Girl in the Dark

by Marion Pauw

  “He’s a bad man.”

  “He’s still very emotional about Rosita’s and Anna’s deaths.”

  “They’d been fighting,” I said. “Two days before Rosita died. He stormed out in the middle of the night and never came back.”

  Iris leaned across the table toward me, her eyes narrowing a bit. “What was the fight about, do you think?”

  “She told someone about something. I heard them shouting about it. In the middle of the night, right through the wall.”

  My words seemed to please Iris Kastelein greatly. She leaned in even closer. “You’re sure?”

  I nodded.

  “And that’s what they were arguing about?”

  I nodded again.

  “Interesting.”

  This time I didn’t nod.

  “I had the feeling something in his story didn’t compute. Do you think Rosita might have threatened to tell Victor’s wife about their relationship?”

  “How should I know?” I started scanning the white wall looking for spiders. Maybe I could catch one and take it back to my cell. That way I’d have a pet.

  Iris Kastelein sat back in her chair. “I know this is hard for you. But we have to talk about the day Rosita and Anna died. You were the one who found them, weren’t you?”

  I suddenly started feeling very hot again. I felt the sweat running down my back, even though all I was wearing was my undershirt. “Yes,” I managed. “Yes.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “I saw the door was open and went in. They were lying right there.”

  “And were they already dead?”

  All that blood—I could see it again, in my mind. I tried shaking my head, but that didn’t get rid of the blood.

  “Ray?” asked Mo. “Did you hear the question?”

  “Yes,” I whispered. “They were already dead.”

  “Did you see anything else, before you went inside? Was there anyone else in the street? Neighbors? People you knew? Strangers?”

  I tried to think, but it was hard to remember what happened on May 17, 2003. At night, in the darkness of my cell, it was all very clear-cut and real. But trying to talk about it with someone else was hard.

  “No,” I said, though I was far from sure. “I don’t think so.”

  Iris Kastelein jotted something down in her notebook. This conversation was starting to tire me out. “I want to go back to my cell.”

  “Please, just a little longer.”

  I wanted to be strong, to answer all her questions. But the dough machine in my head was getting my thoughts all mixed up.

  “I think it’s time, actually,” said Mo from his corner. “We don’t want Ray’s stress level to rise.”

  “Oh, okay. Of course.”

  I got up. “Bye, Iris.”

  As I was escorted out by the guard, I heard her say to Mo, “That was the first time I’ve heard him say my name.”

  CHAPTER 42

  IRIS

  “Iris! Yoo-hoo!”

  I didn’t know very many people who, in this day and age, still hollered yoo-hoo, so I guessed it had to be one of my mother’s friends. It was lunchtime and I’d just run to the supermarket to buy the ingredients for a quick meal for me and Aaron. Spaghetti Bolognese. We had it for dinner at least twice a week.

  I turned to see Lina. She was holding a bag of potatoes and waving like mad, even though she was standing only a dozen feet away from me.

  “How lovely to see you, darling!”

  “Hello, Lina. I didn’t know you shopped here.” Lina lived around the corner from my mother, in Buitenveldert. This inner-city market was a far cry from her natural habitat.

  “I’m on my way to finger-paint with my sweet little Down-children,” she said with a wink, whereby she had a hard time keeping the other, not-winking eye, open.

  “Oh?”

  “Didn’t your mother tell you? I teach arts and crafts to the mentally handicapped. Every Wednesday afternoon.”

  “My mother never tells me anything, actually. Especially not the important stuff. How long have you and my mother known each other, anyway?”

  Lina, frowning, looked up at the market’s tiled ceiling. “Probably thirty-five years or so at least. Your mother had just moved to our neighborhood. I knew her neighbor—she’s been dead for years, but I won’t bother you by going into old wives’ details. It was the neighbor’s birthday, and that’s how we met. Agatha knew practically no one back then. And I had just stopped work upon getting married; that’s what we did in those days. So we’d look each other up. And after Carla and you left home, we started a bridge club, but that’s a whole other story.”

