. He

knew he was falling for the captain’s bait but every time it

came up he felt the need to explain himself anew.

Beeuwers spat into the rain. ‘He wasn’t the guy we were

looking for. You seem to have forgotten that. We can’t just

go out shooting people hoping that, after the fact, they’ll

turn out to be guilty of something. Everyone’s guilty but not

everyone deserves to be gunned down in the street. He was

only a rapist. There’s no death penalty for rape.’

‘There should be,’ Van Hijn replied, remembering that

peculiar, yet vaguely familiar smell, unsettling somehow,

when they entered the dead man’s flat. And how the man

with him, a uniform, started vomiting and collapsed on to

the floor almost immediately. Not that you could really tell

what constituted the floor. That was the thing. The man had

wallpapered his whole flat with porn, torn from magazines,

jagged edge of flesh overlapping flesh, creating monstrosities

and freaks unbelievable and disturbing. A tableau like something

from the tormented mind of Hieronymous Bosch. But

it wasn’t just the walls. That wouldn’t have made the uniform

so sick, nor given Van Hijn a dizzying nauseous headache

like the constant spinning after stepping off a fairground

ride. No, it was the fact that everything had been wallpapered.

All the surfaces had been meticulously covered with porn:

the ceiling, totally covered, the chairs and the tables and the

table legs, the phone, the whole border and back of the TV,

everything but the screen. Within a couple of minutes Van

Hijn had lost all sense of perspective and depth. The room

seemed to pulsate, the floor to float. He reached out for

objects that turned out to be much further away than he

anticipated. Eyes followed him around the room. A woman

with six legs and thirteen breasts seemed to smile. And he

remembered the keepsakes that the rapist had mounted on

a porn-splashed altar, the reason for that smell, all thirty of

them, tagged and dated, with names and small photos

attached to each. They had to carry him out of there.

Van Hijn snapped out of the dark tangle of his memories

and stared at Beeuwers. The rain made him look like a piece

of discarded furniture. Van Hijn stepped forward and leaned

into the captain’s sweating face. ‘This is my case, always has

been, since the first body and I’m not going to let your goon

take over. I don’t care what the fuck you think about it.’

‘In that case you’ll find your transfer coming sooner than

even you anticipated, I assure you.’ The captain tried to smile,

to show him that yes, he was still in control, but he couldn’t

make it, his lips refusing to rise. He knew that the detective

had got the better of him this time. He would have to do

something about that.

Van Hijn winked at the captain. A faint smile, barely

discernible in the rain. He turned away before the captain

could answer. He didn’t care. There was nothing left to lose.

He hit the streets hard, his feet splashing the puddled rain,

his head hunched down, fists stuffed into his pockets. The

dialogue with the captain had angered him more than he’d

realized. Hadn’t demoting him been enough? Yet, there was

always this tendency to push home the further humiliation,

to consolidate the gain and destroy the enemy. He shouldn’t

have been surprised, or only at his own naivete perhaps.

He could go back to the cinema, catch the last hour of the

film, pretend he’d been there all along. No, somehow he

didn’t think that was going to work today. He could still see

the man’s scarred feet and the way the passers-by had

wrestled with each other to get a glimpse of the body before

it was carried away. His mouth felt dry and bitter, his head

heavy. He stopped at a cafe, ate two pieces of chocolate

pecan cheesecake, too fast, and stared at a poster advertising

a forthcoming fashion show. The redhead looked at him

from its surface, smiling, saying, who cares about all that and

what does it matter anyway? When the sugar hit, he felt his

whole body relax, deflate and soften like an old sponge

soaked in a bath. He smoked a cigarette and headed back

to the station, back to life and to the phone call that he has

to make.

This is how it begins. With Jon staring out of his window at

the space where the tramp once stood. Wondering where

the old man was. If he would come back again to this spot.

If he would come back at all.

He turned to the empty room, bare except for the clutter

and murmur of the accusing computer, the deadline looming,

the work still undone. His mind was filled not with paragraphs

and grammar but with thoughts of Jake, the short

snap of time they’d spent together, the meagre two weeks

that the old man had stayed in Jon’s flat. The aching throb

of the space where someone used to sit.

Jon stared at the flickering screen of the computer monitor,

the impossibly complex rendering of a man’s body

overlaid by meridian lines snaking and spiralling like telephone

cables connecting the parts, keeping the system in

flow. He could feel a headache’s claw creeping up the back

of his neck, spreading wider, like a ratcheting of the skull,

and he closed his eyes and saw Jake’s face once again, the

straggly beard and high forehead, the eyes wide and alive,

and he forced himself not to think of these things, squeezed