Pressure mounted from above. An informal chat with the prosecutor confirmed my suspicions; she couldn’t recommend I put the case forward based on what I’d presented. With two hours to go I got a call from an officer up in Bergen who had seen the alert we’d put out on the internal system, saying there’d been a man who looked like our suspect who’d been living in a holiday cabin in the woods. Normally it wouldn’t have warranted more than a note in the file, but if there was a chance she’d be able to fill in some of the background on the man, then we were prepared to take the drive up north. We were set to leave just as Station Chief Smit called us into his office and told us, very specifically, to go back to the building Muller’s body had been found in and show Klaasen’s mugshot around. I countered this had been done, no less than twice already. Three could often be the lucky number, I was advised.

With one hour to go a man looking like a serial heroin user positively ID’d the man in the photo as having left Muller’s flat about the time of her death. The phrase ‘reliable witness’ and the man propping himself up on the door frame in front of me, scratching at his elbow pits and avoiding any kind of eye contact, didn’t seem a natural fit. And yet he was confirming just what we needed. Just in time.

On the ride back to the station I became more and more convinced that the witness was a plant. Had it come from Muller himself? It was all too neat, all too just-in-time for my liking. But I had no proof, and wouldn’t get any either. Of that I was sure. So we had no choice but to submit the case.

The trial was swift, the three judges – in the Netherlands we don’t trust the general population to sit on juries, so we entrust the whole thing to judges – handed down the maximum penalty allowed, and did it in record time to boot.

And now this.

An identical killing.

A copycat killing.

It can’t be, I think, it’s got to be Klaasen. The double buzz of my phone brings me back to the canteen, empty now except for the man with the mop. Jansen’s still not back. I check the message, relieved to see it’s from Joel. Even better he’s in Amsterdam and will be home in about ten minutes. It’ll take me twenty to walk. I check the time; it’s been way longer than the ten I’d promised Jansen. Fuck it. I’ve told him everything I know anyway. He and Inspector Vermeer can wrestle with it, not me.