A Cold Case in Amsterdam Central

by Anja de Jager

  My mobile rang. It was Edgar Ling. He sounded out of breath. ‘You won’t believe it,’ he said. ‘The skeleton. We’ve got a match.’

  Chapter Ten

  Francine Dutte looked ready to go out, probably to work. Unless she wore a leather jacket and matching boots inside the house. She had masses of dark hair and looked more Mediterranean than Dutch, as if Gina Lollobrigida had suddenly taken a job as a prosecutor in Amsterdam.

  ‘Thomas,’ she said. She only glanced at me for a second.

  ‘Hi, Francine.’ On the way over, he’d filled me in about her. He’d worked with her on two cases, both drugs-related. She was going places in the prosecution department. Very ambitious but had a brother who was trouble: a football hooligan, convicted many times over. The brother in the DNA database.

  ‘This really isn’t convenient. It’s my day off, and the Kamphuis case isn’t due to go to court for a month or so yet,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not about that.’ Thomas reached out and touched her on one leather-clad arm. ‘Francine, can we come in?’

  ‘Is it Sam? I know his trial’s today, but—’

  ‘Let’s go inside, Francine, and we’ll tell you.’

  She combed both hands through her intensely waved hair and cradled the back of her head as if that would help her think. ‘Okay, but you’ll have to be quick.’ Decision made, she took her hands from her head and the released hair bounced back into a cloud around her face.

  It was difficult to guess Francine’s age. Her make-up was thick but flawless. There was some creasing around her eyes, but her forehead was wrinkle-free. We followed her down the corridor. A golden chandelier dangled from the ceiling. Maybe it would have looked fine in one of the canal apartments – we just about got away with it in the communal hallway of my flat – but hanging from the low ceiling of a sixties terraced house in Amsterdam East, it was completely out of place.

  She didn’t ask us to sit down, so we stood in her front room and formed an awkward triangle. Thomas stood close to Francine. She looked at her watch.

  ‘It’s about a member of your family,’ Thomas said. ‘Maybe your grandfather.’

  ‘My grandfather?’ She frowned. ‘He died ten years ago.’

  ‘No, not him. We found the remains of a male member of your family, a close relative, who died in his thirties or forties, possibly during the Second World War.’

  ‘You . . . what? You’ve found what?’ She grabbed a pen and a lipstick from the table and put them in her handbag. The bag matched her leather jacket. ‘Sorry, I don’t understand.’

  ‘Did you hear about the skeleton we found at Centraal station?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, the one in the locker. So?’

  ‘We did a DNA test and ran it through the database. It came up with a match. Your brother.’

  ‘How could it possibly be? If this is your idea of a joke, Thomas . . .’

  ‘No joke. Do you know of any member of your family who died during the war? Or a few years either side?’

  There were a few photos in her front room. One was a wedding portrait, a young Francine and a man who looked older. Francine was looking at him; he was looking at the camera. Then a photo of a young woman smiling outside a building I recognized: the same university I’d gone to, the one just outside Amsterdam Zuid train station. No photos of the brother.

  ‘From the age, we think it must be your grandfather or great-grandfather, or a great-uncle.’

  ‘Oh for goodness’ sake.’ She looked around, eyes darting about the room, over the table. Looking for something else to stuff in the bag. ‘This is so inconvenient. I really have to go.’

  ‘You and your brother have the same parents, don’t you?’

  ‘It would have been rather better if we didn’t.’ She grimaced. ‘But I don’t have that excuse.’ She snatched her smartphone from the table. ‘Is that all? Can we talk about this later?’

  ‘Is it possible—’

  ‘Yes, yes, it’s possible. My grandfather disappeared in the final months of the war. He was in the resistance.’ She rummaged around in the bag and came up with a set of keys. ‘My grandmother was picked up and died in a concentration camp. Westerbork. Quite late in the war as well.’

  ‘Your father escaped?’

