The Night Ferry

10

I wake in the early hours, with his heart against my back and his arm around me. A part of me wants to stay like this, not moving, scarcely breathing. Another part wants to run down the hotel corridor, the stairs, along the street, out of the city, away!

Slipping out of bed and into the bathroom, I dress in jeans and a blouse and fill the pockets of my jacket with cash and my mobile. I bend to lace my boots, accepting the dull ache in my spine for what it is, a part of me now.

Daylight is leaking over the rooftops and the streets are beginning to stir. A machine with spinning brushes seems to be polishing the cobblestones with overnight rain. Most of the windows are closed in de Walletjes, with curtains drawn. Only the desperate and the lonely are on the streets at this hour.

I wonder if this is what it feels like to be a refugee—to be a stranger in a place, despairing and hopeful all at once. Waiting for what will come next. I have never lived like this.

Hokke is waiting for me at the café. He knows about Samira. “A bird told me,” he says, raising his eyes. As if signaled, a pigeon flutters onto a branch above us.

The air inside the café is noisy with whistling steam and banging pots. Counter staff and waitresses acknowledge Hokke with waves, shouts and handshakes. He leaves me for a moment, threading his way between tables. The kitchen door is open. Bending low over sinks, scrubbing pans, are three young men who greet Hokke with respect. He ruffles their hair and shares a joke.

I glance around the café, which is almost empty except for a table of hippies who seem to be communicating in a code of clicks and clacks from their beaded hair. On her own, a young teenage girl nurses a hot drink. Waiflike and hollow-eyed, she is just the sort pimps prey upon with warm meals and promises.

Hokke has returned. He, too, notices the girl. Summoning a waitress, he quietly orders breakfast for the girl, thick toast, jam, cheese and ham. She accepts it warily, expecting there to be strings attached, and eats greedily.

His attention turns to me.

“I have to find Samira,” I tell him.

“Again.”

“Refugees have networks. You said so. You mentioned a name: de Souza. Could he help me?”

Hokke puts a finger to his lips. He leans closer, speaking out of the corner of his mouth like a prisoner under the eye of a warder. “Please be very careful when you speak such a name.”

“Who is he?”

Hokke doesn’t answer immediately. He pours coffee from a pot, tapping metal against glass. “Despite what you have read, the Netherlands is defined more by what it forbids than by what it permits. We do not have slums. Graffiti is cleaned away quickly. Broken windows are repaired. Abandoned vehicles are towed. We expect our trains and trams to run on time. We queue. It doesn’t change the people, of course, just the aesthetics.”

He gestures with a slight nod toward the kitchen. “There are half a million illegal workers in the Netherlands—Iranians, Sudanese, Afghanis, Bosnians, Kosovars, Iraqis. They work in restaurants, hotels, laundries and factories. Newspapers wouldn’t be delivered without them, hotel sheets wouldn’t be laundered, houses wouldn’t be cleaned. People complain, but we cannot do without them.”

A pipe appears in his hand. He packs it slowly, pressing tobacco into the bowl with his thumb. A match flares and flickers as he sucks in a breath.

“Imagine a person who could control a workforce such as this. He would be more powerful than any trade union leader or politician.”

“Is there such a person?”

His voice drops to a whisper. “His name is Eduardo de Souza. Nobody has more real power in this city than he does. He has an army of couriers, cleaners, drivers and spies. He can get you anything: a pistol, a fake passport, a kilo of the finest Afghani heroin. Drugs and prostitution are only a small part of it. He knows which politicians are sleeping with which girls and which illegals are looking after their children or cleaning their houses or tending their gardens. That is real power. Destiny making.”

He sits back, his soft blue eyes blinking through the smoke.

“You admire him.”

“He is a very interesting man.”

His answer strikes me as peculiar. It carries a hint that there are things he hasn’t told me.

“How long have you known him?”

“Many years.”

“Is he a friend?”

“Friendship is something I find harder to understand as I get older.”

“Will he help me find Samira?”

“He could be behind it all.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Yanus once worked for him.”

He places his hands on the table and wearily pushes himself to his feet.

“I will get a message to him.”

His pipe slips into his jacket pocket. He won’t let me pay for breakfast. The bill has been covered, he says, nodding toward the owner.

Outside it is raining again. The puddles are shiny and black as oil. Hokke offers me an umbrella. “I will call you in a few hours. Give my regards to DI Ruiz. Tell him that old policemen never die. They just miss a beat.”

