Читать книгу Black Widow - Isadora Bryan - Страница 12

Chapter 5

It was gone six by the time Tanja dropped Pieter back at his flat at the edge of the Binnengasthuis. The heart of student land, she considered wryly. The kid might have been better served doing another degree. Or going to work on Daddy’s farm. She could see him on a tractor, a gold-plated tractor, slow-ploughing neat lines into his inheritance.

It hadn’t been a long day by any means, but she could tell he was tired. He invited her in for a coffee, but she declined. She had something else in mind.

Something foolish. She knew it was that, even as she steered her car towards the south-east, towards Diemen. Towards Alex. Dumb, dumb, dumb!

She made a beat of it: Dum-dum-dum, tapping it out on her steering wheel.

It was a pointless trip, in so many ways. And the A1 was a bitch at this time of day. But she couldn’t seem to help herself. Saturday still felt like a lifetime away.

Besides, she had some of her most inspirational moments in her car.

She temporarily forgot about Alex, and thought instead about Mikael Ruben. To die like that, to go to the afterlife, or oblivion, without being able to see where he was heading! And his parents! A couple of agents had been dispatched to Den Haag to speak to them, and by all accounts the mother’s grief, in particular, had been hard to bear.

It was always the parents who suffered most, Tanja considered bleakly. Perhaps the worst aspect of the Butcher case had been speaking with the little girls’ families. There had been times when she’d found it close to unbearable. She still did.

Detachment, Tanja!

Anyway, the officers hadn’t learned anything from the trip. As far as the Rubens were concerned, their son had been an angel; no one could have taken a dislike to him.

She didn’t think that inspiration going to come to her tonight. At least not in that sense. So she turned on the stereo. It hadn’t worked in ages, but Pieter had surprised her by fixing it whilst she was filling up with petrol.

‘Just a broken fuse,’ he’d shrugged. ‘You didn’t seem to have any spares, so I took one from the ABS circuit. Just try not to slam on your brakes in the wet, okay?’

‘What?’ Tanja protested.

‘Only kidding, Detective Inspector. There was a spare, actually.’

It was weird, that he dared to tease her. Yet stranger still was that she found it hard to take issue with it. Not properly, at any rate.

She reached into the glove box, withdrawing a CD at random. It was one of her homemade compilations by the look of it. Good; she liked variety in her music. Her moods changed all the while; it was fitting that her tunes should do likewise.

The opening bars of Lithium worried at the speakers. She was immediately transported back to ‘91, when she’d seen Nirvana play at the Paradiso. A year or so after Anton and Ophelie had been killed, the denial turning to anger. She’d been shocked by the volume, and the sweat dripping from the ceiling into the gob-smacked, demented mouths of the fans.

But Nirvana was angry young person’s music, not angry old person’s music. She skipped forward a track. Modulated guitar. Jimi. Little Wing.

Skip. Me and Bobby McGee. Perfect!

No, not perfect. Janis and Bobby’s love affair is doomed to end, way too soon, somewhere near Salinas, wherever that might be. Hardly a positive message.

Tanja stabbed at the button. The End, by the Doors. Christ.

She chewed on her lip. Never mind that they had an agreement in place for dinner Saturday night; she had to see him now. She was like a girl, albeit without the saving grace of innocence: save for the small chance that they might end up in bed together (and how she longed for that; it had been ages), no good could come of it.

The music swelled; the music died. Ah, of course, it was that old classic: artists who had died at the age of twenty-seven!

Mikael Ruben was twenty-seven, she considered.

Alex, too.

She put her foot down, feeling anxious again.

Diemen had been a separate town, once, but it had effectively been subsumed into the sprawl of Greater Amsterdam. It was divided into three parts. Old Diemen was pretty enough – though that prettiness hadn’t extended to the station building on Den Hartoglaan, which, in conceptual terms, was the mirror of the gloomy Elandsgracht headquarters.

‘I’m looking for Detective Sergeant Hoekstra,’ she said to the uniformed girl on the desk.

The young woman looked up from the document she’d been studying. ‘Is it a police matter, madam?’

‘No. He’s a friend of mine.’

The desk officer’s eyes widened, but she didn’t pass comment as she reached for a phone. She was a good-looking girl, Tanja supposed, her hair lustrous, her skin smooth. The usual superficial nonsense.

Tanja sniffed, the air catching awkwardly in her offset nose. It was just a small thing, really, hardly noticeable. Just one of many battle scars. It didn’t bother her at all.

