A Cold Case in Amsterdam Central

by Anja de Jager

  ‘Why did you go there anyway?’

  ‘You told me about the leather jacket, and there was only one person who had a key. I knew Eelke had put the jacket in the flat. He was the only one who could have. So I went to see him, to ask him what had happened.’ She coughed with a dry hacking sound. I poured her a glass of water and she drank greedily. She gave the glass back to me and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘I didn’t want to believe it, that Eelke could have killed Frank. I thought there was an explanation and I was relieved when Eelke said that it was Kars’s fault. That Kars had killed him. But that wasn’t true, was it?’

  ‘In a way it was.’ It wasn’t even a complete lie. It would make things easier for Tessa to think that. It was so hard accepting that you had been totally deceived by someone. Plus if there hadn’t been problems on that building site, if they had installed the glass panels correctly on the roof terrace, Frank wouldn’t have died.

  ‘I wanted to believe Eelke so much,’ Tessa said, almost more to herself than to me. ‘I wanted that to be the truth, so I went to Kars’s house. Just to have a chat.’

  ‘A chat?’

  A nurse looked around the corner of the open door to check on Tessa. She seemed content to let us talk because she walked away.

  ‘Maybe not a chat,’ Tessa said. ‘I was very angry. I shouted at Kars, said I would call the police, call you, and tell you what he’d done. Then I heard this noise from upstairs. Screaming.’ She closed her eyes.

  I thought she’d fallen asleep, but she continued talking.

  ‘I got my phone out and I called you.’ She didn’t open her eyes. ‘Kars grabbed my phone and locked me up with his mother. He was giving her Valium, to make her sleep most of the time. The pot of pills was there and I didn’t know what was going to happen, I just knew it wasn’t going to end well. I thought he would keep me locked up there for the rest of my life. When he took his mother away, I got really worried and I decided that it was much better to end it there rather than go through years of abuse.’

  ‘Did he touch you?’

  ‘No. No, he never did. But I thought I only had one opportunity to do it. I took the pills. It felt like the best thing I’d ever done. The best thing I’d done since Frank had died.’

  I smoothed some hair away from her face. ‘It’s all fine now.’

  ‘No.’ Tessa looked at me. ‘No it isn’t, is it?’

  ‘You’re right.’ Didn’t I understand only too well how she felt? ‘It will get better. I promise you that. It will take time, but it will get better. Kars is dead.’

  ‘Good. That’s good.’

  Mental exhaustion made my body feel as if it weighed ten kilos more than usual. Tiredness intermingled with emptiness as I opened the front door to my apartment. I hadn’t heard from Mark, even though I’d sent him three text messages after I’d been debriefed.

  I’d discharged my weapon.

  That official police euphemism used to annoy me, but now I understood. I found it hard to admit to myself that I’d killed someone. I dragged my tired body up the first flight of stairs. Was I any better than Eelke? He had punched his brother with no intention of killing him. Had it been justified to shoot Kars to save Ingrid? To save Tessa? Even if, in the back of my mind, I thought it was what he’d wanted to happen. That was why he’d apologized to Ingrid. Why he’d raised his gun.

  I heard a commotion from the top of the stairs. The sound of a cat’s screams and something heavy falling on the floor pulled the skin on my arms into goose bumps.

  I suddenly found the energy to take the stairs two at a time. What was happening to Pippi? The door to my flat was open, which was probably why the noise had managed to travel down. It sounded as if someone was strangling her. Even when she’d been thrown in the canal a week ago, she hadn’t sounded this desperate. Her cries resembled those of a hungry baby.

  ‘I’ve nearly got it,’ a man’s voice said. ‘Can you just hold this?’

  ‘Not really,’ my mother said. ‘I’ve only got one hand. Well, I’ve got two, but you know what I mean.’

  The words were interspersed by loud meows.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I pushed the door open wide. A man in a courier’s uniform, wearing a pair of pink Marigolds, was holding Pippi by the scruff of her neck. Her eyes were bulging out of her head as the skin was pulled back tight. ‘Put her down.’

  ‘Lotte, the cat needs to go back to her owners,’ my mother said. ‘I called the removal company.’

  ‘I’m in so much trouble for losing the bloody thing.’ The man’s face was deeply wrinkled underneath short grey hair. ‘I need this job.’ The Marigolds gave his sincere statement a ridiculous edge.

  ‘I’m sorry about that,’ I said, ‘but I can’t let you have her.’

  ‘Lotte, be sensible. This man’s job is on the line, and it isn’t your cat.’

  Pippi looked at me from the man’s grip and meowed as if she knew that I would rescue her. ‘I’ll call the Americans. The owners. I’ll tell them I’ve got her.’

