A Cold Case in Amsterdam Central

by Anja de Jager

  ‘What?’ As if he’d read my mind.

  ‘That wasn’t related to this, was it? It was that same man who came with you the first time. Thomas Jansen? With a colleague.’

  ‘Sorry.’ I brought my hand to my forehead. ‘They came to see you and talked about Dollander?’

  ‘Yes, they said they had some information about his whereabouts. It didn’t make any sense to me at all. I’ve never met him. But now I’m wondering . . .’

  ‘I’m sure it has nothing to do with that,’ I lied in a soothing voice. Inside I was fuming. What were they thinking, talking so openly about Dollander? If they were trying to stir things up, they were taking a massive risk. I should have attended the team briefing. ‘He was probably involved in a property development deal,’ I said.

  ‘But what has it got to do with me?’

  ‘Nothing. Probably nothing.’

  ‘Neither does Frank Stapel’s death.’

  ‘You employed him.’

  ‘Sure, I employed him. He worked at one of my sites. He was a good worker. God, I even used him to decorate my own house.’

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘Ages ago. What I meant was that there is nothing wrong with employing someone, is there? He didn’t die at my building site. It was at Kars’s.’ He reached out and touched my arm.

  I pulled back.

  He stuffed his hand in his pocket and turned towards the external door. ‘I was going to ask if you wanted to go for a drink, but I guess I shouldn’t.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Well, thanks for seeing my mother anyway.’ He took a step towards the door, then turned back to me. ‘How do you do it, Lotte? How do you keep sane in your job?’ He put his hand against the door frame ten centimetres away from my face. I would only have to lean in a little to have those fingers touch me.

  To stop thinking of him caressing me, I laughed. ‘I don’t think I do. I don’t think I stay sane.’

  ‘But you weren’t really sane to begin with. You were a scary crazy girl from the start. Remember? You were going round asking all those questions, ringing doorbells, talking to the neighbours.’

  ‘Was that crazy?’

  ‘It wasn’t normal. You were tenacious. You just wanted to find Agnes.’

  ‘No I didn’t.’ I moved a hand through my hair. ‘It wasn’t only about that. It was also about finding information to get my father to come and see me.’ I shook my head. ‘You’re right, I was crazy, or naïve, or just blind. I thought that if I discovered something, he would come to Amsterdam.’

  ‘And did he?’

  ‘My mother never told him what I was doing.’ I laughed again, a single exhalation. ‘I’m sure he would have put a stop to it straight away. He would have known how dangerous it was. My classmate had gone missing, and I was out in the park trying to find her, talking to everybody.’

  He pushed away from the door frame and I could breathe more easily. ‘Yes, my mother didn’t like it. Even when I was with my friends, she didn’t want me combing through the park.’

  ‘But they never stopped us going that way to school. If it had happened today, there would have been a blockade. There would have been a mothers’ protest.’

  ‘Or they would have teamed up to make sure we were always accompanied to and from school.’

  ‘Why didn’t they?’

  ‘It wasn’t the park, though, Lotte, was it? We were perfectly safe in the park.’

  ‘Still, parents today . . .’

  ‘True. There’s no way I would let my kids do what you and I did. I’ve never been the same since.’ His face was baggy, especially around the jawline. The skin drooped, but somewhere in that man in his mid-forties, I could still see the child with eyes full of tears. His hair had been long then, but now, as he bent forward and stared at his feet, I could see his scalp shining through the stubble on the crown of his head.

  ‘No, nor me.’ I said it softly. ‘And it still didn’t get me what I wanted.’ I grimaced. ‘My only friend was gone. Then you were gone. My father never came to see me. My mother refused to take his calls.’ I offered up something that was still deeply painful to distract Mark from his memories. To drag the conversation away from his little sister. To no longer talk about what had happened over thirty-five years ago.

  ‘Sometimes I wished I’d never asked you for your notebook.’ Mark brushed his fingers over mine.

