Алистер Маклин - Floodgate

Bakkeren and Dekker were the names of the two boat-owners who had been involuntarily deprived of their vessels during the previous night. As it turned out, they were brothers-in-law. Bakkeren was phlegmatic about the borrowing of his boat and not particularly concerned by the fact that he had not yet been allowed to examine his boat to see what damage, if any, had been done to it. Dekker, by contrast and understandably, was seething with rage: he had, as he had informed de Graaf and van Effen within twenty seconds of their arrival at his suburban home, been rather roughly handled during the previous evening.

‘Is no man safe in this godforsaken city?’ He didn’t speak the words, he shouted them, but it was reasonable to assume that this was not his normal conversational custom. ‘Police, you say you are, police! Ha! Police! A fine job you do of guarding the honest citizens of Amsterdam. There I was, sitting in my own boat and minding my own business when those four gangsters –’

‘Moment,’ van Effen said. ‘Were they wearing gloves?’

‘Gloves!’ Dekker, a small dark, intense man, stared at him in outraged disbelief. ‘Gloves! Here am I, the victim of a savage assault, and all you can think of –’

‘Gloves.’

Something in van Effen’s tone had reached through the man’s anger, one could almost see his blood pressure easing a few points. ‘Gloves, eh? Funny, that. Yes, they were. All of them.’

Van Effen turned to a uniformed sergeant. ‘Bernhard.’

‘Yes, sir. I’ll tell the finger-print men to go home.’

‘Sorry, Mr Dekker. Tell it your way. If there was anything that struck you as unusual or odd, let us know.’

‘It was all bloody odd,’ Dekker said morosely. He had been, as he had said, minding his own business in his little cabin, when he had been hailed from the bank. He’d gone on deck and a tall man – it was almost dark and his features had been indistinguishable – had asked him if he could hire the boat for the night. He said he was from a film company and wanted to shoot some night scenes and offered a thousand guilders. Dekker had thought it extremely odd that an offer of that nature should have been made at such short notice and with night falling: he had refused. Next thing he knew, three other men had appeared on the scene, he’d been dragged from the boat, bundled into a car and driven to his home.

Van Effen said: ‘Did you direct them?’

‘Are you mad?’ Looking at the fiery little man it was impossible to believe that he would volunteer information to anyone.

‘So they’ve been watching your movements for some time. You weren’t aware that you were under surveillance at any time?’

‘Under what?’

‘Being watched, followed, seeing the same stranger an unusual number of times?’

‘Who’d watch and follow a fishmonger? Well, who would think they would? So they hauled me into the house –’

‘Didn’t you try to escape at any time?’

‘Would you listen to the man?’ Dekker was justifiably bitter. ‘How far would you get with your wrists handcuffed behind your back?’

‘Handcuffs?’

‘I suppose you thought that only police used those things. So they dragged me into the bathroom, tied my feet with a clothes line and taped my mouth with Elastoplast. Then they locked the door from the outside.’

‘You were completely helpless?’

‘Completely.’ The little man’s face darkened at the recollection. ‘I managed to get to my feet and a hell of a lot of good that did me. There’s no window in the bathroom. If there had been I don’t know of any way I could have broken it and even if I had there was no way I could shout for help, was there? Not with God knows how many strips of plaster over my mouth.

‘Three or four hours later – I’m not sure how long it was – they came back and freed me. The tall man told me they’d left fifteen hundred guilders on the kitchen table – a thousand for the hire of the boat and five hundred for incidental expenses.’

‘What expenses?’

‘How should I know?’ Dekker sounded weary. ‘They didn’t explain. They just left.’

‘Did you see them go? Type of car, number, anything like that?’

‘I did not see them go. I did not see their car, far less its number.’ Dekker spoke with the air of a man who is exercising massive restraint. ‘When I say they freed me, I meant that they had unlocked and removed the handcuffs. Took me a couple of minutes to remove the strips of Elastoplast and damnably painful it was, too. Took quite a bit of skin and my moustache with it too. Then I hopped through to the kitchen and got the bread knife to the ropes round my ankles. The money was there, all right and I’d be glad if you’d put it in your police fund because I won’t touch their filthy money. Almost certainly stolen anyway. They and their car, of course, were to hell and gone by that time.’

Van Effen was diplomatically sympathetic. ‘Considering what you’ve been through, Mr Dekker, I think you’re being very calm and restrained. Could you describe them?’

‘Ordinary clothes. Rain-coats. That’s all.’

‘Their faces?’

‘It was dark on the canal bank, dark in the car and by the time we reached here they were all wearing hoods. Well, three of them. One stayed on the boat.’

‘Slits in the hoods, of course.’ Van Effen wasn’t disappointed, he’d expected nothing else.

‘Round holes, more like.’

‘Did they talk among themselves?’

‘Not a word. Only the leader spoke.’

‘How do you know he was the leader?’

‘Leaders give orders, don’t they?’

‘I suppose. Would you recognize the voice again?’

Dekker hesitated. ‘I don’t know. Well, yes, I think I would.’

‘Ah. Something unusual about his voice?’

‘Yes. Well. He talked funny Dutch.’

‘Funny?’

‘It wasn’t – what shall I say – Dutch Dutch.’

‘Poor Dutch, is that it?’

‘No. The other way around. It was very good. Too good. Like the news-readers on TV and radio.’

‘Too precise, yes? Book Dutch. A foreigner, perhaps?’

‘That’s what I would guess.’

‘Would you have any idea where he might have come from?’

‘There you have me, Lieutenant. I’ve never been out of the country. I hear often enough that many people in the city speak English or German or both. Not me. I speak neither. Foreign tourists don’t come to a fishmonger’s shop. I sell my fish in Dutch.’

‘Thanks, anyway. Could be a help. Anything else about this leader – if that’s what he was?’

‘He was tall, very tall.’ He tried his first half-smile of the afternoon. ‘You don’t have to be tall to be taller than I am but I didn’t even reach up to his shoulders. Ten, maybe twelve centimetres taller than you are. And thin, very very thin: he was wearing a long rain-coat, blue it was, that came way below his knees and it fell from his shoulders like a coat hanging from a coat-hanger.’

‘The hoods had holes, you say, not slits. You could see this tall man’s eyes?’

‘Not even that. This fellow was wearing dark eye-glasses.’

‘Sun-glasses? I did ask you to tell me if there was anything odd about those people. Didn’t you think it odd that a person should be wearing a pair of sun-glasses at night?’

‘Odd? Why should it be odd? Look, Lieutenant, a bachelor like me spends a lot of time watching movies and TV. The villains always wear dark glasses. That’s how you can tell they’re villains.’

‘True, true.’ Van Effen turned to Dekker’s brother-in-law. ‘I understand, Mr Bakkeren, that you were lucky enough to escape the attentions of those gentlemen.’

‘Wife’s birthday. In town for a dinner and show. Anyway, they could have stolen my boat any time and I would have known nothing about it. If they were watching Maks here, they would have been watching me and they’d know that I only go near my boat on weekends.’