‘Don’t be. He didn’t do this. I know you’ll sort it out. I know you believe in him, otherwise you wouldn’t have come here.’
I sat down close to her, didn’t know what to say other than sorry again.
‘Your mother called, did you know that?’
‘Yes, she said.’
‘It was funny, just like the old days.’ She coughed and took a sip from a glass of water standing next to the buzzer. A buzzer with two buttons, one to open the door, the other to call for help. ‘The first time your mother and I talked was after you’d come to see me with your notepad, to ask questions about Agnes.’
‘I didn’t know you talked to my mother.’
‘Of course I did. She needed to know where you were. She would get worried otherwise. She worried so much about you anyway, running around all by yourself, that you didn’t have many friends. Just like that boy.’
‘Like Mark?’
‘No, not Mark, he always had lots of friends, always a houseful. He was a good boy. Like he’s a good man now, but you know that. You know he didn’t do this, that’s why you’re here. I know that.’
I swallowed. I wanted to believe that so badly. I couldn’t get my hopes up again.
‘No, I mean that other boy. Kars. Kars van Wiel,’ Mrs Visser continued. ‘He was running wild, especially after his older sister left.’
‘When did she leave?’ I was surprised that my voice sounded so normal.
‘She went to study in the States, I think. Nobody was doing that in those days. Kars, he missed her terribly. His father called, asked if Kars could come over to play with Mark. He used to work with my husband, you know, in the oil industry. They were both away a lot.’
‘What was he like? Kars?’
‘So angry. So upset. He really missed Barbara. He and his brother were alone with his mother, and his father away for months at a time.’ She looked down at the floor. ‘Like my husband, I guess.’ She coughed again and drank the last of the water from her glass. ‘Would you mind getting me some more?’
I got up, filled the glass in the tiny kitchen. It had a sink and a fridge but no hob or oven. It was just a space to store goods, tea and coffee. All meals were taken together, so there was no need to cook. This was a good place, it was clean, everybody had their own space, but still, I hated that this was the inevitable end. I hoped I’d die before I needed to go somewhere like this.
‘Tell me about Barbara,’ I said after I’d put the glass on the table next to the buzzer.
‘I never met her. She didn’t come back. Made a life in the States for herself, I guess.’
‘Older than Kars, you said. How much older?’
‘Kars was ten at the time, same age as Mark. She must have been a good ten years older. Kars was always in trouble, always so angry. He had a real temper on him, but he’s calmed down a lot. Both brothers have.’ Her eyes fell closed, the eyelids swollen but still creased, the skin under her eyebrows sagging as if to form a second eyelid.
I moved slowly to let her sleep. I must have made a noise, as she opened her eyes and stretched her hand out to me. It was trembling ‘Your mother said that you’ve been lonely.’
‘She’s one to talk.’
‘She doesn’t want her life for you. That’s what she said.’
The sudden pain in my chest took my breath away. I wanted to forget that it was my worry about my life turning into my mother’s that had made me sleep with Mark in the first place. It’s better not to have any hope. It’s much better not to take these chances in life so that you don’t get hurt. ‘Can I get you anything else? Another glass of water before I go?’
Her eyes closed again. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she murmured, more out of habit than because she even knew I was still there.
I placed my hand carefully over hers. The knuckles felt sharp. Bones like glass under my touch. I didn’t dare put the full weight of my hand on hers, afraid I would shatter her fingers. I touched them carefully, like you would touch precious china. Maybe this was goodbye. Tears were close to my eyes as I walked down the stairs.
I was halfway down when I saw Job van Wiel, Kars’s father, standing by the exit. He was leaning heavily on his walking stick. A small suitcase rested next to his feet. He was staring out of the window in the direction of the manicured garden that lined the path from the road to the entrance of the nursing home. His phone rang. He dug it out of the pocket of his corduroy trousers with one hand and placed his reading glasses on his nose with the other. He stared at the display before pressing a button with a careful index finger. ‘Hi, Kars, what’s up?’ A long silence. ‘Sure, that’s not a problem.’ He disconnected the call and took two careful steps from the exit to a large chair, dragging his suitcase behind him like a recalcitrant dog. He rubbed a hand over the smooth egg of his head, then rested both hands on his knees.
