A Death in Rembrandt Square

by Anja de Jager

  I nodded. I could finally go to the hospital and check on Barry. But this was also when the clock started ticking: once his lawyer turned up, we had twenty-four hours to question Ruud Klaver.

  ‘Look at his body language and the interaction between him and his lawyer,’ I said. ‘Within fifteen hours of this footage, he will confess to having shot Carlo.’

  ‘Okay.’ Charlie pressed play on the video footage.

  On the screen, the image of the interview appeared. The camera had been at the side, so you could see both me and Ruud and his lawyer at the same time. I remembered that I’d been tired. I’d been home for a few hours but I hadn’t slept. I could only hope that Ruud’s night had been as bad as mine. If his clothes were anything to go by, it hadn’t been great. His white polo shirt was definitely grubby after a night in the cells.

  ‘Why did you get into a fight with Carlo?’ I asked. I noticed that I was turning my wedding ring round and round. I’d had no idea that I’d had a nervous tic like that. I had been really worried about Barry, I remember that. No wonder I was fidgeting as I was talking.

  ‘You’ve got the wrong guy,’ Ruud said. ‘I was home by midnight last night. Didn’t my wife tell you?’

  ‘We’ve got two witnesses who said you were in a fight with Carlo Sondervelt,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve got the wrong guy,’ he repeated. ‘It wasn’t me.’

  It was strange to see myself on the screen, this ten-year-younger version. I still had long hair, tied back into a ponytail, and I’d tried to look businesslike and mature by wearing a trouser suit. I remembered I always used to wear clothes like that. These days, I didn’t need that; there’s nothing like having wrinkles to make you look mature whatever you’re wearing.

  I could see the time at the bottom of the screen and I could tell we’d been at it for two hours at this point. On the one hand we’d had two witnesses, but on the other hand we’d had a man with an alibi. Nancy and Tristan had been adamant that Ruud had been the one, but I remembered that she’d described a thirty-something man with blond hair and then picked out a forty-something man with brown hair from the photos. On the screen, Ruud’s brown curls looked closer to blond because they were shot through with grey. There was a deep line between his eyebrows, but otherwise he had a youthful face that was soft around the jaw and cheeks with a little bit of extra weight.

  ‘What did you do with the gun?’

  Ruud shook his head. ‘I didn’t have a gun. I haven’t got a gun.’ He threw a glance at his lawyer. ‘Look at the stuff I’ve done. When have I ever shot anybody?’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘let’s look at the stuff you’ve done, as you call it.’ I sounded really sarcastic and made a show of going through a pile of papers.

  When Nancy first identified the man who had shot Carlo, I was surprised. I knew Ruud Klaver. He had been arrested a few times for GBH and a couple of muggings. I could totally see him for the fight. I had once arrested him before I joined CID. The next morning he’d told me that he got the red mist whenever he was drunk. He was drunk far too often. So yes, that fight was sadly in character.

  The only thing that surprised me was that he’d had a gun. If Carlo had died as the result of a beating, I would have had no doubts at all. Now I had to ask once more.

  ‘This guy? Are you sure?’ I looked at Tristan. ‘Do you agree?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes. Yes, it was him.’

  ‘Okay. Thanks.’

  I left the room to talk to Barry.

  ‘Klaver?’ he said. ‘Seriously?’

  ‘It’s what they said.’

  ‘Okay, well let’s go pick him up.’

  So, regardless of my initial doubts, there had been plenty of previous. ‘A long list of assaults,’ I said. ‘I think you’ve paid us a visit, what? Twice a year or so?’

  ‘I really didn’t do this.’ Ruud pulled at his lower lip.

  I didn’t say anything, but allowed a silence to develop.

  ‘I had a couple of drinks earlier on,’ Ruud volunteered. ‘Maybe they saw me then and got confused.’

  ‘If you don’t have any evidence,’ the lawyer said, ‘I suggest you let my client go.’

  She was right: at that point we hadn’t had any evidence.

