‘You don’t think he shot Otto, do you?’
‘No, I’m pretty sure he didn’t.’
The doorbell rang. My father got up to open the door. I heard voices, him and another man. I sat back against the sofa and thought maybe I would have been a different person if I could have spent more time with my father. I imagined weekend visits that were joyful, pleasurable. Maybe we’d have gone to Alkmaar’s cheese market together, where sets of two men would run stretchers with moon-yellow cheeses around the large square. Their white uniforms and summer-coloured straw hats my father had told me so much about would make them seem like ambulancemen, doctors, on a jaunty outing, their red hatbands floating behind them like the streamers from a party. The sun would shine. My father would be holding my hand tight, which was good because I wouldn’t want to get lost in the crowd. People would press against me, smell of sweat and cheese, but I wouldn’t be afraid, I wouldn’t be worried, because my father would hold my hand and I’d be secure.
I rubbed my hand over my eyes. I wasn’t that naïve, not even in my own daydreams. It wouldn’t have been sunny; it would have rained and bad things would have happened anyway, like in that first visit, which my mother had sabotaged on purpose.
Footsteps came from the hallway.
‘Hi, Lotte. Didn’t know you were here,’ Ronald said. His hair was back under control.
‘Is this an official visit?’ I asked.
‘Is yours?’
‘No, I’m off the case. I’m just having a coffee with my father.’
‘Mine is not official either.’ Ronald sat down on the far side of the sofa. My father sat next to me. ‘At least not this time.’ He looked at my father. ‘I’m sorry, Piet. One of my colleagues has got the idea that you shot Anton – because you were there that night. I know you’ve got nothing to do with it, so I’ve come here to warn you. I’ll continue to protect you,’ he looked at me, ‘and I’ll protect you too, Lotte.’
‘I don’t need protecting,’ I said.
He ignored me. ‘Did Anton say anything? Anything of interest?’
‘Not really,’ my father said. ‘He just showed me the files in the shed.’
‘But you said you didn’t find anything, Ronald,’ I queried.
‘True. I checked, and there was nothing. Two sets of footprints from the garden to the shed. One is Anton’s—’
‘The other one is mine,’ my father said. He sounded resigned. ‘Do you want the shoes I wore that evening?’
‘If you don’t mind.’
My father nodded and left the room. I could hear his footsteps go up the stairs and walk around above my head.
‘How are you, Lotte? Are you OK?’ Ronald asked.
‘I’m fine.’
‘I’m sorry to hear you’re suspended. Have dinner with me tonight. Talk about what you knew, how far you got.’
I shook my head. ‘Thanks, Ronald, but not tonight. I’m going straight home to bed.’ I needed to sleep. I didn’t think I could cope with seeing Wendy tonight in my dreams so I’d take some of the pills I’d managed to leave untouched so far. My arms felt heavy with fatigue. ‘How is Karin holding up?’
‘She’s hard as nails. We’re talking again to her soon. See what she has to say. She’ll tell us who she saw.’ It sounded like a warning.
I didn’t understand why he was telling me this. We sat in silence until my father came back. He held out his shoes. They looked so innocent, these slate-grey leather shoes with their dove-grey laces crossing from metal hole to metal hole, the crepe soles so necessary in the snow, the heels worn down from walking, the leather marked with a white line where the salt-mixed melted-snow water had run up the sides. But they seemed enormous and significant as Ronald opened a plastic bag and got my father to put them in. He was careful not to touch them.
‘And remember,’ Ronald said, ‘if anything comes to mind, anything Anton said, anything you saw, give me a call.’
‘Sure.’ He walked Ronald out. ‘Give my love to Ilse.’
Ronald said he would. He didn’t turn round to say goodbye to me.
‘Is Ilse his wife?’ I asked my father when he returned.
‘Yes. She’s nice – very caring. But I think you’ve met her.’
‘I have? When?’
