Free Little Sister by David Hewson

Thing is, Pieter . . .’
    ‘What?’
    ‘There’s something very odd about this place. I can’t quite put my finger on it.’
    ‘You will,’ Vos told him and wondered where they might look next.

15
    Three.
    That was the number, the holy number. The only one that mattered.
    Three little girls on the waterfront in Volendam.
    Three, the magic symbol of family: mummy, daddy, children.
    Three for The Cupids too. A drummer, a bass player who sang more than the others, a guitarist who wrote their tunes.
    Listening to them now in the narrow house in Amsterdam the sisters agreed this was a cheat. There were only three of them but they played tricks when it came to music. They had their own studio
not far from the museum by the lake. It was upstairs, above a cafe owned by their manager, the big man who smiled a lot and never really looked as if he meant it. Jaap. Jaap Blom.
    He didn’t push himself but The Cupids did. Their fame was on the wane nationally but in Volendam a touch of tacky stardust remained. For some reason they had still had glitzy friends too,
celebrities who visited, foreign musicians looking for somewhere interesting to record. Show business people and other rich strangers, from the city and beyond. In the small, insular lakeside town
that upstairs studio was a special place. When their mother finally took them there – she’d been hired to sing backing vocals for a demo – she’d dressed the three of them
carefully in their school uniforms. It was important to make an impression.
    Did they? This was a lifetime ago, part of a childhood they remembered only dimly and with difficulty. It was hard to divorce what was real from the dream. They were eleven when the bloody
evening fell upon them. Its details remained elusive, as much the fiction of others as themselves.
    Some things seemed certain. The Cupids were big men, forceful and full of themselves. They laughed too loudly. They sang off-key. And somehow, in the studio above the cafe that other, quiet,
unsmiling man Jaap fixed all their errors with a subtle brand of magic. A wrong note was corrected. A thin vocal got duplicated until it sounded fuller than the three of them could ever achieve in
real life. When the girls listened to the tune that came out of the session – technically perfect but lacking in emotion and spirit – it was hard to associate it with the shambling,
middle-aged men who sat around the studio drinking beer and smoking dope.
    Freya Timmers and her daughters could sing. Loud and clear and true. The men in The Cupids were charlatans. Not that it stopped them getting rich and famous for a while.
    After a few minutes Kim announced she was bored with the music and made coffee. They didn’t talk much. Since the phones were lost there was no way anyone could get a message to them.
    Especially Jo.
    Cute Jo.
    Clever Jo.
    Lost Jo.
    Kim closed her eyes and sang the first line of an old hymn.
    I will bless the Lord.
    Mia waited for her moment and sang the middle harmony.
    They waited.
    Jo was the soprano.
    Jo completed their harmony. Without her nothing worked.
    Back in Marken they heard her. But that place was familiar. It was
theirs.
    Here in the strange cold city she was missing from their lives.
    Kim sang the lower line again. Mia came in on cue.
    Outside pigeons cooed as if they wanted to join in. Someone walked past laughing. A car horn tapped out an angry shriek. A dog barked. Then another.
    They waited for the third voice, so reliable in Marken, but it never came. Instead there was the sound of a key in the front door. The Englishwoman bustled in carrying two blue-and-white Albert
Heijn carrier bags, full to the brim judging by the way she struggled with them.
    ‘All set up for the duration now,’ she announced. Then she put them on the table and added, ‘I’ll let you two unpack. You want to earn your keep here, don’t
you?’
    Cheese and eggs, bread and milk, ham and packs of ready-to-eat fruit. She watched them