‘Lotte, nothing out of the ordinary happened. I don’t understand why you are being so . . . so . . .’
I picked up a cup, dried it and didn’t fill the silence.
‘So official,’ she concluded.
As she handed me another dripping cup, our fingers almost touched. The smell of Lux washing-up liquid reached my nostrils.
‘Tell me about the money,’ I said.
‘What money?’
‘The money you were talking about last time. Mum, don’t make this so hard for me!’
‘I’m not making this hard. It’s a private matter – I don’t see how it can possibly make a difference.’
I put the cup quietly on top of its mate in the cupboard. ‘You told me last time that Dad got paid for something he shouldn’t have, and that it was wrong of him to take it.’
‘Oh, that.’
‘Yes, that. How did you find out?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘See? You’re doing it again.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Acting as if it’s not important. Mum, we lived in relative poverty for years. You still have next to nothing. He has a huge house, a BMW parked outside the door, brochures of expensive holidays . . .’
‘And you wish we’d had that too?’ Her eyes remained on the plate in her right hand, checked that the stains had disappeared under the brush.
‘No, I just want to know why we didn’t have some of that.’
‘It wasn’t my money to take. I told you that. I walked out, so how could I expect him to give some of that money to me?’
‘Did he ever offer to pay?’
‘Is that what this is about? You want to know if your father cared enough to offer to pay for you?’
I paused with the tea towel limp from my hand. ‘No, I—’
‘Well, he did. He offered. He offered a few times. Especially after you started to visit him, he called to say he wanted to do more for you. But I knew where the money came from so I couldn’t accept it.’ She picked up another plate and scraped the rest of what looked like mashed potatoes into the kitchen bin with the washing-up brush. There was more leftover food there than I was happy to see. The plate then disappeared under the bubbles in the sink.
‘Where did the money come from?’
‘Ah, so we’re back to that, are we?’ She handed me the clean plate.
‘Yes, we are.’
She picked up a glass, turned it round and round in her hand, the brush firmly inside, until the residue of the orange juice had disappeared before she responded. ‘It was hers, OK? It was her money.’ She put the glass down, took one of the Marigolds off and threw it with force into the foamy water. It splashed in her face and bubbles splattered all over the cabinets and the work surface. The drops mixed with washing-up froth streamed down her face like tears. The muscles around her mouth contorted. The glove filled with dirty water from the round washing-up bowl and went under.
‘Her? Who do you mean?’
‘That Maaike woman. His new wife. She hired him to do some private security for her real estate business. He did far more for her than that. So much more, I had no choice but to leave when I found out.’ My mother wiped her face with her bare hand.
‘Oh Mum, why didn’t you ever tell me this?’
‘Tell you what? That your father left me for a richer woman? That the house he lives in, the BMW you so enviously describe, their holidays, are all paid for by her? That the money he offered me to look after you was hers?’ She straightened her back, pulled off the second Marigold and flung it in the sink as well. It floated for a bit, then sank beneath the soapsuds.
‘So how is this different?’ I muttered, to stop myself from screaming. I was like one of those gloves, drowning gradually in dirty dishwater, bit by bit.
‘What do you mean?’
‘All along, you told me that my break-up from Arjen was different from your break-up from Dad. I came to you for help. I came to you for advice. And you kept telling me your divorce was different. Well, it doesn’t sound so different to me. It sounds exactly the same.’ The volume of my voice was rising even though I was trying hard to keep it under control. I wanted to yell at her for making me feel guilty about leaving Arjen. How could she have been all high and mighty with me, making me feel that it had all been my fault, that I’d done something wrong, that I could have saved my marriage, whilst the same thing had happened to her? I remembered the words she had said: ‘What did you do?’ But she’d known only too well that sometimes you didn’t do anything, that things just happened to you, that the people around you made these decisions to be with somebody else for whatever reason, and that there was nothing you could do.
She pulled the plug out of the sink and the water drained, revealing the dinner debris beneath.
I was fighting back tears. ‘Mum, you made me believe that something different happened between you and Dad. You always told me . . . you made me believe it was something important.’