‘She’s the receptionist.’ I must have looked at him blankly because he added, ‘At the police station.’
Their smiles together, their glances. I’d missed something again. ‘I had no idea. I thought they were having an affair.’
‘No, they’ve been married for ages. Must be over fifteen years.’
‘I had no idea,’ I said again.
‘Yes, he got her that job. She wanted to join the police force at first, but he thought it wouldn’t be right for her, so he got her somewhere safe from where she could see what was involved.’
I remembered that she’d told me about that, the first time I’d come to the Alkmaar police station.
‘Another coffee?’
I was thinking, so I’d missed my father holding my empty mug out in front of me. ‘I can always do with another,’ I told him. ‘Thanks.’
He got up, and a few moments later the whine of the coffee grinder streamed from the kitchen.
‘Let’s talk about something else,’ I said when he came back with the coffees. But I said that to stop myself thinking of how easily all the jigsaw pieces would fit together if my father really was guilty. ‘You’ve known Ronald for a long time, haven’t you?’
‘Yes, we worked together for almost twenty years. Why?’
‘Why does he think he needs to protect you?’
‘It’s funny. I informed him I was going to see Anton and he told me not to. Said I was too old, it was too dangerous. I don’t know. Maybe because he sat by the side of my bed with Maaike after my heart attack. It feels as if he’s wanted to wrap me in cotton wool ever since.’
‘He told me about that. He did still sound upset.’
‘After more than ten years. Can you imagine?’
I nodded. I recognised the feeling, but I’d only known about my father’s heart attack for a week.
His face creased with his smile. ‘I’m glad you’re looking out for me. Would you like to stay for dinner?’
I looked at my watch. It was just before five. ‘No thanks, Dad. I’m going home. I’m exhausted.’
‘You can stay here tonight if you like.’
‘Thanks, but I wouldn’t be good company tonight.’
‘That doesn’t matter; that’s what family is for.’
‘Some other time, maybe.’
‘I’m worried about you, Lotte,’ he said after a pause and a long stare at me. ‘I’m worried that you didn’t ask me about the money, that you didn’t just come out with it. You know you can talk to me, don’t you?’
‘I know so now.’
‘If there’s anything you want to talk to me about . . .’
‘No, Dad, I’m fine.’
‘You’re not, Lotte, and it probably would do you good to get things off your chest. I won’t tell anybody, I’d understand – why don’t you try it?’
Talk about what I did after I’d hit Paul Leeuwenhoek, talk about distorting evidence? ‘Dad, I’ve done some stuff I’m not proud of.’
‘Haven’t we all.’ He no longer smiled; his face was sombre.
‘I’d completely misjudged Paul Leeuwenhoek.’ I’d been so in love with him that I hadn’t been able to see him for who he really was – not until he had taken his mask off, not until he’d taunted me with it.
‘But you found out in the end.’
‘Yes, I did.’ And I’d hit him in the face, pointed a gun at him, had forced him under the shower, forced him to get dressed in clean clothes.
‘There are always suspects we get on with better than others, people we’d like to be innocent, people we’d like to be guilty. But it doesn’t always work out the way we want it. Our friends can have committed crimes, even.’ My father finished his sentence in a
low voice and I realised that this was as much a conversation with himself as it was with me.
‘So this happened to you too?’
‘Of course. You do this job for long enough, you come to realise that the nicest people can be tax evaders; that members of your own family can drink too much and get behind the wheel. We are not responsible for what they do; we are just responsible for how we react, how we deal with it.’
I closed my eyes and the picture of how I’d dealt with it came flooding in.
It had taken Paul Leeuwenhoek a while after I’d hit him to come round, but finally he’d opened his eyes.
‘Get up,’ I said.
He refused.
‘I have to work very hard not to shoot you right now,’ I told him. ‘Don’t give me an excuse, because I will pull the trigger.’
He smiled.