  It was as if he’d pushed all the air from my lungs. I leant against the wall and closed my eyes. I hadn’t wanted to give him the notebook with my drawings in it, and the notes I’d made in large, looping writing after I’d talked to the neighbours. If I hadn’t given it to him, we wouldn’t have found Agnes. And now we were standing here together in my hallway. ‘What happened after we found her?’ I said. ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘My mother came running out of the house. She was screaming.’

  ‘She called the police?’

  ‘Yes. She hugged me. Turned my face away from the shed.’

  That moment was a blur to me. ‘I can’t remember,’ I said again.

  ‘Then the police came. They sat me down, asked me why we . . . why I was in the garden.’

  I rested my hand on the wall, even though I wanted to put it on his chest. ‘Did you tell them I was there?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Maybe they talked to my mother.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. He was close. I only had to stretch my hand out slightly and I could hold his as I had done that day.

  ‘I better get going. Goodbye, Lotte.’

  I stayed glued to the black-and-white-tiled floor until he had left the hallway, to stop myself from calling out to him, asking him to come back. I shut the front door behind him. I didn’t want to go back upstairs. I waited for five minutes until I was sure he’d gone, then I followed him out of the front door, unlocked my bike and cycled along the canal in the falling darkness.

  I followed the route I had cycled so often. Along and across canals, the houses getting newer the further I went from my flat. I liked to think of the map of the city as the dissection of a tree, where the canal rings were like year rings, building up as the city kept growing. It held true for a few centuries. The centre of the city was full of seventeenth-century idiosyncrasy, with houses as tall and narrow as they could build in those days. Then, like a river that had burst its banks, Amsterdam had outgrown its canal rings and, no longer restricted for space, spread more widely. Roads now had enough space for cars to pass each other. The houses had gardens and weren’t split up into shops, businesses and flats. The space didn’t last. Further out, the flats came back. Sixties and seventies blocks this time, apartments that looked as if the architect had designed them with a toddler’s colourful bricks. To the left I saw the familiar shape of the church at the edge of the park. Its steeple was sharp as a knife, ready to cut a patch of grey out of the low-hanging sky and clear the way to heaven. It was made from bronze that had oxidized to match the pale green of the willows that grew along the canal on the outside of the park. The park that bordered my mother’s flat.

  I turned and cycled through the entrance. It had been so big when I was a child. I’d walked every possible route through it. It had taken me weeks to search every metre of it for clues. Now it took me just a few minutes to cross it. At the exit, I didn’t turn right, as I normally did, to go to my mother’s. After all, she was at my place and it was to avoid her that I was out on my bike. Instead I turned left and headed for Tessa’s.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  ‘How are you?’ I said.

  ‘Okay.’ In front of Tessa was a stack of black-rimmed cards and envelopes.

  ‘You’re having trouble sleeping.’ It wasn’t a question; I recognized the telltale signs.

  ‘In the beginning,’ she said, ‘I’d get his clothes, hold them tight, and sleep. I can’t do that any more. I still want to, make the hours pass quicker, but I can’t.’

  ‘I used to go for a drive in the middle of
the night when I couldn’t sleep.’

  She nodded. ‘If it gets bad, I need to get out of the flat. I walk. Try to get some exercise too.’

  ‘It hasn’t been great weather for walking at night.’

  She shrugged. ‘A bit of rain is the least of my problems.’

  She was probably right.

  ‘Your family must help you,’ I said. Someone had tidied up. The carpet was visible and there was somewhere to sit. Edges of the chaos were still there, but more under control.

  ‘They help make my life more difficult. Told me I should send cards to everybody who came to the funeral. I was going to put something on Facebook, but apparently that won’t do.’ She wrote her name on three of the cards and stuffed them in unaddressed envelopes. ‘You came to the funeral. Would you like one of these?’

  ‘Tessa—’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. To be fair, my mother did bring the cards and she’s coming back later to put the names on the envelopes. She can choose who to send them to. Anybody who cared about Frank was his Facebook friend anyway. Not my mother, though. Frank always thought she didn’t like him.’

  ‘That’s tough.’