  “Was she already seeing my dad?”

  The frown-groove on Lina’s forehead got even deeper, as if I’d asked her to multiply three hundred thirty-five by six thousand eight hundred ninety-three. “No, your father wasn’t in the picture yet when I met Agatha. She only met him six months after she came to live here. I can still see her standing there blushing: ‘Lina,’ she said, ‘I’m going to marry that man. That man’s going to take good care of me.’ ”

  I was afraid I’d taken over Lina’s frown. “So she must have lived in another house at first.”

  “No . . . !” said Lina with a dramatic flourish. “No . . . she already owned the bungalow. That was quite something in those days. A woman owning her own home, with no husband in sight. We all secretly envied her a bit.”

  I wondered how my mother had managed to come up with the down payment on the bungalow. Nowadays homes like hers cost over a million. I knew she had gone to secretarial school, but I’d never heard her mention having had a job. I always blindly assumed my father was the one who’d bought the house. Who knew—perhaps my mother had a rich great-uncle stashed away somewhere who’d left her a nice little nest egg, like Rosita had. “How do you think she came up with the money?”

  Lina shrugged. “She must have had savings.”

  “Savings from what?”

  “Don’t ask me. She’d had a good job, she said.”

  A good job, at the same time as looking after a young child? It sounded pretty far-fetched to me. “Strange, though,” I said.

  “It sounds strange. But that’s the way the cookie crumbles. The older you get, the less you understand.” She glanced at her watch. “Gee, is that the time? I have to go, kiddo. My special little friends are waiting for me.”

  She gave a whoop that sounded something like “toodly-doo!”—a farewell salutation of the over-sixty crowd, I had to presume—and briskly marched out of the vegetable section clutching her bag of potatoes.

  As I hurriedly tossed a bunch of celery, a jar of spaghetti sauce, half a pound of organic ground beef, and a package of grated Parmesan into my basket, I wondered if Lina knew about Ray. I strongly suspected she didn’t.

  Back at the office I called the land registry. Within one minute I had an answer: the house was bought in 1983 for 150,000 guilders. In cash, no mortgage. It must have been an astronomic sum back then.

  “My favorite girl!” I hadn’t heard Rence come in. He wasn’t in the habit of wandering into my room out of the blue in any case. Normally I was summoned to his office.

  Rence sat down on the edge of my desk and crossed one leg over the other. He was wearing red socks.

  “How are you getting on with the Boelens investigation?”

  “Hmm,” I said.

  “Go on, tell. Who have you spoken with, what does the record say, first impressions?”

  “The stories are all pretty consistent; everyone I’ve spoken to says the same thing. Ray Boelens is a disturbed individual, the woman next door was using him, then she dumped him, and he blew his top. He’s never confessed, but has made some rather incriminating statements. Not only did he have a motive; he was also at the crime scene and he more or less admitted to owning the murder weapon. Not very helpful, any of it.”

  “Who have you talked to so far?”

  “Neighbors. Friends and relative
s of the victim . . .”

  “And?”

  “Well. The stepfather is a rather sleazy customer. Jailed for dealing drugs. With Rosita and Anna out of the picture, it turns out he’s the sole heir to a fortune left by his late wife’s uncle. Sounds like a motive, you might say. Were it not for the time gap—would you commit murder and then just sit around for years waiting for the uncle to die in his own sweet time? That’s what I’d call really planning ahead.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Then there’s the boyfriend. Boelens heard Asscher and Rosita having a fight not long before the murders. He heard Asscher shout something along the lines of ‘You shouldn’t have told her.’ Maybe Rosita told the wife about their relationship. A plausible motive, you might think. Except that Asscher was vacationing in Crete at the time of the murder.”

  “A hit man?”

  I shrugged. “It’s possible.”

  Rence picked up the photo of Aaron and me at the zoo and glanced at it. “What do you think? Do you think Ray Boelens is innocent? Is there even a single indication to think that?”

