The House of Dolls (36 page)

She got up. Showered. Got dressed. Forgot about breakfast for a while, walked down to the tiny chapel, stepped over the gutter and the old hidden bones, went inside, prayed.

For understanding more than forgiveness. What had occurred was a sin. Rosie paid for it in the most brutal of ways. The weight of that would never leave her. No matter how many times she got down on her stiff legs, knelt on the hard chapel floor, put her hands together, tried to talk to God.

But Theo Jansen was just a man. Both ordinary and special. Decent and flawed. A man she’d loved. Perhaps still did even though she hadn’t appreciated the fleeting, dull hatred in his eyes the night before when he forced the truth from her. A truth he knew already.

She opened her eyes. Looked around. Alone in the small chapel at that time of the morning. The smell of fresh flowers mingling with wood polish and an undertone of damp. Rosie never came here. Didn’t laugh when Suzi asked. She was a good girl. A loving daughter. Had the strength and the temper of her father from time to time. But the two of them never argued much. Not even when something dark and bad happened at that place on the Prinsen.

She climbed to her feet, pulled her coat around her in the bitter chapel.

Theo would go back to jail. That was inevitable. A display of humility and regret might bring some clemency. She would encourage him in that. Support him publicly. It would be the end of her time in the Begijnhof. She couldn’t in all conscience stay there any more.

And then . . . when he was released.

He thought himself old now, though he wasn’t quite sixty. By the time he came out he’d be a name in the newspaper archives. Forgotten largely. Perhaps with most of his fortune sequestered by an avaricious state.

She and Rosie had money hidden away in secret accounts. That would be safe surely. After all the years of milking Theo perhaps she could return the favour and provide his pension. He wasn’t an arrogant man. The idea might even amuse him.

Suzi Mertens shook her head. Wished she could think straight. The previous night was a way of saying goodbye and both of them knew it. There was no love left to be rekindled. Only respect underlined, in her case, by the smallest amount of fear.

Theo was who he was. A part of him might die. But the rest would never change, however hard she tried.

That was one more reason why there could never be a lasting reconciliation between the two of them. Too much distance, too much rank history. It was all a stupid dream, one that vanished the moment she looked into his cold and disappointed eyes.

She walked outside. Still no tourists. Pigeons flapping, cooing. A solitary man in a black winter coat, too heavy for the morning, sat hunched on the bench in the public area, his back to the tall wooden house where she lived.

A glimpse of face. Old, pale, whiskery. Neat grey hair. Vaguely familiar.

Suzi Mertens sat down next to him and said, ‘Will it ever be summer?’

Looked at him more closely. She did know him. There was even a name. Maarten. A foot soldier from the past.

He’d always seemed cheerful before. A nice sort, as much as any of them were. One of the lads. Full of bawdy jokes and laughter. Now he was miserable and downcast like her on this chilly April morning.

‘Not for everyone,’ Maarten said.

He was opening his coat. There was something there, grey and gleaming. A gun.

‘I never meant to hurt him,’ she said softly. The words sounded pathetic even as she spoke them.

‘But you did.’

‘Yes. Both of us. Rosie and me. We didn’t betray him. Not really. We just wanted something we could say was our own. Something we made ourselves. That wasn’t handed down from him.’

She wasn’t going to run. Not from a middle-aged crook who’d soiled this precious quiet place already.

A long and steady look into his old and miserable face. He didn’t want this. Theo had sent him here.

‘And now he wants me dead,’ she said.

You weren’t supposed to question. You were meant to cower, to shiver, to plead.

Maarten got up, stood over her. Coat just open. Hand on the weapon.

Klaas Mulder’s home was on the first floor of a block in De Pijp. Overnight the duty team had begun to penetrate behind the dead hoofdinspecteur’s mask revealing a different side to the stiff unyielding man Vos had worked with for more than a decade.

The apartment, a place no serving police officer appeared to have visited, told its own story. Top-floor penthouse, three bedrooms, in an expensive modern building. Original paintings on the walls. Fancy modern furniture. A gigantic TV in the living room. It spoke of money. They’d extracted some of the man’s bank statements and were starting to run through them. Mulder had more than a hundred thousand euros stashed in offshore holdings in the Caribbean.

