A Cold Case in Amsterdam Central

by Anja de Jager

  It didn’t fit. It didn’t make sense at all. I must have stood by the side of the road for at least ten minutes. Then I got back on my bike and continued the battle along the road against the wind to the nursing home where Mark Visser’s mother lived.

  I hadn’t thought I’d ever meet her again. She was one of those people who belonged to my childhood. Now she was the husk of a person, a thin layer of skin and bones with a mind inside. Her eyes were the only part of her face with any colour in them: blue with smudged brown circles underneath. ‘Thank you so much for coming, Lotte.’

  ‘Mark mentioned that you’d like to see me.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about you a lot recently. After Mark told me you called him.’

  I managed to keep the smile on my face.

  ‘I remember you coming by with your green notebook and your pencil, straight after school, asking questions.’

  She must hate me. I was responsible for her daughter’s death. Why was she smiling at me? She poured me tea in a delicate porcelain cup with pink flowers painted around the rim. Her hand shook and I wanted to take the teapot from her to stop her from dropping it and spilling tea all over the pale yellow carpet.

  ‘I must have been a right pain,’ I said. What had I been thinking? Going round to those people’s house, bothering them in their time of grief. Looking back, I couldn’t understand why my mother hadn’t put a stop to my obsession with my classmate’s disappearance.

  I had continued what I’d thought was an investigation for months, until my green notebook had been full. I had made a number of drawings: of the house and the garden, of all the paths in the park, of the houses next door and the street. I had asked my questions and written down the answers. I had lots of information. But I still didn’t know where Agnes was. Agnes’s father had been home twice; I’d seen him when I went round for a cup of tea. He was a big man, tanned, with dark hair. He didn’t seem to fit in the front room, with the small chairs and the thin teacups. When he saw me come in, he asked me when I was going to stop coming round. When was I going to stop asking questions, like the police had already done a few months ago? They’ve stopped? I asked. But she hasn’t been found yet. Her father’s voice got loud. Yes, they’ve stopped. They’ve stopped looking. They think they’ll never find her. He looked angry, Agnes’s mother looked sad. I guess that for him it was difficult. He had been away for months, and when he came back, there were no policemen around the house any more and no photographers in the street. She was old news. Agnes’s mother had seen them leave one by one and day by day. It would be easier that way, more like a little bit of pain all the time, like a bruise or a blister, instead of a huge pain suddenly, like a knife wound or an operation.

  ‘You were helping,’ she said now. ‘Do you know that you were still looking even though the police had given up? That was a complete shambles.’

  ‘I was looking because I hadn’t found her yet.’ What was still clear in my mind was that desire to trace her. It had been a need that had driven me, more important than going to school. Going to school was something my mother told me I had to do. Going round with my paper and pencil, asking questions, making drawings, taking notes, had been a compulsion. Even if I hadn’t got anywhere.

  Mrs Visser smiled, and her thin skin pulled together like crumpled paper. ‘You were driving my son crazy with your questions. I remember it clearly.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking.’

  She reached out a hand and touched mine, as if I was the one who needed comforting. She bent over. Now she would hiss out her spite. Instead she smiled again. ‘You didn’t give up. Even though . . . Never mind. Has Mark helped you? With that skeleton?’

  ‘I’m not sure how much he can help.’

  ‘If there’s anything I can do, let me know. I haven’t got much time. I’ve set an end date, but I’d like to think that . . .’

  I imagined that I could see her mind working through the paper-thin skin of her brow. I didn’t want to think of my mother in Mrs Visser’s situation, but I was.

  ‘. . . I’d like to think that I’ve repaid my debt to you.’

  There was pressure on the back of my eyes. ‘There’s no debt. I was only a child. I didn’t do much. We were too late.’ I had been too late. I couldn’t bear the thought that Mrs Visser felt she owed me.

  We finished our tea.

  ‘Do you know who has the room next time?’ She pointed at the wall. ‘Gerard Dutte. I read about his story in the paper this afternoon, how when he was seven, he walked seventy kilometres to his aunt and uncle’s.’ She laughed. ‘That story wasn’t news to us. Everybody here has heard it at least thirty times.’

