Ten Past Midnight

The call came at ten past midnight, and Jo knew before she’d said a word into the phone that whatever it carried was going to matter, because Anselm never called this late, and had never once, in five months, called without a reason he’d already thought through on the way to dialling.

“Els is at the OLVG.” His voice had none of its usual evenness in it. “Someone broke into her studio. She’s hurt — not badly, they’re telling me, but she’s hurt, and Sanne’s already there because Sanne’s on nights this week, and I’m getting a taxi and I need you to meet me there.”

“I’m coming now.”

The taxi ride felt longer than it measured, the city sliding past in the flat orange wash of streetlight that made every canal look identical to every other one, and Jo spent the whole of it doing the only thing she knew how to do with fear this large: breaking it into facts small enough to hold. Els was alive. Sanne was already treating her, which meant Els had reached help, or help had reached her, quickly enough to matter. Whoever had done this had wanted something from that studio badly enough to hurt a sixty-one-year-old woman to get it, which told Jo, even before she knew the details, most of what she needed to know about how close they’d come to something worth protecting.

Anselm was already in the corridor when she arrived, standing the way she’d first seen him stand in his own office in January, very still, watching a door he couldn’t yet go through. He turned before she’d said anything, the way he always did.

“They won’t tell me much until Sanne comes out. Head wound, they said. Not life-threatening. She fought whoever it was, apparently, which is either the bravest or the most foolish thing I’ve ever heard of Els doing, and I can’t currently separate which.”

“Both, probably. It usually is.” Jo took his hand, because there was nothing useful left to say and this, at least, was something she could actually give him. “What did they take?”

“I don’t know yet. The police were still there when Sanne called me. She said drawers pulled out, papers everywhere, a filing cabinet forced.” He said it flatly, cataloguing rather than feeling it yet, the way she recognised from her own worst mornings at a microscope. “I keep thinking, if I’d gone to the insurer three days ago instead of waiting to see Els once more first, this doesn’t happen. There’s no unofficial file left worth breaking in for. There’s just a formal one, with lawyers attached, and nobody breaks into a studio to steal something the authorities already have a copy of.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know it enough to lie awake with it.” He looked at her properly then, something raw and unmanaged in his face that she’d only seen once before, in the study, the night he’d told her about the ledger he hadn’t looked at. “I keep doing this. Choosing the version that costs less today and finding out later what it actually costs someone else.”

“You chose to see her once more because she’s your oldest friend’s oldest friend, and you didn’t want the last conversation you ever have with her to be one where a stranger with a warrant is standing in the room.” Jo kept her voice steady, because his wasn’t, and one of them needed to be. “That’s not the same as choosing carelessly. You can’t run every decision back through what you know now and call the earlier version a mistake. Nobody gets to see round that corner.”

“You do it constantly. Run everything back and check whether the earlier version held.”

“I check evidence. I don’t relitigate love.” She said it and meant it more than she expected to, and he held onto that, visibly, the way a man holds onto a rail on a boat that’s finally stopped pitching.

Sanne came through the double doors twenty minutes later, scrubs, hair escaping its clip, the flattened exhaustion of someone who had spent the last hour being competent about something she badly wanted to fall apart over instead.

“She’s stable. Concussion, four stitches above her ear, bruising on both forearms consistent with putting them up to protect her head, which means she saw it coming and had time to try.” Sanne said it in the clipped, factual register Jo recognised from her own reports, a woman keeping herself upright by keeping to what she could prove. “She’s asking for you, Papa. Not me. You.”

“Is she—“

“She’s frightened, and she’s furious, and she keeps trying to apologise to me for something I don’t understand yet, which I’m choosing to assume is about tonight and not about anything older, because I don’t have room for anything older right now.” Sanne’s composure cracked, briefly, at the edges. “Someone hurt her, Papa. In her own home. Over a painting. I don’t — I need someone to tell me this is actually about a painting and not about something worse that nobody’s told me yet.”

Anselm didn’t answer straight away, and Jo watched him make, in real time, the decision he’d been circling for months.

“It’s about a painting,” he said. “And about your mother, and about a debt she took on that I didn’t know about until a few weeks ago, and about people who want it to stay buried badly enough that they’ve now hurt someone to keep it that way. I’m not going to tell you the rest of it standing in a corridor at one in the morning. I am telling you, tonight, that there is a rest of it, and that I am done deciding you don’t get to hear it.”

Sanne looked at him for a long moment, something shifting behind her eyes that wasn’t quite relief and wasn’t quite anger either, closer to the exhaustion of finally being told the truth after asking for it for three years. “That’s the first time you’ve ever said that to me. All of it, at once, without softening it first.”

“I know. I’m sorry it took this.”

