Death on the Canal

by Anja de Jager

  I’d thought I had a chance with Mark and then I had screwed that up.

  It was only because the sun was shining brightly that I even dared to think of these things. Soul-searching after dark was too dangerous.

  We pulled up outside Katja’s house and for the second day in a row there was no response when we rang her doorbell. These flats had been purpose-built around the turn of the nineteenth century. At the end of the street, a group of small children had spilled out of a primary school and were playing football around a fountain. Not surprisingly in this heat, they were more interested in the water than in their ball.

  Katja lived at number 83II, so she was on the second floor. I took a couple of steps back into the road and looked along the brown brick building to what would be her window. The roads in this quarter were named after Dutch statesmen, and maybe they had insisted that the apartment blocks built here were straight and tall. I couldn’t really see much of Katja’s flat apart from a few plants in the window. The sun beat down on my back and created dark pools under my armpits.

  ‘We should check with the neighbours,’ Tim said. I’d expected him to joke about the conversation with Mark Visser or drunken texting as we were driving here, but luckily he’d kept his mouth shut and left me to my thoughts. ‘We could keep coming back here every day and never find her at home.’

  I nodded and rang the bell for 83hs. There were two front doors next to each other for each house: the leftmost one served the ground floor only and the right one was used by floors one through to three. An elderly woman with a purple rinse glanced from between thick net curtains. Here the pavement ran right along the window. Unless you had these opaque nets, every passer-by could look straight into your front room. The curtain fell closed again. I could hear from where I was standing that Goede Tijden, Slechte Tijden was on TV. They must be on episode five thousand of that series by now. I wasn’t sure if the woman didn’t open because she didn’t want to have her programme interrupted, or whether she hadn’t even heard the doorbell.

  I knocked on the window. ‘Police, open up,’ I said loudly.

  The woman appeared at the window again. She had a deeply lined face, and a cigarette hung from one corner of her mouth.

  I showed my badge and pointed at the door. My sign language seemed to work. The woman reluctantly nodded. When she finally opened her front door a fraction, we were assaulted by the sound of the TV.

  ‘God, what a noise,’ Tim muttered behind me.

  I ignored him. ‘Do you know where your neighbour Katja Bruyneel is?’ I said loudly.

  She fiddled with her hearing aid and looked at me blankly.

  ‘Turn the sound down!’ Tim said.

  She shuffled back inside.

  The noise of the TV disappeared and I could hear myself think. ‘We’re here about your neighbour,’ I said.

  ‘Did they complain again?’ She spoke with the cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. ‘It’s only because the programme’s in Dutch.’

  ‘We’re looking for Katja Bruyneel. Your neighbour on the second floor.’

  ‘Oh, her.’ She took the cigarette from her mouth. Two teeth were missing. ‘She’s such a nice girl. She never complains about the noise and helps me with my shopping. But I haven’t seen her for a while.’

  ‘Is she on holiday?’

  ‘How do I know? Young people these days, they go on long holidays and work trips. I can’t keep up with where they are. Haven’t seen her in months.’

  ‘Do you have the key to her flat?’

  ‘No, why would I? We don’t even share the same front door.’

  ‘Who has?’

  ‘The complaining ones.’ She pointed at the ceiling. ‘They have her key.’

  ‘Are they at home?’

  The woman sighed. ‘Otherwise they wouldn’t have complained, would they?’

  I didn’t bother correcting her again.

  Tim rang the doorbell of 83I and the door to the right opened.

  We were halfway up the narrow stairs when the TV volume went up again. I could follow the dialogue through the wall of the stairwell.

  The neighbour on the first floor opened her door. She was a slim woman who seemed all stomach. Seven or eight months pregnant, I guessed. Her long hair hung limp around her face. I remembered that stage of pregnancy. It was hard work; you were tired all the time and you couldn’t sleep properly. In this heat it must be impossibly energy-sapping. At least I had been eight months pregnant in winter. My ex-husband had said that I was like a big pink hot-water bottle. It had been a happy time.

