Death on the Canal

by Anja de Jager

  ‘Tell us what happened that evening,’ the man next to Bauer said. I’d seen him around, of course, but I didn’t know his name. From the back I had a perfect view of his mass of pale-blonde hair that looked remarkably like the bottom of a mop. He sat slumped in his chair like a bored teenager at school.

  I drew two circles in my notebook and linked them. They looked just like the large sunglasses that the woman had tucked into the front of her linen shift dress.

  ‘I’m surprised you asked me to come here.’ She wrapped her arms around herself, and the microphone picked up the sound that her two large bracelets made as they clinked together.

  ‘You called us to say you knew where your friend got the drugs from,’ Bauer said.

  ‘He wasn’t really my friend. Should I have a lawyer present?’

  ‘That’s entirely up to you. Did you aid him in the purchase?’ He moved on quickly with his questions, probably to get her to answer before she could follow through on that thought of a lawyer.

  ‘I didn’t get him the drugs.’

  ‘Did you purchase any for yourself?’ He had a checklist in front of him and poised a pen just above the paper as if to tick off any statement that she made.

  ‘No.’ She sat back as if even the suggestion was an insult.

  ‘And you’re certain he was after cocaine.’

  ‘Yes. That’s what he was telling us. We tried to shut him up but we couldn’t stop him.’

  Was she talking about her really annoying friend, the Beard? He had been talking about wanting drugs, I recalled that.

  ‘Tell us from the beginning what happened that evening,’ Bauer said.

  It was interesting seeing someone else go through this standard investigation technique. Get a willing witness to tell you everything that had happened leading up to an incident and you were much more likely to get the full story. Talking about what had gone on before seemed to make them able to recall details more fully.

  ‘My husband called me to say that a business acquaintance of his was over from Frankfurt and wanted to go out for dinner, and did I want to come? I wasn’t doing anything that evening and my sister was at my place and we said: why not? It was a nice evening, it would be pleasant to eat outside, so we decided to go to Groen.’

  ‘Is Groen close to your house?’

  ‘Yes, it’s within walking distance and we go there all the time. But this time we drove – I drove – so we could drop Karl off back at the hotel.’

  Karl must be the name of the Beard.

  ‘Had you met him before?’

  ‘No.’ She pulled a face. ‘If I had, I might not have gone. He was rather obnoxious. Loud to begin with and quickly getting worse as he had more to drink. My sister was starting to feel uncomfortable in his company and I knew she wanted to leave. He kept touching her, as if he thought we’d invited her along for him. I persuaded her to stay for one more drink. I’d get so bored otherwise with the men talking shop. Then Karl began asking about drugs and my husband was mortified. Especially because Karl seemed to assume that we knew where to buy them.’

  ‘And you don’t.’

  ‘No, of course we don’t. He said he wanted cocaine. Snow, he said, but I knew what he meant.’

  Bauer looked down at a piece of paper that I recognised as a pathologist’s report. ‘He died early this morning of a heroin overdose.’

  I stopped doodling. He’d died? No wonder they’d called her in for a formal statement.

  ‘I know. We heard and we talked about whether to come forward or not,’ the woman said. ‘But there was a policewoman at the table next to us and she overheard him asking about drugs and didn’t do anything, so we didn’t think we’d done anything illegal.’

  Bauer shot a glance at his colleague. ‘How did you know the woman at the table next to you was a police officer?

  ‘When that other guy got stabbed, she rushed towards the sound. That was rather odd. You don’t expect a woman to get up from a table when you hear some screaming. Certainly I didn’t. But she jumped up straight away and told the guy she was with not to get involved. To stay behind.’

  My breathing quickened. I leaned in closer to the window, rested my elbows on the shelf in front of me and my chin on my folded hands. I didn’t really want to hear what she was going to say, yet I couldn’t pull myself away from the window. It was as if I was watching a TV series where you knew something bad was going to happen but you couldn’t tear your eyes away from the screen.

  ‘You heard all of this?’

  ‘Yes, the tables outside are quite close together. You can’t help but hear every word.’

