A Cold Case in Amsterdam Central

by Anja de Jager

So that was part of the interview. ‘The doctor said I’m fit for work. In his view, the wound has healed well and there will be no lasting damage.’

  ‘You’ve been out for . . . ?’

  ‘Four months.’

  More nodding. Their heads moved in tandem. ‘It’s great that you’re physically able to work again. Do you feel mentally well enough?’ The man looked at me.

  ‘Absolutely. Can’t wait to get back.’ Those four months had felt like a century. Now at last I’d be back with the team. Then I could show them I was still good at this job.

  Justin wrote more notes. ‘There was a suspicion that you were still unbalanced after the strain of the previous case, and a concern that this might have caused you to make, shall we say, the wrong choices.’

  I stared at a painting covering the place on the wall where a window should be. It was modern art and resembled a dismembered doll inside a shopping bag. ‘I’m fine now. Four months of rest did me the world of good.’

  ‘Let’s talk about your last investigation. After that we can come back to your state of mind. That’s more something for Justin to focus on anyway,’ the woman said.

  I took my eyes off the painting to stare at the woman. I’d clearly missed something at the introduction, because I hadn’t realized they didn’t have the same roles. ‘Sorry, why is Justin focusing on my state of mind?’

  The woman’s eyes left mine and moved down to her notepad. ‘For now we want to talk about—’

  ‘I’d like to know what Justin has to do with my state of mind first.’ The pink shirt should have been a giveaway. Justin must be the internal do-gooder, the police’s own social worker.

  ‘Maybe I can schedule a follow-up with you, Lotte? Is that okay?’ he said.

  I didn’t like that he was using my first name. I didn’t like the idea of having a follow-up with him. I also didn’t like not working. ‘Sure,’ I said.

  So I met with him. I met with him four times to be precise, four times in two weeks, and we discussed previous cases, getting shot, a failed marriage, a lost child.

  And now he’d been talking to Ingrid. What had he told her?

  ‘It wasn’t anything confidential,’ Ingrid said, as if she’d been reading my mind. ‘Just office gossip. Actually . . .’ She picked up her mug of tea, blew on it, took a small sip. ‘No, never mind.’

  ‘Actually what?’ I held my mug between both hands, warming up skin that had suddenly felt cold. From the kitchen the dishwasher whirred and clicked.

  ‘I was going to say: if you know Mark Visser, shouldn’t you report it to the BII?’

  ‘There’s no conflict of interest. We were at school together. Not even in the same year.’

  ‘Sure, but,’ she folded her long body forward, dug her pointy elbows into the flesh just above her knees, ‘shouldn’t you be careful?’

  ‘I am careful. I’m taking Thomas with me to every meeting.’

  She nodded. ‘Okay. But if you ever, you know, don’t want Thomas to come along, for whatever reason, I’d be happy to help.’ She closed her eyes for a second. ‘I would love to help. I really want to help. That’s all I wanted to say.’ She finished her tea and got up.

  ‘Thanks for coming round,’ I said.

  I listened to her footsteps go down the stairs. I went to the bathroom and took my jumper off to grab a quick shower. In the mirror I caught sight of the scar marking my right shoulder. There was another one, larger, on my back. The surgeon had asked me if the scarring would be an issue. I’d said it wouldn’t be. I touched the scar with the index and middle finger of my left hand, ran skin over skin, felt the ridged circular scar and the puckered surroundings. Red lines flared from the circle, creating an image of a sick sun. Not just the bullet hole, but the signs of the operations to repair the nerves. They were slowly starting to look less angry.

  I pulled back the shower curtain. Pippi shot out from under the taps and I leapt back so far that I stepped on my jumper and nearly slipped. ‘Oh, cat!’ I said. She hadn’t been in the spare room then. ‘You’re such a silly girl.’ The towel by the side of the shower was now used by Pippi-puss as her bed. ‘Your dinner’s in the kitchen.’ I shouldn’t get too used to her being here; her owners would surely want to have her back soon.