  ‘Thanks for coming round,’ the pregnant woman said after I’d shown my badge. ‘Who complained about her this time?’

  ‘We’re not here about your downstairs neighbour.’

  ‘We’ve stopped trying to get her to turn it down. It’s easier to just watch the same TV programme.’ The woman shrugged. ‘It’s only GTST. As soon as that’s over, she turns the sound down.’ She patted her belly. ‘Once the little one is born, we’ll be making a lot of noise too. See how she likes that.’

  ‘We’d like to speak to Katja Bruyneel,’ I said. ‘Have you seen her recently?’

  ‘No, not for a bit. Isn’t she on holiday?’

  ‘When is she back?’

  ‘She normally asks me to look after her plants, but she didn’t this time.’ She rubbed her belly. ‘She’s been really down recently. Her sister’s death hit her hard, and then she lost her job.’

  ‘When did you see her last?’

  ‘It was May. Or April maybe.’ She rubbed her belly again. ‘Time has gone so fast.’

  ‘That’s more than two months ago.’ I knew her parents hadn’t seen her either. They’d told us as much yesterday. I didn’t have a good feeling about this.

  The woman rested her hand on the door frame as if for support. ‘I can’t believe it’s been that long. I never checked. I know she hasn’t been home because I normally hear her walking around.’ She tucked the limp hair behind her ears. ‘You’ve got me worried now.’ She looked at the stairs leading up, as if that would miraculously produce Katja. ‘Can we make sure she’s okay?’

  ‘Do you have her keys?’

  ‘Yes, hold on a moment.’ When she came out with the keys, she put her shoes on. ‘I’ll have a quick look around. See if there’s anything to show where she is.’

  ‘Don’t.’ I shook my head and exchanged a glance with Tim. ‘Let us. You stay here. We don’t know what we’ll find.’ Katja Bruyneel had severed her relationship with her parents, her sister had died and she’d lost her job. Nobody would have reported her missing.

  The woman put her hand to her mouth. ‘I know she was depressed after her sister died. Do you think …’ She paused, then took a resolute step outside. ‘I should have checked on her.’

  Tim put a restraining hand on her arm. ‘You need to stay here,’ he said. ‘You really do.’

  The woman paled as it sank in what we were suggesting we might find behind Katja’s door. She gave me the keys with an outstretched arm, as if she wanted to be as far away from Katja’s flat as she could be. I didn’t blame her. In my early days as a police officer, I’d been the first person in a flat where someone had been dead for two weeks. That had been in the summer as well, and it had been just as hot. Even the memory of the stench made me gag. I hoped we weren’t going to find anything like that now. I hoped I would never find anything like that again.

  We went up the second set of dark-carpeted stairs. This stairwell was shared by the flats on the second and third floor. Washing hung on a foldable rack suspended in the stairwell. A couple of T-shirts, a pair of knickers and three sets of socks dangled above our heads. On a ledge were two bicycle pumps, probably one for each flat. I had the keys in my hand and walked up to Katja’s front door. Tim had to wait for me below as there wasn’t enough room for both of us on the small landing.

  I knocked once on the door but didn’t really expect any reply. The key turned easily. The door was
n’t locked from the inside. I caught a hint of the smell of empty flats: that mixture of sour milk and stagnant water sitting in unused drains. But the good news was that it didn’t smell of a decaying corpse.

  ‘Katja? Katja?’ I called. Dust covered all the surfaces and gave the dark-wood floorboards a grey patina. The place looked as if it had been abandoned for longer than a couple of months. Nobody had been here in a while. A large rubber plant was dead in a terracotta pot, its thick leaves scattered on the floor. The plants in the window were only green because they were plastic.

  I always carried a pair of nitrile gloves in my handbag and I put them on before stepping over the threshold. Not that this was definitely a crime scene, but it was better to be safe than sorry. There was something impersonal about the apartment. The beige walls and white doors reminded me of going to the dentist. Only the smell wasn’t antiseptic; rather the musky smell of a place that had been empty for a while. A hint of rotten food and dust. The sofa had a pale wooden frame filled with white cushions and perfectly matched the shelving unit.