  ‘He was wrong. I think she knew how important he was to me.’ She took the next card from the stack. ‘He was the strong one. She saw that.’

  I wouldn’t have written them, those death-edged cards that nobody wanted to get through their mailbox. I didn’t know anybody still sent them. Tessa wrote her name on the next card. She looked like a schoolchild writing her lines. Punishment.

  ‘But she would have liked someone else for me. She’s an intellectual snob. He wasn’t as smart as me. He didn’t have a proper education.’ Each of the sentences was accompanied by the swish of stuffing a card into an anonymous envelope. She stopped halfway through her name and lifted her pen off the paper. She stared at the letters. ‘But brains aren’t everything, are they?’The pen went back down and finished her name. Tessa Stapel. ‘Maybe if I’d been a bit more stupid. Thought a bit less about everything. Frank could do that: just enjoy life.’

  Outside, rain had started to fall again. The sky was only a little lighter than the rims of the envelopes. A mourning sky, crying for something. The grey was the perfect backdrop for the leaves of a tree, bright green, just arrived, young, not yet damaged.

  ‘How many of those do you have to write?’

  ‘My mother said seventy-three.’

  ‘I don’t even know that many people.’

  Tessa looked up and smiled. ‘Nor me.’

  ‘Her friends?’

  ‘The only generation that still cares about this stuff.’

  ‘Got another pen? I’ll give you a hand. Sign some for you.’

  The grin widened. ‘Isn’t that falsifying my signature?’

  ‘Only if your mother’s friends find out.’

  She pushed some cards my way and I picked up a pen. I wrote Tessa Stapel on a card. I looked at the writing; spikier than hers, more idiosyncratic. Memories came back of a time when I’d seen stacks of cards like these. Who had they been for? My grandfather maybe. I took the next card from the pile. Wrote my own name on it.

  Tessa looked at me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ve ruined it.’

  She took both the cards I’d signed, the one with my name and the one with hers, and tore them into small pieces. ‘I should keep writing them.’

  ‘Sure. I’ll put them in the envelopes.’We worked in silence and did ten in quick succession.

  ‘Shall I seal them?’ I didn’t want to bring those envelopes of doom close to my face, let alone lick them.

  ‘No, just leave them open. We’ll do that later, when my mother gets here. She’s bringing a sponge.’

  ‘So what about Eelke, does she like him?’

  ‘I used to go out with him, you know that? But she knew that was never serious, so she could like him for himself. It’s odd. He’s just as much a fuck-up as I am.’

  ‘Did Frank care?’

  ‘He always tried to prove he was good enough for me.’ She passed me another card. ‘He was worth ten of me.’

  I pretended to concentrate on sliding the card into the envelope.

  She put her pen down and evened up the stack of cards in front of her until all the black edges aligned. ‘He thought that if he just earned enough money, she would change her mind. It was stupid. That’s why he was working so many hours, in so many places. My mother didn’t care about the money. She only cares about education.’

  ‘So many places?’

  ‘Little jobs here and there. He painted Mark Visser’s house.’

  ‘Yes, Mark told me.’

  ‘Did a great job.’ Her voice shot up in enthusiasm. ‘Oh my God, have you seen his house?’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Oud-Zuid. One of the big houses.’

  Oud-Zuid. Expensive. Walking distance from Station Zuid. Walking distance to where Frank had died. ‘How long ago was this?’ I said.

  ‘We weren’t engaged yet, so it must have been eighteen months, two years ago.’ Tessa kept talking. Vowels and consonants glued together until they were no longer individual words but a stream of speech. ‘It’s wonderful. A nineteenth-century house but all modern on the inside. When you go through the front door, it’s meant to feel as if you’re going forward in time. From past to future. That’s what Frank said. He made sure the paintwork took pride of place. He had to be very careful with the plastering, to make it really smooth. There were no pictures yet to hide any mistakes or bumps. He showed me, when it was nearly done. I was . . .’ She rested both her hands on the cards, the hand with the double wedding ring on top. Suddenly she looked like a widow, even if she wasn’t dressed in black. Her eyes filled with tears. ‘Last night I slept with Eelke.’

