A Death at the Hotel Mondrian (Lotte Meerman Book 5)

by Anja de Jager

  I got to my feet, because a soft voice worried me more than shouting.

  ‘Did you know he wasn’t dead?’ he said. ‘Don’t you feel guilty? My father killed himself.’

  Julia threw me a look over her shoulder and pivoted until her back was against the wall. Her fingers gripped the material of the orange safety jacket. It was as if she’d been pushed back by his words.

  ‘You did know!’ He took a step forward. ‘You and your fucking family knew and said nothing. My father died!’

  I squeezed past Julia and pushed the guy away from her front door. He didn’t fight the pressure of my hand but let me guide him into the quiet street. I kept one hand on his shoulder and used the other to show him my badge. Charlie’s substantial presence at my back was comforting in case this was going to escalate. Based on what he’d said, I had a pretty shrewd idea who the man was and why he was here.

  ‘Calm down,’ I said.

  He pulled his arm free, then tore the baseball cap from his head. ‘The police.’ He glared at me. ‘You’re only here to cover up for your mistakes.’

  I looked behind me and saw Julia still standing in her doorway.

  ‘I’m guessing you’re Paul Verbaan’s son?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ His voice was defensive, as if in his mind he was adding: what of it? He put his cap back on, the right way around this time. ‘I’m Daniel. Daniel Verbaan.’

  Daniel. The fourth name in Theo Brand’s diary.

  ‘We’ll come back later,’ I said to Julia.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Come on in.’

  The neighbours in the houses on either side were at their windows, trying to catch every second of this unusual spectacle in their quiet street. I wanted to get this guy away from their prying eyes.

  ‘If you want to talk to me, I’ll talk to you,’ Julia said. She stepped back and pulled the door open wide.

  That took me by surprise. Daniel stepped forward and crossed the threshold. I followed him. I felt less in control than I wanted to be, but I couldn’t help thinking that this conversation was going to be very interesting.

  I checked Julia’s face as I went back in. She seemed calm and collected, and I wondered if I’d completely misread her emotions when she’d backed away from the door. Had she always intended to ask him in? Why would she do that – greet the son of her brother’s murderer?

  The thought popped into my mind that maybe Daniel was right and she’d known all along that her brother wasn’t dead.

  ‘Would you like tea or coffee?’ she said as calmly as if one of her friends had turned up. Daniel was a full head taller than her, but she looked him in the eye and didn’t back down.

  He shook his head. ‘Nothing from you,’ he replied.

  Julia shrugged as if his answer was uninteresting and sat down at the table. Whatever her emotions were, I couldn’t see any evidence of guilt. ‘That man was a fraud,’ she said.

  Daniel sat down opposite her and I took the seat next to him, ready to physically interfere if I needed to. ‘So why are you willing to talk to me?’ he said.

  ‘I talked to you last time too. As I said then, what your father did wasn’t your fault. Daniel, look, I know why you want to believe him, but that man wasn’t Andre.’

  ‘We talked for a long time,’ Daniel said. ‘I filmed our conversation.’

  The skin on my arms broke out in goose bumps. ‘You filmed him?’

  He ignored me. ‘I remember him from school. It’s him, Julia.’ He grinned at her. ‘You can’t fool me. The guy who came to see me is your fucking brother.’

  II

  The Troublemaker

  Chapter 8

  On the screen, I saw the man I’d seen yesterday morning. He was as neatly dressed as he had been then, almost someone ready to go to work rather than a man from London visiting Amsterdam for pleasure. Had he seen his trip here as work? Was he wearing a suit and tie because this was important to him and he’d dressed for the occasion? I couldn’t figure it out. He looked so ordinary: dark hair speckled with grey, small glasses, and a carefully groomed beard; once again it proved that it was hard to read people’s histories from their features. His eyes were squarely and confidently aimed at the camera, as if he was ready for his confession. The footage was paused.

