A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1)

by Jager, Anja de

  I walked into Reception, tape recorder switched on in my pocket. Did Ilse know I’d been suspended? She was on the phone, neck straight, head straight, headset covering one ear, her butter-blonde hair tucked behind the other, exposing the milk-and-cream skin of her cheek. I pictured her light colouring besides Ronald’s darkness. She saw me but didn’t interrupt her call. I waited and watched people walk in and out. I hadn’t thought of what I’d do if Ronald came in. I looked at my watch; it was half past twelve, one and a half hours before he was due to meet Karin in Amsterdam. Maybe that was him on the phone to Ilse.

  She finally finished her call and said, ‘Yes, what can I do for you? Ronald isn’t here right now.’

  I smiled, assumed my most relaxed pretend-nice face. ‘That’s a shame. I just popped in to see if he wanted a coffee.’ I gestured at the car outside. ‘I’m waiting for my father to get out.’

  ‘Your father?’ Her face looked blank. So Ronald hadn’t told her.

  ‘Yes, Piet Huizen. He used to work with Ronald. Surely you must remember him.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course. We all liked him a lot.’

  I smiled, pretending gratitude this time.

  ‘It doesn’t seem that long since his retirement,’ she said.

  ‘Twelve years.’

  She nodded pensively.

  ‘You must remember his last day here,’ I said.

  ‘We were all so concerned, after the heart attack.’

  ‘My father told me you sent him flowers.’ He hadn’t said anything of the kind, but she would have done; she was the type.

  ‘Yes, I did. Because I felt so guilty. I should have given him a hand.’

  ‘With?’ My heart thumped in my chest but I managed to keep my voice steady.

  ‘Carrying those crates. He was dragging them down the stairs as the lift was out of order – I remember it well. He put them over there in the corner.’ She pointed, but her arm drooped and her voice petered out at the sight of my too-real, triumphant smile.

  ‘That’s not what you told us when we took over. Our chief inspector, who worked the case, said you gave him a cardboard folder with only a few pages in it. Did Ronald help you pick which bits to keep behind?’ Ronald should have briefed his wife better, told her what she should and shouldn’t tell me. Maybe Ronald hadn’t instructed her at all because he was worried she might talk. She seemed a nice enough woman; maybe he hadn’t mentioned anything about Wouter, my father, Otto Petersen and Anton Lantinga. I stared at her milk-white skin, the faltering smile on her pink lips.

  She blinked a few times and tucked more hair behind her ear.

  I leaned on the reception desk, purposefully moving my body into her space. ‘It was a perfect selection, enough to make us think the Alkmaar police were incompetent and not to draw any suspicion. Ronald did a good job there.’ I took my mobile phone out and slowly took a picture of Ilse, to show the CI. Not that there was any doubt in my mind.

  ‘Well, no,’ she said, ‘I didn’t—’

  ‘Didn’t meet with our chief inspector? He says you did. He says you gave him the cardboard folder. Are you saying he’s lying?’

  ‘No, no, I did give him that, but—’

  ‘You just told me you saw my father carry crates of files down the stairs. Now you admitted you gave CI Moerdijk just six pages.’ I took the tape recorder from my pocket and pressed the stop button in full sight of her. ‘Thanks, Ilse. Much appreciated.’

  She didn’t say anything, just stared at me. A bright red blush crept up from her neck to her cheeks. I knew she’d call Ronald as soon as I’d gone.

  As I walked towards the exit, my eyes scanned every person who walked down the steps, every individual who came through a corridor, to see if Ronald was coming back to work. I wasn’t sure what I’d do if I saw him, but because of him my father had spent the night in prison. It was easier to blame Ronald than to acknowledge that my father wasn’t free because I’d taken my tablets and slept. I needed to make sure he wouldn’t spend another night locked up, and for that I had to get Karin to admit that Wouter Vos had turned up on their doorstep after my father had left.

