I thought it had been a good move to tell her that until two hours later, when she passed behind me. She put her hand on the back of my chair as if there wasn’t enough space for her to squeeze past. I moved my chair forward and rolled away from her touch. ‘I’ve asked for the files from the archives,’ she said.
‘Which files?’ Thomas said.
‘On Mark Visser’s sister. On her murder.’
I shouldn’t have mentioned it.
‘That’s so amazing,’ she said. ‘You solved your first case at eight years old. You’re like the police version of Mozart: a child prodigy.’
‘It was nothing like that. I didn’t solve anything.’
‘But it shows something, doesn’t it? I can tell you’re not comfortable talking about this, but it shows how your mind has always worked like this. How you’ve always been, I don’t know. Tenacious? Brave?’ Her skinny form was bent forward over the desk and to the right, to get as close to me as she could, as if she wanted to share a secret with me. She took a half-eaten chocolate bar, milk with nuts, and put the last few squares in her mouth. She left the empty wrapper, paper and foil, in the middle of her desk, which was already completely covered with folders and notes.
‘I’m not brave.’
‘Four months ago you stepped out in front of that bullet. You knew that man had a gun. You got shot.’
I looked over at Thomas. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking about this misguided adoration. I shook my head. ‘It wasn’t like that.’ I thought I’d said that three times already.
‘But still, locating Agnes Visser’s body when you were only eight, that’s amazing.’
She couldn’t stop talking about the little girl whose body I’d found. She thought it was the most thrilling thing that had happened since she’d joined the team: finding something I’d worked on as a child. But I’d been nothing like Mozart. This wasn’t my early masterpiece.
It was my early failure.
The thought that those files from the archive would be sitting on the desk next to mine made my lunch jump around in my stomach.
A knock on the door frame behind me made me turn round.
It was Edgar Ling. There was a small smile around the forensic scientist’s lips that he was trying to suppress. His eyelids were half closed over his bulging eyes, as if he were tasting his favourite food. ‘Your extra bones,’ he said. ‘They might be rather important.’
‘DNA match?’ Thomas said.
‘Yes. I double-checked it.’ He looked at the printout in his hand and shook his head.
‘Who is it?’ Ingrid said.
‘It’s . . .’ Edgar paused. ‘It’s Tim Dollander.’
‘You’re fucking kidding me.’ Thomas jumped up from his desk.
At the start of my career, I would not have said Tim Dollander’s name out loud without looking behind me. Then he was in jail for the best part of a decade. After his release he’d seemed to pick up where he’d left off and there had been the years during which we’d failed to prove him guilty of human trafficking and drug dealing. Everything he did, all the money he’d made, was hidden behind seemingly legitimate property deals. A reformed man, he’d called himself, but we’d suspected different. Six years ago, he disappeared, his property firm closed down and we thought he’d moved his main business somewhere more conducive to what he was trying to do. Somewhere like South America had been the most often voiced theory. I knew these facts. Everybody in the Amsterdam police force did.
‘That’s why I reran the test.’ Edgar Ling’s smile was so broad, it split his features. It sat uncomfortably on his face, in contrast to the melancholy of his bulging eyes.
Ingrid’s face was like Munch’s scream, but with an O of delight. ‘Wasn’t he seen in Portugal? Or on the Costa Brava somewhere?’
‘Yeah, well,’ Edgar said, ‘that’s why I checked.’
‘How do a gangster’s arm bones get mixed in with a Second World War skeleton?’
‘That’s for you to figure out.’ Edgar held out the printout to me, but Thomas reached over and grabbed it.
He scanned the page. ‘Fucking hell. Tim Dollander.’ As if he only believed it now that he’d read it. ‘Think he’s dead?’
‘Unless someone just cut off his arm,’ I said.
‘With him, that’s possible,’ Thomas said.
Edgar shook his head. ‘No, it’s too high up. They would have had to cut it above the shoulder joint. There aren’t any knife marks on the bones. He’s most probably dead.’
Thomas punched the air. ‘Oh man, this is unbelievable. Lotte, I’m suddenly loving this case.’
‘This is insane,’ I said.
