Death on the Canal

by Anja de Jager

  I puffed the hair away from my face. With my hands on my hips, I stared at the photos. I should take them down row by row and wall by wall. That way I wouldn’t miss any and I would keep them in order. Somehow it mattered to keep Mazur’s installation intact.

  I pulled the sofa forward and saw that the photos continued right to the floor. If he had hidden a couple of hits behind each one, that would have kept him in business for a while. The bottom row featured the Vondelpark from the gates at the front to a close-up of a parakeet. I lifted that line of prints from the wall one by one and put them face down on the floor. Then I took the first one and undid the metal clips on the back. I lifted the cardboard underside, expecting to find a small plastic bag.

  There was nothing. Only the blank reverse of the photograph.

  I sat back on my heels. I’d been so convinced that this was where Piotr had hidden his stash that I could feel the disappointment into my stomach. Maybe this one had contained the hit he’d sold to the Beard, I told myself.

  I worked my way around the room, checking twenty-three photos in quick succession. I got into a calming rhythm of taking the backs off, finding nothing and returning them.

  I was on my fourth row and lifting a photo of de Bijenkorf when I heard the voice. It came from behind the wall. Right where I was standing.

  ‘Don’t you leave. Don’t you dare leave.’ It was a woman’s voice.

  I stopped with the photo in my hand.

  What had they made these walls out of? Cardboard? The words were so clear that I could recognise the pain in the woman’s voice. I listened in anguished fascination.

  The man’s response was too low for me to catch.

  ‘I love you,’ she said.

  ‘You have an odd way of showing that.’ The man must have moved closer to the wall.

  I hugged the photo to my chest. It was as if I was listening to a radio play.

  ‘You know I love you. Don’t you love me any more?’ the woman said.

  I pressed my ear against the wall to find out what he was going to say. Why did his answer mean so much to me?

  ‘I still love you,’ she said. ‘I’d do anything for you.’

  There was a silence. ‘And maybe that’s the problem,’ the man said. It sounded final.

  ‘You can’t do this,’ the woman sobbed. ‘You can’t leave me.’ Then I heard a scream and something crashed loudly against the wall.

  The sound made me jump. I dropped the photo on the sofa and was out of the flat before I could even think about it.

  These neighbours weren’t strangers.

  That woman was Natalie Schuurman, and she was arguing with her partner Koen. Did he say she had an odd way of showing her love because he knew about her relationship with Piotr Mazur? Piotr who’d been stabbed to death?

  I had my hand on the gun on my hip. Domestic violence wasn’t easy. It was delicate to decide when to intervene. In the past, one of my colleagues had been attacked by the girl he’d been trying to protect. I rang the doorbell.

  The door opened a fraction. A man looked through the gap. His right hand held the edge of the door tight. ‘Yes?’ He was in his late twenties, with dark hair and a tight-fitting white T-shirt. He wore a ring around his middle finger. The rest of his body was hidden by the door. He was extremely attractive. He and Natalie would be the kind of couple who turned heads in the street.

  ‘Is everything okay in here?’ I tried to look over his shoulder to check if I could see her.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Police. Can I come in?’ I showed my badge.

  He didn’t open the door any further. ‘What’s this about?’

  ‘I want to ask you a couple of questions about Piotr Mazur.’

  Koen scratched his forehead with his left hand. A ring around his thumb glinted. It was a plain golden band. The other hand never left the door. ‘I spoke to someone on Friday already.’

  ‘We’re just following up. There’s some new information since then.’

  ‘I really don’t know anything.’ He wasn’t going to move from the door.

  ‘What about your girlfriend?’ I threw a glance at the names by the door to pretend I needed to check. ‘Natalie.’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘I’d really like to speak to her.’

  ‘Oh man.’ He pulled his hair back and smiled a bashful smile at me. ‘You heard, didn’t you? We were just having an argument. Some stuff got broken.’

  Maybe if you woke up next to someone this good-looking every morning, it would get boring. Otherwise I couldn’t imagine what Natalie had been doing with Piotr. ‘I’d like to make sure she’s okay,’ I said.

