The House of Dolls (24 page)

‘What next?’ Bakker asked.

He waited.

‘We bring in Wim Prins?’ she suggested.

‘No. First we look at the files on his wife. I was . . .’

All that happened when he was on sick leave from the force, about to resign. He’d no idea who’d handled the death of Bea Prins. A supposed suicide.

‘I wasn’t here then.’

He stood back and let two uniformed officers through, pads in hand, witness statement forms.

‘I’ve got to tell Frank. Until yesterday Wim Prins ran this city. If we’re going to accuse him of murder . . .’

Vos gestured to the lift. De Groot’s office was on the fourth floor, next to the management suite and the technical area that handled computer intelligence and forensic work.

‘Point taken,’ Bakker agreed.

Still Vos didn’t move.

‘What now?’ she asked.

‘You were good in there, Laura,’ he said. ‘Very.’

Bakker blushed, mumbled something. And they got in the lift.

A silent breakfast. Liesbeth Prins finished her coffee and croissant, lit a cigarette knowing that annoyed him. Unshaven, dishevelled in a creased blue shirt and a pair of jeans he hadn’t worn for years, Prins hunched over a bowl of cereal, barely touching it. Her smoke rolled over him. He didn’t look at her.

‘What time did you get in?’ she asked.

‘You didn’t check?’

‘Eleven thirty.’

He pushed the bowl aside, took a deep, pained breath.

‘Why ask a question if you know the answer?’

‘The papers were phoning here all night. I didn’t know what to say.’

‘That’s unusual,’ Prins replied with a sharp, sarcastic smile.

She stabbed the half-smoked cigarette into the remains of the pastry.

‘Do you care, Wim? Does it touch you? Do you still think she’s screwing us around?’

‘Maybe,’ he answered with a shrug. ‘I don’t know anything any more.’

‘Where were you last night?’

‘I went for a walk. I had a few drinks . . .’

‘A few?’

‘Not enough.’

He’d scanned the headlines already. Two stories. The murder of a city gangster and his girlfriend. And the shock resignation of the leader of the council. They all reported the official line: this was just temporary. Then went on to rubbish the idea.

Someone had been briefing. He hada good idea who.

‘Are you fucking her? The Willemsen woman?’

He laughed.

‘What makes you say that?’

‘You. The way you’ve been skulking around. The way you are around her. You’re a lousy liar.’

That was amusing.

‘We managed to fool Bea and Vos for long enough.’

‘You didn’t answer the question.’

A shrug.

‘For a while. It was stupid. Over now.’ This part still puzzled him. ‘Thing is . . . when you’re in that place it’s politics and I was never a politician really. You have to remember it’s not real. I didn’t—’

The dregs of warm coffee flung in his face. Then she flew at him, nails scratching, cursing, shrieking.

Sharp pain on the cheek, crockery on the floor. Crumbs and cereal spilling onto the geometric black and white kitchen tiles.

He escaped her flailing fingers, held her wrists, waited until the spitting fury subsided a little.

‘There was just you and Bea up till then,’ Prins said. ‘I wasn’t cut out for it. That’s why I did it I guess. I always thought . . .’

The pressure of her arms against him eased and so did the swearing.

‘I guess I missed the secrets. You didn’t object when it was the two of us.’

‘Bastard . . .’

This was ridiculous and he said so. Theirs was a pact made between illicit sheets, stolen moments. Twice they took holidays in Aruba, Prins telling Bea it was to work on the villa, Liesbeth lying about going with a girlfriend.

She dragged herself away. He picked a napkin off the table, wiped the coffee from his face. Felt his cheek. Pain and scraped skin. Prins ran a finger across it, held it out for her to see.

Blood on his fingertip. He glanced at his reflection in the window, framed by the light-green lime trees in the courtyard. A stripe down the right of his face. One that would take a while to heal.

‘Don’t ever do that again,’ he said in a low, cold voice. ‘We’re not angels. Neither of us.’

‘I never pretended to be, did I?’

The doorbell rang. She went downstairs. Prins watched her go. Hair a mess, clutching her dressing gown around her. It wasn’t like this when they were slipping away together in the early days, full of the heat of being young.

‘Post,’ she said coming back upstairs, ripping open a big brown envelope, special delivery.

‘You’re reading my letters now?’ he asked, looking at the name scrawled on the front in thick black felt tip.

‘No more secrets to hide. Are there?’

