A Cold Case in Amsterdam Central

by Anja de Jager

  ‘Until my brother died.’

  ‘He fell,’ Thomas said. He didn’t look up from his papers. ‘It was an accident. Unless you think it was suicide?’

  ‘The insurance company would like that, wouldn’t they? But Frank didn’t kill himself. Isn’t someone liable? Responsible for his death?’

  ‘Accidents do happen. Your brother,’ Thomas said, ‘he worked in two different places?’

  ‘Yes, that site in Zuid, and one in the centre, I think.’The wall behind Eelke was covered in photos of Ajax players. Some were from the golden era: Marco van Basten, Frank Rijkaard; and there were some newer players I recognized but couldn’t name. Twenty photos in frames, four across, five rows down. A sea of red and white. From what I could see, all the photos had been signed.

  ‘Did he work anywhere else?’ Thomas said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Just those two places.’

  ‘Okay, but painters, decorators, they often do little jobs here and there.’

  ‘Frank didn’t.’

  ‘Cash-in-hand jobs? Off the books?’

  ‘Frank didn’t.’

  ‘Did you know about the skeleton?’ Thomas said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘When did you last talk to Frank?’

  ‘Night before he died. He came to the flat.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Nothing in particular.’ Eelke looked down at the kitchen table. ‘Just catching up.’ He was still in his studied relaxed pose. He’d stopped looking at me several questions ago and that made his pretence more convincing, without the twitching eyes to give him away.

  ‘He didn’t mention this skeleton?’ Thomas repeated.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or any plans he had to make some extra money?’

  Eelke sighed. ‘The only plans he had were to do his job. He was an honest guy, worked hard, on two building sites.’

  ‘An honest, hard-working guy with a skeleton in a locker.’

  ‘Maybe he was holding the ticket for someone.’

  ‘His fingerprints are all over the bag.’

  I’d been watching Eelke, so I couldn’t tell if Thomas’s face changed during the lie. We hadn’t spoken to Forensics yet.

  ‘Nobody else’s?’ Eelke said.

  ‘There are always other prints.’

  Eelke’s head shot up. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t know why he had that skeleton. It was probably just a prank, or most likely it wasn’t even his. But he’s dead now, the funeral is tomorrow and you need to go to the building site. Find out if there’s something not right there. Because you must wonder, now that you’ve found this skeleton, you must start to question—’

  ‘There are two things we want to know.’ Thomas looked Eelke straight in the eye. ‘One,’ he held a finger out, ‘where the skeleton came from, and two,’ second finger, ‘why your brother had it in his possession.’

  ‘You don’t care about his death.’ Eelke sounded as if he’d only just realized that.

  ‘He fell.’ Thomas wrote something in his notebook.

  ‘Tessa said you were like that.’ Eelke’s eyes locked with Thomas’s. An unhappy smile crept on to his mouth. ‘When you talked to her three days ago you were like that too. You don’t care. You’re all like that. Siding with the establishment. Looking after the rich. Forgetting about the common man.’

  ‘And what do you do?’ I asked.

  Both Thomas and Eelke looked at me as if they’d completely forgotten I was in the room.

  ‘Sorry?’ Eelke took one hand out of his trouser pocket, put the elbow on the table and tipped his head sideways. He scratched the back of his neck.

  ‘Your job. What do you do?’

  ‘What does that have to do with anything?’ Eelke said.

  ‘Just answer the question,’ Thomas said.

  ‘I’m a teacher. PE teacher.’

  ‘And a big Ajax fan.’ I nodded at the wall behind him.

  ‘Yes, love the photos,’ Thomas said. He got up to examine them more closely. ‘Cruyff. Wow.’ He turned back to look at Eelke. ‘How did you get Cruyff to autograph a photo for you?’

  ‘Well,’ Eelke smiled, ‘I actually bought that one.’ He looked comfortable for the first time since we got in. ‘But the others, they were signed just for me. At the stadium. Started as a kid.’

  ‘Great collection.’ Thomas went back to his chair and sat down. ‘Did you see the game on Sunday?’