  ‘Yes, he was only seven at the time, but he walked all the way from their house to his aunt and uncle’s in the north. It was seventy kilometres and it took him a week to do it.’ She zipped up the handbag and hoisted it on her shoulder. There were hardly any creases in the leather of the bag. Likewise there were none in the jacket. I was reminded of Tessa pulling her husband’s jacket around her shoulders. The front had been cracked from use, the elbows rubbed and faded. Francine’s was different. When Thomas reached out and held her arm, it would have felt soft to the touch. ‘But he got there,’ she said. ‘It’s a story he tells a lot these days.’ She frowned. ‘At least it’s a good story.’

  ‘We’d like to talk to your father,’ Thomas said.

  ‘I can’t allow that.’

  ‘We need to take a DNA sample—’

  ‘My father isn’t well. He’s in a nursing home.’

  ‘Come on, Francine,’ Thomas said with a smile. ‘You know what the procedures are.’

  She seemed to melt, her smile wide, the tip of her tongue running over her teeth. I thought she was going to give us her father’s address. But the magical effect only lasted a few seconds, then the smile fell from her face and she stuffed her hands in the pockets of the leather jacket. ‘There’s clearly no need,’ she said. ‘My grandfather’s remains have never been found. You’ve got a DNA match with my brother, so that’s the end of the story.’ She did the zip of her jacket up and took a scarlet scarf, already folded, from the table. She held the middle against the front of her neck, wrapped it around twice and made a knot in the front. She didn’t look down at her hands once; all the movements were done with a fluid and practised precision. ‘You’re right, Thomas, I know the procedures as well as you do, and I know that what you’ve got is a positive ID. Now please.’ She pointed to the door. She couldn’t have dismissed us any more effectively.

  ‘Your DNA then, Francine.’

  ‘Thomas, there really is no need. If this was a case, I’d press for a conviction based on the evidence you’ve got.’ She held her keys out. ‘How about I come to the police station later?’

  ‘Do you have anything of your grandfather’s? Any photos?’ I asked as we walked to the front door.

  A curt shake of the head was all the reply I got.

  ‘Thanks, Francine,’ Thomas said.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘We’ll talk later.’

  ‘She won’t leave it that much later,’ Thomas said after we’d left. ‘She’ll be ringing in half an hour. An hour max. She’ll tell you it’s a disgrace that his skeleton was in a bin bag, will ask if there’s any movement on the case. She won’t leave you alone for a second.’

  ‘She doesn’t even know my name. She won’t leave you alone, you mean.’ Not only had she not asked my name, she’d used Thomas’s four times in ten minutes. She hadn’t even bothered to answer my question. There was no way she was going to call me.

  Thomas grinned. ‘She’s a good prosecutor because she always finds the weak spot. She’ll call you.’

  ‘I don’t mind. I’m the one taking this seriously, remember?’

  ‘Excessively so.’

  ‘I want to get her some answers. Tessa. Find out what happened to her husband.’

  Thomas shook his head. ‘Wanting to find the more recent skeleton I understand, but you should know better than to think we can get everybody the answers they want.’

  ‘Maybe the answers they deserve?’

  We got back to the police station just before lunchtime. At our office, Thomas popped his head around the corner and said, ‘Coming?’ to Ingrid. The two of them left. Ingrid looked over her shoulder at me but didn’t invite me along.

  A little later I went down to the canteen.
Cheese sandwich and glass of milk on a tray, I sat down at my favourite table, from where I could see the traffic outside. It was raining, and a woman with a green golfing umbrella was walking her dog along the canal: a large German shepherd with an unambiguous plan of where he wanted to go. The dog reminded me of Thomas.

  ‘Mind if I join you?’ Edgar Ling said. He put his tray down without waiting for my answer. ‘How did he take it?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Sam Dutte.’ He took a large bite of his sandwich. He’d brought his own lunch: four sandwiches, in a blue-and-white striped box. An apple and a banana to the side.

  ‘We talked to his sister, Francine. Thomas knows her.’ I could hear him eating. The grinding sound of teeth on food. His jaw clicked on every move.

  ‘What’s she done?’ he said.

  I laughed. ‘Francine Dutte’s a prosecutor. Hasn’t done anything as far as I’m aware.’

