The Wrong Girl by David Hewson

out himself.
    De Groot cleared Vos’s visit to the Schiphol detention centre straight away. Bakker went back to her office and found Van der Berg. He was hunched over a computer screen watching CCTV from the night before.
    ‘I should have known something would happen,’ he said. ‘As soon as Pieter said we were going to have dinner.’
    ‘Beer. A tosti. A boiled egg.’ She pulled up a chair and sat next to him. ‘I’m used to it by now.’
    It was almost six months since De Groot took her on full time after the doll’s house case. The brittle, naive young woman she’d been back then had matured a little. Marnixstraat had come to accept her. Laura Bakker had brought Vos back into the fold after his breakdown and fall from grace. No one else had managed that.
    ‘Is Pieter OK?’ Van der Berg asked.
    He was a curious man. Heavyset, bumbling, almost feckless on the surface. Rarely went straight home to his wife. There was always a bar to visit along the way. But Vos had told her he was one of the most able detectives in the building. The best when it came to a murder investigation.
    ‘He looks OK to me. I wish he’d fix up his boat. It’s still a mess.’
    ‘Agreed.’ Van der Berg smiled pleasantly. ‘But he’s happy. He’s got his little dog. That nice woman in the bar to do his washing . . .’
    Was he fishing? She wasn’t sure.
    ‘He can’t go on like that.’
    ‘Why not?’ Van der Berg asked.
    ‘Because . . . at some point you have to grow up.’
    He snorted then jabbed his finger directly on the computer screen the way some men did.
    ‘There’s footage from an awful lot of cameras here. We need to hand it over to forensic to sort out. Too much for us to deal with right now.’
    ‘What else do we have?’
    Koeman was trying to pick up more from the British man’s associates. That was going nowhere.
    ‘Have you seen a pink jacket?’ she asked, pointing at the monitor.
    ‘A couple.’ He rolled through some footage and came on the frame. It had to be the Bublik girl after she was snatched. She was on the city side of the square, with a Black Pete figure in a green costume. Bakker looked at the time: just two minutes after the first grenade.
    ‘That doesn’t work,’ she said.
    He looked interested.
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Not enough time. Saskia told us she’d wandered away from her mother because she was arguing with the woman from uniform. She wanted to see Sinterklaas. As soon as the grenades went off Bouali . . . Bowers . . . whatever we call him grabbed her.’
    ‘Correct,’ he agreed.
    Bakker pulled up a map of the area.
    ‘Then he took her out of the square somewhere close to the casino. He got distracted. She ran away.’
    Van der Berg nodded.
    ‘That’s got to take two minutes at least,’ Bakker went on. ‘Probably more.’
    They had to assume there were at least two Black Petes in the abduction attempt. How else could Saskia’s phone have changed hands? Then, in the confusion, the second went on to snatch Natalya by mistake when he saw the pink jacket, after Saskia had got free.
    ‘Maybe the timer on the camera’s wrong,’ he suggested.
    She didn’t say anything, just looked at him.
    ‘Unless you have another idea?’ Van der Berg added.
    Bakker pulled up a transcript of the witness statements taken from Renata Kuyper and her daughter the previous day.
    ‘How did the first Black Pete know she was wearing a pink jacket?’
    Van der Berg frowned.
    ‘Because he followed her all the way from their house in the Herenmarkt. Not hard to work out Lucas Kuyper’s granddaughter lived there. He saw what the girl was wearing and told his friend.’
    She waited.
    Van der Berg scanned the other pictures of the square.
    ‘So you lose the kid you want,’ he said. ‘You meet your accomplice. Pass on the phone you took from her. And he picks up the nearest one with the same jacket by mistake. Could happen. Not sure why.’
    ‘Timing,’ Bakker said, pointing at the clock on the screen.