The House of Dolls (29 page)

Prins found his fingers wandering to the case tucked into the storage compartment by the window. That was all he had now. All that stood between him and oblivion.

‘Sir . . .?’

The business class flight attendant was a pretty young woman, curly fair hair tucked beneath her blue hat, bending over him solicitously, wanting to take the glass. Prins looked round. One other passenger in the cabin and he was on the far side. The next nine and a half hours would be peaceful. Perhaps he’d sleep. If he did the case was going beneath his feet.

‘I need your glass for take-off.’

Prins drained the champagne in one and handed it over. Looked round the cabin again. Wanted to laugh. Life was like this in the sprawling council offices next to the Opera House. Cocooned. Protected from the world outside. It had been the same in the law too, even when Michiel Lindeman was walking the tightrope between the police and the underworld. Nothing from outside ever touched him there. No one.

He looked out of the window at the flat fields stretching to the low grey horizon. This two-dimensional land had always enclosed him, trapped him, held him close. Was it odd to think he could escape it? That a simple act of flight could detach him from the boundless past like a conjuror’s trick?

Drink wasn’t one of his vices. But for the next few hours . . .

The plane kept moving. A line of others ahead. Then the last one cleared. He pulled his belt more tightly around his waist. Felt for the case again.

The flight attendant was strapped in opposite. He looked. She smiled. Then the phone rang next to her. She answered, glanced at him briefly, took off her belt, got up and went towards the cockpit.

Prins looked out of the window. Another plane came into view. It went to the piano keys at the end of the runway. Lined up. Ran noisily down the asphalt.

The flight attendant didn’t come back. The plane didn’t move. He looked at his watch. Almost midday. He wondered what had happened at the cobbled crossroads between Zeedijk and Stormsteeg. Knew that he would never see that grimy street in Chinatown again. Or anything of Amsterdam.

Then the sound changed. The engines winding down. He looked out of the window. A Volvo estate, white with blue and red police markings, had pulled up on the taxiway ahead. A couple of airport vehicles followed it. Behind them was a set of long steps, the kind they used when there was no jetway available.

The young woman in the blue uniform came out. Looked at him. Embarrassed.

‘Mr Prins. There’s a problem . . .’

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, undoing the belt, taking out the case. Smiling at her. She was extraordinarily pretty and he didn’t like the idea he’d interfered with her day.

The rear doors of the white police Volvo were opening. He knew what he’d see there. Pieter Vos. A man who never ceased looking. Vos got out in his creased blue coat, swept back his too-long brown hair, looked up at the plane, bright, keen, alert. Young too somehow, as if the past had somehow frozen him the moment his daughter went missing. A man who knew what he wanted straight away, Prins thought. Then came a tall, slender young woman with red hair flying loose, sweeping all round her in the choppy wake coming off another jet that had just started to lumber down the runway, ready to rise free from the unforgiving grip of gravity. To escape.

To escape
.

That was all he’d wanted. A moment of peace. Some distance from the grasping, grubby world.

He got up. Brushed down his clothes. Clutched the case beneath his arm. Followed the flight attendant to the door. Waited and watched as she worked the long handle beneath the porthole window.

Finally she got it free, pushed with her slim shoulder, brought sharp Schiphol daylight streaming into the cabin, an icy breeze alongside.

The steps weren’t there yet. Beyond her outstretched arm he could see everything now. Fields and asphalt. Planes and tiny people gathering below. To take him back to the city. To Marnixstraat and so many questions that’d never end.

The woman kept her arm out, holding him back. But she wasn’t looking. There was no need.

Prins simply pushed her sideways, walked on, stood on the lip of the plane door, gazed down, held his breath.

Grey taxiway, grass growing through the cracks. Fifteen metres or so to the ground. Enough he guessed and leaned forward, opening the case as he went, twisting so he fell head first, silent, eyes closed, wreathed in a cloud of flying banknotes.

An escape. A quick and easy one, no going back.

Jaap Zeeger finished his statement just after eleven thirty. Waited for a while. Realized no one was much interested. Marnixstraat seemed to have better things to do.

