Death on the Canal

by Anja de Jager

  Natalie took it carefully between her perfectly manicured fingers. ‘Is this the woman who killed him?’

  ‘How did you hear about that?’

  ‘One of the security guards told me last night, after he’d been called in to do an extra shift. I think you contacted the store?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Then I googled it and read that you were looking for a woman in connection with his murder.’

  ‘He was in a bar with her last night.’ I pointed at the photo.

  ‘I’ve never seen her before. Maybe someone else he was shagging.’

  The word jarred with her perfect outer persona and made me wonder if maybe she had cared about him more than she showed. Was she putting up a front because last night he had been in a bar with another woman?

  ‘Did Piotr ever mention a child?’ Thomas said.

  ‘A child?’ The photo dropped from Natalie’s fingers. She bent over quickly to pick it up. ‘No, never,’ she said as she handed it back to me.

  ‘Are you sure?’ I said.

  ‘Quite sure.’ Her whole posture was back under studied control.

  ‘Do you know anybody who might have wanted to kill him?’ I said.

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘What about Koen?’

  ‘Piotr was our neighbour. Our friend.’

  ‘Where were you between ten and eleven last night?’

  ‘Koen and I were at home. We didn’t go out at all. Is that it? I need to get back to work.’

  She showed us out. Thomas and I left the area and joined other shoppers on the escalator down.

  ‘Let’s go and have an ice cream,’ Thomas said. ‘You need to cool down.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we interview Koen?’

  ‘His fiancée has just given him an alibi. Ingrid can go round to talk to him as part of the normal door-to-door.’

  ‘An ice cream,’ I said. ‘What are you? A five-year-old?’

  ‘It’s hot. I know why you were like that with her.’

  ‘And how was I with her?’ I stepped off the escalator and walked towards the exit through the handbags. Not because I wanted to look at them, as Thomas probably suspected, but because I was avoiding the exit by the perfume counter.

  ‘Angry. Judgemental.’ He pushed the door open.

  ‘That woman got on my nerves.’

  There was an Italian ice-cream shop right opposite the department store. Thomas must have seen it on his way in. It was mid-morning and there were still empty tables outside. With this weather, in an hour the queue would be out the door. We bought our ice creams and sat down. Next to us, two teenage boys were holding hands under their table. They couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Had I been into open displays of affection at that age? The boys didn’t talk. They sat in silence, licked ice cream with eager tongues and watched the world go by.

  Thomas wrapped a napkin around the bottom of his cone to protect his sky-blue shirt against spillage.

  ‘We’re skiving in the middle of a murder investigation.’ I took a large bite of lemon ice cream and enjoyed the sensation of it melting in my mouth and cooling my head internally.

  ‘No we’re not. We’re on a break. You needed it. I could see you were getting angry,’Thomas said, ‘and I know why.’

  There were too many reasons. ‘I was with Piotr when he died. I couldn’t save his life so yes, I was getting quite annoyed when his girlfriend—’

  ‘Girlfriend?’ Thomas interrupted.

  ‘Well, whatever you want to call her. The woman he was sleeping with. His squeeze? That better? She didn’t seem to care.’

  Thomas bit the edge of his cone. ‘It’s not about that, though, is it? I know your husband left you. That he cheated on you.’

  I smiled and shook my head. Trust Thomas to observe closely. Only this time he’d watched and drawn the wrong conclusion.

  ‘You’re even doing it now,’ he said. ‘Deflecting.’

  ‘I’m not doing anything. I’m having an ice cream. I’m cooling down. This was your suggestion. And you’re really wrong.’

  A group of teenagers came loud as a storm down the street. They sounded high on the joy of summer. The boys next to me quickly untangled their hands.

  ‘Even though she was cheating on Koen with Piotr,’ Thomas said, ‘that doesn’t mean she doesn’t deserve sympathy for her loss.’

  It was her lack of loss that had angered me. How callously she’d talked about not caring for him. Her claim that he’d just been a bit of fun. That her fiancé was important and her lover wasn’t.

