The House of Dolls (6 page)

He was a coward at heart, Prins thought. Now was the time to test it.

‘I’m paid to offer you advice, whether you want to hear it or not.’

‘Thank you,’ Prins replied. ‘We’ve listened. Now will you kindly do what we’ve asked?’

The first phase was almost ready. Within a month the city would start to turn to the civilian staff who usually dealt with traffic and minor street crime. They would be empowered to enter coffee shops and arrest on sight. Pick up pimps, hookers and dealers, call the police and hand them over.

Hendriks kept tapping the table with his pen. But he hadn’t started to make notes yet and that meant something.

‘These are unarmed men and women we pay to hand out parking tickets. You’re asking them to harass criminals in the street.’

‘That’s their job now,’ Prins insisted.

‘And when one of them gets beaten up? Or killed?’

‘Then we crack down harder,’ Willemsen replied.

‘Is there really anything else to talk about?’ Prins asked, glancing at his watch.

Margriet Willemsen shook her head.

Alex Hendriks picked up his three phones, tucked his iPad beneath his arm and left.

Marnixstraat didn’t look any different. Office after open office. Then, finally, homicide with its lines of desks, reports and photos on the wall, detectives, men mostly, working computers and phones.

Faces that were familiar. Koeman with his droopy brown moustache, eyeing Laura Bakker as she walked, the way he did every female officer, looker or not. Thin, miserable Rijnder, trying to work up a smile. Van der Berg, the genial office drinker, raising an imaginary glass when he spotted Vos approaching.

A brisk, brave man, little appreciated.

‘Welcome back, boss,’ he shouted as Vos got near. ‘It’s your round.’

Vos smiled, lifted a pretend beer, said nothing.

Then Klaas Mulder, hands on hips, leaning on the door of a meeting room.

The carefully sculpted fine blonde hair was thinning. Rugged face lined, the cheekbones more prominent, the grey eyes more weary. When Vos was a brigadier Mulder shared the same rank. Always saw himself as competition. Not a man to pool resources or information. Then, after Vos’s departure, he was promoted to hoofdinspecteur, De Groot’s deputy, picked up the skimpy case against Theo Jansen and built it into something that could jail Amsterdam’s leading gang lord on obscure and perhaps dubious money-laundering charges.

Vos was still half-crazy at the time. But one day, when he was feeling serious, he skipped the coffee shop and the bar and went to the library to read through all the newspaper reports. Any prosecution that put Jansen in jail was probably deemed a good thing by the city hierarchy. It still didn’t feel right to him. And now the evidence was unravelling. No wonder the man’s smile looked counterfeit.

‘Pieter. Good to see you back where you belong.’ Mulder reached out and felt Vos’s scruffy black jacket. ‘You’re wearing your old work clothes too.’

Before he joined the police Mulder had almost become a professional footballer. Trialled for Ajax. Just a dodgy knee stopped him, or so he told everyone. That didn’t prevent him working out most days in a gym nearby. A tough, solitary, uncompromising man. He’d been lucky not to face a disciplinary hearing over some of his antics with suspects.

‘Just passing,’ Vos said and walked past him into the room.

Two sights there to take his breath away. A large porcelain doll on the table, twice the size of the one he’d received almost three years before. And Liesbeth Prins, pale, thinner than ever, standing in the corner, hand to her mouth, staring at him.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Where’s Wim?’

‘Busy.’ Her voice sounded fragile too. ‘He’ll come if we need him.’

‘This is about his daughter,’ Laura Bakker cut in. ‘He should be here now. What . . . ?’

Vos smiled at her, put a finger to his lips, waited until she was quiet.

He went over to a desk, took a pair of disposable gloves from the drawer, pulled them on.

The doll was still inside a cardboard box shaped like a coffin. Left outside Prins’s home in one of the Jordaan’s more beautiful
hofjes
, a quiet sanctuary of houses set around a private garden near Noordermarkt. The security cameras had caught a hooded figure flitting into the entrance around seven in the evening. Nothing of use on the box. Nothing on the doll either except the hank of hair, the bloodstained pinafore dress and that curious note:
Love’s expensive, Wim. Get ready for the bill.

The box was plain and ordinary. No line drawing of the Oortman house.

‘Where’s the hair?’ Vos asked.

‘Forensic have got it,’ Mulder said. ‘They came back thirty minutes ago and confirmed it’s from the Prins girl. As is the blood.’ The tall detective stared at De Groot. ‘Am I working on this or not?’