‘It’s fantastic.’ Thomas picked up the phone and called the boss.
‘This is the best day of my career,’ Edgar said. ‘When I was working on old skeletons all day, I dreamed of one day finding something like this and being the person who makes the breakthrough in a case.’
‘Dollander,’ Thomas said to the boss. ‘Yes. Tim Dollander. Yes. Yes, I know. DNA evidence. It’s him for sure. Yes. Yes, we’ll come right over.’ As if it were impossible for the boss to come to us.
‘You’ll let me know, won’t you? How you get on?’ Edgar said.
‘Of course we will. Thanks for this magic trick.’ Thomas shepherded Edgar out of our office with a kind hand on his back.
We walked down the corridor like a group of excited schoolchildren. The smile never left Thomas’s pretty face. Ingrid rubbed the short hair at the back of his neck in a playful gesture. Even my cheeks were hurting. It was how unexpected it was. I wanted to skip down the blue carpet, even though I realized that finding Dollander’s bones mixed up with a Second World War skeleton raised more questions than it answered.
Chapter Twenty-three
The door to the CI’s office was wide open. He stopped looking at his PC screen and pulled his reading glasses from his nose. His thin face didn’t mirror our smiles. Instead it was set in a frown.
Thomas and Ingrid took the two seats opposite the desk. As there was nowhere else to sit, I leaned against the bookshelves in the back, careful not to disturb the rows that indicated the correct legal response to every situation. I was curious to see what advice the books gave on how to deal with finding the arm bones of a serious criminal.
‘This changes everything.’ The boss dangled his reading glasses, let them swing back and forth, stopped them at the highest point then allowed them to fall down.
‘Right, that’s why I wanted to bring it to your attention straight away,’ Thomas said.
‘Yes, thanks, Thomas.’ Some of the CI’s running gear was hanging over the radiators in front of the window. From where Thomas and Ingrid were sitting, it was hidden from view. He probably wouldn’t like that I could see his sky-blue Nike top and a pair of dark-blue shorts. His running shoes were standing side by side, waiting to be worn again, waiting to be pounded on the pavement. ‘Fill me in. Where are we with this?’ He grabbed a notepad and clicked his pen.
I was silent. What did ‘this’ even mean in this case? Was he asking about Dollander? We hadn’t even had time to look into him yet.
‘We were looking at missing men,’ Thomas said.
‘And we now know who it was. Yes, I get that. But do we know where these bones came from?’
‘Lotte’s looking into that.’ Thomas glanced over his shoulder at me. The giddiness of earlier had disappeared.
‘Lotte. Where have you got so far?’ Still the pen was suspended in mid-air, waiting for one of us to say something noteworthy.
‘Can we take a step back?’ I gripped the shelf that I was leaning against, dug my nails into the wood. ‘It started with Frank Stapel’s death.’ This was my chance to convince the boss of what had been a certainty in my mind only.
Thomas sighed. ‘Not this again.’ He turned in his chair. ‘Lotte, can you drop it?’
‘Seriously, Thomas, you still don’t see the importance?’ I said.
The boss was w
riting something down. I waited until he looked at me again.
‘Whoever killed Dollander is obviously a dangerous individual,’ I said.
‘We don’t know what he died of,’ Thomas said.
‘Yeah, with someone like Dollander, and his body buried somewhere, hidden, there’s a really good chance it was natural causes,’ I said.
‘You two, stop arguing. Lotte, make your point.’
Thomas turned back to look at the boss and folded his arms. The muscles of his shoulders were tensed, and two thick cords of stress ran from his ears to his collarbones.
‘The guy who had those bones in a bin bag died by falling off the seventh floor of a building. Makes you think, doesn’t it?’ I said.
‘Yes, it does.’ The boss nodded and made some more notes. ‘So do we know where these bones came from?’
‘It’s a tricky one. According to the books, and I assume his tax records, Frank Stapel officially worked on two sites, the one where he died, and another in the centre.’ I moved my right shoulder round in its socket a couple of times and gave it a rub. ‘Thomas, Ingrid and I checked both sites. The problem is that Edgar Ling said the bones had been buried, and on neither site had there been any digging recently.’
