A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1)

by Jager, Anja de

  Chapter Seven

  The next morning in the office, my words of greeting to Hans stuck in my throat. My desk was a picture of emptiness, naked and exposed like never before. The grain in the wood was visible for the first time in a while. Lines came together and veered apart as if they were attracted and repelled at irregular intervals by magnets at either side of the desk. My papers and files had disappeared. Where yesterday my reports on the Wendy Leeuwenhoek case and my photos had marked out part of our shared office as mine, today my space looked as if it was ready for somebody new to move in. Could they have found out about my father so quickly? Or had they finally found out the truth about Wendy?

  I traced the lines of the wood grain with a finger and wondered if I was touching my desk for the last time. I hugged my pink folder to my chest with the other hand, afraid to put it down and have it swallowed up as seemed to have happened with everything else I owned. In the shadow of my PC monitor, my pen holder with seven blue biros and a pencil stood alone on the desk like a solitary scarecrow in a field. I found my phone on the floor. I picked it up and put it back where it belonged.

  ‘Where’s my stuff?’ I asked the room in general. I tried to sound calm.

  ‘Oh, the boss took it,’ Hans said, his eyes not leaving his PC screen.

  ‘Chief Inspector Moerdijk?’ I was working hard to control my voice.

  Hans nodded but didn’t say anything.

  I walked over to his chair and looked at his screen over his shoulder. He didn’t even try to hide the fact that he was looking at Facebook. ‘Everything?’

  He turned round. ‘As you can see,’ and pointed out the emptiness of our office with a sweep of his large hand as if he was sowing grains on barren ground.

  ‘And you let him?’ My hands started to tremble. ‘You let him take my files? Why? Am I sacked?’

  ‘Sacked? Why would you be?’ He swivelled back to his screen. ‘He was really angry with you though. Muttered about some meeting with the prosecution. You weren’t here. Where were you anyway?’

  Relief that I hadn’t been fired, that the CI hadn’t found out why I had gone to Alkmaar, battled with sudden anger. ‘He’s taken all of it to the prosecution? I didn’t want to give them everything, just my report.’ I picked up yesterday’s newspaper to look underneath. ‘Did he leave anything behind?’ I didn’t bother putting it back, but let it fall on the floor, discarding it like a pair of laddered tights. He might have missed some photos, some scraps of paper.

  Hans stared at me as I opened the drawers to the left and right of him. I knelt down and looked past his legs and his feet in black leather shoes with the worn-down heels to check in his bin. He reached out a hand to place on my shoulder. I got up quickly and avoided the contact. I paced through the office, looking under desks even though in some cells of my now fevered brain I knew it was pointless. In the corner, the boxes of files in the Petersen case stood as a reminder that I should have been here rather than in Alkmaar. I took my frustration out on each of them as I dug through the papers. Photos, reports and forms in duplicate floated through the air, creating a white snowstorm inside our four walls.

  ‘Lotte,’ Hans said, ‘he took everything away. You can stop looking. Talk to the CI. He was rather meticulous. There’s nothing left here.’

  ‘How could he take it without telling me?’ By now I was panicking, taking shallow breaths. Oxygen only filled the top layer of my lungs. I tried to calm down, tried to focus on the modern art on the wall, a still-life of blue and red intestines combined in a frame, oddly reminiscent of the open PC in Wouter Vos’s apartment, but I couldn’t get myself under control.

  I walked back to my desk, thinking feverishly. He had touched my photos. They were my photos! I should have kept them at home. If only I hadn’t been in Alkmaar, I could have given them my reports and kept all my photos. The pink folder lay on my desk in silent condemnation. Someone else would be looking at those photos now. Someone else would be holding the photo I’d touched every day: Wendy Leeuwenhoek as everybody in the country knew her, the photo her parents, Paul and Monique, had given to the press and to us fifteen years ago, when Wendy had disappeared, the one they had thought best represented their daughter. It had been taken when Wendy was six years old, five months before she’d gone missing. In the photo, her hair was tied in short blonde pigtails, one either side of her head, which dangled down in corkscrews onto her shoulders. She wore a pair of jeans, white trainers and a pink T-shirt decorated with splatters of mud. She held a small plastic watering can, white with yellow daisies, with both hands crammed together side by side in the handle, straining to carry the weight. She stood in the vegetable garden at the back of her grandparents’ house, smiling widely at whoever was taking the photo. One of her front teeth was missing.

