Death on the Canal

by Anja de Jager

  ‘The drugs,’Tim started again after a short silence. ‘Do you know what else she was using?’

  ‘She died of a heroin overdose, so she must have moved on to that,’ Mabel said. ‘Probably when her sister kicked her out. Sylvie was stealing from her too, until even Katja had had enough. We had a meeting here, at the house, to discuss what we were going to do. We refused to pay Sylvie any more money and I think Katja was at the end of her tether. We told her that clearly it wasn’t as easy to deal with Sylvie as she’d imagined, so she should cut us some slack.’

  ‘We told Katja that she was going to end up just like her mother,’ Harald said. ‘We warned her, but she wouldn’t listen.’

  It suddenly dawned on me that when he talked about the girls’ mother, he didn’t meant Mabel at all. Were they his daughters from a previous marriage? Had he left a pretty wife for this female version of himself? Had his first wife been a drug addict too? It would explain Mabel’s coldness towards the daughters, especially the pretty one who looked so much like her mother.

  ‘We told Katja time and time again to be careful, but she wasn’t,’ Mabel said. ‘And now, when all my worries have come true, she doesn’t want to see us any more.’

  ‘When did Sylvie leave Katja’s place?’

  ‘Oh, I’d say three years ago. Katja wanted to get her into rehab. We said that she should do what she thought was best.’ Mabel exchanged a look with her husband. ‘We’d washed our hands of both girls at that stage. Too much had happened. But Sylvie refused and Katja kicked her out.’

  Tim looked down at his notes. ‘But she did go to rehab.’

  ‘That was later, and not voluntarily. She was caught stealing from her work – we hadn’t even known she had a job – and it was part of her sentence. This was about a year after her sister kicked her out.’

  I made a small drawing in my notebook to work out Sylvie’s timeline from the mother’s disjointed answers. She’d moved in with her sister at seventeen and lived with her until she was twenty-one. A year later, she was arrested for theft and went into rehab. Then we knew nothing about her for the next few years until she OD’d six months ago aged twenty-four. ‘Do you know where she lived for the last few years?’ I asked.

  ‘Probably in a squat or a gutter somewhere. Or found some guy to take her in. There were always plenty of them around. From a very early age.’

  ‘So when she died of a heroin overdose …’ I said.

  ‘We weren’t surprised, no.’ Mabel finished my sentence. ‘You hear it all the time.’

  ‘She’d been clean for a while.’That was what the pathologist’s report had said. He’d tested her hair and there had been no cocaine or heroin use until the hit that killed her.

  ‘Yes, and then she probably got down about something, maybe man trouble, and took heroin. Isn’t it typical for people to overdose then? We read that somewhere, didn’t we, Harald? That addicts go back to the same amount of drugs they used before, only their bodies are no longer accustomed to it.’

  Tim nodded. ‘Yes, that can happen.’

  ‘It’s such a shame it didn’t work out. It’s painful, of course, to know that you’ve failed, but you can’t save them all. There are always high levels of drug use amongst them. Higher than with the general public. We were disappointed that she’d moved on to heroin, weren’t we, Harald, but we weren’t surprised. We had expected it.’

  ‘What about Katja?’

  ‘All those years, we really tried,’ Mabel said. ‘At the time, our friends told us we were crazy taking those two girls on, but we thought it was worth trying. They looked right, you see. But I guess they were always going to end up like that.’

  ‘What do you mean,’ I said, ‘you took them on?’

  ‘Katja was five and Sylvie three when we adopted them. Their mother had died young and the father wasn’t around any more. We looked after them for almost fifteen years. I don’t think they ever loved us.’

  Harald put his hand on his wife’s knee. ‘Two children with their background, I think we just took on too much.’

  I looked at the painting again of the couple with their dog. Was their life better now, without the girls? With one dead and the other no longer speaking to them? I finally understood the ‘divorce’ comment that Katja had made.

  ‘I know,’ Mabel said, ‘that you never can tell. But there was no obvious damage and their hair’ – she reached out and touched her husband’s head – ‘it was the same colour as ours.’