  ‘So this woman heard Karl talking about buying drugs.’

  ‘At first I’d hoped that she hadn’t. I was mortified. And she and the guy she was with …’ she laughed and touched her sunglasses, ‘let’s say I thought she was paying more attention to him than to us.’

  I shouldn’t have been here but I was unable to move away. Listening to a stranger describe us was addictive. On the other side of the mirror they could luckily neither see nor hear me.

  ‘They were talking all evening.’ Her smile carried a hint of wistfulness. ‘She was really into him. You know, don’t you, when you see a couple and one of them leans forward all the time and the other leans back. But when Karl started talking about buying drugs,’ the woman continued, ‘she looked over at me with this disapproving look, as if she blamed me for having brought him there and spoiling a perfect evening.’

  A perfect evening. But Mark had been leaning away from me all the time. He knew I’d shot someone dead three months ago. He had told me that a police officer had been jailed for eighteen months. He’d said he’d seen me outside his house and he probably didn’t even know the full extent of it.

  And then I remembered that he’d said I scared him.

  The top of my throat thickened, right at the back of my tongue, and for a second I couldn’t breathe. I hid my face in my hands. He couldn’t have meant it.

  The door behind me opened.

  I had only a second to pull myself together, but it was enough. I pressed my fingers against my eyes and pushed the tears back. I picked up my pencil as if I had been taking notes all the time.

  I recognised the guy who came in. In the light from the hallway I could see that he was smartly dressed in a shirt and chinos. One of Bauer’s team, Tim Poels. I was truly grateful that it was dim in the observation area.

  ‘I didn’t know there was anybody in here,’ Tim said. I knew his name because Ingrid had once pointed him out to me. She really liked him, but for all I knew, she’d probably never spoken to him. He was new and had only recently moved into Bauer’s team.

  ‘Just listening in,’ I said.

  ‘Are you okay?’ He wore a pair of small wire-rimmed glasses, which he took off to look at me.

  ‘Hay fever,’ I said. ‘It’s terrible at this time of year.’

  ‘What did I miss?’ Tim said. ‘I got held up.’

  I looked at him in disbelief. ‘Other than the whole thing?’ That was why Bauer had looked at the mirror. Because he thought that Tim Poels was sitting here.

  ‘You’re just upset that we’re going to take this case from you.’There was a smile in his voice and the teasing allowed me a chance to give him a watery grimace back that could probably pass for a grin.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I’d watched Piotr Mazur die under my hands the other night. I had to keep working this case.

  ‘Ah, so I haven’t missed it yet,’Tim said. ‘You’ll cover for me, won’t you? If anybody asks, I was here all the time.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Have my notes.’ I moved my notepad towards him as if I was seriously suggesting that my doodles of sunglasses and the couple of words I’d taken down were useful.

  ‘Did Karl say that he wanted to buy coke specifically?’ Bauer was continuing the interview.

  ‘Not then. My husband Paul, he told him to shut up. That we didn’t do any of that. Then Karl went
into the bar. I thought he just needed to use the bathroom, but he was there a while and he didn’t come out and I went after him. Maybe Paul should have done that, I don’t know. He was going around those guys wearing yellow T-shirts, asking them one by one if they had any drugs.’

  The yellow T-shirts. I’d held one of those T-shirts against Piotr Mazur’s stomach as he was bleeding out. I thought of how his blood had covered my hands. I remembered the thick metallic smell in the warm evening. I thought of Natalie calling him just a security guard. I picked up my pencil and wrote down: Talk to the doctor. What did he hear? Maybe he’d been there when Karl was trying to score drugs. I had his name and I should give that to Bauer.

  ‘Karl was so drunk at that point, I don’t think he knew what he was saying. I apologised to the guys, explained that he was off his face and that he really didn’t want to imply that any of them looked like dealers. One of them was getting quite annoyed. Not because of the drug thing but because of how Karl was pestering the waitress too. I was going to get my husband to drag him out of there and get him back to the hotel. I tried to talk to Karl but he kept saying, “I just want some snow.”’