  I knew all these details without having to look at the photo. I also knew that she would never get her grown-up teeth. Today she should have been twenty-one, going to university maybe. Instead she’d never changed from this picture that was now part of the nation’s memory.

  ‘I can’t let it go like this. I didn’t get a chance to say . . .’ I raised my hand to my forehead, trying to stop the pain exploding from my mind.

  Hans got up from his chair. ‘Calm down, Lotte.’ The sound of his voice was as about soothing as sandpaper.

  My heart punched the inside of my ribcage at small intervals. ‘Fuck you – you let him take her.’ Forcing the words out made my throat hurt. Two of my colleagues stopped and stared in the hallway. ‘Fuck you too!’ I screamed. Hans put a hand on my arm. I shook it off.

  ‘He should have told me! Why didn’t he call me?’ The pressure behind my eyes was growing; my tongue blocked the back of my throat. ‘Fuck him,’ I whispered. The office started to swirl; the world went black. I gripped the back of my chair and blinked hard. My surroundings returned in a grey-red colour.

  ‘Lotte.’ Hans put his hand on my arm again, with more strength than before, getting a solid grip. It hurt. I forced my breathing to slow. Breathed in 1-2-3. Breathed out 1-2-3.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Sorry, Hans.’ I peeled his hand off my arm and stormed away to the last place of privacy: the toilets.

  Hans was gone when I got back but he’d left a yellow stickie on my phone with a message in his square handwriting: the boss wants to talk to you.

  I picked up the phone, but not to call the boss. I dialled the number of a psychiatrist. I could no longer deny that I needed help. Her first free appointment was the next morning. I had to try to hold it together for one more day.

  Chapter Eight

  My footsteps dragged as I slowly made my way down the corridor to Chief Inspector Moerdijk’s office. The door was closed. I knocked, balancing a plastic cup of water on a new notepad.

  ‘Lotte? Yes, come in.’ The CI’s face was drawn into lines of disapproval. Like a sheet of origami paper that had been previously used for another pattern, laughter lines were still visible, but faint. ‘Take a seat.’

  I sat down opposite his desk, on the edge of my chair. I refused the temptation to slump and stayed upright, my spine long, my back straight, the majority of my weight carried by my own muscles in a display of total control. I put the plastic cup on my side of his desk, opened my notepad and waited for him to start the conversation.

  ‘Where were you yesterday?’ The chief inspector folded his arms together.

  On the wall, the books lined up together on their shelves gave me strength. They kept their knowledge hidden inside until someone pulled the covers apart. ‘In Alkmaar.’

  The frown between his eyebrows deepened. ‘You were supposed to take the evidence to the prosecutor’s office.’

  I looked at my notepad for inspiration but found none. The circles of the ring binding were almost parallel, apart from the third, which sloped down and encroached on the next spiral’s space. I bent it into place with the back of my pencil. ‘I know. But the Petersen case—’

  ‘That’s no excuse. I had to cover fo
r you.’ His PC emitted a beep and the chief inspector’s close scrutiny travelled from me to his screen. He double-clicked with the mouse then rolled its scrolling wheel with a rapid whirr. ‘Did you at least find anything interesting?’

  ‘There might be something,’ I said.

  He kept his eyes on the screen, typed some text with two fingers and hit Enter with a distinct movement. Then he looked back at me. ‘Like what? Come on, Lotte, don’t make me drag this out of you.’

  I sat still, didn’t move my hands or my feet and looked the CI straight in the eye. ‘Give me a couple of days. I need to check it further.’