‘But it was.’
‘That’s not what I mean. I told you Arjen had had an affair and got the woman pregnant. You said you couldn’t help me, because what had happened between you and Dad was so different.’
‘With your father it was all about the money.’
‘I thought the money came from somewhere else.’ I said it softly, embarrassed now at how easy I’d found it to believe that. ‘That he’d been taking bribes.’
‘Bribes? What are you talking about?’
‘I believed that bribes had paid for his house. That this was why you left him.’
Had I wanted to believe it? Because my own criminal behaviour would be less deplorable if I were the daughter of a corrupt policeman? Then it would have been in my genes, in my make-up: it would not have been my responsibility. I had tried to protect myself as much as protect him, I suddenly realised. It had been so difficult to live with the knowledge that I was the kind of police officer who destroyed evidence, who altered the scene of the crime.
I felt less guilt about shooting a young man in a petrol station than I did over what I’d done at Paul Leeuwenhoek’s house. The guilt about the subsequent clean-up operation was maybe even worse than my revulsion over having sex with him. That revulsion was so deep that I couldn’t stand the sight of my own skin these days, couldn’t endure anybody touching me – but the sex had been an act of my weak flesh whilst the clean-up had been a premeditated act of what I used to think was my strong mind. At least with my father, I’d tried to protect him. The clean-up was purely to protect myself.
My mother took a step back from the sink and said, ‘Maybe I would have preferred it if he had been on the take.’ She laughed harshly. ‘Isn’t that awful of me? I would have preferred it if he had been a criminal. Instead he was just sleeping with a rich woman.’
‘Mum—’
‘No, you wanted me to talk, so let me talk. He was coming home with all these little presents. Presents from her to him: a new suit, a nice jumper, some calfskin-leather gloves. He wasn’t even hiding them. He told me she’d given them. He told me! Can you believe it? He told me because he wanted to keep a clear conscience. Didn’t want to do anything behind my back.’ She sat down on the kitchen floor next to the fridge. ‘Instead he was rubbing my face in it. That was the hardest.’
‘Mum.’ I bent down until I was level with her and wrapped my arms around her. She smelled of the Nivea body lotion she’d used for forty years.
‘It wasn’t supposed to be like that. Marriage was supposed to be for ever. He was supposed to be faithful to me.’ She shook under my embrace. My arms felt her ribs through the skin. There seemed to be no flesh in between. When she spoke, her breath tickled the skin inside my ear. Her whispering voice was so close it seemed she was talking right inside my mind. ‘Some days, when you were at school, I’d take the train to Alkmaar. I’d get the bus to their house, stand outside behind a tree, and watch them. He moved in with her – our house wasn’t good enough for her, I
suppose – and I watched them, when I knew he was on lates, watched their morning routine. And I could see what it was all about. It was about the money. He left me for somebody with a lot of money, so that they could live in their big house, drive her nice car. Have all the things he wanted to have but could never afford. You see, that’s why it was different. Arjen just left you for someone younger, someone prettier. Your father left me for someone richer. Don’t you see it was totally different?’
‘Oh, Mum.’ So lying was something I’d inherited from my mother, not my father. I didn’t know if I wanted to hit her or hug her. As I was already hugging her, it seemed easier to keep on doing that. Who was I to judge? I’d jumped to conclusions; I’d thought he was on the take. My mother hadn’t forced me to cover for him; she hadn’t told me he was taking bribes. It had been my misunderstanding, my own stupid fault. My job, my life, my career down the drain over a misunderstanding. How had that happened?
‘And then he wanted to see you,’ she hissed in my ear, ‘but he already had another wife, another house – why should he have his child back?’
‘When was this?’ I had to work hard to make sure my arms did not crush her but I couldn’t stop all my muscles from tightening up. ‘When did he want to see me?’
‘Oh, immediately. But I didn’t want him to see you. I didn’t want him and his mistress to tarnish you with all that cash. You would have been unhappy with our flat here; you wouldn’t have been satisfied with what I could give you. I couldn’t let that happen. I had to protect you from that. So I wouldn’t let you visit him until you were old enough to make your own choices. And I think you made the right ones.’
