A Death in Rembrandt Square

by Anja de Jager

  I sat back on my chair. That was her big reveal? That ten years later the barman said Nancy might have had a drink after all? That was what I was doing this interview for? ‘Would that have made a difference?’ Sandra asked.

  ‘I don’t think it would have. Not with the forensic evidence to back the statement up.’ I was careful not to let my voice broadcast my relief.

  ‘The circumstantial forensic evidence.’

  ‘Anybody would have said that our witness was credible and reliable. The judge in the case ruled that she was.’ I took another sip of water.

  ‘Only she wasn’t. We have proof that shows that Ruud Klaver was innocent.’

  ‘Discrediting our witness doesn’t make him an innocent man.’

  ‘I know that. What I’m saying is that you believed the witness so implicitly that you never checked other facts that you should have checked. You never followed up on other lines of enquiry that would have ended with Ruud Klaver declared innocent. You believed this pregnant woman and got an innocent man convicted. A man who is now dead. You lost him ten years of his life because you felt sympathy with the victim’s girlfriend.’

  My throat suddenly felt as if I had swallowed shards of glass. I had to stay focused. I had to ignore that this was going to be broadcast all over the country. I pressed the nails of my middle fingers into the pads of my thumbs. I needed to create pain in another part of my body to keep my mind sharp. ‘I think everybody would have had sympathy with a twenty-year-old pregnant girl whose boyfriend had been murdered in front of her eyes.’ The physical pain felt good. It gave me control back. Now that I was hurting myself, Sandra wasn’t hurting me with her questions. I pressed harder. ‘I understand what you are doing in these podcasts: trying to show that certain convicted criminals weren’t actually guilty, but you also need to understand that there were victims in this case. That there were people for whom this was really hard. And as I said, I don’t think I would be the only one to feel for a young girl in that situation.’

  ‘It’s interesting, isn’t it, that you’re here, doing this interview, to find out the truth about this case. You didn’t find it out for yourself because you were so fixated on your witness. Even now, even after I’ve told you I have evidence, you haven’t figured out what it is. That’s really poor policing. And the fact that you’re here shows me that you know it.’

  I would have got angry if I hadn’t known she was right. I hadn’t discovered what evidence Sandra had. It wasn’t just that I had to accept that she might be a better investigator than I was. It was that I had to accept that I had failed. Oddly enough, that knowledge made me calm. I had nothing left to give and it was about time I saw what I was getting in return. I released my fingers experimentally to see if I could stay in control of my voice without the physical pain. ‘What is your proof that Ruud Klaver was innocent?’ The control held; my voice was still steady even if the painful shards were still there.

  ‘I’m sure,’ Sandra continued as though I hadn’t spoken, ‘the family are pleased that someone as competent as you is working on Ruud’s murder case.’ The sarcasm cut through the honey of her voice like vinegar. I knew it was just to rile me. I knew that this would never make it into the broadcast version of the podcast. ‘You never found the gun, did you?’

  ‘No, we didn’t. Are you going to share your so-called evidence with the listeners?’

  ‘Of course. I hope this episode has shown that there is serious doubt about the police’s case. Their forensic evidence was circumstantial and their witness was not as reliable as they presented her. Now we’ve found that the weapon used in Carlo’s murder had been used in another murder three weeks earlier, a murder for which Ruud Klaver had a rock-solid alibi.’ She looked at me in triumph. ‘You locked away an innocent man and you can no longer do anything to right that wrong.’

  The same gun had been used before? Oh, that was a basic error. We should have checked the database to see if the weapon had been used in any prior unsolved incidents.

  She pressed a button on the recording device and stopped it. ‘It’s good, isn’t it? My evidence.’

  The evidence of another murder with the same weapon could only be a bullet with a matching striation pattern. How had Sandra found out about it? And, more importantly, how had Forensics missed it? ‘Which murder? Is someone else in jail for it?’

  She pushed a file towards me. ‘I’ve printed everything out for you. Have it.’