It made me want to throw up. After I’d made him have a shower and a good wash, the gun pointed at his head at all times, I needed him to get dressed. ‘Put some clothes on,’ I ordered. ‘No, not these ones. Clean ones. Get them out of the cupboard.’
He did as I said. He had been silent throughout, probably correctly reading in my eyes that I would not have hesitated to pull the trigger.
‘Now go down the stairs.’ He started to say something, but I jabbed the gun in the nape of his neck. My fingers had held him there only an hour ago. I pushed the image out of my mind. ‘Down the stairs.’ He walked slowly down both flights. I opened the cellar door. He looked at me once before going through. I closed the door behind him, wedged a chair under the doorknob and moved a table against the chair.
‘It doesn’t matter what you do now,’ I heard him shout, the sound muffled by the door.
He was wrong. It mattered a great deal. I went into the kitchen and opened the cupboards until I found a pair of household gloves and cleaning fluids. I grabbed a handful of plastic bags and put them over my hair and shoes. All the time tears were streaming down my face and revulsion was coursing through every nerve, every vein in my body
I went back upstairs, into the bedroom, and stripped the sheets and pillowcases from the bed. I stuffed them in a bin bag. I got clean sheets out of the cupboard and made the bed again. Then I hoovered the carpet thoroughly and wiped all the surfaces. I cleaned the upstairs bathroom. I took his comb, pulled some hairs out and scattered them on the bed and on the floor to make sure it didn’t look too clean. I looked under the bed, got the used condom and put that in the bag as well. The upstairs clean, I paused to think where else I had been. Or rather, where else I had been that I shouldn’t. Or that I couldn’t go to when the team turned up. With an old case like this, they’d be less careful about spreading their own DNA around. I would follow them to as many of the rooms as I could. There were used wine glasses, but I was leaving those. I wasn’t going to hide that I’d been here. I just needed to hide what we’d done for about two hours of the time.
What we had done.
What we had done and why he’d done it.
I had never been used like this. I opened the door to the downstairs bathroom and vomited violently. In my mind I said it out loud: it was the thought that I’d been drinking with this murderer. That would be a good enough excuse. I flushed but didn’t scrub. I put all the cleaning things back in the cupboard in the kitchen. I went outside and put the bin bag in the boot of the car. I’d burn that later. He wouldn’t win.
When I was finally ready, I went out to the garden and started to dig.
I would like to think that I did the right thing, because the case would have never come to court otherwise, but today, sitting on the sofa in my father’s house, I couldn’t accept that I had.
‘I’m not sure I dealt with the situation well,’ I said to my father.
‘You’re not responsible for other people’s crimes, but you are responsible for getting them in front of a judge. And you did that, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘Then you shouldn’t feel guilty.’
I wasn’t sure I agreed with him. I wasn’t yet as jaded as his words suggested he was. But I did feel a glimmer of hope that I could at some point be of the same opinion as my father. Maybe by the time I’d retired, after another twenty years of work, I could look back at this episode and think I’d done well, because I found Wendy’s body and got her murderer the punishment he deserved.
‘It’s not knowing why he murdered her,’ I said. ‘It haunts me at night.’ That and wondering if I hadn’t been just as calculating as Paul.
‘In some of my cases I thought that even the murderers didn’t know why they’d killed. A sudden flash of anger, a punch that was harder than intended. It’s possible he never meant to do it.’
I wanted to change the subject and was reminded of something that my father had said earlier on. ‘You mentioned that Anton told you he was fed up with lying.’ The words had stuck in my mind because they were so similar to what Paul Leeuwenhoek had said to me. I no longer believed that this was the reason why Paul had told me part of the truth.
‘Yes – he said that he wanted to come clean.’
‘Any idea what he was going to tell us?’
‘How he got those files, I think.’
‘He couldn’t have had much time . . .’
‘He wouldn’t have needed much time. It doesn’t take long to get here from Bergen. He could have called some of his friends.’
