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had an identical pink jacket with a very specific design.
    ‘Timing,’ Bakker said. ‘It seems . . . confusing. And the Kuyper girl . . .’
    ‘What?’ Vos asked.
    He’d sat in on that interview for a while. It seemed straightforward.
    ‘She sounded really vague,’ Bakker complained. ‘That was all.’
    ‘She’s eight years old,’ De Groot grumbled. ‘What do you expect?’
    ‘Just a touch more detail. It was almost as if she was telling a story.’
    ‘Enough of this,’ the commissaris insisted. ‘Leidseplein had something like ten thousand people in it at the time. What looked like bombs going off. The kid had just been snatched. No big surprise she can’t dictate a decent witness statement.’
    ‘That’s why I want to look at the video.’
    De Groot glanced at Vos as if to say: this is your call.
    ‘We need to look,’ Vos agreed. ‘But in the morning.’
    He got up, brushed down his blue jeans and shabby donkey jacket. It still bore dust from the chaos in the square.
    Downstairs they discovered Hanna Bublik had left the station already. Nothing Van der Berg could say would keep her there.
    ‘I need to reconfirm the existence of beer on this planet,’ the detective said mournfully.
    Silence.
    ‘Pieter?’ he asked.
    ‘Not tonight,’ Vos said then wandered out without another word, strolled alone down Elandsgracht, picked up Sam from the Drie Vaten and led the dog across the gangplank onto the cold, dark boat.
    The police had done their best to be friendly, especially the dishevelled, polite brigadier who seemed to be in charge. When they finally ran out of vague promises a friendly, bleary-eyed detective called Van der Berg took her to reception, gave her his card and one for the brigadier, Vos, then offered to find a lift home. While they were talking another man came up, miserable and guilty. He introduced himself as Koeman and said he was the officer dressed as Black Pete she’d first approached when Natalya went missing. The one who’d given her a hard time.
    The moment he started a stuttering apology she just looked at him once then walked out.
    November drizzle was putting a sheen on the broad street outside the police station. She didn’t want their lift any more than she craved an apology. All she needed was Natalya back home.
    They seemed to understand the price of that. The release of a man she’d never heard of. And money perhaps. How much they didn’t know. Didn’t seem to want to discuss it either. She was a foreigner. On tourist papers. No right to work, even as a whore. All she had to her name was three and half thousand euros kept in cash, stuffed in an envelope beneath Natalya’s mattress, the pile steadily growing as she worked over the months.
    As soon as it reached five she’d be able to put down a deposit on a place of her own. Try to find a real job. Hairdressing maybe. Or looking after little kids. She liked that idea. Felt she might be good at it. Perhaps overly protective but that would diminish with the years. One day they’d become normal, the way they used to be in Gori. One day she’d be able to walk down the street without feeling people were looking at her.
    It took twenty minutes to get back to Oude Nieuwstraat. The red lights were on in the cabins running down from her house. Girls in the windows, sitting in their underwear, smiling, beckoning at the few men stumbling up and down the shiny cobblestones, hoods up, just looking mostly.
    Chantal met her on the stairs. She looked shocked, worried. Younger than usual. No make-up either.
    ‘The police were here,’ the Filipina girl said. ‘They said someone took Nat.’
    She always shortened her daughter’s name. It annoyed the hell out of her.
    ‘What do they want, Hanna?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ she replied and that was true.
    ‘But . . .’
    ‘Not now!’
    She wasn’t going to discuss this with the girl. And that wasn’t because Marnixstraat told her not to talk to anyone about the case.
    Chantal