  “Except his own assertion?”

  Rence nodded and put the photograph down.

  “To be honest, nothing. Well, except for the fact that Ray doesn’t smoke and the perpetrator stubbed out a cigarette on the little girl. Not that that’s a very convincing argument.”

  “Clearly,” said Rence. “And what’s your hunch?”

  “I can’t say I have a very clear thought about it at this point.”

  He jumped up and shook his head vehemently. “No! I don’t mean thoughts! I mean your intuition! Come on, Iris. What does your heart tell you when you look at Ray Boelens?”

  “I feel confused,” I answered wearily.

  “We’re at a place where we either get a whole team going on this or we give up. From what you’re telling me, I guess it’s going to be the latter.”

  I hesitated. If it came out that Ray was my brother, and that I’d spent an inordinate amount of time on his case, I’d be in big trouble. But I didn’t want to leave Ray in the lurch. Not now that I knew Asscher and Rosita had quarreled right before her death. I could always give up later on. “I’d like to have another go at Asscher. He had a strong motive, and, as you just said, he needn’t have carried out the murder himself. He could have hired someone.”

  “Would you like me to have a look at the dossier?”

  “Please.”

  CHAPTER 43

  RAY

  The night after Rosita had drawn the curtains shut in my face, I couldn’t sleep. Weirdly, though, I wasn’t thinking about her—no, I was thinking about the day my mother brought me to the Mason Home.

  We had a little suitcase with us, packed with some of my things. Enough underwear for a week, three pairs of pants, five T-shirts, and two sweaters. And the bird encyclopedia. “I can always bring you the rest later, Ray.”

  The size of the suitcase had given me hope that my stay at the Mason Home would be temporary. After all, my mother knew I couldn’t live without my Lego Technic set, or my fossil collection.

  But when I asked her how long I’d have to be there, she wouldn’t look at me. Keeping her eyes on the road, she said, “No idea.”

  I was big for my age. Big enough to sit in the front seat. That’s why it was extra difficult for people to understand that I was emotionally delayed. At least, that’s what I’d heard my mother tell our neighbor. Later on she explained it to me as well. “People see a big kid, but they don’t get that you’re still very small inside,” she’d said.

  My mother and I were a family, and yet she told me I was going to love Mason, gushing about the homey dormitory, the varied menu, and the swing sets in the yard.

  She’d left the little suitcase in the cubby I was supposed to keep my stuff in. It had once had a lock on it, but since boys kept losing their keys, the school had stopped giving them out.

  “Later, when we say good-bye to your mother, you mustn’t cry,” said the nurse giving us the tour of the Mason Home. She put her arm around my shoulder, as if to show I belonged to her and not my mother. I promptly shrugged her arm off me.

  “We’re on our way to the exit. When we get there, give your mother a big hug and wave good-bye to her, like a big boy, all right? Don’t disappoint your mother, Ray.”

  I waited for my mother to explain about the emotional delay, but she didn’t. Instead she said, “Cute, aren’t they, those little pots of watercress painted by the kids.”

  The nurse smiled. “We’re always doing crafts projects with the children in here. Watercress is delicious and healthy, too.”

  “I think a nutritious diet is very important. Although Ray isn’t too fond of his vegetables. I always make him eat the healthy stuff first, before I let him have any meat.”

  “I’ll pass that along,” said the nurse.

  “It would also help if you allowed him to assist in the food preparation. Or if you’d let him grow vegetables in the garden.” My mother’s voice sounded different. I looked at her and saw that her mouth was a thin line and she was blinking her eyes a lot.

  We had reached the exit.

  I didn’t really believe that my mother was just going to leave me there. I thought it was something like the Last Warning: “I’m letting you come home with me this time. But I’m warning you: The next time you’re a bad boy, I’ll leave you here for good.”

  “Now it’s time to say good-bye.”

