Black Widow (33 page)

‘Ah, shit,’ he cursed.
Back for round three, are you?

The drink had made him more combative. He strode to the door, and opened it with a yank.

It wasn’t Tanja. It was another woman, whom Alex thought he should recognise. But the vodka had made him sluggish. She held a tyre iron. Had she broken down? He closed his eyes, just for an instant, as he thought to place her.

So he didn’t see the blow coming. And nor did he feel it; by the time his brain had processed the onset of pain, his nervous system was already overloaded, and he was as good as dead.

Chapter 25

Wednesday

It was six in the morning. Anders Wever was in bed, dreaming of a monstrous black canal dredger, when his phone rang. It was a patrol officer, who had been patched through to his number by the Communications Centre. The officer, Alicia, was distraught. It took Wever a full minute to calm her down to the stage she could get her words out.

‘It’s Detective Hoekstra, sir,’ Alicia said finally. ‘He’s dead.’

Anders sat up in bed. The dog, which slept below, sensed his mood, and started an anxious whining. He shushed her to silence. ‘How?’

‘Sir – the side of his head is caved in. He’s been murdered.’

‘I’m on my way,’ Anders said grimly. ‘Ah, Christ, I’m on my way.’

He rang the others as he drove. First van Kempen (who already knew; no surprise there), then Antje Scholten, then Pieter Kissin.

‘But how can we be sure it’s Tanja?’ Pieter asked after a lengthy pause.

‘There’s no doubt,’ Wever replied. ‘We have that website you found.’

‘That doesn’t prove anything.’

‘Maybe not,’ Wever conceded. ‘But van Kempen’s turned up a few things.’

‘What things?’ Pieter demanded.

‘He’ll fill you in soon.’

Pieter snorted. ‘How long has he known of these
things
?’

‘Since yesterday evening,’ Wever admitted.

‘Which probably explains why he was in such a hurry to get me out the way! But why wasn’t I told? Was he afraid that I was going to go running to Tanja? Did
you
think that? Because, after all, my first loyalty is to my partner!’

‘Don’t push it, son,’ Wever warned. ‘And you should know that Tanja was in a
foul
mood when she left yesterday. She was saying how Alex had betrayed her. And I
know
that she went round his place.’

‘How?’

‘Because he told me,’ Wever explained. ‘She must have gone back later.’

‘Speculation,’ Pieter said. ‘Until there is absolute proof –’

‘Believe what you want,’ Wever said brutally, thinking,
what sort of fool have I created
? ‘But within five minutes everyone is going to be out looking for her.’

‘She’s not at home, then?’ Pieter queried.

‘No. We’ve already sent a car round.’

‘Have you tried ringing her?’

‘No answer. Anyway, get in as soon as you can.’

There was another pause, shorter, yet somehow more telling than the one which had preceded it. ‘Sir,’ he said, and the patchy line did not disguise his coldness.

Anders tried ringing Tanja again.

This time she answered, her words floating on a layer of traffic noise. ‘Hello?’

Anders felt as if he’d been caught out, somehow. He wasn’t quite sure what to say.

‘Anders? Is that you?’

‘Tanja – you need to come into the station.’

‘I’ll be there in a couple of hours. I just need to go back to the flat. You know, make myself presentable. Feed the cat.’

‘It needs to be now,’ he insisted.

‘What’s the rush?’

‘Where have you been all night, Tanja?’

‘I’m not sure that is any of your business, sir, is it? But what is it? Has someone else been killed?’

‘Someone has. Alex Hoekstra.’

There was a distant, truncated sound, of tyres, maybe, squealing on tarmac. A click, and a grunt, a patter of breath in Anders’ ear.

The sound of traffic receded.

‘It’s Alex? You’re sure?’

‘Yes, Tanja.’

Wever had known Tanja for twenty years. Their relationship hadn’t always run smoothly, but it still took all of his self-control to hold himself together, to stay calm. To keep from saying,
how the fuck could you do this to us
? It made no sense to him, on the most human level. But the evidence couldn’t be denied, and he’d long since decided that he was more of a police officer than a human being. He had to be.

‘We had a row,’ he heard her say. ‘Another one.’

‘Yes. You need to come into the station, Tanja. So we can talk about it.’

