A Cold Case in Amsterdam Central

by Anja de Jager

  ‘Not an interview?’

  ‘It was very low-key. I didn’t bully her, if that’s what you’re afraid of.’

  ‘We’ve got nobody to back your story up. That’s what worries me.’

  ‘We’ll find her,’ I said. His running gear was hanging to dry over the radiator again.

  ‘She did say she wanted to die.’ He followed my eyes. ‘Sorry, it got rather wet. In the rain.’

  ‘She didn’t mean it literally. It was just an expression.’

  ‘The parents—’

  ‘She knew something. Something about her husband’s death. Remembered something. There’s the leather jacket.’

  ‘The parents think that Frank Stapel’s death was an accident. That you’re needlessly going on about it. They claim that you made Tessa snap, were bringing it all back to her.’ He rolled his chair back, pushed it until he was beside the radiator. He lifted the running top. Fingered it. Turned it over. Touched the back.

  ‘When I got there last night,’ I said, ‘she was writing thank-you cards to the people who’d gone to the funeral. Her mother had asked her to do that. I don’t know how that wasn’t reminding her of her dead husband.’

  His running top must have passed the test, as he folded it in two, and again, and stuffed it in a sports bag with a flame drawn on it in white, the symbol of the police force. ‘You’re convinced the husband was murdered?’ He picked up the shorts. Tested the wetness of the waistband. Stretched the material. ‘You arrested the brother.’

  ‘It’s all connected.’

  The boss looked over his shoulder, half bent over his sports bag. Behind him, the rain continued to wash the windows. I was tired. I got my notepad out and started to draw circles. I didn’t want to draw the path of the raindrops, didn’t want to register how they started at the top of the window and slowly slid to the bottom. Circles were neutral. Beginnings and endings all rolled into one, never stopping, never starting. Not just going down but also coming up again. My pen kept going round, making the circle’s outline thick. It spun off to a new circle, next to the old one but attached by the pen’s line. The circles were thick like wedding rings. I filled them in so that they were coins instead.

  ‘She called you twice.’ He put the shorts back over the radiator. ‘Maybe it was a cry for help.’

  ‘Twice? Not yesterday. She called me from Centraal station, of course. Then she called me last night. The cry for help, as you call it.’

  ‘Why did she call you?’

  I thought of the sounds I’d heard. ‘She sounded panicked. Really upset.’

  ‘So that’s why—’

  ‘Why I went out looking for her. Yes.’

  The boss nodded. ‘I’m concerned about you, Lotte.’

  ‘You don’t need to be.’

  ‘Are you sleeping? Are you eating?’

  ‘My mother’s staying with me. She had an accident.’

  The boss raised his eyebrows. ‘Is she at least cooking for you?’

  ‘She’s broken her arm. She can’t.’

  ‘If you need to take some time off—’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Ingrid said she’s got some spare time to work with Thomas, if you need time off.’

  ‘She told you that?’ She was saying anything to get to the other part of the investigation.

  ‘She’s concerned about you too.’

  ‘All those people concerned about me. How nice. But I’m fine. Nothing to worry about.’

  I was about to leave when Thomas popped his head around the door.

  ‘Eelke and his lawyer are ready for us,’ he said.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  It had been seven hours since we’d arrested Eelke, but I could still smell alcohol coming from his every pore. He’d had another four or five drinks before Thomas had turned up. He’d drunk as if he’d found water after ten days in the desert. Maybe that was what being dry for years did to you. His lawyer, a well-dressed Moroccan man, sat next to him.

  ‘You were with your brother on that roof terrace.’ Thomas said. We’d agreed he’d take the lead. ‘Tell us what happened.’

  ‘No comment.’ Eelke’s voice was soft.

  ‘That’s not what you said last night. You told my colleague here that you were with him.’

  ‘I don’t know what I said.’

  ‘There’s no point denying it now,’ Thomas said. ‘You were with him on the roof terrace, you have the keys to Tessa’s flat, you put the jacket back the next day. You’re the only one who could have done that. Did you kill your brother?’

