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

by Anja de Jager

  ‘I don’t know what you want me to say.’ Peter folded his arms.

  ‘Be honest about the night you were assaulted,’ Ingrid said.

  ‘I’m not going to change—’

  ‘Tell us the truth,’ I interrupted him, ‘and we’ll forget that you sent those emails yourself and pretended that Erol Yilmaz harassed you.’

  ‘I don’t really remember,’ Peter said.

  ‘Your colleague told us you were drunk that night, that you refused to go home, that you were aggressive. We’ve kept all of that quiet and will continue to do so.’

  ‘But I’d be changing my testimony.’

  I stopped myself from smiling, but I knew we had him. Just a bit more pressure was needed.

  ‘We need to get those people,’ Ingrid said. ‘And we can’t do that if you still maintain that it was Erol.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We’ve got a witness from that night,’ I said. ‘But your testimony contradicts what he says, which makes it hard for us.’ Which meant that Ingrid didn’t believe me. None of this needed to stand up in court; all I needed to do was convince my colleague that Erol had told the truth.

  ‘But if I say something else now …’ His voice trailed off.

  ‘We won’t do you for wasting police time, if that’s what you’re concerned about.’ I would love to pursue him for what he’d done to Erol, but then Erol hadn’t called an ambulance for Peter either, so in my head the two men were pretty much square. Sometimes policing was all about what you could prove in court plus getting the best solution for all concerned.

  ‘I really thought it was Erol,’ Peter said. ‘At first. I thought I’d seen him.’ He paused. Then he made up his mind to talk and the words flooded out. ‘The next day I remembered that there had been more than one attacker. That it hadn’t been him. I wanted to tell you but I couldn’t.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘By then it was in all the papers and Caroline kept telling everybody who was willing to listen that it been Erol, and I couldn’t go back on what I’d said. I wanted to come clean, but she hates him.’ He seemed relieved to get the story off his chest.

  ‘She hates Erol?’

  ‘Yeah. Because he left her.’

  I narrowed my eyes to see Peter more clearly. ‘I thought she left him.’

  ‘That’s what she told everybody, but in reality he’d had enough of her. He never understood her and she hated him for that. She wanted to stitch him up, so even when I told her that it probably hadn’t been him – this was when I was still in hospital – she said: let’s destroy him now. You have to understand her,’ he added. ‘Nobody likes to be left behind. I know I shouldn’t say this, but I think she could have killed him when he first said he wanted a divorce. It came as a real shock to her.’

  ‘What about the restraining order?’

  ‘Caroline did all of that. She really went off the deep end. Made up a story, made Yilmaz’s life hell. I thought she’d moved on, and then this happened. It’s all my fault.’

  Ingrid and I exchanged a glance. ‘You said there was more than one guy?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Peter said. ‘I think there were four of them. They shouted something. I turned round and saw them.’

  Ingrid showed the mugshot of the guy who owned the car.

  ‘Yeah,’ Peter said sheepishly. ‘That could have been him.’

  Ingrid was still shaking her head when we left the house.

  An hour later, my mobile rang. It was Charlie.

  ‘I got it,’ he said. ‘I’ve got it.’

  Chapter 37

  ‘What is it?’ Thomas said. He’d also come to the office.

  ‘Just wait.’ Charlie grinned. He was like a schoolboy saying: not telling you. He inserted a memory card in the PC and played the footage.

  It was granular. It wasn’t high-definition by any stretch of the imagination. It showed a pavement, cars going past, a tram rattling by.

  ‘Where is this?’ Thomas asked.

  ‘The luxury watch shop,’ Charlie said. ‘The one next door to the hotel.’

  The camera must be installed somewhere inside the shop window. If anybody was going to smash the window to grab the watches on display, at least there’d be footage of that. That didn’t mean we’d ever be able to identify who was on the screen, but it made shops feel better.

  ‘Look, here he comes,’ Charlie said.

  The man walking into the picture hurried along.

  ‘Well done,’ Thomas said, and Charlie smiled as if he’d just been given the biggest compliment on earth.