‘Right.’ Ingrid nodded at me. ‘So apart from those building sites, he seems to have worked on a few things here and there, but nobody wants to confirm that.’
‘Okay, so what I’m hearing is that you, Thomas, hadn’t been able to figure out who the dead guy was until DNA showed it was Dollander, and you, Lotte, haven’t found out where the body came from. So we’re nowhere. You’ve done exactly nothing in a week.’
‘We identified the bones,’ Thomas said. He crossed his legs. One foot bounced in the air.
‘You did?’ The CI put his pen down. ‘I think Edgar Ling did that. He’s done a great job. I was talking about what you had done.’
‘Dollander wasn’t on the missing persons list, so we couldn’t have—’
‘I’m not asking for excuses. I’m not accusing anybody of anything. I’m just stating the facts. And now that this is Dollander’s body, those facts are going to have to change. Maybe less bitching, no bickering and some more cooperation.’ His eyes went from Thomas to me. ‘That would be a good start.’
‘Yes, boss,’ Thomas said.
‘Lotte.’ His gaze turned to me. ‘What have you got on the builder?’
‘The key question is how his jacket got back to his flat.’
‘His wife knew about the skeleton, I bet,’ Thomas said.
‘She seemed genuinely upset when she opened the locker.’
‘Maybe she’s a good actress? Why did she call you in the first place?’ Thomas grinned at me over his shoulder. ‘Maybe she played you. Knew you’d just come back. Not on your A game yet.’
‘Didn’t I say something about bickering?’ The boss put his glasses back on. ‘I’m starting to feel like a school teacher here.’
‘Sorry. Yes.’ He paused. ‘I think Tessa was with her husband when he put that bin bag in the locker at the station. It is probably her jacket. She wears it constantly.’
‘Let’s look at Frank Stapel’s death again,’ the boss said before I could respond to Thomas. ‘You’re right, Lotte. If Dollander was killed, whoever did it is dangerous. We don’t know how Dollander died, and we should trace that.’
‘He was seen a year ago in Portugal,’ Ingrid said.
‘And that was clearly wrong. What do we have that’s certain? Let’s see.’ He moved the mouse rapidly back and forth to wake his PC up again and read from the screen. ‘Released from prison in 2008. Lived in Amsterdam for a couple of years. Was interviewed in 2010 about the murder of a Moroccan in the Bijlmer. Drug related.’ He looked at Thomas. ‘If we want one hundred per cent certainty, that’s it. That’s the last confirmed sighting.’
I narrowed my eyes against the glare from the sun that burst through the window behind the CI. For the first time in weeks, the sky was uniformly blue. The light brought the backdrop into sharp relief.
‘He could have died soon after,’ the boss said, ‘from what Forensics thought. Does that make his death drugs related? Is there anything in Frank Stapel’s past that could link him to that?’
‘Tessa Stapel crashed a car in a drink-driving accident.’ Thomas thumbed through a stack of papers. He read from one, held the rest aloft. ‘She has a history of alcohol abuse and depression. Two known suicide attempts that required a hospital stay.’ He put the papers down and looked at the boss again. ‘Frank’s brother Eelke had a few close shaves: hung out with a group of football hooligans. Minor player.’
I tapped Thomas on his shoulder. ‘Can I see those?’
‘Sure, yes. Here.’ He handed them to me. ‘Seems to have cleaned up. They both have.’
I could kick myself for not having checked into Eelke and Tessa’s pasts. ‘What about Frank?’ I didn’t see his name listed here at all.
‘Completely clean. Not a single offence, not even a parking ticket. Nothing.’
‘Any known links between Dollander and any of the guys that Frank worked for?’ The boss held out his hand for the papers and I passed them on.
‘I’ll look into that,’ Thomas said.
‘What did Dollander go to prison for?’ Ingrid said.
‘He cleaned out squats with a group of his mates,’ Thomas said. ‘The violent route. Beating up the squatters until they decided that leaving was definitely the best course of action. That was a roaring trade. With one of them, it got out of hand and he beat a guy to death. Was sentenced to ten years in prison in 2002, got early release in ’08.’