  ‘What a mess, wasn’t it? That AZ goal was clearly offside.’ Eelke’s shoulders dropped, happy with the football conversation. Was he one of those guys who was only interested in sport? There was no evidence of a woman in this flat. No pictures, no ring on his finger.

  ‘How well do you get on with Tessa?’ I asked.

  ‘Why?’ His dark eyes darted back to me.

  ‘When you picked her up from the station, did she say anything? Had Frank told her anything about the skeleton?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Would she have told you?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘If your brother had a money-making plan . . .’ I said.

  ‘He didn’t have a plan.’

  ‘But if he did, would he have told you?’

  Eelke chewed his bottom lip. ‘He didn’t have a plan.’

  * * *

  ‘What the fuck questions were those?’ Thomas said as soon as we got outside the block of flats and had closed the door behind us. ‘What do you do for a living?’ He said it in a nasal, sing-song voice. ‘I’m happy for you to tag along, but don’t interrupt me. I was questioning him about his brother’s accident and you want to know what he does for a living?’ He set off towards the car at a pace that I had trouble keeping up with.

  Tagging along? Was that how he saw it? ‘You didn’t want to know what kind of work he does?’ I said.

  ‘I really couldn’t care less.’ He smiled at me with the grin of a fighter eyeing up a much smaller opponent. His squat build would make him a good boxer, but he’d never go anywhere near the ring; he’d be too worried it might mess up his perfect hair. ‘And that stuff about Tessa, was that really necessary?’

  ‘She called him.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘It was worth a question. You don’t think that’s useful?’

  ‘No, clearly not.’ He unlocked the car doors with a beep.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘There’s nothing there. Builder finds skeleton on building site. Doesn’t want to delay the boss, sticks the bones in a bin bag, stores them in a locker for a day, aiming to chuck them out later. Has an accident and dies. End of. There’s no plan, nothing that he’d tell either his wife or his brother. There’s nothing. There’s an accident. That’s it.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I know you want to think this is important, but it’s not. I want to get it off the books and move on to something more meaningful.’ He opened the door.

  ‘A skeleton, a dead man. What more do you need to make this meaningful, Thomas?’

  ‘A Second World War skeleton and an accident. I guess I’d need a crime.’

  ‘Moving the skeleton not crime enough for you? You don’t get out of bed for anything that carries less than a twelve-month sentence?’

  ‘I’m less interested when the guy who did it is dead.’

  ‘Frank Stapel’s death is odd, though, don’t you think?’

  He stopped, one leg in the car, the other still outside, hands on top of the door frame. ‘You’re dragging this out beyond any reason. We went to the site. We interviewed the widow and the brother. We’re done.’ He sat down behind the wheel.

  I was done too. Done for the day. ‘You go back to the office,’ I said. I tapped the roof with both hands. ‘I’ve got something to do around here.’

  Thomas opened the passenger door from the inside. ‘Get in.’

  I didn’t even know if he’d heard me. ‘No, you go. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  He pulled the door shut
. Just as I was about to walk away, the window whirred down. ‘Why did you come back, Lotte?’

  The comment buffeted me like a storm-force wind. I’d had to fight hard to be allowed back in. I needed to make up for the mistake that had nearly ruined my life. ‘I’ve been cleared.’ Getting things out in the open could be the first step towards an improvement in my relationship with Thomas. I took a deep breath to work up the courage. ‘Thanks, Thomas.’ He’d been the person closest to finding out the truth about me. He’d listened to the tapes of the conversations I’d had with the murderer. Of course not all the conversations had been recorded, and Thomas knew that.

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘Thanks for what?’

  ‘For not saying anything.’

  He shook his head. His eyes narrowed and his eyebrows pulled together. ‘I wasn’t going to jeopardize a conviction. Go to another team. We didn’t want you back.’ He closed the window again and drove off.

  My cheeks burnt as if I’d been hit in the face. I watched the car disappear. I hoisted my handbag higher up my shoulder. There was something I should do. I was only two apartment blocks away from my mother’s flat.