  I was happy to leave that house.

  ‘We’d better talk to the sister, don’t you think?’ Tim said once we were outside.

  I called the police station and got the address. During the drive back to Amsterdam, I could only think of two little girls who had been selected for their hair colour.

  We went to Katja’s flat, but there was nobody home.

  Chapter Eleven

  The rattan couch was covered with thickly stuffed magenta chintz cushions with a pattern of roses. I sank so deeply into the sofa that I was worried I might never be able to get up. Tim had wisely chosen one of the firmer chairs. He’d probably been a victim of the sofa last time he was here. He fiddled with his pen, taking the cap off and putting it back on. A small fan whirred in the corner and blasted tepid air around the room.

  Petra Maasland had decorated this space in her own image. Anybody giving her a hug would probably disappear in her flesh; her hair was grey and downy like dandelion fluff and her face as puce as the chintz. Only her jeans and T-shirt clashed with the floral interior. I guessed she was in her early fifties. She sat down on the other sofa with a small grunt, then shuffled from one bum cheek to the other to create a comfortable hollow in the cushions. ‘You wanted to talk about Sylvie Bruyneel?’ she said. Her blue eyes were sharp. She had openly ignored Tim when he came in, I assumed because he’d disregarded her concerns around Sylvie’s death six months ago.

  The surroundings were more suited to a boudoir than a counsellor’s room in a clinic. Tim was too angular in this oasis of femininity. Maybe the female informality inspired confessions of a different type than he would extract in our interrogation rooms. Words that came from a sense of security instead of a fear of force. Whether those revelations would be more honest depended on whether you were more likely to lie to a friend or an enemy.

  ‘You knew Sylvie well?’ I said. Tim was still fully concentrating on playing with his pen. If he’d been within reach, I might have snatched it from his hands.

  ‘I did a lot of work with her. She seemed to be one of the ones I’d reached. One of those rare success stories.’ Petra met my eyes with sincerity. Counsellors tried to change people’s lives.

  And then we dealt with the aftermath if they failed. ‘But she overdosed.’

  Petra’s grey hair bounced as she shook her head sharply. ‘That’s why I thought it didn’t make sense.’ She paused. ‘Even though I know these things happen. I’m not that naïve.’

  ‘You flagged it up to us. Why didn’t this one make sense?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Petra shuffled forwards on the sofa. ‘What are the police doing to stop heroin from being sold?’ Her eyes flashed from me to Tim. ‘Or don’t you actually care when people die?’

  He paled a little but didn’t challenge her words. Beforehand, we’d agreed that I’d run the questioning, but that didn’t mean he needed to stay silent. He took the pen’s blue top and put force on the end with his thumb until the plastic snapped.

  Petra blinked a couple of times at the sound.

  ‘Tell me why you thought you’d reached her.’ I kept my voice even, didn’t linger on the word ‘thought’ as I’d wanted to.

  ‘The month before she died, I told my husband that it was young women like Sylvie who made this job worthwhile. So when I heard the news, I was in shock.’ She bit her lower lip as if she was trying to keep something inside. What was it? Tears? An explanation?

  ‘She died from a more serious drug than she came in here for.’
r />   Petra frowned. ‘When she first arrived here, she told me that doing a line every now and then was all the rage. She didn’t think she was doing anything wrong. Understanding her dependency was a big step on her road to recovery.’ She pushed her lips together as if she suddenly understood what she had said. Because Sylvie hadn’t really recovered.

  ‘Coming here was part of her sentence?’

  ‘Yes, the theft was her first offence. She got community service plus a period here in the clinic to go through a programme.’

  ‘She was only using coke at that point?’

  ‘And alcohol, of course. They often go together.’ She looked at Tim.

  The posters on the wall were a mixture of framed art reproductions and public-health notices. Use clean needles. Call us if you’re thinking about using again.

  ‘You don’t think she used heroin before she came here?’ I said.

