The Wrong Girl (28 page)

‘Do you like Chinese food?’

‘This isn’t the time, Vos.’

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘It isn’t.’

He turned and looked at the house again.

‘Did I miss something?’ she asked.

‘Probably not. Let’s get back to Marnixstraat.’

Halfway there his phone rang. Vos pulled in to the side of the road to take it.

They were in the Nine Streets. Vos found himself staring at a shop window full of seasonal kid’s clothes. Snowflakes and reindeer. Thick wool caps. Expensive children’s toys.

Bright jackets. A pink one there with a pony on it.

Mirjam Fransen, furious as usual.

‘What in God’s name do you think you’re doing, Vos? Saif Khaled’s on our watch list. You’re not supposed to go near him without our permission.’

He wondered if he ought to buy Bakker something for Christmas.

‘I never checked your watch list. I’m looking for a little girl.’ He told her about the photo of Khaled and Bowers on Pijpers’s phone. ‘We have to follow these things up.’

‘Did you find anything?’

The pony jacket cost seventy-five euros. Probably as much as a woman like Hanna Bublik could net in an hour or two.

‘I found out your surveillance people have a habit of leaving Chinese restaurants without paying the bill. Why did you have people there?’

Silence then.

‘Is there something I should know?’ he asked.

‘About what?’

‘About Saif Khaled? Martin Bowers? That phone tap I asked for on Henk Kuyper?’

‘Enough of this shit, Vos. You’re making things worse.’

‘Is that possible?’

‘It is.’

‘We need to offer a full ransom when they call.’ He was trying to sound reasonable. Hoped it worked. ‘Not this fake one De Groot’s put together. You can come up with the money. Mark the notes. Put GPS in the bag. Do stuff I don’t even know about . . .’

‘Not going to happen.’

Vos had a pretty clear picture of how the handover might take place. Plenty of examples of extortion and kidnapping in the past. A minion, sometimes an innocent one, would be sent for the pickup. He’d check the money was there then take it to a more senior party. A stack of paper wouldn’t fool them for more than a few minutes. Then the link man would be on the phone.

He walked away so that Bakker couldn’t hear him.

‘If we don’t go through with this the way they want . . .’

‘This is your case, Vos,’ she said and didn’t try to hide her disdain. ‘You said so. Deal with it. But you’re not giving criminals government money.’

Bakker ambled over. Vos called Hanna Bublik. Still voicemail.

‘Jesus, Hanna,’ Vos whispered. ‘Where are you?’

Then left one more message.

The Nokia phone found in the pocket of the dead Ferdi Pijpers now lay dissected on a plastic tray. Aisha Refai was poking through the pieces with a pair of tweezers, messing with the sixteen gig flash memory, when Thijs the freelance phone geek walked in. Twenty-three, tall and earnest. He worked as a consultant for telecoms firms in the city. She only called him when she was stuck. He knew that too.

Thijs stared at the dismantled phone on the desk and said, ‘What in God’s name are you doing? An N96? That’s like a work of art.’

‘It’s a phone,’ she said. ‘A phone.’

‘A phone in bits now.’

She told him what had happened. How the Nokia was found in a shot man’s pockets. Already wiped.

‘Hard or soft reset?’ he demanded.

‘Hard?’ she said uncertainly.

He sat down, pulled on a pair of latex gloves and started to reassemble the thing.

‘So you turned it on and found nothing?’

‘Correct,’ she said, trying to sound patient. ‘Why do you think I called you?’

‘Because you need a genius.’ He grinned. Thijs looked nice when he did that. ‘Coffee helps kick off the genius cells by the way.’ He nodded at the new machine. ‘Double espresso.’

She grunted something and went and made him one. When she returned the phone was back together again. He was sliding out the keyboard from under the body. It looked neat. Small screen, early smartphone, made in 2008 from what she’d read. But a museum piece.

Thijs put in the power cable and hit the on button.

‘There are two ways to reset an N96. Hard and soft. You type . . .’ He scratched his head, as if trying to recall something. ‘Asterisk hash 8780 hash for hard. Three zero for soft.’

‘You can’t imagine how much that knowledge has enriched my life.’

He grabbed the coffee cup, raised it in a cheery toast and took a sip.

‘UDP.’

Nothing more.

‘Pardon?’

