Finally, her movements ceased, to be replaced by quiet sobbing.
“Pieter?” she implored. “Pieter, please help.”
Lying there and trying to regain his breath from the violent struggle, he was vaguely aware of his mobile phone ringing insistently from the bedroom.
◆◆◆
Having checked on the girl in the basement and then done a quick circuit outside to make sure everything was secure, Johan strode back into the lounge, shivering and dusting the snow from his coat and looking forward to getting the log fire going.
He stopped dead at the sight which confronted him.
His niece was lying on the floor, twisting and thrashing, grunting like some beast, having some kind of fit he thought in alarm. But when she turned over onto her back and he saw her eyes, which were rolled back into her head so they bulged out of her face like white marbles, Johan faltered and drew in his breath.
He looked at her in dismay, wondering if he should help.
Yet when he saw a strange white mist coming out of her mouth, a little bit like smoke but all shiny and sticky-looking and flecked with black, and he smelt a pungent stench like rotten food or corrupted flesh, then, slowly, he drew away and quietly backed back out of the room, his fingers all shaky and sweaty as he pulled the door gently shut.
Chapter 22
Waterland
Pieter looked down at Kaatje’s sleeping form on the large bed.
Exhausted and mentally drained, confused and scared and tearful, she had fallen asleep in his arms on the landing, and he had carried her back to the bedroom.
He was still breathing hard but more from shock than anything. His arm throbbed painfully and the tips of his fingers felt numb, but thankfully the blade of the knife had not slashed his arm too deeply. The injury seemed to only be superficial. He’d washed it underneath the bathroom taps to stem the bleeding and wrapped it in a towel.
God, what the hell was going on? his confused mind demanded.
None of this made any sense, this whirlwind of bizarre events and incidents.
He heard his phone start to ring again and, glad for the distraction, he walked around the bed and picked it up, glancing at the CALLER ID.
Floris de Kok. He was one of the civilian desk-jockeys at HQ, a good man who had offered invaluable help during the Werewolf case, and who specialized in organising the files department as well as working in the surveillance unit.
It was shortly after one in the morning, so whatever he was calling for it must be something important.
◆◆◆
Prisha Kapoor and her partner Rowan, who hailed from Dublin, currently still lived at their place in Amsterdam, a neat little corner-apartment overlooking Erasmus Park. Most evenings and weekends were spent shifting their belongings over to their new place in Utrecht, but their lease here still had a month or so to run, and so luckily for Pieter they were in town when he rang in the early hours of the morning.
Surprisingly they were still up – watching old repeats of The X-Files, Prisha told him. When he explained his situation and stressed the urgency of it, he heard Rowan call out, “what’s he waiting for? Tell the eejit to get his arse round here. To be sure to be sure,” she added for his benefit.
Twenty minutes later and Pieter pulled up on the quiet street just outside the building’s glass door, and helped Kaatje out of the car. She was half asleep, dressed in his thick winter coat over her jeans and shoes, mumbling to herself, with the bandages back over her eyes. She seemed very docile and subdued now, as though all of her strength had evaporated away, and this left Pieter more concerned than relieved.
But he didn’t have time to think about it right now. Later, in the cold light of day, he could assess the events from earlier and try to make sense of them, but for now he needed somewhere Kaatje could stay, with somebody who he could trust.
Prisha buzzed him in.
She was waiting in the doorway to their apartment, and she ushered them inside.
The TV was off. In the background, some calming meditation music was playing, which sounded like whale noises to Pieter. On the wall was a framed print of MC Escher’s impossible staircase. Rowan was in to all this wacky stuff, he remembered.
“What happened to you?” Prisha asked upon seeing the long strip of fabric dressing on his forearm.
“I’ll tell you later,” he told her, and she didn’t press him on it.
Rowan led Kaatje away and sat her down on an armchair close to the fireplace, tutting and fussing over her.
“Look, I appreciate this. I’m very sorry for springing this on you both like this, at this time of night, but I didn’t have-”
“Say no more,” she interrupted him. “It sounds like something serious is happening. Is it connected to the Nina Bakker case?”
Pieter swallowed and nodded.
“You’d best get going then. We’ll take care of Kaatje.”
Back out on the street Pieter took out his mobile and rang Floris de Kok back.
“Talk to me,” he said as he climbed into the car.
“Boss. Something important came in about an hour ago, and I thought you should know. We’ve had a hit on the ViCASnl system which looks very promising.”
Floris was referring to the national crime-linkage database. Pieter had put in a request for any suspects or vehicles that matched their own to be flagged up and referred over to them, for cross-checking.
“Go on.”
“Well as a matter of fact it was the people over at NCSC, the security camera nerve-centre at Bos en Lommerplein, who spotted it.”
“They sent us something the other day, which turned out to be useless,” Pieter pointed out, remembering the CCTV footage outside the Bakker’s house.
“Yeah I know. But I did a little checking of my own this time, just to see if this had anything going for
