The Wrong Girl by David Hewson Read Free Book Online Page A

narrow alley to the left. Shadows. Maybe somewhere to hide or lose them. He stumbled into it, caught his foot on a manhole cover, went down to the ground, whined as he grazed his knuckles trying to keep his face from hitting hard stone.
    When he looked up he knew this was over. The place was nothing more than a blind passageway, a high brick wall at the end. No windows. No people. Just rubbish bins and a stray cat streaking out of the corner as if fearing what was to come.
    ‘Bloody stupid,’ he muttered and heard his old voice, bitter Lancashire grit, all the hope and little love it had once possessed thieved from him over the years.
    Think for yourself.
    He hadn’t done that in a while. They did it for him.
    Footsteps behind. A metallic sound he didn’t want to think about.
    A woman there, severe face, black hair. The boss. He could see that.
    ‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ she ordered in English. ‘We’re taking you in.’ She smiled. ‘You’re going to talk.’
    ‘I don’t know nothing,’ he grumbled, half-hidden in the shadows, staring at her bland, hard face. ‘Even if I did . . .’
    The men around her had guns out.
    ‘We’ll see,’ she said with a nod to a man by her, hooded, big, strong. He had a weapon in one hand. Cuffs in the other. ‘Get him.’
    ‘Take orders from a woman, do you?’ Bouali yelled in his coarse, northern voice. ‘That’s what you call a man here?’
    Her eyes were on him. Cold and unfeeling.
    ‘Do as you’re told, boy,’ she said. ‘You . . .’
    Martin Bowers, Mujahied Bouali, scrabbled round on the ground, found the gun inside his belt, got his fingers round the grip. Sometimes things happened without him thinking. They just came into his head.
    He was turning the gun on them before he even realized.
    The phone in Vos’s jacket pocket rang. Just past the Melkweg. He cursed and paused, out-of-breath, glanced at the screen.
    Van der Berg. Not a man who wasted time or words.
    ‘What?’
    ‘There’s something wrong here. I think I just saw a kid snatched. Pink jacket like they were talking about.’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘Off the square. A black van. It went back into the centre. I’d have got a number if it wasn’t for all these damned spooks driving around like idiots.’ A pause. ‘Where are you? Where’s Laura?’
    Keeping up with the AIVD men. Out of sight.
    ‘We’ll be back in a minute. I think they’ve got the man.’
    ‘What man?’ Van der Berg yelled. ‘I saw him here. Putting the kid in a van.’ That gap again and they were both thinking the same thing. ‘There’s more than one of them, isn’t there?’
    ‘Sounds like it . . .’
    The ducks and coots rose from the canal, filling the air with the sound of their wings and anxious, high-pitched cries. Then a staccato rattle of gunfire.
    Saskia.
    A pink jacket. A tall figure holding a young girl’s hand. Renata ran and ran, down the long lane, past the Melkweg, out to the canal by Marnixstraat.
    In the distance the grey modern building that was the police station. Fat use they’d been. It was Henk who’d found her. Bad Henk. Thoughtless Henk.
    He’d throw that at her. She knew it. But right at that moment she didn’t care.
    She ran, bent down, held her daughter, hugged her. Looked at her pale, puzzled face and didn’t dare to ask the obvious question . . . Where the hell have you been?
    ‘She’s fine,’ Henk said in a flat, bored voice. ‘She got lost. That’s all. Let’s go home.’
    He ruffled Saskia’s blonde hair.
    ‘I’ll buy ice cream. Whatever . . .’
    A scream from somewhere. A sound like gunfire.
    Three things then, simultaneous, no more than a few steps apart, separate yet connected.
    Laura Bakker reached the blind alley where the AIVD team had raced in pursuit of Black Pete. A bloodied body lay bent on the floor. Next to it a hard-faced woman in a business suit chanting into a radio.
    A wall of men formed ahead as soon as Bakker showed up. Her ID card meant nothing. They’d