He thought he heard her sob. But there was hardness in her voice. Indignation. ‘You think
I
did it? I’m being
framed
, Anders. I thought I was just being paranoid, but…. I don’t know who’s setting me up, or why, but –’

‘We can’t talk about this on the phone, Tanja. Give yourself up. If you are innocent we’ll prove it, I swear.’

The line went dead. Anders tossed the phone onto the seat, and steered his car towards the city.

By the time he arrived at Elandsgracht, Pieter Kissin, Dedrick van Kempen and Antje Scholten were waiting for him. He ushered them into his office.

It was van Kempen who spoke first. ‘This is a difficult thing for all of us,’ he said. ‘But no one should feel afraid to speak freely. We have all been taken in by Tanja Pino. There was nothing in her record to suggest that she was capable of murder. Or five murders, to be precise.’

Pieter shook his head. ‘With respect, sir, there is still a chance we are dealing with two separate killers here.’

Van Kempen snorted. ‘You say that, with Tanja’s name all over that cougar dating site?’

‘It isn’t her name.’

‘It might as well be!’ van Kempen argued. ‘But I’m sure we’ll find our proof sooner or later. And really, what does it matter? One murder is more than enough.’

Van Kempen went on to tell Pieter what he knew of Tanja’s dinner date at Qin Shi Huang’s. Of the grey automotive paint found on Jasper Endqvist’s body. Of the brief testimony which had just been furnished by Femme van der Paul, who had heard Tanja threatening to kill Alex.

‘The key to all this is surely Jasper Endqvist,’ he said. ‘Providing we can get our hands on Tanja’s car before she thinks to trash it, we should be able to prove a match.’

‘Tanja says she is being set up,’ Wever advised. ‘Do we dismiss that out of hand?’

‘I think we must,’ Scholten answered, as she blearily rubbed the sleep from her eyes. ‘An essential adjunct to the avenging mind is a component of paranoia. I’d imagine that Tanja was still thinking that everyone was out to get her, even as she was gouging out those poor men’s eyes. And running over Jasper Endqvist. And killing Alex Hoekstra.’

‘So what will she do next do you think?’ Wever asked.

‘Carry on as normal, I suspect,’ Scholten answered. ‘The fact that we are onto her will only fuel her determination.’

‘You don’t think she will run away?’ van Kempen queried.

‘No,’ the professor answered. ‘She will want to stay close to hand, so that she can observe our efforts at close hand. And revel in them.’

‘Bloody hell,’ Wever muttered.

‘There is one other thing,’ van Kempen noted. ‘Her gun – it’s not in the locker. We will have to bear it in mind, should we find it necessary to take her down.’

Pieter started to object again, only to think better of it. Wever felt for the kid. But what he’d said before, about an officer’s first loyalty being to his partner – well, there were limits. Pieter had to see that.

‘We should probably search her apartment,’ Pieter said. ‘Want me to take care of it?’

Wever nodded. ‘If you wouldn’t mind. And Pieter. Take someone with you – and don’t be thinking that any of this is your fault.’

‘No, sir.’

Pieter left, his head bowed.

*

Tanja hadn’t dared to return home. But she couldn’t sit still; she needed to keep moving. But where? She wanted to run to the morgue, to see Alex. She wanted to track down whoever had done this to him. To her. She wanted to climb the steeple of the Oude Kerk, and scream abuse at the fucked up world and his bitch wife. At God, who either didn’t exist, or else was a filthy, miserable, infinitely callous Cunt. She wanted to sit down with a nice mug of tea, watch German sitcoms and laugh herself insensible. She wanted a real drink. She wanted to curl up on the floor, and cry out her guts; to eviscerate herself, and so save the rest of them the bother.

The last thing she wanted was to turn herself in. She could not.

In the end she took a familiar course, falling back on the one thing that had mostly kept her safe in the past: her job. She swallowed back the pain and the poison, knowing that she would choke for it later. But for now there was only Tanja Pino, the police officer. And if her brothers in the politiebureau wanted to deprive her of that status – well, they would have to catch her first.

She drove around for a few hours, formulating strategies. Evidence; it was all about gathering evidence.

I swear to you, Alex. We’ll catch this bitch. And until we do, I am not going to fall apart.

She stopped in a drive-thru MacDonald’s and changed into her clean jogging gear, kept in the boot of the car. There was a bike-hire place just across the street. She left her car in the car park, and rented a mountain bike. She had a destination in mind: the Nieuwe Ooster Cemetery. Something was bothering her about Maria’s testimony and the map. Janssen had missed something, she was sure of it.