  He watched me over the edge of his reading glasses. It was a long, deep stare – as if the pale blue eyes under the white hair were attempting to look through my eyeballs and straight into my mind. Then he pushed his glasses higher up his nose and said, ‘I’m sure you noticed that I took the files to the prosecution yesterday.’ He opened a drawer and rummaged through some papers. His head was still bent over the open drawer as he went on: ‘I gave them all the files on Wendy Leeuwenhoek, just to be on the safe side, and all the tapes.’

  ‘Yes, the office has lost half its contents.’ Someone else was looking at those photos. It made my eyes sting. I rubbed the palm of my hand over the far corner of my eye but hid the gesture by smoothing my hair. I ran my hand all the way over my head, then reached for my plait.

  ‘The prosecutor should see everything before the trial,’ he said. ‘They still haven’t set a date.’ He got a new diary out of the drawer, and when he flipped the thin pages, it sounded like someone thumbing through a Bible or a hymn book. ‘Probably next month.’

  I nodded.

  ‘You have to testify,’ he told me. ‘Your statement will make all the difference. It’s a shame the last meeting isn’t on the tapes. A recorded confession would have made it watertight—’

  The faintness I had felt in the office came crawling back from my toes, via my legs, to my stomach. Its content, mainly black coffee, rushed to my mouth. I kept my teeth locked together, waited, then took a few more deeps breaths until the blackness subsided. As I reached for my water, my hand trembled but didn’t visibly shake. I lifted the plastic cup.

  A picture of Wendy as I had found her jumped into my mind. The ground around her showed marks where my hands had been digging. The earth had given way easily under my fingers as if it had been ready to return her. At first my fingers had only found earthworms and woodlice amongst the soil as the earth buried itself under my nails. Then I touched the smooth bone of her skull. That’s when I stopped and called in the rest of the team. That’s when I knew what I’d found. This was the first time I had allowed myself to realise the truth.

  I waited by her side, crouched down but not touching her until the technical team and the police photographer turned up. I wanted to scrub my hands free of the feeling of her corpse but instead I’d waited and watched and stood guard as the photographer took shots of her skeleton partially liberated from the dark soil. Her skull looked like a delicate egg tapped open with a teaspoon. It must have taken more force to fracture her bones. By the time the team turned up, I’d stopped crying and managed to wipe the tears off my face.

  I remembered how my skin had been streaked with mud from my hands. But I had been holding up; I had been keeping it together.

  ‘You’re not worried about your statement, I hope,’ the boss said. ‘They will question your methods.’

  I wasn’t sure I could keep it together for much longer. The thought of being on the stand and answering the questions of the judge and the lawyers filled me with dread.

  ‘And I don’t understand why you went to the Alkmaar police in the first place,’ he continued. ‘They were completely incompetent in the original investigation. It was a good thing I took over.’

  ‘They had a witness,’ I said. As soon as the words left my mouth I wished I could take them back.

  CI Moerdijk tore his glasses off his nose. ‘A witness? Who? In the Leeuwenhoek case?’ He smacked the glasses on top of the diary. The pages flipped over and hid what was underneath, not used enough in this first week of the year to stay open.

  ‘No, in Alkmaar. The police there had a witness who saw the suspected killer arrive at Petersen’s house just before he was shot.’

  The CI pushed back on his chair and stood up. He turned towards the window so that the creases in the back of his jacket faced me. ‘For a second I thought . . . Never mind.’ He looked at me over his shoulder. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘They told me so themselves.’

  He turned away again. It had started to snow, a white background for the CI’s lean frame in its charcoal-grey suit. ‘Who did this witness see?’

  ‘Anton Lantinga. Or at least his car.’

  ‘I never heard of this witness.’ He placed his hands in the small of his back and massaged his spine, then swayed his hips from right to left to give a further stretch. ‘Reliable?’

  ‘The Alkmaar detective seemed to know him very well,’ I said. ‘But personally, not from police business.’

  He went back to his desk and sat down. ‘You met him?’

  ‘Yes, the Alkmaar police took me.’

  ‘It was strange how little paperwork came from them.’ He pinched the bridge of his small nose.

  ‘They told me they had boxes full of information – stacks of files.’

