Julia laughed. ‘No, not you. Andre. He didn’t have a husband, did he? Or a wife? I mean, I am his next of kin, aren’t I? There isn’t anybody else who’s got a claim?’
‘As far as I’m aware, you’re it,’ I said. ‘Unless he’d made a will, of course.’ Maybe he’d left all his money to the cat. Stranger things had happened.
‘At least you can say you’ve seen something of London now,’ Julia said. ‘Double-decker buses, black cabs, the river; you’ve been as much of a tourist as you can be in three hours.’
As much of a tourist as I wanted to be.
We turned off the riverside and along Putney High Street. I had the same thought as I’d had when I’d first cycled to Laurens Werda’s offices by the Amstel station. Here was another part in another city where the old and new made uncomfortable neighbours. A seventies cinema, houses that looked at least a hundred years old, modern buildings, rundown shops all stood side by side in a hotchpotch as if unable to decide which was more important: old or new. For Julia it seemed that new definitely beat old. She was more interested in the money she was going to inherit than in her brother’s death.
Could I blame her? What was it she’d said? That he’d seemed like a stranger to her? So maybe he was a stranger who’d suddenly left her a lot of money. ‘How long are you going to stay for?’ I said.
‘Just another day. I should see something of London, shouldn’t I, now that I’m here. But I want to be back in time to sort out the funeral.’
I wasn’t sure that Andre would have wanted to be buried in Amsterdam, in the country he’d left behind, the country that he’d hated, according to Laurens, but I also knew that graveyards and memorials were for the living, not the dead. Unless Andre had left specific instructions for his burial, he no longer had a say in what was going to happen to his remains.
Julia and I said goodbye and I boarded the train at Putney to go back to Clapham Junction.
The train to Gatwick was busy and people were standing in the aisles with their suitcases. In the Netherlands there had been complaints recently amongst commuters that they had to stand in the morning when they’d paid for a ticket and therefore surely were entitled to a seat. Here, everybody seemed to placidly accept that they were packed in like sardines. Maybe if you had no choice in the matter it was better to just go with it. Better to get to Gatwick tired and hot than not get there at all.
I held on to a metal railing with one hand and checked my phone with the other. There were a number of messages from Mark, asking me where I was and to get in touch. I called him but got his voicemail. I put my phone away. I’d talk to him later.
At the airport, I decided that I should buy something for him at the duty-free, ready for Sinterklaas. As I strolled through the aisles trying to find something suitable, I called Thomas. I knew he was working today.
‘Can you look into something for me?’ I said as I picked up a teddy bear with a Union Jack waistcoat. ‘I need you to check the records for a Theo Brand. Father’s name is Robbert or possibly Harry.’ I put the teddy bear back. It was too childish. A tin of biscuits? Alcohol?
‘Theo Brand?’ Thomas repeated. ‘Our Theo Brand?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I think Andre took someone else’s identity. The name and the date of birth on the passport should match.’
Thomas said he’d get on it straight away.
I filled the fifteen minutes I had before my flight boarded by looking through the nice shops. If I was going to get Mark something, I might as well get him something he’d like. As I was milling around, I responded to his texts, telling him that I was away today but we could meet up tomorrow. Then changed that to say that I really wanted to see him tomorrow. That was better.
I didn’t want to think about Andre. I’d been feeling so guilty for not talking to him that morning. Not that I thought I’d driven him to suicide, but I could have stopped him, had I known. This guy who had been abused as a child, who’d had a tough life and had never got over what had happened to him
And now I was thinking that he had taken someone else’s identity.
All I could hope for was that he’d just stolen a passport.
The flight home was uneventful – we seemed to ascend and then descend again almost immediately – and I stared out of the window watching the sun set over the thick layer of cloud.
As we prepared for landing, I saw the fields of glasshouses and finally the pastoral setting as we landed on the Polderbaan. Before today, I hadn’t been on a plane for years, probably not since the Polderbaan had been built. Even when I’d had my long holiday, I hadn’t left the country. It was embarrassing how little of the world outside the Netherlands I’d seen. I’d never had an interest in foreign shores, never been part of the global tourism that took people as old as my father to places as far away as Thailand for a whole month. I’d never been to London before, but now all I’d done was go to the house of a dead man. I hadn’t even had any interest in seeing the sights. Once I’d realised that there really had been a Theo Brand, all I’d wanted to do was get on the plane back home.
The Polderbaan was in the middle of nowhere, a good fifteen minutes of taxiing, to keep the noise levels down. I looked out of the window and saw a cow next to the runway. The cow told me I was home.
There was an announcement telling us that we were allowed to switch our phones back on. As soon as I had a signal, my phone beeped to let me know that Thomas had left me a message.
I listened to it straight away.
He’d found them. Parents Robbert and Barbara Brand. Two sons: Harry and Theo.
Theo had been reported missing thirty years ago.
I nearly laughed. I’d argued with Mark about Andre, had defended him when Mark had said he’d acted selfishly by staying away all these years.
Mark hadn’t been entirely right. It hadn’t been selfishness. It had been something else.
Had I felt guilty over the suicide of a murderer?