The switchblade he’d used in the attack on Bakker had been identified as the same weapon that murdered Anna de Vries. The reporter’s iPad had been found in a drawer in Mulder’s flat. No time, it seemed, to erase it. A couple of the team were running through the video of Prins and Margriet Willemsen when Vos and Bakker turned up.

‘Busy woman what with running Amsterdam and everything,’ Bakker noted, watching the two of them in bed.

She was back in a new clean grey suit with a fresh pair of shiny black boots. Trying not to seem affected by the night before.

Mulder had three different unallocated phone SIMs in his jacket when he died. One of them was used to send De Vries the text messages, supposedly from Wim Prins and Katja, to lure her to a bleak dead-end alley in De Wallen. That case, at least, seemed closed.

Just before nine De Groot turned up with a tired Koeman. Bakker went out of her way to thank him. The man looked embarrassed. Still shocked. Beyond the room white-suited forensic officers continued to tear the place apart. It wasn’t a fruitless exercise.

‘So now I’ve a corruption case on my hands?’ De Groot asked as they sat down at the table in a lavish kitchen.

‘It looks like the money came from Surinamese,’ the lead officer on the night team said.

‘He was working for Jimmy Menzo?’ the commissaris asked.

‘Seems so,’ the man agreed, handing over some sheets. ‘There are these too . . .’

Phone records kept coming in for the SIMs in Mulder’s possession. None was more than a month old. It looked as if he changed them regularly.

Vos looked at the names on the printouts.

‘He called Rosie Jansen,’ De Groot said, peering at them too. ‘Six o’clock. On the day she died.’

‘He was off duty,’ Vos said. ‘Theo had been kept in custody. Maybe he was just being friendly.’

De Groot didn’t like that.

‘We need to nail this down, Pieter. Today if we can.’

Vos wanted to laugh but didn’t.

‘Meaning what?’

‘Meaning I want an end to it,’ De Groot replied. ‘God knows we’re going to get enough shit thrown our way as it is. Menzo having his own man inside the force. A senior one at that. We know Prins staged this nonsense with his daughter—’

‘No we don’t,’ Bakker cut in. ‘We haven’t heard her story yet.’

De Groot waved her away.

‘What other explanation is there? How else . . . ?’

‘We’ll look into it,’ Vos said. ‘When she can talk.’

The commissaris didn’t like the tone of his answer.

‘I want this closed,’ he repeated. ‘Prins was pulling this stunt with the daughter. He murdered his first wife and the girl found out. Mulder was Menzo’s man inside Marnixstraat. He killed that reporter. We know he was in contact with Rosie Jansen just before she died.’

‘And he was in the area,’ the night man added. ‘We’ve got CCTV of him in Dam Square early that evening. She lived just round the corner. No one knows where he went after work.’

‘Then he dumps her on your doorstep just to fool us all,’ De Groot said. ‘Jimmy Menzo wanted Theo Jansen dead. When that failed he sent round Mulder to kill his daughter instead. I want you to take control of everything. Prins. Mulder. Jansen. This is getting political. Be discreet. Be prompt. Any questions?’

Vos could think of lots. Just none he wanted to ask just then.

‘I’m sorry this didn’t turn up anything about Anneliese,’ the commissaris added. ‘Sounds like Wim Prins was playing a cruel trick on you and Liesbeth there. Mulder just added to it. Maybe when this is done with we can look again—’

‘But it is about her,’ Bakker cut in. ‘There’s got to be a connection . . .’

‘The connection’s Wim Prins,’ De Groot said. ‘He knew exactly what happened when Anneliese went missing. Maybe . . .’ He couldn’t look Vos in the eye. ‘Maybe he knew more than that. Talk to that girl of his when she comes round. You’ll see.’

A uniformed officer, a woman in the night team from Marnixstraat, came in from the other room. She had her phone in her hand, looked at De Groot.

‘We’ve just been sent a sheet of phone records from the city council,’ she said. ‘Came through the door first thing this morning. Don’t know who sent them.’

‘And?’

‘It looks like Margriet Willemsen called Mulder before Anna de Vries was murdered. Not long after the reporter walked into the council offices and talked to Prins.’ She picked up the iPad in her gloved hands. ‘With her home movies.’

‘I don’t want any more politics in this than we’ve got already,’ De Groot said.