  Daniel had given us the recording, and once we’d got to the police station I hooked it up to the bigger screen. Daniel had said it was probably for the best if Julia didn’t see it. She hadn’t argued and neither had I. She had maintained that this man couldn’t possibly be her brother.

  I had a printout of Andre Nieuwkerk’s photo in front of me: the school picture that had gripped me this morning. Had this awkward kid grown up to be the man I’d met yesterday? The way the three of us were sitting here – me, Charlie and Daniel – with Theo Brand projected large made it seem that he was in the room with us, so real on the screen that he was impossible to avoid. I would think of him by this name until we had evidence to the contrary.

  ‘What made you think this man was Andre Nieuwkerk?’ I asked. ‘It isn’t immediately obvious to me.’ I held the photo up next to the screen. ‘I can’t really see a likeness.’

  ‘It was something he said.’

  ‘You knew him well, then?’ Charlie asked. It was an interesting question.

  ‘Not him per se …’ Daniel took off his baseball cap, rubbed his head, and put the cap back on in reverse. His face looked vulnerable now that it was no longer shadowed and protected by the peak. A tuft of dark hair escaped over the adjustable strap and stood up straight. As if there was a teenager still hidden inside the middle-aged man. ‘He said something about Julia. We used to be classmates.’

  ‘You and Julia Nieuwkerk?’ I thought nothing could surprise me any more, but I was still taken aback that Daniel’s father had killed the brother of his classmate. I looked at the man with the too-youthful baseball cap in a new light. I could only imagine how horrific this must have been for him.

  ‘Yeah, we were classmates in primary school and then went to the same secondary school. So I knew her well and I knew her brother a bit.’

  Julia’s assertion that she’d always been willing to talk to him, that he wasn’t to blame for what his father had done, suddenly took on a different meaning. I had misread the situation from the beginning: when she’d stepped back, it had been to let him in, and that wasn’t because she’d known that her brother wasn’t dead but because this man used to be her friend at school.

  ‘The secondary school you went to, was that the school where your father was a teacher? The same school Andre went to?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the man who came to see you – let’s call him Theo, to be clear – he knew you?’ I said.

  Daniel nodded. ‘He said, “Hi, Daniel, it’s been a while. I last saw you when you and my sister used to cycle to school together.” I got the feeling that he said that because it would convince me.’

  I nodded. That made sense. I’d cycled with a classmate to school too. My mother had arranged it with another mother, so that we had company for the twenty-minute ride. It was a big step from walking to primary school to cycling to secondary school.

  It just didn’t seem like fireproof evidence to me.

  ‘Wouldn’t lots of people have known about that?’ I asked. ‘Any of your classmates, for example?’

  ‘No, because Julia didn’t want to be seen with me. She’d make me wait at the last bicycle tunnel, around the corner from the school, for exactly three minutes. It was only for a couple of months anyway, and then my mother told me I had to go by myself.’

  I looked at the photo of Andre again. I looked at Theo on the screen. I understood why Daniel had let the guy in, even if they looked like different people. If nothing else, he was someone who had clearly known the family well.

  Daniel pointed at the screen. ‘Can we just watch the footage? I’m sure you’ll have questions for me afterwards.’

  That pulled me up. I
nodded at Charlie, who was the one closest to the laptop. He pressed play, and the frozen face started to move again.

  ‘Are you sure about this, Daniel?’Theo spoke in the same lightly halting Dutch that he’d used with me. ‘Are you sure you want to record this?’

  ‘You’re not dead. This is evidence that my father wasn’t a murderer.’ The footage wasn’t quite steady, but moved ever so slightly. It only showed Theo’s face. ‘Where have you been hiding all these years?’

  ‘I live in London.’

  ‘Living a happy life.’ Daniel’s voice was bitter.

  Theo grimaced. ‘I try my best.’

  He would kill himself the next morning, so it was clear that his life hadn’t been that happy.

  ‘Did you think about us?’

  ‘About you? Why would I? I was too busy trying to survive.’