  Charlie paused the footage. ‘He doesn’t sound convincing, does he?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t. And I never understood why he denied having been in the fight. If I’d been him, I would have admitted to that early on, and only denied the shooting.’

  ‘Even today, Tristan sounded certain that he’d identified the right guy.’

  I pointed at the screen. ‘This part was never in question. Ruud Klaver is definitely lying here. We know for a fact that he was in that fight.’ I sat back in my chair and looked at myself on the screen, paused in the middle of staring at Ruud, my hands folded. ‘Study that footage closely. This is what Klaver looks like when he’s lying. It might be helpful.’

  I got up and went back to my own desk. I didn’t want to watch the rest, and put my headphones in to block out the sound of my own voice.

  My music was interrupted half an hour later by Charlie laughing loudly. I switched it off. ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Oh, I just didn’t think anybody actually would say that. But you did. You said: “It’s all over, Ruud.” So funny, just like on TV.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘After you got the forensic evidence.’

  Ah yes. I’d rushed back from the hospital after the call from Forensics and waited with ever-increasing impatience for the official report to come through so that I could confront Ruud with it.

  I walked over to Charlie again to watch this bit on the screen over his shoulder. He pressed play.

  ‘We got into a fight. He punched me.’ Ruud’s voice was sullen, like a child surprised to have been hit by his classmate in the playground. He felt his jaw and wiggled it as if he could still feel the impact of Carlo’s fist.

  ‘Did you hit him back?’ I asked.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘But we didn’t find any of his DNA on your hands.’

  Charlie paused the footage. ‘Why was that?’

  I shrugged. ‘His hands were clean. No blood, no gunshot residue, nothing. I remember thinking that he must have washed them very carefully.’

  Charlie nodded. ‘He must have thought he was going to get away with it.’

  ‘We didn’t find anything on any of the coats at his house either. But there was blood splatter on his jeans, so we knew he must have discarded the jacket he was wearing at some point, because there was no way there could have been blood on his jeans but not on his coat. He’d clearly tried to clean up, so the scrubbed hands were in line with getting rid of the jacket.’

  I knew exactly what to say, because Barry had questioned the same thing.

  I went to the hospital often to give Barry updates. It helped me to pretend that he was going to be fine. That as long as he was lying here resting, he would heal and would be back at work in no time.

  ‘He could be innocent, you know,’ Barry said. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time a witness picked out the wrong person.’

  ‘I know.’ I was sitting at his bedside. There had been an uncomfortable silence for the first ten minutes of my visit. Egbert had been in tears. It was discussing the case that had brought normality back.

  I’d come here after three hours of needless interrogation, because there were only so many times that you could ask the same questions before you went slightly insane. My colleague had taken over. He’d known how desperate I was to check on Barry. I sat with my hand on my stomach. ‘But Nancy and Tristan both identified him. Do you think he didn’t do it?’ My scheduled pre-natal check-up was in a couple of weeks. Maybe I should ask them to move it forward.

  ‘What about his alibi?’ Barry sounded like a patient schoolteacher faced with an overexcited student. He often acted as if his main job was to keep my enthusiasm in check.

  ‘His wife is lying.
There’s no way he was home that night by midnight.’

  ‘There was no gunshot residue on his hands.’

  ‘He washed them.’

  ‘You didn’t find marks on any of the jackets.’ He tapped his hands on the bedding.

  ‘He probably stuffed the coat he was wearing in a bin on his way home.’ I had to stay upbeat. I had to argue my case energetically, because otherwise I would dissolve into tears at seeing Barry here like this, and that wouldn’t do anybody any good. Arguing helped me dissolve the lump in the back of my throat.

  ‘Did you find the gun?’

  ‘No. He must have dumped that somewhere too.’

  ‘At least you’re keeping an open mind,’ but there was a hint of a smile on Barry’s face. ‘You haven’t forgotten that we have to prove he’s guilty, have you?

  ‘I know, I know.’

  And now Charlie had picked up on the same point. He pressed play again.

