linguist, the best violinist in the school, as well as their most athletic hockey player, Francisca was traffic-stoppingly beautiful and rode like an angel on horseback. Her long blonde hair cascaded over her shoulders and her deep blue eyes paralysed men in the rare moments when she overcame her natural shyness and looked them in the eye.
Wielart wasn’t interested in women, per se. But the sixteen-year-old Francisca stirred something in him. And he started to make sure he was at home when Francisca was coming over.
She didn’t say much to him, but whenever he asked her about her father’s shipping company, she not only knew exactly what was going on, but could articulate it with the precision of a financial journalist. As she got to know him, she began to look him in the eye when she spoke to him. It stirred a feeling deep inside him that he knew was wrong, though he soon became a slave to it.
Francisca came on Wielart family holidays over the next two years. She played and read and sang with Josebe. In fact, they were utterly inseparable.
By the time Francisca was eighteen, Wielart was totally infatuated with her. He couldn’t be in the same room as her without darting a glance at her from behind his thick, round glasses whenever he thought no one would notice. She now had the body of a woman, not a girl, and he longed to see it, to touch it, to smell it. Occasionally, feigning innocence, he would walk into Josebe’s room at an inopportune moment in the hope of catching a glance of Francisca in a state of semi-undress. But he never had any success.
Wielart’s long-held aversion to swimming – his father had fervently believed that professionals must never risk being seen by their clients in anything other than a suit and tie – had robbed him of any chance to see Francisca in a bathing costume. All he could do was lust after her with growing desperation, while concealing his obsession with mounting self-loathing.
Pallesson made the short journey from The Hague to Amsterdam by train. Having deliberately left an hour’s slack in his schedule, he headed southeast across the Centraal Station concourse rather than taking a more direct route to his assignation through the Magna Plaza.
As he walked past the magnificent spires of St Nicolaaskerk, Pallesson didn’t have a religious thought in his mind. Far from it. In fact, the anticipation of the little treat he was about to give himself was making his armpits wet. He could feel the beads of sweat dripping down his ribcage.
A cold smile creased his face as he turned down the Oudezijds Achterburgwal. He looked approvingly at the swans gliding with menace along the canal – patrolling territory that stretched deep into the red-light district.
Pallesson hesitated as he walked past the first row of girls displaying themselves in the window, beckoning to him with their fingers. They beckoned to everyone. They had to. The only way they made any money was if they could earn more than the cost of the window they hired by the hour.
The top end of the red-light district offered the cheapest girls. They catered for a diverse range of tastes. Pallesson loved the illusion the windows gave that they were locked in cells. Animals in cages.
Like most bullies, he wasn’t naturally brave. So it took him a few metres to slow his walk until he finally stopped by the window of a small brunette desperately trying to entice him. He laughed at her. She took no notice and kept beckoning to him. And he kept laughing. He was safe. What was she going to do about it?
After a few seconds, he moved further down the street, buoyed up by his entertainment. He felt empowerment coursing through his veins. His next target was an Asian girl. She was pretty, smiley and had a great body. Pallesson stood in front of her window with his arms crossed. A dark frown crossed his face, as if something was concerning him. He fixed the girl with his cold, grey eyes, and shook his head. The girl kept smiling and opened her door ajar to encourage him.
‘Fifty euros for good time,’ she said. ‘Fifty euros.’
He gestured with his hand to dismiss her – though it wasn’t as if she was going anywhere – and moved on.
A hundred metres further along the pavement Pallesson turned down a narrow side street. An observant tourist would have noticed that all of the windows in the alley either had a whip hanging inside the window, or a small card proclaiming S&M. Pallesson checked his watch. He had forty-five minutes.
The curtains of the first two windows were shut. He wasn’t bothered. He’d used them both over the last few months. He wanted to try the last girl on the left. He’d noticed her before. She was large, strong-looking and, with any luck, German.
He was nearly shaking with excitement as he approached her window. The curtain was open. She was sitting on a high stool, talking to someone on her mobile phone. He caught her eye, expectantly. Unlike the other girls, she didn’t rush to open her door or beckon to him. She just carried on with her conversation and made him stand in the narrow alley like a prick. He felt demeaned. He was now desperate to have her.
She knew what she was doing. This little jerk wasn’t going anywhere. And she could see by the way he was dressed that she could up her charges. In her own time she opened the door and gestured with her head for him to enter. He stepped into her narrow window without saying a word. She drew the curtains behind him.
He left half an hour later, but without the shifty look that most of the punters had when they stepped quickly back on to the street and walked one way or the other, trying to blend into the general crowd. He liked being in control, not skulking about.
He checked his watch again. He had ten minutes to get to the jetty in the Oude Turfmarkt. He walked briskly along the canal past the magnificent houses that border the red-light district, making a mental note of the one he would like to live in. He then cut through the university campus, which brought him out opposite the Hotel de l’Europe. As he walked down the street he could hear the clock tower across the canal by the flower market chiming noon. He was bang on time. As he always was.
The old merchant’s boat waiting to pick him up was tied to the jetty used by the tourist boats.
‘Good morning,’ he said to one of the thickset lumps of muscle standing on the jetty.
The man barely registered his presence.
‘Let’s go,’ Pallesson said, unfazed.
The small boat had one cabin with a long narrow table and bench seats either side. One of the thugs shut the double doors behind him without so much as a word. He was now trapped in his own glass-sided cell, looking out on to the canal as the boat pulled away from the jetty.
Wevers van Ossen was the proprietor of the old merchant’s boat. He was also a vicious psychopath. And leader of the Kalverstraat gang, which was notorious for its brutality. For over a decade he’d been running a ruthless protection racket in Amsterdam.
His authority, however, was now being challenged by Eastern European gangs who were prepared to stand their ground. And one Dutchman – Jorgan Stam. The level of violence employed by Stam’s men was escalating fast. The balance of power was being tested.
So van Ossen had made a strategic decision. He was diversifying into drugs. It was simple for him. There were any number of desperate ‘mules’ prepared to take the risk of bringing heroin to Amsterdam by boat or land. All he had to do was warehouse and redistribute it. At no risk, given his position in Amsterdam. He’d ‘protected’ the docks for years. And Pallesson was the conduit and fixer for his first deal into England.
The two minders on van Ossen’s boat could have been twins, with their shaven heads and wide noses. Both were reckless killers. They’d left behind their birth names when they walked out the back door of the garrison at Doorn, Utrecht, and assumed the new identities that van Ossen had created for them: Fransen and Piek.
As members of the Dutch Maritime Special Operations Forces (MARSOF), they had come through the most brutal of training regimes in every extreme terrain possible; and thrived on it.
During their tour of duty at Camp Smitty near As Samawah in Southern Iraq, they had fought in conjunction with AH-64 attack helicopters, clearing out subversives. They had put their lives on the