  She handed me one of the free newspapers. Francine Dutte’s face smiled at me from the front page. Next to her was a smaller photo of her grandfather’s skeleton as we’d found it at Centraal. The photos accompanied an interview with her.

  I scanned it. ‘I would love to meet him.’ I had wanted to from when I first talked to Francine. Here was my opportunity. ‘Would you introduce me?’

  Chapter Twenty-five

  I knocked three times. Once normal, twice loud. No reply. I raised my hand to knock again.

  ‘Not here,’ a voice said behind me. I turned to see an old man with a wooden walking stick standing just on the other side of the hallway. He was a similar age to Mrs Visser but his upright posture screamed that he wasn’t at death’s door yet. His bald head reflected the glare of the spotlights in the hallway.

  ‘This is Detective Meerman,’ Mrs Visser said to the man.

  ‘Finally going to check his story, are you?’ he said. He pointed with his thumb towards the door I’d been knocking on.

  ‘What about his story?’ I said.

  ‘That war hero story. That story about his father.’ He turned abruptly, then marched off, swinging the walking stick as if it was an accessory rather than a necessity. After about ten steps, he slowed down and began to put more weight on the stick. Halfway down the corridor, the march turned into a slow stroll. He thought we’d stopped watching him. He joined an elderly woman and two men built like bulldozers. They occupied the table closest to the TV. I recognized their silhouettes from the back. ‘Kars van Wiel. And Tony.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mrs Visser said. ‘They come every week to visit.’

  The old man put his hand on the old woman’s head. He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. Her hair was pure white and hung loose down her back. The young girl’s hairstyle lined an ancient face. She looked up, then pulled her head back and shuffled closer to her son. Kars van Wiel covered his mother’s hand with his own. She put her head on his shoulder. The old man looked away, grimaced, and rubbed his hand over his bald head. The woman smiled at her son, cupped his jaw with a crooked hand and kissed him on the mouth.

  ‘Have his parents been here long?’ I had to look away as the kiss lingered.

  ‘Just his father. Not his mother. He’s recovering from a hip replacement. I try to avoid the mother when she’s visiting and her sons are here too. Kars especially. With Tony she isn’t too bad.’

  ‘How long has his father been here?’

  Laughter broke out from the table. The woman’s voice made a noise like a cracked church bell. She threw her head back and shook her hair. Her hand was on her son’s thigh.

  ‘Over a month. Due to stay another week or so.’

  The woman got up. Shook her husband’s hand. Only when she moved away from the table did I see she was wearing a miniskirt and high heels. Her legs were slim. As they say: eighteen from the back, eighty-one from the front. She hooked her arms through her sons’, and thus entwined, like an ageing star with two bodyguards, they left the nursing home. The father’s gaze followed them for a while, then he buried his head in his hands.

  ‘What does he know about Gerard Dutte’s past?’ I said.

  ‘Everybody here has war stories. Everybody did the right thing, you must remember.’ Mrs Visser winked at me.

  ‘
So what’s Father van Wiel’s war story?’ A woman dressed in a cardigan with a string of pearls around her neck and her white hair neatly permed took the seat next to Kars’s father. She put one hand on his shoulder and poured him a cup of tea with the other.

  ‘Job van Wiel’s story isn’t that different from Gerard Dutte’s. His father was in the resistance, hid Jews in his shed and printed illegal newspapers. To be fair,’ her eyes were on the two people at the small table, ‘his father did get a medal, so in his case the story is indisputably true.’

  ‘You don’t think Gerard Dutte’s is?’ To my mind, Francine definitely thought it was. She wouldn’t have given that interview if she had any doubts. ‘I guess it’s true, because the mother died in a concentration camp, didn’t she?’

  That’s what Francine had said, but the old man had asked if I was finally going to check it. I should not have taken Francine’s word for it. I made a note of it, to do later. ‘What about you?’ I said. ‘Do you have any heroic tales?’

