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differently. The poor were poor. The rich were rich. And everyone in between seemed powerless to change a thing.
    He stayed with the other nervous parents. Waiting for this strange day to right itself. As if they’d pick up the cargo trike, put Saskia in the front and go home. Have supper together, make small talk as he opened the inevitable bottle of wine. Then he’d return to his little office in the gable roof to lose himself in the computer and all those people he knew around the world. Strangers to her yet closer to him than his own flesh and blood.
    She stumbled coming off the pavement into the square. A hand came out to steady her. She looked, recoiled. The Black Pete costume. Red this time. The same black face again.
    Renata pulled herself away from him, showed the phone. A shake of the comic head.
    Then she lurched on. Stopped everyone she could find. Aware that this was stupid. Irrational would be Henk’s word. Unthinking. Unproductive. But what else was there to do?
    After a couple of minutes she’d crossed the square. Looking back the crowds were working their way out in neat lines. The announcements over the loudspeakers seemed less frantic. Full of encouragement, words of comfort. Calling the lost to a single assembly point. Close to the place where Henk had stayed.
    Hand out, mind blank. No sight of Saskia anywhere. Then a shadow fell across the phone and a hand reached out for it.
    A woman about her age. Harder-faced. Lean in a cheap nylon jerkin and black jeans. A desperation in her eyes Renata thought she recognized.
    ‘You’ve seen her?’ she asked the woman.
    A stream of words. Foreign. Incomprehensible. The hand went out for the phone again and Renata thought: wrong time, wrong place for a mugging. Amsterdam in chaos and all this foreign bitch wants to do is steal a phone with a photo of a young girl on the screen. Smiling in a pink jacket.
    She jerked the handset away, stepped back, stared at her. As if she should have known.
    Not now. Not with a child missing.
    The woman grabbed her arm, the phone with it, put the screen close to her face, stared at the picture there.
    Then let go, what sounded like a foreign curse on her breath, looked at her, shook her head and shuffled away into the crowd, shoulders bent, tears in her eyes.
    The phone rang. Henk’s number.
    ‘I’ve got her,’ he said, nothing more.
    Vos was the first to see them. A group of masked men in black, hooded, armed, racing to the corner of the square, back towards the Melkweg. AIVD officers, he assumed.
    He didn’t care De Groot had told them to stay put. This was his city. His people. Men in masks had no place in it.
    Koeman was wiping the last of the black make-up from his face, moaning as usual. About what a mess this whole thing was. How people – the police too – didn’t know what to do.
    ‘Dirk,’ Vos told Van der Berg. ‘You deal with things here.’ He glanced at Bakker and Koeman, told them to follow him, then pushed through the line of families queuing to get out of the square, kept on until they were clear, looking down the narrow alley that led to the music venue. The men were past the place already, running by the grey buildings in Raamplein, chasing a distant figure who kept looking back as he stumbled across the bridge ahead.
    A man in a white T-shirt and jeans. Black face like Koeman’s.
    Vos set up a jog. Best he could manage. Bakker was younger, fitter than the rest of them. As he watched she broke into a run, long legs, long arms pumping, red hair flying back behind her.
    ‘They’ve got weapons,’ Vos yelled, knowing it was pointless to tell her to keep back.
    ‘Me too,’ she cried, turning, patting her jacket. And then she was over the gentle rise of the bridge, heavy feet so loud on the cobbles the noise sent a small gaggle of coots on the water flying and flapping away in sudden fear.
    Vos had left his weapon in his locker as usual. It was the Sinterklaas parade. Why would he need it?
    Some four