Karin sat huddled on the floor in a corner of the sitting room. She was hiding behind the dining-room furniture like a frightened wild animal, the striped wallpaper behind her like bars. Her hair was still in its Grace Kelly chignon but unravelled strands hung about her face. Black mascara was smudged around her eyes like a large bruise, and her wrinkles were red as if they’d been recently cut in her skin with a razor. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ she burst out. ‘You know this is your fault. I told him not to—’
‘Not to what?’
She caught hold of her necklace, a single long strand, and pulled it round her neck, pearl by pearl, as if it was a rosary. ‘I’ve got nothing left. Nothing.’ Her other hand clutched her BlackBerry.
I crouched down beside her. ‘Mrs Lantinga, I’m so sorry. Have you got any idea who did this?’
Karin stared from the policewoman who was keeping her company, back to the open door. I glanced over my shoulder to see what she was looking at, but didn’t see anything. I only heard the footsteps of my colleagues walking up and down the hallway. ‘I’m not talking to you. I’m not suicidal yet,’ she said, her eyes not leaving the door.
‘Shall I close it?’
She shook her head and wiped the tears away with her left hand. Her BlackBerry whirred as her thumb continuously scrolled the trackball in a compulsive gesture. She didn’t look at the device; her eyes were riveted to the open door.
‘Did you hear anything?’
‘A shot. I told him not to talk to you. And not to that old guy either.’
‘Which old guy?’
‘The retired policeman – Huizen?’ There was tension in each of her muscles. She looked scared to death, ready to jump up to attack anybody coming through that doorway. At that moment, she looked the same age as Otto Petersen’s mother.
I sat down on the floor next to her and we both looked at the open door. A hint of her jasmine and apple perfume was a reminder from a happier, less frightening time. A couple of forensic scientists walked by in their plastic outfits. I waited until they’d gone.
‘He came here?’ I said it quietly.
‘Yes, around six. Wasn’t here for long. Didn’t come in.’
‘What time . . .’ I looked at the policewoman for answers, wanting to spare Karin the entire question.
But Karin replied. ‘I heard the shot at just after seven,’ she said. ‘And I called the police immediately.’
An hour before we’d been due to meet. I remembered the blue police sirens overtaking us on the road from Alkmaar to Bergen. ‘You know who did this,’ I said. ‘Tell me what happened.’
She hid her face. ‘Please don’t ask. Leave it.’ She sounded exhausted.
‘I can’t leave it. Your husband is dead – you say it’s my fault, and it feels as if it is my fault. I need to know.’
‘First Otto, then Anton.’ She spat out the words.
‘Did you hear anything? See anything? Anybody?’
The BlackBerry flashed a red light but Karin didn’t look at it. She kept staring at the door and remained silent.
I wanted to talk to my father but I couldn’t as I had to drive Stefanie back to Amsterdam. If I’d been here with Hans I could have taken him along, but with Stefanie I couldn’t take the risk. Her conviction that he was involved and her quest to nail him for something to get our boss off the hook were too strong. The inside of the car was cold but I had to take my coat off; it was too bulky to drive with it on. I switched the heating on full. The odour of warmth filled the car, which would have to do before the actual sensation materialised.
‘I saw you,’ Stefanie said. She smelled of the cigarettes she’d had with Ronald.
‘Saw me when?’
‘With that Alkmaar detective, Ronald de Boer. I saw the two of you together.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘I don’t care,’ she said. ‘You can do what you like. I won’t tell anybody.’
I switched the radio on. A female voice was telling us the weather forecast: more frost for the next three days, but a lower chance of snow. Stefanie reached out and changed the channel, pressing the button to change it again every time she heard a talking voice. In the end a radio station playing Abba satisfied her and she sat back. The road was practically empty. Without the snow of last week, this drive was a whole lot easier. It shouldn’t take us more than forty-five minutes to get back to Amsterdam.
‘So Anton Lantinga didn’t kill Petersen then,’ she said.
‘We’ll wait for forensics, but it seems the same modus operandi.’