‘Can I can help you with anything?’ I said.
‘My son was supposed to pick me up. He can’t make it. Problems with his mother.’ He ran a hand over his head again, as if the egg needed polishing. ‘There are always problems with his mother.’ The bags under his eyes looked so deep that they could hold an espresso cup full of tears.
‘I can give you a lift. Where do you live?’
‘There’s no need,’ he said, but he picked up the suitcase.
‘Give me that.’ I held out my hand. ‘Most people take more luggage on a week’s holiday. How long have you been here?’
‘Five weeks. But I don’t need much.’
The automatic exit doors whooshed open. We walked to my car and he gave me the address. I waited until he’d clicked the seat belt in place before I started my questions. ‘I was chatting to Mrs Visser just now. She told me about your daughter.’ I kept my eyes on the path behind me as I reversed towards the road.
‘Barbara. Yes, that was such a long time ago. She went to the States.’
I put my indicator out and joined the traffic. ‘Is she enjoying herself there?’
‘I think so. I don’t know.’ His voice was soft. He had his head turned away from me, as if the other lane of traffic was holding his interest.
‘You’re no longer in touch?’
‘Oh, we are. Just not as much as I’d like. She calls us once a month and is always in a hurry.’
‘That’s a shame.’
‘She and my wife argued. She left. I was in Kuwait at the time. I travelled a lot. Worked with Mrs Visser’s husband. Middle East mainly. Wherever there was oil.’ His voice took on the tone of a storyteller recounting an oft-told tale. ‘We had a big party planned, with all her friends. I was going to come back for it, then drive her to the airport the next day.’
‘But she’d already left.’
‘Yes. My wife called, three weeks early. She said she and Barbara had had an argument and she’d gone.’
‘They didn’t get on?’
‘Always rowing, those two. We never really managed to make up. I wanted to fly out to see her. We’ve never been.’ Job pointed to the next crossroads. ‘It’s a right here at the traffic lights.’
We turned into a residential street.
I knew which house was his as soon as I saw it. The street was ordinary, but one house differed from the rest, and that was the one we parked outside. All the other houses were identical, sets of two tied together by a single roof. This house didn’t have a twinned neighbour. It stood alone. The other houses were 1950s or ’60s. This one was older. Prewar. I was reminded of the one house that caused the kink in the road when we went to see Mark Visser that first time. The house of Old Karel who’d refused to sell.
I undid my seat belt and rested both arms on the steering wheel. I remembered Tessa mentioning a creepy house. Not the house where Agnes Visser had died, but this one. Someone hadn’t sold here either, but I doubted it had been to hold out for more money.
I got out and held the car door open. I helped the old man with his suitcase. As we walked up the path, Tony van Wiel opened the door. His body fil
led the frame. ‘Detective Meerman. To what do we owe the pleasure?’ His arm barred my entrance as effectively as a traffic barrier.
‘I was at the nursing home and gave your father a lift.’
‘Do you want to come in?’ Job said. ‘The least I can do is make you a cup of tea.’
Tony stepped slowly aside. I hesitated. The last time I’d seen him, he’d smiled. Now his face was tense. I held my hand on the holster of my gun as I stepped over the threshold. The long, dark hallway led to a perfectly preserved 1970s kitchen. The wallpaper had a pattern of brown and orange swirls. Low-hanging metal lamps lit up a wood-veneer table and grey linoleum covered the floor. It was all eerily immaculate, as if someone had redecorated in a forty-year-old style only a week ago. From the kitchen I could see the garden. In the back was a patch of regimentally straight rows of pink tulips.
Tony followed me in. His heavy boots clumped through the hallway.
‘Have a seat,’ Job said. ‘Where’s Mum?’ he asked Tony.
‘She’s gone to bed. She was upset when Kars brought her back.’
Job frowned. ‘Where is he?’ When there was no reply, he put the kettle on the gas.