Barnaby answers his cell phone quickly as if he’s been expecting a call. It must also be raining in London. I hear car tires swishing on a wet road and raindrops on his umbrella. I ask about the funerals. There is a long pause. I swap the phone between hands.

“Saturday at the West London Crematorium. They won’t release the bodies until Wednesday.”

There is another silence. The knowledge of Samira and the twins expands in my chest. Lawyers and medical ethicists can debate all they want about who “owns” the twins, but it doesn’t change the fact that Cate provided the embryos. Barnaby should know.

“There’s something I have to tell you.”

He grunts a response.

“I know why Cate faked her pregnancy. She arranged a surrogate. Her embryos were implanted in someone else’s womb.”

Something shifts deep in his chest. A groan. “I told you to leave my daughter’s affairs alone.”

I don’t expect this reaction. Surely he must be curious. Doesn’t he want to know the outcome? Then it dawns on me that none of this is new. He knows already.

He lied about finding Cate’s computer, which means he must have read her e-mails. If he knows, why hasn’t he gone to the police?

“What are you doing Barnaby?”

“I’m getting my grandchildren.”

He has no idea what he’s dealing with. “Listen to me, Barnaby. This isn’t what you think. Cate broke the law.”

“What’s done is done.”

“These men are killers. You can’t negotiate with them. Look what happened to Cate.”

He isn’t listening. Instead he charges ahead, trying to attach logic and fairness to what should happen next.

“Stop, Barnaby. This is crazy.”

“It’s what Cate would have wanted.”

“No. You’ll get yourself killed. Just tell me where you are. Let’s sit down and talk.”

“Stay out of this. Don’t interfere.”

The line goes dead. He won’t answer again.

Before I can dial Spijker there is another call. DI Forbes’s voice is hoarse with a cold and the clicking sound in his throat is muffled by phlegm. I can imagine one of his children bringing the infection home from school and spreading it through the house like a domestic plague.

“Having a nice holiday?”

“It’s not a holiday.”

“You know the difference between you and me? I don’t run away when things get tough. I’m a professional. I stick with the job. I got a wife and kids, responsibilities…”

And wandering hands.

He sneezes and blows his nose. “I’m still waiting for your fucking statement.”

“I’m coming home.”

“When?”

“By Friday.”

“Well you can expect a warm welcome. A Chief Superintendent North has been on the phone. Says you didn’t show up for work. He’s not happy.”

“It’s not important,” I say, trying to change the subject. I ask him about the two trucks that couldn’t be accounted for on the ferry that carried Hassan and the other illegals. One was stolen from a German freight yard three months ago, he says. It was resprayed and registered in Holland. According to the manifest it was carrying plumbing supplies from a warehouse in Amsterdam, but the pickup address doesn’t exist. The second truck was leased from an owner-driver five weeks ago. He thought it was doing a run from Spain to the Netherlands. The leasing documents and bank accounts are in false names.

This case is populated with people who seem to be ghosts, floating across borders with false papers. People like Brendan Pearl.

“I need a favor.”

He finds this amusing. “I shouldn’t even be talking to you.”

“We’re on the same side.”

“Cellar-dwellers.”

“Running into form.”

“What do you want?”

“I need you to check the Customs and Immigration files for the past two years. Among the stowaways and illegals were any of them pregnant?”

“Off the top of my head I can think of two in the past three months. They were hidden in the back of a container.”

“What happened to them?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you find out?”

“Yeah, sure. Along with a thousand other fucking things on my plate.”

I feel the heat in my cheeks.

“There’s something else. Hassan Khan has a sister, Samira. She’s pregnant. I think traffickers are going to try to move her into the U.K.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. You might want to give Customs a heads-up.”

“I’m not a free agent here.”

“It’s only a phone call. If you don’t want to do it, just say so.”

“How are they going to move her?”

“They’ll probably stick to what they know.”

“We can’t search every truck and container.”

I can hear him scratching a note on a pad. He asks me about Spijker and I give him the nuts and bolts of the surrogacy scam.

“I’ve never known anyone who attracts trouble like you do,” he says.

“You sound like my mother.”

“Do you take any notice of her?”

“Not much.”

The call ends and I close my eyes for a moment. When I open them again, I see a class of schoolchildren with their teacher. The girls are dressed like Madeline in navy blue raincoats with yellow hats, and they are all holding hands as they wait for the traffic lights to change. Inexplicably, I feel a lump forming in my throat. I’ll never have one of those.