  I carefully opened the door to the bathroom. It was empty. There were two doors leading off the hallway. I tried the first one. It turned out to be a broom cupboard. That left just the bedroom at the end. My footsteps showed on the floor. I didn’t like that the door was closed. It looked surprisingly ominous.

  I took a breath in. It should be fine, I told myself; I would have smelled it otherwise. There was no point in delaying.

  Tim looked in the bathroom. ‘These apartments are such a pain,’ he said. ‘When they were built, people didn’t need showers. They used the bath houses.’

  I pushed the door to the bedroom open.

  It was empty. The bed was made. Not disturbed. We didn’t know where Katja was, but at least she wasn’t dead of a drug overdose in her flat. My shoulders dropped as the tension left my body.

  ‘A friend of mine had to put a shower in a cupboard.’

  I turned round in relief at not having found a corpse. ‘So there’s no space for a bath?’

  ‘God, no. They’ve done an okay job with this one.’ He sounded as if he was a bathroom specialist. ‘They must have broken out another closet at one point.’ He came out of the bathroom. ‘Have a look,’ he said.

  It didn’t feel quite right to be nosing around in the flat of a girl who might just have gone on a cruise around the world. ‘Let’s leave; there’s nothing here,’ I said.

  ‘Could you cope with a bathroom this tiny?’Tim pointed to the little room. ‘Have a look inside.’

  I did so, just to humour him. There was a toilet and a shower but no sink. How odd. Where would you brush your teeth? Where would you wash your hands? Surely not under the shower. I stepped over the threshold of the small bathroom. As soon as I was in, Tim pushed the door shut from the outside.

  ‘That’s not funny!’ I wasn’t that keen on small spaces and there was no room in here, unless I sat on the toilet or stood under the shower. It was pitch dark because there weren’t any windows. ‘Open up.’ I banged on the door. ‘Let me out.’ The thin stream of light coming from underneath the door was enough to let me spot a pulley string just to the left. I tugged it, maybe a little harder than necessary, and the light came on.

  The entire inside of the bathroom door was covered in photos. I hadn’t noticed them when I came in, but as soon as I looked at them, my breath caught.

  ‘What’s it worth to you?’ Tim joked from outside the door. ‘To let you out?’

  I recognised Sylvie from the pictures that the counsellor had shown us. But more importantly, I recognised the other woman too.

  ‘Lotte?’

  I was still staring at the central photo when Tim opened the door.

  ‘Sorry, you went very quiet suddenly. Are you okay? I was just kidding.’

  I could only point. The woman in the picture was wearing a black dress and high heels. Unlike the last time I’d seen her.

  Because then she’d been wearing a floral dress and carrying a denim jacket.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I called the prosecutor’s office and got a search warrant. I looked around me. Did the place seem different now that it was no longer the flat of a potential suicide but that of a potential murderer? What did it mean that the woman who might have killed Piotr Mazur was the sister of a woman who had died of a heroin overdose?

  ‘I’d better tell the pregnant neighbour that we haven’t found a dead body,’ Tim said.

  ‘Sure.’

  He left the flat, leaving the door open.

  A few posters adorned the wall. One was of an icy wasteland; another was a set of intertwined letters forming no words that I could decipher. Then there was that row of plastic pot plants. Had they been placed there to make the flat look inhabited from the outside? Who would care about that? I heard Tim knock on the downstairs neighbour’s door. A car went past. Otherwise there was silence and my footsteps were loud on the wooden floor as I paced the length of the flat.

  I opened the bathroom door again and examined the inside. It was entirely covered by photos of all sizes. What they initially screamed at me was that there was no gap. If Katja had given Piotr a photo of a child, it hadn’t come from this door.