  I grabbed the file and stuffed it in my bag. I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of looking through it here. I could tell by her face that she was disappointed. I was hoping that she was disappointed by the entire interview. I thought I’d done well. I’d held it together and answered all her questions.

  ‘You were right,’ she said. ‘There were things the family didn’t want me to ask you about.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I’m really curious.’

  ‘I’m sure you are.’

  ‘But I respect their wishes.’ She grinned. ‘And they’ll tell me at some point. Or maybe you will.’

  The podcast was going to be released on Wednesday. That gave me a day before the whole country would know that I’d worked on this case. It was something I would have preferred to keep hidden.

  As I stepped out into the rain, I felt the weight of the file in my bag. Had I ever bought anything at a higher price? I had the murderer of Ruud Klaver to find. And I had to look at this second murder. Surely doing the interview had been worth it.

  I grasped the file tight with the hand that wasn’t fighting to hold onto my umbrella. I didn’t want to examine its contents at my desk. If the information turned out to be garbage, I wasn’t sure what I’d do, but smashing up Sandra’s recording studio was one option. Bursting into tears was another. Both of these were best avoided.

  I rushed back through the storm to my flat and opened the file with trembling fingers. As I skimmed through the pages, I saw that Sandra’s evidence was solid. Klaver’s alibi was backed up with photographs.

  Everything tumbled around me.

  I had made a mistake. It now seemed likely that Ruud Klaver had indeed been innocent.

  Chapter 20

  ‘The next time I see Sandra Ngo, I don’t know if I should hug her or kill her,’ Chief Inspector Moerdijk said.

  His running gear was drying over the radiator in his office. He must have gone for a run at lunchtime and got caught in the rain. The bottoms of my trousers were still a little damp from where my umbrella hadn’t kept all the rain off. It was harder to stay dry when there was also a force 8 wind trying to pull the umbrella from your hand and you were attempting to keep a file with important papers from getting soaked.

  ‘Kill her,’ I said. ‘Or just give her a kicking. I won’t tell anybody you did it.’

  I had gone to the boss’s office after I’d examined the file and had a chance to absorb what I’d found in there. Barry had said that I’d focused on Ruud Klaver exclusively from the start. That after Nancy’s evidence I’d only ever looked at him. I knew I had needed it to be him because otherwise we wouldn’t have gone into the Klavers’ house in the first place. But that didn’t make it the truth, and now it turned out that the gun that had killed Carlo Sondervelt had been used in another murder and Ruud Klaver had a solid alibi for that time.

  ‘I’m not sure she deserves that. But you do. I told you explicitly not to give an interview to Right to Justice and you went directly against my instructions.’

  I shrugged. What was done was done. Nothing the boss could do would make me feel worse than I already did. I’d had some time to calm down after the interview, and it no longer felt as if old wounds had been ripped open. Instead they throbbed with the familiar ache of a previously broken bone during rainy weather.

  ‘You do know that I’m your boss, don’t you? You haven’t forgotten that? And you also remember what that means, right? It means that if you ask me if you can do something, and I tell you you can’t, then you don’t.
You don’t do it sneakily behind my back.’

  There was a joking edge to his voice, so I wasn’t worried by his words. I knew him well enough to be aware that the fact that he was kidding meant that he was secretly pleased. In a way, I did deserve to be told off. Not for going against his wishes, but because Sandra’s evidence had nothing to do with information that the family had given her. I’d thought it would be impossible for me to unearth the thing that she had found, but I could have done. In fact, I should have done. Ten years ago.

  ‘What do you want us to do now?’ I said.

  ‘You never looked into this at the time?’

  ‘No, we had no idea the gun had been used before. That murder was at the other end of the country. We never compared the bullets.’

  ‘But Sandra Ngo did. How many people are shot each year?’

  ‘Fewer than twenty countrywide last year, if you include non-lethal shootings,’ I said. ‘But it’s on a downward trend, so maybe there were around thirty the year Carlo Sondervelt died.’

  ‘Ha. It probably wouldn’t have taken her long to narrow it down and find the right one.’

