He hangs up and puts the phone back in the drawer. The desk tilts, the room spins. He picks up his desk phone, takes a few deep breaths, then dials a number. One he’d hoped he was never going to have to call.

Fire

It’s definitely Huisman, the man we’ve been chasing all this time.

We step towards the bed and he lets out a low groan before his head jerks up suddenly, as if an electrical current’s passing through him. He’s held there for a few seconds before his muscles go slack and his head drops back down. He groans again and I realize he’s strapped down with thick fabric bands.

‘He looks like shit,’ Vermeer says. ‘Not sure he’s faking it.’

Heroin withdrawal’s no joke. I once sat with an ex-colleague who’d had to shoot up undercover and just couldn’t seem to kick the habit once he returned to desk work. The withdrawal itself broadly fits into three stages. In the first eight hours after the final dose the craving starts to take hold, and people often seem to get irritable at even the smallest things. Then it starts to go downhill in stage two. The stomach cramps, the profuse sweating, the desperate desire to move increasing in intensity over the next day or so, the unbearable knowledge that there’s a simple remedy to stop all this just a needle prick away. The third and final stage can last for days: muscles spasms, diarrhoea, vomiting, your body alternating between a high fever and a death-like chill till you’d claw your own eyes out in despair. Some veterans add in a fourth phase: relapse.

From the looks of it, though, Huisman’s in the second. I step closer and see his T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms are dark with sweat. He also smells like he’s been sweating for some time. He turns his head and opens his eyes slowly like it’s a struggle. The whites of his eyes are heavily bloodshot and have the manic quality of a person seeing things.

‘No …’ he says, his voice like paper sliding off paper. ‘No more.’

You can see from his eyes we’re not getting anything out of him for a while. Maybe even days. Days he’s going to have to spend in the drunk tank, which is a far cry from here. In any other situation, if we weren’t here to arrest a man we suspect of brutally killing two young women, I might even feel sorry for him.

‘You want to do the honours?’ I ask Vermeer.

She reads him his rights, though it’s clear he’s not really taking it in. Once done we loosen the straps, and help him upright. He’s groaning, but compliant. But as Vermeer pulls the cuffs out a change comes over him.