  ‘You didn’t feel guilty that you let everybody think my father was a murderer?’

  ‘He wasn’t a murderer but he was an abuser,’ Theo said.

  ‘Don’t lie.’

  ‘I’m not lying. You know I wasn’t the only one. Others came forward. He’d been doing it for years.’ His mouth moved as if he was fighting to keep the emotions inside, but he stayed calm as he spoke.

  ‘They retracted their statements.’

  ‘And you know why they did that.’

  ‘Because they were lies.’

  Theo shook his head. ‘I know that’s what you want to believe. But you went to the same school. You know what that place was like. They would have put huge pressure on the kids to withdraw their statements, not to get the school involved. Especially after your father’s death.’

  ‘My dad killed himself.’

  The term ‘dad’ was unusually endearing. I was more used to abusers’ and murderers’ families creating an emotional distance from the perpetrator.

  ‘He was accused of having murdered you; that’s why he killed himself.’ I could hear tears and anger in the voice, even though I couldn’t see Daniel’s face on the screen. But I could see it here, in the room, and could tell that he was fighting to hide those emotions from us.

  Paul Verbaan’s suicide had been interpreted as a confession of guilt by the investigating team. But he’d left no written confession behind.

  Theo leaned forward and Daniel must have moved back in response, as the footage shook. ‘Don’t you think all those years of abuse were worse than murder? All those boys whose lives he ruined? Don’t you think that was why he killed himself? Because now everybody knew what kind of man he was.’

  Everybody seemed to have a different opinion as to why Paul Verbaan had killed himself. I understood that Theo probably wanted to think he’d committed suicide out of guilt over the abuse. Julia had said he’d killed himself because he’d been barred from the church.

  Personally, I thought that the press and the police were culpable too. Not just for the pressure that they must have put on the man, but also for his name getting out.

  ‘Didn’t you feel sorry for us?’ Daniel asked.

  ‘You know what?’ Theo folded his arms. ‘I mainly felt sorry for me. For being abused by your father, for being kicked out of my parents’ house when your mother came to confront me.’

  His parents had kicked him out of the house? I remembered that as students we had been surprised that it had taken his parents four days to report him missing, but nobody had known this bit of information. I made a note of it, because I couldn’t decide if it made things clearer or more confusing.

  ‘My mother knew about you?’

  ‘Is that news to you?’ Theo smiled, but I could see how his mouth moved with another emotion as well. ‘Yes, she walked in on us.’

  ‘That’s a lie.’ Daniel’s voice was tight.

  ‘She didn’t tell you? It’s what started it all. She believed your father was the victim. That I had come on to him. Forced myself on him. That I was sucking him off because I loved him so much.’ His voice was bitter and sarcastic at the same time.

  ‘You fucking queer!’

  Daniel must have dropped the phone at that point, because suddenly the screen showed the ceiling of the room and a corner of a lampshade. I heard a thump. I heard someone cry out.

  ‘Get out of this house,’ I heard him say. ‘Get out now.’

  The phone moved again, Daniel recording the aftermath of his violence. Theo was holding his face. His hand was over his left eye.

  I threw a glance at Charlie, because it explained the bruising he’d noticed earlier, and which I’d seen the previous morning. I looked down at Daniel’s hands and noticed the telltale marks on the knuckles of his right hand.

  On the screen,Theo was on his feet and grabbing his coat. The footage showed his back as Daniel followed him with the camera until he left the house and the door closed behind him. The recording ended.

  ‘I tried to call him,’ Daniel said. ‘After he’d left. I left him a whole bunch of messages because I wanted him to make an official statement to the police.’

  My head spun with questions that this clip had raised. ‘Did you know his parents? Julia’s parents?’

  ‘Not well, but yes, I’d met them. Why are you asking me about them?’

  ‘Theo said they kicked him out of the house.’

  ‘I could believe that. It’s quite possible. They were very religious. Very strict orthodox Calvinists.’