‘UDP. User Data Protection. Clever little thing Nokia came up with to make sure you wouldn’t lose your stuff. Even if the phone crashed. So long as the flash memory’s intact you’re covered. So . . .’ He watched the screen come alive. ‘It’s still there. You just need to know where to look.’

She folded her arms, kicked her stool back from the desk and watched him.

The supercilious grin on his face didn’t last long as he clicked through the buttons.

‘Any luck?’ she asked as he started to run out of options.

He put the phone down, took a deep breath and asked where the SIM was.

‘There wasn’t a SIM in it.’

‘Really? And this is how you found it? In the morgue? Wiped?’

‘At the risk of repeating myself . . . yes.’

‘It doesn’t work like that. This thing’s been completely erased. The data area. The system area. Completely blank. You can’t do that from the phone itself. The only codes that work are the ones I told you.’

This was interesting.

‘But you could do it, couldn’t you?’

He waved his arm.

‘Naturally. But not from the phone. You have to plug it into a laptop. Go deep. If you know what you’re doing it’s a minute’s work. But you need your gear.’

She tried to think this through.

‘He could have done this himself. At home. Before he went out.’

‘Then why take the phone with you?’

‘To make calls?’ she said wearily.

‘You’re not listening, sweetheart.’

‘Don’t call me . . .’

‘It’s blank. Not even set up. My theory . . .’

He liked to think of himself as a detective from time to time. Which drove her nuts.

‘Someone got the phone after he was shot. Either on the way from the airport or here they plugged it into a laptop and knew what they were doing.’

‘So there’s nothing there at all?’

‘Devoid of data. Not a bit or byte in sight.’ He turned the phone over in his hands. Almost affectionately. ‘Cool piece of kit in its day. Five megapixel camera. GPS. Carl Zeiss optics. Wi-Fi. HSDPA. DVB-H, not that
that
was much use . . .’

‘Enough. Enough.’

He got paid by the hour and liked to lengthen things with gobbledegook if he could.

‘Sorry,’ Thijs said putting the Nokia back on the tray. ‘I take it you didn’t find the micro SD card.’

‘What?’

He checked his watch. She scowled at seeing that.

‘Who was he?’

She told him, with a little background.

‘So he was a secret squirrel?’ Thijs asked.

‘Used to be military police. Intelligence possibly.’

He turned the phone in his hand.

‘Good kit for the job. You realize that if he took photos he’d have a GPS fix on them? The exact location. This little beast has A-GPS too. Probably accurate down to five metres or so if you’re lucky.’

‘Clearly I’m not lucky.’

He found a tiny slot on the side. Then picked up a magnifying glass and took a good look at it.

‘If I was a spooky person I wouldn’t store my important stuff on the flash. I’d keep it on a little SD card and take it out until I needed it. Those things are smaller than a baby’s fingernail. No one ever looks. See?’

He passed over the magnifying glass and pointed to the open card slot on the phone.

Scratches there. Clean and recent from the look of it.

‘So someone removed the memory card too,’ he said.

‘And wiped the phone?’ she asked. ‘Why do both?’

‘To be careful?’

‘A careful spook would hide the card, wouldn’t he?’ She got to her feet and said, ‘Come.’

‘Where are we going?’ he asked a little nervously.

‘To the morgue. To hunt through a dead man’s clothes.’

Thijs turned pale.

‘No, no, no. I do phones. Corpses are so not my scene.’

‘You’re getting paid and you’re getting free coffee,’ she said then slapped him on the shoulder. Hard. ‘If I find something down there I want you to look at it.’

‘But . . .’

Hands on hips she glared at him until there was silence.

‘Don’t touch anything nasty,’ she added. ‘That’s my job.’

One drag and Hanna Bublik knew this was the first and last time she’d try dope. The message light was flashing on her phone. Vos demanding she go to Marnixstraat at three thirty. Important, he said. The call was coming in at four. The man was insistent on that. If she could talk to him perhaps . . .

She thought about calling him back and asking if the security people might change their mind about putting together a real ransom. Then decided against it. There was a choice here. Between Cem Yilmaz, a man who’d just branded her as one of his own, the hurt still burning through her shoulder. And Pieter Vos, a decent police officer trapped in a system he seemed to know was flawed. Powerless to do what he thought right.

Not much of a choice at all.