It was a few kilometres to the cemetery, along a smooth and largely uninterrupted stretch of
fietspaden
cycle route. She focused on the rhythm of her pedalling, her head bowed against a stiffening breeze, and a weight of confusion. As she parked her bike in the rack beside the cemetery gates, her mind almost seemed to be tripping over itself. So many disparate threads.

Yet still intertwined; she knew they were. All she could do was press on, and hope that her intuition, and experience, would take her where she needed to be.

Tanja had seen Ursula’s map, and it didn’t take long to find the murder site. The clean-up crew had already left of course, but the area was still marked by a sagging police tape. Even without it, the scent of violence hung over the stained grass. This portion of the cemetery sat in a dip, and was shielded from curious eyes. A good place to kill.

She knelt down beside a grave as a man passed carrying a bunch of lilies, and pretended to immerse herself in a contemplation of loss. There was no need to pretend. She thought of Alex; and then, Anton, and her little girl, and for a moment the sense of grief was so overwhelming that she wasn’t sure she would be able to hold it back.

Yet she did so, and maybe it was the hardest thing she’d ever done. A promise was a promise, and she remembered her mantra: be strong now, fall apart later.

Some of the graves were more elaborate than others, but nothing that stood out.

Until, that is, she read the inscription on the
nearest
headstone:

Cornelius Goldberg, 1950 – 2009. Beloved brother of Hester.

We are whatever God made us.

Tanja read the message again, and felt that same shiver, that same elastic quality to her heartbeat. The third Hester Goldberg they’d interviewed had been grieving the recent loss of her brother. And there had been a name in Hester’s telephone book: Cornelius; Tanja was certain of it.

Maybe the name wasn’t such a random pseudonym after all.

And the killer – whoever she was – had chosen this exact spot? Tanja had seen enough coincidences in her time to recognise that they happened, but not like this. This seemed – engineered.

We are whatever God made us
.

What the fuck was that? An abrogation of guilt?

Tanja sat down on her haunches. It wasn’t fair, that she should be forced to process all this information alone! She even wished that Pieter were with her!

But since when had fairness had anything to do with it? It was the first thing she’d learned as a cop. She remembered her first case as a member of Homicide: an old man, a war hero, battered to death by some pissed-up kid, who had taken a shine to his medals. Where was the fairness in that? Or, more recently, five little girls, raped and tortured and murdered. How was that fair?

Tanja retrieved her bicycle, and set out on the long ride to Kerkstraat. To Hester Goldberg’s place.

*

They’d picked him up in the small hours, whilst he’d been in the process of breaking into the many-towered church of Sint Nicolaas. Not for any illicit reason, he claimed; it was just that he wanted to get closer to God, and couldn’t wait until morning.

He was so determined to have his communion that he’d broken the jaw of the officer who’d tried to arrest him.

Somewhere along the way he’d fallen into KLPD hands.

Van Kempen pulled up a chair. ‘So your name is Jacobus Baas,’ he said to the huge figure who sat, calm now, in the chair opposite.

Jacobus nodded. ‘I am.’

‘And you are – were – the doorman at The Den?’

‘Yes,’ Jacobus confirmed.

‘We’ve been looking for you.’

‘So I hear.’

‘Why haven’t you been in touch?’ Van Kempen demanded.

Jacobus made a steeple of his fingers. ‘When I heard your colleagues had come to the club, that they were looking for me, I had a moment of revelation.’

‘Oh?’

He turned his eyes skyward. The ceiling was chipped, and dirty, but he seemed to find stars or angels there. ‘I have found God, Superintendent.’

‘Good for you,’ said van Kempen. ‘He’s always out when I call on Him.’

‘Then I am sorry for you,’ Jacobus said with a beatific smile. ‘But look, God has revisited me in my cell. He has told me to purify myself! And for that process to begin, I must confess my sins. And one sin in particular.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘It goes back a long time,’ Jacobus announced. ‘Twenty years. ’

Twenty years? Ah, of course. ‘Would this have anything to do with Sophia Faruk’s arson conviction?’ van Kempen asked.

‘You’ve heard about that?’ Jacobus had a rosary, which he twisted between his fingers. The officer had let him keep it: there was no way it would hold his weight, should he think to try and hang himself. ‘The thing is,’ he continued, ‘it was all my idea.’