  The PC beeped again. The CI narrowed his eyes to slits and moved his face closer to the screen. He felt with his hand over the surface of his desk. ‘Why didn’t that get to me?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He searched through the contents of his desk. ‘And yet I asked for more information. Three times, I think.’ He patted the sides of his jacket and checked inside his pockets. ‘No reply.’

  I pointed. ‘Under the diary.’

  He lifted it and retrieved his glasses. ‘Anton Lantinga – that’s a surprise. We talked to him, but found nothing. I’m sure I’ve met him at some charity event since. Well, finding a witness after all this time – it’s a reason to officially reopen the case.’ He read what was on the screen and started typing again. ‘You, Hans and Stefanie can work on it, see where it goes.’ His fingers tap-tap-tapped on the keyboard. This was the time to mention that DI Piet Huizen was my father, to say that I wouldn’t – couldn’t – be impartial, that there was a clear conflict of interest and that my involvement would be against all the regulations. Instead I drew circles on my notepad.

  ‘Financial Fraud will be pleased with that one, another big fish,’ he went on. ‘I remember Lantinga set up his own firm after Petersen Capital went belly-up. Very successful they’ve been too. Let me know if I can help.’ Tap-tap-tap and Enter. ‘Always thought it was Geert-Jan Goosens, Petersen’s other business partner. Not that he killed him, but that he hired someone. The money was never found, you know – the money they embezzled from their investors.’

  ‘How much was it?’

  ‘Ninety million guilders . . . just over forty million euros. No need to write it down, it’s all in the notes. Check out Lantinga, and Petersen’s widow. She had a watertight alibi if I remember correctly. Bit too watertight if you ask me.’

  I nodded and got up out of my chair. Only last night I’d decided that I’d keep my father out of trouble, and now I’d put him directly in the firing line. And for what? To defend him against the boss’s remarks? I felt like a traitor because deep down I knew I’d done it to distract the boss from the missing recorded confession and my use of violence.

  I had to protect my father. I had to keep working the case to keep him in the clear. Oh my God, what if they found out? My job was all I had. My legs wobbled and I held on to the armrests. I pushed to get myself upright.

  The CI was too engrossed in what was on his screen to notice. ‘Talk to me on Monday,’ he said.

  In the canteen I had the third of my morning coffees. I held my mug tight and thought of the coffee cups in my father’s house, the white flame cold on the
porcelain. Was this some deep-seated revenge, getting even for being abandoned as a child? I took a gulp of coffee. The bitterness in my mouth and the scalding of my tongue was what I sought, the surge of caffeine in my blood only of secondary importance.

  The canteen felt different without people. The chairs waited for lunchtime; only a few clumps of policemen in uniform were talking in hushed voices about something that couldn’t be discussed at their desks. The room was poised before the rush like a church on Sunday morning before the service started. My scalp hurt as if my hair was tied back too tightly. I undid my plait and watched the different groups of people scattered around the tables. I didn’t want to see the snowy world outside the window. It was too white, too pure for me to look at. My eyes hurt, as if someone was pushing a screwdriver into my brain through one of my eye-sockets. I closed them in an attempt to make it go away. I put my mug down on the table and rested my head in my hands. My hair fell forwards and covered my face.

  ‘When are we arresting him?’ Stefanie’s voice shredded my thoughts like an alarm clock destroyed sleep. She pulled up the chair opposite mine, scraping it along the ground.

  ‘We can’t arrest him—’ I hid my hands under the table to hide their trembling.

  ‘But there’s a witness, right? Moerdijk told me there was a witness.’

  I slumped against the chair, its hard-edged back digging uncomfortably into my spine. ‘When did you talk to him? I only left the boss five minutes ago.’

  ‘He called me.’

  ‘I’ve got to go.’ I stood up. I needed to be alone.

  ‘Fine – I’ll come with you.’ She walked beside me as we left the canteen.

  I tried to shake her off. There was only just enough space to walk two abreast down the hall. On my right, the drop to the atrium beckoned as we followed the walkway that connected the old part of the building to the new. I stared down over the wooden banister and trailed my hand over the smooth iron verticals that held it up.