So she left the dope cafe and walked along the little cobbled street, trying to dodge the stag-party Brits clutching beer cans and joints, the kind who’d ring her cabin bell out of bravado.

Somewhere along the way her phone rang. She heard Renata Kuyper’s firm, clear voice in her ear.

‘We have to meet.’

‘Why’s that?’

A long pause then, ‘Are you OK?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Where are you?’

She looked around. Spuistraat.

A pause. The Kuyper woman was using a computer.

‘There’s a cafe two streets down towards us. Florian. I’ll see you there in ten minutes.’

The place was smart with twee furniture and paintings of Venice on the wall. The woman behind the counter gave her an odd look as Hanna came through the door, asked for a coffee and took a seat.

The cannabis stink was probably on her. Just from that one deep drag she could taste it thick on her tongue. Feel it in her head, mingling with the pain of the Turk’s fiery iron brand.

From the very beginning, that strange, cruel Sunday in Leidseplein, she’d been racking her head with a single, simple question: what to do? And there’d never been an answer. She was a stranger in this place. Alone. Illegal. Suspected. Hated by some. On Sunday the police told her to be patient and wait. To watch. To trust them. Yet it was Wednesday and they seemed no closer to knowing who’d taken Natalya. Or who might be holding her now the reason for her abduction, getting Ismail Alamy freed, had vanished.

Cem Yilmaz might be her only option, however much she loathed the idea. And his seventy thousand wasn’t enough. She needed Renata Kuyper. There was nowhere else to turn.

Then she turned up, immaculately casual as usual. Paid for the coffees, sat down, took her hand.

Hanna withdrew her fingers.

‘What in God’s name have you done?’ Renata asked. ‘You look awful. You stink of something.’

She shrugged, took a bite of the pastry Renata bought for her. The shoulder hurt like hell. She needed the toilet.

A dash, a lurching race. Then she was inside and heard the door open and close behind her.

She threw up in the basin. Breathless, gasping, she washed out her mouth and stood in front of the mirror, removed her jacket, and the sweater, the cheap shirt beneath.

‘Jesus,’ Renata whispered looking at her back. ‘What’s that?’

‘Price of entry,’ she said when she got her breath. ‘It gets me some money for Natalya. Someone I know. Seventy thousand if he’s telling the truth.’

She found the cream. Renata took it and smoothed on the ointment while she winced, nearly cried from the hurt. Then came the dressing. She put it on loosely, said they’d stop at a chemists and buy some more. It was important to change the thing frequently and avoid the risk of infection.

‘Infection?’ Hanna asked. ‘What does that matter? I need money.’

‘Henk took out what he could. Thirty. His father’s promised to match it. That gives us sixty. A hundred and thirty. That’s more than half what they’re asking. Still a lot.’

She put her clothes back on.

‘We still need a way to get it to them, Hanna. Have you got any ideas there? Because I haven’t.’

A middle-class woman from the Herenmarkt didn’t mix with criminals. But an illegal hooker from Georgia . . .

‘I’m trying,’ she said and left it at that.

A long, well-manicured finger pointed at her shoulder.

‘And that was part of the price?’

Some things were beyond tears. Beyond feeling.

‘Why do you care?’ This still puzzled her. ‘I’m just a whore from a place you couldn’t find on a map. You don’t owe me anything.’

Renata got off the toilet, looked at her, nodded.

‘True.’

‘Then why?’

‘For God’s sake, does it matter?’ The sudden anger silenced her. Took Hanna by surprise. ‘Maybe I’m being selfish. Is that OK? Looking for something to do. Something that . . . makes me feel good about myself.’ She leaned against the mirror. ‘Not a lot does if I’m honest. Happy?’

‘And that’s it?’

Renata paused, didn’t look at her then.

‘If you’d rather I wasn’t here . . .’

Hanna put on her black jacket, walked out through the cafe and called Vos. He asked the usual questions. Where was she? Was there anything he could do?

‘You could tell me you’re getting somewhere,’ she said straight out. Her head felt clear now. The pain from Cem Yilmaz’s brand helped in a way.

‘I need you here in Marnixstraat,’ said the patient, thoughtful voice on the other end of the line. ‘I want you to talk to him when he calls. To talk to Natalya too.’

Compassion. That was the word. He had it, and so, in a brittle, difficult way, did the red-haired young woman who worked with him. But was that worth anything? What was the point of kindness in a world that didn’t value it?