  ‘Frank’s death was an accident.’ Eelke’s voice was calm. Resigned.

  ‘So tell us what happened.’

  ‘We had an argument,’ Eelke said softly. ‘I pushed him. He fell back against those glass panels and they just gave way. They pivoted and he fell through. Then they collapsed after him. I took our stuff, ran and left the building.’

  ‘How is that an accident?’ Thomas asked.

  ‘Those panels should have held him. It was just a soft punch.’

  ‘Which was it? A push or a punch?’

  Eelke shrugged.

  ‘A push or a punch, Eelke?’ Thomas repeated.

  ‘What does it matter? He fell back and those panels collapsed.’

  ‘He fell and you ran away.’

  Eelke laughed, a bitter laugh like the one in the car early this morning. Was that what this had all been about? Just two brothers fighting over a woman? Like the man who’d killed Agnes Visser, maybe living next door to temptation had been too much.

  ‘Did you argue about Tessa?’ I asked

  Thomas looked at me as if to say: not everything is about this girl.

  ‘Tessa?’ Eelke looked genuinely puzzled. ‘No, it was about his stupid plan.’

  ‘To do with the skeleton?’ Thomas asked.

  Eelke looked at his lawyer, who nodded as if to give him permission to continue. ‘Yes, he’d seen the boss dig it up that morning.’ He dropped his head and stared down at the table.

  I was ready at that point to stop the interview and send a car out to arrest Kars van Wiel. I could just imagine the bulldozer digging up a skeleton and somebody putting it in a bin bag to dispose of at the building site. Where had the skeleton been? At Kars’s house?

  ‘He saw it that morning?’ Thomas calmly continued his line of questioning, as if Eelke hadn’t just given us what we wanted. ‘But Frank hadn’t been on site.’

  ‘No, he was doing another little job.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t know. At some house somewhere. He told me he’d seen the boss dig up a skeleton in the garden. Frank had been painting one of the upstairs rooms and had a perfect view of it.’

  ‘His boss didn’t know your brother was there?’

  ‘No, Frank told him he’d already finished but he had to touch up here and there.’

  ‘So then he sees the guy dig up bones in his garden.’

  ‘Right, and stuff them in a bin bag. Then he put the bag in the kitchen and headed out. He didn’t know there was anybody else in the house. Frank grabbed the bag and stored it at Centraal.’

  Thomas pulled up his eyebrows as if this was the dumbest idea ever. ‘But why?’

  ‘Frank had this stupid plan. He thought we should do something with the skeleton. Put pressure on his boss. I don’t know.’

  ‘You mean blackmail?’ Thomas said.

  Eelke shrugged. ‘Most ridiculous blackmail plan ever then, because his boss didn’t want the skeleton back. He told me that over the phone, but Frank wouldn’t believe me. The guy didn’t come. He didn’t bother turning up.’

  Of course, Kars must have thought it was just a Second World War skeleton and didn’t know he’d dug up some of Dollander’s bones as well. Did he even know the second skeleton was there?

  ‘Which guy?’ Thomas said. It was the first time I remembered there was more than one boss. My heart rate sped up and my mouth felt dry. Another boss doing work on the kind
of creepy house that Tessa had mentioned.

  ‘And then Frank got angry with me. We’d waited over an hour. He said I’d messed up. Hadn’t set up the meeting properly. He said I’d only had to do one thing and I’d managed to screw that up. He shoved me and then I punched him. He should have just left those bones where he found them.’

  ‘Which guy?’ Thomas said again.

  ‘We didn’t even want that much money to give him the bones back. I told the guy to bring the money to the site. We watched from the roof terrace so we could see him coming. But he didn’t even bother to turn up.’

  ‘Eelke.’ Thomas’s voice was loud and Eelke raised his head suddenly, as if he’d snapped out of reminiscing. ‘Eelke, which guy were you trying to blackmail?’

  ‘What’s in it for me if I tell you?’

  ‘If you cooperate, it will make a difference. I know your brother’s death was an accident. We know you didn’t mean to kill him. All of this matters.’

