A Death in Rembrandt Square

by Anja de Jager

  ‘No,’ Ingrid said loudly. She stopped. ‘What’s really impossible is you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes. What the hell was that?’ Her voice trembled. I could see the anger in her face. ‘You were supposed to be staying quiet. His father’s just died and you had to say that he was hit by a car in that tone of voice? Have some consideration for the guy’s feelings.’

  ‘I said I didn’t want to go.’

  ‘You didn’t want to go? What are you? A stroppy teenager? We’re in the middle of a murder inquiry and you go and piss off the victim’s son.’

  ‘Do you know what he did?’

  ‘I don’t care,’ she shouted at the top of her voice. ‘I don’t care what he did ten years ago. I care about solving this case.’

  ‘But Ruud Klaver wasn’t innocent.’

  ‘Stop talking about that! I know you really want him to be guilty, but in fact it doesn’t matter. No, sorry, it does matter, but only if it’s got something to do with why he was murdered.’

  ‘He did it.’

  ‘Lotte, seriously, shut up about it. I’ve seen you obsessed before, but I’ve never seen you this blinkered. A man was murdered and you’re doing your utmost to piss off his son, who hates the police already anyway. Who hates us so much that he prefers to talk to a journalist rather than speaking to us.’ She paused and took a couple of breaths. ‘And the way you just behaved, I can’t blame him.’

  ‘Wow.’ I could understand her reaction, because she hadn’t been here ten years ago. ‘But—’

  ‘No. Shut up!’ She whipped the words at me. ‘I’ll work on this with Thomas. I shouldn’t have brought you here.’

  ‘Well, I did say—’

  ‘I thought you could behave professionally,’ she said before I could finish my sentence. ‘This is going to be my last case in this team and I want to do a good job. That means that I don’t care if you were right or wrong ten years ago. I care about why someone would have wanted to kill Ruud Klaver. I care about whether there have been threats. I care about anybody he could have met in prison. I care about finding out what he’d got up to since he got out. Those kinds of things. The kind of things his family could probably tell me. If you hadn’t pissed them off!’ She spat the words at me.

  ‘But Dennis was claiming he was innocent.’

  ‘Yes, and I was interested in that at first because it could have driven the victim’s family – Carlo Sondervelt’s family, I mean – to do something. But as they have an alibi, a confirmed alibi, we drop it. If it turns out Ruud Klaver was innocent—’

  ‘He wasn’t.’

  ‘If it turns out he was,’ she continued, as though I hadn’t said anything, ‘that’s interesting because it’s possible he knew who really did it. Maybe he blackmailed the real murderer. Maybe that’s why he got killed. You see what I’m doing here?’ she ranted. ‘I’m only interested if it tells me who killed him! And you need to stop thinking of him as a murderer and actually see him as the victim.’

  I pushed my hands deep in my pockets and bit my teeth together to stop myself from replying. I slowly counted to ten. ‘Fine,’ I said when I’d got myself under control. ‘Fine, you work on this with Thomas from Monday. Get that idiot traffic cop to go with you if you need anything this afternoon. He’ll love that.’ My heart was still racing. I could feel it in my throat.

  Ingrid slowly shook her head. ‘Idiot? Wow, Lotte, you’re really something.’ She turned and rushed down the stairs, leaving me standing there.

  I tried to see her point of view but failed. She might not care if Ruud had been innocent or not, but I definitely did. I couldn’t stop myself.

  Chapter 14

  It was clear to me what I needed to do: I needed to talk to the people who were willing to speak to me. Sometimes there was no point in trying to break down a brick wall; the better option was to go round it. Ingrid might think it was unimportant whether Ruud Klaver was innocent or not, but I was still convinced that this could have been why he was killed. The way the murder had happened, hitting him with a car on that crossing, made it seem such an impulsive act. That meant that there had to have been a trigger for it, and the most obvious trigger was that Right to Justice podcast. Ingrid wasn’t totally wrong in saying that I really wanted him to have been guilty, but even more than that, I needed to discover what Sandra Ngo had found out so that I’d know what feelings she’d stirred up.

