I don’t even respond. Down in the car pool I’m assigned a small unmarked. Drives well, fast, tight. Nothing like the Stang, though. Ten minutes of blurry windows and I’m standing outside a house in Amsterdam-Zuid. Stephanie practically tears the door off its hinges as soon as I knock. She ushers me inside, and I catch her checking out the street as she closes the door. I decide not to tell her my houseboat got burned down. Through a corridor strewn with kids’ toys and photos on the wall of modest holidays on windswept beaches with grey skies. I don’t see a father in any of them, just two kids. The kitchen is heavy with the gluey scent of last night’s pizza. A cereal packet stands on the surface like a sentinel. Stephanie turns to face me, clutching the worktop behind her for support. She’d sounded nervous on the phone, now it’s kicked up several notches.

‘I found this,’ she says, handing me a few sheets of paper she pulls from a drawer next to her. There’s a smudge of eyeliner by her right eye.

I check the papers. Pathology reports for the volunteers who died. Not all of them, though. There’s one missing.

‘Where did you get these?’

‘I can’t tell you. But you didn’t get them from me.’

She’s edgy, something inside forcing her to do the right thing but now she has she just wants me gone. I get that. What I don’t get is why, again, there are only five, not six. Six people got the placebo, the other six people got the drug, but there are only five reports. I start to wonder what happened to the sixth. Did one survive the drug? Is that possible?

‘That’s all there was. See these?’ She points out each report’s number in the top right corner. ‘I checked the numbers either side and they were for different people.’

‘Not the missing volunteer?’

She shakes her head.

I pull out the list of names, check them. It looks like one of the two brothers didn’t die after all, the one lacking a pathology report is Rein Benner.

‘So you reckon this one, Rein Benner, didn’t die?’

‘I don’t know, but there’s no pathology report and there would be if he had.’

I suddenly feel like a wave’s swelling behind me.

‘One last thing.’ I show her a photo. ‘Was this the man who told you to keep quiet?’

I hold up a photo of Judge Muller, the same one I’d seen at his house of him and the mayor. I’d found it online, an article about a fundraising event both men had attended. In it, Muller’s wearing his pinstripe suit.

She stares at it, face furrowed, but finally shakes her head.

As soon as I’m outside I get Jansen on the phone.