  ‘Me? During the war, nothing happened to me. Nothing happened to my parents. I can remember being hungry, but we got through it. Had an uneventful war, I guess.’

  I noticed she looked tired. It was long after the war that Mrs Visser’s life became eventful in a way that nobody would have wanted. ‘Let’s go back,’ I said. ‘I can talk to Francine’s father some other time.’

  She nodded and put her arm through mine. She leant on me. I could feel the bone of her arm through the papery skin and the thin layer of her cardigan. The cancer had eaten all the flesh away.

  We waited for the lift. ‘So what did his father get a medal for?’ The lift arrived and we got in. The doors closed unhurriedly behind us. Even a geriatric patient with a Zimmer frame could have got in with time to spare.

  ‘He saved three Jewish people who’d been hidden in his shed. Killed some Nazis to protect them.’

  The lift crawled to the next floor down. ‘I guess you’ve heard everybody’s stories quite a few times by now.’

  ‘Job van Wiel’s stories at least were new, but he’s going home soon.’

  ‘One less person to tell you his war stories.’

  ‘I’ll miss Kars. He came to see me the other day, without his mother that time, so kind. He and Mark know each other, of course.’

  ‘They do?’

  ‘They were friends at school. They both . . . they felt they had a lot in common.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘After Agnes . . . after Agnes died . . .’ She closed her eyes. ‘I thought this would be easier. That I could talk about her. But it’s still . . .’ tears ran down the gullies that wrinkles cut in her cheeks, ‘it’s still so hard. Anyway, Mark recommended this place to Kars. For his father to stay in when he was recovering from his hip replacement.’

  After I’d escorted Mrs Visser back to her room, I cycled towards the band of canal rings that had Centraal station at their centre and I thought about the different generations. Francine Dutte said her grandfather had been a resistance hero and gave interviews in the papers about how important he’d been to her. The war threw long shadows. Not so long ago, an eighty-year-old woman had confessed to the murder of a man in 1946, the year after the war. She’d thought he’d been a Nazi sympathizer, but in reality he’d been in the resistance. His cover had been so good that even other resistance members hadn’t known about it. She shot him on his own doorstep.

  My father once told me that when he had just joined the police – that must have been the early sixties, only fifteen years after the end of the war – when Germans asked him for directions, he sent them the wrong way. Ten years before that, someone like Kars van Wiel’s grandfather got a medal for shooting Germans during the war. Today we were all friendly, didn’t even ask them to give our bikes back but politely pointed them the right way if they wanted to visit the Anne Frank house. When I’d been in uniform, we were happier with the German tourists than with the English ones. Less drinking and more sightseeing. I’d read somewhere that Amsterdam had the highest ratio of tourists to inhabitants in Europe. Less than a million people lived here and more than two million visited every year.

  I was so close to Centraal station that I might as well talk to the security guard again to check if he had seen Frank Stapel when he’d put the bin bag in the locker.

  The same guard was on duty in the stored luggage area. His uniform was still immaculate. He smiled when he recognized me. ‘I knew you’d want to know,’ he said. ‘I talked to my boss, asked if I should call you, but she said you’d come back.’

  ‘What did you want to call me about?’

  ‘The tapes,’ he said. ‘The CCTV footage. I’ve got it lined up to when Frank Stapel gets here. I found it for you,’ he said. ‘I found the exact spot.’

  I looked up at the CCTV camera, trained on me like a gun. ‘Show me,’ I said, and stepped into the office where Tessa had sat less than a week ago.

  The security guard gave me his chair. The edge was damaged and some of the stuffing was coming out. He stood behind me, reached over my shoulder and pressed play. He smelt of cigarettes and coffee. The screen flashed to life.

  ‘There he is, can you see?’ he said.

  I nodded. The images were jerky but clear. A man walked into the stored luggage area. He had his back to the camera. He wore a leather jacket and carried a bin bag in one hand.

  ‘You have one down every corridor?’

  ‘Yes, we’ve got footage of him coming in, too.’

  ‘Nice.’

