A Cold Case in Amsterdam Central

by Anja de Jager

  ‘And now they’ve found his skeleton?’ Her husband put an arm around her shoulder. ‘Let’s get home, you can tell me all about it.’

  As they waited for the lift to arrive, Francine leant in to him, put her arm around his waist and her head on his shoulder. The sound of his breath, so near, gave her tingles in her stomach. Her pelvic floor muscles tightened with the memory of his face next to hers, tucked in the corner of neck and shoulder; the feeling of the rasp of his stubble, like an exfoliator on her cheek. It had been too long. She loved the way he smelled when he’d just come off a plane: the smell of a T-shirt that had been worn two days in a row no longer hidden by the hint of his rosemary and lemon shampoo. She also knew he would hate it if she told him that. It was the smell of having two people in bed instead of one, of a morning when she could reach out and touch him, feel his bare skin.

  They took the lift one floor down and got in their car.

  As she negotiated the exit from Schiphol, Christiaan said, ‘I guess it’s had a lot of publicity, this skeleton?’

  ‘What do you think?’ She let two cars go past before she joined the ring road. Her husband was so close. She’d only have to stretch out her hand and move her arm a little bit. She wished she didn’t have to pay attention to the traffic. ‘It’s been all over the papers.’

  ‘You should do something with that. Get your name out there. Maybe do some interviews.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t you want to move up? Don’t you want to have a career? So far, if people know anything about you, it’s that you’ve got a brother who’s a football hooligan.’

  ‘Sam’s . . .’ She swallowed the rest of her brother’s defence. He was a football hooligan. It was a fact. The whole world was allowed to say it. She shouldn’t get angry at her husband for voicing it. She stopped her indicator, no longer in a rush to overtake the green car in front of her. The anger was gone, and with the anger the need for speed.

  ‘You know it’s true. Especially after that article asking if a prosecutor with a criminal brother could possibly be objective. You can’t even blame the journalist. So why not use this to get some positive publicity for a change? The papers would love to write about it.’

  ‘What am I going to say?’

  ‘Tell your father’s story, about how he walked for a week to escape. Your grandmother died in a concentration camp. How’s that not a story the papers would give an arm and a leg to write about? It’s April. Next month we have Remembrance Day and Liberation Day. It couldn’t be better. Maybe they’ll ask you to say something during the ceremony.’

  She treasured how words now flowed from him. ‘You think it will make a difference?’

  ‘People will know you. Maybe you can go on some of those talk shows. You deserve some good publicity. You work so hard, but all your colleagues talk about is your brother. How about they talk about your hero grandfather for a change? Tell them how he inspired you to become a prosecutor, to do something for society, just like he’d done. Stand for good, stand against evil, just like your grandfather. How’s that not a story?’ She heard the excitement in his voice. ‘I’d love to run with that,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Francine said. ‘Are you sure it’s appropriate?’

  Chapter Twelve

  The crowd in the church was small, probably some of Frank’s colleagues, his family and a few friends. I’d slipped in the back without making anybody look round. The few people who knew the hymns made a frail sound that echoed through the half-empty church. I didn’t sing along. The afternoon light picked out the colours of an abstract stained-glass window. At the top of this religious grotto, a bald vicar talked about a man he’d probably never met.

  When he’d finished, Eelke stood up and straightened out a piece of paper with notes. He wore a black shirt with dark trousers. No tie, no jacket. Still a huge improvement on the tracksuit bottoms he’d been wearing yesterday. He walked to the front of the church. He looked down at what he’d written, then turned the page over and seemed to put it aside.

  ‘My brother and I were close.’ His voice broke. He kept his eyes down and coughed. ‘We were close. We had to be. Especially as kids.’ He rubbed his hair. ‘We were red-haired, had no father and a drunken mother.’

  The hall was wider than it was tall, eleven rows of seating, furnished in an unrelenting modern style with bare pine-wood benches. Actually, bench was too grand a word for one slat to sit on and one to rest your back against. Near the front was an elderly woman with tears streaming down her face. Was that the drunken mother?

  ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that, but those were the words the other children in school used. I’m older . . . sorry, was older than Frank. It was bad enough when I was at school alone, but when Frank joined, I had to defend him as well as myself.’ He grimaced at the memory. He looked at Tessa. ‘Even then I was skinny. Just like Frank.’ His grimace turned into a smile. ‘I worked hard to get a bit bigger but it hasn’t done much good. I’m sure at work his friends still had to carry Frank’s heavy gear for him.’ A guffawed laugh burst from a man on the third row who could well have been one of those colleagues. He had a gnarled face like an ancient leprechaun. A woman with smooth blonde hair sitting next to Tessa turned round to stare at him.

  ‘Anyway, at school there was just us. Eelke and Frank against the world. He helped me so much. We lived next door.’ He looked at Tessa. ‘He was my anchor,’ he seemed to say just to her. ‘Helped me keep my life together. Now he isn’t here any more and I’m alone. We all miss him.’ He looked over to the vicar and gave him a nod. He stepped down from the podium and took his seat. Through the slats that formed the backrest, I could see that Tessa slipped her hand into his and squeezed it tight.

  Large tapestries made by the funeral director’s children or an artist severely lacking in talent hid part of the grey-painted bare-brick walls. One of the hangings seemed to depict Noah’s Ark. At least, unidentifiable blobs were lined up two by two. Blobs like two little boys.

  The mourners filed out of the hall and I watched them pass. Tessa and Eelke walked side by side. The blonde woman who might be Tessa’s mother was right behind them.

  ‘That was kind,’ the mother said to Eelke, placing one hand on his shoulder. She seemed to know him well. ‘Really touching.’ She paused and looked back at the coffin. ‘I hate cremations. What’s wrong with a burial? At least you accompany the coffin to its last resting place. Just the thought of the body burning.’ She shuddered.

  Tessa swayed and Eelke gripped her tightly. He held her upright and supported most of her weight. ‘Mrs K. Please.’

  ‘Sorry.’ The woman took two fast steps to catch up with her husband and linked arms.

  Eelke stopped, turned Tessa round and wrapped both his arms around her. She rested her head on his shoulder. I could see that her body was shaking with sobs. My eyes stung too. Eelke put his cheekbone against the crown of her head. They stood like that as everybody else left the hall. I stayed in my seat at the end of the row and felt like a voyeur watching their shared pain. I was glad they didn’t look my way when they finally walked out.

  I waited until they’d left before I followed them into the room at the side of the church where everybody had gone for coffee and cake. The squabble broke out only a little later.

  Tessa was talking to the gnarled man who was probably Frank’s colleague. She was asking him a stream of questions about the skeleton. Why had he given it to Frank to look after? It wasn’t real, was it? The man responded that he didn’t know anything about it, but Tessa wouldn’t accept it. Eelke stared at them from a distance. He held a piece of cream cake on a saucer but didn’t eat it.

  Tessa’s mother walked over to join them. Eelke moved, but too late to intercept her.

  ‘Was Frank good at his job?’ Tessa’s mother asked the colleague.

  The man nodded. ‘One of the best. Couple of property developers we work with were always asking him to do more jobs. For them, their family, their
friends.’

  A waitress handed me a cup of too-strong tea. I refused the cake.

  ‘What were you working on recently?’ Tessa said. Her smile disappeared. ‘Other than the one . . .’

  ‘Sure. Well, we’re working on an office refurbishment. Turning it back into a residential property. It’s lovely to make something that was standing empty into a place where families can live again. We’re also working on a pretty unusual house.’

  ‘He can’t have been that good,’Tessa’s mother interrupted just when I got interested in what the colleague had to say. ‘He must have been clumsy. To fall like that.’

  ‘Mother!’

  I put my teacup down and was just about to join them when an ancient woman with purple hair, balancing an enormous piece of cake, came up to me. ‘Isn’t this a lovely party?’ she said.

  ‘He wasn’t clumsy,’ Tessa said loudly. ‘Someone pushed him.’

  ‘Darling, I know you want to think that, but if he wasn’t clumsy, maybe he jumped.’