  I got in Stefanie’s car and sped down Alkmaar’s streets. The wheels of the car chewed up the kilometres of bendy asphalt road. In the danger-red car, I overtook a couple of dodderers on the road when it straightened out. I had less than an hour and a quarter before Ronald met with Karin, and I needed to talk to her before he did, even though I was suspended. I pushed the accelerator in to press the car forward and Stefanie’s car responded with a pleasing increase of sound and speed. I didn’t care how angry she’d be when she found out I had left her and Hans behind. I wasn’t doing this to arrest Wouter. My mobile rang, but the caller display showed it was Hans, so I didn’t pick it up. I didn’t want him to stop me.

  The villages flew by on either side of the motorway and, where the railway ran parallel to the road, a train was struggling to keep up with me as I hurtled south, accompanied by the flashes of speed cameras, back to Amsterdam.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Twenty minutes before Ronald was due to arrive I walked up the steps leading to Omega’s front door.

  ‘Karin, please,’ I said to the receptionist. ‘It’s urgent.’ I didn’t have to show the badge I didn’t have any more as her face said she recognised me. She walked me through to the boardroom where Karin and her lawyer sat side by side. Papers were strewn over the cherrywood table; Karin held a black and gold fountain pen in her hand.

  ‘You need to tell me the truth,’ I said before she could even open her mouth. ‘We can protect you, but you need to tell me what really happened.’ I reached over the chair, put the tape recorder on the table in front of her and switched it on. I stayed standing.

  She screwed the golden top back on the pen, put it down on the table and slid some of the papers face-down underneath a copy of Het Financieele Dagblad.

  I rested my hands on the back of the cherrywood chair. It was the same one I’d sat on last week, only this time I was right opposite Karin. She was sitting at the long side of the table, no longer at the head, as if she’d handed over control. Under the apple and jasmine perfume there was a whiff of perspiration.

  ‘I know you’re scared,’ I said quietly, ‘but I also know that he needs to be stopped. Only you can help us to do that.’

  She collected the rest of the papers in a pile and straightened them.

  ‘Ronald de Boer will be here in’, I checked my watch, ‘fifteen minutes. You have until then to tell me.’ The traffic had been horrendous because of the snow, and the journey to Amsterdam had taken much longer than I’d anticipated. ‘Tell me what happened after Otto’s death and what happened just before Anton’s.’

  She took a deep breath in and out. An award naming her Dutch Business Woman of the Year rested against the wall. Her left hand disappeared up the right sleeve of her jacket and the sound of her bitten nails scratching her skin was loud in the quiet room.

  ‘Karin, please.’ I turned to her lawyer. ‘Please, convince her. This is the only way.’ He looked at me in silence, his expression sympathetic and aloof at the same time. My heartbeat was ticking out how many seconds I had left until the ten minutes would be up. I needed to speak, to use words to cover the thumping in my chest.

  ‘OK,’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you what I think happened. You were absolutely right – Otto wanted you out of the way, so he could meet up with someone in private. Only it wasn’t Anton. This wasn’t about your betrayal and your affair. This was about something else. He was meeting Wouter. Wouter Vos, whose testimony bankrupted his firm and put him in jail. This was about that betrayal, wasn’t it?’

  Karin picked up her BlackBerry.

  ‘The loss of his firm probably hit him harder than the loss of his wife.’

  Now she gave a short laugh. ‘That much is true,’ she said under her breath. Her lawyer reached out his hand and put it on her arm, ruffling the material of her peacock-blue jacket.

  But I’d
been given a response, a reaction, so I kept talking. ‘Anton saw Wouter when he left your house.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘He drives off. Wouter stays behind to wait for Otto. Something happens, and Wouter shoots Otto. Wouter knows Anton saw him so he comes up with the idea of being a witness. As long as we don’t know he was the whistle-blower, and his name isn’t on any of our records, Wouter has no motive – but Anton does. Wouter probably figured it out together with his schoolfriend Ronald de Boer.’

  Something changed in her face; her mouth twitched at the sound of his name. She lifted her head, and now that she was not at the other side of a pane of glass, I could see that the wrinkles around her eyes were still red and inflamed. I recognised the signs of long periods of crying.

