The House of Dolls by David Hewson Read Free Book Online Page A

imaginary glass when he spotted Vos approaching.
    A brisk, brave man, little appreciated.
    ‘Welcome back, boss,’ he shouted as Vos got near. ‘It’s your round.’
    Vos smiled, lifted a pretend beer, said nothing.
    Then Klaas Mulder, hands on hips, leaning on the door of a meeting room.
    The carefully sculpted fine blonde hair was thinning. Rugged face lined, the cheekbones more prominent, the grey eyes more weary. When Vos was a brigadier Mulder shared the same rank. Always saw himself as competition. Not a man to pool resources or information. Then, after Vos’s departure, he was promoted to hoofdinspecteur, De Groot’s deputy, picked up the skimpy case against Theo Jansen and built it into something that could jail Amsterdam’s leading gang lord on obscure and perhaps dubious money-laundering charges.
    Vos was still half-crazy at the time. But one day, when he was feeling serious, he skipped the coffee shop and the bar and went to the library to read through all the newspaper reports. Any prosecution that put Jansen in jail was probably deemed a good thing by the city hierarchy. It still didn’t feel right to him. And now the evidence was unravelling. No wonder the man’s smile looked counterfeit.
    ‘Pieter. Good to see you back where you belong.’ Mulder reached out and felt Vos’s scruffy black jacket. ‘You’re wearing your old work clothes too.’
    Before he joined the police Mulder had almost become a professional footballer. Trialled for Ajax. Just a dodgy knee stopped him, or so he told everyone. That didn’t prevent him working out most days in a gym nearby. A tough, solitary, uncompromising man. He’d been lucky not to face a disciplinary hearing over some of his antics with suspects.
    ‘Just passing,’ Vos said and walked past him into the room.
    Two sights there to take his breath away. A large porcelain doll on the table, twice the size of the one he’d received almost three years before. And Liesbeth Prins, pale, thinner than ever, standing in the corner, hand to her mouth, staring at him.
    ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Where’s Wim?’
    ‘Busy.’ Her voice sounded fragile too. ‘He’ll come if we need him.’
    ‘This is about his daughter,’ Laura Bakker cut in. ‘He should be here now. What . . . ?’
    Vos smiled at her, put a finger to his lips, waited until she was quiet.
    He went over to a desk, took a pair of disposable gloves from the drawer, pulled them on.
    The doll was still inside a cardboard box shaped like a coffin. Left outside Prins’s home in one of the Jordaan’s more beautiful
hofjes
, a quiet sanctuary of houses set around a private garden near Noordermarkt. The security cameras had caught a hooded figure flitting into the entrance around seven in the evening. Nothing of use on the box. Nothing on the doll either except the hank of hair, the bloodstained pinafore dress and that curious note:
Love’s expensive, Wim. Get ready for the bill.
    The box was plain and ordinary. No line drawing of the Oortman house.
    ‘Where’s the hair?’ Vos asked.
    ‘Forensic have got it,’ Mulder said. ‘They came back thirty minutes ago and confirmed it’s from the Prins girl. As is the blood.’ The tall detective stared at De Groot. ‘Am I working on this or not?’
    ‘We don’t even know if there’s a case yet,’ the commissaris replied. ‘Give it time.’
    The note was in a plastic evidence envelope. Vos looked at it and frowned.
    ‘What?’ Mulder asked.
    ‘I already said.’ He looked at Liesbeth. ‘Prins doesn’t love his daughter. Does he?’
    She came a step closer. He could smell her perfume. The same as it always was.
    ‘That’s not true,’ she said. ‘Katja’s been a nightmare for the last few years. Wim’s done his best. Paid for medical help. Paid to keep her out of trouble. It didn’t—’
    ‘Does he love her?’ he repeated.
    ‘In his own way,’ she replied, staring at him with the same sad, brown eyes. ‘You won’t understand. If there’s