  ‘Aren’t you listening to me?’ Tessa shouted. ‘Someone shoved him. Shoved him hard. Pushed him off that building.’

  Could that have happened?

  ‘Such a nice party,’ the purple-haired woman muttered. ‘But who are these people?’

  ‘Mark Visser,’ the voice on the other end of the line said. The other property developer. The other address where Frank had worked. As always, my breath caught when I heard the name. My initial reflex was to put down the phone again and hide, followed by an intense feeling of guilt and an internal stern lecture that I shouldn’t be so pathetic.

  ‘Detective Meerman, Amsterdam police,’ I said. ‘We’d like to talk to you about Frank Stapel.’

  There was silence.

  ‘Frank Stapel,’ I repeated. ‘He worked for you, didn’t he?’

  ‘Detective Meerman. Of course. Today is difficult, but if you could come to this address . . .’ Mark Visser explained why he couldn’t meet us where Frank had worked and asked us to come to another building site where he would be tied up all day.

  I agreed we’d meet him there. Frank Stapel’s place of work could come later.

  ‘I wish I could come along,’ Ingrid said. ‘I would love to see you interview someone.’

  ‘You can go in my place,’ Thomas said. ‘I don’t need to go.’

  I googled Mark Visser and his company. I found a website with a picture. I stared at the image, looked at it with my eyes slightly closed, but even so I couldn’t say if this was the same Mark Visser I’d known.

  I tried to call up a clear image of the boy who had been two years older than me. All I got was a series of images of dark hair and blue eyes. He’d had a straight fringe, a blunt line across his forehead. Uneven teeth, still trying to adjust to the size of his mouth, but then we’d all had those. The hair of the Mark Visser on the screen was trapped under a bright-yellow hard hat. He looked like a tall man of wiry strength. Unless they’d made him look like that on purpose: the type of man who’d be able to build you a house.

  ‘Lotte, what do you think?’ Ingrid said.

  ‘I’ll go with Thomas,’ I said. Unable to tell whether I knew him or not, I had to make sure that Thomas was coming with me. Internal Investigations might have cleared me, but that didn’t mean I was off their watch list.

  * * *

  When Mark Visser opened the door, I still wasn’t sure. He was the right age, a few years older than me, but it was hard to see the boy in such a tall man. At his firm handshake I had to tip my head back to look at him. His blue eyes were shielded by small circular glasses that rested on pronounced cheekbones, and he wore a charcoal-grey suit over a black polo-neck jumper.

  Then he smiled at our introduction, a broad smile, and it transformed his face. His teeth were still uneven and he suddenly looked so much younger that all my doubts disappeared. The shape of his mouth hadn’t changed, even if everything else about him had. Would he remember me? My stomach muscles tensed with the anticipation. He didn’t give any indication that he had.

  It had been a short drive to get to this polder from Amsterdam, but the city felt a hundred kilometres away. The main characteristic of this landscape was that it was relentlessly flat. You could see the curvature of the earth if your eyesight was good enough. It was impossible to tell where one bit of reclaimed land ended and the next began.

  The road to the house Mark was building was a straight line cut through the countryside. Thick clouds, bin-bag grey, formed a flat surface, parallel to the ground. I relaxed: there was no corner from which people could shoot at me, no buildings in which someone could hide. Even driving was easier, as you could see cars coming from kilometres away. It was all here, open to the eye. The straight line of the road was beautiful. Only one bend spoiled the perfection, where a small house jutted out.

  Now, as we followed Mark Visser into the farmhouse, Thomas asked him about the kink in the road.

  ‘Old Karel’s house,’ Mark said. ‘He kept holding out for more and more money when the government was buying up the land. In the end they decided it was cheaper to build the road around his house. He killed himself.’ His tone was matter-of-fact. At one point he had been my friend. ‘Traffic noise drove him crazy. And this was more than sixty years ago, before there was that much traffic. Come through. This way.’

