Pieter stepped backwards and looked down, but he could see nothing because of the covering of snow.
He climbed back in and dusted the snow off his hair.
“Do you want to see the body? We still have it if you do - although it’s not a pretty sight.”
“No need. We can head back now.”
Back in his own car outside the town hall Pieter checked his phone and saw he had an email.
Some initial data had been retrieved from Tobias Vinke’s mobile phone, which they had fished out of the canal by the boatyard.
Tracking a mobile phone was relatively easy, if it were turned on. Changing the SIM card after every call would negate this to a certain extent, but not completely. Some criminals used cheap phones, known as burners, and after using them once they would ditch them somewhere, dropping them in a litter bin or throwing them over a wall.
Once police had a suspect’s number they could zone in and locate the general areas that it was used in.
Having found Vinke’s phone in the canal, they soon established a number of sites of interest.
According to the email, most of these spots were in central Amsterdam itself, which didn’t really help them an awful lot. But on several occasions over the past week, the signal from his phone had pinged off two masts outside the city. One in the town of Edam, which was about fifteen kilometres further north of Ransdorp, and the other at Hoorn, which was around twenty kilometres north of Edam. Both towns were strung on the main coastal road out of Amsterdam, the N247, which suggested that Vinke had his phone turned on whilst driving into this part of North Holland. The death of the cyclist here in Ransdorp, if it were indeed the work of their prime suspect, seemed to back up this theory. And if they took this hypothesis forward, and continued Vinke’s probable route along the coastal road, it suggested that he had holed up with Nina Bakker not at his previous home in Warder, which they had raided without success on Sunday, but somewhere closer to Hoorn.
It was still a large area, but the digital forensic cyber-cops who specialized in the field of mobile phone data extraction were trying to shrink this area still further by checking as many phone masts as possible in the vicinity.
The net was starting to close.
Vinke may have been dead, but Pieter felt sure they were very near to finding the spot where Nina Bakker was being held captive.
He was also convinced this would lead them to Lotte and her accomplice, the sniper.
◆◆◆
On his way back to Amsterdam Pieter made a quick call to Prisha Kapoor to check up on the situation with Kaatje.
It was still quite early, and the road south was growing busy with morning commuters heading for work. Prisha told him that Kaatje was fine. She had taken a sleeping pill at her suggestion and was still sleeping soundly.
“I’m going to work from home today, and Rowan is taking some more things down to Utrecht soon, but she’ll be back just after lunch. So there’s going to be someone with Kaatje all day. It’s best to let her sleep. You get on with the case. Everything is good here.”
Pieter thanked her and ended the call, and followed the flow of traffic south to the city.
Chapter 23
Mission Briefing
Pieter sensed the tense atmosphere as soon as he arrived at the main Police HQ on Elandsgracht. There was a strange hush throughout the large building, which he recognized from the few previous occasions he’d experienced it. It was the nervous anticipation when a major breakthrough on a big case was in the offing.
As he climbed the stairs to the squad room a junior clerk intercepted him and directed him to the conference room on the second floor, next door to the media suite. He was just in time, the man told him. Something was definitely going on.
The large room was filled with people. Pieter stood in the doorway momentarily and glanced around.
A set of tables and chairs had been arranged in a large horseshoe-shaped cluster in the centre of the carpeted floor. At the open end, most of the wall was taken up with a large Smart projector screen, which was used either for briefings before a big operation or for video conferencing calls. Above the screen was a camera, and to either side a pair of speakers. At the moment the projector screen was blank.
There was room for about twenty people around the tables, and each place was equipped with a laptop and a Wi-Fi hub, plus a small microphone. More chairs had been arranged around the walls, while in one corner there was a desk for serving tea and coffee and pastries.
It looked like they had been busy while he was gone.
Most of the seats were already occupied, but looking around he noticed somebody waving him over to a vacant spot. It was Floris de Kok, and Pieter moved across and sat down next to him.
“What the hell’s going on?” he asked under his breath. It was strange to see Floris here in the main building: he spent most of his time down in the basement, filing away his beloved paperwork. The fact that he was here at the centre of things, like a troglodyte blinking in the daylight, filled him with apprehension.
Floris couldn’t stop grinning, enjoying himself immensely.
“I think we might have found them, Boss. I did as you said and told the people over at Surveillance Command at Bos en Lommerplein to go through all the cameras en route from Amsterdam to Ransdorp, with instructions to track the van they picked up in relation to the hit-and-run. They weren’t too happy with the sudden workload, especially as it meant they had to put
