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

got machine pistols. Body armour. Balaclavas and riot gear. Pushed her back until she could see no more and left her fuming, cursing in the street. Stamping her big boots on the cobbles, all to no avail.
    As the Kuypers placed their arms around their daughter like a shield a tall blonde-haired woman raced up to them, yelling something in a foreign tongue. Bent down, stared at the girl. Shook her head. Furious. Lost.
    You tried to steal my phone.
    A random thought. Unwanted in the circumstances. Renata barely noticed her husband slide away, turning his back, muttering he had to call someone. Then vanishing across the bridge.
    Pieter Vos saw some of this, as did Laura Bakker retreating from the bloody scene in the alley, and Dirk Van der Berg walking from the square. Antennae tuned for trouble, the three detectives homed in on the odd little group.
    There, by the side of the girl, her mother, the distraught woman, Bakker looked at Vos and said, still struggling to believe this herself, ‘They shot him. Just like that.’
    ‘Where’s my girl?’ Hanna Bublik yelled in broken Dutch as she clutched at the child in the pink jacket until Renata Kuyper snatched Saskia from her clawing fingers.
    Van der Berg glanced at Vos. A nod. He seemed to know.
    A sound. High-pitched. A jaunty childish tune, the kind set for a specific caller. Renata Kuyper took her phone from her pocket, checked the screen, turned to her daughter and asked, ‘Saskia . . . ?’
    The girl stayed silent, eyes on the canal and the returning wildfowl.
    ‘It’s from your phone,’ said Renata.
    Vos retrieved the handset from the mother’s cold fingers. ‘It’s a video call,’ he said, and tapped the screen.
    There was a face on the little screen. Dark with make-up. Scarlet lips. White teeth.
    ‘It’s the mother I wish to talk to,’ this new Black Pete said.
    ‘My name’s Pieter Vos. I’m a brigadier with the Amsterdam police.’
    The face laughed then, the teeth perfect and even.
    ‘Then you’ll do.’
    An ambulance tore round the corner, siren shrieking, down to the street where the men with guns were gathered.
    ‘My brother Mujahied’s a martyr, isn’t he? We listen to your radios. We know your schemes. You murdered him.’
    The speaker was turned to full so they could all hear and see. The voice was foreign. The accent hard to place.
    ‘I don’t know what happened. We’re police. There’s a girl . . .’ Vos began.
    ‘You’re all the same. Dogs and criminals.’
    ‘What do you want?’
    ‘We have the Kuyper child,’ Black Pete said. ‘Granddaughter to your bloody soldier . . .’
    ‘No,’ Vos cut in.
    The white eyes grew large with fury.
    ‘Don’t argue with me! Two decades on from Srebrenica, eight thousand dead there. So many more in Iraq and Afghanistan. Do you think we can’t count? This murderer’s offspring is with us now.’
    Vos looked at the little girl, clutched to her mother’s legs by caring arms. Then at the other woman. Foreign. A mark of desperate poverty about her.
    Pink jackets.
    ‘Saskia Kuyper’s here with me. Safe with her mother. You’ve got the wrong kid. It’s the same clothes but . . .’
    Hanna Bublik seized the phone from him, glared at the face on the screen.
    ‘She’s eight years old. From Georgia. No father. No money. No . . .’
    A wagging finger, a bossy hand, waved her into silence.
    ‘I speak to the man now,’ Black Pete said. ‘Him only.’
    One more time she tried and got the same. Vos looked at her, nodded, and she gave him back the phone.
    ‘What she says is the truth,’ he insisted. ‘You’ve got the wrong girl. Let her go. Do this now. Make yourself scarce before we find you . . .’
    The black face was laughing again. Then the picture changed. A brief view of what looked like a small room. Wooden walls. Something familiar about it for Vos.
    Finally a shape in the corner.
    Perhaps it was an easy mistake. She looked a little like the Kuyper kid. Prettier if anything, with long