Free Little Sister by David Hewson Page B

could talk to them. The director asked why.
    ‘No particular reason,’ he answered.
    ‘I don’t think that would be appropriate.’
    Van der Berg didn’t push it. He just wanted to know what the answer would be.
    He wandered back into the corridor overlooking the rear of the building. The administrative wing was attached to a two-storey residential annexe by the wood. Through the branches he could just
make out the shoreline of the lake. There were a few boats on the water. A few faces at the window of the adjoining block. As he watched the male nurse out in the garden with four or five patients
got called on his phone. The man looked up at Veerman’s office and nodded. Then he walked the girls with him over the neatly tended lawns back into the building.
    Van der Berg returned to Veerman’s office. The director was bent over papers on his desk, the psychiatrist Visser by his side.
    ‘How many inmates do you have here?’ he asked.
    ‘Patients,’ Visser corrected him. ‘They’re not convicts. Not prisoners. They’re patients. This isn’t a jail. We’re here to help people.’
    ‘How many patients?’ he asked.
    ‘Twelve now the Timmers girls have gone.’
    ‘Knock before you come in again,’ Veerman added.
    He got the impression Visser wanted to say something, but not while Veerman was around.
    ‘How many do you cure?’ he asked.
    She winced and said, ‘Not as many as I’d like. It’s hard. Some of these kids have been screwed up almost since birth. Putting them in a place like this isn’t
always—’
    ‘It’s what the law demands,’ Veerman broke in.
    ‘I know that! All I’m saying is it doesn’t make the task any easier, locking them up somewhere that cuts them off from the outside world.’
    ‘Your job makes mine look easy,’ Van der Berg told her.
    ‘Very funny.’
    ‘No. I mean it. Can we . . . can we talk in your office?’
    Veerman was onto that straight away.
    ‘There’s nothing you can ask Irene that I can’t deal with. Ask it here. We’ve got work to do.’
    ‘True,’ Van der Berg agreed.
    Big place to keep a handful of young girls out of sight from the public, he thought. Remote too. He wondered who from outside kept an eye on the institution. Whether Veerman and the Visser woman
answered much to anyone at all.
    ‘I need to take a break,’ he said and walked down the stairs, out into the car park then round the back of the residential block. There were cooking smells from what must have been a
canteen. A dog was barking somewhere. Big dog from the sound of it.
    A light breeze was blowing in from the lake, rustling the leaves of the trees in the spinney. The sound mingled with the squawks of gulls in the blue sky. He wandered towards the pebbly
shoreline and lit a cigarette. If this were a hotel it would be a fine place, he thought. They could clear up the area around the wood and have weddings and parties there. The wild scrubland that
ran from the car park all the way to the trees then onto the shoreline could easily be removed. The location was peaceful, a good half a kilometre from the pretty wooden houses of the island
village. Someone could make a go of it. Instead it was a kind of jail. Quite unlike any he’d ever seen.
    There was a sound behind him, so loud and sudden Van der Berg jumped. He turned and saw a stout woman in a white kitchen uniform, a blue plastic mob cap on her head. She looked fifty or so with
a fierce, jowly face and was holding back a large German shepherd dog, struggling to keep a grip on the animal’s chain lead.
    ‘So you’re the policeman? Took your time,’ she said in an accent he recognized immediately: a Volendammer.
    ‘That I am.’ He showed her his ID. ‘And you are . . . ?’
    The woman swore at the dog and dragged it back on the chain. The animal whined then sat on its haunches. Tamed.
    ‘Bea Arends,’ she said and stuck out a giant hand covered in flour.
    ‘You work in the kitchen.’
    She laughed, a pleasant sound,