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

“You say your ex-husband blamed Bakker for what happened? Did he ever blame Nina as well?”

Saskia swivelled her head and looked at him in surprise, as though the thought had never occurred to her before. She considered the possibility briefly, and then just shrugged her shoulders.

“I know what you’re thinking Inspector,” she told him quietly. “As soon as I heard about what happened to Doctor Bakker and his wife, and the announcement about Nina’s abduction, it crossed my mind too. Would Tobias do something like that? I asked myself. Is he capable, the man I was married to for all of those years?”

Again, after a pause, she just shrugged.

Walking back over to the counter, she dropped the cigarette into her coffee mug. Pieter heard it sizzle.

“I’ll take you upstairs, to Elena’s bedroom. That’s where she killed herself.”

They were standing in the small bedroom, which had been cleared of all furniture and was spotlessly clean. No signs of the daughter remained anywhere up here.

Saskia had closed the door behind them, and she pointed up at a clothes hook on the back.

“That’s where we found her, two days after her sixteenth birthday,” she told him in a flat voice. “She’d hung herself with the cord from her dressing gown.”

Pieter felt his mouth go dry, and he stared at the hook because he didn’t know where else to look.

“It was just before breakfast. I came upstairs to help her as usual, and I came in, and there she was. She’d been dead for several hours so the assumption was that she took her own life shortly after we all went to bed the night before. The weird thing was that during the previous evening Elena had been feeling more positive, the best she’d been since the operation. She actually spent some time sitting with us downstairs, cuddled up on the couch with me and Tobias watching the TV. Which is stupid, as she could barely see anything, never mind the television – silly, right?”

Saskia went back outside and waited for him on the landing.

Pieter re-joined her.

“Me and Tobias separated a month or so later, just after the New Year.”

“Do you know if he continued to have any contact with Doctor Bakker? After you split up?”

“I’ve no idea. We hardly speak. I guess it’s possible.”

“What does he do for a living? You said downstairs that he worked intermittently.”

“He’s a ship breaker. He works for NV Damen, a small business in the Western Islands. When they have enough work for him that is.”

Pieter knew the place. It was just to the west of Centraal Station. He and his dad used to take walks there sometimes, when the weather was nice and his dad was sober.

“Do you have an address for him? Where is he living these days?”

He tried to sound casual, but inside he could feel his excitement starting to build.

“He moved out in January. To a small place in Warder. It’s on the coast, just north of Edam. A tiny community full of fishing boats and seagulls. He was brought up in that part of Holland. Tobias has always liked the smell of the sea.”

◆◆◆

Tobias had been in another of his rages for nearly two days now.

Down in the basement, Nina heard him stomping back and forth across the room just over her head, banging doors and talking loudly but inaudibly to himself, and occasionally screaming obscenities.

She’d heard him arrive back home the night before last (on a Friday evening she thought, although she was already losing track of the days) and all that night she had lain in her bed listening to him tearing the place apart, smashing things, thumping and kicking the walls, or overturning the furniture by the sounds of it, yelling and making a terrifying ruckus, and Nina had shut her eyes and tried to block out the noise. It had been impossible. The sheer violence of his anger petrified her, making her cringe and duck at each new bang, at every guttural and muffled roar. It was only towards the early hours that things had finally gone quiet; perhaps sheer exhaustion had eventually overcome Tobias.

What was wrong? Nina wondered.

Was it something to do with what had happened that morning at breakfast, the way he had reacted after she’d asked him, in all innocence, if Tobias truly was his name? The way he had quietly left as though the question had unsettled him somehow? Thinking back, she remembered hearing him talking loudly to himself soon after followed by what she thought was the sound of crying, and then a short while later by the slamming of a door. He’d been gone all that day, returning later and launching into this never-ending rage.

The following morning she had awoken to relative quiet. A short time after, and she could make out the muffled sound of a TV or a radio. During the afternoon there was the occasional banging and scraping, a little more shouting, and then more hush. But as the day wore on the shouting became worse again, and by early evening the commotion and discord grew into a continuous uproar.

Luckily, he had not been down to see her or to bring her food, and although she was grateful for that considering his obvious anger, this also concerned her. And as Saturday night stretched into Sunday morning with no let-up in the sounds from above, and after two days of being left alone down here, Nina had come to the conclusion that she needed to get out of here. She needed to try and escape.

That Tobias – if that were even his real name – was totally and dangerously deranged was now obvious to Nina. Her attempts to talk to him, to befriend him, had failed. It had seemingly made her situation much worse, to the extent that if she didn’t try and do something about her predicament, then there was only one way this was headed.

Sitting at the small