  I moved my chair to make space for the kids, but they didn’t sit down with the two boys. Instead they waited on the pavement for the pair to get up and be part of the group again. The boy closest to me left quickly, without looking back. He had been absorbed by the huddle before the other kid had even got up. For a moment I saw loss flicker on the kid’s face. In his eyes I recognised that desire, that longing, to make the moment last and to be a couple for longer. He dawdled after the group, on the edges, where the other boy was already right in the centre.

  ‘You’re married,’ I said. ‘If you found out your wife was cheating on you, would you hit her?’

  ‘You’re thinking about Natalie’s black eye.’

  ‘Would you kill the guy? Would you knife him? Shoot him?’

  ‘I hope not.’

  I took a bite of my ice cream and the icy sting soothed my brain. Thomas had been right about one thing: I had been angry.

  ‘Seriously,’ I said, ‘if you found out your wife had had an affair, what would you do?’

  ‘I don’t think I’d be violent. I’d be distraught. My marriage gives me stability. I need it.’ The biscuit of his cone crunched between his teeth. ‘This is going to sound silly, but if it fell apart, I would too.’ He looked at me. ‘But you know that, because you did, didn’t you?’

  ‘Fall apart? Maybe. But mainly I was angry. I could have stabbed him. If I’d had my gun on me, I might have shot him.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have.’

  ‘My ex got his secretary pregnant. Trust me, I might have.’

  ‘But you didn’t. You didn’t even hit him.’

  ‘No, I smashed some things of his. Of ours. After he’d left.’

  ‘Very sensible. What things?’ He nibbled the side of his ice cream, which was now down to half its original size.

  ‘A clock.’

  ‘You smashed a clock?’

  ‘His parents had given it to us as a wedding present.’

  ‘How symbolic,’ Thomas said.

  I laughed. ‘Don’t mock. It seemed very meaningful at the time.’

  ‘Do you know that in certain parts of Asia, if you give someone a clock, it means that their time is running out?’

  ‘That was probably his parents’ view of our marriage from the start. It all seems rather funny now, swiping that clock from the mantelpiece.’

  ‘Waste of a perfectly good clock.’

  ‘Nah, it was an ugly thing. Best use of it possible.’ I watched the street for a bit.

  ‘What if Natalie wasn’t the only woman Piotr was sleeping with?’Thomas said. ‘Maybe the woman in the floral dress was his partner. Maybe that’s why she gave him the photo, to remind him of his child.’

  ‘But nobody knows anything about this child.’ In fact, Ronald had said he’d be very surprised if Piotr had a kid. But then he also hadn’t known that Piotr had been sleeping with Natalie.

  ‘Did you see how Natalie reacted?’

  ‘Maybe he has a family back in Poland,’ I said.

  ‘Not according to his parents.’

  ‘No. True. Piotr was happy to see the photo but the woman was nervous. Anxious.’ I remembered her tense muscles. ‘Have you found anything at the flat so far?’

  ‘He’s got a lot of photos but none of them relating to a child or even a relationship. It was rather clean. But I was only there for an hour or so. Maybe Ingrid will find something.’

  ‘That’s strange. He d
idn’t have any photos of Natalie?’

  ‘We found a laptop and we’ll go through that later. Our only lead is the woman he was in the bar with.’

  ‘Had he been in the country long?’

  ‘Over six years. He must have spoken decent Dutch, as most of his texts are in Dutch. He’d worked at the department store for the last couple of years.’

  My mobile beeped. It was a short text from Mark asking when I wanted to take his statement. I shouldn’t have felt as happy as I did; this was purely a legal necessity. It wasn’t quite Where are u? I need u now, but I smiled at the thought that it was the second time in a row that he’d contacted me instead of the other way round.

  Chapter Five

  Mark and I walked side by side across the white wooden drawbridge that led into the Westerpark. We were perfectly in step and I wouldn’t have to reach out far to hold his hand. Even before, we hadn’t done that in public. I brushed my fingers against the back of his, and said, ‘Sorry.’ I moved sideways, closer to the handrail, as if that would prove that touching him really had been accidental. My heart thumped at the base of my throat. The sun was high and bright in the sky and turned life into a holiday.

