“No, no… absolutely no. I’m sorry. Everything is fine now,” he promised, his insides feeling like they had turned to liquid.
“Very good. You just wait for my call, and when it comes you do what needs to be done.”
Then the line went dead.
Tobias grabbed hold of the bookshelf to stop himself from collapsing to the floor.
Lotte ended the call and stood staring out of the window, at the frosted grass of the old courtyard, and the statue of The Virgin Mary, and the 15th Century wooden house just opposite her new apartment, and she sighed in annoyance.
Sitting at the table behind her, her Uncle Johan asked: “Problems?”
Turning away from the window, she looked across the room at him.
“Possibly; now we’ll need to keep a watch on him as well.”
Chapter 10
Man in a Van
After making the shock announcement and revealing to the waiting press that Nina Bakker, (daughter to an eminent eye surgeon and his glamourous wife, who he confirmed were both dead, found murdered in the burnt-out remains of their luxury home) was missing and the police were now treating this as a kidnapping case, Commissaris Huijbers conducted a question and answer session. Pieter stayed for the first few questions, which were fairly standard fare from the reporters, and then quietly slipped away.
He was still fuming from the earlier confrontation, and the dressing down that Huijbers had delivered. Pieter was fully aware that the Police Chief was simply using this as an opportunity to push his own agenda, to try and undermine and antagonize him publicly because of the recent history between the two of them. It was pathetic office politics from Huijbers, nothing more than silly point-scoring, and Pieter was determined not to rise to it or react. It was just unfortunate that Kaatje had found herself caught in the crossfire, and now she had disappeared, and Pieter felt dejected as he went up to the top floor and closed his office door behind him.
Booting up his computer, he checked his email messages and saw that he had one marked priority. The sender was the National Centrum Surveillance Command building next to the shopping complex at Bos en Lommerplein, the newly built nerve-centre where security camera footage for the whole of the Netherlands was gathered and analysed. Unlike some European countries such as the United Kingdom, Holland, and especially Amsterdam itself, had relatively few police surveillance cameras. In the city there were just over 200, a ridiculously small number for a place regarded as the murder capital of Europe. To counteract this deficiency, a law was passed back in 2014 that enabled the Amsterdam police to access the thousands of private security cameras throughout the city. Anybody who fitted cameras of their own, whether it was in a shop, a bar or restaurant, a museum or outside their own home (but not inside private residences: they were thankfully still off-limits), at a cashpoint, in a privately-run car park, or anywhere else, they then had to register them in the central database at NCSC. The police could at any point log into their live feeds, or see recorded footage, without having to ask for prior permission or to get a warrant. At the flick of a couple of switches they could tune in to any security camera anywhere in Amsterdam and the rest of The Netherlands to see what they revealed.
The email waiting in his inbox contained a short AVCHD encrypted video file from NCSC labelled VONDELSTRAAT – 7:08PMand dated the night of the abduction. The recording lasted approximately two minutes. There was an additional note informing him that the footage was from a street surveillance camera, but the small camera fixed to the Bakkers’ gatepost had not been working at the time. Which was a damn shame, thought Pieter! The email also stated that after a thorough trawl, this was the only footage of a possible suspect to the abduction yet discovered.
Pieter clicked on the file and eagerly waited for it to download. It was better than nothing, he supposed.
It turned out to be disappointing.
Leaning close to the computer monitor, the first thing Pieter noticed was just how dense the fog had been that night. The whole of the frame was filled with thick, swirling clouds, with just a faint glow from a couple of street lamps showing through the impenetrable grey mass. Then he saw a twin set of faint headlights come into view, moving through the fog like a pair of sickly yellow eyes, and a darkish vehicle – a van, he thought – glided slowly past. He watched as the headlights halted for a few seconds, before turning left. Now he was looking at red tail-lights and nothing else, for the fog was just too dense. Another few seconds ticked by, and as he watched Pieter worked out what he was seeing. The van, and he was certain it would have been a van, was in the Bakkers’ driveway in front of the huge gates, presumably waiting for them to open. Yes, now the tail-lights were moving forward once more and were quickly swallowed up by the swirling grey clouds.
There was a brief fuzz of interference on the screen and the logged time jumped forward to 7:18PM and the footage resumed, this time showing the yellow headlights reappear and the vehicle turning back onto Vondelstraat and disappear in the opposite direction, away from the camera. A few seconds later and an orange glow flickered into view from just off frame and grew brighter by the second - the fire.
The video file came to a stop, and Pieter sat back in his chair, pondering things over.
On his desk were the print-outs of the two emergency calls from the night of the abduction.