  I turned on the tap and stood under the hot water. My heart rate was slowly getting back to normal. After my shower, I put on a bathrobe and brought my face up close to the mirror. I had dark circles under my eyes; I’d hardly had any sleep last night. My hair had grown so long that I could almost tie it back again. I needed to decide whether to cut it or let it grow.

  I went into the study and looked at my drawing. I wrote down Kars van Wiel. I wrote down Mark Visser. Mark had mentioned my name to his mother. They’d talked about me. Talking about what was painful was the worst thing to do. The more you talked and thought about something, the more it created a path in your brain, like water running over soft soil, until it had cut a ravine of remembering. Stuffing it away, deep inside you, until you forgot, that was the way to deal with bad memories. I wondered how well Tessa Stapel was dealing with her pain. I squiggled lines from both the property developers’ names to the box with the word skeleton, even though I couldn’t see how the skeleton could have come from either site. Had Frank worked somewhere else? On another job?

  Pippi stuck her little black-and-white face around the corner of the door.

  ‘Hello, Pusskin.’

  She took a careful step into my study and stared at me. Then, spooked by something I couldn’t see, she ran away.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ Francine’s father said.

  It was the interval and they were standing in the foyer of the cinema, eating their ice cream as they did every time they went to the movies. Francine would have to tell him that they’d found his father’s skeleton, she just had to find the right moment. He was an old man. She was worried how he would take it. He looked smart in his suit and tie, overdressed compared to everybody else, but he was attired the way he thought you should look when you were out and about. On the rare occasions he was freed – as he put it – from the nursing home, he wanted to dress properly. Because he’d been out in the sun and his face had a rosy hue, he looked the picture of health, even though he wasn’t. His white hair was still thick.

  ‘I’m sure it wasn’t like that at all.’ Francine wondered what the people she worked with would say if they saw her now. She’d considered cancelling now that her husband was home, but it was difficult to deny her father his once-a-week outing. She’d also thought that it would be easier to tell him here about his father’s body. That had been a stupid idea. She should have talked to him in the nursing home, where there was help around if the shock was too much.

  She took a scoop of her vanilla ice cream. It wasn’t made with anything that had ever been close to a real vanilla pod. Her father had bought ice cream, as he did every week, in an attempt to fatten Francine up. Or so he said, anyway. It was probably because he fancied a chocolate ice cream for himself. It had been easy to fall into these weekly patterns, work permitting, having a chat on Sunday after her run and going to the cinema on Tuesday, where she paid for the tickets while her father covered the snacks.

  ‘They always put the break in at a stupid point,’ he said. ‘I want to know what’s going to happen on the other side of the door.’

  ‘You wanted to go to this cinema. We could have gone to one that doesn’t have breaks.’

  ‘I want my ice cream. Plus, well, I need to go. You know. That’s what old age does to you. You need to go more often.’

  ‘They probably put the intervals in to keep ice cream producers happy.’

  ‘For the cinemas to make more money. They won’t start the second half until the queue for the popcorn has gone.’

  The decor of the cinema dated from at least a decade before the smoking ban: plenty of cigarettes had been stubbed out on the red carpet. The faded glory of the place was in sharp contrast
to the ultra-modern special effects of the movie.

  Francine’s father had wanted to see the latest war film. His favourites were war and sci-fi. Nothing to do with the courtroom, he always said, as it reminded him too much of his daughter’s work.

  ‘What do you think is on the other side of the door?’ he said. The interval lights had come on just when the young hero had been about to go into the bedroom of a bombed house in Berlin.

  ‘No idea. Nothing good, I imagine. Did you do anything like that: go into bombed-out houses?’

  ‘Amsterdam wasn’t bombed, but I’m sure we got up to lots of stupid stuff. I was a young boy when the war started.’

  ‘You were still a young boy when it finished.’

  ‘I can remember that last winter, when there was no food.’

  ‘The Hunger Winter.’ The ice cream felt sinful as they talked about other people starving, even if it was now long in the past. She took another scoopful, pushing the little plastic spoon into the solid mass, and tried to enjoy the sensation of the ice cream melting on her tongue. She had to tell him now or wait until the movie had finished.