  Chapter Seven

  In nature, the first rays of warm sunshine had brought bumblebee queens and solitary bees out of their nests. In my mother’s flat, spring had brought forth a multitude of boxes. Large, old-fashioned pieces of furniture crowded the place at the best of times, and now I couldn’t even get in the door. ‘This a bad time?’ I said.

  ‘Of course not.’ Her tone belied her words and I waited for her to make an excuse, but she pulled a large box out of the way to clear a path. The ease with which she did it said more about her than her white hair. ‘You can help. I could do with a hand.’ Too thin for seventy-four, she looked fragile, but I knew she was really a steel rod with wrinkled skin around it.

  I carefully stepped over another box to get to the oak table.

  ‘How’s your shoulder?’ My mother put a basket of rags – old T-shirts shredded into cloths and a few ancient socks – in front of me.

  ‘Fine.’ Our relationship had been strained these last few months since I’d been reunited with my father. I hoped we could get back to how we used to be.

  She sat down with her own basket of cloths and her own cardboard box. ‘What did the doctor say?’

  ‘He said it had healed well.’ I chose a cloth from the basket in front of me. In a previous life it had been a thick white tennis sock. I balled my hand and shoved it inside the sock. The circle that my index finger made with my thumb showed through the hole that my mother’s rough-skinned heel had worn in the fabric. I held it out. ‘That’s what my scar looks like: a circle inside smooth tissue.’

  She pushed my hand away. ‘That’s not funny.’

  ‘I’m not being funny.’ I looked at my hand again within the sock. I examined it from a different angle. ‘It’s pretty accurate actually. But more like the exit wound. The entry wound is much smaller.’ I reached over to the cardboard box on the floor and raised the lid. My toys. I’d put them in this box when I’d made room for my university books. It had been an indication that I’d grown up, even if I hadn’t been able to afford to move out.

  I pulled the lion cage out of the box. I caressed its plastic bars with the white sock.

  ‘You look tired,’ my mother said.

  ‘Thanks.’ I concentrated on the yellow vertical rods.

  ‘How’s your father?’ My mother was cleaning the fake Barbie doll I’d never liked. It had a similar figure and facial features to the real one but had been less than half the price.

  ‘He’s fine.’

  ‘And his wife?’

  ‘Mum, please.’ I moved on to the lions themselves. The two plastic animals were stuck in a soundless roar.

  ‘Is she fine too?’

  ‘She is.’

  ‘And work?’

  ‘First day back last week.’ I told her about the skeleton.

  ‘I hope you can identify it. Give the family something to bury,’ my mother said.

  ‘If there is a family.’ I fished the large pool out of the box. It was a grey plastic kidney shape with a blue slide in the middle.

  ‘At least you’re doing something worthwhile this time, not just running after your father.’ She had moved on from the dolls to the small collection of Playmobil. She rubbed the head and legs of each little man and woman with a piece of an old T-shirt.

  ‘That was important.’ I wiped the dust from the penguin enclosure.

  My mother didn’t respond.

  I passed the penguins themselves through my tennis sock and arranged them in a line on the table. ‘I’m really concerned about the widow. The skeleton, it’s old anyway.’ I kept them as far away from the lions as possible.

  ‘You always care about the strangest things.’

  ‘My boss told me not to look into her husband’s death. And my colleagues would probably agree with you.’ I grimaced at the memory of Thomas’s words. ‘But she’s so young, and I have to admit, the skeleton makes it all the more intriguing.’

  ‘You need to be careful. After all that drama with your father, just do what your boss wants.’

  ‘I want to do something good for a change. Make it better for someone. Give this girl the answers she needs.’

  ‘And the family of that Second World War skeleton?’

  I shrugged. ‘That’s old news.’

  ‘Don’t talk like that. It doesn’t feel old to me.’ She finished cleaning the twenty little men and women.

  I didn’t bite and didn’t give her another chance to talk about the war. She’d only been a child when it ended, but she’d told me about the hunger so often. How there’d been no food at all that last winter, no electricity, no gas. How I should be grateful not to have lived through that. I packed the zoo back into its cardboard box. I gestured to another one close to me. ‘This one next?’

  She nodded.