Prins shook his head, walked to the coffee machine, set it up to make more. The morning routine. That was all life had become. A series of mechanical actions and gestures, leading nowhere, achieving nothing.

Liesbeth had gone quiet. It was a silence he knew. One that demanded something of him.

The coffee machine stopped grinding, started whirring.

‘What?’ he asked and walked over to the table.

A single sheet of white paper. Thick black felt ink. The lettering looked juvenile. Like that of a clumsy school kid.

It read:
Zeedijk and Stormsteeg. 11.30 am. Tumi case. Money. Wait there.

She didn’t say a word.

Wim Prins went back to the coffee machine, poured a short black cup, sipped at it. Read the note again.

Glanced at the clock. Almost nine.

‘The bank won’t be able to deal with this till ten. They don’t give me much time, do they?’

‘You mean you can’t get it?’

Thinking.

‘I’m going to have to take a passport or something. You can’t get that kind of money out of a cash machine.’

‘Can you do it?’

‘Yes,’ he insisted. ‘But I need time. And I need space.’ He stared at her. ‘I don’t want you passing this on to Vos for an hour. OK?’

A shake of her anxious head.

‘Don’t start screwing around now, Wim. This is about Katja. Not you . . .’

He lost it then. Was on her. Shaking her slim bony shoulders. Face in hers, furious. Lost in the rage.

Almost landed a blow. Which would have shocked him as much as her.

Prins let go. Still mad. Fighting to control it.

‘I have to wash coffee off my face. Try to look half human. Try to work out how I can get more money than I’ve ever seen in my life, stick it in a stupid suitcase and stand out in Chinatown like a horny tourist hunting a hooker. Don’t make it harder. Don’t you dare.’

He went after that. Into the bathroom. Then the bedroom. Came out with a plaster on his cheek, bright sweater, casual trousers, brown shoes. Like a man on holiday, or heading for one.

Then into the study to pick up some things.

She stayed in the kitchen, miserable at the table, smoking. Looking at the note.

At ten past nine he got his jacket and coat, made her swear to keep quiet till ten, then left.

Liesbeth Prins wondered why she listened to him. What good reason there was not to phone Pieter Vos at that moment. She wanted to see him anyway. She missed his easy, quiet, amiable company. What once was routine and dull now seemed affectionate and caring.

None of that mattered back when she was slinking off to Wim Prins’s bed.

One more glance at the note. She wouldn’t call. Not until the time he’d demanded.

He’d been right about one thing. They weren’t angels. No use pretending.

Frank de Groot looked as if he hadn’t slept. He stood by the window of his office on the top floor of Marnixstraat, gazing out of the window. There was work being done on the bridge over the Lijnbaansgracht. Men with pneumatic drills hammering at the pavement, pedestrians struggling through the chaos. The noise leaked into De Groot’s office. It didn’t help the mood.

He listened as Vos outlined what Jaap Zeeger had told them and said, straight away, ‘Forget it.’

‘Forget it?’ Bakker cried. ‘Zeeger told us—’

‘Zeeger’s a convicted criminal. A thief. A dope pedlar. You’re going to set his word against that of an elected politician? A lawyer for God’s sake?’

Vos coughed into his fist and took a seat in front of the commissaris’s desk. De Groot got the message, sat down opposite. Bakker folded her arms, leaned against the partition wall, sulky as a teenager in a foul mood.

‘We’ve got to look into it, Frank,’ Vos said. ‘He’s made a statement.’

‘Bea Prins shot herself in the Beursplein car park. She was an addict. Plenty of witnesses for that. I’m not reopening the case on the back of hearsay from a criminal.’

A moment’s silence then Vos asked, ‘Did you handle it?’

‘Yes!’ De Groot bellowed. ‘Me. And no. I wasn’t the right officer for the job. If you’d been halfway sane I’d have let you look at it. But you weren’t.’ Then more quietly, ‘And I understand why. We were all in a mess then. We’d been chasing Anneliese for three months and getting nowhere.’ A hard look across the desk. ‘I know you suffered. You weren’t the only one.’

‘I need to see those files.’

‘Fine, fine. And if you spot something, tell me. But don’t pull Prins in just because Jaap Zeeger’s walked through the door looking all fine and dandy and decided to tell a few cock and bull stories. We put Theo Jansen in prison because of that little bastard and look where we are now. Why the hell we should believe him—’

‘Prins has been trying to walk away from this ever since it started,’ Bakker interrupted. ‘He’s never looked like a man who’s lost his daughter. According to Zeeger Katja went to pieces because she suspected Prins killed Bea – and he knew that. Doesn’t it fit with what we saw?’

