The House of Dolls (38 page)

‘I won’t be th-threatened,’ Hendriks stuttered. ‘Not by the likes of you.’

‘And what exactly am I, Alex? Please. Do tell.’

He didn’t answer. Got up. Unsteady. Walked out the same way.

Suzi Mertens was waiting when Vos and Bakker got back to Marnixstraat. A serious, pretty woman with a sad, drawn face. Drab brown coat and dress, like an off-duty nun. She’d asked for Vos by name at reception. Said nothing else except that she’d wait.

They listened to her in an interview room. After five minutes Vos stopped the conversation, called for a third officer. Issued the warning and turned on the voice recorder for the rest of her story.

It made a kind of sense. The privehuis was hers and Rosie’s. Theo Jansen knew nothing about it, even when they closed it and sold on the property through the Thai woman, passing it to Jimmy Menzo.

‘Why did you do that?’ Laura Bakker asked.

‘Because Rosie wanted to.’

‘Why?’

No answer.

Vos turned off the recorder, nodded to the third officer, asked her to go. When it was just the three of them he asked, ‘What made you break up with Theo?’

‘I hated watching him change and never notice.’

She kept wringing her hands. Looking at the frosted-glass window bright with the sun.

‘I just wanted a normal life. A family. Someone . . . you could talk to round the table. Take your kid to the beach. Pick them up from school.’ The fingers moved more frantically. ‘Wasn’t much, was it? But Theo . . . Every day was a battle. A war. Anything we wanted he’d buy. Whatever we asked for. But we didn’t get him. Not after Rosie was born. We weren’t family. Just something else he owned.’

‘You could have taken her with you,’ Bakker said.

A short, cold laugh.

‘You think so?’

She put her hands on the table, aware she was fidgeting. Recovered something of herself.

‘What happened in the privehuis?’ Vos asked.

A shake of her head.

‘I honestly don’t know. Rosie dealt with everything. She said it was best I wasn’t involved. One day she closed the place down. Said we could sell it on to someone else and let them deal with it. You didn’t argue with Rosie. She was like her father that way. It was pointless.’

‘They were young girls,’ Bakker said with a sudden vehemence. ‘Little more than children. Older men grooming them.’

‘I never knew,’ Suzi Mertens answered very easily.

‘But Rosie did,’ Vos said. She didn’t answer.

‘You live in the Begijnhof,’ Bakker said. ‘Do you pray in the church there? Ask for forgiveness—?’

‘I did my best!’

Her sharp voice echoed round the room. They waited.

‘I did my best,’ she said again more gently. ‘Something went wrong. Rosie was proud of that place. She said they got interesting customers. Businessmen. Politicians. Movie stars sometimes. People with money. And class.’

‘They were paedophiles,’ Bakker told her. ‘Abusing young girls who couldn’t protect themselves. While you made money out of it—’

‘I didn’t set the rules,’ the Mertens woman interrupted. ‘I didn’t go there.’

‘You knew though, didn’t you?’ Bakker said grimly. ‘You had an idea something funny was going on.’

Suzi Mertens stared at Vos.

‘Rosie said she had people from the police among her regulars. So I assumed I wasn’t the only one who turned a blind eye.’

‘Anyone with a name?’ Vos asked.

‘He killed her, didn’t he?’

‘Mulder . . .’ Laura Bakker whispered.

‘Is that why he did it?’ Suzi Mertens asked. ‘To keep her quiet? I’ve got the right to know. So has Theo. Why do you think he sent me here?’

‘Where is Theo?’ Vos said.

‘I’d tell you if I knew.’ She waited. ‘Is that why Mulder killed my girl?’

Vos got up. Warned her she’d be cautioned for hiding Theo Jansen on the run. Charged when the station got round to it.

‘You didn’t answer my question,’ she said.

‘I didn’t,’ he agreed.

Alex Hendriks didn’t wait to get his coat. After he left Margriet Willemsen’s office he took the lift downstairs, walked straight out into the cold Amsterdam morning, stood for a long while among the office workers and tourists, watching the boats on the canal, the hawkers in the market.

A ten-minute stroll back to his bachelor flat. Along the Amstel, across the Skinny Bridge into Kerkstraat.

There he’d wait for the embarrassed drone from human resources. The council rarely fired officers, and never senior ones in his experience. But there was a process to be followed. He’d written it himself.