‘Will Alkmaar take the case?’
‘I’m not sure. Those files . . .’
‘Forget about those files, for goodness sake!’
‘They’re important.’
‘Yeah yeah. Anyway, Goosens then? Or do you think Karin killed both men?’
‘She was distraught and scared.’ I turned the sound of the radio up and whispered along with Agnetha that the winner takes it all.
‘I talked to Ronald,’ Stefanie said.
I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel in time with the music.
‘He didn’t have many ideas on who could have killed Anton. He worked the original Petersen case, didn’t he?’ she wanted to know.
We entered the tunnel under the Noordzeekanaal and the radio cut out. ‘Yes, he did.’
‘He’s very good-looking. You’re a lucky girl. I’ll be pissed off if they take the case after all the work we’ve done.’
‘The two weeks of work we’ve done.’
‘You know what I mean.’
I did. I thought of Ronald’s words, that he’d protect my father. Like me, Ronald must think he needed protecting from himself.
Chapter Nineteen
It was still dark when I cycled to work. The dynamo on my bike whirred like the trackball on Karin’s BlackBerry when her thumb had turned it compulsively last night. The sight of Anton’s head with the gunshot wound at the temple and Karin’s tears had haunted me until the early hours. The only reason I hadn’t taken my car out for another restless nocturnal drive was because I worked instead. I’d spent a long time in my study.
It had only taken seven seconds to change my drawing and cross out Anton Lantinga’s name in its box, but then I’d been left with nothing that made sense – unless the witness, Wouter Vos, had seen Karin drive Anton’s car. I stared at the piece of paper for ten minutes or so, then got the Tippex out and removed the cross through Anton’s name with white. My drawing was about who killed Otto Petersen. Unless we had evidence that the same murderer killed both men, Anton was still in the picture for the first shooting.
Petersen’s mother told me her son was talking about revenge. But what if that wasn’t revenge for Anton’s affair with Karin, but revenge for the collapse of Otto’s company? I drew a new box and wrote in the anonymous whistle-blower that Stefanie had unearthed. Van Ravensberger admitted to getting most of his losses back from the investments that Goosens made for him. Was that what happened to the money? I drew another dotted quarter circle, concentric to the first one, connecting Goosens to the missing forty million euros, to show this second alternative.
I’d paused my pen on the line connecting my father to Anton. So far it only said Did he pay him? above it. With an unwilling hand I wrote He was seen at Anton’s house below the arrow.
After another half an hour of looking at the partially empty sheet with a totally empty brain, I gave up. In my bedroom I shook a number of the small blue pills into the palm of my hand. They looked like blueberry jelly beans. I raised my hand to my mouth, then lowered it again and tipped the pills back in their amber pharmacy pot.
Now as I moved my legs in a steady rhythm, the effort of cycling brought some warmth into my cold calf muscles. Anton’s murder had to give us new information. He’d wanted to talk to us – and that had clearly forced the killer to act. Had he told anybody he’d set up the meeting? And we weren’t the only ones Anton wanted to meet. He had also arranged
to meet my father and, who knows, maybe even somebody else.
A car’s headlights threw a ghostly glow over my shoulder before it overtook me, forcing me sideways, off the cleared and salted part of the road. I made new tracks in a layer of mushy grey snow that had been shovelled to the side and all thoughts of Anton momentarily disappeared from my mind. The frost and wind made my eyes tear up and I pulled the furry collar of my coat high up my face to protect my skin. The scarf that covered my mouth was dotted with white where the condensation of my breath had frozen into tiny ice particles. At least no new snow had fallen overnight. I cycled past the flower stall where they’d sell their frozen-looking tulips later today and stared at the relief that adorns the police station’s wall. The figures symbolise the role of the police force to help and protect. We certainly hadn’t managed to protect Anton Lantinga. I would find his murderer, I vowed, even if his wife didn’t want me to. I locked my bicycle and entered the police station.
I was at my desk, my first mug of coffee in my hand, when Hans came in.
