The Devil's Playground Read Free

damage, it seemed as dead as the man on the ground. Van Hijn carefully opened it. He felt a slight
    surge in his belly. On the inside front cover he saw a name
    and a phone number. He could just make them out although
    the rain had smudged the ink.
    The number wasn’t local. The name wasn’t Dutch.
    He flicked through the rest of the book, feeling the wet
    bend and droop of the pages under the rubber skin of his
    glove. On the third page, sunk halfway down, was a plain
    white bookmark, a string of numbers written on it by a shaky
    hand. They didn’t seem to mean anything but they were too
    precise, too neatly spaced to have meant nothing, an idle
    doodle while waiting for the phone to ring or the train to
    pull in.
    He forced himself not to think about these things. It was
    too early. Nothing had any context. There was no point in
    speculating. Evidence had to be gathered first, sifted and
    comprehended.
    He jotted the two sets of numbers down in his notebook,
    then called over for an evidence bag and sealed the book
    and bookmark away. It was time for others to take over. The
    ones who would study the dirt with magnifying glasses. Spray
    chemicals and fill test-tubes. Photograph the scene before
    clearing it away. He could already see them making their way
    towards the enclosure in their white boiler suits and plastic
    gloves, the forensics team, setting up borders, marking their
    territory like a ragged troop of Arctic explorers.
    There was nothing else he could do at the scene. Some of
    the younger officers were whispering, their eyes flicking in
    Van Hijn’s direction every now and then.
    He knew what they were saying. He’d heard it ever since
    the canal incident; at the station, in a bar, passing on the
    street. The whole gamut of Dirty Harry jokes. At times, it
    seemed as though the whole of Amsterdam knew. Yet, it had
    never reached the papers. The man had been given a cheap
    burial. No one mentioned that he’d been killed by mistake.
    The fact of his crimes was enough to keep things quiet and
    discreet. The whole thing was buried. Elections were close
    and bad publicity was bad publicity. No one wanted that
    kind of thing to besmirch the department as a whole. They’d
    struck a deal: a quiet transfer, a pension hearing, a desk — the
    prospects of a belly, a bad back and endless cups of cheap
    coffee awaited him.
     
    ‘Detective. I’m surprised to see you here.’
    Van Hijn turned and saw Captain Beeuwers approaching,
    shaking off the rain like an annoyed dog, trailing young
    fresh-faced replacements in his stream.
    ‘I got the call,’ Van Hijn replied, wishing he hadn’t,
    wondering how much of the film he’d missed.
    ‘That’s all fine, but you’ll hand the case over to Zeeman
    now that he’s here.’ The captain’s eyes seemed to shift over
     
    Van Hijn’s face, as if scanning for any weakness, ready to
    target.
    Van Hijn smiled. Perhaps it was just as well he’d had to
    miss the film. Perhaps this little encounter would be worth
    it. ‘I’m still the one in charge until the transfer comes
    through,’ he said.
    The captain’s face seemed to freeze almost as if someone
    had pressed a button. ‘A deal was made, and besides, we
    don’t want you going off all half-cocked again. It doesn’t
    look good for the department.’
    ‘The man wasn’t innocent,’ Van Hijn drily replied. He
    knew he was falling for the captain’s bait but every time it
    came up he felt the need to explain himself anew.
    Beeuwers spat into the rain. ‘He wasn’t the guy we were
    looking for. You seem to have forgotten that. We can’t just
    go out shooting people hoping that, after the fact, they’ll
    turn out to be guilty of something. Everyone’s guilty but not
    everyone deserves to be gunned down in the street. He was
    only a rapist. There’s no death penalty for rape.’
    ‘There should be,’ Van Hijn replied, remembering that
    peculiar, yet vaguely familiar smell, unsettling somehow,
    when they entered