  I would have liked to think the man on the screen had been in a rush because he’d been desperate to save someone’s life, but instead I was pretty certain he was hurrying to make sure that someone died.

  ‘What time is this?’ I asked.

  Charlie pointed at the screen. The clock was in the bottom corner and seconds were ticking away. He rewound the footage a bit: at the moment that Laurens Werda walked past the watch shop, the clock said 08:32.

  Nearly two hours after Andre had called him.

  Charlie wound the footage forward. ‘Here’s when he leaves. He stayed for half an hour or so.’

  It was 08:58 when Laurens came past the watch shop again. The grainy footage meant that I couldn’t see the look on his face.

  I looked back through the notes I’d made the day we’d found Andre dead. We thought he’d come back to his room at 8.37, because that was when his key had been used. But that hadn’t been him. That couldn’t have been him.

  It had to have been Werda. Did he have a key to Andre’s hotel room?

  The cleaner told me that she’d let Andre into his room on Saturday morning because he’d lost his key.

  The morning after he’d had dinner with Werda.

  This all made so much sense.

  I got up and scribbled on the whiteboard.

  ‘Andre called Laurens at 6.43 a.m. We know from Carol that he had tried to commit suicide before and that he’d called her and she’d saved him. How long would it have taken Laurens to get to the hotel?’

  ‘Half an hour at most,’ Thomas said.

  So he’d waited for more than an hour to set off. That bastard.

  ‘Do you think he murdered him?’ Charlie said.

  ‘Not that. But I wonder if the reason he came to the hotel wasn’t to stop Andre from committing suicide, but to check that he had successfully done it.’

  ‘You’re saying Andre didn’t die after Werda came to the hotel but before?’

  ‘Yes. And Werda had a key; the cleaner had to let Andre into his room the morning after he’d spent the night at Werda’s place.’

  ‘So he came to the hotel, let himself in with the key, made sure that Andre was dead, and then left?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s exactly what I think happened.’

  Thomas rubbed his chin. ‘He called him at 6.43 to say he was going to kill himself, hoping that Werda would stop him, as the arrangement had been with Carol, only Werda had no intention of stopping him. Not with what Andre knew. He waited over an hour and then went to the hotel. Now how the hell are we going to prove any of that?’

  That was a good question.

  ‘Andre’s death was very convenient for him, don’t you think?’ Thomas said. ‘If you hadn’t called his sister, we would never have found out that he really was Andre Nieuwkerk.’

  It hadn’t been because I’d called his sister. It had been because I’d talked to him that morning, but nobody knew about that.

  ‘If you hadn’t spoken to her,’ Thomas continued, ‘none of this would have come out, not about the Body in the Dunes, not about Theo having been murdered, not that Verbaan didn’t kill Andre. It would all have been buried. You did well.’

  I shook my head. I hadn’t done well at all. ‘You’re right about one thing,’ I said. ‘Andre’s death was very convenient for Werda. There was no way he was going to stop his suicide.’

  ‘Is that even a crime?’ Charl
ie asked.

  ‘Let’s go pick him up again,’ I said. ‘We’ll see what we can get him to admit to.’

  Laurens’ sanctimonious smile made me want to throw up. Of course we’d had to wait for his lawyer again. At least we knew who she was, so she was only a quick phone call away.

  ‘You don’t feel bad for what you’ve done?’ I asked.

  ‘What did I do?’

  ‘Andre Nieuwkerk called you that morning to tell you he was going to kill himself, and you didn’t stop him.’

  ‘You’re wrong. I went to his hotel, but by the time I got there, he had already died. I was so upset that I sat by his side for half an hour. He was the man I’d loved. I was torn apart.’

  ‘You didn’t think to call an ambulance?’

  ‘He was dead. I checked his breathing. Yes, he called me and I didn’t stop him in time. I didn’t call the police after he contacted me. If that was what he wanted, then why would I interfere? Yes, I was very sad, but to stop him would have been selfish. My wish, not his. When you love somebody, or even when you loved somebody years ago, you should do what’s best for them, not for yourself. Don’t you think?’