‘But someone must have told him to come for those files though. That’s what puzzles me. We’re going to use those Photofits . . .’
‘You’re not going to use anything. You’re not working on it any more,’ my father said gently.
‘Was it wise to give Ronald your shoes?’ I asked after a few silent sips of my coffee.
‘What else was I going to do? Refuse? He would have been back tomorrow with a search warrant.’
I nodded because I knew he was right, but I wasn’t happy about it. ‘You’ve got to be careful. Get yourself a lawyer.’
‘I didn’t do anything.’
‘Since when does that matter?’
My father pulled a face at my cynicism. ‘It’ll come out anyway, that I was there. Karin opened the door. She saw me.’
‘Yes, she told me that.’ Ronald’s words about interviewing her seemed more ominous. ‘How can there be only two sets of footprints if you saw those files and later they were gone? Somebody must have gone to the shed after you.’
‘Anton?’
‘Maybe. Was Anton forced to retrieve those crates by his killer?’ I said the hypothesis out loud to hear what it sounded like. ‘But then there would be three sets of footprints, of which two were Anton’s.’
‘It’s not your case any more, Lotte.’
‘Those files . . .’ I knew he was right but my brain followed the track it had started on. ‘You saw them in the shed. But when Ronald turns up, not that much later, they’re gone. Someone keeps moving them in the nick of time. Be careful, Dad.’
On the drive home I put the music on as loud as I could and sang along, purely to keep awake. My eyelids were heavy and my arms were only kept up by the steering wheel. I found it hard to focus on anything other than the traffic ahead of me on the long straight road south. My thoughts tumbled around in my head. Ronald had collected my father’s shoes; only two sets of footsteps went out to the shed; Ronald was married to Ilse, the receptionist. I had to trust Ronald and Hans to figure out what had happened now. I was off the case; I should just sleep.
Finally in my study, I looked at the drawing on the architect’s table, then got a blue marker pen out and drew in my views. With each line and square I got more despondent. I should not have been suspended. I could have solved this case if only they’d let me. I would not have been suspended if I hadn’t tried to cover for my father. I had tried to be a saviour, to sacrifice myself for somebody who didn’t need any help – as futile a gesture as that of my colleague who nearly drowned in an Amsterdam canal after jumping in to rescue someone who was practis
ing for a triathlon. Why was I still working on this, still thinking about it, when the chief inspector didn’t want me to?
I wasn’t needed any more and I couldn’t block the bad thoughts about Paul Leeuwenhoek any longer with the dam that work used to form. Gripping my marker pen tight in my fist, I destroyed my carefully outlined arrows and squares with thick lines. I pressed too hard and tore the paper from one of its bindings. Then I cast my pen into the corner, went to my bedroom, undressed and sat on the edge of my bed. What was I going to do tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that? I tipped a large number of blue pills into the palm of my hand.
Chapter Twenty-six
The doorbell woke me up at 9.22 a.m. There was pressure on my bladder. I tested the temperature in the flat with a big toe, only to put it hastily right back under the duvet. I held out for ten minutes or so, then the need to pee won out over the need for warmth. I’d forgotten to turn the heating on and started to shiver as soon as I was up. I wrapped my dressing gown around me and protected my cold toes with woollen slippers. The doorbell rang again. The bathroom was freezing; ice flowers covered the glass and a cold draught whistled in from around the window and hit my face. I emptied myself and smelled the sweet strong odour that told me I was dehydrated. The doorbell rang again; this was the third time maybe. Then the phone rang. Ignoring both, I ran back to bed to stuff my frozen feet under the duvet.
Someone banged on my front door. I pulled the duvet over my head to make the world go away but the banging got louder and louder until it sounded like someone bringing a hammer down on the wood. I rolled out of bed and stumbled down to the door, calling out, ‘I’m coming.’
‘Lotte? Lotte!’ a man’s voice shouted at the top of his lungs.
A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1) Page 23