  Eelke swallowed. ‘It was Mark,’ he said. ‘Mark Visser.’

  So this was how much it hurt when all your hopes were destroyed. Thomas looked at me. Maybe I’d made a noise. In his eyes I could see only pity.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  In the little garden outside the police station, a few bees were feeding from the small blue flowers of the forget-me-nots. They flowed from flower to flower, perpetually in motion, only pausing to collect pollen to bring back to their community. Their movement was hypnotic and graceful. They weren’t something to be frightened of but something to be admired, with their work rate and community spirit. I straightened up from observing them only when some of my colleagues entered the garden and the beep that the door made when they swiped their cards through the reader pulled me out of my reverie.

  The sound reminded me of my first day back at work. I’d arrived in Amsterdam the evening before, but it was only when I’d swiped my entry card through the reader at the police station and had seen the lights flash up green that I felt like I’d come home. Before I’d been forced to take four months off, I had never been away from work for more than a week. The need of my fellow colleagues to sit in a caravan for three or more weeks every summer never ceased to amaze me. For me, work had been much more fascinating than any holiday could possibly be. When I was married, neither my husband nor I had wanted to be away from our jobs for any length of time, and after the divorce, the thought of leaving home and employment to sit somewhere with a group of strangers became even less appealing. No, it was when I got to work that I felt I was finally back where I belonged. How wrong I had been.

  Now one of my colleagues asked me if I was coming, holding the door open for me.

  What could I do other than go through? Only a few weeks ago I’d been happy to be back inside the station. Now I was already lingering in the garden.

  I went through the door and faked a smile at my colleague who’d held it open.

  I went for a very early lunch and sat at my usual table. Ingrid joined me. I would have preferred to be alone but didn’t have the energy to tell her to go away. She stared at me from over her salad. She picked at a few lettuce leaves with a fork. Missed most of them and ended up with one rocket leaf speared on the fork’s teeth. Her shoulders were hunched forward. ‘This isn’t what I expected from working with you,’ she said

  ‘What did you expect?’

  ‘That I’d learn from you.’ She brought the fork to her mouth. Chewed the leaf. Slowly. ‘That you’d show me how it’s really done.’ She pushed some sweetcorn to the side, moved a few pieces of beetroot to the centre.

  ‘You’re coming with me to my interviews. You’re part of all the team discussions. What more do you want?’

  ‘I thought, from reading your case studies, that it would be different.’

  ‘Different how?’

  ‘More . . . I don’t know. You’re clearly committed to work.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘The work you did before, that seemed more alive.’

  ‘Alive. What does that mean? It took a long time. Many meetings. Many interviews. What you read about, what you saw, that was only part of it.’

  ‘I listened to the tapes.’

  ‘What tapes?’

  ‘The ones where you talked to that murderer. The tapes of the interviews. I studied your technique. I learned so much from that. How you got to the answers. How you talked to him for hours. Got close to him until you found the truth.’

  I put my sandwich down. The last bite seemed to jump up through my throat and back into my mouth. I swallowed. Thomas had let her listen to the tapes. I guessed they were part of the archives now.

  Ingrid continued pushing parts of her salad from one side of the plate to the other. Equal-sized dice of vegetables covered by an orange dressing. Rocket leaves ended up on a small pile. Another type of lettuce, which looked more like seaweed than something you should have for lunch, was collected in the centre of the plate. ‘Now you were wrong all along, weren’t you? You never thought it could be your childhood friend,’ Ingrid said when she was finally happy with her food arrangement. ‘You’ve given up so much for your job. That is so exciting. That’s what I want to be like. I wanted to see how to become like that.’

  ‘You’re crazy.’ I pushed my plate away.

  ‘You lost your husband, you got shot—’

  ‘Yes, I got shot. How’s that good? How’s that something you want to imitate?’

  ‘You’ve been . . .’ She swallowed. Paused. ‘You were my hero. I wanted to be like you.’

  ‘Like me? Why would you want to be like me?’