Character, she thought; her body had that lived-in look. But it was all right; Alex liked that sort of thing. He’d told her so, more or less, on a windswept beach two years ago. The North Sea beating around the Frisian island of Texel, the October sky streaked with all the colours of a forge, the few trees likewise turned gold and bronze. And Alex, his arm around her shoulders, saying, in his typically roundabout fashion, that he would rather live in an older house than a new one; that autumn was his favourite season. She remembered thinking that he was an idiot, but a charming one.

The girl replaced the phone, blowing a strand of long hair from her eyes as she did so. Perhaps Tanja would call the clinic again, at some point. Just to satisfy her curiosity.

The desk manikin worried at a finger. ‘I’m afraid he’s already left for the day.’

‘Where’s he gone?’

‘I can’t say.’

Tanja showed her badge. ‘I need to speak to him.’

The girl straightened up. She was quite tall; gravity had yet to drag her down. It would, of course. This thing she had now – it would pass quickly. And then she would have to perfect some other trick, as all women did. Tanja didn’t envy her at all, because the trick was hard to master.

‘You’ll find him across the street, ma’am,’ the desk officer said after a brief pause. ‘There’s a bar –’

‘I know it,’ Tanja said, and she was already on her way out the door.

She ducked behind one of the ugly brick sculptures which fronted the building, to check her reflection in her compact. She didn’t wear much in the way of makeup, but maybe a little more lipstick would be advisable. That done, she adjusted the line of her skirt, undid a button, tweaked the cleft of her cleavage, felt a bit tarty but who cared, then jogged across the road.

It wasn’t much of a bar, but it was convenient. The majority of customers had the look of police officers. Some were still in uniform.

She saw Alex across the bar. He was part of a small group. Two other men, and a woman, gathered around him in a snug alcove.

He saw her, gave a little start, then crossed the floor to join her. She felt his lips brush her cheek.

‘Hi,’ she said coolly, employing all the self-control at her disposal. God, she wanted to kiss him! ‘I hope you don’t mind? I know we are getting together on Saturday – we’re still okay for that, right? – but I was just passing, and thought, well, you know.’

Alex’s smile was gentle. ‘Well, it’s certainly a surprise seeing you here. But a good one!’

‘Yeah?’

‘Of course it is!’

Alex looked at her for a long moment. His grey eyes had that familiar, lighthouse glint which came with each slow blink.

She steeled herself; it needn’t be this complicated.

‘This is Detective Inspector Pino!’ Alex informed the others as he steered her back to the alcove. ‘A good friend of mine! Tanja, say hello to Ricky, Wim and Margarete.’

‘Hi,’ said Tanja. Her tone was light, but her thoughts were heavy. She knew what they were thinking, particularly with Alex in attendance: that she was little more than a middle-aged nympho, who was so obsessed with the notion of energetic sex that she found it impossible to form relationships with men her own age.

But the sad thing was, she would rather they think of her in those terms than as the woman who had let the Butcher of the Bos escape.

A space was made for her, opposite Alex. She lowered herself into it. She rested her hands on the table, and listened as the others continued with a story about a local blind man, who had got himself into trouble with a length of cheese wire.

‘Anyway,’ Ricky elaborated, ‘he’d just wrapped the wire about his cock –’

‘Why would he do that?’ asked Margarete.

‘You’d have to ask him that,’ Ricky answered with a shrug. ‘So, there he is, happily exploring the limits of his pain threshold, or whatever, when – boom! – he has a fit. Yeah, he’s an epileptic, too. Did I mention that part?’

‘Ouch,’ Alex winced. ‘I think we can guess the rest!’

‘That’s not the worst bit,’ Ricky drawled. ‘No, the worst bit is – get this – his guide dog ate it.’

‘Christ!’ Margarete exclaimed. ‘Really?’

‘Honest,’ Ricky affirmed. ‘I know the paramedic. Seems that not only is the poor guy blind, and epileptic – and into weird forms of self-abuse – but he’s also a strict veggie. Won’t allow meat in his house. Not even for his dog. So when the mutt sees the treat on the floor, she can’t help herself.’

And so it continued. The conversation alternated between the ridiculous, and the deadly serious, the tone hardly changing from one topic to the next. This was how police officers dealt with the pressures of work, generally. You either made light of it, or you went mad. Or joined Interpol.

Tanja listened without contributing, just happy to be a part of Alex’s circle. This was the sort of thing that couples did.