This was a walk he’d taken every day for nineteen years, working his way up the council hierarchy. Doing what he was told. Being a good civil servant. Along the canal then to the pretty pedestrian bridge where the artists sat and painted, trying to sell their canvases to any passing tourist. A quiet, solitary stroll. If there was time he’d stop by the painters, admire their work. Tell them he wished he could draw too, which was true though in truth he’d never much tried. There was always work. Papers to be dealt with. Decisions to be made. Councillors to be obeyed. Levers and switches that needed pulling in order to keep the city running.

Sometimes he’d think about those choices as he sat by the Amstel, glad to leave the council building and De Wallen behind. Tourists would ask him to take photos of them beneath the white wooden arms that rose from their supporting arches to make way for boats moving up and down the broad, busy river. He always agreed. For all its faults he loved Amsterdam, was proud of his native city.

His small, modestly decorated flat was just on the other side, close to the point at which Kerkstraat met the tree-lined street that bore the river’s name.

On this strange day he walked straight past the artists, didn’t even look at them. Then stopped. The white arms were rising. A large commercial barge edged slowly down the river towards the Skinny Bridge. Tourists had their cameras out. Cries of delight.

A bridge. A boat. A hiatus in the day his old life ended.

Hendriks stared at the rising arms. Could see his building on the corner of Amstel and Kerkstraat beyond.

A silver-grey Mercedes parked outside. Four swarthy men in business suits were getting out. They looked busy, anxious. One went to the door, pressed the bell. The other three were looking around.

Transfixed, Alex Hendriks watched them. He’d entered a different world since Wim Prins and Margriet Willemsen seized the helm of the council. Perhaps that explained his actions. Or so he liked to think.

The bridge kept slowly rising. Across it his eyes caught those of one of the men in suits.

Recognition. He felt it. Felt the way his blood ran cold.

A shout. The other two turned. The fourth at the door gave up and looked too.

The twin levers of the Skinny Bridge moved slowly towards the bright spring sky. One of the men was dashing towards the crossing. Hendriks kept gazing at them, unable to move. It felt like a dream. A slow nightmare seeping up from the cold waters of the Amstel, freezing his limbs as it crept around him.

The lights on the bridge started flashing. A low klaxon. The nearest suit got to the rising edge, tried to cling to it.

One hand out. In it something so unexpected it made Hendriks turn his head sideways, like a curious bird.

A gun. It had to be.

Two of them now and at that point Alex Hendriks found his legs. He turned and ran, kept on going along the opposite bank of the Amstel, fleeing for his life.

There was a Volvo estate near the main road. White, red and blue.
Politie
on the side.

He glanced back. The white arms were all the way up. The figures in suits swarmed angrily on the other side. Too far to chase him down the opposing bank.

Hendriks opened the back door of the police car and fell in. Saw two uniformed officers turn and stare at him.

‘Marnixstraat,’ he said.

‘We’re not a taxi . . .’ the cop at the wheel began to say.

‘You want to know what happened with Klaas Mulder, don’t you?’

They were quiet then.

‘Take me to Vos,’ Hendriks ordered, and slunk down into the back seat.

Fourth floor of Marnixstraat. A forensic officer was working archived CCTV material on one of the big-screen workstations. Vos, Bakker and Koeman watched. A map of the area around Rosie Jansen’s apartment near Dam Square was in the corner of the screen. Van der Berg sat busy at another desk, poring over more phone logs.

Vos had checked repeatedly on Katja Prins’s condition in hospital. She was awake now. Liesbeth was still there. Katja still hadn’t spoken a word to anyone.

‘Here.’ Laura Bakker pointed to a tall figure in the corner of the CCTV coverage. ‘That’s him.’

‘Mulder,’ Koeman agreed. ‘Rosie Jansen’s apartment’s round the corner. Narrow pedestrian street. No camera coverage there. This puts him in the vicinity. There’s nothing to say he was in her place. Nothing we’ve picked up in his apartment either.’

The detective looked tired and out of sorts. There’d be an internal inquiry into Mulder’s death, beyond the usual inquest. All firearms incidents generated them.

‘He’s nailed for the De Vries woman,’ Koeman added. ‘No question there. Rosie . . .’ He frowned. ‘I don’t see it. Are we bringing in that woman from the council and her little imp or what?’