  ‘But their own son …’

  ‘“If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away.”’

  I recognised the Bible quote, but that didn’t make it any easier for me to understand what they’d done.

  ‘I think he was telling the truth about that,’ Daniel said, ‘and that made it even more likely that my dad didn’t kill Andre. I wanted him to tell you what he told me, but he wouldn’t answer his phone. I didn’t know where he was staying. That’s why I went to Julia’s. She’s in the phone directory.’

  ‘You hit the guy and then you were surprised that he didn’t answer his phone?’ I couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of my voice.

  He took his baseball cap off again. ‘I shouldn’t have, I know that. It was just … the language he used, seeing him alive. And he didn’t seem to feel bad about lying all those years.’

  I counted to five slowly to get myself under control. Anger wasn’t going to help.

  ‘But I felt I should show you all of it,’ Daniel continued. ‘I haven’t edited it at all. You can check that, can’t you?’

  ‘You did the right thing,’ I said.

  ‘What Theo talked about in this footage,’ Charlie said, ‘how much of that were you aware of?’

  ‘None of it.’

  ‘Well, you knew that other boys had come forward,’ I said, ‘because you knew they’d retracted their statements.’

  ‘Yes, that I knew. But the other bit …’ he folded the peak of his cap double, straining the cloth between his fingers, ‘that bit about my mother, that she’d walked in on them, that she’d gone to his parents … I didn’t know about that. My mother died two years ago. She never talked about any of it much.’ He let go of the cap and shoved it away as if it was to blame for him ruining it.

  ‘Was it around that time that she told you to stop cycling to school with Julia?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure.’

  I knew I shouldn’t be angry with the guy for what his mother had done. I didn’t know if the man in this footage even was Andre Nieuwkerk. I didn’t know how much of what he’d said was true. It was also unfair to expect Daniel to remember exactly what had happened thirty years ago. ‘Let’s go back to what you talked about before this recording. Did Theo say anything about why he’d come to see you? Why now?’

  ‘He said that he wanted to tell me in person because soon everybody would know.’

  ‘Everybody would know?’

  ‘Something like that. Afterwards, I thought that maybe he was planning on writing a book or going on TV. He’s probably going to try to make money out of
it.’

  Everybody would know. I wrote the words down because, as it stood, nobody knew.

  The man Daniel had punched in this footage would be dead the next morning. If he’d been planning to let everybody know, why had he killed himself?

  ‘You should talk to him,’ Daniel said. ‘Trace him and find out the full story. Surely now we can prove that my father didn’t murder him.’

  That pulled me up. I hadn’t realised he didn’t know. There was no reason why he should have known, of course; we hadn’t talked about this at Julia’s. ‘There’s no need to trace him,’ I said. ‘We know where he is.’ I scrutinised his face to read his reaction from his features. ‘I’m sorry, but he’s dead. He died yesterday morning.’

  ‘He died?’ Daniel slumped back in his chair as if I’d just pulled the rug from under his feet. The only emotion I could see was disappointment. ‘He can’t have done. That’s so unfair. Then what was the point of all this?’ He pointed at the screen. ‘He talked to me just to stir things up?’

  Chapter 9

  If I’d learned anything in my long experience as a police detective, it was that it was better to keep your boss informed of what was going on, so I went to brief Chief Inspector Moerdijk.

  I was concerned he might have left for the day, because he liked to run home. It was all part of an extreme health regime that bordered on the fanatical. The crazy amount of exercise he did made him too thin, and even though he was less than ten years older than I was, his face was shot through with wrinkles that showed the patterns his skin would form depending on his expression.

  His door was open, though, and he was obviously pleased to see me, the smile lines on his face deepening. ‘Congratulations,’ he said in a jokey voice. ‘Trust you to have been in the right place at the right time.’

  That was very different from the ‘What the hell have you been up to?’ that I had been expecting. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The commissaris just called me. He said that getting the guy who assaulted Peter de Waal could be a real breakthrough for these cases.’