  I put a few more cards into envelopes. I felt more like an agony aunt than a detective, and made an encouraging sound to keep her talking.

  ‘He looks so much like Frank,’ she said. ‘You must have seen that. And I . . .’ She sighed and turned the wedding rings round and round on her finger. ‘I was sad and lonely.’

  ‘I understand.’ I remembered Eelke hugging her at the funeral, holding her tight.

  ‘I needed . . . some comfort, I guess. It was either Eelke or alcohol. I’m not sure I made the right choice.’

  ‘You know you can call me if you need help or company.’

  She signed a few more cards.

  ‘There’s one other thing I want to ask you about,’ I said. ‘Frank’s jacket. When he fell, he wasn’t wearing a coat.’

  ‘It was a warm evening.’

  ‘But how did it get back here? Did you meet him earlier?’

  ‘I was at work all day. What does the jacket matter anyway?’

  ‘Come on, you’re a smart girl, Tessa.’ I reached out and touched her arm. ‘Frank was wearing this jacket when he put the skeleton in the locker.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have done.’

  ‘He did. We’ve got it on CCTV. He went back to work immediately afterwards, as far as we know. That evening he fell to his death. And somehow, as if by magic, the jacket found its way back to your flat. If Frank was with someone else that evening, if he met someone, that person would have a lot of information that we’d want to know. Did you see something that scared you? Were you at the building site?’

  ‘I’ve only been there a couple of times. I don’t have a head for heights and I don’t like the inside of buildings when they’re not finished yet. So fragile without the walls. As if they could fall over at any time. Or crumble. Frank always said I had too much imagination.’ She whispered the last words. There were tears in her eyes. She lifted her head and looked at me. ‘The jacket. You think he was wearing it when . . .’

  ‘When he fell? No, he can’t have been, because then he would still have been wearing it when we found him. Even if someone had taken it afterwards, we would have seen the marks. Like we did—’ I was going to say like we did on his skin, but bit the wo
rds back just in time.

  She sucked her lips between her teeth.

  ‘Tessa, if you were there, if you saw anything, if you held his jacket while he was working on something, doing something, you have to tell me. If it really was an accident and if someone gave you the jacket back, tell me. We won’t think badly of him. Or of you.’

  ‘Maybe he came home, from Centraal? Before he went back to work.’

  ‘We checked the time on the ticket and when he arrived at the building site. He wouldn’t have had enough time. He couldn’t have come back here.’

  Tessa dropped her shoulders on a short exhalation. ‘My mother’s coming soon. Thanks for helping me with these.’

  ‘Here’s my card again,’ I said. ‘If anything happens, call me.’

  She took it. ‘I’ve got your number stored in my mobile. From when you first gave it to me. When you came to tell me that Frank had died. Remember?’

  That seemed ages ago. ‘Of course.’ I scanned through the history of received calls. ‘This one, is that you?’ I showed her my mobile.

  She handed the card back. ‘Yes, it is.’

  I stored it under her name.

  Tessa opened the door. She stood close. On impulse, I gave her a hug. Her arms went tight around me. Her shoulders shook. The wetness of her tears soaked through in the nook of my shoulder, just above my collarbone.

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ I said, and wiped a tear from her cheek with my thumb.

  She showed the gap between her teeth in a watery smile.

  As I left the building, I came face to face with a woman my age whom I recognized from the funeral. Tessa’s mother. She had similar wrinkles to mine: the small vertical lines above her top lip, the lines that radiated out from the corners of her eyes into an age-defining fan, and that paper-cut-thin line between her eyebrows.

  ‘Detective Meerman?’ she said.

  I nodded.

  ‘I’m Vanessa Koning. Can we talk?’

  Chapter Thirty

  I shouldn’t have taken her to my mother’s flat, but it was empty, and the closest place where we could speak in privacy. Vanessa hadn’t wanted to chat in the corridor as she was worried that either Tessa or Eelke would overhear.