A Cold Case in Amsterdam Central

by Anja de Jager

  I ran after him, to keep up. ‘Agnes is my friend. And my father is a policeman,’ I said to explain myself.

  ‘But you’re not. You’re just strange.’

  ‘I’ve walked all the paths in the park. She isn’t here.’

  He stopped. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’ve done the same. Me and my friends, we’ve searched the whole park. On our bikes.’ His dark hair was so long that it nearly touched his eyes as he bent his head forward. He pushed it back with his hand. He squinted as if he were looking up into sunlight, but it was a cloudy day and there was no sun.

  ‘When did you last see her?’ I said.

  ‘I should have walked with her to school.’

  ‘Was that what your mother said?’

  He carried on walking. ‘I’m older than Agnes. I should have looked after her.’

  ‘And be late for school every day?’ I looked over at him to see if he smiled. He didn’t. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t want to be—’

  ‘Didn’t want to be mean about her? Don’t worry, she was mean about you.’

  I looked at the toes of my new shoes, two different shades of blue, suede and leather, which were not like the shoes the other girls wore but were bought from the shop that sold ‘good’ children’s shoes, according to my mum. Of course ‘good’ was just a grown-up way of saying ‘ugly’. I didn’t like that Agnes could have been mean about my shoes, or any of my clothes, or about how I didn’t join in with games, or that I liked books. She had a lot of things she could pick from. ‘What did she say?’

  Mark didn’t answer and I was glad about that. Maybe she hadn’t said anything. He was just being horrid, like most boys. How would he know who his sister’s friends were? ‘Why didn’t you walk to school with her?’ I said.

  ‘I thought she was fine by herself.’

  ‘Did anybody see her that morning?’

  ‘No, nobody.’

  ‘We should ask the neighbours, show her photo, we should—’

  ‘The police did that the first day.’

  ‘We should—’

  ‘You shouldn’t do anything. You shouldn’t come here with your notebook.’

  ‘I’m not coming anywhere, I’m walking to school.’

  He snorted. ‘You were waiting for me. To ask me questions.’

  ‘I’m only trying to help.’

  ‘Why?’ he said, his voice angry. ‘Why are you trying to help? Stop whatever it is you’re doing.’ He ran away to school.

  I stood still on the path, then sat on a bench and wrote down what he had said: that nobody had seen her that morning, that he and his friends had gone through the whole park and hadn’t found her. That had gone well, I thought. I had two bits of information that I hadn’t had before. When I saw my dad, when I had all my information, I would ask him if this was what questioning was all about, that you needed to get new information, and that it didn’t matter if the people you asked the questions liked you or not. It was much more likely that they didn’t like you, because I’d already found out that nobody ever liked answering my questions. I was going to talk to all the neighbours next.

  I hopped off the bench and walked to school, notepad tucked under my arm, pen stuffed in the pocket of my trousers. I skipped over a puddle and kicked a small stone sideways into the grass to the side of the path. I hopped on one leg up to the first tree, then changed legs. I wondered if the police had looked for Agnes in the canal that ran around the park. I chewed the end of my pen.

  It was the memory of the little boy that Mark had been that made me want to ask him if he was really redeveloping that house. Ingrid was out. Thomas was diagonally opposite me, at his desk by the window. He glared, probably wondering who’d called and what they’d said to silence me. I wasn’t going to do anything that was going to get me suspended, not with Francine on my back. I was going to abide by the rules, and that meant being accompanied by a colleague when you were going to see a childhood friend, especially if you were starting to doubt him. What Francine had told me had nothing to do with the skeleton in the locker or with Frank Stapel’s death, but I didn’t like it. If Mark had bought that property, what did that say about his personality? Probably that he was willing to do a lot to make money. In the past, a child had died there. I remembered the feeling of Mark’s hand in mine.

  I looked at Thomas, who wished I’d joined another team. ‘What can I do to help?’

  ‘It’s under control,’ he said.

  ‘There must be something—’

  ‘The builder. You stick to the builder. Plus your childhood friend. And the builder’s widow. You deal with that. That’s enough to do.’