Chapter 19
The darkness of the room was broken only by a circle of light thrown by a standard lamp next to the sofa. It made the space small and eerie, as if there was something hidden in the corners that shouldn’t be displayed. I wanted to look for an overhead light switch so that I could illuminate every centimetre of this space instead.
Robbert Brand was sitting on a black leather TV chair. Behind him, the curtains were closed to block anybody outside from looking in. It was odd, those curtains. Normally people kept their curtains open to show they had nothing to hide. What would this man have to hide? He was in his early eighties, with shrewd grey eyes that belied his age. According to Thomas, who had picked me up from the airport to drive me to the other side of Amsterdam through thick rain that threatened to turn into sleet, Robbert was very keen to talk to us about a man who had come to see him the other day.
‘You were easy to trace,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ Robbert said. ‘We never moved from here. We never changed our number. We wanted him to be able to find us. To be able to call if he ever wanted to get back in touch.’
‘Tell me about the visit.’
‘It was on Sunday,’ Robbert said.
Sunday. So not the evening before Andre died.
‘The man said he had something to tell us about Theo.’
‘What time was this?’
‘It was in the morning. Around ten o’clock, I think. Something like that.’
‘And you had no concerns about letting him in?’
Robbert’s hands gripped his knees. ‘I would talk to anybody who had something to tell us about Theo.’ He grimaced. ‘We pretty much have over the last thirty years.’
‘So what did he tell you?’
‘He said …’ Robbert swallowed. ‘He said that he thought Theo was the Body in the Dunes. That he’d been murdered thirty years ago. It was weird.’ He rubbed his face. ‘I’ve always said I just wanted to know what had happened to Theo, but this really threw me. I knew about the Body in the Dunes, of course; the
police came and talked to us when that skeleton was found, but I thought it had been identified. We followed the case at the time. I remembered that I was jealous of that family for having answers, but at the same time grateful that it wasn’t Theo, because it meant we could still have hope.’ He shook his head. ‘I knew I was crazy for feeling both those things at the same time. I remember being torn inside, not knowing what I wanted. Anyway, the police ruled Theo out because apparently he’d moved to London. He’d renewed his passport there in 1991. October 1991, they said.’
Of course. That would have been enough to rule him out because it would have shown that he had still been alive at that point. But now I couldn’t help thinking that it was Andre, not Theo, who’d renewed the passport.
‘How old was Theo when he went missing?’ Thomas asked.
‘He was seventeen when he left home. Turned eighteen a month later. We talked on his birthday. We still talked over the next few months – he would call us every now and then – but then it stopped and we haven’t heard from him since. That was thirty years ago.’
‘When did you talk to him last?’
‘I think it was May, early May of 1988.’
‘What did you think had happened?’
‘We really weren’t sure. At first we thought he just needed some space; isn’t that what they say these days?’
Thomas nodded.
Photos on the mantelpiece showed the Brands frozen for ever in happier times, when there had still been four of them. It was a typical family portrait, the boys standing behind the seated parents, and if it wasn’t for the fact that Theo would never come home again, you would think it was a happy picture. Harry and Theo looked alike, both blond and with toothy grins.
‘But when the silence lasted and lasted, when he never picked up the phone when we called, when he didn’t even send a card on his mother’s birthday, that’s when we started to worry. We thought something had happened to him.’
‘No arguments?’
‘Of course we had arguments: what time we wanted him to be home, how much pocket money we were giving him, but they were typical run-of-the-mill things and they were largely in the past. Harry was always annoyed,’ Robbert added with a smile. ‘He said we gave Theo much more freedom than we’d given him at the same age.’
‘What did you say to the man who came to see you?’
‘I said that I didn’t believe him because we all knew that the Body in the Dunes was Andre Martin Nieuwkerk. But then he said that was him. He was Andre Nieuwkerk and the body had been misidentified all those years ago.’
‘Did he tell you why he thought it was Theo?’
‘No,’ Robbert said. ‘He just said it was what he believed.’
Thomas and I exchanged a glance. We’d agreed that we wouldn’t mention that Andre had been using Theo’s identity. We were curious as to whether Andre had told the Brand family that himself. I also knew that telling them this would lead the family to conclusions that I wasn’t yet ready to draw.
‘Did he tell you why he believed it?’
‘I asked him, but he refused to tell us. He just said: I thought you needed to know.’
I wanted to scream in frustration. All along Andre seemed to have told people things without giving any proof to back them up. He would tell them one thing but keep another ten things to himself. As if he was giving the answer to a quadratic equation without showing his workings. It was the kind of thing that would get you low marks on your maths paper in school. It was the kind of thing that made people wonder if they should believe you or not.
‘Was he right?’ Robbert said. ‘Was the body misidentified?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The man who came to see you was definitely Andre Nieuwkerk.’
Robbert’s face showed the struggle he had been describing before, between getting answers and not liking what those answers were. ‘We should talk to him,’ he said.
I shook my head. ‘We can’t. He died last week.’
Robbert raised his hands to his mouth. ‘But we need to know.’ There were tears in his eyes. ‘Before I die, I need to know.’