  ‘And she didn’t use it while she was here either. She said she’d never used anything other than coke and some party drugs. MDMA mainly. She didn’t lie.’ Petra shrugged each shoulder in turn like a boxer getting ready for a fight. ‘We know that because when our clients join us, we test them. On a voluntary basis only.’

  I’d looked through the pathology report on Sylvie’s death back in the office and had paid special attention to the toxicology section. ‘There was heroin and cocaine in her body. No other drugs.’

  ‘That’s why I thought it must have been wrong. I came to check – but you know this, of course.’ These last words were directed at Tim.

  He nodded but didn’t say anything.

  ‘You were the one who questioned it,’ I said. ‘Not her family.’

  ‘They lost contact,’ Petra replied. ‘Anyway, why is our dead addict of interest to you now, almost six months after she died?’

  ‘There might have been another death where someone bought coke but most likely got white heroin,’ Tim said.

  ‘Those tourists.’ Petra pushed herself further forward on her chintz sofa. It needed the help of both hands to overcome the suck of the cushions. ‘Of course, I read about them. But there’s someone in jail for that. And Sylvie was a local.’

  ‘We’re worried that it’s started again.’ I slipped into an official tone at her more confrontational stance. ‘Another foreigner has died. A German. We’re concerned that local deaths are hidden in the statistics or that they might have got to hospital on time.’

  ‘Yes, I see. The police are investigating now that another visitor to Amsterdam has died.’ She spat out the words. ‘That’s bad publicity and you need to sort it out. Poor Sylvie, you never really cared about her death.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Of course. I liked her, I really did. You still only see her as a number.’ She pulled a hand through her thick grey curls. ‘All you want is to make it safe for tourists to come here and snort coke. Are the tourist board paying your salary?’ Her eyes swung back to Tim. ‘When it was only a local girl, you never investigated.’

  ‘At that time—’ Tim began.

  ‘You just wrote her off.’ Petra calmly cut off his words. ‘You thought: here’s another dead addict who choked on her own vomit. For us, she was a girl who shouldn’t have died. I was angry for a while and then I thought that … that …’ She shook her head. ‘Never mind.’

  ‘No, tell me,’ I said. ‘What did you think?’

  ‘That she’d used too much by accident.’ It came out too quickly, the words spilling from her mouth. She picked up her iPad. ‘But you only care about your tourists. Look at her. Look closely.’ She shoved the tablet under my nose. ‘Does she look like an addict to you? And still she died and you didn’t care. You get labelled as an addict and nobody cares about you. You’re a cost centre.’

  I took the iPad and looked at the photo as Petra Maasland had asked me to do. It was a photo of a smiling young woman in a field somewhere, her arms stretched out to the sky. It could be any girl. Blonde, healthy, happy.

  ‘That’s how I remember her,’ Petra said. ‘She sent me this two days before her death.’ She grabbed the iPad back as if she’d made a decision. There were tears in her blue eyes. ‘We should never have let her go.’

  ‘What do you know about her social life? Or her sister?’

  ‘Forget about her. She’s completely unreliable.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Is there anything else? I have to go now.’

  Tim and I left the clinic and walked back to the office. Tim was still very quiet.

  ‘You okay?’ I said.

  ‘I missed it, didn’t I?’ He stared straight ahead.

  ‘I don’t know.’ But at this stage it was a possibility.

  ‘This is really going to bug me.’

  Bug? Not the word I would have chosen. It seemed too light. The lowering evening sun picked out the golden strands in his short hair, but a pair of aviator sunglasses hindered my ability to read his expression. It surely must bother him more than he was showing.

  ‘She could just have moved on to heroin,’ I said.

  ‘The boss will be furious.’ He was dismissive of my attempt to make him feel better.

  ‘That’s never been something that worried me.’

  ‘Easy for you to say. You have all this success behind you. For me, it won’t look so good.’

  There was no wind to speak of, but the heat of the day had finally abated to something more pleasant and bearable. ‘It could well be nothing. Don’t get yourself worked up.’ I would happily walk a detour and stay outside a bit longer.

  ‘You’re right.’