  I couldn’t talk to Ruud’s family, that was pretty clear to me, so I needed to take another angle. I would talk to the people who were friendly towards me and who were on my side. I had to use the connections that I had.

  After Ingrid had left me at Dennis Klaver’s apartment building, I’d jumped on the bus to get back to the police station.

  My mother’s words that I would always have believed Nancy Kluft because she’d been pregnant at the time resonated more than I would have liked. I needed to hear straight from Nancy’s mouth again what she had seen that night. If my witness had been wrong, then it was possible that Ruud Klaver had been innocent. But she’d been so adamant. She’d never wavered. Surely she couldn’t have been mistaken.

  I was rummaging through a large cardboard box to find Nancy’s original witness statement when the door behind me opened and the guy who’d taken the painting away the day before came in with another large canvas. He smiled at me. ‘You guys have won the art lottery,’ he said. ‘Of all the ones I’ve hung up today, this is my favourite.’

  I was grateful to him for pulling me out of my memories of the past, and therefore I was kinder than I normally would have been and pretended to be interested. ‘Show me.’

  ‘I think this guy was inspired by Warhol.’

  ‘You’re into art?’

  ‘Not really. I just hang them up. But you know the one I mean? The one with Marilyn Monroe four times in different colours?’

  ‘I know the one. Someone did one of Queen Beatrix as well.’

  ‘Anyway, here’s your version.’ He turned it over. Robin van Persie’s smiling face stared at me in four different colours. ‘See what I mean? Just like Warhol.’

  ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.’

  ‘Don’t you like it? Not a fan?’ He took a step back to admire it but stopped smiling at the rejection. ‘It really is the best of the bunch.’

  ‘How much did this cost the taxpayer?’

  ‘You can’t put a price on art. That’s what my boss says.’

  ‘Your boss is full of shit. Ask any of the auction houses; they find it very easy to put a price on it. Is your boss a failed artist by any chance?’

  ‘I’ve seen some of his drawings. They’re awful.’ The grin was back on his face. ‘Anyway, I hope you like football.’

  ‘Hate it.’ Robin van Persie in blue, red, yellow and green.

  ‘One of the guys downstairs has a blue and black rectangle.’

  ‘Sounds great. I love rectangles. Maybe we can swap.’

  The guy waved away my suggestion and carefully hung the atrocity on the wall. ‘Give it a couple of days, you’ll love it.’ He touched its edge on his way out, as if he was sad to leave it behind.

  I was going to have to look at this painting for the next however many months. There was no way I was going to last that long. Well before then I would have brought in a bread knife from home and slashed the thing to pieces.

  No, I wouldn’t. I would sit here and wait until the day we got something new. In the meantime, I would go back to doing some work. I didn’t want to look at my old case any more. It was pointless, I decided. I should look into Ruud’s current life. Why was I making the assumption that this definitely had something to do with Carlo’s murder? What about Ruud’s life after jail? Maybe his wife had got so fed up with having him at home that she’d hit him with her car.

  I wasn’t serious about that, of course. She’d stood by him all this time. If he’d been tough to live with after he’d got out of prison, she would have just divorced him. It wouldn’t be the first time
that had happened. I’d worked on another case where someone had been murdered whilst on parole. Hours after he’d been released, in fact. Ruud had been out for over a year when he was killed. Maybe that was weirder.

  I knew I was going round in circles. I kept thinking about the same things. I had to get out of the office. I had to actually do something, even if I had no idea what. Often, if you started to dig, something would come to the surface. Without any other leads, I would try to discover what Sandra Ngo had found. I would start with Carlo’s murder and work forwards from there.

  Looking at my old files made me think about the colleagues I’d worked with at the time. Maybe they had a different memory of the case. I picked up the phone and called my former boss.

  I hadn’t spoken to Barry Hoog in more than five years. He was surprised to hear from me but said that of course he would love to talk to me and I should come to his house. We’d lost touch since he retired from the police force, and even in the years before that, we’d talked little. He had moved out of CID and into the financial fraud department, where he had been surprisingly successful. Sitting at a desk looking at numbers all day had suited him better than his superiors had anticipated, and they’d ended up very pleased that they’d made the effort.