  ‘She must have been excited.’

  ‘No, just in a rush to get rid of us.’

  ‘Really?’ He put his sandwich down. ‘I thought the family would be pleased.’

  ‘I guess the grandfather’s been dead a long time. Francine never knew him.’

  ‘Are her parents still alive?’

  ‘Her father is. The son of our skeleton.’

  ‘What did Francine know about her grandfather?’

  ‘She didn’t tell us much. Grandfather was in the resistance, grandmother died in a concentration camp.’

  Edgar picked his sandwich back up and the clicking noise returned. It was the clacking of bones, but different from the sound the ones in the bin bag had made. This was a muffled sound, with the flesh and skin around the joints working as a dampener. ‘It’s possible that he was executed,’ he said.

  Executed. It made it worse somehow that the skeleton of one of the good guys, of someone who had been executed by the Nazis, had ended up in a locker at the station. What would I do if the country was overrun tomorrow by an invading army? Would I do the right thing and stand up, or would I just go on with my daily life, try to ignore the violence around me, try to ignore the fact that all the men were taken away to work in the factories of the enemy and that some ethnic groups were decimated? I liked to think that I would act, but you never really knew until you were faced with the situation. I used to talk to my mother about the war. The south of the country had been liberated, the north had been starving. Francine Dutte’s family, stuck in Amsterdam, would have been right in the starving part. It must have been even worse when the grandfather disappeared.

  ‘There’s no obvious exit wound,’ Edgar said.

  ‘I saw that from the photos,’ I said. ‘Probably out through the throat?’

  Edgar nodded. ‘Yes, out through the throat, gun at the back of the head, from up high. I imagine the man on his knees, on the floor, classic for an execution. The only thing that’s wrong is that he couldn’t have had his head bent down, because then there’d be an exit mark. Alternatively . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Alternatively, the other way round.’

  I picked up his line of thought. ‘In through the throat. From under the jaw.’

  He nodded again. ‘Yes, throat or mouth. Classic suicide.’

  I thought of my shoulder, where the star shape on my back showed quite clearly where the bullet had left. The surgeon had said I’d been lucky that it had been a small-calibre gun and therefore had made less mess. ‘The size of the hole, can you tell anything from that?’

  ‘I’d say handgun, but I’m not sure.’

  ‘Anything about the rest of the body?’

  ‘I’ve mainly been concentrating on taking the DNA and looking at the skull. It’s been interesting. Do you remember we talked about the ground that the body had been in? Well, I found tulip pollen.’

  ‘Tulips? So it was buried in a garden?’

  ‘Not necessarily. It could have been a tulip field. Or a park.’

  There had been tulips in the flower beds around the building site in Amsterdam Zuid.

  ‘The arm as well?’

  Edgar nodded. ‘The man and the Second World War skeleton: they were buried in the same place.’

  I looked at my watch. Frank’s funeral was in an hour. Maybe his colleagues could tell me something.

  Chapter Eleven

  Her husband stood, suitcase by his feet, on this side of the barrier. Among the throng of people, he was the only one looking towards the exit. Everybody else was staring through the glass partitions at the people waiting for their luggage the other side of customs, anxiously anticipating their loved ones’ arrival. Those were the people who’d turned up on time. Francine hated airports, because there was always stress involved. On the way over, she’d been worried what her husband was going to say. Whatever it was, he would sound more tired than angry. He never got angry. Even when things in their relationship had been bad, he hadn’t got angry. He wouldn’t argue. He would just walk away. That frightened her most, that one day he would not come back from a business trip.

  When he saw her, he just nodded at Francine’s apology for being late, looked at his watch and sighed. She wanted to tell him that she’d tried to be on time, had even seen a flash so had probably picked up a ticket for speeding, and still she’d arrived at Schiphol half an hour after he’d collected his luggage. She didn’t say anything, however, because she knew he’d argue that she wouldn’t have had to speed if she’d only left the house on time. They’d had that conversation so often before. He probably wanted to tell her that he’d almost be home by now if he’d taken the train, but that she’d insisted on picking him up. If she’d listened to him, he would have been in a better mood. This was all taking place in her head and she didn’t want to start their time together with an argument. ‘Darling, I’m so sorry,’ she said, ‘but you won’t believe what happened. It was the police.’