  ‘You’re a role model. When we studied your cases, we all wanted to be like you. Now it’s just work.’

  I shook my head. ‘That’s insane. Why would you want to be like me?’ I knew I was repeating myself. ‘My husband left me and I live alone in a flat; apart from that, I’ve got a cat and my mother staying. Yes, I’ve been shot and so I’m still in pain every day.’ I had to stop myself from rubbing my shoulder. ‘You’ve got some stupid romantic notion about what I’m like. But if you think that this is “just work”, you’re so wrong. Filling in endless reports and paperwork is “just work”.’

  ‘I thought you and I . . .’

  ‘That you and I what? Would have cosy chats about my fucked-up life?’

  ‘But it’s just all lies anyway, isn’t it, Lotte? You told me you found Mark Visser’s sister’s body. Well, I read the files and you’re not in there. You’re not even mentioned. You made it all up.’ She got up. ‘It’s all lies.’

  All lies. If only. Then I would not have seen my classmate’s dead body.

  She rested her tray on the back of the chair. ‘Why did you do that? To sound more interesting?’ She pushed away.

  I deserved her anger, but not for the reason she thought. I took my old notebook out of my handbag and looked at the drawings I had made as a child. ‘This wasn’t Mark’s,’ I said. ‘It was mine.’

  In her face I saw the desire to believe me fighting with her suspicions. I knew exactly how that felt.

  ‘It was mine,’ I said, ‘and I was too late to save her.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  I closed my eyes. What did it all matter now anyway? After Mark had figured out that the neighbour had lied, he and I had gone to confront the man. We rang the doorbell in vain.

  ‘He’s not here,’ Mark had said. ‘Perfect. Let’s check his garden.’

  Even as I helped Mark carry the ladder, I didn’t want to go over the fence. But when Mark had gone to the top and held his hand out for me to follow him, I climbed up anyway.

  Mark stood still and stared at something in the garden, close to the shed.

  He turned to look at me. His face had crumpled in on itself, like Piet’s did when he was reading. ‘That’s her hair ribbon,’ he said. The bright purple strands fluttered from a bare branch of the tree.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said. ‘Let’s call my dad.’

  Mark didn’t
listen. He walked up to the ribbon. I was close behind him. We stopped at the shed. I held his hand. It was shaking in mine. I wanted to look at the cat and I wanted to look at the sky and I wanted to look anywhere else, but together we looked through the window of the shed. And saw Agnes’s dead body.

  The memory of seeing her in that shed would haunt me for ever. ‘When I first questioned the neighbour,’ I said now, ‘she was still alive. If I’d known then that he’d lied to me, I could,’ I shrugged, ‘I could have called the police, I guess, and they could have rescued her.’

  Ingrid frowned. ‘Are you sure? Let me check the files, but that’s not what it seemed like to me.’

  ‘I wish it wasn’t. But when I saw her . . . she’d only just died.’

  Thomas arrested Mark, and that evening I went home and played cards with my mother. Whatever hope I’d had that her lonely life wasn’t going to be mine had been cruelly destroyed. I tried not to think about him.

  The next morning Thomas passed a message on. Mark had asked if I could visit his mother.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  As I went up to Mark’s mother’s room, I tried not to think about why he had asked me to go. I was shocked when I saw her. I hadn’t thought that two days could make such a difference. She had already been thin, but now the cancer showed in her face, the disease eating her up from inside until there was nothing to protect the skin from rubbing against the bone. The skin of her face hung loose around her skull. The arms of her chair were a necessity to keep her upright and in shape, like an exoskeleton.

  ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I can’t get up.’ She had opened the door with the buzzer that was within reach of her claw of a hand.

  ‘Have you eaten at all? Since I saw you last? Is there anything I can get you?’

  She shook her head, pulled her lips into a macabre grin. ‘I can’t keep anything down. We had set an end date, that doctor and I. I was going to die on Tuesday. Now I need to wait. To see what’s going to happen to Mark. I couldn’t die while he was in prison.’

  I could see the shape of her teeth through the skin of her cheeks. ‘I’m sorry.’