  I cycled to the outskirts of the city. It was such a normal street, this one. A pleasant street with houses made mainly of glass. I was worried before I rang the doorbell. All sorts of thoughts bounced through my mind as I stood there. Guilt over the night of the arrest was still crippling me.

  It had always been hard for me to visit him, even though he’d never openly blamed me for anything. Deciding that there was no time like the present, I pressed the doorbell next to the blue front door. I didn’t have to wait long. Seconds later, the door swung open.

  I made sure I had a sunny smile firmly glued on my face.

  He looked up at me and beamed widely. ‘Lotte, it’s great to see you.’

  ‘You’re looking well, Barry,’ I said, and I was relieved that I could say it and it wasn’t a lie.

  His skin was deeply tanned, as if he’d spent every hour since retirement in glorious sunshine. His hair was bleached to an even white, though he wasn’t yet sixty. ‘Come in, come in,’ he said.

  He turned deftly and I followed him down the corridor. As soon as he had his back turned towards me, the smile dropped from my face. I caught a glance of myself in the hallway mirror and saw that I looked as sad as I felt.

  Because seeing my former mentor in his wheelchair was always a stark reminder of what had gone wrong during Ruud Klaver’s arrest.

  It had all been going so well until I’d handed Klaver over to Barry.

  It was at exactly that moment that I caught sight of movement from the corner of my eye. I saw the knife the kid had in his hand. As he made the movement towards Barry, I could have grabbed his arm. But instead of going forward, I stepped back. I kept myself safe. I kept my unborn child safe. And I saw the knife go into Barry’s back. Even then I didn’t move. Even then I stood as if frozen, my arms wrapped around my belly, and watched as my colleague, the guy who’d been next to me as we’d burst through the door, grabbed Dennis tightly in a textbook grip, with one arm bent behind his back and the other held securely. The knife clattered to the floor and Barry crashed to his knees.

  Maybe even then I could have stopped his movement. I could have dived after him as he rolled down the stairs and grabbed an arm. But I was stationary. Frozen.

  Afterwards they told me that it had all been over in seconds. Nobody blamed me, or if they did, behind my back, they called it inexperience. Everybody in that room had been equally to blame, they said, for taking their eyes off a kid. But when Barry was carried to the ambulance, I didn’t go with him. He probably would have wanted me to, but I couldn’t. My actions to protect myself and the child in my belly had been instinctive.

  And I knew that they had caused this tragedy.

  Chapter 15

  Barry’s house was a mess of books and papers strewn all over the floor, and he deftly whirred past them as though this was a purpose-built obstacle course to test his wheelchair agility. Even though it was Friday, last Saturday’s paper still lay open on the sofa. I moved it aside to make some space. ‘How’s retirement treating you?’

  ‘Egbert keeps telling me not to call it that, but to think of it as my second career.’ Egbert was Barry’s long-term partner. They’d been together for decades. ‘He says hi, by the way. He’s sorry he couldn’t be here.’

  He was probably just giving us space to talk about our old case. ‘What have you been up to?’

  ‘Just this and that.’ Barry stacked an already precarious pile of library books even higher. ‘I was running a campsite outside Amsterdam, but the season’s over now.’

  ‘A campsite? How . . .’

  ‘It’s fully wheelchair-accessible,’ he said before I could even feel embarrassed for having brought it up. ‘I’ve also been doing some consulting work. It’s been fun, pays the bills.’

  ‘Do you miss the police force?’

  ‘You’ve done well for yourself, Lotte. You closed some great cases.’

  ‘I learned it all from you.’ I was happy to let him control the conversation and change the subject. ‘I’m sure I used to be very annoying.’

  ‘Just really keen.’ He smiled at me.

  ‘Yeah, a bit too keen probably.’ I’d worked with people who were like that. I could only imagine how irritating I must have been.

  ‘You’re here to talk about Ruud Klaver, right?’

