Back upstairs I get a call from Ron.

‘The Snake is in the nest,’ he says. ‘Repeat, the Snake is in the nest.’

I’m not sure Ron’s coping that well with leaving the police force. I try not to think what that bodes for me. Am I really ready to give this up?

I call across to Vermeer, letting her in on the news.

‘Right, back in the car,’ she says. ‘Oi, what are you doing?’

Everyone jumps, but it turns out she was directing herself at Kush, who now has his head deep in the bin. When he pulls it out he has a stroopwafel wrapper in his mouth. In the car pool I load him into the vehicle, having divested him of his prize.

‘Tomorrow you need to find somewhere for him to stay,’ she tells me as we head off.

‘Might not be a tomorrow.’

‘I know you had a breakdown but, damn, that sounds pretty pessimistic.’

‘No, what I mean is, there might not be a tomorrow because if we get lucky the guy we’re meeting will be able to tell us where Akkerman is. And I’m starting to feel he’s just as involved as Huisman. And if that’s true, we find one, we find the other.’

‘We can hope,’ she says, nosing out into traffic. ‘We can hope.’

The walls are vibrating, Claudia has been replaced with a young man who looks like he’s severely hung-over, and the club itself is fuller than it was earlier.

‘Do none of these people have jobs?’ Vermeer asks.

‘It’s bewildering, right?’ Ron says. He’s been drooling over Vermeer since we stepped in a few moments ago, and isn’t showing any sign of letting up. ‘I mean, just who the fuck are they? It costs a fortune to get in, the drinks are massively overpriced, it’s not even five o’clock on a weekday, and yet here they are.’

We all marvel for a minute at how the other half live before I ask where the man we’re interested in is. Ron speaks to the hung-over man who points to a screen marked LOWER BAR, LEFT CORNER. There are a series of semicircular booths all facing a stage. There’s a shiny pole in the middle of it, though as of yet the act hasn’t started. There are people in each booth, and the man points to one with three figures.

‘Snake’s the one in the middle.’