I sat down at the kitchen table. The skirting boards were a light brown that hadn’t been fashionable since the seventies. A black clock with red hands ticked away the seconds. There wasn’t a single scuff mark on the walls. The window ledges had been newly painted as well.
‘Have you lived here a long time?’ The straw seat of the chair dug into the back of my legs. At one point my mother had had a fridge just like the one that hummed in the corner. She’d replaced hers.
‘My wife has lived here since she was a little girl,’ Job said. ‘We can’t really leave. She gets confused.’ The kettle came to the boil with a loud whistle that sounded like a high-pitched scream.
‘It’s because you’ve never moved.’ Tony stirred sugar into his tea with a spoon with a little Delft-blue clog attached to the end. The spoon looked dainty in his enormous hand. His neck was triangular above the collar of his polo shirt. ‘Maybe you should think about it.’
Job raised his eyebrows. ‘That’s a change of heart. You said we should stay. I wanted to put it on the market before I went to the hospital. The stairs are murder on my hips.’
‘Love your garden,’ I said. ‘It’s huge.’ A property developer could have built three houses on that piece of land. I turned on my seat to face it. ‘You must have spent a lot of time getting it like that.’ The pink tulips dominated one corner. The flowers that had spilled their pollen on both sets of bones.
‘Something’s happened to it.’ Job stood up. ‘What have you done to my tulips?’ He stared at Tony.
‘I haven’t done anything,’ Tony said. He looked down at the spoon. His face was that of an obstinate teenager. His biceps bulged from the short sleeves, more tensed than holding the spoon demanded.
‘They weren’t like that. They weren’t in rows.’
‘Dad, shut up.’ Tony looked at me.
‘Does she know what’s out there?’ I made the words deliberately confrontational. ‘Your mother? Is that why she’s crazy? Because she’s got a dead body buried in her garden?’
The impact of Tony’s fist against my mouth knocked me off my chair. My head smacked on the linoleum floor and the thump reverberated inside my skull. The sound came before the pain. As the metallic taste of blood hit my tongue, I thought that at least Mark was innocent.
Chapter Thirty-seven
‘Hi, Francine.’ Her father looked at the wall calendar that kept track of which visitor was coming in. It helped him remember who had been to see him. ‘I didn’t know you were coming.’
On the table, she saw Thursday’s paper open to the interview with her. She pointed at it. ‘What did you think? Just tell me the truth, Daddy. Please just tell me the truth.’ She had to fight to keep her voice under control.
Her father, a shrunken figure in his chair, nodded. ‘Yes, maybe it’s time.’ He got up and took his bible from the bookshelf. He removed the cover and got a photo out. He pushed it across the table. She recognized the uniform. Of course she recognized it. Even though the photo was black and white, there was no mistaking it. The black uniform, the flame on the sleeve, wasn’t this the uniform that the evil people wore? The traitors? Even worse than the Germans, this was the uniform of those who betrayed their own country. Those who were on the enemy’s side. Those who took advantage of the situation and sided with the rulers: Dutch Nazis. She gripped the top edge of the photo, ready to tear it in half.
She stopped. The man in the photo was the spitting image of her father. The eyes were the same, the nose was the same. It could have been a younger version of her father wearing that uniform. ‘Is this . . .’ She couldn’t get the words out.
‘Your grandfather, yes.’ Her father looked away.
‘All those years you told me he’d been a hero.’ She found it hard to talk through the tears that tightened her throat. ‘You told me and Sam. How he’d been a hero and we should be like him. Well I guess Sam is.’ The press were going to have fun with this one. They were already calling the hooligans ‘neo-Nazis’ in the papers.
Her father stared at the photo. He didn’t touch it. ‘I have dreams,’ he said. ‘About my father. There’s a group of people, my neighbours, my colleagues. I have a shovel in my hand. There’s a hole. I’ve probably just dug it, and at the bottom is my father, dead, in his uniform. The other people look at me. They finally understand what I am. They don’t say a word, they just push me in beside my father, look at me with hate in their eyes and spit on me, big gobs of phlegm, as they fill in the hole.’ He smiled, an insincere smile, the corners of his mouth lifting but his eyes staying sad. ‘So ever since you told me they’d found his body, I’ve been waiting for this moment. Waiting for someone to say that they now know what I am. And to fill in the hole.’