I felt sorry for him. I wanted to rest my hand on one of his, which were gripping his knees so tightly. I wanted to give him the answers he so desired, but the bones of the Body in the Dunes had been cremated all those years ago and the ashes had been scattered.
The sound of the key in the front door stopped me from having to reply.
‘Harry,’ Robbert shouted into the hallway as the door opened. ‘The police are here to ask about that man who came to see us.’
And again the thought popped into my head that Andre had made matters worse for everybody he had talked to. He had unsettled people, raised all these questions and never given them answers. He had never given them any closure at all.
Harry came hurrying into the room, still wearing his coat and with a sports bag over his shoulder. ‘The police?’ He was short and skinny, with blond hair that was going a washed-out grey at the temples. He was two years older than Theo would have been, in his late forties, and wore a red and white checked shirt under a blue jacket. ‘What are you doing, sitting here in the dark?’ he said, and flipped the light switch on the wall. Suddenly nothing in the room was hidden any more. More photos were revealed, all over the room. All of Theo. Some of them also had other family members in them, but it was Theo who smiled at me from all corners. It was unnerving to see the central position he still took within his father’s everyday existence.
Apart from the fact that his hair was blond and Andre’s had been dark, I could see a slight resemblance between the two faces.
‘I’m Detective Lotte Meerman,’ I said. ‘You were here when Andre Nieuwkerk came to the house?’
‘Yes,’ Harry replied. ‘On Sunday. Did you speak to him as well? Was he a fake?’
‘No, he really was Andre Nieuwkerk,’ Robbert said before I could answer the question. ‘Didn’t I say at the time that I thought he was the real thing?’
‘What difference does it make?’ his son said. ‘He didn’t know anything about Theo.’ He took a seat next to me on the sofa, on the part closest to Robbert in his chair.
‘Did Theo know Andre?’Thomas asked. ‘Were they school friends?’
‘No, not as far as I know,’ Harry said. ‘It was all speculation.’
‘They couldn’t have been friends,’ Robbert said. ‘Andre lived in another part of the country completely. Wasn’t he from Elspeet? I don’t know how the two of them could have met.’
‘Why do you say it was all speculation?’ I asked Harry.
‘All the man said was that he thought the body might have been Theo. He didn’t have any proof. He had no reason to say it.’
No reason to say it.
That was a very interesting point to think about. What had been his reason? Surely he wouldn’t have come to this family and told them he thought their son had died if he hadn’t been absolutely sure. He hadn’t planned to visit the parents of any other missing boy, only the Brand family. If he was just guessing, it would be too cruel.
‘How did he seem to you when he said it?’ I said. ‘Nervous? Determined? Sad? What did you think?’ I didn’t even want to consider the fact that he might have lied.
‘Gosh, I don’t know,’ Robbert said. ‘He wasn’t a young man, I remember thinking that. Probably the same age as our Harry. I would say that he was calm, not nervous.’
‘Was he holding something back?’
‘You mean you think he might have had more information than he gave us?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Well, we got annoyed with him for coming here. What was the point of saying those things about Theo and then just leaving without giving us anything?’
‘Do you think Theo’s dead? That he’s really the Body in the Dunes?’ Harry asked. ‘Can we do a DNA test on those bones? That will tell us, won’t it?’
‘Those bones no longer exist,’ Thomas said. ‘Andre’s parents cremated them a
nd scattered the ashes.’
‘You mean we might never find out?’ Robbert said.
‘I’ll do whatever I can,’ I promised. But I wasn’t hopeful. ‘Could you give me a couple of photos of Theo?’ I wanted our forensics department to look at them and tell me if Theo and Andre had had similar-shaped skulls. Similar enough to explain the misidentification.
I chose two that showed Theo’s face clearly but from different angles. I put them in my handbag and signalled to Thomas that we were done here.
As we left, I heard a voice call out to me.
‘There’s something else,’ Harry said, catching us up by the car. ‘I didn’t want my father to hear.’
Chapter 20
‘I’m really glad you came to see us,’ Harry said, ‘because I wasn’t sure if I should call the police or not.’ We’d walked to his house, which was only just around the corner from his father’s place, and he led us through to the front room. Unlike at his father’s house, here all the lights were on, but they only showed that the place looked quite sterile; the home of someone who didn’t care about his surroundings. There were no family photos. There were no visual signs that anybody else lived here.
‘I didn’t know what to do after he’d been to see us,’ he continued. ‘I didn’t know if he was crazy or if I should take what he’d said seriously.’
I could understand that. ‘Did you believe him?’
‘I didn’t know what to think,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t sure if I should believe that he was right, and that we would finally know what had happened to my brother, or if I should wish he was wrong and then I could keep hoping that Theo was still alive.’
‘What exactly did he say?’ I asked.
Harry looked at a pile of papers in the centre of the table, as if all the answers were written down somewhere within that stack. ‘He asked if Theo had gone missing, and said he thought he was probably the dead boy.’
‘Did he say why he thought that? How he knew?’
‘No, he didn’t. I asked him, but he wouldn’t say.’
A Death at the Hotel Mondrian (Lotte Meerman Book 5) Page 15
