Just like his father Nils, twelve-year-old Bram de Jong has a “wide, upturned mouth and hooded, downturned eyes, which gave him a peculiarly mask-like appearance.” He’s also described as being blond, tall for his age, pigeon-toed and possibly with ADHD and an IQ of 140.

Bram’s sex-worker mother in Amsterdam was murdered when he was about six years old, so he’s been living with Nils at the North Grove Arts Collective ever since (The Ink Black Heart, chapter 40). Nils does nothing to discipline Bram, who proves himself to be obnoxious with his near-constant blurting of Drek catchphrases. The boy is beyond mere obnoxiousness, however. He’s pretty scary, with his harassment of an elderly couple and their Cavalier King Charles spaniel outside the Red Lion and Sun pub, where his father is meeting with Seb, Tim and Wally (The Ink Black Heart, chapter 21).

Later, Bram becomes even scarier when Katya tells Strike and Robin that Bram drilled a hole in Josh and Edie’s bedroom wall at the North Grove Arts Collective and was watching them through it. This is what drove Edie away from ever staying at North Grove again (The Ink Black Heart, chapter 33). Philip Ormond reports that Bram threw a rock at the back of his head that left a scar and that Edie once found a dead bird in her bed, something attributed to Bram (The Ink Black Heart, chapter 36). When Robin first encounters Bram, he’s singing a Dutch white-supremacist song at North Grove (The Ink Black Heart, chapter 39). As if this isn’t all scary enough, Josh also reports that it was Bram who set fire to his room at the arts collective. Josh thinks that Bram wouldn’t murder someone to achieve an end, but rather to do it as an experiment. Bram “seems interested in seeing how far he can go.… To see what happens next. How they looked, or how it felt to kill someone” (The Ink Black Heart, chapter 63).

Since Bram could probably be categorized as a sociopath, it’s a good thing that Nils doesn’t allow him to take his great grandfather’s massive sword to school. We could go on and on about the boy’s disturbing traits and behaviors, but we’ll just end it here by mentioning that during Robin’s second visit to the collective, Bram thrusts a dead animal in her face, a rat “which was partially rotten, had no eyes; its teeth were yellow, its thick, wormlike tail was stiff” (The Ink Black Heart, chapter 66).

 

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