He sat down and turned on his computer. ‘I asked for a list of everybody who worked for Petersen Capital in 1995. I’m pretty sure those people’, he gestured at the Photofits on the wall, ‘worked there. The list should get here today or tomorrow.’
‘Did you hear about Anton?’ I said.
‘What happened?’
‘What happened?’ I put my mug down and started writing on my notepad, writing and saying the same words simultaneously. ‘Anton was shot dead before we got there. He couldn’t tell us anything.’
‘Any clues? Did his wife see anything?’
I knew she had seen my father. I should tell Hans about that. Instead I shook my head. I saw Karin’s face in front of me. Her fear, the look in her eyes that wouldn’t leave the door, the hand scrolling the BlackBerry. ‘Or at least, I think she saw something but she won’t tell us.’
‘And what did the lawyer say?’
‘What lawyer?’ I said.
‘There wasn’t one?’
I frowned.
‘Last night, Anton didn’t have a lawyer there?’
‘I didn’t see one. But there were so many people milling about: police, forensics, the ambulance crew. So there could have been.’
‘Did you search Anton’s house for the files?’
I shook my head again. ‘No, the Alkmaar police were taking care of all of that.’
‘Shame. Oh well. Apart from getting that list, I’ve gone through your notes from yesterday’s interview with Ferdinand van Ravensberger again. Especially the great returns he got on his money with Goosens – that is very interesting. We’ve got: two employees from Petersen Capital – yes,’ he said when I raised a finger, ‘I know that’s not certain, but it’s likely if Stefanie’s met them. They intercepted the files from Alkmaar. DI Huizen knew how long beforehand?’
‘He said two hours.’ Why had my father put me in this position, where I had to lie to Hans? I felt bad that I couldn’t make him aware of the possibility that my father had destroyed the files in return for money, and that I hadn’t even bothered to look for them.
Hans sucked some air in between his teeth. ‘That’s not long. Not long to contact somebody, I mean.’
‘Somebody knew before he did?’
‘Maybe . . . I don’t know. Anyway, they could have been protecting either Anton Lantinga or Goosens.’
‘Or Karin.’
‘I checked her alibi yesterday, met with that prison warden. He’s still there, still at the same place, and he remembered things very clearly. He said she was there until about half past five, then drove off to Alkmaar.’ Hans chuckled. ‘He said he remembered her because she was so pissed off. She was swearing at her husband for making her sit out in the rain, and now she had to drive all the way back. He even remembers that the traffic had been horrendous. He listened to the radio and had a laugh with his colleague because Karin would now be even more pissed off. But her alibi stands: there was no way she could have been back in Alkmaar in time to kill Otto Petersen.’
I was disappointed and pleased at the same time.
‘Could she have killed Anton?’ Hans asked.
‘I don’t know.’ Clear in my memory was that thumb scrolling her BlackBerry. Had she just been scared of being found out? ‘If he had been shot in the house then maybe. But I can’t imagine she got him to go outside, followed and shot him there.’
‘Then we have missing money, or maybe not, and stellar returns, as Ferdinand van Ravensberger said, for any of the investors who put cash in Goosens’s new fund,’ Hans said.
‘Stefanie seemed quite convinced that there was no missing money,’ I responded. ‘But you think that maybe Goosens paid previous investors out of the funds Petersen embezzled?’ He was thinking along the same lines as I had been, last night.
‘It’s a possibility, isn’t it?’
‘Are you sure there were good returns for all the investors in Goosens’s fund?’ I dug the photo out of my bag. ‘Maybe it was just money for Goosens, Lantinga and Van Ravensberger. And what about that whistle-blower?’
‘But surely Van Ravensberger wouldn’t have told you about the great returns if there was something dodgy going on.’
‘I don’t know. He was a bit too happy to talk to us. If Goosens dripped the money back into Van Ravensberger’s account, he might not even have realised. CI Moerdijk always thought it was Geert-Jan Goosens, or at least that he had kept the money. What if’, I tipped my chair back and speculated towards the ceiling, ‘Goosens takes the cash, stitches up Petersen for the fraud, promising him a share when he comes out, but then shoots him instead. Anton knows and is worried that Goosens is trying to stitch him up as well, so he wants to talk to us.’