  When I’d returned his text to arrange to take his statement, he’d surprised me by saying that he was going to eat something in the park, close to where he was redeveloping another house, and why didn’t I join him there. Now we strolled together past the buildings that had previously been a gas factory. It had been transformed into a cinema specialising in Dutch movies, as well as two restaurants and three bars. A woman with a couple of toddlers in a large pushchair came the other way. It was that time when morning transformed into afternoon, and the mother and children were part of the early shift leaving to have lunch at home. She smiled at me. Mark and I probably looked good together.

  We took the path that led to the lake. Mark carried a plastic bag from the nearest supermarket. A baguette stuck out of the top. He could have asked me to come to the house he was working on and given his statement there. It would have taken ten minutes at most. Instead he’d invited me for a picnic.

  A change of climate embraced us as soon as we were deeper in the park. It was cooler here than it had been in Amsterdam’s centre. A quiet descended. We were surrounded by trees that functioned as a sound barrier to keep traffic noise out and make birdsong audible. The heavy planting of the Westerpark gave it a very different feeling from city parks like the Vondelpark. This space, designed more than a century later, was a nature reserve with room for wildlife as well as humans.

  ‘I don’t know why I don’t come here more often,’ I said.

  ‘It’s my favourite place,’ he replied.

  And he had brought me here. There was tension in my jaw and a tightness over my cheekbones as my muscles prepared themselves for a huge smile, because at any moment now something good could happen.

  Tall reeds indicated that, hidden between the plants, way down below, there was a stream. In Amsterdam you were never far away from water, but here there was a pure quality to the air that you didn’t get along the canals. Even where we’d sat yesterday evening had had that smell of overripe fish that hot weather often created.

  ‘What did you see last night, Mark?’ I said.

  ‘Can we talk about that later?’

  ‘Okay.’ I tried not to think about work but to enjoy the surroundings. In the distance I heard the deep rumbling of an industrial lawnmower, and the wind carried with it the green smell of freshly cut grass. Here it was still high and verdant, dusted with buttercups and dandelions. It would be cut down later. A parakeet shrieked from one of the trees with the sound my bicycle brakes made when pressed against a wet wheel rim.

  ‘Why did you leave?’ I couldn’t stop myself from asking. ‘Last night, I mean.’

  He put the plastic bag on the ground. ‘It wasn’t easy for me to see that man lying on the ground and all that blood.’

  ‘It wasn’t easy for me either.’ Swifts drifted high above us, their black forms like shadows in the sky. They never stopped flying. They slept on the wing. Mated on the wing. I’d read somewhere that their legs withered away. Sometimes I felt like those swifts, unable to stop flying, unable to stop thinking about the violence I saw around me. Had some part of me gone? Did those swifts hate it like I sometimes did? Would they like to rest on the ground or sit in a tree in the same way that I would like to stop seeing crime everywhere?

  ‘I saw him.’ Mark’s face looked tight. His eyes were intense. ‘And you were holding a blood-sodden rag to his stomach.’

  I noticed something in his expression that disturbed me and I had to look away from it. I stared down as if I wanted to closely study a ladybird scaling a blade of grass at my feet. ‘I tried to keep him alive,’ I said.

  ‘Watching you like that,’ Mark said, ‘it brought everything back. What you do for a living.’

  That pulled me up. ‘Don’t tell me you’d forgotten about that?’

  ‘No. No, maybe not. My head’s just in a spin right now. I saw you with that man and all that blood … I don’t know. You scare me sometimes, Lotte.’

  ‘I scare you?’ I pushed my sunglasses onto the top of my head so that I could see him more clearly. I also allowed him to see in my eyes that his words hurt.

  ‘I wanted to talk. I thought it would be good to talk about last night. And about some other things. Now I’m not so sure.’

  A heron plunged its head into the slow-moving water and came out having speared a squirming fish. ‘Talking always makes things worse.’

  He looked down at my hands. ‘You were covered in blood.’ He shuddered. He actually physically shuddered. ‘And it made me feel sick. I rushed around the corner and had to throw up.’