‘We don’t even know if there’s a case yet,’ the commissaris replied. ‘Give it time.’

The note was in a plastic evidence envelope. Vos looked at it and frowned.

‘What?’ Mulder asked.

‘I already said.’ He looked at Liesbeth. ‘Prins doesn’t love his daughter. Does he?’

She came a step closer. He could smell her perfume. The same as it always was.

‘That’s not true,’ she said. ‘Katja’s been a nightmare for the last few years. Wim’s done his best. Paid for medical help. Paid to keep her out of trouble. It didn’t—’

‘Does he love her?’ he repeated.

‘In his own way,’ she replied, staring at him with the same sad, brown eyes. ‘You won’t understand. If there’s something here that needs to be done . . .’

Nothing more.

‘They sell dolls like that in all the tourist shops in De Wallen,’ Mulder said. ‘Could have come from anywhere. The kid’s probably jerking him around.’

Vos nodded, looked at the figure in the box. It wasn’t much like the one he’d received. He put both gloved hands underneath the back and lifted it. Heavier than he expected.

‘Torch,’ Vos said and held out a hand.

Bakker was there straight away, pulling a long police Maglite out of the pockets of her grey trousers and placing it in his hands. Vos lifted the dress and shone the beam through the translucent plastic of the torso. A dim black shape was just visible.

De Groot swore and glowered at Mulder.

‘Haven’t forensic been over this thing?’ he asked.

‘I got the DNA. You told me you were bringing in Vos and Prins! I was waiting . . .’

‘Good idea,’ Vos said and took the torch away.

Carefully, piece by piece, he removed all the doll’s clothing. On the neck, by a mark saying ‘Made in China’, there was what looked like a small speaker and a hole next to it that could have been for a microphone. The thing could talk. And play back a customized recorded message.

Vos gently pumped the doll’s stomach.

Something crackled. There was an uncertain, electronic racket. After that came the shrieking.

The doll.

Liesbeth Prins.

Both of them.

Vos got his ear closer to the plastic head and tried to listen.

‘Daddy! Daddy! Christ . . .’

A young girl’s voice in agony and pain. A scream. A bellow of anguish.

A repeating refrain.

‘Help me! Help me! Help . . .’

Liesbeth was on him, beating at his arm, shrieking, ‘Turn it off for God’s sake.’

The thing was on a loop. It was back at the beginning already.

Laura Bakker had her hands to her mouth, her face paler than ever. De Groot looked lost and helpless. Even Klaas Mulder didn’t have a thing to say.

‘It’s Katja?’ Vos asked.

‘It’s Katja,’ she said. ‘Christ, Pieter. Turn it off—’

‘I don’t know how.’

He looked round the room, opened his arms. ‘Anyone?’

The doll kept squawking.

Mulder walked over, touched something by the ear. The screaming stopped.

Vos looked at him.

‘There was a switch,’ Mulder said dryly. ‘You saw it too. Don’t pretend . . .’

‘No,’ Vos said with a slow nod. ‘I didn’t see it. I’m out of practice. Slow. Stupid. I don’t know why I’m here.’ He looked at Liesbeth Prins. ‘You need to ask your husband to come into the station. It doesn’t matter if this is Katja’s doing or someone else’s. He should be here.’

He tore off the disposable gloves.

‘What next?’ Bakker asked.

‘I need to pick up my dog from the Drie Vaten. I’ve got a houseboat to fix. There’s a band at the Melkweg tonight I was thinking of seeing and . . .’

A hand on his arm. Liesbeth’s sad eyes turned on him.

‘The doll’s bigger than the one I got,’ Vos said, exasperated. ‘This one has a message. Mine didn’t. Anyone who read about the case in the papers could have done this.’

A sudden flash of anger on her face.

‘And left it on my doorstep? It’s the same man . . .’

‘You don’t know that. You can’t rush to—’

‘A young girl’s missing. Jesus. Can’t you hear her? Can’t you see her? Anneliese—’

‘Anneliese’s gone. I tried. So did all the police officers in Amsterdam. We couldn’t bring her back. I apologize. I did what I could. I failed.’

There was a harsh tone to his voice and he regretted it immediately.

