Isadora Bryan - Black Widow

There was no sign of the proverbial black book. Nor, with the exception of a few bills, any written documents of any kind. Of course, Ruben had been an IT specialist; he’d doubtless kept all his contact details on his laptop, or maybe even his phone. Harald believed that you could do anything with a phone nowadays, if you had small enough fingers.

His own fingers were meaty, and so inflexible that he sometimes wondered if he might be missing a joint or two. It was symptomatic of his body all over, really. He had no illusions as to his physical appeal; his first wife had said he was arranged like an ink-blot test.

He looked in the few cupboards, and beneath the bed, all the usual places. Sure enough he found a laptop, a new Macbook. He didn’t try to turn it on himself; he would suggest to Tanja that she should have the IT bods take a look at it. Just in case. Maybe there was a thingy, a spreadsheet.

Harald had embraced the technological age, though only in the sense that a child might embrace a senile old grandmother, with hairy warts, and a bladder problem. The last computer he’d owned – the only computer – had broken the day after the warranty expired, presumably in protest at all the emails it had been receiving from the bloodsuckers at Swartout, Schoonhoven and Rosenthal. Lucky? Hah!

He checked his watch. The day wore on. Handing the key back to the building superintendent, he headed out to his car, and braved the traffic back to the station. He hoped to catch Tanja before she left for home. He had no real news to report, but he liked to be near her.

Chapter 5

It was gone six by the time Tanja dropped Pieter back at his flat at the edge of the Binnengasthuis. The heart of student land, she considered wryly. The kid might have been better served doing another degree. Or going to work on Daddy’s farm. She could see him on a tractor, a gold-plated tractor, slow-ploughing neat lines into his inheritance.

It hadn’t been a long day by any means, but she could tell he was tired. He invited her in for a coffee, but she declined. She had something else in mind.

Something foolish. She knew it was that, even as she steered her car towards the south-east, towards Diemen. Towards Alex. Dumb, dumb, dumb!

She made a beat of it: Dum-dum-dum, tapping it out on her steering wheel.

It was a pointless trip, in so many ways. And the A1 was a bitch at this time of day. But she couldn’t seem to help herself. Saturday still felt like a lifetime away.

Besides, she had some of her most inspirational moments in her car.

She temporarily forgot about Alex, and thought instead about Mikael Ruben. To die like that, to go to the afterlife, or oblivion, without being able to see where he was heading! And his parents! A couple of agents had been dispatched to Den Haag to speak to them, and by all accounts the mother’s grief, in particular, had been hard to bear.

It was always the parents who suffered most, Tanja considered bleakly. Perhaps the worst aspect of the Butcher case had been speaking with the little girls’ families. There had been times when she’d found it close to unbearable. She still did.

Detachment, Tanja!

Anyway, the officers hadn’t learned anything from the trip. As far as the Rubens were concerned, their son had been an angel; no one could have taken a dislike to him.

She didn’t think that inspiration going to come to her tonight. At least not in that sense. So she turned on the stereo. It hadn’t worked in ages, but Pieter had surprised her by fixing it whilst she was filling up with petrol.

‘Just a broken fuse,’ he’d shrugged. ‘You didn’t seem to have any spares, so I took one from the ABS circuit. Just try not to slam on your brakes in the wet, okay?’

‘What?’ Tanja protested.

‘Only kidding, Detective Inspector. There was a spare, actually.’

It was weird, that he dared to tease her. Yet stranger still was that she found it hard to take issue with it. Not properly, at any rate.

She reached into the glove box, withdrawing a CD at random. It was one of her homemade compilations by the look of it. Good; she liked variety in her music. Her moods changed all the while; it was fitting that her tunes should do likewise.

The opening bars of Lithium worried at the speakers. She was immediately transported back to ‘91, when she’d seen Nirvana play at the Paradiso. A year or so after Anton and Ophelie had been killed, the denial turning to anger. She’d been shocked by the volume, and the sweat dripping from the ceiling into the gob-smacked, demented mouths of the fans.

But Nirvana was angry young person’s music, not angry old person’s music. She skipped forward a track. Modulated guitar. Jimi. Little Wing .

Skip. Me and Bobby McGee . Perfect!

No, not perfect. Janis and Bobby’s love affair is doomed to end, way too soon, somewhere near Salinas, wherever that might be. Hardly a positive message.

Tanja stabbed at the button. The End , by the Doors. Christ.

She chewed on her lip. Never mind that they had an agreement in place for dinner Saturday night; she had to see him now . She was like a girl, albeit without the saving grace of innocence: save for the small chance that they might end up in bed together (and how she longed for that; it had been ages ), no good could come of it.

The music swelled; the music died. Ah, of course, it was that old classic: artists who had died at the age of twenty-seven!

Mikael Ruben was twenty-seven, she considered.

Alex, too.

She put her foot down, feeling anxious again.

Diemen had been a separate town, once, but it had effectively been subsumed into the sprawl of Greater Amsterdam. It was divided into three parts. Old Diemen was pretty enough – though that prettiness hadn’t extended to the station building on Den Hartoglaan, which, in conceptual terms, was the mirror of the gloomy Elandsgracht headquarters.

‘I’m looking for Detective Sergeant Hoekstra,’ she said to the uniformed girl on the desk.

The young woman looked up from the document she’d been studying. ‘Is it a police matter, madam?’

‘No. He’s a friend of mine.’

The desk officer’s eyes widened, but she didn’t pass comment as she reached for a phone. She was a good-looking girl, Tanja supposed, her hair lustrous, her skin smooth. The usual superficial nonsense.

Tanja sniffed, the air catching awkwardly in her offset nose. It was just a small thing, really, hardly noticeable. Just one of many battle scars. It didn’t bother her at all.

Character, she thought; her body had that lived-in look. But it was all right; Alex liked that sort of thing. He’d told her so, more or less, on a windswept beach two years ago. The North Sea beating around the Frisian island of Texel, the October sky streaked with all the colours of a forge, the few trees likewise turned gold and bronze. And Alex, his arm around her shoulders, saying, in his typically roundabout fashion, that he would rather live in an older house than a new one; that autumn was his favourite season. She remembered thinking that he was an idiot, but a charming one.

The girl replaced the phone, blowing a strand of long hair from her eyes as she did so. Perhaps Tanja would call the clinic again, at some point. Just to satisfy her curiosity.

The desk manikin worried at a finger. ‘I’m afraid he’s already left for the day.’

‘Where’s he gone?’

‘I can’t say.’

Tanja showed her badge. ‘I need to speak to him.’

The girl straightened up. She was quite tall; gravity had yet to drag her down. It would, of course. This thing she had now – it would pass quickly. And then she would have to perfect some other trick, as all women did. Tanja didn’t envy her at all, because the trick was hard to master.