‘What about Grandmother, was any of that true?’
‘Any of what? That she died in a concentration camp? Yes, that’s true.’
‘What happened? Why did the Germans—’
‘The Germans? The Germans didn’t do anything to her. Were you hoping that at least my mother stood up against them?’
‘No, I meant—’
‘She was a member of the Nazi party until her death. But they lost, of course. That’s when the neighbours came.’
‘The neighbours?’
‘Yes, they came, dragged my mother away and killed my father. The evening before Liberation Day, when it was obvious how the war was going to end. I thought they would kill me too, so I ran.’ He frowned. ‘Later I found out that after my mother was driven away in a truck, they moved into our house.’
‘Daddy, I’m—’
‘They put her in Westerbork. When all the Germans had gone and the Jews had been freed, they reused the concentration camp. Did you know that? They put all the NSB-ers and their wives and their children, if they were old enough, into those same camps. Scores died. My mother was one of them.’
‘And you?’
‘I was lucky, I guess. I told you the truth from there on in. I walked north to my aunt and uncle. I was lucky that I was so young. They took me in and nobody ever knew.’
‘You didn’t tell?’
Her father laughed. ‘If you’d seen how the children were treated. The teachers were beating them up, the other NSB children. They would line them up outside the school and give them each a kicking. The teachers! Until the children were bruised all over. There were two children in my class, their parents weren’t even full NSB members, but everybody knew they had been “wrong”. They were beaten up every day, by staff and other children alike. What did you think I was going to do? Give them another punchbag? Or invent a war hero? I was seven years old. What would you have done?’
‘But later—’
‘I should have told you? Even your mother didn’t know.’ He hung his head. ‘I’d told the same story so often, it didn’t even feel like a lie a
ny more. It felt as if my father really had been a hero. Only at night, only in the dreams, do I remember what he really was.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I should have stopped you. When you did the interviews. But I almost didn’t remember and I didn’t think anybody else would. It’s so long ago.’
‘You didn’t do anything wrong. It was your father—’
‘He was so proud of his uniform. I still remember that he came into my bedroom in his black uniform and his cap. He was never allowed to be a member of anything else before.’
‘Proud. That’s so hard to believe,’ Francine said.
Her father ignored her. ‘What are you going to do?’ he asked instead.
‘We should bury it. Christiaan can help, that’s his job.’
‘Bury. That’s an interesting word.’ He lifted his teacup to his mouth. His hands were shaking. The brown liquid slopped against the sides. It almost spilled over the edge, but was just about contained.
‘What should we do?’
‘I had hoped I would . . . that I would be . . .’ He put the cup down. He took his glasses off and wiped a hand over his eyes. ‘At least your mother’s dead. It’s the first time I’ve been happy about that. Happy that she’s no longer with me.’ He got up, using both hands to lift his body out of his comfortable chair. He looked out of the window. ‘I know what will happen here. When they find out.’ His voice was faint, and Francine had to strain to hear him.
‘Nobody needs to know.’ If only she could see his face, but she was talking to his back. He seemed to slump forward at her words, his back bent. He moved further forward until he was resting his forehead on the window. She got up. Put her hand on his back. Slid it further forward, around his waist, and gave him a hug.
‘But I know,’ her father said.
‘Dad, we can keep this quiet.’
‘I know where they buried him.’
‘You do?’ Francine pulled back and turned her father round. ‘Oh Dad.’ However much she wanted to protect her good name, she couldn’t keep that quiet. Even though her grandfather hadn’t been in the resistance, she still felt this overriding need to do what was right. She hated that about herself at that moment. Knowing full well that this was the last time anybody would think of her grandfather as a hero, she called Thomas.
A Cold Case in Amsterdam Central Page 23
