Into the Night: Inspector Rykel Book 2 (Amsterdam Quartet) by Jake Woodhouse Read Free Book Online Page A

come back later tonight. With some friends.’ He smiled.
    He’d been finding that smiling was pretty good at unnerving people.
    ‘So what’s it gonna be?’ he asked, feeling like someone in a movie.
    ‘Okay, okay,’ said the guy. ‘If I tell you I don’t see you again. Okay?’
    Kees smiled a bit more. As suspected, the guy came from somewhere where the police had more power, and hadn’t worked out that it was different in the Netherlands.
    Fifteen minutes later Kees was standing outside a house in Zandvoort, the North Sea at his back. He’d even seen some people on the beach, the sun hanging over the sea reflecting light back off the green-brown water. He’d been here last summer, he remembered as he pressed the doorbell.
    He and a few colleagues had made the trip out having seen posters for a world skinny-dipping record attempt. Expectations had been high, and they’d settled in on the beach with large amounts of beer.
    But in the end they’d been disappointed. It turned out anyone who actually wanted to take their clothes off in public wasn’t worth looking at.
    Finishing their drinks, they’d driven back into Amsterdam and gone to a live sex show, which Kees had ducked out from early. For some reason he’d found it depressing.
    Nothing much happened in response to the bell ringing, so he walked round the side, noticing how the saltspray was corroding the metal gutters. The garden out back was small, neat, with a few rows of tulips following a white wooden fence. He went through the gate, which he expected to creak but didn’t, and walked up to the patio windows, peering inside.
    Neat, like the garden. Not the kind of place he’d expect a Bosniak to have friends.
    He tried the windows but they were locked. Glancing around he could see the back of the house wasn’t overlooked directly, except maybe by the houses on either side. He turned back and stared at his reflection in the glass, the image slightly doubled, out of focus.
    Fuck it
, he thought as he pulled out his gun, flipped it round and broke the left-hand pane with the butt.
    Glass tinkled to the ground. A shard just missed his foot.
    Kees brushed off the gun and re-holstered it, his foot crunching glass as he stepped inside.
    His search turned up little; there were two bedrooms, one lived in, the other looking like it might have been ages ago but had been left untended for a while, dust on the bedclothes giving it away.
    In the kitchen there was a half-eaten burger, congealing in its open wrapper next to a laptop set up on a breakfast bar, and a soft-drink cup. He prodded the bun. It was still warm, the sesame seeds felt like braille against his finger, and a bit of brown glossy sauce oozed out of the edge.
    Pushing aside the burger and the large cardboard cup with its swirls of red and white spiralling round the outside, he moved the laptop so he could see the screen. Thescreensaver showed the pink silhouette of a dancing woman on a black background.
    He slapped the space bar and the machine whirred into life, replacing the dancing woman with a plain desktop. A web browser was open, with two tabs. The first tab showed a news website with a story about a headless man being found after a tweet, the second was the Twitter account in question.
    Kees had heard all the chatter on the police radio about the beheading as he’d driven over to Haarlem.
    He looked at the Twitter page.
    The first tweet gave an address in Amstelveen.
    The second, posted at 17.46, read, ‘More to come?’
    Everybody in the Netherlands must be looking at this
, he thought.
    For a moment he wondered where it had all gone wrong.
    This was the kind of case he should be in charge of, not sneaking around looking for missing witnesses.
    He heard a noise outside, and looked out of the window, ducking back just in time.
    Someone was walking up to the front door.
    The footsteps stopped. Kees could hear keys rattling, then one turning in the lock. He stepped quietly behind the door