A State Of Sin Amsterdam Occult Series Book Two, Mark Hobson [notion reading list txt] 📗

three-day stubble. Huijber’s words were like an annoying bee buzzing around, his voice going in one ear and out of the other.

“Has anything been seen of Visser yet? he asked. “He wasn’t at the clinic, just those loonies who attacked me. He must have gone somewhere after he left Kaatje outside my house.”

“Nothing yet. He’s gone to ground somewhere. But he’ll turn up, and the patients who he was carrying out his crazy fucking experiments on, which makes no sense to me. People with no eyes! I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen those dead ones for myself. Yes, it’s only a matter of time until we find him. We’ve flooded the whole area with officers so he won’t get far.”

Huijbers paused just then, and Pieter glanced over. He was looking at the door to Kaatje’s room, his mouth working away silently, and when he turned to face Pieter again, a steely determination had hardened his eyes.

“We’ll get them, Pieter,” he whispered with real meaning. “We’ll get the fuckers who did that to her.”

On his way down in the elevator Pieter found a number for Madame Benoit, the Centre Manager at the Hollandsche Manege Riding School, and despite the late hour, he rang her.

He told her he wanted as much information as possible about the stable girl Elena.

Chapter 15

The Smell of the Sea

Elena Vinke.

That was the name Madame Benoit had given him. Pieter ran it through the system at work the following morning, even though it was a Sunday.

Elena was just two months short of her sixteenth birthday and working as one of the stable hands on the weekends and during the school holidays when the accident happened. Her parents were now separated and waiting for a divorce, the tragedy having driven an irreparable wedge between them. There wasn’t much on the father, but her mother was still living in the family home with her new boyfriend, and so Pieter had phoned to arrange a visit for later that morning.

Saskia Vinke was a very tall woman in her mid-thirties, with a blonde bob and ice-blue eyes, her glamorous features marred by a down-turned little mouth and worry lines radiating from her temples. She greeted Pieter pleasantly enough, but he could feel the grief was there just below the surface, a year after the death of her daughter.

She and her new man lived just around the corner from the Albert Cuyp Street Market in the De Pijp district of Amsterdam. She led him into the small kitchen and poured him a very strong coffee, telling him her boyfriend had popped out to allow them to talk freely. She sat opposite him across the narrow kitchen bar, holding her mug with both hands to warm them. It was cold, with the heating turned down, and there was a pile of dirty dishes in the sink, and from somewhere in the basement came the sound of a spin-dryer vibrating at full speed.

“You’ve caught me at a bad time, so please excuse the mess. Sundays are always a day for catching up on the housework.”

Pieter brushed away her concerns with a casual flick of his hand. He sipped at his coffee, his eyes glancing through the door to the living room and seeing the framed pictures on the wall of a young teenage girl, smiling and laughing and surrounded by autumnal trees.

“Do you mind if I smoke? I normally only do so outside, but your phone call this morning took me unawares, and I find it easier to talk if I can smoke. It settles my nerves.”

Pieter smiled and nodded and watched as she lit a cigarette, her hands visibly shaking.

Saskia blew smoke up at the ceiling and gave an exaggerated shudder of her shoulders. “That’s better,” she laughed nervously.

Crossing her legs, she put her elbow on the counter, holding the cigarette upright.

“I’m assuming you’re here because of Elena?”

“Yes.”

“You’re one of the few people to have come around since it happened. We don’t get many visitors and those who do bother calling tend to want to talk about other things, anything other than about Elena. It’s understandable I suppose. It probably makes them feel uncomfortable, wondering if I’m going to break down and fling myself on the floor. But it is nice of you to come, even if it’s only for official reasons.”

Pieter looked at her and she cast her gaze away, and she drew hard on the cigarette.

“What is it you want to know?”

“Tell me about your daughter, about the accident.”

“Where do I begin? It was a day just like any other, a sunny morning just over a year ago. A sunny Saturday morning, cold and crisp and clear. The riders had taken the horses across to the park to ride along the track that they have there, they do that whenever the weather is good. It’s something they’ve done a hundred times before. Elena, with the other stable hands, waited back at the riding school as normal.

Sometimes the horses can be very frisky and excited when they come back from the park. That’s nothing out of the ordinary, and so it was that day. The girls came back, with Nina Bakker amongst them, and went into the stables, and Elena was helping to remove the saddle and so on when, out of the blue, the horse Nina had been riding suddenly kicked out with its hind leg. Elena just happened to be bending over at the time and the hoof caught her right in the eye, just here.”

Saskia tapped at her brow just above her right eye with the hand holding the cigarette.

“Pop, right into the socket apparently. There was a lot of blood, and the girls were screaming they say, the staff running around in a complete panic, and somebody called for an ambulance and then they called me. I was working at the time – I work part-time in a café on Waterlooplein – but I dashed straight over to the hospital and