Now it was clear to me that she’d sabotaged those visits from the beginning by refusing to drop me off. And I’d thought she was protecting me. I went to Alkmaar on my own and my father and I got off on the wrong foot because I ended up defending her.
What about me? I wanted to say. What about my childhood? You always told me he didn’t want to see me. How did you think that made me feel? Unwanted, unimportant, unloved. I had been at the bottom of the pile at school. Not only were my parents divorced, which was uncommon but not unheard of, but I also had no contact with my father. The other girls had called me names, shouted that I was so ugly even my own father couldn’t stand the sight of me, was so disappointed in me that he couldn’t bear having to talk to me. When I’d told my mother, she’d lectured me to stand up to them, to get angry, to get even. She could have told me the truth: that my father did want to see me, that it was her choice we had no contact.
Instead I said, ‘Mum, it doesn’t matter.’
‘It does matter.’ She didn’t know what I was referring to. My head juddered. ‘He was the adulterer,’ she hissed. ‘He should have been punished. He shouldn’t have a nice life, with his new wife, in her big house. He should have been the one with the hard life, with the two jobs. Not me.’ She was talking louder.
I pushed her away from me. She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her jumper and took a deep breath as if to say, ‘Right, that’s that. No more crying.’ I stood up but didn’t give her my hand to pull her to her feet. ‘I’m sorry, Mum.’
‘I’d like you to go now, Lotte. Thanks for helping me with the dishes.’
I picked up my coat and walked down those stairs again.
Outside the flat I got in my car and stared at the cyclists going past. How the hell had I got it so badly wrong?
Chapter Twenty- five
‘I’ve been suspended,’ I said, hanging my head and feeling like a twelve year old who is telling her father that she’s been kicked out of school for something she hasn’t done – sounding defiant and defensive at the same time.
‘What for?’ He frowned, his forehead deep ravines of concern, then stepped aside, saying, ‘Come in.’ He took my coat, hung it up.
I followed him down the hallway. Classical music streamed from hidden speakers. I thought it was Mahler, but couldn’t be sure. The smell of lemons was even stronger than last time.
‘For this, of course,’ I replied. ‘For working on this case and not telling them you’re my father.’ I was angry that he didn’t understand.
‘You didn’t tell them?’ He stopped and rested his hand on my arm. I shook it off. ‘But why not? Sorry, sit down and you can tell me all about it. Coffee?’
On my nod he walked to the kitchen. I went with him. ‘I did think it was strange that they let you work on this case.’ He put two mugs under the spout of a stainless-steel coffee machine.
‘I was stupid. I should have told them.’
He turned round and looked at me over his shoulder. ‘Why didn’t you?’
‘I didn’t think it could do any harm. Coming here, I mean. There was no way Ferdinand van Ravensberger had killed Otto Petersen. I thought I could come and talk to you . . .’ The sound of beans being ground drowned out my words. I didn’t want to tell him that I’d come here to escape talking to the prosecutor about Wendy Leeuwenhoek. That I had been afraid the prosecutor was going to ask me difficult questions and that I’d hoped I could keep Wendy’s photos for a bit longer. I rested against the marble work surface, its sharp edge digging into my hip. I picked up a cleaner, lemon-scented Ajax, and swung it back and forth in my hand.
‘Give me that,’ my father said. ‘Sorry, I was just scrubbing when you turned up.’ He opened the cupboard under the sink and put the bottle in beside the other cleaning products. He frothed milk in a stainless steel jug and poured the foam in my cup, then rinsed the jug under the tap and put it in the dishwasher.
I looked around. There were many appliances and gadgets here, compared to my mother’s kitchen with the old tins filled with herbs. ‘I’m surprised you don’t have a cleaner,’ I commented.
‘Then what would I do all day?’ He handed me my mug and filled the other for himself. ‘This has been an interesting change. Back to doing a proper job.’ The corners of his mouth rose, then he let the smile drop from his face. ‘I’m sorry I got you into trouble.’