  The man shook his head and pulled the pet carrier closer to him with a booted foot. Pippi sprawled out as much as she could, as if she were dropping from a high building and needed to break her fall.

  ‘Can you at least put her down?’

  He laughed with a grimace. ‘You wouldn’t say that if you knew how long it had taken us to catch it. If you open the carrier, we can put it in and it will stop this almighty racket.’

  Her claws were out. I reached for her. Her nails hooked in the sleeve of my coat as if it were a life jacket. I put my arms around her shivering body. The man still held her neck with his Marigolds. We locked eyes.

  ‘It’s just a cat,’ my mother said. ‘You can get another one. Her owners will be missing her.’

  ‘Don’t do this,’ the man said.

  ‘Did they call you? Her owners?’

  ‘Of course they did. Wondered what had happened to kitty.’

  ‘Look, whatever I need to sign, just give me the forms. I’ll call your boss. This is my responsibility, not your mistake.’

  He sighed and let go.

  I put Pippi on the floor and she rushed into my study. She would be hiding under the desk. ‘Your mistake was a week ago. What happened?’

  ‘There was a whole bunch of stuff that they wanted to throw away. Furniture that they didn’t want to ship back to the States. There were some chairs, a sofa, and I put the cat down on those chairs. We had so much stuff to carry. I just forgot to pick it up later. The cat.’

  It seemed such a long time ago: that night that I jumped into the canal to rescue her. ‘Without me she would have drowned.’

  ‘Could you just sign this form?’

  ‘Give me the number of the Americans.’

  ‘I can’t do that.’

  I had lost so much today, I wasn’t going to lose the cat. ‘Give me the number and I won’t report you to Animal Protection. You left a cat in a carrier. You nearly got her killed. Losing your job will be the least of your problems.’

  The man paled. Maybe my argument had scared him, or maybe what had happened today showed in my eyes.

  ‘Or you can give me the number,’ I said, ‘and your problems will go away.’

  He gave me a piece of paper with an international number on it. I checked what the time was in the States. It was afternoon. I dialled. The phone rang with that foreign tone.

  A woman picked up.

  ‘Hi, Nancy, this is Lotte from upstairs. From Amsterdam. I have Pippi. Your cat.’ My cat.

  ‘Oh, I’m so glad. I’ve been worried about her. Is she all right?’

  ‘She’s okay.’

  ‘Excellent. Can you talk to the couriers to get her here?’

  ‘I don’t . . . I don’t think that’s a good idea.’ There was no way I was going to put her in a carrier again and give her to that man. ‘She’s been quite traumatized. I don’t want to put her through that.’

  The woman laughed. ‘She’ll be fine as soon
as she gets here.’

  I could hear the kids in the background. ‘Can we get a dog?’ the boy shouted.

  ‘Jonathan, be quiet. Anyway, Lotte, thanks for looking after her. Let me know when she’s on her way.’

  I shook my head, even though I knew she couldn’t see it. ‘I’m not going to do that. It wouldn’t be good for her at all. She’s . . . she’s just settling in here. I’d . . .’ I swallowed. ‘I’d really like to keep her.’

  ‘A dog, Mummy, can we get a dog?’

  ‘Please, Nancy,’ I said, ‘please can she stay here?’

  There was a moment of silence as she weighed up what to do. It seemed to last a long time.

  ‘I know what you mean, but I want her back.’

  ‘She’s an old cat. The stress of the travel. Do you really want to put her on a plane?’ I paused. ‘I’m not sure I can do without her now.’

  ‘And my husband was already complaining about the cost of flying her over. Okay,’ Nancy said finally. ‘I’ll miss her, but it sounds as if she’s got a good home.’

  ‘She does,’ I said. ‘I’ll look after her.’ I put the phone down and turned to the delivery guy. ‘We’re done here. I won’t report you.’

  After he’d left, I smiled at my mother to show that I wasn’t angry with her. Her ideas of right and wrong had always been too black and white. She would hand in a ten-euro note that she found on the pavement to the police, even if she needed the money.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘It’s all right.’

  She went into her room and I picked up my book. Turning the pages seemed to be a signal for Pippi to come back in and jump on my lap. Nowhere in Surviving Your Elderly Parents did it talk about arguments over pets, but there was a chapter on the difficulties that could come up when grown-up children had more knowledge than their parents. That was to do with modern technology, but I thought some of the advice would work in our situation too. The doorbell rang and I lifted Pippi off my lap and rushed to the intercom. ‘Hello?’ I said, almost breathlessly.

  ‘Did I catch you in the middle of something?’ Not Mark.