  I could have done it in a day: looked at the striation marks on the bullet and gone through the database to find one that matched. I couldn’t shake the thought that someone within the police station must have given Sandra access to our database, or even run the query for her.

  ‘So, yes, this does prove that the same gun was used in two murders, three weeks apart,’ I said. ‘The first was committed in a forest just outside Arnhem, between two and four o’clock in the afternoon, on the seventh of January. No witnesses.’ I took a sheet of paper out of the folder. ‘Here is a statement by Dennis Klaver, saying that the seventh of January is his birthday, and his father was at his party that afternoon.’ There was a pile of photos of a children’s party, with Dennis and both his parents very clearly present. I had looked through these photos quickly; I didn’t need any more reminding of what Dennis had looked like as a kid. ‘It takes about an hour and a half to drive from Amsterdam to the woods outside Arnhem where the body was found. Or an hour by train to Arnhem’s centre, plus at least half an hour to get to the exact location. And the same to come back, of course. So we’d be looking at three hours’ travel time, and according to Dennis, his father was at his party the whole time.’ I took out a second page, signed by Angela Klaver. ‘This is from the wife, stating the same thing.’

  ‘It’s pretty solid as alibis go.’

  ‘There’s even an invoice from the place where the party was held, and a party invitation with the exact date and time.’

  ‘Sandra Ngo is very diligent. Maybe we should ask her if she wants to come and work for us.’

  ‘Not funny,’ I said.

  ‘I would say she’s out-Lotted Lotte. This is the kind of thing you’d do.’

  I ignored his joke. Or jibe. Or whatever it was. Instead I pushed a photo of a man in a red T-shirt across the table. ‘This is the other victim: Maarten Hageman, forty-five years old. From the database, I can see that the Arnhem police thought this might have been organised-crime-related or a revenge killing. Hageman was well known to them. Completely different to Carlo Sondervelt. I couldn’t find an immediate connection between the two.’ But I had only been looking at the information for about an hour before going to the boss. ‘I also don’t know what impact this information has on the ongoing investigation into Ruud Klaver’s murder.’

  ‘It’s certain that it’s the same gun?’

  ‘Yes, from the photos, the striation marks look identical. But I have asked Forensics to double-check everything. Ngo seems to have hired an expert to write a report. In both cases, the bullet was recovered from the body with minimal damage.’ I collected all the bits of paper up and put them safely back in the file. ‘If this had come up during Ruud Klaver’s trial, he probably wouldn’t have been convicted. Even though it doesn’t prove his innocence, of course. Two different people could have used the same gun.’ I placed the file on the floor underneath my chair. ‘But it certainly would have put reasonable doubt in the mind of the judge.’

  The boss stood up and stared at the storm outside. ‘This isn’t good.’ He directed his words to the window.

  ‘What do you want us to do now?’ I spoke to his back. ‘Are we still concentrating on Ruud Klaver? Or do you want us to work on Maarten Hageman and Carlo Sondervelt’s murders again?’

  The boss turned around abruptly. ‘You’ve made this the death of a man who had been wrongfully convicted.’

  I was only too well aware of that. ‘Nobody else knows about the second murder. The podcast hasn’t talked about it yet.’ I had promised not to expose the information outside the police station until after the podcast was aired. I had to give Sandra her scoop. I didn’t see the point in telling the boss that that was only two days away. It would just annoy him more.

  ‘True. Anybody listening to those damned Right to Justice podcasts would still assume Ruud Klaver was guilty.’

  ‘Not quite. When Ruud was hit by that car, the podcast had just reached the stage where Ngo said there was going to be evidence that proved his innocence.’ I knew that because it was what I’d been listening to when I saw the family come out of the hospital.

  ‘But they hadn’t said what the proof was. What if the real murderer of Carlo Sondervelt wanted to make sure that none of this came out?’

  ‘Then he’d kill Sandra Ngo, not Ruud Klaver,’ I said.

  ‘Or he’d have a chat with her first to find out what she’d got,’ the boss said.

  My phone bleeped. As if she knew we were talking about her, Sandra Ngo had sent me a text. She was going to change the broadcasting schedule; my interview was going to be aired tonight. I looked at my watch. I had six hours of normality left.