  ‘He hit you because you were chatting up his girlfriend,’ I said on the screen. I looked at my watch. I must have been bored with asking the same questions over and over. Or maybe I’d been checking how close it was to hospital visiting hours.

  ‘Yes. He followed me out of the bar and punched me in the face.’

  ‘And then you punched him back. And after the fight, you waited for him outside the bar and shot him.’

  ‘No. I walked around for a bit, to clear my head, and then I went home. My wife saw me arrive back.’

  Unfortunately for him, his wife had said he’d come home around midnight, but the fight with Carlo had taken place after midnight, so that had either been wrong or was a definite lie.

  ‘But you weren’t surprised when we arrested you for murder.’

  ‘I thought the guy had died after I’d punched him.’

  ‘So that’s why you lied about getting into a fight in the first place.’

  ‘Yes. No.’ Ruud threw a look at his lawyer.

  ‘My client admits that he was in a fight with Carlo Sondervelt,’ the lawyer said. ‘But unless you have evidence that he shot him, you should let him go.’

  ‘Stop,’ I said. ‘Can you rewind that?’

  Charlie did, and I watched it again. ‘That’s interesting,’ I said. ‘Did you see? He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to confess to.’

  He played the same bit again. ‘He looked confused, didn’t he?’

  I wasn’t sure the look was confused per se, but he had definitely looked for confirmation and the lawyer had stepped in. ‘He should have gone with that from the beginning,’ I said. ‘He should have admitted to the fight and denied the shooting.’

  ‘But if he really was innocent, maybe he didn’t know there had been a shooting in the first place,’ Charlie said. ‘That’s what he said, wasn’t it? That he thought you’d arrested him because Carlo had died after the punch-up.’

  That was true. And that was why it had been such a relief when we pressed him for another hour and he’d confessed to the shooting too. I’d been far too triumphant to realise that this had been really suspicious. Had I just been too inexperienced? Or too preoccupied with everything else going on? On the other hand, I’d had forensic evidence and I had a confession. How could I have known it was all wrong?

  That evening, I listened to the podcast. I had to admit that Sandra had edited it fairly. Her closing words stayed with me. I hadn’t really taken them in when we were actually recording, but now I heard them. Really heard them, because they so closely mirrored what I was thinking.

  ‘You locked away an innocent man and you can no longer do anything to right that wrong,’ her voice said.

  Even though her words mirrored what I’d been thinking, I knew that there was something I could do. I could find Ruud Klaver’s murderer. I could find out the truth about what had really happened.

  I looked at the architect’s table in my office, studying what I had so far. The fact that I had been wrong about Ruud Klaver’s guilt, and that I hadn’t been able to see it, sat heavily in my stomach. I wasn’t saying that I’d never made mistakes before. As I’d said in Sandra’s interview, we were all human and everybody could make mistakes. But the worst thing was that I’d never even considered that he could have been innocent. Ever since the Right to Justice podcast had resurrected the case, all I’d been able to think about was about being proved right. I only cared about what was going to happen to me, to my reputation. I had overlooked that here was a real person whom I’d locked away in prison for a crime he hadn’t committed. Someone who’d been killed.

  All I could do now was accept the mistake I’d made and live with it. Maybe try my hardest to make sure that nothing like this happened again. That would be a good way to make amends.

  And I could find out who had really killed Carlo Sondervelt. This must be terrible for his parents, too. And for Nancy, whose witness statement had wrongly locked Ruud Klaver up.

  All those people suffering because of my mistake.

  Sandra Ngo might be a nuisance, but that didn’t mean she was wrong. In fact, I admired the persistence that had got her to the truth. Her dogged pursuit of this case and of the facts. I was impressed that she had found the second murder committed with the same weapon. And even more impressed because I had missed it. I had been so convinced of Ruud’s guilt that I hadn’t checked everything I should have. I could have found that second murder.