  ‘The parents didn’t question the toxicology report.’ On the Keizersgracht we stopped at a red light on the crossing. The queue of tourists wanting to visit the Anne Frank house still curled along the canal and around the Westerkerk. A long rainbow banner ran down the length of the church’s tower. ‘Look, Sylvie left the clinic almost two years ago. God knows what she got up to in the meantime. We need to talk to the sister; maybe she’d seen her more recently.’ The blue in the rainbow flag precisely matched the blue of the top of the tower. It suited the church to be adorned with this multicoloured streamer.

  ‘If I missed it,’Tim said, ‘Bauer will go nuts. I can just hear him: “You only had to do one thing …”’

  ‘We’re going for a drink,’ Tim said an hour or so later. ‘Do you want to come?’ He’d got changed and was wearing a T-shirt that was tight around his arms. A tattoo peeked out below the sleeve. A circular interwoven band. I didn’t normally like tattoos, but this one suited him perfectly.

  It was a Monday night. An automatic refusal was already on my lips. That I said ‘sure’ instead surprised me, and probably Tim as well. ‘I could do with a drink. And the last time I was in a bar, someone got killed. I don’t want to develop a phobia.’

  ‘We’ll keep you safe.’ He flexed his biceps. The tattoo stretched. ‘We’re strong around here.’

  He was young. I really shouldn’t stare.

  Whatever Bauer had against Tim, it didn’t stop him from coming out for drinks with us, even though two hours later he was the first to leave. He was the only one who had a home to go to. The evening was balmy and we sat outside at a bar not that far from the police station. I recognised quite a few of the faces around me.

  Mosquitoes were annoyingly attracted to the light in the middle of the picnic table. I squashed one on my arm. No blood, so I hadn’t been bitten yet. Maarten made a joke that I laughed at too loudly. My head was woozy. Why hadn’t I done this before, gone to a bar with my colleagues and just had fun? It was good to let off steam. Not be so serious all the time.

  Maarten offered to get another round. I shook my head. I really had had too much to drink. My stomach felt loose. No more alcohol for me. ‘I’m only halfway down this one.’

  ‘Wuss,’ he said, and got up to get the drinks in. I stayed behind with Tim.

  He rested his arms on the picnic table between us. ‘What was your best arrest? That guy who’d killed his daughter?’
>
  I caught myself staring at his muscles and looked back into his dark eyes. ‘Maybe.’

  He smiled an appreciative smile. ‘The one that made you famous and there’s still a better one out there? You’re amazing.’

  ‘I do my best.’ It sounded like I was boastfully underplaying my accomplishments rather than just telling the truth. I liked how the words felt on my lips. I liked the admiration in his eyes even more.

  Maarten came back with two beers and a girl. She was young. Maybe the age Sylvie Bruyneel had been when she died. Tim’s age. I should leave. What was I doing here with them? I took hold of my handbag and got ready to stand up.

  ‘Scoot over,’ Maarten said to Tim. He grabbed his beer. I looked at the girl so that I wouldn’t stare at Tim as he swung his leg over the picnic bench and sat down next to me. I could immediately feel his closeness in my stomach.

  ‘This is Miranda,’ Maarten said. ‘Tim you know. Meet Lotte.’

  I raised my hand to acknowledge her then folded it around my half-empty beer glass. It was still just about cold enough to cool me down.

  Maarten was soon deep in conversation with the girl and Tim gave me a grin. The crinkles around his eyes pulled a smile to my lips too. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I felt myself moving towards him and pulled myself upright. Too much alcohol made me sway. A moth came down to the lamp in the middle. It was throwing itself against the glass. Luckily it wasn’t an open candle. I looked in front of me. Better to be in a conversation with four people. Safer.

  Miranda noticed my glance. ‘We were just talking about what I should wear to this party.’

  ‘And I said: something sexy,’ Maarten said.

  ‘What kind of party is it?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a work do.’

  I shook my head, but that made the world spin; I felt as if my brain was moving separately within my skull. ‘Better play it safe where work’s concerned.’