‘It’s there, for God’s sake,’ Koeman cried. ‘She was screwing Prins and Mulder. Prins knew about that video. What’s the betting she called Mulder to tell him and ask for a favour?’

De Groot growled something no one heard.

‘Also,’ Koeman added, ‘we need to bring in that little council guy. Hendriks. I still don’t buy the way he kept popping up.’

‘You want to arrest the vice-mayor and one of her officials?’ De Groot demanded.

‘No,’ Vos said in a calm voice, trying to keep down the temperature. ‘We just need to talk to them. Their place not ours for now. And besides . . .’

‘Besides?’ De Groot asked.

Vos shrugged and said, ‘Katja Prins apart – and she’s not talking – what else do we have?’

Theo Jansen found the hair dye he bought the night before. Put it on his stubbly head and beard. Looked at himself in the mirror in the cheap Zeedijk hotel. Saw a fool stare back from the stained, cracked glass.

He had money. A gun and plenty of ammunition. An untraceable phone. A long, empty day of waiting ahead. Any other time, free like this, he’d have gone for a walk, taken a couple of beers. Stopped at a canal stall and downed some herring. The way he used to for Rosie when she was a kid, pretending to be a pelican, dangling the raw cold fish and onion over his gaping mouth.

Any other time . . .

There would be no more days like that. No pleasant hours with his daughter. No reconciliation with Suzi. His life had come to focus on a single act of vengeance. The death of the person who’d stolen the life of a treacherous daughter. Was that for him? Or Rosie? He wasn’t sure. Didn’t care. Only one thing mattered and that was the deed itself.

Jansen screwed up his face and examined himself in the mirror again. He wouldn’t want to go back to prison like this. At least there he had a kind of dignity.

Then the phone rang. Twenty minutes to get to a coffee shop near Rokin. One he owned. Or used to. He wasn’t sure any more.

Jansen got his things, all of them, didn’t plan to stay more than one night anywhere until this was done. Paid forty euros to the surly Sri Lankan at the desk. Walked outside into the bright city day.

He’d never thought about Amsterdam much growing up. It was the only home he knew. The only place available, not that he disliked that idea at all. A civilized city, genteel in parts, rough and dangerous in a few well-defined quarters of De Wallen. A man who knew those streets, understood where to go and why. These dark alleys made him once he used his strength and cunning to despatch or possess everyone who stood in his way.

He dawdled down the narrow street of Zeedijk, eyes on the cobblestones, glancing in the windows. Realized he’d never walked around the city in this timid, anonymous way before. He was a proud man. Liked to stare people in the face. To judge them. To let them judge him. Just like Pieter Vos, the sad, smart officer from Marnixstraat. A man Jansen could deal with. Never control. He knew that because he’d tried.

More little shops. A couple of tourists, drunk or stoned. It was hard to tell. Down a lane a line of cabins, red lights, big women in underwear. Jansen stopped in front of the nearest. She had shiny ebony skin, huge, pink satin knickers, pink satin bra. Mouthing something filthy, making a gesture with her finger between her lips. Waving him in with a pink nail, grinning, pointing to the intercom.

One press of the button. How much? Fifty euros? A hundred? He’d no idea. These places probably belonged to him. If not then Menzo or his heirs. What happened in them was someone else’s business. Theo Jansen had never paid for a woman in his life. Never wanted or needed that. He’d have stayed with Suzi from beginning to end if she’d allowed it. But that love died as the empire grew. More cabins. More coffee shops. Restaurants and supply lines running into the Dutch hinterland.

It was work. Just a job. Like his father’s. But better paid and, for those who prospered, richer rewards.

And someone would do it, always. Because that was the nature of life, of Amsterdam. Of every city he’d ever visited. However much the church and prudes might wish it otherwise. Theo Jansen gave the public what they wanted. Treated well those who were loyal to him. Punished those who weren’t. The way the government did. And they were there forever too.

The coffee shop was ahead of him. Maarten stood outside the door. Big heavy coat. Long miserable face. They went to the tiny smoking room at the back. Kicked out a couple of dope-heads who took one look and didn’t argue.

‘Well?’ Jansen asked after the black guy from the counter served them a couple of fierce coffees and left them alone.

‘Well I did it.’

Maarten looked different. Not as scared or submissive as he used to be.