  Her father continued eating until the scraping sound of the plastic spoon on the bottom of the cardboard pot indicated there was nothing left. ‘Aren’t you going to finish yours?’

  ‘Sorry if I’m not eating it without taking a breath.’

  Her father smiled. ‘You still look good. You don’t have to worry about what you eat.’

  ‘I’m looking after myself. Actually, Daddy, there’s something I need to tell you.’

  ‘Is something wrong? With Christiaan or Ruth?’

  ‘No, everybody’s fine. It’s about the skeleton they found. The one at the station.’

  ‘The one in the locker?’ He read the paper every day, front to back.

  ‘Right, that one. They did a DNA test on the bones.’ Francine took a deep breath. ‘Don’t be upset, Daddy, but it’s Grandad.’

  Her father went pale. His eyes widened and his Adam’s apple moved up and down.

  ‘Daddy?’ She shouldn’t have come out with it like that.

  Her father shook his head and rubbed his hand over his face. ‘Are you sure?’ His voice sounded thin, like a muted trumpet.

  ‘Yes. They linked the DNA to Sam’s.’

  ‘How . . .’ Her father shook his head again. ‘Of course. I get it. Sam’s in the database.’

  Francine nodded.

  ‘Dad went missing in ’45. I never thought . . . I read in the paper that he’d been shot.’

  She put her hand on his, the one still holding his plastic spoon. ‘Yes, he’d been shot. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be.’ Her father took a deep breath and visibly struggled to pull himself together. ‘He’s been gone for so long. I never thought we’d find his body. And someone dug up his skeleton.’ He remembered the part that Francine had hoped he’d forget. ‘They dug him up and put his bones in a bin bag and stored them at Centraal station?’ He sounded as if he couldn’t believe it. ‘Why would anybody do that? Who would do a thing like that?’ Tears glistened in his eyes. ‘My father. Why?’

  ‘We’ll find out who did this, Daddy, don’t worry. They won’t get away with it.’

  ‘But there’s only the skeleton, just the bones? No clothes?’

  ‘Just the bones.’

  Her father closed his eyes. He whispered something, too soft for Francine to catch. The gong chimed to announce that it was time for them to go back in. She let her father go first, then chucked the leftover ice cream in the bin and immediately felt guilty for throwing away perfectly good food.

  When they were back in their seats, her father said, ‘Remember that movie we saw a few years ago? The one about Iraq and the bomb disposal squad?’

  ‘Hurt Locker?’

  ‘Yes, that’s the one. That one was real. In the first five minutes, the famous person died.’

  ‘Oh yes, I remember. I thought he was going to be the main character and then he got blown to bits.’

  ‘Right. And that’s how it was. That’s what I remember of the war: the people you think are going to live for ever, they’re the people who don’t survive.’

  The lights in the cinema dimmed, saving Francine from having to respond. She reached out for her father’s hand. Then the second half of the movie started.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Ingrid’s short dark hair was slicked down with gel, like a swimming cap with a fringe that skimmed the top of her eye sockets. Excitement radiated from her every movement. Pippi had been the same when I’d given her a small bit of salmon as a treat last night. She had tried to play it cool but her large eyes had given her away and she purred as she ate it. She was still purring as she jumped on to my lap afterwards. As I stroked her soft fur from her ear to where her tail started, which made her bump her lower back into my hand, I reminded myself that I should really call her American owners to let them know she was okay.

  The memory and Ingrid’s eagerness made me smile. It was mid-morning and I had suggested that we go to the office refurbishment where Frank Stapel had worked. She had immediately pushed aside the pages she was scanning through. She and Thomas had divided a stack of files between them, trying to find a missing man with a broken arm. Hopefully we’d get a DNA match for him too.

  I’d looked at Mark Visser’s website. I’d read that this building had at one point been three apartments and an office but now they were turning it back into one house. The photos showed how two of the three kitchens had been ripped out, one bathroom removed, dividing walls between rooms demolished and new walls put in.