Outside he shuffled his cheap windcheater around his shoulders, crossed the street, walked down towards the Prinsengracht. It was cold and looked like rain. A coffee somewhere. Something to eat. Maybe call in on the Yellow House and do some of the painting and decorating he’d promised. Then, at four, clock on with the courier service for the late shift.

Plenty of things to do. He didn’t need dope or booze or cigarettes to achieve them any more.

Clear and clean.

That was what Barbara Jewell promised them. That was what they got.

This part of the city was so ordinary. So quiet. So . . . normal. Down Elandsgracht people walked their little dogs, cleaning up after them as they went. Shoppers and the odd tourist. People buying bread and meat from the organic butcher’s. De Wallen was nothing like this. One day, Zeeger told himself, he’d move to the Jordaan. Get a full-time job. Settle down. Maybe find himself a girlfriend. A wife even. Fall into the kind of life he once sneered at. Away from uncertainty and the sudden threat of violence.

He walked past a coffee shop, wrinkled his nose at the stench of the joints from a couple of lowlifes hunched on a bench seat outside. The statues of Johnny Jordaan and his band were ahead of him. The bridge. The way back into the centre. Some time to waste. Some time to think.

A voice called.

‘Hey, Jaap!’

He walked on.

One of the deadbeats smoking outside the shop looked familiar. No name. Just a reputation.

Picked up speed. The canal. Boats. The cop Vos lived near here somewhere. He knew that too.

‘Hey . . .’

A hand on his arm. Firm and strong. A miserable, bearded face, dark with dirt and smoke. Lost eyes. Black and malevolent.

He’d looked like this once. Before the Yellow House saved him.

‘Remember me?’ the bum asked. His friend was next to him. A big guy too. No cops nearby. Just ordinary people and they knew best to walk on.

Zeeger said, ‘I think you’ve got the wrong man. Sorry . . .’

The other was on the phone.

‘There’s a call out for you,’ the first one said, moving closer, putting his arm round Zeeger’s skinny shoulders. ‘People want to talk.’

He tried to struggle free. Mumbled, got scared, confused.

The way things used to be. He didn’t feel so clear and clean any more.

So he did the stupid thing, the old thing. He kicked out with his feet, got the guy in the shins, started to run, down towards the bridge and the little bar on the corner.

Didn’t get more than four steps before they were on him. Dope didn’t make everyone slow. Or peaceful. He got a couple of kicks to the legs to bring him down, a couple more in the gut to keep him quiet.

Someone over the road was shouting. Talking about calling the police. But from what Zeeger’d heard in Marnixstraat the last thing they’d have on their minds would be a reformed druggie getting a shoeing from a couple of deadbeats in the shadow of Johnny Jordaan’s statue in Elandsgracht.

He crouched on his knees, tried to roll into a ball, mumbled something pathetic.

‘They want to talk to him, moron,’ the other guy said. ‘Leave the bastard some teeth.’

‘Yeah . . .’

The boots stopped. No point in running. No point in doing anything but wait.

Jaap Zeeger had spent most of his life getting told what to do, what to think, how to feel. If it wasn’t Jansen’s minions shoving dope down his throat it was Barbara Jewell talking patiently, endlessly, trying to unravel the mess that was his life.

That was the way of things. It was never going to change.

A couple of minutes later a black Mercedes drew up. Two tall men in suits and sunglasses got out. Talked to the dope-heads. Gave them some money and told them to scram.

One of them reached down and picked up Zeeger by the collar.

Another face he knew. One of Jansen’s, one of Menzo’s, he wasn’t sure.

‘People want to reacquaint themselves, Jaap,’ the man said pleasantly. ‘Get in the car, will you? It’s only polite.’

Zeeger struggled to his feet, wiped some blood from his mouth. Felt himself. No ribs broken. No damage really. He’d had worse.

Then walked to the Mercedes, climbed in.

Blood on the asphalt. Lavender banknotes flying round the stranded jet like leaves caught in an exotic blizzard. Emergency vehicles. Police and ambulance. Prins on a gurney, medics round him working frantically.

Vos followed them inside the nearest ambulance, Bakker behind him.

Four medics working. Lines. Monitors. Syringes.

He wasn’t breathing. Head a mess. Shoulder to one side, blood leaking through his shirt.

Vos found a gap between the two men working on his right, leaned, tried to get close to his ear.