A police car is parked outside the hotel. A uniformed officer waits in reception, standing almost to attention.

“New Boy” Dave hovers like a jealous suitor. “Where have you been?”

“I had to see someone.”

He grips my hand tightly.

The officer introduces himself and holds out a police radio. I place it against my ear. Spijker’s voice comes from far away. I can hear water. Seagulls. “We’ve found someone.”

“Who is it?”

“I’m hoping you can tell me.”

Something soft and wet flips over in my stomach.

The officer takes back the radio to receive further instructions.

“I’ll come with you,” says Dave.

“What about your flight?”

“There’s still time.”

We sit in silence on the journey. Frustration is etched into his forehead. He wants to say something planned, thought-out, about last night but it’s not the right time.

I feel oddly ambivalent. Maybe that means I’m not ready to marry and I’m not really in love. The whole idea was one of those “what if” moments that doesn’t survive the hangover or the harsh light of day.

The Dutch officer has a vocabulary of four English words and is unwilling or unable to explain where we’re going. Meanwhile, he navigates the narrow streets and bridges, taking us through an industrial area with docks and warehouses. We seem to pass the same gray squares of water several times before pulling up beside a weathered wooden pier. Police cars nose together as though drinking from the same trough.

Spijker is a head taller than the other detectives. He is wearing a dark suit and polished shoes but still seems miscast in life; as though he’s playing dress-up in his father’s clothes.

There is a wooden ramp that slopes into the water from the dock. Halfway down it is a Zodiac made of heavy rubberized canvas with a wooden bottom. Another is already waiting on the water with four men on board.

Spijker hands me a pair of rubber boots and a waterproof jacket to wear over my sweater. He finds similar clothes for Dave and then pulls on his own rubber boots.

The Zodiac launches in a fluid movement. Spijker holds out his hand and helps me step on board. The throttle engages and we pull away. The sky is like a solid gray sheet with no depth at all. A quarter mile off I see the flat of a paddle, lifting and dipping, as a canoeist follows the shore. Farther out is a ferry, snub-nosed and puffing smudges of black smoke.

I try to orientate myself. Some six miles to the west is the North Sea. We seem to be following a western dock. The air smells sweet—of chocolate. Perhaps there is a factory nearby. Dave is beside me. I feel him when I rock sideways, brushing his left arm with my breast.

Spijker is comfortable steering a boat. Perhaps it rubs off, living below sea level, protected by dikes and flood barriers.

“How much do you know about the sea, DC Barba?”

What is there to know? It’s cold, it’s wet, it’s salty…

“My father was a merchant seaman,” he explains without waiting for me to answer. “He divorced my mother when I was seven but I used to spend holidays with him. He didn’t go to sea anymore and he wasn’t the same man on shore. He seemed smaller.”

Dave hasn’t said much since I introduced them to each other, but now he mentions the sailing school he wants to buy. Soon they’re discussing skiffs and sail area. I can actually picture Dave in an Aran sweater, ducking beneath a boom. He seems suited to outdoors, big spaces full of wind and sky and water.

Five hundred yards ahead of us is a container ship. The Port of Amsterdam spent millions thinking they could match Rotterdam as a hub for international trade, explains Spijker. “It is never going to be so.”

Passing the ship, we come to a wooden pier rising twenty feet above the waterline supported by pylons and beams. A floating platform is moored on the nearside.

Spijker disengages the throttle and the engine idles. He steadies the Zodiac and throws a rope around a rusting cleat on the platform, drawing us closer. At the same moment a spotlight is switched on and swings into the darker shadows beneath the pier, searching amid the weathered gray wood. A flash of white appears. A figure suspended above the water, gazing down at me. A noose is looped around her neck. Another rope around her waist disappears into the water, obviously weighted down.

The body swings slightly as if moved by an unseen hand and her outstretched toes seem to pirouette on the surface of the water.

“Is it the deaf girl?” asks Spijker.

Zala’s eyes are open. Two crimson orbs. Blood vessels have burst in the whites and her pupils seem to have disappeared. She’s dressed in the same skirt and pink jacket that I last saw her wearing. Salt in the air has stiffened the fabric.

The Zodiac is rising and sinking on the slight swell. Spijker steadies it and I step onto the platform. A metal ladder, bolted to a pylon, leads up to the pier. Seagulls watch from the navigation buoys and a nearby barge. The other Zodiac has arrived, carrying ropes and a stretcher cage.