  ‘I knew it was work.’ The words broke forth from his silence. He didn’t look at her but walked quickly through the obstacle course created by the other people at the airport. ‘You always say that I work too hard, but really it’s you who . . . Never mind.’

  They walked past a woman with a string of heart-shaped balloons. Was that what Christiaan would have preferred, Francine thought, for her to be waiting for him here with balloons? She’d taken two days off, she wasn’t going to her brother’s trial, what more could he want? In the back of her mind she knew she was being unfair, that he hadn’t asked her to collect him, that it had been her idea and that she had screwed it up.

  ‘I’m parked at the Cheese,’ she said, inwardly cringing at mentioning the parking area named with tourists in mind. Cheese, Windmill, Clog, Tulip, these were the zones you could choose from. What was wrong with a, b, c and d? ‘Would you like me to carry your bag?’ She’d planned it so differently. She was going to be here early, he was going to give her a tight hug as soon as he saw her; it would be the perfect start.

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’ He set off at high speed towards the travelator.

  ‘Have you read any of the papers? The Dutch papers, I mean.’ Her feet were hurting in her new boots. The high heels, so sexy when she’d tried them on, had seemed perfect for the meeting she’d envisioned. They would make her that little bit taller so she would fit exactly into his embrace. Now she was almost running to keep up with him and they weren’t quite as ideal for that.

  ‘Not really, haven’t had much time.’ He swerved around an elderly couple.

  ‘Did you read about the skeleton?’ She was getting out of breath. ‘The one they found at Centraal.’

  ‘No, I didn’t. Is that your new case?’ He sounded utterly uninterested in the answer.

  ‘Thomas came.’

  He started kneading the back of his shoulder with the hand that wasn’t dragging the suitcase along. Somehow it hardly slowed him down. ‘Thomas. I should have known.’

  She could have kicked herself. She should have said that Lotte Meerman had come to the house. Francine had recognised the detective instantly and Chri
stiaan would have been interested in her. ‘He came—’

  ‘I thought you’d taken the day off?’

  ‘Yes, and he was with a colleague.’

  ‘More work?’

  ‘No.’ She stopped and let the travelator carry her towards the car park. It suddenly hit her, what Thomas had told her. All the time he and Lotte had been in her house, all she could think of was getting rid of them and getting to Schiphol before Christiaan came through customs. Then, on the way over, her mind had been on how annoyed he would be with her. Only now, on the way to the car park, with announcements of flights taking off and flights landing and a delayed flight circling overhead, did Francine finally realize that what they had come to tell her was something monumental.

  She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. This was the man her father had told her stories about when she’d been a child: about how her grandfather had been a hero who’d stood up to the Nazis. Whenever there was something that Francine or her brother were having problems with – fights with kids at school, or teachers they didn’t get on with, or homework they wanted to skip – their long-dead grandfather was held up as a shining example of how to overcome adversity, of how you had to work through your difficulties and find something you could do. Not that it was said in those words, but the stories about How Grandad Fought the Germans were told like parables but with an extra level of resonance: this figure who was related to them had done those brave things. The message in the parables had always been the same: stop slacking and do some work. Francine couldn’t say that it had been the only thing that shaped her, but her grandfather had been a big influence on her. For her brother it had turned into something to kick against, but then he kicked against everything.

  ‘This skeleton, the one they found at the station, it’s my grandfather.’

  ‘Your grandfather?’ Christiaan had walked on, pulling his bag behind him, but now he stopped too and turned round. They made eye contact for the first time since she’d arrived.

  ‘Daddy’s father. You know the story he tells, how his father was in the resistance, how he disappeared?’ The sign above the travelator showed a picture of a piece of cheese and an arrow to the left. ‘I’m parked there.’ She walked to the elevator and pressed the button.