Pieter tried not to let his irritation show; sometimes de Kok was slow at getting to the point.
“Give me a few more details will you?”
“Right. Several nights ago there was a hit-and-run fatal road accident out at Ransdorp. A guy riding his bicycle was found dead at the side of the road early in the morning. Hit by a vehicle a few nights before it seems. The dead chap has been identified and his family have confirmed he’d popped out on an errand and not come home, so they reported him as missing, and the spot where his body was found points to the fact that he was on his way back when he was hit. He was lying in a ditch, which had frozen over, hence the reason he wasn’t spotted for a while.”
“Okay. But hit-and-runs happen all of the time.”
“True. More often than people realize. If you are driving along late at night, say for example out in the sticks like in this case, where it might be dark and with no street-lighting, and suddenly a pedestrian or another car or a cyclist appears from nowhere and, boom, you have no time to react, before you know it you’ve hit them. Now, most people would stop to help, phone for an ambulance, or give them first aid or whatever. Do the right thing. Sadly, however, not everybody. Some people panic and drive straight on, shitting themselves but making a snap decision not to stop, to head straight home in the hope that maybe they just hit a cat or something. And even if they know that isn’t the case, that they’ve just in fact run over another person, they don’t always think rationally. They don’t want to ruin the rest of their lives and go to jail all because of a few seconds of inattention. Especially if a child is involved. So they go home and spend days, weeks and sometimes years having to live with what they’ve done, and unless there are witnesses, they get away with it. As you said, it happens all of the time.”
Pieter, sitting in his car outside Prisha’s apartment, sighed loudly.
“Look, I already know all of this stuff Floris. But what does this have to do with our case? Why has it been matched up?”
“Because the local police don’t think that this was simply a hit-and-run. They think it was intentional.”
Pieter switched his mobile to speakerphone and clipped it to the holder on the dashboard.
“They spent a whole day at the scene studying the tyre marks on the road, and they’ve come to the conclusion that the driver turned his vehicle around, and then swerved straight into the guy on his bike. They say the skid marks prove this. They are also fairly sure that the body was moved. It was found about fifteen feet back from the edge of the road, and the position it was in – laid straight out nice and neatly beneath the ice – makes them think the corpse was rolled into the ditch. Plus the bike was in there with him too.
Okay, so they decided to check around, gathering any footage from nearby CCTV cameras. Anyway, they came back with something interesting. An image, of a man wearing overalls and driving a dark van. He was snapped driving through the village itself, very near the accident scene, and the time display on the image matches up roughly with the time the victim’s family say he was away from home on his errand.”
Pieter heard his mobile chime quietly.
“I’ve just sent the pic over.”
Pieter snatched hold of his phone and tapped on the MMS text. He leaned forward in his seat, his eyes screwed up as he studied the tiny image. It showed a profile view of a man in the driver’s seat of a black van. Although the shot was grainy, it was in colour, and must have been snapped just as the van was driving by a streetlight in Ransdorp so that it was easy to see the brown overalls he was wearing. And even more promising, he had a baseball cap on his head, exactly as Mr Clegg, the resident at the nursing home on Vondelstraat, had described.
“The police out there decided to put the details into ViCASnl to see if anything came up at their end, and hey presto, the people at NCSC struck lucky. Not bad for a bunch of hick cops, eh?”
Pieter said nothing back initially.
“What do you think Boss? Is he our guy? What are you going to do with this?”
“I think I need to go out there and see for myself, Floris. I also think you should do more checking. Get in touch with Bos en Lommerplein and have them do a trawl of all the cameras around that general area. Also tell them to start from the Amsterdam ring road and work northwards, as far as Ransdorp and then beyond, to see if they can pick up this van and find out where he was setting off from and where he was headed to.”
“They’re not going to like it, being told to get out of their beds at this time, on a cold night. You know what they are like, that lot? Most of them are just seeing their days out to retirement, a nice and easy number.”
“Floris, I really don’t care what they think.” Then he added: “But well done on this.”
The skies over Holland always have a washed-out quality to them, like the colour has been rinsed away. The flatness of the land seems to suck out any warmth or vitality, even in the middle of a hot summer. At this time of the year, in the middle of a freezing winter, as the sun reluctantly wakes from its slumber, creaking and groaning like an old man, the clouds overhead seem to settle over the countryside like a shroud over a corpse.
This