‘So how’s your day been?’ Alex asked her suddenly.

‘Oh, busy,’ Tanja answered haltingly, aware that the others had broken off their conversation; that they were waiting for her to say something contentious. ‘They’ve given me a new partner.’

‘It was bound to happen eventually,’ Alex said. ‘Is he any good?’

‘He’s not awful,’ she answered, as she struggled to divine a note of jealousy in Alex’s voice. But there was nothing there; his expression was quite neutral.

‘High praise indeed!’ he said.

Tanja nodded, but she suddenly felt drained. Disconcertingly so. She stood. ‘I should probably be off,’ she said.

‘So soon?’ Ricky protested.

‘I’m sure we’ll meet again,’ Tanja responded.

Alex had stood with her. She motioned him apart a little. ‘I’ll see you in a couple of days, then?’

Alex nodded. ‘Looking forward to it! Do you want me to see you to your car?’

‘No, I’ll be fine.’

She waited for a few moments outside, but it seemed he’d taken her at her word.

She drove back to her flat, going over each aspect of the evening in her head. She didn’t think she had made any progress. But neither, to be fair, had she lost any ground.

She was greeted at the door by an old ginger cat. Gember peered up at her, his tail twitching to express his irritation at her late arrival.

He made no attempt to head outside, as another cat might. He’d been run over twice in his youth, and seemed to have decided that no mouse was worth the ignominy of spending another week at the vet’s. Either that or he was agoraphobic. It was possible: Tanja had heard that, human beings aside, cats were more prone to mental instability than any other animal.

She was hungry now. Padding into the kitchen, she tugged open the fridge, hoping that something edible might have appeared. But no, there was nothing save a portion of pickled nieuwe haring, which she kept as a treat for Gember. She mashed the herring onto a plate (he had sore gums, nowadays, and struggled to chew), then sat back to watch him eat. She’d had him nearly fifteen years. He’d been in her life longer than anyone save her mother. She loved him, and just between the two of them, had no problem admitting it.

Tanja took the photo from the dresser. Ophelie sitting on her shoulders, the Eiffel Tower perfectly to scale in the background. Anton had taken it on the final day of their holiday in 1990, and his thumb was slightly obscuring the corner of the picture. It hardly mattered.

The first time Alex had come to hers, she’d taken down all the photos of her former husband, but not the ones of her daughter. And Alex seemed interested in her past, his questions sensitive rather than prying. He knew instinctively just where to tread.

‘Happy birthday, sweetheart,’ she said, placing the photo back.

Afterwards, she sipped a glass of wine while Gember sat on her lap, purring imperiously as she stroked his soft little head. He claimed this affection by right. And Tanja gave it willingly, because she knew that he would never throw it back at her.

‘So what do you reckon, Gember?’ she asked. ‘With regards to Alex, I mean? You remember Alex? Of course you do. You like him. He feeds you spiced cheese when he thinks I’m not watching. So, am I being foolish, wanting him back? After all, it got pretty tricky, before!’

Gember yawned, and scratched at his chin, grunting at the effort this required. He wasn’t as flexible as he might once have been.

Tanja chuckled at his indifference. Cats had no concept of loneliness.

*

Gus de Groot looked around the inside of the subterranean bar, struggling to make sense of what he was seeing.

On the one hand there were the women. God, the women! All in their forties or fifties, smartly, if thinly dressed. All sipping delicately at their drinks, giving the impression that it was merely a warm-up for some other act of swallowing.

And then there were the men, the oldest of whom was perhaps Gus’ age. Thirty. Or twenty-seven, in real terms. Gus had recently worked out his own system, a sliding scale, determined by such factors as looks, vigour, and general underground coolness.

Whatever, it seemed an unlikely demographic, statistically speaking. Ten middle-aged women, in a room with a similar number of men who weren’t much more than half their age? The only other place you might see that sort of mix would be at a Take That reunion concert. And in that case all the men would be gay.

He made a mental note to send Elizabeth a bunch of flowers. She might only have been an admin monkey, but she came into contact with some juicy documents. He’d primed her to the sort of stuff he was interested in, and now she could hardly fire the texts off fast enough. The last was a beaut: Gus – just photocopying bar receipt for case file: dead guy was drinking in Den on Enge Lombardsteeg before getting killed. Love you!