  ‘You thought you’d take me on a picnic to tell me that?’ My words felt bitter like bile in my mouth. I didn’t want to hear how much I nauseated him. Anger was brought into sharp relief by the preceding moments of happiness. I brought my sunglasses down like shutters. ‘Is this some sort of revenge?’

  ‘Lotte, don’t—’

  ‘Don’t what? You look at me in disgust. You tell me I scare you and you’re clearly repulsed by me. Looking at me made you literally sick.’

  ‘I’ve seen you outside my house, Lotte,’ he said.

  ‘We should skip the picnic, don’t you think?’The laugh I went for almost turned into a sob, but I kept my voice steady. ‘I’ll come to take your statement later.’

  I walked away from him quickly, handbag hoisted high up my shoulder. I didn’t look round but I heard he wasn’t following me. He didn’t call me back. Had I secretly hoped he would? Had I hoped for one of those movie moments when he’d rush after me, grab me by the arm and stop me to say it had all been a mistake? If I’d hoped for it, it definitely didn’t come.

  I’d been stupid to think that as long as I stayed in my car, he wouldn’t notice me.

  Chapter Six

  Nothing was as great for taking my mind off my fucked-up life as work. I forced myself to think about Piotr Mazur. When I’d seen him in the bar he’d smiled and his face had been transformed. Then someone had stabbed him and I couldn’t keep him alive. And Natalie Schuurman, the woman he’d been sleeping with, had said he was ‘just a security guard’, a fling to get through the boredom of her job. That memory brought up the anger necessary to melt the lump of sadness underneath my breastbone. It still worked.

  The murdered man had cared about that child in the photo. Seeing the picture of the smiling toddler had made him happy. His parents didn’t know anything about his life. They didn’t know about his child. Nobody knew about the child. Nobody seemed to care that much about Piotr’s death.

  I lifted my face to the sky so that gravity would pull the sadness back into the corners of my eyes. I rubbed the edges of my fingers underneath my lower eyelashes to wipe away any mascara that might have smudged. Putting on extra make-up for the picnic had been a great idea. I went into the police station.

  As I w
alked past the interview rooms, I noticed a woman in a dark-blue dress come down the corridor with DI Adam Bauer and one of his team. The woman didn’t look my way but I recognised her. She carried the orange bag that I had coveted last night at the bar. Against the dark dress it made even more of a statement, and here in the police station it was immediately clear that I couldn’t get away with owning something like that. It went perfectly with her dress and would look stupid with my T-shirt and jeans. What was she doing here? Had she seen something last night?

  Bauer’s stomach wasn’t much smaller than that of a thirty-week-pregnant woman. That he ever passed any of the fitness tests was a miracle. He walked with the lumbering gait of a grizzly bear. Still, he and his team had an enviable record for clearing drug cases.

  I hesitated only a second and then ducked into the dark of the observation area. It wasn’t purely curiosity about what the woman was going to say; the longer I stayed away from my desk, the more of a grip I’d have on myself. God forbid Thomas would want to continue our discussion of failed relationships.

  I flipped the switch so I could hear what was being said on the other side of the one-way mirror. The dimness was comforting. I liked watching other people. That had never seemed like a bad thing before. I got my notebook and pencil out of my handbag, then put my bag on the floor and pushed it under the chair. I leaned my elbows on the shelf in front of me, which was made from very similar wood as the tables had been at the bar. It had that classroom-type air to it, as if to remind the observers in the dark that we were here to learn something.

  ‘Thanks for coming in.’ Bauer trudged towards the mirror and inspected it as if he knew there was someone sitting here. Had he seen me duck into the observation area, or was he just checking that he looked presentable? Sweat stains showed around his armpits. Carrying around all that extra weight must be hard work on a hot day. Being this close, I could see where his collar had chafed the skin of his neck. He needed a shirt at least one size bigger. He turned round and pulled up a chair. His shirt was plastered against his back. If it hadn’t been this warm, maybe he would have worn a jacket that could have hidden all his sweat problems.