  The woman continued her statement. ‘Those guys were nice about it. They could see that I was mortified. I chatted with them for a bit to make amends, but when I turned around, Karl was talking to the guy in the white jeans. And the guy gave him something.’

  ‘What guy?’

  ‘The guy who got stabbed. He was the one who sold him the drugs.’

  I stared at the window in disbelief. ‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ I said. We hadn’t found any drugs on Piotr’s body, and surely Ingrid would have told me if they’d found any at his flat.

  ‘But he didn’t use the drugs then. He OD’d this morning,’ Bauer said.

  ‘I dragged him out of the bar and asked the waitress to get us more drinks. When that man was stabbed, we immediately left. I drove Karl back to his hotel, and my husband and I made sure he got to his room safely. He was so drunk he could hardly stand up. He fell on the bed and we left him there.’

  ‘So that’s why this case will go to us,’ Tim said. ‘It’s a real mess.’

  ‘Piotr Mazur didn’t have any drugs on him,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll have to have another look.’

  Annoyance grew. ‘Are you saying we didn’t do a good job?’ I was worried; the CI would be happy enough to assign it to another team. One case fewer for us, one more for the Serious Crime team to work on.

  On the other side of the window, the woman started to cry. ‘Then my husband called me this morning to say his meeting had been cancelled because Karl had been found dead in his hotel room.’ She covered her face with her hands for a second. When she had herself under control again, she opened the orange handbag and got a tissue out.

  ‘Take your time,’ Bauer said.

  She blew her nose. ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘Are you ready to continue?’

  ‘I feel responsible,’ she said. ‘I knew he had those drugs on him but I thought it was none of my business. That as soon as I’d dropped him off at the hotel it was no longer my problem. But he died.’ She looked directly at Bauer. ‘It doesn’t matter whether I liked him or not. I let him die.’

  I sat back in my chair and stared at the mirror. I bit my lip. I knew exactly how she felt.

  The door to the CI’s office stood open and I popped my head in. ‘What’s going on? Why didn’t you tell me?’ Rows of law books lined the boss’s office. He probably kept them here to look more knowledgeable, but they were also indicators of having to do things by the rules.

  He sighed as if seeing me here was the most inconvenient thing ever and dragged his eyes away from his computer screen. ‘I told Ingrid and Thomas. You weren’t there.’ At least he didn’t pretend not to understand what I was talking about. ‘It was decided once this woman came forward. Pauline van der Heuvel. Did you see her?’

  ‘Yes, she had the table right next to me. With that guy who OD’d.’ I assumed he was talking about last night. I shouldn’t tell him that I’d listened in to the interview. Best to keep that quiet.

  ‘Did you witness him buying the drugs?’

  ‘No, I must have been outside at the time. But he was talking about wanting drugs. Any drugs. Maybe he bought heroin.’ When I’d heard him, the Beard hadn’t mentioned coke specifically.

  The boss shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter. We can’t take the risk. You know that other case is huge and it’s still going on. If someone else is selling contaminated coke, then it could be that dealer was right and it wasn’t his fault.’

  The ‘other case’ had been Bauer’s main focus over the past twelve months. Six tourists who thought they were buying coke but were given white heroin instead had died. Do a line of that and you could OD pretty quickly. When that was going on, we had boards in the tourist areas of Amsterdam warning people that they should be careful what they were buying and who they were buying it from.

  Surprisingly enough, the dealer had come forward after he’d recognised himself from some security footage. He’d always maintained it had been an honest mistake and that he hadn’t meant to kill anybody. He was a dealer, not a murderer.

  I shook my head. ‘We had no idea who he was until he handed himself in, and now it turns out we had the wrong guy?’ If we had another case here of a heroin overdose when the victim thought he was buying coke, that would put that conviction in serious doubt.

  ‘We have the right guy. There’s no question about that. We’ve got him on CCTV with one of the victims.’ The boss threw a quick glance at his computer screen, but it was still less interesting than talking to me. ‘But the guy always claimed it wasn’t his fault. That there was nothing anybody could have done because to the naked eye there was no way of telling the drugs apart. Unless he regularly sampled his own wares, of course, which he claims he never did.’