‘Talk to me, Wim. For God’s sake . . .’

The man’s eyes were open, unfocused, flickering in fear and bafflement.

‘Talk to me,’ Vos repeated, the volume of his voice rising. ‘Your kid’s missing. Mine’s gone.’ His hands gripped Prins’s sleeve. ‘Talk . . .’

The ambulance lurched forward. They were leaving the taxiway. Laura Bakker pulled down a tiny seat built into the back door, sat there arms folded, stony-faced.

‘Vos . . .’ she said.

He wasn’t listening. Had the stricken man by the arm and the medics were getting uppity now.

‘You need to get back,’ the nearest said.

Vos took out his ID.

‘I’m a police officer. This man’s in the middle of a kidnapping. A murder. I don’t know—’

‘You don’t know?’ the medic said, shoving him out of the way. ‘That’s so interesting. Now . . .’

‘Pieter!’ Bakker called.

The monitor flatlined. Prins’s eyes turned blank. A long continuous beep. One of the medics swore, called for the defib. Bakker reached out, grabbed Vos’s flailing arm, pulled him to the back of the ambulance. Kept hold of him while he flapped until finally she said, ‘He’s gone. Can’t you see . . .?’

‘No.’ Vos tried to get free from her, but not much. ‘He can’t be . . .’

‘He threw himself out of the bloody plane, for God’s sake!’ she yelled at him. ‘You saw it. What the hell do you think . . .?’

The medic walked over, leaned down, said, ‘If you two don’t shut up I’ll stop and throw you out in the road right now.’

One of the others said something about standing back. A sudden jolt, a bang. Prins’s bare chest jumped with the shock.

Still the continuous drone. Flat line.

‘He’s dead,’ Bakker said. ‘I know what that looks like. So do you.’

The argumentative medic was back at the table, working, no longer saw them at all.

‘He’s dead,’ she repeated. ‘Not your fault. There’s nothing we could do.’

‘I should have got his name out to immigration as soon as Zeeger walked into the office.’

‘If De Groot wouldn’t let you bring him in how could you?’

‘Not waited till I heard Liesbeth. Not . . .’ Something in her face silenced his aimless fury.

‘You don’t look back,’ Laura Bakker said in her plain, flat northern voice. ‘You don’t ever look back. He’s dead and that’s it. Start thinking, will you? What the hell do we do now?’

He’d never asked about what happened to her parents back in Dokkum. De Groot said she’d seen them after the car crash. Asking questions seemed an embarrassing imposition. And yet he’d so easily thrown all his tortured history in her direction.

‘That’s all there is to it?’ Vos asked. She wrinkled her nose.

‘What else is there?’

Twenty minutes it took to the hospital. The medics never stopped trying. Pumping drugs into the man on the table. Going back with the defibrillator time and time again.

Then they were there. The doors opened. Bright midday sun poured into the ambulance, onto the blood and the discarded ampoules, and the exhausted medics crowded round the body in their midst.

One of them was drawing a sheet over Prins’s corpse.

‘Sorry,’ the nearest one said and started to tidy away the wires and the syringes. He nodded at Bakker. ‘She was right. He didn’t stand much chance after a fall like that.’

A glance at his stained and gory tunic. A shrug.

‘Still. You’ve got to try.’

They didn’t keep Hendriks long in Marnixstraat. Better things to do once the news came in from Schiphol. When he returned to the council building he walked straight into Margriet Willemsen’s office. Waited until she slowly raised her head from the papers in front of her.

‘Prins is dead,’ he said.

Nothing.

‘Did you hear me?’

His voice was fractured, high.

‘They called,’ she said. ‘Do you know what happened?’

The briefest of details. Prins had failed to show for the ransom meet, tried to flee the country instead. Flung himself from the plane when it was stopped on the taxiway just before take-off.

‘What the hell were you doing there?’ she asked.

‘I got a text. From Til Stamm. I think she was the kid who got into my account. Took that video. She said to meet her there . . .’

Willemsen thought about this.

‘Did you tell the police?’

A shake of the head.

‘Of course not. They’ll be back though.’

She put down her pen, pushed away the papers in front of her. Went and stood at the window. Much as Prins had done the day before, when everyone was scheming behind his back, plotting to bring him down.