  When we got to the building itself, I showed my badge and we were let in by one of the workmen.

  ‘Lotte Meerman,’ he said. ‘This must be important then. I saw the photos in the paper. After you’d been shot. How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ It was odd that everybody thought they knew me. I told him I wanted to check if the skeleton could have come from here. The man opened the door and said that we could look around, of course, and just give him a shout if we needed anything. Mark Visser was luckily nowhere to be seen. His sister hadn’t been out of my thoughts. She’d been my classmate, the same age as me.

  I was conscious of Ingrid at my side, an observing but non-speaking presence who watched my every move as if she wanted to make a permanent record in her mind of everything I did.

  On the floor above, I heard a man singing along to a radio, his voice high and squeaky as he tried and failed to hit the top notes. I went up the stairs, where dirty footprints on the naked steps showed how sensible it had been not to put carpet down until the other work was done. I walked into the room where the singing was coming from and saw the man himself. I recognized his gnarled leprechaun face from the funeral. ‘I’ll be with you in a second,’ he said before turning back to the wall. He was applying plaster in large pink half-circles on a background of white. He evened it out, put more on and took more off. When he was happy, he turned around from the wall. He held out a hand with paint residue tattooed deep in the skin around his knuckles and said his name. Robbert Kloos. Tessa had mentioned him two days ago.

  ‘You’re the joker of the outfit,’ I said.

  He raised his eyebrows, plastering knife dangling from his left hand. ‘Who said that?’

  ‘Tessa Stapel. Frank’s widow.’

  ‘Ah, her. Yes, we talked.’

  ‘At the funeral yesterday.’

  ‘Yes, she kept grilling me. Wanted to know what I knew.’ He put the plastering knife on the floor and stretched his shoulders up to his ears and back.

  ‘She thought you’d put that skeleton in the locker.’

  ‘Yeah, so she said. But it wasn’t me.’ He picked up a bottle of Gatorade and glugged down half of it in one.

  ‘Could it have come from here?’

  He nodded. ‘Sure.’

  My head shot up and I met his eyes.

  ‘It could have done.’ His gaze was steady and his voice delib
erate. ‘It’s unlikely, but sure, there could’ve been a skeleton here. But I never saw it.’

  ‘You didn’t dig here?’

  ‘No, we just changed the interior walls.’

  The room looked nothing like it had done on the website. I should have expected a building site. Straight horizontal and vertical lines were cut through by the diagonal shape of a stepladder, which also blocked the view out of the window. That ladder was Frank’s memorial; it showed how far he’d got in painting this room, and where work had been interrupted by his death. A large pale sheet with a set of multicoloured paint stains was tucked under the ladder. It had been used at previous jobs, as none of the walls here were magenta pink or sunflower yellow; this room was all about shades of beige, and pale browns. These could be Frank Stapel’s paint rollers and brushes. His pots of paint were distributed around the base of the stepladder, still ready to be used but with the lids once again tightly on.

  ‘You didn’t put in any new foundations or anything like that?’ I said.

  ‘There was no external work at all.’

  ‘We know our skeleton had been buried. It was covered in soil.’

  ‘Then it didn’t come from here and I don’t know what Frank was up to. I’ve never found one of these war deaths. Never seen a skeleton. But if I did, I’d call the police. Most people would. He didn’t. It’s strange, and not like him. He was a good guy, just got married, liked to chat.’

  ‘He worked for both Mark Visser and Kars van Wiel, didn’t he?’

  Robbert nodded.

  ‘Just on those two sites?’

  ‘He might have done some bits and pieces here and there.’ He finished the rest of his drink, then screwed the top back on the bottle and wiped his mouth with his hand.

  ‘Do you know where?’

  ‘He was a good worker. There were always little projects coming his way.’

  ‘Did he seem different on his last day? Excited?’

  Robbert shrugged. ‘No, not excited.’

  ‘But not normal either, right?’

  ‘He wasn’t able to concentrate on anything. Had even more smoking breaks than usual.’