Little Sister Read Free

minutes were crawling by. Sofia wouldn’t be back in the bar for an hour or more. When she was
he’d walk Sam home and enjoy a beer. Van der Berg and Bakker would probably join him.
    ‘I hate procrastination,’ the young policewoman declared.
    ‘I love it,’ Van der Berg cried. ‘Well . . .if it means you don’t have to fill in a load of stupid forms.’
    ‘Without forms . . . without organization we’d be lost,’ she insisted.
    The phone on Koeman’s empty desk rang. Vos looked at it and didn’t move. So did Van der Berg. Bakker sighed and marched over to take the call.
    There was a bright and cheery woman on the other end.
    ‘I want to talk to Ollie,’ she said. ‘Tell him Vicky’s back in town. It’s his lucky day.’
    ‘Ollie who?’
    ‘Ollie Haas,’ the woman replied briskly. ‘Don’t you know your boss’s name?’
    ‘Yes. I do. Who’s Ollie Haas?’
    ‘Your brigadier!’
    Van der Berg was at the desk already. His hand was the size of a goalkeeper’s glove, fingers like sausages, out and beckoning.
    ‘No,’ Bakker said. ‘I think you’ve got the wrong—’
    She let Van der Berg retrieve the phone and listened. Vos was there now too. A brief conversation. Vicky was newly returned from a long stay in Turkey. Ollie Haas was an old friend. Lover maybe.
She wanted to get in touch.
    ‘He doesn’t work here any more,’ Van der Berg told her. ‘Hasn’t for . . . I don’t know . . . years.’
    ‘We had a falling-out. Lost touch. I went to live abroad. I really want to see him again.’
    ‘I’m sorry . . .’
    ‘Do you have his address? His phone number?’
    Van der Berg put his hand over the speaker and relayed the questions to Vos. He shook his head and took the phone.
    ‘I’m brigadier here now. Vos. Officer Haas is retired.’
    ‘I’m an old friend! Surely you can tell me where he lives.’
    ‘Write me a letter,’ Vos suggested. ‘I’ll pass it on to human resources. They can try and—’
    ‘This is all to do with that shit you lot got yourselves in, isn’t it? Volendam? The Timmers kids? I thought you people had buried that once and for all.’
    After that the line went dead.
    ‘What the hell was going on there?’ Van der Berg wondered. ‘No one wants to get in touch with Ollie Haas.’
    ‘Who?’ Bakker asked.
    ‘You won’t remember,’ Vos said. ‘You were a kid. It was . . . years ago.’
    ‘Ten years,’ Van der Berg said. ‘We watched that whole farce fall apart in front of our eyes. They wouldn’t let me and Pieter anywhere near it. And then—’
    ‘It was just an old girlfriend,’ Vos suggested.
    Van der Berg was staring at Bakker.
    ‘You remember The Cupids, don’t you? The pop group?’
    She tugged at her long red hair and wrinkled her nose.
    ‘Rings a bell. Didn’t they break up? There was a scandal or something?’
    He snorted.
    ‘A scandal? One of them wound up dead. One went missing. As for Gert Brugman . . . well, you can still catch him singing for beer in the bars around here. Used to be a ladies’ man.
Looked a real mess the last time I saw him.’
    ‘There was a murder,’ Bakker remembered. ‘A family. It was in all the papers for a while. I was in Friesland. At school. Volendam . . .’
    Van der Berg grunted at the name of the fishing town half an hour away from the city.
    ‘Have you ever been there?’ Vos asked.
    She stretched out her long legs, yawned and said, ‘No. Everyone says it’s full of tourists.’
    Vos checked his watch.
    ‘Not just tourists. Career development, Laura. You’re supposed to read up on old cases from time to time. Cold ones too.’
    ‘I am,’ she agreed.
    ‘Well there’s your assignment. Go down to records and pull out what you can on the Timmers murders. Read through the files. Tell me where Ollie Haas went wrong.’
    ‘Stop at twenty screw-ups,’ Van der Berg added. ‘After that you just might go crazy. At least it cost that idiot his job in the end. They should have snatched his pension