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caterwauling around the square.
    Two minutes he waited. Then he stripped off the rest of the Black Pete outfit. Underneath he wore a white sweatshirt and jeans. The only possession left was the red bag meant for sweets. The money was in there. Incriminating evidence too. He took out the cash, the gun, the shells, walked to the water and threw the rest into the canal.
    For the last three nights they’d provided him with a room in a block for restaurant workers not far from Centraal station. Too dangerous to go back there now. He had his passport in the back of his jeans. His old English name. A photo from before.
    Maybe . . .
    The siren got closer. He couldn’t think straight.
    He put his head round the wall and looked back to Leidseplein.
    Then turned and started running again. A man with a shiny black face, the make-up dripping down onto his white T-shirt. Arms flailing. A gun tucked into his jeans. He fled uncertainly towards the narrow tangle of streets and lanes and canals that was the Jordaan.
    Henk Kuyper seemed content to do as the police asked. Stay near the theatre in Leidseplein watching the sullen, puzzled crowds disperse. Listen to the public address system calling for order. Promise his distraught wife everything would be fine. Everyone was safe.
    The assembly point for meeting lost family members was close by. After fifteen minutes there was still no sign of their daughter.
    His wife looked at him and said, ‘This isn’t my fault.’
    ‘Whose is it then?’ he wondered checking the square, eyes narrowed, scanning.
    ‘Why do you always blame me?’
    ‘I don’t.’
    ‘You could have come along, Henk. You could have been here. Maybe then . . .’
    The cold, sad stare silenced her. He always managed that when he wanted.
    She pulled out her phone. That morning, before she got worried about the Black Pete following them, she’d stopped the orange cargo trike on the canal near the open space by the Anne Frank house on the Prinsengracht. There she’d taken a picture of Saskia in the bucket seat at the front.
    Fair hair neatly combed. Eight years old in a pink jacket with ponies on it. Trying hard to smile against a crowd of bored tourists waiting to get into a museum dedicated to another lost child.
    But this wasn’t that dread world. Not an occupied Amsterdam, controlled by monsters. Thanks to Henk’s family money they were comfortable. Protected from the worst of the wrecked economy. His work brought him into conflict with his staid, patrician father. But Lucas Kuyper never staunched the flow of money. He was always there, a quiet, grey presence, ready to help when needed.
    The Kuyper name went back centuries, had its place in Amsterdam’s lists of minor nobility. It looked after its own and kept them close.
    ‘These things don’t happen to us,’ she told him, as if to convince herself.
    Then left him at the assembly point, clutching her phone in her hand. The picture of Saskia was still there: a tiny figure in a cargo bike. The pink jacket was too big for her. It wasn’t her style anyway. The only reason she wore it was because Henk came home with the thing saying it was a spur-of-the-moment purchase. A present for no good reason. He did that from time to time. He loved his daughter. More than he loved his wife.
    Hand out, phone in it, picture uppermost, Renata stumbled through the diminishing crowd, asking, pleading for someone to look at Saskia’s photo and tell her where her daughter might be.
    An image rose in her memory. Didn’t mothers around the world do this? In poorer places? The ones Henk thought he was helping? When a bomb exploded. Or snipers moved into nearby buildings.
    A mother. A lost child. Was there any difference between an upper-class Amsterdam wife and a refugee torn from her son or daughter?
    Henk would have something to say about that. A caustic comment that would tell her how stupid she was to think such a thing. Whatever she – they – believed society thought