  ‘Let’s go for a coffee,’ I said.

  His mouth was halfway through forming ‘no’ when he closed it again. I braced myself for a more cutting refusal. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I could do with one. Didn’t get much sleep last night. We worked all hours.’

  In the canteen, we got our coffee in brown plastic cups. I automatically sat at my favourite table by the window, on my seat, the one that let me see everybody. A few survivors of the night shift were winding down; a few colleagues who liked each other chatted about work.

  ‘I’m sorry about yesterday,’ I said.

  ‘What do you want, Lotte?’ Thomas said.

  ‘What’s your problem with me?’ I picked at the corner of the lid of the small tub of coffee creamer.

  Thomas raised his eyebrows. ‘Now isn’t a good time for this.’

  ‘It is. We need to work together, and that’s hard because you don’t like me.’ The corner tore off. I dropped the tub back on the table and sighed.

  ‘It’s irrelevant whether I like you or not.’ He opened a sachet of sugar and sprinkled it into his coffee.

  I sat back in my seat and made eye contact. ‘No it isn’t. As I said, I’m sorry I wasn’t here yesterday. I’ll make it up. But you need to let me take a part. What have I ever done to you?’

  ‘To me? Nothing as far as I know. But I do know about the mistakes you made. The mistakes that got you shot. Bad mistakes. Remember?’ He took a sip of his coffee. ‘I listened to the tapes of your previous interviews. I know exactly what you did.’

  I stabbed the top of the tub of creamer with the sharp edge of the plastic stirrer, shaped like a traffic light without its lamps. It went through the cover and spilled most of the creamy-beige liquid on the table. ‘He was convicted, wasn’t he?’ I tried to block out the memory of the murderer’s green eyes on mine as I had been giving my short testimony. ‘I’ve learned. I’m trying to work on this case with you. Together with you. I’ve taken you to every interview, involved you in every call.’ I took a sip of the coffee. Caffeine raced through my body, the first hit of the morning, so good, so invigorating.

  Thomas flexed the thin white piece of plastic between index finger and thumb, judging how much stress he could put on it before it would break. ‘The boss is interested in this case. I can’t risk it, Lotte.’ His voice sounded more tired than angry. ‘Now more even than before.’

  ‘Risk what?’

  ‘You going it alone. Like you did last time. I know Ingrid will do as I say.’

  ‘I’m doing everything by the book. I haven’t excluded you,’ I said, keeping my tone light. ‘Not even when one of the dead man’s employers turned out to be my childhood friend. Even then I made sure you came with me.’

  ‘To protect yourself.’

  I shrugged. ‘No harm in covering my back.’

  ‘And now we’re having this lovely heart-to-heart.’

  ‘I want to clear the air.’

  ‘Clear the air.’ He took another sip of coffee and put the plastic cup back on the table. ‘You’re trying to be charming. Unfortunately,’ he pushed his chair back and tapped the table with both hands, ‘you’re failing. You’re not very good at the charm.’ He got up. ‘And it wouldn’t make any difference anyway.’ He was half turned away from me, already on his way out of the canteen. He threw his plastic cup in the bin. It sounde
d heavy; it had still been half full.

  I took a big gulp from mine then rushed after him. I caught up before he’d reached the stairs. ‘I need you to work with me.’ I was slightly out of breath.

  He sighed and folded his arms. ‘Lotte, it’s you who’s not working with me. Actually, you haven’t done much work at all.’ He tucked both hands more securely under his elbows, holding his ribcage. ‘Just tell me one thing: why are you so interested in that builder’s death?’

  ‘His widow deserves to know what happened, and it’s all linked. We find out where else he worked and it’ll help us find where the skeleton was buried. Where that other body still is.’

  ‘Sure, but his death was an accident. He fell. Tessa will never accept that.’

  ‘She said she would believe me if I—’ I bit back the rest of the words.

  ‘If you told her so.’ Thomas finished my sentence. ‘She won’t. You know the type: she’ll still be here years later, trying to get us to investigate that accident.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Her smile had told me she’d accept whatever outcome I presented to her. ‘I think she trusts me.’