  He walked stiffly as if his suit was as comfortable as a straitjacket. I didn’t think he was wearing it for our benefit. He half turned and addressed us over his shoulder. ‘There’s a lesson there for all property developers.’ He pointed a finger to the ceiling, which he could touch if he stretched his arm out fully. ‘Know when to sell.’ He laughed.

  Thomas met my eye, raised his eyebrows and shook his head.

  Mark showed us into his office at the back of the house. I couldn’t hear the traffic any more because it was drowned out by the boom of machines driving metal poles into the ground. Even that noise was challenged by the pounding of my heart against my chest.

  ‘You wanted to ask about Frank Stapel?’ Mark sat down. He hooked his feet behind the legs of the chair and I noticed that he was wearing brown hiking shoes that didn’t go with the suit. ‘Yes, we’re looking into this skeleton,’ I said. My mouth was dry.

  ‘And of course those who find skeletons are all evil project developers.’ He smiled at Thomas. He avoided looking at me. His skin had a pallor under the tan. Was he hung-over? Or was he worried because we were here?

  ‘We’re checking the places where Frank Stapel worked,’ Thomas said.

  ‘Yes, sorry about that.’ Mark put a folder on his desk. ‘It is an interesting one. We’re turning offices and a flat back into a single dwelling.’

  ‘Did you dig up a skeleton?’ Thomas said.

  ‘No we didn’t.’

  ‘If you had—’

  ‘We didn’t.’ Mark said the words with extra emphasis. A frown emerged between his eyebrows. It was oddly diagonal, starting just below his left eyebrow and ending above the right. He ran a finger round the collar of his jumper, pulling it out as if to give him room to breathe. ‘We haven’t altered any of the foundations of that building. I’ve heard of people finding those Second World War skeletons, but it’s always in farmland.’ He got up, took the suit jacket off and put it on a hanger. The jumper was tight-fitting. His shape reminded me of the boss, those same thin muscles of a fanatical runner or cyclist, but hopefully without the desire to win at all cost.

  ‘You’re changing the foundations here,’ I said. Through the window behind him I could see mechanical diggers riding to and fro. One of them could easily have hit on a skeleton.

  Mark sat back down. ‘We could have found one here, but—’

  ‘But Frank Stapel didn’t work here,’ Thomas said.

  Mark’s eyes flicked to me and he saw that I was watching him. He switched his glance back to Thomas. ‘No, he only worked on that refurb,’ he said ‘Plastering, painting, the finishing touches really.’ He brought his thumb to his mouth and bit o
n a hangnail.

  The tea I’d had at the funeral was pressing against my breastbone. His hand was completely different now – rough-skinned, large and strong – but it still reminded me that the last time I’d seen Mark we had touched. I’d held that hand. We’d both been upset.

  He caught himself and folded his arms. ‘It’s not just builders who find skeletons,’ he said.

  ‘You’re the ones,’ I said, ‘who put a house on every patch of green you can.’The diggers at the back were driving metal rods into the soil as if they were drilling for oil. Laying new foundations.

  ‘What about farmers?’ Mark said. ‘They plough it over.’

  ‘It’s not the same. I wouldn’t want to live so close to another house that I could see what they had for dinner.’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘Golden Bend,’ Thomas replied for me, using the name for my canal area favoured by guidebooks and estate agents.

  ‘Didn’t know the police paid that well. Anyway, you should visit the refurbishment that Frank worked on. That’s probably more to your taste.’

  ‘The site where Frank actually worked. Yes, we wanted to go there,’ Thomas said. ‘You insisted we came here.’

  ‘Yes, sorry, I’ve got some people—’

  ‘Did Frank Stapel ever come here?’ Thomas said.

  Mark sat back in his chair. ‘Not that I know of. He’d have no reason to. We’re not ready for decorating yet.’

  ‘He worked for two employers. No conflict there?’

  ‘Happens all the time. We don’t have work for everybody continuously; it’s not a daily job like yours. Feel free to take this folder,’ Mark pushed the file closer to Thomas, ‘but the skeleton didn’t come from here.’

  ‘If I need it, I’ll come back.’ Thomas took the folder and got up. Interview ended.