  ‘Maybe Ronald even suggested it,’ I went on. ‘Ronald stalls the case: as long as he’s working on it, it will never go to court. But then it is taken over by Amsterdam. And Ronald contacts you. In order to remove both Anton and Wouter’s names, the files need to disappear. Ronald won’t respond to Amsterdam’s requests and it will all go away. Is that what happened?’

  Our eyes seemed glued together.

  ‘Karin, this time it won’t go away. Right now, you might think it will, because nothing happened for twelve years after Otto’s murder. But this is different. A second person has died. You’re a key witness. How safe do you think you are?’

  Her eyes slid from mine to something unimportant on the wall behind me. Her hand disappeared up her sleeve again. As she scratched, the cloth rode up over her arm and uncovered the raw-red marks of eczema.

  I gazed up at the painted ceiling and the Dutch ships in full sail, and said, ‘After Otto’s death, there was a balance, don’t you see? You and Anton wanted Otto dead just as much as Wouter did.’

  Her expression contradicted me.

  ‘OK, maybe you didn’t want him dead, but it was convenient, wasn’t it?’

  She rested her hand on her forehead. ‘It was,’ she whispered. I didn’t ask her to repeat it; the tape might pick it up anyway and it was not important.

  ‘Wouter knows Anton won’t rock the boat, you won’t either, and you’re both implicated in the theft of the files. It’s a perfect equilibrium. This is different.’ I pulled the chair back and sat down. ‘Karin, you know this is different, don’t you?’ I glanced down at my watch: five minutes left. I wished Stefanie was here to give me a financial analogy that would make Karin understand. ‘You worked so hard to build this firm, to go from being a secretary to Dutch Business Woman of the Year. That will all vanish. Both your husbands have been murdered. Unless we make an arrest, that suspicion will always hang over you. Your reputation will be in tatters, your investors will run away, your firm will collapse.’

  Karin exchanged a glance with her lawyer and that’s when I knew she’d talk. I’d finally got through to her. I let a silence fall and allowed it to last. In my head I counted – nine, ten, eleven . . . and didn’t fill the gap.

  ‘He came,’ she said. Her lawyer put his hand on her arm again. She turned her face to him. ‘I’ve got no choice. Let me talk. Anton would have wanted me to talk.’ She looked back to me. ‘Twenty minutes after that old man Huizen left.’

  ‘Wouter Vos?’ I said.

  She nodded. This time I did point to the recorder and she repeated, ‘It was Wouter Vos. I hadn’t seen him in years, but he hadn’t changed a bit. Smarter, better dressed, but otherwise still the same spiteful little creep. Because of Otto’s losses we had to lay off a group of people. We thought that if we scaled the firm down, we might weather the storm.’

  She closed her eyes and rubbed a finger under her lower lashes. ‘Anyway, Wouter Vos was one of the people we chose to let go. He didn’t wait long to send that file to the police. We knew there must have been a whistle-blower but I didn’t know who it was until after Otto’s death. There were plenty of people who wanted to see our downfall, but I never thought it was Wouter. He seemed too . . .’ she sighed, ‘too nice. Can you believe it?’

  She let the weight of her chignon tip her head back and looked at the ceiling. ‘So there he was, back on our doorstep. Anton walked out with him and didn’t come back. I heard the shot. I was scared – I stayed indoors. I was such a coward.’

  She stopped and took a couple of breaths. ‘Then Ronald de Boer turned up, with the rest of the police circus. He said I should under no circumstances reveal to anybody that Wouter Vos had been there. He frightened me.’ She stared back at me. ‘What was I going to do? He was police. He’d set it up from the start. Even after Otto’s death it was Ronald de Boer who made it clear that nobody would take Anton’s word over Wouter’s, not as long as he was on the case, not while nobody knew Wouter was the whistle-blower. Wouter had shot Otto in self-defence, he said. We had an hour to pick up those files and everything would be over. Without those files, there’d be no witness statement and Ronald promised us he’d keep it that way. So Anton got two of his friends, ex-colleagues, to do it, using names of the police-officers who’d pissed him off.’