  ‘For as long as you do what she wants.’

  Over his shoulder I saw that Ingrid had come in. ‘Never mind.’ I hoisted my handbag higher up my shoulder. I smiled at Ingrid. I knew she would think I’d given her a birthday and St Nicolaas present all rolled into one. ‘Want to come interview Mark Visser?’

  ‘Oh yes please.’ She didn’t even think about it.

  I grinned a smug smile at Thomas.

  Chapter Twenty

  I left my bike at the police station and Ingrid and I drove in her car through the relentless flatness of the polder. The rain had stopped, and where the sun peeked between the thick dark clouds, it gave them golden edges. I could see as far as I wanted; nothing interrupted my view for several kilometres. The long, straight road followed a small canal from field to field. It was a back road, with only enough room for one car. If another came from the opposite direction, both of us would have to drive with one wheel on the grassy verge. There were no other cars. It was just us this April morning.

  The fields on either side were lower than the road, which made them seem like sponges that had filled up with groundwater over the years and descended below sea level. The cows that chewed the verdant grass were weights that submerged the meadows further. If it continued to rain, the puddles and cows combined would surely make the land sink.

  I hadn’t called ahead this time. This would be a surprise visit.

  ‘Is there anything specific, anything in particular, that you want to question him about?’ Ingrid said. ‘Or is it something more . . .’ She didn’t finish the sentence.

  ‘Something more what?’

  ‘Personal. Something personal.’

  I gripped the seat belt tightly. ‘No, it isn’t personal. It’s about another property that Mark Visser is developing.’

  ‘What’s special about it?’

  ‘His sister died there.’

  ‘She died recently?’

  ‘No, when she was eight. Mark found the body.’

  ‘How old was he?’

  ‘Ten.’

  ‘That poor boy, that must have been terrible.’

  ‘Yes, and now he’s redeveloping the house.’

  Ingrid was silent for a bit. I feasted my eyes on the long view to the horizon. In the distance, tulip fields were blankets of colour. It wasn’t possible to see any of the individual flowers, they were too far away, but together they formed an army of petals that fought against the gloom of the grey sky. It was getting late in the season for them to still be flowering. Soon the farmers would cut their blooms off to allow all the energy to stay in the bulb. They removed the beauty to increase the strength and value of the product they wanted to sell. Were these the tulips that had shed their pollen on Francine’s grandfather’s skeleton? I didn’t know how many acres of tulip fields there were in this area, let alone in the Netherlands as a whole.

  Ingrid parked the car and we got out. I rang the doorbell. It took a while before Mark opened the door. His eyes were puffy behind the glasses. This time he wasn’t wearing a suit but a jumper over jeans. Stubble hugged his jawline and the plains below his cheekbones. You could spend hours tracing the hollows in his face with your fingertips.

  ‘More questions?’ he said.

  ‘Always.’ I introduced Ingrid. Mark smiled his salesman’s smile. We followed him to his office at the back of the house. It was still quiet; the diggers weren’t wrecking anything yet.

  ‘Tell us about another property you’re developing.’

  ‘I gave you the files—’

  ‘Tell us about Parkstraat 12.’ Even just saying the address made my mouth feel odd, as if a dentist were about to stick a needle in my gum.

  Mark twitched with a short jerk of his shoulders and arms. His eyes seemed to sink deep. ‘What about it?’

  ‘You’re working on that one too.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘Unfortunately that’s not an option. Why are you redeveloping that house?’

  Mark scrunched up his face, then released it, trying to calm himself. ‘I have no choice.’

  ‘You don’t?’ Ingrid said. ‘How come? Have you been contracted by someone else to develop it?’

  ‘In a way, yes. He left my mother the house. When he died.’

  ‘What?’The word left my mouth on a sudden exhalation.