  ‘How did you get into his hotel room?’

  ‘He stayed at my house on Friday night, after we’d had dinner, and he left his key behind. I thought he’d done it on purpose. He said he still loved me.’

  I shook my head. That dinner had been about something completely different.

  ‘He wanted me to visit him, spend more time with him,’ Laurens continued. ‘But it would have been a mistake to rekindle our relationship.’

  By this point Andre must have known that Laurens had killed Theo. That must have been why he’d come to Amsterdam: to talk to his ex-partner about it, the man who’d given him Theo’s papers and got him to go to London.

  Either way, what were we going to be able to prove? That Laurens had gone to Andre’s hotel room. That Andre had died either just before, or while Laurens had been there. His visit was right in the window of the time of death the pathologist had given us. Not interfering with a suicide attempt was not a crime. Working at a charity for runaways was not a crime. All I had was a whole bunch of circumstantial stuff and no evidence whatsoever.

  Andre had told Daniel that soon everybody was going to know what had happened.

  I could imagine him calling Laurens. Giving him one last chance to prove that he’d loved him. No, giving him one last chance to prove that he was a decent human being.

  A chance that he hadn’t taken.

  ‘Was he still alive?’ I asked. ‘Was he still alive when you got to his room?’

  ‘What do you think?’ Laurens said. ‘Surely you don’t think I killed him. You think I sat with him and watched him die? I told you, he was already dead. He committed suicide.’

  ‘What happened with Theo?’ I asked. ‘Did he want more money? Did he threaten you? Blackmail you again?’

  Laurens stayed silent.

  ‘You murdered him; that’s why you had his belongings. You gave his passport to Andre and made Theo come alive again. Did it feel good?’ I asked. ‘Did it feel good to meet Andre in London, to be with the man you’d lied to? Did it feel good to know you’d got away with murder?’

  His lawyer made a movement. ‘The statute of limitation on Theo Brand’s murder has long passed. Can we stop talking about this?’

  I knew I had no grounds for arrest. ‘Sure, let’s move on to Andre Nieuwkerk if you prefer. You killed him too,’ I said. ‘You killed him and I’m not going to stop until I can prove it.’ I didn’t care that I was talking to their backs. ‘I’m not going to stop.’

  But we still had nothing at the end of the twenty-four hours that we could keep him locked up for. The prosecutor refused to extend the arrest period. He pointed out to me that we had one case where the statute of limitation had passed and another that looked like a suicide.

  Chapter 38

  The next evening, the doorbell rang. I wasn’t expecting anybody and pressed the button on the intercom with resigned annoyance. It would probably be someone wanting to convert me, or to sell me something.

  ‘It’s Laurens Werda,’ the disembodied voice said. ‘I’m here with my lawyer. Can we talk for a moment?’

  Why the hell were they here? ‘I’ll come down and we can go to the police station instead,’ I said. ‘Let’s talk there.’

  ‘I don’t think you’ll want to,’ a female voice said. The lawyer.

  Without her there, I wouldn’t have let Laurens in. Even though I had my gun in my flat, I wouldn’t choose to be alone with a man who, I was pretty sure, had murdered someone, even if it was thirty years ago.

  I pressed the buzzer that unlocked the communal door downstairs. ‘I’m all the way at the top,’ I said. ‘Third floor.’

  I waited by my front door until I saw them coming up. Laurens’ face was flushed red from the exertion of climbing the steps. The florid hue clashed with the pink of his shirt. I stepped aside to let him and his lawyer in. The woman must be in better physical shape than Laurens, because she hadn’t even broken sweat.

  I went ahead of them, led them to the dining table and sat down. It was the closest to a formal interrogation area I could offer in my flat. There was no way I was going to sit on the sofa with them.

  I indicated seats at the other side of the table, one of them the place where my mother used to sit when we played cards. The place from where it was easiest to cheat.

  ‘We thought we’d talk to you,’ the lawyer said, ‘so that you can drop the investigation.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, ‘and why would I do that?’

