The House of Dolls Read Online Free PDF

Jimmy Menzo have it all?’
    Lindeman shrugged.
    ‘If you want to go home and live with your daughter. Enjoy your money. Forget about how things were before. They’re gone for good.’
    Rosie smiled at him, looking the way she did when she was five, ten years old. His daughter could always wind him round her little finger and she knew it.
    ‘That’s what you came to tell me? That I’m an old man and I’m out of it?’
    ‘Pretty much,’ Lindeman agreed. ‘I’m a lawyer. Not a miracle worker.’
    They waited for him to say something.
    ‘I’ll think about it.’
    Rosie wasn’t smiling any more.
    ‘I said I’ll think about it,’ Jansen repeated.
    ‘We’ve got a pre-hearing meeting fixed this morning, Dad. They want an answer before it comes in front of the judge.’
    ‘The court needs to know now,’ Lindeman added. ‘A commitment. A—’
    ‘A piece of paper?’ Jansen snapped. ‘You want me to sign that? I, Theo Jansen, relinquish all my rights—’
    ‘We don’t have any rights.’ Her voice was stern and rising. ‘We don’t have anything. We’re screwed. Let’s try and get out of this with a little dignity.’
    There were tears welling in her solemn dark eyes and he always hated that.
    ‘I want you home,’ she said again in a voice so soft and gentle it belied her looks. ‘I want us to enjoy things together. That place you bought in Spain. We never went there. Not once. All the things we never had time for . . .’
    Jansen leaned back in his chair, looked at the ceiling, the bleak, windowless walls. In his mind he could see the city outside. April. Soon the new herring would be here. He could grab a beer in a brown bar, walk to a canalside stall, dangle a sliver of raw fish over his mouth, down it like a Pelican the way he did when Rosie was a kid and he wanted to make her laugh. You weren’t supposed to do that in Amsterdam. It was common. But so was he. And she always giggled when he did it. That was enough.
    Freedom wasn’t something intangible. It had a taste. You could touch it, smell it. A fifteen-year sentence, ten inside if he was lucky, wasn’t punishment. It was an execution of a kind, cruel and deliberate.
    ‘You need to say it now,’ Rosie insisted. ‘Michiel has to tell them. If he doesn’t there won’t be a hearing. You go back to jail. And I go home alone. Dad, if you won’t do it for yourself, just do it for me, will you?’

6
     
    The houseboat was thirty years old, fixed moorings with electricity, phone line, water and mains drainage. A stationary, rotting wooden hull on the canal the locals shortened from the Prinsengracht to Prinsen, close to the Berenstraat bridge.
    ‘I’d hate to live in a pit like this,’ De Groot said as he ducked his head and went into the cabin. Roses, chrysanthemums, a few vegetables were visible beyond the glass in their pots and raised beds. None of them prospering.
    ‘How’s Maria?’ Vos asked, recalling the man’s quiet, shy wife.
    ‘Fine. She wonders why you don’t come round any more.’
    He said something about being busy. De Groot eyed the chaotic interior of the houseboat, the boxes of tools on the floor, rock posters covering the peeling paint on the timber walls, raised a single heavy eyebrow. Then followed Vos to the old pine dining table and sat with him.
    ‘Busy doing what? Never mind. I want you back. You can be a brigadier again. The pay’s a bit better. Not much—’
    ‘What’s happened?’
    Skimpy details. The night before, a miniature cardboard coffin was left outside Wim Prins’s courtyard home in one of the smarter
hofjes
a kilometre north near Willemstraat. An antique porcelain doll. A hank of hair. A bloodstain.
    ‘How did they want the money?’ Vos asked, interested in spite of himself.
    De Groot pulled a photo out of his coat pocket.
    ‘They didn’t exactly. There was a note in the doll’s hand. Computer. No prints.’
    One line, big bold letters.
    Love’s expensive, Wim. Get ready for the