  ‘Sure.’ He turned round. ‘Natalie,’ he said loudly, ‘the police are here.’ He seemed calm.

  I didn’t like that I still couldn’t look into the flat. ‘You don’t have to let me in if you don’t want to.’ I spoke evenly, because domestics tended to escalate quickly. ‘But then all your neighbours can hear exactly what we’re talking about.’ I directed the last words down the corridor, where another door had crept open. It was now pulled shut again but I thought I saw the letter box move.

  ‘We have no secrets from each other here.’

  ‘So what had Piotr been up to?’ It was taking too long for Natalie to come to the door. Even though I kept my voice steady, I could feel my heart rate speeding up and adrenaline starting to pump through my veins.

  ‘Nothing much. He was a nice guy. Pretty quiet.’

  The longer that front door was only slightly ajar, the more I felt there was something inside that flat I wasn’t supposed to see. Something to do with Natalie’s black eye the other day, perhaps. My body was getting itself ready for action. I would have to push Koen out of the way and make sure he had no chance to shut that door on me. I wondered where Tim was. ‘Natalie, are you okay?’ I said loudly.

  Koen threw a glance at me. ‘Natalie, hurry up.’

  ‘I’m coming,’ I heard from inside the flat.

  Footsteps came to the door. Koen opened it further and Natalie arrived at his side. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s a bit of a mess in there.’

  ‘Are you okay?’ I repeated. ‘I heard the noise.’

  ‘Yes, I’m fine.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yes, absolutely.’

  I scanned her face. No sign of new bruising. She was wearing a strappy summer dress. There were no marks on her arms either. I nodded. I had to take her word for it.

  We talked for a few minutes in the corridor. They confirmed that they’d been at home on Thursday night, that they hadn’t heard anything that might throw new light on Piotr’s death and that they didn’t know anybody who would have wanted to kill him. I had no choice but to let them go back into their flat.

  Over the next couple of hours Tim and I continued to turn Piotr’s flat upside down. I heard no more noise from next door and we didn’t find any drugs. The place was clean.

  We returned to the police station and Tim left to go for a run. That seemed a stupid thing to do in the heat of the day. I popped down to the canteen to have a quick bite to eat. As I was eating my sandwich, I paged through the pathologist’s report on Piotr Mazur’s murder. Unsurprisingly, there had been cocaine in his blood, but only traces, so he hadn’t used any on the evening he died. There had been no defence wounds on his hands or arms. I thought about his flat. Where did he keep the drugs? He must have had another place somewhere. I made a note: maybe he’d lived with the woman in the floral dress. Did she now have his stash? We needed to find her. Forensics had lifted a clear fingerprint from the photo in his wallet. It wasn’t in our database, but once we found the woman, we would be able to tell if she had handled that picture or not.

  None of the photos in Piotr’s apartment had shown any people. We didn’t even find a snap of his parents. It had been immaculate, almost as if the flat was purely there to display the photographs.

  I went back to the office to do what Bauer actually wanted me t
o do and looked through all the people who had overdosed on heroin. I’d just pulled up the list from the central database when Tim came back.

  ‘Where shall we start?’ I said. ‘Last twelve months? Is that too long?’

  ‘I’ve got the list right here. I’ve been looking at these. Twenty-eight ODs on heroin across the country. Eight in Amsterdam. Can we rule out other drugs? Like the student who died taking contaminated MDMA?’

  ‘Yeah, that doesn’t seem to fit.’ Eight. Not too bad in the scheme of things. I rolled my chair over to Tim’s desk to look over his shoulder at the list he’d pulled up. He moved his coffee mug out of the way to make space for my notepad. I had to lean in to read the names on the screen.

  First on the list was a sixty-five-year-old man. A long-term user. They’d found him with the needle still in his arm. Old school. ‘That’s not a candidate,’ I said.

  ‘And neither is his wife. Same age. Also injected. Died the same day. Maybe a suicide pact?’A drop of sweat rolled from the edge of his short-cut hair down his neck. ‘Either way, doesn’t seem to fit the pattern. Not with the needles.’ He wiped his forehead. His shirt was glued to his back. I could see the shape of his muscles through the damp fabric.