It was clear that there was something going on here. Gus had been safely stowed in the shadows of the upstairs coffee shop when Pino and her sidekick arrived. Luck really, that he’d decided to purchase a few loose joints before pressing on – if the crazy-eyed bitch had arrived ten minutes later, she’d have caught him mid-snoop. And then there would have been trouble.

He’d seen the thunderous look on her face when she’d left. She was clearly unhappy about something, which could only be good news as far as his story was concerned. And in a personal sense, too. Gus didn’t like Pino, the sanctimonious old witch. Those little girls – of course it was sad. But the public had a right to expect that journalists would perform their duties to the limit of their abilities, however gruesome the case. And if the girl who’d escaped the killer had afterwards gone a little mad, well that was hardly his fault. Debre’s parents had been with her when he’d asked the questions. They’d been happy to take the money. If there was any blame to be apportioned, it didn’t lie with him.

Uh-oh. A woman was drawing near, her hand tracing the line of a velvet cushion, a wall hanging, and now the bar. So, she was either blind, or else she was in that tactile mode that women tended to employ when drunk or horny. They were like kids, when their juices were flowing; they had to touch.

Gus understood, now: the place was some sort of brothel, only in reverse.

Which kind of made him a prostitute. A weird feeling, but not altogether an unfamiliar one.

‘My name is Sophia,’ the woman breathed. ‘I own this place.’

‘Gus,’ he grunted. He didn’t bother with pseudonyms, generally; he always tended to get them muddled up.

‘You’re new here, Gus.’

‘Hmmn!’ He turned to the bartender and ordered a drink. ‘Chivas Regal,’ he grunted out of habit, not for one moment expecting that the place would stock anything so prestigious. Or expensive. ‘Double.’ The whisky had been the favourite drink of Hunter S Thompson. Gus was quite devoted to it, at least in public.

‘We have a twelve year vintage, or an eighteen,’ the barman said. ‘Alas, I’m afraid we’re just out of the twenty-five.’

Shit. Gus winced, aware that he was here on his own imitative, without the safety net of an expenses form. ‘I’ll go for the twelve,’ he said. ‘I prefer that mellow taste.’

‘Ah,’ said Sophia, ‘but the eighteen is far more sophisticated. Things get better with age, Gus, don’t you think?’

‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Gus said. He hesitated a moment, then gestured at the barman. ‘And one for the lady!’ he added.

Sophia inclined her head graciously. ‘Thank you. I’ll have a small glass of Rioja.’

Sophia moved closer, lowering herself onto the barstool beside him. Gus reached into his jacket, ostensibly to remove a packet of cigarettes, but in reality to switch on his dictaphone.

Well, that was what the uninitiated might term it. More accurately, it was a professional grade digital voice-recorder with 24-bit pulse code modulation recording capability. Which meant that it could pick up a mouse’s fart at a range of a hundred metres. Gus liked his gadgets.

‘So how did you hear about us?’ Sophia asked. ‘We don’t exactly advertise.’

‘Oh, I’ve got contacts!’

‘That’s a bit secretive, isn’t it?’

‘Maybe,’ Gus answered, grinning his lopsided grin. He was gratified that Sophia responded with a more measured smile of her own.

She looked at him in quizzical fashion, then briefly brushed her fingers to his arm. It was clearly a test of some sort. Gus concentrated on seeming to enjoy her touch. But it was hard. Whatever the nature of her business, the idea that she might have a chance with him was clearly outrageous. He would no more sleep with a geriatric than a wolf would feast on rotten meat.

He tapped his fingers on the dark mahogany of the bar. Maybe it was just the weed in his system, but it occurred to him that he’d felt the same way about sushi, until he’d tried it.

‘So how’s your day been?’ he asked.

She scowled. ‘Oh, difficult.’

Gus took a deeper drag on his Gitanes, before belatedly offering her the packet. She shook her head.

‘How so?’ he enquired.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Hey, now who’s being secretive?’

Sophia fixed him with a strange look. ‘You really want to know?’

‘I’m a good listener, Sophia.’

Sophia leant closer. ‘You know, Gus, it might be good to talk to someone about it. But not here.’

‘Where, then?’

‘Oh, I know a place. It isn’t far. A hotel.’

Jesus fucking Christ! thought Gus.

‘Well, in a minute then,’ he said.

He polished off the remainder of his whisky, then ordered another. And another. By the time he’d finished his third double, Sophia’s thinly veiled proposition no longer filled him with absolute loathing.

It had been a while, he supposed. And his dick had needs. And he was a professional; there was literally nothing that he wouldn’t do to get his story.