‘You need more than the word of a lowlife crook. One who’s a self-confessed liar,’ the commissaris repeated. ‘Until I see that—’

‘Give me some people then,’ Vos demanded. ‘I’ve got Bakker here. Access to forensic. Van der Berg. I can’t . . .’

Another angry flurry then De Groot threw a printout across the desk.

‘Seen this? Heard the latest?’

Vos picked it up. Crime report. Timed at six thirty-four that morning. Body in the Oudezijds Voorburgwal canal in De Wallen near the Oude Kerk. Local woman aged twenty-eight. Single rising stab wound to the abdomen. Fished out of the water after a street-cleaning crew saw her at daybreak. The duty team thought it was a mugging gone wrong. She was a newspaper reporter from one of the big city titles. They’d got the ID from her phone, found in the alley where she was attacked.

‘I met that girl a couple of times,’ De Groot added. ‘She came on the crime beat after you quit. So I’ve got Jansen loose and everyone screaming at me for that. Menzo and his woman murdered last night. Now this . . .’

Bakker said, ‘Katja Prins is missing. She believed her father killed her mother. Somehow this hooks into Vos’s daughter’s case too. Maybe—’

‘Maybe what?’ De Groot demanded. ‘Tell me.’ He jabbed a fat forefinger at her. ‘Give me something solid. Something I can show to the people who run this place and say: here. This is why I stopped officers chasing a murderous thug loose in Amsterdam. You don’t know if this kidnapping’s for real. Or if Prins is right and it’s just that kid screwing around again.’

‘True,’ Vos admitted.

‘Start screaming for resources when I can see there’s something to do with them. Not now, Pieter. You know I can’t do that.’

Vos shrugged. Bakker stayed silent.

‘So what are you waiting for?’ De Groot asked.

Vos stopped in the corridor, stared out at the view over the bus station towards the Westerkerk.

‘The man’s an idiot,’ Bakker grumbled. ‘Why . . .?’

She stopped when she saw the look in his eye.

‘He’s not an idiot. He’s right. It’s just hearsay. Barely that.’ A look at his watch. ‘Frank never worked homicide. Not if he could help it.’

Footsteps along the corridor. Van der Berg walked up holding a blue folder with the name Beatrix Prins on the cover. He opened the window, let in the cold spring air. Smiled, bleary-eyed, a smell of booze about him even at this hour.

‘Did you deal with this when it happened, Dirk?’ Vos asked.

‘Sadly no, boss. I was on holiday with the wife.’ He screwed up his eyes. ‘Beer tour of England. It rained a lot.’ He grimaced. ‘I needed a break after all the shit we’d been through here.’

Vos rapped his fingers on the folder.

‘I want you to sit down. Go through every line. Forget what conclusions anyone else reached. See it with a fresh pair of eyes.’

‘Witha view to what?’

‘Telling me if it adds up.’

Van der Berg nodded and walked off to the lift.

‘Will it keep him out of the bar?’ Bakker asked when he’d gone.

‘Best murder man I ever had,’ Vos said. ‘Don’t judge people by appearances.’

She tipped him an ironic salute.

Vos shook his head.

‘And where do we go . . . boss?’

He waited.

‘The Yellow House,’ she said when Vos stayed silent. ‘Oh, and let me guess. We take our bikes.’

‘There’s a chapel downstairs, Theo. Would you like to see it?’

Bright morning. A few tourists in the part of the Begijnhof courtyard open to strangers.

He had a headache. Had sat up drinking all four beers she’d bought until, some time around two, he’d crawled onto the sofa and gone to sleep. Even after another shower, a fresh set of clean clothes, he felt dirty and stupid.

There was nothing on the news to worry him. No messages from Maarten. He’d told the barber to lay low, stay quiet. Not to trouble him unless it was necessary. Still he felt lonely and somehow ashamed. He’d believed Menzo when he’d said he hadn’t killed Rosie. Didn’t need to hear that from Pieter Vos. And still he’d burned the man alive, with his dead mistress in the back seat.

Once that wouldn’t have worried him much. Now something nagged.

‘You want me to pray?’ he asked, half-joking.

She wore a loose grey dress falling almost to her ankles. A white blouse with round collars. Her face seemed insufficiently lined by age. Suzi was at peace in a way she’d never been with him.