Read Online Into the Night: Inspector Rykel Book 2 (Amsterdam Quartet) by Jake Woodhouse - Free Book Online Page A

pocketed the phone, hoping Frits hadn’t noticed it wasn’t on, and wondered what to do now.
    A horde of tourists cycled past on a guided tour, following the lead bike marked out by a large yellow flag attached to a pole. One of the tourists near the back of the convoy clearly hadn’t got used to the fact that Dutch bikes didn’t have brakes.
    ‘You’ve got to backpedal,’ she told the woman in English, who looked at her as if she’d just told her to jump in the canal. Tanya shrugged and started walking, her mind back on the attendance logs. What she’d found had shocked her. And she didn’t know what to do about it.
    Tanya stopped by a tree. The sun was just dropping behind the houses on the far side of the canal, dark shadows devouring their fronts.
    She pulled the sheet out again and looked at it. At the names she’d circled.
    I need the older logs
, she thought.
See if that’ll narrow it down.

12
    Saturday, 8 May
19.26
    Kees couldn’t believe what the voice on the phone had just told him.
    ‘You delivered it where? Are you fucking insane?’
    He was crawling back into Amsterdam – an endless stream of people with nothing better to do had decided to get into their cars and block his way.
    And there was a speck of dirt on the windscreen right in his field of vision. He’d tried to wipe it off earlier but it wouldn’t budge. Then he’d tried lowering the seat back to change his sight-line, but that hadn’t worked either.
    It was still there, blurring his view.
    After the old man had told Kees about the men disappearing out the back he’d searched the area, but it was clear they’d gone. Kees had then put a call in for Osman Krilic, but was still waiting for a hit off the central database. He couldn’t quite believe how long it was taking, it wasn’t like Krilic was a common name.
    As he’d left the house the landlord had asked him about claiming compensation for the glass from the police. Kees had told him it was like that when he arrived, putting the blame on the two men who’d run out the back as he’d walked up the front path.
    From the old man’s description, one of them was unquestionably Isovic.
    ‘You don’t want it?’ said the voice that Kees knew asPaul. He’d figured that wasn’t his real name. People practising the art of blackmail generally tended to prefer anonymity.
    ‘Course I fucking want it,’ said Kees, lurching the car forward and to the right, spinning the wheel one-handed to make the most of a gap which had opened up. ‘But not sent there. I was going to pick it up, like we agreed.’
    ‘Like we agreed,’ echoed the voice. ‘Is that the same way we agreed that you’d give us the information we need? Because I got a message passed back through our mutual friend that you wanted to stop.’
    ‘Look, it’s getting too risky. I think we just need to be a bit careful right now—’
    ‘You seem to forget that you owe us. Quite a lot. What I sent you today was just a little reward – I haven’t added it to the bill. But we don’t need to have the discussion about what will happen if you don’t honour our agreement, do we?’
    Kees was about to respond when he heard the click telling him he’d been disconnected.
    A V of birds, reflected in the rear window of the car in front, forged from left to right in the sky.
    Fuck
, he thought.
Fuckfuckfuck.
    They were right, he did owe them.
    And now he was screwed.
    By the time he made it back to the station garage, dropped the keys off and rushed up to the first floor, he felt like he could really use a line. Just medicinally, just to help put things in focus a bit, give him the clarity his brain needed to sort out what he was going to do next.
    At least the sniffer dogs aren’t kennelled here
, he thought as hestepped into the main office and made his way over to his desk.
    There were at least six other inspectors milling around, finishing up paperwork, surfing the Internet, or just staring at the ceiling. Saturday night