Spijker climbs the ladder and I follow him. Dave is behind me. The planks of the pier are old and deeply furrowed, with gaps in between that are wide enough for me to see the top of Zala’s head and her shoulders.

The rope around her neck is tied to a metal bollard normally used for mooring ships.

A police officer in climbing gear abseils over the side. He swings in a harness beside her body and we watch in silence as Zala is lashed into a stretcher cage. The rope around her waist is tied to a cinder block. I can see the cement dust on her hands and the front of her jacket.

They made her jump. The certainty is like a vision. She held the cinder block in her arms and they pushed her the final step. She dropped fifteen feet before the rope stopped her. The cement brick tore from her fingers and kept falling until the second rope, tied around her waist, pulled taut. My stomach shares the drop.

“A fisherman found her just before nine thirty,” says Spijker. “He reported it to the coast guard.” He swivels to a junior officer, seeking confirmation.

“What made you think…?” I can’t finish the question.

“She fitted the description.”

“How did she get out here?”

Spijker motions along the pier. “It’s fenced off. Warning signs. Of course, that only encourages people.”

“You’re not thinking suicide?”

“Your deaf girl didn’t carry that lump of concrete out here by herself.”

In the distance there are whitecaps where the water is less sheltered from the wind. A fishing boat is coming in, its windows flashing in a rare shaft of sunlight.

Despite his veteran’s cynicism, Spijker needs to show compassion and offer condolences. Somehow I have become his only link to this girl.

“She came from Kabul. She was an orphan,” I explain.

“Another one.”

“What do you mean?”

“The list of surrogates from the IVF clinic. At least ten of them were orphans. It’s making them difficult to find.”

Orphans. Illegal immigrants. What a perfect combination of the unwanted and the desperate.

“Samira mentioned a visitor to the orphanage. A westerner who said he could organize a job for her. He had a cross on his neck. I might know who it is.” I give him Donavon’s name and he promises to check the files.

The dock gates have been unlocked at the far end of the pier. A forensic team arrives in a van. A second car is summoned to take us back to our hotel.

As I walk along the pier I feel that Amsterdam has changed and become darker and more dangerous. I long for the familiar. Home.

Dave falls into step beside me.

“Are you all right?”

“Fine.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“What do you know about it?” I snap. Straightaway, I feel angry with myself. He’s done nothing wrong. After a few minutes I try to assuage my guilt. “Thanks for being here. I’m sorry about last night. Forget everything I said.”

“I think we should talk about it some more.”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

“I love you.”

“But it’s different now, isn’t it?”

Dave puts his hand on my forearm to stop me. “I don’t care. I want to be with you.”

“You say that now, but think about in five years or ten years. I couldn’t do that to you.”

An abandoned crane is rusting on the shoreline. It looks like wreckage from an ancient war. Zala’s body is still spinning in my mind, pirouetting on her toes in the waves.

I have been a fool. My good intentions have set off a chain of events that have led to this. And I don’t know where it ends or who else will be hurt. I am certain of only one thing: I want to spend every waking moment hunting down the people who took Cate from me and who did this to Zala. This is not about an eye for an eye. It’s bigger than that. I want to make their misery more poignant and horrific than anything they have inflicted upon others. Never in my life have I felt so capable of killing someone.

Dave’s hair is combed. His bag is packed. A taxi is booked for the airport. The clock hasn’t moved. Not even a second. I swear it. I hate the last hour before someone leaves. Everything has been said and done. Minutes drag out. Statements are repeated. Tickets are checked.

“It’s time to leave this alone,” says Dave, rinsing his toothbrush. “It’s over.”

“How did we get to over?”

“Maybe you think,” he says, choosing his words with care, “that this is about you and me. It’s not. I’d tell you the same thing if I didn’t love you.”

“But that’s why you should understand.”

He picks up his bag and puts it down again.

“You could come with me.”

“I’m not leaving Ruiz.”

He puts on his jacket.

“You could stay,” I suggest.

“I have to give evidence in court.”

“I need you.”

“You don’t need anyone.”

It’s not meant to wound but I flinch as though struck.

He opens the door slowly. All the while I’m hoping he’ll turn back, take me in his arms, force me to look in his eyes, tell me he doesn’t care about anything except me, that he understands.

The door closes behind him. My chest is suddenly empty. He’s taken my heart.