He smiled in wonder at the beautiful sight, moved almost to tears.
Placing the lantern onto the stone floor he shrugged off the small knapsack and opened it, and reaching inside, he withdrew a long and slender object that glinted in the light as he pulled it free. A noise made him look up again, one of the babes gently sighing in its sleep, perhaps disturbed by the newcomer. The sound filled him with pride.
In a small voice he whispered into the dark. “Hello my young wolves”
After a moment of quiet, and with a feeling of perfect serenity, he turned and passed back through the doorway with the sharp knife held before him.
CHAPTER 1
AMSTERDAM RED LIGHT DISTRICT
MIDNIGHT
The first thing that popped into Inspector Pieter Van Dijk’s head as he surveyed the scene was: Mary Kelly, Miller’s Court, Whitechapel, 1888.
He stood just inside the glass door alongside the strategically placed wall mirror, partly because this was about the only bit of the room’s floor that wasn’t bloodstained, and also because having walked into the room unprepared he’d found himself suddenly frozen immobile.
For about sixty seconds he reckoned he didn’t blink, or breathe. He just looked across at the small bed. And then, as was always the case, he felt ashamed and he briefly looked sideways at his own reflection in the mirror.
Noises of merriment drifted in from outside as another group of tourists flocked by, laughing and enjoying their night out, and he suddenly remembered that he hadn’t drawn the curtain across the door behind him. Quickly, and preying none of the gawkers had glanced through the glass, he reached back with his hand and grabbed the red material and yanked the curtain closed, pissed with himself.
Then he turned his gaze back towards the body. I’msorry, he thought, whoever you are.
The room was red. Partly from the red neon lights that surrounded the glass entrance, partly from the red frame of the ceiling mirror. But mostly because of the blood, which completely covered the bedsheet and its paper covering, blood so voluminous that it had splashed in waves over the edge of the mattress onto the cheap laminate wood flooring and then spread further, to the very edges of the small room. More red gore had turned the walls crimson, had also fountained upwards to splash and saturate the overhead mirror. It dripped from the small lampshade on the bedside table, surrounded the overturned stool that rested on the floor beside the doorway. And at the centre of it all, the pile of human remnants on the bed itself, legs spread and arms flung to the side, with the torso fully opened up and emptied of its contents – eviscerated was probably the correct medical term, he told himself.
Whoever had done this had really gone to work.
The only other person in the room with him was a fellow cop, Sergeant Daan Beumers, who for once was unusually subdued, which was unnatural for somebody who normally never stopped yakking. He’d been standing at the foot of the bed, bending forward at the waist in order to get a good view of the steaming cadaver, but now his freckled and fresh-faced colleague moved towards him.
“You’d better put these on boss,” he said, holding out a pair of plastic galoshes. “I always carry a few spare with me.”
As Pieter bent to fit them over his shoes his mind was already starting to slip into gear, going through the priorities: secure the scene – mark a path of contamination to keep the forensic boffins happy – note any smells apart from those emanating from the deceased, such as aftershave, fast food etc – initiate a preliminary survey – evaluate physical evidence possibilities. This was called crime scene management. Later, once the forensic guys arrived other tasks to complete would be to capture the scene photographically – prepare a crime-scene sketch (yes, they still did that, even in the modern age) - retrieve and secure forensic evidence – conduct a search pattern (in this case a radial search pattern centred on the bed would be best) – collect tissue and liquid samples, hairs and fibres, biological samples such as faeces and vomit and semen, DNA and fingerprint gathering – and retrieval of drugs and drug paraphernalia. Next it would be the removal of the cadaver (just how the hell they would do that did nor bare thinking about) and transportation to the lab for the autopsy, where the whole sequence would be repeated again in a much more sterile environment. There was a lot of work to be done, much of it to be carried out immediately by himself and Beumers before the boffins arrived. So best get on with it.
Pieter slid and squelched his way towards the bed, and turned his clinical cop’s eyes onto the victim before him.
It never ceased to amaze him of the kind of damage that could be done to the human body, both before and after death. Gunshot wounds resulting in fatalities were becoming more frequent in the city, especially those involving criminal gangs whose main illegal trade involved drug smuggling and people trafficking, but in a country where the acquisition of firearms was still quite difficult due to the stringent gun-ownership laws the main cause of death in murder cases was from stabbing. These usually involved a small number of wounds to the front of a person’s torso or defensive cuts to the palms and fingers. But even a single stab could be enough to leave frightful injuries, the insertion and retraction of a blade ripping through skin, tendons and if deep enough nicking bones and piercing organs. The loss of blood could be either minimal or plentiful, but other ‘substances’ could be released, such as bizarre-looking bulges
