behind a beautiful thirty-degree day in Hong Kong to come to windchill factor six below in Amsterdam. Spring looked like coming late to the tulip fields that year.
There was a lull on the streets as the rush to work was over and the tourists were not yet out in force. Mann cut a smart figure striding athletically across the cobbles, his eyes always fixed on the horizon. In the melting pot of Amsterdam society his Eurasian ethnicity, his mix of Chinese and English, didn’t look out of place, though his tanned face stuck out amongst the pasty look of people emerging from a European winter.
The place he was looking for was situated on a side street in a five-storey merchant house that had once been a beautiful eighteenth-century building and was now carved up into at least thirty companies. Mann found the right intercom. He pressed the buzzer. There was a loud click as the heavy door lock was released and he was buzzed up. Standing in the hallway, he looked at the board of company names in the hall. NAP was on the second floor.
There was the sound of clacking keyboards and muted telephone conversations as he emerged onto the second floor. NAP was one of three companies that had their offices there. The NAP office door was open. There were six desks that Mann could see, laid out in a herringbone fashion behind a long, modern, wood and chrome reception desk. There were two men and four women busy on PCs and phones. On the walls were posters of exotic faraway places.
It was a plush office. So far as Mann could tell, it looked like the expedition industry was booming.
Mann went inside and stood in front of the reception desk and waited for the young receptionist to remember that, when the buzzer sounded downstairs, it usually meant someone was on their way up. Her black metallic fingernails drummed away on the desktop whilst she rocked slightly in her seat and giggled into the phone. She had last night’s heavy makeup smudged under her eyes and her hair was flattened at the back of her head. It looked like she’d been lying on her back for most of the night but probably not sleeping. Her glitzy top revealed more than it covered up and she had the aura of stale wine, stale cigarettes and something else around her. When she finally looked up from her desk and saw Mann, she blinked, grinned and slammed the handset back on its base.
‘Can I help you, sir?’ she asked in Dutch, tilting her head slightly to one side and then the other as she leant forward over the desk to show him some more cleavage.
‘You can if you speak English.’
She giggled. ‘Of course, sir. What can I do for you?’ She played with her hair. It looked like she could do a lot, thought Mann, except he liked his women washed and at least ten years older.
Mann placed his hands flat on the desk in front of her as he leant across. He gave a lingering look down her top and then he slid his eyes upwards towards hers as he gave her a big smile. She looked up at him, her eyes wide with surprise and delight. He could practically hear her panting. She was as excitable as a kitten with a new ball of string.
‘I am here to talk about the five volunteers who have been kidnapped,’ he said, a little too loudly, whilst keeping the smile. All other activity in the office stopped as all heads turned his way.
‘I’m sorry…’ The receptionist blinked at him a few times. She lowered her voice instinctively as she lost her smile; just when she was beginning to think it was her lucky day. ‘We are not allowed to speak about that.’ She looked over her shoulder and smiled nervously at an older woman who had been watching and listening. She had a nameplate that said ‘Dorothy Jansen’ on her desk.
Mann kept his hands on the desk as he gave a sweeping look around the room, before he stood up to his full height and brought his police badge out of his inside pocket. And, just in case anyone in the room was hard of hearing or had trouble with English, he pronounced the words slowly and precisely as he flashed his badge.
‘Hong Kong Police.’
It wasn’t worth a damn here but he knew she didn’t know that.
The receptionist looked over at her colleagues for support but they looked away nervously and tried to act like it wasn’t their problem. Only Dorothy continued to watch the situation.
‘One moment, please.’ The receptionist stood, wriggling her micro black skirt down from where it was lodged at the top of her thighs, revealing a hole in her tights, before tottering away on her skinny legs and oversized platforms. She disappeared through the door at the back of the office. Whilst she was gone Mann looked around at the rest of the team. Only Dorothy was smiling back. She looked like she was in her late fifties. Probably come back to work after the divorce. She looked like she had something she wanted to say but wasn’t sure how to begin. She also had a look that said it couldn’t be said in front of everyone.
The receptionist returned. Two minutes later a chiclooking woman in her late thirties appeared. She was olive-skinned. There was something Oriental about her appearance. She was five foot two at the most, size zero, short boyish hair with auburn lights in it. The way she was marching towards him as fast as her pencil skirt allowed, she reminded Mann of an angry wind-up doll in one of those horror movies. Her eyes were glued on him, beautiful but cold, hard and calculating: all black kohl eyeliner. Her full lips were perfectly painted in burgundy. In an otherwise casual capital like Amsterdam, this woman was a power dresser: a black, tiny-waisted jacket and a pewter-grey silk camisole tucked into the waistband of a black pencil skirt. Mann looked at her feet Victorian-style black ankle boots with aubergine-coloured straps lacing them, plus stiletto heels—she was a brave woman, given that the whole of Amsterdam’s centre was cobbled. She studied him as a female spider eyes a potential mate.
‘This is our manageress, Katrien.’ The receptionist smiled at him apologetically.
The woman’s face remained stony as she said: ‘Follow me.’ This must be the Bitch that Alfie referred to. There would only ever be one woman in one office. Otherwise, like territorial rats, one would definitely have eaten the other.
Mann did as he was told and followed her through the office past the two rows of desks. Only Dorothy dared to look up as they passed. She smiled at Mann sympathetically. Mann winked back.
‘Nice offices,’ he said as they passed two open doors, one with a long hardwood conference table in it, and the other a lounge and informal meeting room with black leather armchairs and a wall of expensive artwork.
The fact that he was taking his time to have a good look around as he went seemed to annoy Katrien greatly. She glanced back irritably a few times to see why he wasn’t coming to heel. At the end of the corridor they came into a chrome and leather office, glass on two sides with a window overlooking the medieval part of town. Mann could see the old church where sailors had come to pray for hundreds of years, after they’d used the local whores and got blind drunk in the taverns; their sin and their salvation neatly contained less than a few feet from one another. Belle—Amsterdam’s brass statue in honour of sex workers—stood waiting to have the bike removed from its base.
The room had a hint of expensive perfume, undertones of jasmine. There was an orchid growing in the corner but little else—no photos, no personal effects. Katrien’s laptop lay closed but blinking on the desk. The room was devoid of character, thought Mann. Either it wasn’t a place she spent much time in, or she wasn’t a woman who liked to leave a trace. She closed the door behind them and snapped the louvre blind closed to block out the mid-morning sun as it cut a swathe across the black fossil-inlaid desktop. Then she sat down behind her desk and waited for him to sit.
He didn’t take his coat off—there was definite chill in the air but sat and immediately pushed the chair away from the desk and eyeballed her as he rested his forearms on the chair’s leather arms. She didn’t flinch. He could see that Katrien didn’t intimidate easily. He could see she liked to be in charge.
‘Nice orchid. Never seen a golden one before.’ He smiled. She didn’t smile back. ‘Does it remind you of home?’
She looked startled by his suggestion.
‘No.’
‘But you are Asian, aren’t you?’ Her English was impressive but she had hardly