The woman he’d lived with for most of his adult life, loved, never expected to leave him, put her bony fingers into her bag, pulled out a photo. Then another. Vos looked at them. Their daughter at her last birthday party. Bright eyes, long blonde hair, smile on her face. A future in front of her.

The second, he knew, was Katja Prins, not that he’d ever met the girl except through a picture in the odd gossip piece in the city papers.

Dead eyes, blank face. But the hair was much the same and the smile . . . was maybe the one Anneliese would have worn had she known. Fated, resigned, half-amused that life should amount to this and nothing more.

‘Walk away from Katja and you walk away from our daughter.’

They were all watching.

‘If I couldn’t save Anneliese,’ Vos said and heard his own voice rising angrily, ‘what makes you think I can do it for someone else?’

Frank de Groot intervened, thrust an ID card into Vos’s hand. An old picture. The same rank. And a piece of paper.

‘Let me be the judge of that,’ he said. ‘I’ll get Prins in here even if I have to drag him every inch of the way. This is Katja’s last known address. Some dump near Warmoesstraat. Tell me who you’d like assigned to work alongside you. We’re busy here but take your pick.’

Laura Bakker stood stiff and nervous in her misshapen grey suit, sad green eyes staring at the floor.

‘I’ll take Aspirant Bakker,’ Vos said.

De Groot blinked. Mulder was laughing.

‘This is serious, Pieter,’ the commissaris said in a gruff, annoyed tone.

‘Yes,’ Vos said. ‘It is.’

Then put a hand to Bakker’s arm and led her from the room.

When Hendriks was gone, taking his papers and gadgets with him, Margriet Willemsen got up and walked to the window.

‘What’s this about your daughter?’ she asked as Prins came to join her.

‘Nothing.’

‘Don’t give me that, Wim.’

So he told her. She looked worried.

‘What if Hendriks is right? If Menzo or Jansen or one of the other hoods is coming for us?’

‘Jansen goes free this afternoon. Those two will be at each other’s throats in a second. It gives us more ammunition to do what we want . . .’

‘What’s she like? Katja?’

‘She was fine until two, three years ago. Just another teenager.’ He shrugged. ‘Difficult. Not so bright. Never said where she was going. What she was doing. Then . . . It was her mother all over again. God knows I’ve tried. Just a while back there was this place . . .’

The Yellow House. He’d paid through the nose for that, thought for a time it might be working. Then she was back to the squalid tenement off Warmoesstraat, living like a tramp.

Willemsen picked up some papers Hendriks had left behind.

‘I don’t want this to get in the way. We’re on shaky ground already.’

‘What?’

‘Hendriks is right. People are getting cold feet. We might have to trim things a little . . .’

‘No,’ Prins insisted. ‘I won’t allow it.’

She smiled.

‘We’re tearing up the twentieth century. Putting something new in its place. You can’t expect everyone to leap on board from day one. Why should they?’

‘Because we’re right.’

‘Right doesn’t mean you get to win . . .’

Prins closed his eyes. Headache coming on.

‘I want you to think about your daughter,’ she said. ‘That story’s going to break one way or another. When it does I don’t want to see you like this. You’ve got to look hurt. Concerned.’

‘I am hurt. I am concerned.’

‘Show it then. Katja going off the rails is proof we’re on the right track. When she turns up we can use that.’

Margriet Willemsen came close, touched his chest very lightly for the briefest of moments.

‘They’ll find her. When they do get her out of Amsterdam. Put her in rehab in America or somewhere. No distractions. For her. For us.’

He didn’t say anything.

‘Do you understand me?’

His phone was ringing. He looked at the number:
Liesbeth
.

‘Past caring,’ he muttered and took the call.

Vos insisted they go to Warmoesstraat by bike. He wasn’t a cop yet, whatever Frank de Groot said. The ID card was in his jacket for convenience, nothing else. She seemed keen to avoid cars too. The previous week she’d been driving a station patrol car when it got into an argument with a tram.

‘The tram won,’ Bakker said wide-eyed, as if this was a surprise. ‘Commissaris De Groot wasn’t happy.’

‘You don’t have trams in Dokkum?’ Vos asked.

‘Dokkum’s the most northerly town in the Netherlands. Did you know that?’

They found the dead-end turning down towards the canal.

‘Trams, Laura. I was asking about the trams.’

‘No trams.’ A shrug, the briefest of giggles as she put her long fingers to her lips. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t have bashed that one here. He just came at me! I told De Groot. Wasn’t my fault.’