  I opened the cardboard flap; inside were my earliest books, large and bright. Pim, Frits en Ida. They had been my favourite. The series of adventures of two brothers and their little sister. I used to dream of having brothers.

  ‘Sorry, Lotte, I lost track of time. I’m having some visitors soon.’

  My mother always had people from her church over. ‘Anybody I know?’

  ‘I’m babysitting.’

  I stared at the books but left them in the box. ‘Who for?’

  ‘Nadia.’ She stared at me with her duck-egg-blue eyes as if challenging me to object. ‘She’s dropping her daughter off.’ Her eyes were almost the same colour as the walls in my flat.

  ‘Nadia?’

  ‘They’re going to the cinema. I’ve been babysitting—’

  ‘They? My ex-husband and his new wife?’

  ‘Well, you’re meeting my ex-husband,’ she said.

  ‘Your ex-husband just happens to be my father. A bit different, don’t you think?’

  ‘Nadia needed the help.’

  ‘How long have you been talking to her?’

  ‘Arjen called after you’d been shot. He’d read about it in the papers. He called to check you were all right.’

  ‘He didn’t call me.’

  ‘You were in hospital. He and Nadia came to see me a month after. I told them you were on the coast and I hadn’t seen you for a while.’

  I tore the white tennis sock from my hand and threw it on the table. ‘You told them you were lonely.’

  ‘I told them I hadn’t seen you; they drew their own conclusions and came over. With the girl. She’s so sweet. She’s almost two now.’

  ‘Mum, please.’ I closed my eyes. My own daughter had never made it to two. After her death, my marriage had fallen apart.

  ‘You asked me why I was meeting them.’

  My mother knew exactly where my weak spots were. It would have hurt less if she had taken a knife and jammed it into my shoulder.

  ‘I babysit once a week. Arjen drops her off, Nadia picks her up.’

&
nbsp; I looked at the boxes full of my old toys.

  ‘And a few extra evenings. Now that she’s back at work.’

  ‘Sorry, Mum, got to go. See you next week.’ I picked up my coat and moved to give my mother a kiss on the cheek. She backed away. I pulled the box with the toys towards me. It was the most precious one. The books would have to stay. I wrapped my arms around the box, hoisted it up on to my hip and carried it down the stairs.

  My mother shouted after me that I shouldn’t be so childish.

  I ignored her.

  I was halfway between my mother’s flat and the tram stop when I heard someone else call out behind me.

  ‘Detective Meerman!’

  It was Tessa. She darted across the grass that edged the block. When she got close, she pointed at the box. ‘Can I help you with that?’

  I shook my head, kept the box in front of me, both arms wrapped around it. ‘I’m only catching the tram.’

  ‘I saw you,’ she said, ‘and knew this was our chance to talk. Were you interviewing other people in the area?’

  ‘I was visiting my mother.’

  We crossed the road side by side.

  ‘You will take my husband’s death seriously now, won’t you? You won’t just say it was an accident, like your colleague? I talked to Eelke just now. We both think . . .’ She had her set of keys in her hand and the metal ring that held them together was slipped over her middle finger.

  ‘Tessa, maybe it was purely an accident.’We arrived at the tram stop and I put the box down.

  ‘But what if it wasn’t? If you won’t even investigate . . .’

  I looked down the road in the direction the tram would arrive from. ‘We’ll investigate.’

  ‘You’ll do it thoroughly? You? You personally?’

  I stopped looking along the tram rail. The wind blew Tessa’s hair around her face. She drowned in a man’s parka.

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘You have . . . experience. You’ve been in all the papers. If you decide it was an accident, I’ll believe you.’

  Unlike doctors, the police could never make things better. Unless we could prevent a crime, the best we could do was to punish perpetrators and give those left behind some justice. In Frank’s case, his death could well have been an accident, but I could give Tessa answers about what he had been doing on his last day and that might help heal the wounds that his loss left behind. If I wrote off the very first death I’d seen once I’d come back to work, then why had I bothered to return? Helping this young widow come to terms with her husband’s death might not be in my job description, but it would even the universe’s score against me.