‘But there was Alkmaar’s witness . . .’
‘OK, so Goosens and Anton split the money. Anton was still at Karin’s house, is seen by Wouter Vos, kills Petersen . . . Then what? He wants to confess?’
‘Doesn’t seem right.’
The phone rang and disrupted our speculation. ‘Will they never leave us alone?’ I grumbled to Hans. I enjoyed bouncing ideas off him, throwing them across the office to see which ones stuck, even if this time my ideas were ones that I knew were wrong. I picked up the phone. ‘Lotte Meerman.’
‘Hey, Lotte, it’s Ronald de Boer.’
As if I hadn’t recognised his voice. I leaned back on my chair and looked up at the ceiling. A spider had found refuge against the cold outside and now lived in the corner. ‘Hey, Ronald. Any news?’
‘It was a different weapon.’
I was close to swearing but stopped myself. A man had died, after all. ‘Interesting,’ I said instead.
‘Yes. It was from a further distance this time. No traces of gunpowder on Anton’s head.’
‘But it could still be the same perp. There are twelve years between both murders . . .’
‘I don’t think so. Leave it to us.’
‘Sure – your patch. You didn’t find your lost files at Anton’s house, by chance?’
‘Lotte, leave it to me, OK? I’ll take care of this.’
‘But we’re actually getting somewhere—’
‘Don’t drag your father any further into this than he needs to be.’ He sighed.
The sounds of the exhalation in my ear reminded me of last night. It reminded me of what he’d said about covering for my father. ‘DI Huizen was here on Wednesday.’
‘DI Huizen? Right, you’ve got some other people in your office with you. I understand. Well, he’s been busy then.’ He laughed.
‘He was here,’ I repeated, ‘and we did a Photofit of the people who picked up the files.’
‘Lotte, think about it. He got rid of—’
‘Stefanie recognised them. Did she tell you?’
‘She told me she doesn’t trust him.’
‘Yes, well, she’s got other motives for that. She recognised them. I think that’s important.’
‘Lotte, leave it. Your fat
her . . . well, I think he might be more deeply involved in this than we thought.’
There was no way my father would have killed anybody. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘You don’t want to think so.’ His voice sounded louder and more determined.
‘No, Ronald, I seriously think—’
‘For the last time, leave it, Lotte. Honestly, you don’t want to drag him any deeper into this.’
‘You’ve said that already. I heard you first time round.’ I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t dragging my father into this but that I was dragging him out. I understood that my father had got rid of those files and that he’d taken bribes, but there was no way I would believe he’d done anything else. However, I had to be careful what I said with Hans around.
‘I know him better than you do – I worked with him,’ Ronald said harshly. ‘Trust me, I know what he’s . . . well, capable of, I suppose. Sorry, Lotte, I’ve got to go. I’ll call you when I’ve got news.’ The line went dead.
* * *
I sat at my favourite table in the canteen with my usual lunch of a cheese sandwich, an apple and a glass of milk. My lack of progress was, I decided, because I’d let my emotions rule me. I had to let my brain take over and do the work. Like I used to. Forget that DI Huizen was my father, lose my preconceptions of him, negative or positive, and look at the facts.
From my handbag I took out the photo Mrs Petersen had given me, the Photofit of the two police impersonators who met with my father and took the files, and my notepad. I glanced at the leftmost Photofit then took a glug of milk and stared out over the canal.
A couple of kids in their mid-teens were throwing bricks on the ice. On other canals people had started to skate. The temperature had got down to minus ten last night, caused by the snowless clear skies, but I wasn’t sure the ice would hold. The Singelgracht, however, was being kept open by the tour boats that broke through every day, but the boats didn’t start running until midday and the frozen night’s ice must seem an enticing short cut.
A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1) Page 18