‘When he got out, he seemed to do more of the same plus a bit of drug dealing, some GBH where the other party never pressed charges,’ I said.
‘Then the murder of that Moroccan in 2010,’ the boss added.
‘Yes, and before that, two working girls, both heroin addicts, in 2009. Nothing proven in either case.’
‘Two girls that he brought into the country, right?’
‘Yes, with three others girls who decided it was in their best interest not to testify.’ I remembered that case. One of the ones that had driven the previous CI to distraction. Sure, we all understood that sometimes it was hard for someone without legal papers to come forward, but if only one of them had been willing to be a witness, we could have locked Dollander up for a long time.
‘Okay,’ the boss said, ‘then he gets killed in . . . let’s call it 2010. Was buried somewhere next to a Second World War resistance hero. How did that happen?’
Thomas and I looked at each other. This was the area where neither one of us had a clue. I shook my head.
‘Okay,’ the boss said. ‘You don’t know. I get it. What are the next steps?’
I pushed myself away from the bookshelf. ‘Do you want to go back through Dollander’s known acquaintances?’
‘Makes sense,’ Thomas said. ‘We’re mainly focusing on two property developers: Kars van Wiel and Mark Visser. We’ll have a look to see if their paths crossed with Dollander at any point.’
The boss nodded. ‘It’s a plan. That prosecutor called again this morning. Francine Dutte. Does she have anything to do with this?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Of course it’s her grandfather—’
‘Yes, I know that. She was complaining about you, Lotte, but I shut that down.’
‘Thanks, boss.’
‘Just don’t take any more time off to do personal stuff.’
I nodded. I couldn’t believe she’d called the boss to complain about me.
‘But there’s a story with her brother, right?’ Thomas asked.
‘Another football hooligan. He’s the guy who attacked that AZ player in the Ajax stadium last year.’
‘Got a good kicking. Tried that on the wrong guy. Never mess with defenders,’ Thomas said.
‘The player got a red card,’ Ingrid said. ‘Can you believe it? How that wasn’t self-defence . . .’
<
br /> ‘It was violent conduct on the pitch. Automatic red,’ the boss said.
‘The brother was convicted the other day,’ I said.
‘Of course. Sam Dutte. Yes. Hooligans, squatters, is that the link? Did he know Eelke?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Okay. Check that out too.’ The CI’s phone rang. He looked at the display. ‘The burgemeester. Heard about Dollander. I’ve got to take this.’
We left. On the way back to our office, Thomas said he’d make some calls to old colleagues. To get something on the Moroccan that Dollander had allegedly killed. He remembered that they’d made an arrest for that.
Ingrid put a hand on my arm and stopped me in the corridor. ‘And there’s Mark Visser.’ She waited until Thomas had gone into our office. ‘We know Frank worked on a development Tessa hadn’t told us about.’
Even though I felt guilty about it, I knew I should meet Mark’s mother to verify his story about the house. Suddenly everything had become important.
Chapter Twenty-four
I cycled along a long, straight road defended by poplars on either side. The wind was gusting against me, driving me back as if to remind me that this was a bad idea. I pushed the pedals as hard as I could, but it was heavy work and it was difficult to breathe with the wind blowing each of my exhalations back into my mouth.
I stopped next to the nearest poplar, kept my bike between my legs, and rested my head on the handlebars. A car came from the other direction and blew its horn. I dragged my bike off the road and stood it against the thin trunk of the tree. As a child I had been fascinated by how you could tell the prevailing wind direction from the shape in which a group of poplars grew. The ones that got most of the wind were most stunted in their growth.
I thought about Tessa. According to Thomas’s theory, she and Frank had met at the station, either one of them with the bin bag full of bones. They’d gone to the stored luggage area, put the bag in a locker and Tessa left with the ticket. So far it was all entirely plausible. But then, when Frank has the accident, she needs to get rid of the ticket because moving human remains is a crime. She decides not to shred it, but to keep it in the inside pocket of his leather jacket. That was where this theory fell apart. She had screamed when she found that skeleton in the locker.
A Cold Case in Amsterdam Central Page 15