  My mother took my head in both her hands and pressed a kiss on my mouth. Then she wrapped her arms around me so tight that I was afraid I’d suffocate. My mother’s chest was heaving, up and down.

  “It’s hard, isn’t it,” said the nurse. She patted my mother on the back.

  My mother held me so tight and so long that I didn’t think she’d ever let me go. But in the end she did. There was black on her cheeks and her eyes were red.

  “You’d better go,” said the nurse. “That would be best.”

  My mother opened her mouth to say something, but no sound came out. She turned and walked quickly down the path, her head lowered, to the parking lot.

  I kept waving, though my mother never looked back. It wasn’t until she was at the car that she turned to look at me and shouted, “Behave yourself, Ray, you hear? Be a good boy!”

  I was a good boy. I didn’t even cry, did I? Just as the nurse had said.

  The tears came only in the night, when I was in bed.

  I eventually got used to the Mason Home. Even the bad things, like the bullying or the other kids making fun of me. But worse were the days when nothing happened. The days I just sat around in the Mason Home common room, which my mother had told me was homey and fun. But what good were hominess and fun to me? As if a bunch of flowery cushions and a cup of tea and a cookie could make me happy.

  CHAPTER 44

  IRIS

  In a sea of Volkswagens and the odd Saab, the Jaguar stood out. I assumed Victor Asscher had stayed faithful to his make of automobile. This one was a top-of-the-line model with beige leather seats. Aside from a crumpled-up windbreaker in the back, the car was spotless, as if it had just come from the dealer.

  The man was neat, extremely neat. I thought of the Mars bar wrappers, empty juice boxes, and even banana peels littering the floor of my car. I was his polar opposite, but then again, I drove an old VW Golf.

  The thought occurred to me that it was probably this neatness that made it possible for him to live a double life all those years. He was good at cleaning up the messes he left behind.

  “I’ve already told you all there is to tell.” Victor brushed past me coldly, his car key at the ready.

  “I wonder.”

  “Let me put it another way. I’ve already told you more than I wanted to. And besides, I’m in no way obligated to cooperate with your investigation. If you have any further questions, I’d advise you to talk to my lawyer.” He pushed the key’s unlock button. The Jaguar’s headlights lit up.

  “I could ask your
wife myself, if you’d rather not answer.”

  “You’d better not.”

  “Well, then?”

  “Not a day went by when she didn’t threaten me with something. Rosita liked to get her own way. But I knew she’d never actually go through with her threats.”

  “Really? So what was that huge fight you had with her about, just before she died? Wasn’t it about that?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Strange. Most people wouldn’t so quickly forget such a squabble if their mistress was murdered less than two days later. Rosita was threatening to tell Millie about your relationship, true or false? And that wasn’t very convenient for you.”

  “And what about it? Are you going to accuse me of killing Rosita? Of killing my own kid? Now you’ve gone too far.”

  “I would imagine you’d be afraid Rosita would tell Millie no matter what. Not a very nice prospect, that. And you could also have asked someone else to do the dirty work for you, naturally.”

  “I am asking you one last time to step aside.” He took his phone from his pants pocket and dialed a number. “Or would you rather find out what it’s like to be escorted off the premises by security?”

  “Fine, I’m going.”

  He put his phone away again. “Thank you.”

  An older man strolled past us in the parking lot. He had on a three-piece suit and walked with a cane. He was looking at us intently.

  “Good evening, Mr. Van Benschop,” said Asscher. Van Benschop? Was this Peter van Benschop’s father? Studying the man’s face, I realized I had seen him a couple of times before, at the office, when he’d come in for meetings with Martha Peters. Was Asscher his accountant?

  “Now, now, that’s no way to talk to a lady, Asscher.” He glanced at me briefly. “Especially not such a charming specimen as this.”

  “Good evening, sir,” I said.

  He stopped and stared at me, frowning. “Do I know you?”

  “I work at Bartels and Peters. You may have seen me there.”

  He put out his hand. “Antoine van Benschop.”