  ‘We’ve got evidence that Andre Nieuwkerk’s death was suicide.’

  ‘Evidence that you’re willing to share with me?’

  The lawyer opened her bag and took out a large sheet of paper in a plastic cover. Laurens looked at me with an expression on his face that could only be described as smug. ‘It’s how I knew you’d talked to Andre,’ he said. ‘He mentions you in his suicide note. He wrote that he spoke to you but that you didn’t believe him. I thought I’d give it to you. If you take it, you’ll know it’s suicide but nobody else needs to learn about your part in it.’

  I held out my hand. ‘Give me that.’

  ‘He was already dead,’ Laurens said. ‘I got there too late.’

  The lawyer kept the sheet of paper in front of her.

  ‘What about Theo Brand?’ I said. ‘What about the boy you murdered?’

  ‘It was twenty-five years ago,’ the lawyer said. ‘The statute of limitation has passed.’

  ‘Then tell me,’ I said. ‘Just tell me if you killed him.’

  ‘My client won’t answer that question,’ the lawyer said.

  ‘Tell me something else then, for the family. Were those remains Theo Brand? At least tell me that.’

  The lawyer gave a single nod. Confirmation of everything I had guessed but was unable to prove.

  Laurens Werda didn’t say anything. He just pushed the suicide note in its plastic cover across the table. ‘The paper will have my fingerprints on it,’ he said, ‘but it’s definitely Andre’s handwriting.’

  ‘Why didn’t you call the police?’ I said. ‘When you found him.’

  ‘I assumed the hotel staff would find him later that morning. I didn’t know it would be another full day.’

  ‘There’s no legal obligation to report a dead body,’ the lawyer said. ‘My client didn’t commit a crime by not calling the police.’

  I knew that. I knew it wasn’t a crime. ‘Wasn’t there a moral obligation, though? Towards someone who’d been your life partner for two decades?’

  ‘One decade,’ Laurens said. His grin told me that he knew I’d been trying to catch him out.

  The lawyer stood up. ‘You’ve got the note. I hope that clears up any suspicions you might have had about Laurens killing Andre Nieuwkerk. I’d suggest you keep it to yourself. It makes it clear that you’re far more to blame for his death than my
client is.’

  I avoided reading the note. All I saw was that it had been written in blue pen.

  On the way out, Laurens stepped close to me and whispered, ‘He was still breathing. I sat with him until he stopped. Until I knew for sure that he was dead.’

  He closed the door behind him.

  I heard his footsteps go down the steps, following his lawyer.

  My eyes were drawn to the note. I couldn’t stop myself.

  To the hotel staff, it began. I apologise that you’ll find me dead. Please pass this note on to Detective Lotte Meerman. I talked to her this morning. She didn’t believe me then but hopefully she’ll believe me now.

  Chapter 39

  The whole day I pondered on what to do whilst pretending to work, and by the time Mark came to my flat for our Sinterklaas celebrations, I was emotionally drained. As tradition demanded, we waited for dark to fall before we started swapping presents.

  I handed Mark one of his, wrapped in colourful paper. He shook it.

  ‘When I was a kid,’ I said, ‘my mum used to add poems to the presents. Did yours do that?’ That was one of the Sinterklaas traditions, along with putting straw for Sinterklaas’s horse in a shoe in front of the chimney – or in our case the central heating boiler – and then finding it miraculously swapped in the morning for a present.

  ‘She did. It always freaked me out how much Sinterklaas knew about me. Especially all the things I’d done wrong during the year.’

  ‘Me too!’ I said. ‘My mum loved to point out what I could do better. She thought I was much more likely to listen to Sinterklaas than to her. I hope you didn’t add any poems to my presents.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I didn’t. I thought that if there were things we needed to talk about, we could do it as grown-ups. Not in a poem.’ He handed me a present.

  It was the same size and shape as the one I’d given him. I followed his example and gave it a gentle shake. It sounded like something bumping against cardboard. I grinned. I knew what it was.

  He tore the wrapping paper off his present to reveal a letter M made out of chocolate. Milk chocolate with nuts.