  He caught my eye. ‘Sorry, I should have had a longer shower.’ He picked up his mug and drank, as if that would rehydrate him. ‘It was so warm outside.’

  If testosterone had a smell, it would surely be this mixture of coffee and shampoo, with a hint of deodorant.

  ‘Right. Here’s a young guy of Moroccan descent. I remember him.’ Tim pulled up the details. ‘Maarten and I spoke to the parents. They swore he’d never used heroin before. Too religious to do drugs of any kind.’

  Parents were always the last to know their children’s secrets.

  ‘He was found dead in a gay bar,’ Tim continued. ‘They didn’t accept that either. But there really wasn’t anything suspicious about his overdose.’

  ‘Habitual use?’

  ‘The boyfriend came forward and said they’d taken it together on occasion. Amongst other things. Mephedrone, if I remember rightly. The parents didn’t want to believe it, of course. The father got aggressive and tried to hit Maarten.’ He shook his head. ‘Gay and a drug user. Ruined every memory the parents had of their beloved only son.’

  The next four were men who’d all had a long history of arrests and drug use. ‘Those first two used methadone for a while. Didn’t help.’

  That left us with one more. A young woman, Sylvie Bruyneel. ‘Such a waste. Only twenty-four.’Tim pulled up a picture. ‘Cute.’

  Not that cute, I wanted to say, but it would have been a lie. ‘Very pretty.’ I looked at the details. ‘She’d had counselling.’

  ‘Oh shit.’ His voice lowered. The sweat drops down his neck multiplied. ‘Her counsellor came in. I talked to her. She claimed it couldn’t be right as they’d tested the girl numerous times in the clinic and found no signs of H use.’ He wiped his forehead. ‘We dismissed it at the time. She’d been out of the clinic for a couple of years when she OD’d. Who knows what drugs she’d been doing since?’

  I rolled my chair back to my desk.

  ‘We should meet with the counsellor, shouldn’t we?’ Tim said.

  ‘It’s what Bauer wants. Let me call her. Name?’

  ‘Petra Maasland.’ Tim read out the number and I dialled.

  ‘She’s not going to be happy to see me,’ Tim said.

  ‘Why not?’ The phone was ringing at the other end and I kept my hand over the mouthpiece in case it was suddenly answered.

  ‘I told her things she didn’t want to hear.’

  The call went to voicemail.

  Chapter Ten

  Sylvie’s parents, Mabel and Harald Bruyneel, sat side by side on a large sofa with a bold blue stripe pattern. The curtains, made from the same material, were closed, either to keep the heat out or to keep the sofa and the carpet from fading in the bright sunlight. For the parents it was too late; they’d lost their colour years ago. They sat close together, their arms linked to harness themselves against the bad news that a visit by the police often proved to be for the families of drug addicts. Even six months after their daughter’s death they automatically assumed this parental bracing position. They matched like a salt-and-pepper set. Their identical haircut was slightly long for a man but brutally short for a woman. Their hair was that in-between colour that would look blonde in sunshine but washed-out brown inside the house. They both wore grey shorts that ended just above the knee, and polo shirts. The dog, fast asleep in a large wicker basket to the side of the sofa, completed the circle.

  Tim and I had driven here after the counsellor, Petra Maasland, had returned my call and told me that she could only see us in the evening as she had clients all day. If we could come to the hospital where she had her clinic, she’d have time to talk to us after six o’clock. We could of course have insisted on seeing her straight away, but there was no point in antagonising a woman we needed information from.

  Instead we were talking to parents who had not found their daughter’s death suspicious. It was equally important to interview people who didn’t suspect foul play.

  They lived in a small house in one of the newer streets in Zaandam. The town was just on the other side of the Noordzee Kanaal from Amsterdam. Houses were a lot cheaper here. You’d be in Amsterdam in ten minutes by train. During rush hour it took much longer by car, as all the commuters from the north had to be funnelled through three tunnels under the wide canal, causing daily traffic jams.

