Client Confidentiality

Despite Vermeer’s lack of excitement about my theory, I decide to tackle Judge Muller, but he takes some tracking down. First I try the courthouse on Parnassusweg, but I’m told he’d retired nine months ago. The address they give me out towards Amsterdamse Bos turns out to have been sold to a developer who’d taken the large double-fronted red-brick pile and turned it into a warren of tiny flats, presumably with an eye to housing midgets. A callback to the station and a helpful junior officer puts me right, working out that he’d bought a property in Purmerend, a half-hour north of the city.

I’m driving the police dog cruiser again and wish I was back in the Stang, though Kush is much quieter when travelling caged in the back. I start to think the Stang’s maybe not the best car to have if you own a dog. Thing is, I worked so hard on it there’s no way I’m giving it up now. Kush’ll have to adjust. The E22 is relatively quiet and as I drive I think about the best way to approach the judge.

Throughout the investigation into his daughter’s death Muller stepped well over the line multiple times, and yet, because of who he was, got away with it. The pressure had started off a light trickle, but as the days progressed it turned into a torrent, which made Hank and me feel like salmon swimming upstream. His daughter had been killed in an horrific way, so it was in many ways understandable, but the constant meddling with our investigation, the phone calls, the chance meetings, the outright interference got old, fast. At one point he’d even threatened to have us both removed from the case as he felt it wasn’t moving quick enough. I told him, to his face, to do it. Funnily enough he didn’t follow through.

I pull off the main road and within ten minutes I’m turning on to a private drive lined with trees. The house zoetropes in from my left through the trunks as I navigate the long curving driveway deep with gravel. Reaching the house I park and wonder how he’s going to react when I walk back into his life.

The house itself is impressive. Big bay windows, ornate stonework and a Virginia creeper creeping over large sections of the brickwork, the cooler evenings having turned the leaves bright red. As I get out of the car I accidentally knock the siren and lights on, startling several crows which explode into the air from a large beech tree. It takes me half a minute to work out how to turn them off again. Not that I try that quickly. Petty, I know. I get Kush out of the crate and clip his leash on.