  ‘Not his fault. Right. So this is now a drugs case?’

  ‘If Karl Frankel had only OD’d, I would have wanted you to keep working it. But a woman has come forward to say that he wanted to buy coke. Now this is clearly a continuation of that other case and we need to treat it as that.’

  I shook my head in disbelief.

  ‘I heard you were there with Mark Visser,’ he said.

  My lips pushed together. ‘Yes, I was.’

  ‘I know you’re old friends, but be careful what you say to him.’

  I didn’t trust my voice and only nodded.

  ‘This is now a drugs case. Give them whatever information you have.’ He looked at me over his reading glasses. ‘Is there a problem with that?’

  ‘I watched him die. I was there.’ And it was what was keeping my mind busy and away from how I’d behaved with Mark.

  ‘That doesn’t matter. Give Bauer everything you’ve got so far.’

  I nodded again.

  ‘Are you okay?’ the boss said.

  ‘Hay fever,’ I said automatically, the same excuse I’d given Tim Poels.

  ‘It’s bad today. My wife suffers too. Are you taking antihistamine?’

  ‘I haven’t yet. I should.’

  ‘Now you can have a quiet weekend. Enjoy the nice weather.’

  ‘I might go to the beach,’ I lied. ‘More sand but less pollen.’

  ‘My wife says that the helm grass in the dunes is a killer. It always makes her sneeze like crazy.’

  ‘For me it’s not the sneezing so much; it just makes my eyes swell up.’ Nothing like getting excuses in early.

  I went to the office upstairs. I didn’t have to explain to DI Adam Bauer why I was there. He didn’t even ask. I focused on the whiteboard. Six photos were aligned along the top; six people who were no longer alive. ‘The guy who’s in prison killed all of them?’

  ‘Is responsible for the deaths of all of them,’ Bauer rephrased it. ‘That’s why we’re taking over your case. We’re not going to let ours fall apart because some petty dealer got stabbed to death.’ H
e pointed at a picture of a man in his early twenties. ‘He was the first one. He died fourteen months ago.’

  I recognised where the guy had taken the selfie because of the corner of the monument that he’d managed to get into the shot. Evidence to share with his friends that he’d been in Dam Square. He held a glass of beer raised in a salute.

  ‘This was the last photo on his phone before he died. We didn’t really look into it much, you know, just thought he’d come over to do heroin. Even when his friend swore he never touched it, we didn’t take his testimony seriously.’

  ‘Because if he had, he wasn’t going to admit it. He was an Aussie, right?’

  ‘Right, but then there was another one a day later.’ A fat finger landed on the second photo. Similar in age to the first victim. Looked Southeast Asian, or maybe Indian or Pakistani. ‘So that guy’s girlfriend’ – Bauer tapped the photo – ‘came over to Amsterdam. She told us he only ever snorted coke. Told us is putting it mildly. She screamed. Anyway, we tested his hair. And bingo. She was right. Regular coke use but no traces of heroin. Never used the stuff until he died of it. So Forensics retested the first guy and it was the same thing. Here we had two habitual coke users who OD’d on heroin.’

  ‘Then the two the week after, right? That French couple.’

  ‘Found them in their hotel. At least this time we did all the tests straight away.’

  ‘As if we’re not in enough trouble with the French over drugs,’ I said.

  ‘And finally the two Swedish tourists. The ones that made our man come forward. That was a year ago now. It’s taken a while for this to come to court. Anyway, none of these people, or their families, are going to get justice if this case falls apart.’ He hitched up his trousers, first at the back then by the belt buckle. ‘Another drug dealer swapped coke for heroin: the judge might start to believe our man’s claim that this was just a mistake, that it could have happened to any dealer, and call it involuntary manslaughter. That would be a joke. We can’t have that happen.’

  I handed everything over to Bauer’s team. It left me with two days with nothing to do. Not even a case to work on any more. The weather forecast was for relentless sunshine.