I took a sip of coffee and bitterness flooded my mouth. ‘You didn’t get me into trouble. I got myself into it.’ Then I corrected myself. ‘Actually, I already was in trouble. Don’t worry about it. When Ronald told me about your heart attack, your last day at work, those files . . .’ Had that only been ten days ago? It seemed like a lifetime. ‘. . . I don’t think I was in my right mind. I should have dropped it there and then, told the chief inspector. But I didn’t. I thought it was my duty to protect you.’
‘But I didn’t need protecting. I told you that.’
‘I know. But one of my colleagues kept going on about bribes, money missing.’ I pointed a hand around the kitchen. ‘And I had seen your house, your car. You had so much. Mum and I, we had so little.’ I sighed. ‘Those words hit a nerve. It was so easy to believe there might be substance in them.’
‘It’s all Maaike’s. She’s very successful and has worked hard all these years.’ My father looked tired. ‘None of it is mine,’ he said.
‘Come, Dad, let’s sit down.’
‘I suppose you could say I’ve been lucky.’ He patted my back. ‘And I’ve been so proud of you over the years. Your career, the cases you worked on . . . I’ve kept a scrapbook, you know.’
‘Doing something for you felt good,’ I tried to explain. ‘I felt grown-up. Responsible. Making up for earlier mistakes. For lost time. Even though it was clearly futile, trying to look after you when you didn’t need looking after; trying to cover up for you while you were telling the truth all along.’
We sat down on the sofa, side by side on the long leg of the L-shape. He wrapped an arm around my shoulder.
I pulled back and looked at him for a breath or two then I tried out the physical contact and leaned my head on his shoulder. It was uncomfortable but I felt comforted.
‘You don’t have to explain,’ he said gently. ‘How are you anyway? You look even more tired than the last time I saw you.’
I moved from under
his arm and sat up straight against the back of the sofa. ‘I was crying all the way here. But now – I don’t know. I just feel exhausted.’
Exhausted and empty. It reminded me of breaking off some early relationship at university. For weeks I had been fretting over whether I wanted to stay with the guy or not, had cried many tears into my patient pillow, and hadn’t actually done anything about it. Then Patrick had dumped me. And after I’d recovered from wounded pride, which lasted all of thirty minutes, there had been this real sense of emptiness, the realisation that relationships were meaningless and that they hurt. It had been brutal seeing him in the lecture theatre with his new girlfriend and observing all my friends together with their other halves, but for days immediately after the break-up, I’d felt this awful emptiness. However much of a lonely outcast I was, it was still better than going through that ever again.
Once more I felt barren, without purpose, now that my quest to save my father, my sacrifice, had turned out to be unnecessary. My joints, my very bones ached.
‘What are you going to do?’ my father asked.
‘I’m not sure.’ As before, the pot of blue pills by the side of my bed sprang to mind. ‘First I’ll sleep. The CI said I should take a holiday. I might do that. I’ll talk to Hans tomorrow and then I’ll leave him to it and come back when I read in the paper that he’s done.’
‘And Anton’s murder?’
‘That’s Ronald’s case now. Hans is going to work with him. At least, I think so; I didn’t speak to the boss about that. I’m through thinking I’m the only one who can solve crime. Plus’, I laughed, ‘I’m not allowed to anyway. I’m suspended. I don’t want to get in more trouble than I already am. So, just out of personal curiosity, nothing to do with the investigation, what did Anton Lantinga say to you on the night of his death?’
‘It was funny. When I got there, he looked at me and said: “Oh yes, I recognise you. You interrogated me once or twice.” Can you believe it? I was ready to lock him up and he only barely remembered me. He took me to the shed and showed me the two yellow crates I’d packed. He must have read some of the reports, but they hardly looked touched. “I think you might have got into some trouble over this,” he said, “and I want to make amends. It’s been more than ten years and I want the truth to come out. I’m fed up with hiding and lying.”’
A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1) Page 22