De Groot had listened to Vos’s report of that meeting with an expression on his face that said, ‘I told you so.’

‘The commissaris thinks we don’t have enough,’ Bakker told him.

‘We need the Prins girl to start talking,’ Koeman grumbled. ‘This doesn’t look right.’

Vos went over the street map around Rosie Jansen’s apartment. It would have been easy to approach the place without crossing the busy Dam Square. Mulder could have gone to see her. He could have gone anywhere.

The CCTV rolled on.

‘We’re screwed here,’ Koeman grumbled.

Bakker placed a long forefinger on the screen. Her nails were short and clipped, like those of a schoolgirl.

‘There,’ she said.

Vos looked. Wondered. Ignored Koeman’s bleats. Asked someone to fetch Suzi Mertens, still downstairs, waiting to be charged.

When the woman came up he pointed to the figure on the screen and asked, ‘Do you know who this is?’

She took out a pair of glasses and peered closely at the monitor.

‘I don’t think so. Should I?’

On the adjoining computer Bakker typed a name into the ID database.

‘This woman was with Rosie?’ Mertens asked.

‘She was in the vicinity,’ Vos said. ‘Maybe it’s nothing. You’re sure you don’t recognize her?’

Suzi Mertens took off her glasses, glanced at the screen again, leaned forward.

‘I already told you. Who is she?’

‘You can go back downstairs,’ Vos said. ‘You might want to find yourself a lawyer.’

‘Who . . . ?’

Vos nodded at the door. The desk phone rang as she walked out. Koeman answered it.

‘Don’t pull up records when we’ve got witnesses around,’ Vos told Bakker.

‘It was an ID card! She couldn’t see—’

‘If I can interrupt the argument,’ Koeman said, hand over the phone.

He was smiling. Beaming. Happy again.

‘You know I said we should have pulled in that dork from the council,’ he said gleefully. A chuckle. ‘No need. He’s here. And he wants to talk.’

Leidseplein didn’t look much different. Forty years before Theo Jansen did grunt work here. There was money to be made from drink and drugs and sex down the dark lanes that spread out behind the busy square.

He’d decided to heed the barber’s warnings. Steered clear of De Wallen. Hung around cafes drinking endless coffee. Waiting for someone to call.

Behind the ugly sprawl of the casino, wandering aimlessly, he came across a blind alley. A dark cobbled cul-de-sac leading off the street. Found himself staring at it, mind wandering, struggling to focus.

A memory. Somewhere down this dank lane he’d done door duty for an early privehuis. A cheap and nasty dive. One of the first to mix dope and women, not long before the gang wars began. Jansen had been given responsibility for keeping it hidden. Paid off some police officers and a few people in the council. Kept the business running and tried not to look too closely at the clientele.

One night a big Hollywood star, a man everyone recognized, turned up waving a fist full of guilder notes. He didn’t mind being seen in an illicit Amsterdam whorehouse. That was what the city was for. So Jansen took his wad, made sure no one snatched any photos or asked for autographs. Then left him with three teenage Thai hookers and a bag of weed.

The idiot seemed happy enough.

Jansen took a couple of steps down the alley, remembering how he saw the same actor in a family film not long after. Playing the perfect father, a role the papers said he performed in real life. Rosie was five or six at the time and loved that movie. Jansen had watched it with her, feeling sick most of the time.

The black brickwork didn’t look any different in this dark cul-de-sac. Same smell of drains.

Did he own this place now? Or was it part of the Menzo estate that Robles and his thugs controlled?

He didn’t know, wasn’t interested in finding out. Just found himself transfixed by the memories. Maarten was right. People got old, got weak and stupid. And the city rolled slowly on forever. Where he was stood was a short walk from the Museum Quarter with its Rembrandts and Van Goghs, the Concertgebouw where he and Rosie sometimes liked to go when the music was light enough for a working-class Amsterdammer’s taste. But they were different places. Bright and elegant and refined. The two of them were interlopers there and knew it. This was home, hemmed in by dank bricks and the daily grasping round of seedy business. Life had been like this here long before he was born and would stay that way when he was dust. It was a place people needed to visit from time to time. The dark side. Somewhere they could throw off the crippling mantle of respectability and let the hidden animal inside loose for a while.