  ‘Once that podcast airs,’ Moerdijk said, ‘everybody will know that Klaver had been locked up for ten years for a crime he didn’t commit. There will be a huge amount of pressure on us.’

  I showed him my phone. ‘It will go out tonight.’

  He swore softly. ‘Okay, I’ll get some more resources as soon as possible. You should probably stay away from Ruud Klaver’s family for a bit. Thomas and Ingrid can communicate with the Klavers. You concentrate on the old murders – Carlo Sondervelt, Maarten Hageman – see if there’s any link between them and Ruud Klaver’s death.’

  ‘If you’re getting us more resources from other teams,’ I said, ‘there’s this traffic cop . . .’ I didn’t necessarily want to help Charlie Schippers, but I also didn’t want to have my debts stack up any higher than they already were.

  Chapter 21

  ‘None of this makes any sense to me,’ Ingrid said. ‘You seem so convinced that his death and this podcast are linked. You could be completely wrong.’

  ‘Here’s the timeline as I see it.’ I grabbed a blue marker pen. ‘Twelve months ago, Ruud Klaver was released from prison.’ I wrote the date on the whiteboard. ‘There were no incidents. He didn’t get beaten up, threatened, nothing.’

  ‘As far as we know.’

  ‘True. Then Sandra Ngo starts to look into his case. She meets with Carlo’s parents and with Nancy Kluft two months ago.’ I wrote their names down. ‘That was at the start of her research, when they were still cooperating with her. Before they knew what angle she was going to take.’

  ‘I see where you’re going with this. Still nothing happened to Klaver or to Sandra Ngo.’

  Nothing had happened to her then, but something had happened later. Ingrid’s words triggered a memory. Of course. I remembered the afternoon I’d come down the stairs of the police station and heard Sandra Ngo shouting that she’d been burgled but nothing had been taken.

  That had been after the first airing of the podcast in which she’d said that Ruud Klaver had been innocent, but before he had been killed. A burglary that nobody had taken seriously. I doubted anybody had even bothered to dust for fingerprints at Ngo’s house. She had been angry because nobody had visited her.
I sighed. This was just brilliant. She would claim that the police had messed up again.

  ‘On the afternoon of the tenth of October, Sandra Ngo declared in her podcast that Klaver was innocent,’ I said. ‘There was a break-in at her house later the same day, and at eight p.m., Klaver was hit by a car.’

  ‘This could all be a coincidence. Just to play devil’s advocate, of course,’ Ingrid said.

  ‘I didn’t know this was a game where we were allowed to just spout baseless theories. Can I go next?’ Thomas said. ‘Someone close to Carlo, say Nancy, is clearly pissed off when she hears that Klaver now claims he was innocent. After all, she saw him with her own eyes. So when she happens to spot him on the pedestrian crossing, she gets a case of the red mist and drives into him.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve got one,’ Ingrid said. ‘The family must have had the information about his innocence beforehand. They contact the investigating detective to tell her she’s been wrong all along, and she is so pissed off that when she sees him, she decides to hit him with her car just to make matters worse.’ She grinned at me and then high-fived Thomas.

  ‘Very funny.’ I wiped the timeline off the whiteboard.

  Thomas stared thoughtfully at the file he had in front of him. ‘I can see why you want to link those things. I’m guessing we’ll reopen the investigation into Maarten Hageman’s murder.’

  ‘Yes, apparently the Arnhem police are sending their paperwork over. They wanted to lead the investigation, but the boss refused. That will come to us too. Or rather, to me. The boss wants you guys to concentrate on Ruud Klaver’s murder and will get you more resources.’

  ‘I hear you’re going to have that traffic cop working with you?’

  ‘Yeah, I owed him one.’

  ‘Great.’ Thomas grimaced. ‘You know that his colleague, Arnaud, said he’s as thick as two planks of wood.’

  No wonder he was still a traffic cop after ten years. It didn’t really matter. I could work around him. He just had to not get in my way.