  ‘All the time when he was in jail the house was rented out. Then he died and left it to my mother in his will. He must have known that my father passed away a couple of years ago. He said he was sorry and wanted to do something . . .’ His mouth moved as if he found it hard to keep talking. ‘To make up for killing Agnes. My mother doesn’t want it, of course. She’s been trying to sell it but nobody would buy it the way it was. She asked me for a favour. What could I do?’ He looked at me. ‘I don’t go there. I let my guys run with that one. It makes me sick every time I think of it.’

  I nodded. ‘What did he see, Mark? Frank Stapel? What did he see?’

  ‘I don’t know. He didn’t see anything working for me. Or at least he didn’t tell me.’

  ‘Was it at the house where your sister died? Did he find those bones while he was working there?’

  ‘No.’ He frowned. ‘Is that why you’re here?’

  ‘But he worked there.’ I scrutinized Mark’s face. ‘Frank Stapel worked at Parkstraat 12, didn’t he?’

  The hollows underneath his cheekbones seemed to deepen. His mouth became as thin as a line.

  I nodded slowly. ‘I see. He worked on the house where your sister died.’

  Mark hung his head. ‘Yes, he did. But he didn’t find a skeleton.’ He took off his glasses and pinched the marks they had left behind. ‘It won’t matter what I say. Do you want to check? Go over there now? Let’s go, Lotte. I’ll get the keys. You can check to your heart’s content.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ingrid said before I had a chance to refuse. ‘We’ll come.’

  We followed him out of the house. On the other side of the road two red and yellow rectangles of tulip fields were bright as the crayons that Agnes and I had shared, happy in their primary colours, unaware that they would only last for another couple of hours or so, that they were next to be destroyed and have their heads cut off.

  Mark opened the car door.

  ‘Coming?’ he said.

  ‘We’ll follow you.’

  He nodded and got in his car. He was looking at me. I gave him a thumbs-up to say that I was ready to go. Behind him, we drove to the house that had haunted my nightmares for so many years.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  ‘Tell me about your grandfather,’ the journalist said.

  Francine looked at the girl. She was different from the journalists who had chased her for comments about her brother. They had been a mob, a clump of people with microphones sticking out. They had followed her and hunted her to get h
er opinion on something she didn’t want to talk about.

  ‘My grandfather was a hero,’ Francine said. ‘When so many people just stood by, he did something.’ Maybe the journalist seemed different because she was asking about a subject that Francine did want to talk about.

  ‘So he was important to you?’ The girl tipped her head sideways.

  Francine could see that the girl’s eyes were taking in her appearance, not staying on her face but also checking what she was wearing. It made sense; of course she had to give a description of Francine as part of the interview. Francine could imagine what it would say: Successful prosecutor Francine Dutte, dressed in a stylish maroon dress, talked about her grandfather with . . . With what? Delight? Obvious interest? ‘My father told me stories about my grandfather. He talked about what he remembered. He was young at the time, of course, but he told me about the leaflets they were printing and that people came to their house to distribute the illegal papers.’

  The journalist nodded. Ella was her name. She was young. She was pretty, even though Francine thought that twenty years ago she herself had been more attractive than this girl was now. But that was before decades of gravity had tugged on the skin around her jaws. Botox kept her forehead clear of wrinkles, but there was no substitute for young skin. Maybe Ella would write: Successful prosecutor Francine Dutte had clearly made an effort for the interview, but her age showed in dark spots on her skin and the deep lines above her mouth. Her maroon dress was elegant but a bit too youthful.

  She wouldn’t write that. Francine’s husband had recommended Ella especially. Francine couldn’t remember which paper she worked for, but Christiaan had said she would write a positive interview. He’d briefed the girl beforehand. He said she’d been very excited by the chance to write a lifestyle article about Francine.

  ‘Which paper do you write for again?’ Francine said. ‘Sorry, I forgot.’

  ‘I’m freelance,’ Ella said. ‘But this will go into the Metro.’

  It was going in the free paper? Her husband must have had his reasons for suggesting this girl. After all, that was his job. This was what his international clients got from him: hints on what to say and tips on which journalists to use. The girl was wearing a very tight top. Deeply cut, even if it was covered by a jacket.