Read After the Silence: Inspector Rykel Book 1 (Amsterdam Quartet) for Free Online

that made him like her even more.
    ‘Depends on what?’ he asked.
    She reached out and brushed something off his sleeve.
    ‘It depends, Inspector, on what you’d do with it.’

7
     
    Monday, 2 January
10.45
     
    ‘We’re here.’
    Pulling up to a stop, gravel crunching under one of the tyres, the driver turned off the engine and waited. Silence filled the car’s interior. Jaap looked out at the trees lining both sides of the road, barren branches like hands clawing the sky.
    This was Amsterdamse Bos, a wooded area south of the city covering over a thousand hectares, with trees planted by twenty thousand citizens in the 1930s, a government attempt to raise employment after the knock-on effects of the Wall Street crash reached the Netherlands. By day it was frequented by ordinary people, walkers, dog lovers, young families.
    But at night the perverts, the drug addicts and weirdos roamed.
    His throat was Sahara-dry, a leg –
left, right?
, he wasn’t sure – had started to shake, and his stomach felt like he’d just swallowed a litre of live frogs, their slippery bodies writhing in a churning mass, desperately trying to escape his searing gastric juices.
    He tried to calm himself, slow his breathing down,count, anything to bring his body back under control. But nothing seemed to be working.
    The door, where his right hand had been gripping the handle, was opened with a soft click by the uniformed officer who’d stepped forward as the car drew to a halt, and the Arctic air rushed in, ravaging his exposed face, hands and ears.
    And that helped, made it easier to force himself out of the cruiser which had brought him here, to this patch of land deep in the forest.
    Then he was standing, his leg – it was definitely the left, feeling like it had its own private earthquake, ten on the Richter scale – wobbled even more, and he had to steady himself with his hand on the raw metal of the car’s roof, before moving off towards the three men a few metres away.
    They were looking down, away from him, like they were comparing shoes, though they must have heard his arrival in the stillness of this deserted spot.
    His feet ground the frosty grass by the side of the verge, and they took that as their cue to turn and acknowledge his presence. The shorter of the three, and the only one not in uniform, stepped forward and held out his hand.
    When Jaap took it in his own it was like it wasn’t there, almost as cold as the surrounding air, a slight roughness the only clue that he was touching anything at all. The man’s beard was starting to frost like the grass, his shoulders warming his ears.
    ‘Inspector Rykel?’
    He spoke in a voice which was quiet, soft, but still held some authority, the same voice Jaap would use –
did use
– when breaking the bad news to the wife, or husband, or indeed any relation of a murder victim, anyone unlucky enough to open the door to a sombre-faced police officer.
    This was slightly different of course, Andreas Hansen was not a relative at all, but he almost felt like one. They’d been working together for over nine years. Other Inspectors joked that they were like a married couple, only without the squabbling.
    No longer.
    Someone had decided to fire what looked like a single shot to the back of the head, creating a Pollockesque spray on the concrete incline. None of the dark drops had escaped the frost, each was coated with the same dusting of what looked like powdered glass, reflecting the pale sun which was climbing in the sky, shortening all their shadows.
    ‘When was he found?’
    His own voice sounded strange to him, muted slightly, as if his throat was full of cotton wool.
    ‘A driver, first thing this morning.’
    Maybe
, the hope rushed into his head,
it’s not Andreas at all.
    The body was lying face down, arms at its sides like it was on a skeleton bob. The clothes looked familiar, the leather jacket like the one Andreas wore, and the blond hair, slightly too long, clumped