  The man stopped by the lockers. He looked for one that was still free. He stepped back a row, and that was when he turned towards the security camera. I recognized that face with the snub nose from the photo in Tessa’s bedroom and from when we’d seen his body lying on the pavement. It was Frank. He opened a locker, C7, and lifted the bin bag in. He closed the door, walked up to the pay point and inserted a card. The machine spat out a ticket. He undid the front of his leather jacket and put the slip of paper in the inside pocket. Then he walked out of the field of vision of the camera.

  ‘Nice job. Well done finding it.’

  He showed me a wide grin. ‘Thanks. My mum said I shouldn’t take this job, that it would be boring. It’s been anything but.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ I said. ‘Is this your first week?’

  He grinned again. ‘Is it that obvious?’

  ‘Just how new your uniform is.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘Sorry, I never asked your name.’

  ‘Carl. Carl Renburg.’

  ‘Can you show me again, Carl?’

  ‘Sure.’

  I watched it five times. Saw Frank come in all alone, lift the bin bag and put the ticket in the pocket of his leather jacket.

  ‘How’s the girl?’ Carl said. ‘Tessa? How’s she doing?’

  ‘It’s tough for her, but I think she’ll be okay.’

  ‘Good, that’s good.’

  ‘Can I see it once more?’

  Frank held the bin bag by the top as he walked in, keeping it away from his body, as if he were putting the garbage out on bin night. But when he positioned it in the locker, he placed his hand under the bottom. He didn’t just shove it in. After he’d closed the door, he stood there for a second. Dipped his head before setting off to pay. As if he’d said a little prayer.

  I cycled home. The sofa was still by my front door. I really needed to get that taken away tomorrow. My mother was in the spare room with the door closed. It was quiet inside. I went into my study. Pen in hand, I stared at my drawing. Frank Stapel had been wearing his leather jacket when he’d put the skeleton in the locker. He hadn’t been wearing it when he’d fallen from the terrace. How had the jacket come back to Tessa? That was the key to this. Had she been with him on the terrace? I imagined the scene. Tessa had come to the building site and they’d had a few drinks on the deserted seventh floor. Could have been romantic enough for a recently married couple. Had a few drinks, then he’d persuaded her to come o
ut on the terrace with him to have a look at the view, because it had been a lovely evening. They’d joked around, maybe kissed; he lost his balance and fell. She got scared, grabbed the drinks, the picnic, his jacket, and ran back home. Waited until the call from the police came. Distraught, partly because of guilt, partly because of grief. Or maybe they’d had a plan concerning the skeleton. It went wrong. He died. She kept the jacket and the ticket. No. She would have just thrown the ticket away.

  It couldn’t have been her.

  I crossed her name out. Someone else had taken the jacket back to Tessa’s flat. Someone else had been with Frank at the time of his death. Someone who’d watched him fall, or maybe someone who’d pushed him, as Tessa had said at his funeral. Then that person met Tessa to give her the jacket back. She would know who it was. I would call her in for questioning at the police station tomorrow, or interview her with Thomas. That would remind her of the day that Frank had died, and she would tell us what had happened. What it had to do with Dollander, I wasn’t sure. I wrote his name in a different colour pen, right in the centre of the paper.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  The next morning, I was sitting at my desk with my first cup of coffee, reading through the specs for glass panels to check how much force they were supposed to hold, when the boss came in.

  ‘I wanted to tell you guys this in person,’ he began.

  Thomas looked up.

  I couldn’t tell from the CI’s thin face if this was going to be good or bad news. He seemed poised between concern and excitement.

  ‘I talked to the burgemeester at length last night,’ he continued, ‘and we’ve decided to completely change the scale of this operation. Now that we’re looking for Dollander.’ He pulled back the chair at the desk opposite mine and joined Thomas, Ingrid and me. For a second I thought he was planning on personally working with us on this case. Even though that was clearly not his plan, having him here was unusual enough to make me worried. Did this mean we were no longer on the case? Had it gone to a different department? I needed to use the bathroom but couldn’t walk out while the boss was still talking. I felt as if I was back in kindergarten, when I’d needed to ask for permission to go. These meetings were never long; I could wait it out.