A State Of Sin Amsterdam Occult Series Book Two Mark Hobson (romantic novels in english TXT) 📖

He shrugged. “We won’t know for a while, probably a few days until they know for sure if the damage is permanent. But whatever the outcome, we’ll make sure she gets all the help she can.”

“We? Or you?” Prisha looked over the top of her glasses at him.

Pieter raised his eyebrows.

“Perhaps it’s just office gossip, but the rumour is that you and she are…” She left the rest of the sentence unfinished.

“What? An item? It would be against policy to form a relationship with a fellow officer at the same station, you know that.”

“Oh shut up! What rubbish.”

“And a male senior officer and a young female rookie at that.”

Pieter felt his face flush, but he was already thinking about Kaatje hopefully leaving the hospital soon. They had made arrangements for her to come and stay with him for a while, which wasn’t ideal with his place being a four-story townhouse with lots of narrow connecting staircases. But he had reassured her that really, he spent most of his time in the living areas on the top two floors, and he would be there to help her find her feet and to deal with her – temporary, remember? he’d stressed to Kaatje – to help her cope with her temporary eyesight loss.

“You men,” Prisha jabbed her finger at him playfully and shook her head, “you’re all the same.”

This brought him around to the real reason for his visit this morning.

Pieter asked her about the patients from the eye clinic, the ones he had shot and those that had subsequently been found later. The people with their eyes removed.

“We have ten dead ones so far, which include the three that you shot plus the one you ran over with your car. The others were found dead in various parts of the city, some by the police and some by members of the public. They had all frozen to death, which considering that they were dressed just in their flimsy nightclothes isn’t surprising. Two of them were fished out of the frozen lake next to the clinic.”

Prisha frowned and crossed her arms.

“Four have been found alive. Two males and two females. They were all in a terrible state by all accounts, wandering the streets, suffering from hyperthermia and of course unable to see anything. It’s a miracle that they survived at all. But then, everything about this is surreal.”

She moved away so that he couldn’t see her face, and Pieter sensed her confusion and anxiety. Following on from events of several months ago this was the last thing she needed, another case that defied all logic. He was reluctant to press her on this, but he knew he had to have a few answers.

“What ages were they? The ones they found alive?”

“We don’t know for sure. Nobody knows who they even are. They have been questioned by your colleagues, and also by psychiatrists, but without much success. They have very little recollection of events, in fact they have barely spoken to us at all. Mostly they’ve been communicating by drawing sketches as speaking seems difficult for some reason. Other than informing us that they went to sleep as patients in the clinic and then woke up hours or days later, walking around the city confused and scared, they have no memory of what happened to them, or even know what their own names are. A real mystery.”

“But they are all adults I take it? Because when I was there, inside that place, there was a young child. A boy aged about six years old. I caught a quick look at his file, but there was no name, just a photo of him. Patient 27, that’s how they referred to him. He was hurt during a fight, but not too badly, a bust nose. I just wondered if he has turned up.”

Prisha was shaking her head, a sad frown marring her forehead.

“No. All the ones we have found, those who died and those we have who are alive, are all adults. No children. Are you sure there was a child?”

“Yes,” Pieter replied quietly, then added under his breath: “he was in the ward, in one of the beds, and he attacked me. But when I escaped I lost track of him. I just wondered that’s all.”

He rubbed at his shoulder where the boy had bitten him, and he shut his mind to the memory.

Sighing, he stood and stretched, the tension cramping the muscles there.

“Somebody must know who they are. If they were patients in that place, there to have routine operations, then there must be some records, paperwork, that kind of thing.”

He thought of Elena Vinke and the operation that had gone wrong.

And Kaatje.

They must all be connected, be a part of Julian Visser’s crazy plan. Patients he picked at random on whom to carry out his sick experiments. But to what end? What was he hoping to achieve? Was he hoping to make some brilliant medical breakthrough, and these unwitting people were the unfortunate ones that had suffered from his failed operations? Or was it simply the work of an unbalanced, mad doctor? And how was it all connected to Lotte? Was he just another pawn in her game? A means to an end to orchestrate a scenario from which Tobias Vinke would exact revenge by kidnapping the child of the prominent doctor who he blamed for killing his own daughter? Was it even Christiaan Bakker who had carried out the operation on Elena, or his assistant, Julian Visser?

And ultimately, was all of this a part of Lotte’s twisted plot of revenge against himself?

There were just too many questions and not enough answers.

One thing of which he was certain: Vinke had taken Nina Bakker. To replace his dead daughter.

To find where Nina was, he needed to find out more about Tobias Vinke.

He needed to go back to the beginning.

Chapter 18

Nature Versus Nurture – The Making of a Monster

Pieter drove from the hospital to Waterlooplein. The