  Her voice sounded harsh over the sibilance of the swearword. ‘It was fine until you turned up. You and your digging and your bloody colleague. I recognised her but she didn’t recognise me. What did you call it? An equilibrium. And that was fine.’

  ‘Karin,’ the lawyer said. I could kick him for interrupting her, but I supposed that was his job.

  ‘Anton was fed up with it. We talked it through and decided that giving back those files was the best thing to do. But how did Wouter know that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said – and then I remembered my father saying that he had told Ronald, who had warned him not to go. I rubbed my forehead with my hand when I realised that of course it had been my father who’d told Ronald de Boer.

  The door behind me opened. Karin stared over my shoulder, her expression both frightened and angry. I saw who it was and had only just enough time to take the tape recorder and stuff it in my bag before Ronald grabbed my arm.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘How could you, Ronald?’ I wrenched my arm free and spat the words in his face. ‘You arrested my father. You arrested him to save your friend! You worked with my father for years. He trusted you. But you gave him up for Wouter. Was friendship more important than doing your job?’

  ‘Your father shot Anton Lantinga. You’re the one who can’t see straight.’

  I tipped my head sideways, surprised that he was continuing to lie and was keeping up this story.

  ‘Wouter left just before six and your father arrived just as he got into his car and drove away. I’m sorry, Lotte.’ He reached out a hand.

  I jumped out of the way.

  He smiled a small smile at me. ‘This is why I had to get you suspended. How did you say it? Is family more important than doing your job?’

  I pointed at the bag and said clearly: ‘You’re wrong. It’s all on the tape. It was the other way round: Wouter came to the house after my father had long gone.’

  From behind me, Karin’s lawyer confirmed this.

  Ronald paled. He didn’t say anything for a few seconds. The silence hung in the room like a poisonous cloud.

  Then: ‘She’s lying.’ He swung his grey eyes back to me. ‘Your father was at Anton’s house after Wouter left. And you’re suspended.’

  Karin made a movement with her hand and started to say something. I interrupted her. ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s all on tape – I have the recording.’ I smiled at Ronald. ‘Oh, and I spoke to your wife – she was very helpful too. Anyway, as Karin will tell you, Wouter was there last. He came twenty minutes after my father left.’ I waved the tape recorder at him. ‘It’s all on here.’

  His mouth contorted as if he’d bitten into an unripe Granny Smith apple. I put my hand on the rough material of his sleeve. ‘Thanks, Ronald. I really appreciate the way you tried to protect us.’ The taste of sarcasm on my tongue was as addictive as caffeine. ‘I—’ My mobile rang. I expect
ed him to bar my way but he just stood and stared as I left the boardroom. Out in the hallway, I kept the tape in my handbag, securely pressed against my body by my elbow.

  The display on my phone told me it was Hans. ‘What’s up?’ I asked.

  ‘Where the fuck are you?’

  ‘Amsterdam. With Karin Lantinga. We’re done. Make sure you keep Wouter Vos there.’

  ‘We could have kept him here if only we had a car – if you hadn’t taken our car. He went out of a back window almost an hour ago. We couldn’t follow him.’

  ‘Why didn’t you let me know?’ I checked my phone and saw the six missed calls that I’d ignored on purpose. ‘Sorry, I didn’t hear my phone,’ I lied. An hour ago? I knew where he was headed. ‘Could you call the boss? Get him to release my father. He’s innocent – I’ve got proof. Karin confirmed that Wouter Vos came to their house after my father had left. And please ask my father to call me as soon as he’s free.’

  In the downstairs reception, I rested my hand on the door handle and took a few moments to collect myself. My stomach fluttered at the thought of stepping outside without a weapon to protect myself. My hesitation only lasted for a couple of seconds, for then I thought of my father in prison and opened the door.

  I left the building and waited at the top of the steps. The man I was expecting appeared, walking along the canal, head bent as if to protect the mobile stuck to his ear. I knew he’d come here to tidy up the last loose end or remove the last witness, but he was too late for that. His eyes met mine when he was twenty metres away and he snapped the phone shut.