  ‘Hi, Thomas, what’s up?’

  He laughed. ‘I can hear you’re disappointed it’s me. Can I come up?’

  I pressed the buzzer and let him in. I stood with my hand on the door handle and watched him come up the stairs. He wasn’t out of breath. In better health than Ingrid had been. ‘This is late for a visit,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, well. We found something at Kars’s place. I didn’t want to call you. I didn’t want it anywhere on record that I’d talked to you.’

  ‘Not during the investigation. Sure.’

  ‘This is going to be a short one. I watched everything.’

  ‘Watched?’

  ‘He had a camera rigged up in that room.’ Thomas sat down on the sofa. ‘Not a nice man, that Kars.’ He picked up Surviving Your Elderly Parents and turned it over.

  I reached out to take it from him. ‘I’ve only got that because my mother is staying here.’ I put it back on the bookshelf. ‘Can I get you a drink?’

  He looked at his watch. ‘Sure, why not. I’ll have a beer if you’ve got it.’

  ‘Yup. Just wait here.’ I went to the kitchen and opened two bottles of Grolsch. I handed one to Thomas and we tapped the necks together in a collegiate salute.

  ‘Kars’s version of this would describe how to lock your mother in a room and leave her alone for whole days at a time.’ He rubbed the top of the bottle and took a gulp. ‘It was actually better for her when Tessa was there. She looked after her. The two of them talked. Even if it was only for a day, the mother was calmer then. But she became hysterical when Kars took her out of the room.’

  ‘This morning, you mean? When he took her home?’

  ‘He came back an hour or so later. I think you missed him at Job’s house by ten minutes at most. Anyway, what he did to his mother and to Tessa, that’s on there as well as your stand-off with him. And him threatening Ingrid.’ He shook his head. ‘Should never have put your gun on the floor.’

  ‘I know, I know. It was stupid.’

  ‘Ingrid is very upset. She’s blaming herself. She said she should have shot. She also said something about Agnes Visser, that it had been in all the papers that she had been dead for over ten months when Mark found her body. You never saw these?’ He took a handful of printouts from his bag. They were copies of newspaper front pages of the time. The headlines were only too clear: Ten-year-old brother more competent than police, Schoolgirl strangled by neighbour and Police fail to find hidden body for ten months.

  ‘My mother hid those from me. For my own good,’ I said with a wry smile. That had worked out well. I drank from my beer.

  ‘Anyway,’ Thomas said, ‘Kars must have seen you on the screen.’

  ‘I didn’t think he was in the house.’

  ‘He was in the basement. That’s where he had the monitors rigged up. Tony became a lot more talkative after his brother’s death. Told us how they got involved with Dollander in the first place. They ran some of his property projects in the early days. You can watch it when you get back.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘That other stuff is recorded too. Exactly how you acted and what happened in that room.’ He paused. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I think so. I didn’t have a choice.’

  He looked at me, his pretty-boy face serious for a change. ‘I know. You’ll be back at work soon. There’s just one problem.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I had some other tapes of yours. A couple of recordings of you interviewing that murderer. The ones that were . . . let’s say the ones that made me question you in the first place. I seem to have accidentally destroyed them. We all make mistakes.’

  ‘Thanks, Thomas.’

  ‘Sure.’ He put the empty beer bottle on the table.

  ‘Want another one?’

  ‘No thanks.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Time for me to go home.’

  I closed the door behind him and sat down, and Pippi jumped back on to my lap. She turned in circles to find the most comfortable position against my stomach. I scratched the top of her head, between her ears, and she purred. My book, back on the shelf, was out of reach, but maybe I didn’t need it. Maybe my mother and I were doing just fine. I stared out of the window to the darkness outside. Compared to the van Wiel family, we definitely were.

  Then my phone rang. It was Mark. I closed my eyes for a second before I answered it. Happiness stabbed my heart. Hope is hard to kill.

  Acknowledgements

  My mother was eight years old when she saw the Nazis arrest my grandfather. When he returned from the concentration camps, he was so emaciated that my grandmother failed to recognise him. But when I was checking some details at the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD) I read about what happened in the Netherlands to the families who’d been on the opposing side. After the war, many children of Nazi sympathisers were beaten and bullied on a daily basis by teachers and classmates alike. This inspired me to create the character of Francine’s father.

  Many people helped me with this novel and I’m grateful to you all. I’m fortunate that in Allan Guthrie I have a fantastic writer as my agent. Thanks to my editor Krystyna Green and all at Constable and Little, Brown for helping me make this novel the best it could possibly be.

  Finally, I’d like to thank my parents for sharing their stories.