The House of Dolls Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    ‘What else? Did they call?’
    De Groot shook his head.
    ‘That’s it.’
    ‘Wim Prins doesn’t love his daughter. She’s a junkie. An embarrassment. If they wanted money they’d kidnap the kid of someone who cared.’
    ‘I know you hate him. What he did with Liesbeth—’
    ‘It’s not that. Katja’s just a younger version of her mother and God knows she caused him enough trouble.’ It was a terrible thing to say. To think even. But true. ‘Bea Prins killed herself, didn’t she? She was an embarrassment and so’s the daughter. Prins is a man with ideas. A mission. Clean up Amsterdam today. The country tomorrow. A dead wife and a lost child would add some credibility.’
    De Groot put the photo away.
    ‘That’s unfair. Inaccurate too. From what I hear De Nachtwacht isn’t doing too well. It’s easy to be a prude when you’ve got no power. Harder in practice. His coalition’s shaky. His own party’s having misgivings. My guess is the whole thing’s dead before summer’s out.’
    ‘I don’t give a damn about politics. Why isn’t he in the police station now? Screaming at you to do something?’
    ‘Who says he isn’t?’
    Vos laughed.
    ‘Wim Prins wouldn’t want me back. You’re not here for him.’
    No answer to that which said something.
    ‘You can’t ignore the similarities.’
    Vos shook his head.
    ‘What similarities?’
    ‘The doll! Prins got a doll!’
    ‘Did he get a picture of the Oortman house?’
    De Groot threw up his hands in despair.
    ‘For God’s sake, are you still going on about that? It was just a drawing the bastard sent as a joke or something. Why do you waste all that time staring at something in a museum? This is real. The Prins girl’s missing. No glass cases. Flesh and blood.’
    Vos started hanging round the Rijksmuseum out of habit when he crashed out of the job. It was routine. Something to fill the day. De Groot was right. It was just a drawing that came with the doll, Anneliese’s blood, a hank of her hair. One more odd fragmented link among so many. For some reason – the temporary breakdown in all probability – he couldn’t get the picture of that place, with its tiny rooms, the fragile creatures trapped inside them, out of his head.
    He had been over his daughter’s case a million times. In the brief period he worked on it as a police officer. Later, in the quiet of the houseboat in the Jordaan until something – sleep, booze or a smoke – killed the never-ending circle of possibilities and riddles. There was a photo of her by the long window on the street side of the boat, next to a poster for a couple of concerts he’d been to at the Melkweg.
    He walked over and picked up the picture.
    Anneliese on her own eating an ice cream in the park. A little had melted on her bright blue dress. She was pretty, childlike. Almost a doll herself. But her eyes seemed blank now. Her smile a little forced. That was what time did to you. These thoughts had never occurred to him when the shot was taken on a warm June day not long before she vanished.
    Vos put the photo back on the shelf. It seemed to embarrass De Groot.
    ‘We don’t know what happened. We never—’
    ‘He sent you the same doll!’
    A flash of memory: sitting at his desk in Marnixstraat after an endless week of sixteen-hour days. Fielding frantic calls from Liesbeth asking where Anneliese might be. Just turned sixteen. Never late home from school, not without warning.
    One of the aspirants of the time, a shy young kid called Oscar, came up with a cardboard box, a coffin shape sketched on the top with black felt tip. The lid bore a printed line drawing of what looked like the Oortman house, nothing else. Vos could picture himself opening it. Inside a doll. Hair. Bloodstain. Tucked inside the pinafore dress was a photo of his daughter, terrified against a plain background, duct tape round her mouth.
    ‘I didn’t know what was happening then,’ Vos said. ‘I’d no idea if it was a