“Don’t be sorry yet. Be sorry when I’ve actually heard the whole of it and decided how angry I’m allowed to be.” She said it without cruelty, only a tiredness too complete to spare anyone including herself, and turned to lead them both back through the doors, pausing once to look at Jo. “Thank you for being here. I mean that. Whatever this turns out to be, I’d rather you were in the corridor than not.”

Els lay propped against two thin hospital pillows, a dressing above her left ear, one arm mottled with bruising that had already started to darken, and when she saw Anselm come through the curtain her face did something complicated — relief, and shame, arriving together with nowhere separate to go.

“I didn’t tell them anything,” she said, before he’d reached the bed. “Whoever it was. I didn’t have the chance to, and I don’t think I’d have wanted to even if I had. They wanted the papers. The old ones, from the desk in the back room, and I don’t know how they knew there was anything there worth taking.”

“What papers?”

“The agreement. Annelies’s copy, and mine, from the sale. I kept it, Anselm. Three years, in a box under the floorboard, telling myself it was insurance against something I couldn’t name, and I think whoever did this knew exactly where to look, which frightens me considerably more than the head wound does.” Her voice shook, finally, the composure Jo had watched her hold for two months coming apart at last. “They took it. Both copies. Whatever proof there ever was that this happened the way I told you it happened — it’s gone, unless it’s somewhere else I don’t know about.”

Anselm sat down heavily in the chair beside the bed, and reached for her uninjured hand without seeming to decide to. “You should have told me you had it.”

“I should have told you a great many things, three years ago. I’ve apparently decided to ration the truth out one crisis at a time.” A ghost of her old dryness returned, briefly, before the fear underneath it reasserted itself. “This isn’t a quiet insurance matter any more, is it. Whatever it was when your inspector first walked through my door.”

“No,” Anselm said. “I don’t think it’s been that for some time.”

Jo stood near the curtain, watching the three of them find some new, unsteady footing together, and understood, with the cold clarity she reserved for facts too large to soften, that whoever had sent a man in a grey overcoat to stand across a canal had just proven, past any reasonable doubt, that the danger in this case had never been abstract. It had simply been waiting for a document worth enough to make it real.

· · ·Scene break

Vermeer came to the hospital herself, a little after two, called out of bed by a uniformed colleague who’d recognised Els’s name from an open file rather than a closed one. She took Jo aside in the corridor while a second officer sat with Els to record a formal statement, and for the first time since the station near the Wibautstraat, her patience had a different quality to it, sharpened rather than merely settled.

“An assault, forced entry, and a theft of documents connected to a private art sale you and I discussed six weeks ago.” Vermeer said it like a woman reading her own charge sheet back to herself, checking it for holes before she committed to it. “That’s no longer a favour I’m doing anyone. That’s a case. I can open it tonight, and I will, and I’ll want everything you’ve got — the receipt book, the photograph, whatever your client’s willing to hand over about a company called Halbrecht.”

“He’s going to the insurer. In the next few days, formally, on the record.”

“Tell him to make it tomorrow, not the next few days. I’d rather have the paperwork in my hands before whoever did this decides they need to finish something they’ve started.” Vermeer’s eyes went to the curtain where Els lay, briefly, something almost gentle crossing her professional register. “You were right, for what that’s worth. I told you that you were early. It appears you’ve just run out of time to be early in.”

Jo said nothing to that, because there was no comfort in being right about a thing that had cost a sixty-one-year-old woman four stitches and a night in a hospital bed, and some findings, she was learning, were worth considerably less than the price paid to confirm them.

“Get some sleep,” Vermeer said, not unkindly, closing her notebook. “You look like a woman who hasn’t, in a while, and tomorrow’s going to want you fully awake for it.”

She didn’t sleep. She sat with Anselm in the family room down the corridor until the sky outside the small square window had gone from black to the flat grey that passed for dawn in Amsterdam any time of year, neither of them speaking much, his hand loosely around hers on the plastic armrest between two chairs built for exactly this kind of waiting and nothing more comfortable.

“I’m calling the insurer at nine,” he said, at some point in the grey hour before the ward properly woke. “Not in a few days. This morning, the moment their office opens, before I’ve had time to talk myself into managing it one more time.”

“Good.”

“I keep thinking I should feel afraid of what that call does to the gallery. Mostly what I feel is that I should have made it a long time ago, and that everyone I love has paid a little more for every day I didn’t.” He turned to look at her, hollowed out by the night but steadier, somehow, than she’d seen him look in weeks. “Thank you for sitting in a corridor with me twice now. I don’t think I’ve ever properly thanked you for that.”

“You don’t need to thank me for it.” She meant it, and let her head rest, finally, against his shoulder, both of them too tired for anything more deliberate than that. “It’s where I’d rather be.”