  ‘Have you been listening to the podcasts?’

  ‘I like Right to Justice. Sandra Ngo is smart, but she’s probably wrong this time.’

  ‘I think so.’ Whatever else I was going to say was delayed by the clock on the wall telling us noisily that it was ten o’clock.

  ‘Carlo Sondervelt’s death was only my second murder case,’ I said.

  ‘You did well. Don’t worry about it.’

  I shook my head at the pride in his voice. It was that of an old mentor, or even a father. ‘Ruud Klaver died. It looks like he was murdered.’

  ‘I read about it, but I wasn’t sure if it was an accident.’

  ‘I don’t like that it happened just when Right to Justice was claiming that he was innocent.’

  ‘You think those things are linked?’

  ‘It’s a very strange coincidence otherwise.’

  ‘Who knows what he’s been up to since he came out of jail.’

  ‘I can’t find anything. He looked to be clean. Now I’m wondering if we missed something at the time.’

  ‘You honed in on Klaver quickly and didn’t let go.’

  I pondered his words for a bit. I remembered that he’d said the same thing at the time. I’d been visiting him in hospital and had talked about the case. Now, ten years later, I was sitting in his front room and he was once more playing the role of devil’s advocate. We were having a very similar conversation to the one we’d had that time.

  ‘Are you saying we didn’t look into everything?’ I asked.

  ‘From day one, even from hour one, we only looked at Klaver.’

  ‘Was that wrong?’

  ‘Not necessarily. There was never any need to spread our net wider.’

  I nodded. Sometimes the shortest route was the best one. If you have evidence of guilt, there’s no need to dig any further. ‘If you think about it now, is there anything that bothers you?’

  ‘The reason for the fight never seemed right. I always found it hard to believe that they fought over Nancy. If there was anything I doubted, it was that. But in the end, it doesn’t matter why Klaver shot Carlo.’

  I frowned. ‘It does if we were wrong and he didn’t do it.’

  ‘The forensic evidence doesn’t lie. I’m sure he did it, and if we’ve got the motive wrong, then I couldn’t care less about that.’

  ‘But if you look at the evidence, what did we really have? Ruud’s blood on Carlo’s hands and
Carlo’s blood on a pair of Ruud’s jeans.’

  Barry sat back and folded his arms. ‘Are you doubting that he was guilty after all?’

  I pulled my hair away from my face with both hands and groaned. ‘I don’t know any more. I don’t like the fact that Sandra Ngo says she’s got evidence that he’s innocent.’ Plus she refused to give it to me unless I cooperated with her. ‘And I don’t like that Ruud Klaver was killed the evening after that was broadcast.’ I wanted it to be a very bizarre coincidence, but I couldn’t get it out of my head that it was all linked.

  ‘We had the right guy, Lotte. But just because he’d killed someone almost a decade ago doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t investigate his murder properly. Focus on that, and forget about maybe not having discovered the entire truth last time round.’

  I shook my head. ‘But what if that was exactly the reason for his murder? What if there was more to Carlo’s death?’

  ‘Then find that out. But only to solve Ruud’s murder. Forget about his innocence or guilt. Forget about anything you might have missed ten years ago and concentrate on getting the guy who murdered Ruud Klaver.’

  Ingrid had said the same thing.

  I put a hand on Barry’s arm. ‘You always were wise beyond your years.’ I should have visited him sooner. I knew that what he said was right. So why did I find it so hard to accept?

  ‘These days I feel that my years have caught up with your wisdom.’

  I smiled and said goodbye.

  He saw me out. ‘Don’t be a stranger, Lotte. If there’s anything I can help you with, let me know. Or, you know, if you just want to have dinner with me and Egbert, you’re really welcome.’ He rubbed a hand through his hair. ‘I heard what happened and I’ve always meant to say that I’m sorry I didn’t help you more. In those days, I wasn’t very good with the personal stuff.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Thanks, Barry.’

  ‘This,’ he tapped on the side of his wheelchair, ‘wasn’t your fault.’

  He was only saying that because he didn’t know.