  Instead, I had been so convinced of my own infallibility that I’d made the assumption that Sandra’s evidence must have been something the family weren’t willing to tell me, because surely she couldn’t have uncovered something that I hadn’t. My exaggerated self-esteem had caused all kinds of problems in this case. That the judge had convicted Ruud Klaver, that the forensic evidence had backed me up, none of that mattered. This had been my mistake. This had been my doing. I had been wrong and I had messed up.

  Now what was I going to do?

  I got my blue marker pen out and started to scribble on a new piece of paper. I wrote Ruud Klaver’s name in large letters in the centre of the page. I no longer had to force myself to see him as a victim. He was now not only a victim; he was someone I owed something to.

  The next morning, the files from Arnhem arrived. Charlie and I divided up the boxes.

  ‘Look for anything that links to Carlo or Ruud Klaver,’ I said.

  I started looking at the photos. Maarten had been in his forties when he’d been killed, a corpulent man with a suntan and combed-back blond hair. An entrepreneur, according to his obituary, but the Arnhem police had done a great job of showing that none of his restaurants made any money, and that if they’d been run as proper businesses, they would have been closed down years before. They’d all made a loss, whereas Maarten had had plenty of money to spare.

  I stuck his photo on the whiteboard, next to one of Carlo Sondervelt. What could the money launderer and the student possibly have in common? Who would have wanted to shoot these two people? Had it been random? Had they targeted the wrong man?

  Sandra Ngo had found proof that the same gun had been used in both murders, and then she’d been burgled. I had to take her word for it that nothing had gone missing. If the murderer was the burglar, then all the files that he could have seen were now in my possession. Was it linked to that second murder? The murder of Carlo Sondervelt? I didn’t know the answer to that yet, but I was going to find out.

  Chapter 24

  The wind pushed me in the back and propelled me forward faster than my feet could keep up with. Being buffeted like this, it was difficult to keep my balance. The water almost had waves, with white-edged foam, as it rushed through the canal. The boats that were normally as steady as houses now rolled lightly. A cat on the roof of one houseboat looked perturbed, as if the rolling had brought on a feline type of seasickness. In the little park on the corner, the last few leaves were ripped from the branches by the sudden gusts. They raced across the road and overtook me, as if they were looking forward to their inevitable end in a canal. I locked up
my bike and rang Sandra’s doorbell.

  ‘Hi, did you forget something?’ she asked. ‘I have to admit, I hadn’t expected you back here so quickly. What can I do for you? If you have any questions about that file, if there’s anything you don’t understand, let me know.’

  I ignored the dig. ‘I’ve come to ask about the burglary.’

  She frowned. ‘Which one?’

  ‘The one at your house, last week.’

  ‘Ah, that one.’

  ‘Can you show me where they got in? Not through the basement, I assume.’

  ‘You’re interested in that now?’

  ‘Well, as we had such a nice chat together earlier on, I thought I’d do you a favour and look into it for you. You know, help you out.’

  She narrowed his eyes. ‘Seriously, why are you interested?’

  I shrugged. ‘It’s a crime. I’m a police officer. Doesn’t seem that unusual.’ I couldn’t believe she hadn’t put two and two together herself yet. ‘Can you show me the point of entry?’

  Sandra showed me round. The intruder had come in through the window at the back. Had lifted the door handle and pulled the garden door open. They hadn’t even had to break the window. ‘And nothing is missing?’ I said. ‘No papers, nothing?’

  ‘No, but I’m pretty sure someone looked round the office. My papers were in a different order from how they had been before. But they were all there.’

  I nodded. ‘The papers on your investigation into Ruud Klaver.’ It wasn’t even a question. ‘That’s what they must have come for. Someone looked through them a few hours before he was killed.’

  Sandra lifted an eyebrow, as if she was surprised I was willing to share that with her.

  ‘Thanks, Sandra, I’ll be in touch.’

  It was as I was leaving her house that I saw Remco Klaver. I found it hard to read the look on his face.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asked. I was even more confused when he added, ‘Sandra Ngo can be such a cow.’ He no longer looked as if he’d just come back from holiday, because his tan had faded. ‘How are you coping?’ He seemed friendly and quite willing to chat with me.