  Sweat glued my T-shirt to my back. It was stifling in the room and the closed curtains locked us in with the heat. I was dying to get up and open the back door to let some air in. I could also really do with a glass of water, but they hadn’t offered us anything. We were on their side but they probably thought otherwise.

  ‘You weren’t surprised when Sylvie died,’ I said.

  Mabel sat so close to Harald that their legs were touching. He wore white socks. She had bare feet in her sandals. ‘Not in the slightest,’ she said. ‘We’d been expecting that call for years.’ Her voice was soft.

  ‘When did you see her last?’ Tim asked.

  ‘When she came for money.’ Mabel’s voice sounded resigned. Quiet. ‘That was the only reason she’d talk to us. But we told her no because we knew what she did with it. Allowing her to buy more drugs isn’t helping, is it? We, as parents, had to draw a line.’ If she had been angry at any point, that had been worn away by years of disappointment.

  I’d seen it often enough with the parents of drug addicts. There came a point when the continued lying and drugtaking had eroded all the love. Some parents stuck with their children to the bitter end, through rehab and rebound, hoping that this time they would beat their addiction. And sometimes they did.

  But some parents couldn’t or wouldn’t. It was often the ones with other children to care for who made the hard choices. I’d read in Sylvie’s file that there was a sister called Katja. Maybe it was to protect her that the parents had washed their hands of Sylvie.

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘It was years ago, when she still lived at her sister’s place. She was used to having a certain type of life. Katja wasn’t earning much, she was only temping, and Sylvie didn’t have a job at all. She kept coming to us for clothes, for a new bike, help with her phone bill.’ She turned to look at Harald. ‘But we realised that wasn’t what she used the money for.’

  ‘How old was she then?’ I asked.

  ‘What do you think, Harald? Twenty-one? Twenty-two?’

  ‘Something like that.’ The words came out slowly, as if they took all the energy he could summon. He slouched on the sofa, his back rounded.

  ‘She left home when she was seventeen. Sometimes you have to do what’s right for yourself,’ Mabel said, as if she was defending herself against an accusation I wasn’t making. ‘Even before that we couldn’t cope with her any more. She stole from us, was flouting all our rules. We d
rew some boundaries and gave her one last chance. But when she came home at five in the morning, completely off her face on whatever, we had no choice but to show her the door. She packed her things and moved to Amsterdam to live with her sister.’

  ‘So her sister had already moved out as well?’

  ‘Yes, Katja’s the eldest. She moved to Amsterdam as soon as she was able to afford it. She always wanted to live there. Things went well for her for a while. Now she’s decided she doesn’t want anything to do with us any more. She told us she wished there was such a thing as divorce for children.’

  I winced. That had been a cruel thing to say, but Mabel was oddly matter-of-fact about it.

  It struck me that there were no photos in the living room at all. Maybe it was the contrast with Piotr Mazur’s flat. No pictures of either of the daughters, or of the family together. The wall opposite the TV was dominated by a large painting of husband and wife with their dog.

  ‘We did our best with those two but it seems our best wasn’t good enough. With Katja it was hard from the beginning. Sylvie was much easier, until she hit puberty.’

  ‘What do you know about the drugs that Sylvie did?’

  ‘When she still lived here, she partied and went to night-clubs. We think she was using cocaine and amphetamines at that time.’ Mabel talked about the drugs in a slow and precise voice, as if she was speaking in a foreign language. ‘She would come home at four, five o’clock in the morning on a buzz. And she was only fifteen.’

  Was she hiding her guilt by showing no emotion whatsoever? Did she think she could have done more to stop her daughter?

  ‘They let her in at that age?’ Tim said.

  ‘She always was very pretty,’ Harald said. ‘Could twist anybody around her little finger. She looked just like her mother.’

  Mabel didn’t smile at the compliment.

  I kept my face still. Beauty was clearly in the eye of the beholder. From the photos that Tim and I had seen, Sylvie had looked nothing like the washed-out mother. Tim definitely wouldn’t call Mabel ‘cute’. Maybe she had been when she was young, or maybe her husband thought she was attractive because looking at her must be much like looking in the mirror.