  There was something significant about these photos. The effect of the mosaic of dozens of pictures was intense. As I studied them, I heard Tim talking to the neighbour. He asked her if she knew where Katja could possibly have gone. Did she have any friends who could have put her up? The neighbour answered that she couldn’t think of anybody. Was there a boyfriend? Not that she knew. Nobody steady.

  There were no men in any of the pictures. No boyfriends. No photo of Katja and her sister with their parents. I wasn’t too surprised about that. The photos weren’t in chronological order. The one in the centre seemed to be the most recent one of Katja and Sylvie. It could be a few years old. I started to recognise Sylvie in other photos.

  I sat down on the toilet, turned on the light and pulled the door closed. The photos filled my entire field of vision.

  Sylvie was everywhere: on a donkey, on a bicycle, in the forest, with a couple of other girls, in a primary school portrait. The topmost photo on the left-hand side showed two teenagers on the beach. They were close in age but didn’t resemble each other. Sylvie was tall, pretty, with sun-kissed hair and a willowy body. She was the kind of girl who would turn heads in the street. She was smiling broadly, laughing at the camera. Katja was smiling too; not at the camera but at her sister. Katja’s hair had darkened since childhood. She was stocky. The girls’ arms were around each other. They’d been fifteen and seventeen maybe? According to her parents, it was around this time that Sylvie had first started using cocaine and speed.

  I took a quick snap on my iPhone of the mosaic. Then I opened the door again and took a close-up of each picture individually.

  What effect would it have had on Katja to see these photos every day? Looking at the inside of that door was intense. Overwhelming. I would not have felt good having to see a door covered with photos of my dead sister several times a day.

  I realised that the door was a shrine.

  Was it a penance because Katja had kicked her sister out of her flat, as her parents had told us? A visual reminder that for the last three years they hadn’t been in touch at all?

  Katja had been in a bar with a security guard who was also a drug dealer. A man who had sold that German businessman the hit of coke that turned out to be white heroin. Katja’s sister had also died of a heroin overdose.

  Had these photos fuelled Katja Bruyneel’s anger until it was intense enough to make her kill someone? But how many women killed in rage?

  When I had killed, it had been to protect someone. At that thought, I could almost feel the gun in my hand again. I remembered pulling the trigger. I was certain that he’d wanted me to do it, but that didn’t make me feel less guilty. It didn’t make it easier. In fact, in an odd way maybe it made it harder. I could have made a better decision. I could h
ave not given him that way out.

  What had made Katja want to murder Piotr Mazur? When I’d seen them in the bar, he hadn’t been threatening towards her. The witnesses from that evening had said that their conversation had been calm throughout. Things could have changed afterwards, of course, in the street for example, as they were walking away.

  Were her sister’s death and Piotr’s murder linked?

  It seemed the obvious answer but that didn’t make it the right one. There were other aspects to consider. Maybe Katja hadn’t been the one who killed Piotr Mazur. What if she’d been a witness to the stabbing and was now in danger? On the run, not from the police but from the murderer?

  And she hadn’t been in her flat for months. She’d left here well before Piotr’s death. Where had she been living?

  I walked to the window, moved the net curtains sideways and looked past the row of plastic plants. A car with a fridge in the back came past, the white rectangle too large for the boot to shut properly. Instead it was held closed by a piece of string. A woman cycled by on an old-fashioned bike. On the front she carried two small children in matching sunshine-yellow outfits. Nothing else moved in the street.

  Tim came back up the stairs. He called Bauer to tell him that there’d been a breakthrough. He said we’d be back at the police station as soon as we finished our search.

  Why would someone have plastic plants? I’d seen them in hospitals, restaurants and reception areas but not often in someone’s home. An extravagant fake peace lily stood next to a pretend azalea. They would never die but always stay green. They had looked convincing from the outside. It showed forethought. Katja had planned to be away for a while but hadn’t wanted the neighbours to be suspicious. I opened a drawer and found nothing but a few old copies of Libelle and a stack of credit-card statements. The cards had been paid off monthly. The most recent statement was from three months ago.