Death on the Canal

by Anja de Jager

A cupboard hid nothing more interesting than a set of pans and Tupperware boxes. There were books on a single shelf: a few Baantjers, two books by Harry Mulisch and a childhood throwback by Thea Beckman. Nothing really modern. The drawer underneath the coffee table held four different remote controls, all neatly laid out.

  I entered the bedroom and opened the wardrobe. There were only suits in various bland colours: a couple of greys, one blue; a bank of ironed shirts. A professional woman’s wardrobe. These were the clothes she had left behind. There were no casual clothes. No tops. No underwear. She must have taken all of those with her.

  Tim joined me. He opened a cupboard. ‘Look at this,’ he said. I turned round. It contained the washbasin that I’d expected in the bathroom, as well as the boiler. ‘A sink in your bedroom. These flats really are weird.’

  I checked the pockets of all the suits but didn’t find anything. Empty hangers clicked together where some garments were missing. In the drawer of the bedside table I found a box of condoms. Underneath them a stack of papers. I pulled them out and sat down on the bed to look through them. More magazines.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Tim said. ‘I should have gone to Mark Visser with someone else. I shouldn’t have forced you to come.’

  ‘It’s fine.’ Between copies of Cosmo and Libelle I found a newspaper. It was six months old.

  ‘I had the wrong idea. I’d heard you’d been seeing him since that previous case. The one with the dead builder.’

  I looked through the newspaper for any articles that could have something to do with Piotr Mazur or drugs. There wasn’t anything obvious.

  ‘He seemed really annoyed that you’d Skyped him last night.’

  I closed the paper with a loud rustle. I folded it up but kept it with me. It was hard to concentrate with Tim talking. I might have missed something.

  I opened the door to the balcony. Two chairs stood side by side, a small table in between. Apart from that, it was empty.

  I leaned on the railing and looked at the back of the adjacent block of apartments. I’d found nothing connecting Katja with Piotr. There wasn’t a single bit of paper with his name on it. And apart from the photos, I hadn’t seen anything that mentioned Sylvie.

  If Ronald had a rummage around my flat while I was at work, he would find out more about me by just opening a single drawer.

  ‘Are you pissed off with me?’ Tim had followed me onto the balcony and stood next to me. ‘For shutting you in the bathroom?’ He rested his arm on the balustrade and the sleeve of his T-shirt rode up high enough to display the tattooed band around his biceps. ‘I was just messing with you. It was a bit of fun.’ He tipped his head sideways like a contrite puppy.

  Fun. That was what he’d said about going to see Mark. But like with cute puppies, it wasn’t easy to stay annoyed with him. ‘Are you a tidy person?’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Does this place feel too clean to you?’

  ‘No, it’s very dusty.’

  ‘I meant too empty of personal things?’ I was hot, and fanned myself with the old newspaper. At some point this weather was going to break with a massive thunderstorm. ‘I think Katja Bruyneel cleared out before she left.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  I pulled the cap off the marker pen and wrote Katja Bruyneel’s name on the whiteboard. I wrote Sylvie’s name next to it. This afternoon I loved the smell of pen on whiteboard. I even liked the way the pen squeaked when I drew the connecting line between the two girls’ names. I admired the straightness of that line. I’d been vindicated in my decision to move to this team. We’d finally had a major breakthrough in figuring out who killed Piotr Mazur, and it wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t looked at old ODs. I stuck Piotr Mazur’s photo right in the centre. I’d wanted to do that ever since I’d moved into this office. This was the case we should be working on.

  ‘It could just be a coincidence,’ Maarten said.

  I stopped drawing the arrow between Piotr and Katja and turned to look at him.

  He raked his hand through his mop of blonde hair. He’d been here when Tim and I got back to the office. Bauer was still in a meeting. ‘Okay,’ he grimaced, ‘I admit it, I would really like it to be a coincidence. We don’t have anything that links Piotr Mazur to Sylvie Bruyneel apart from the sister. Right? We don’t know for sure that he was Sylvie’s dealer.’

  ‘No, that’s true. The only connection is the sister.’

  ‘You saw the sister in the bar with Mazur.’

  ‘Right.’ I stopped writing and leaned against the edge of Bauer’s desk, which was the one closest to the whiteboard.

  ‘And she gave him something and he smiled.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘This photo.’ I took my copy from my handbag and stuck it on the whiteboard between Piotr and Katja’s names.

  ‘Are you sure that’s what you saw? Could she have given him something else?’

  ‘I didn’t get a really good look at it. She could have given him another photo.’

  ‘Could she have given him drugs?’

  ‘Drugs? No.’ The answer came immediately and instinctively. But then I played that scene back in my mind. She’d handed him something across the table. He’d smiled. I’d thought it was a photo but what was it that had actually made me think that? ‘She gave him a piece of paper. I watched her get it from her pocket. It was the shape of a photo.’

  The door opened and Bauer came in. I quickly pushed myself away from his desk and put the marker pen back on the edge of the whiteboard. He lumbered towards his seat and I moved back towards mine. We had to do some awkward side-stepping in the centre aisle of the office to pass each other without touching.

  He glanced at my drawing and sighed heavily as he sat down. ‘I’ve just come from a meeting with your boss. I’m already regretting accepting you here.’

  ‘I think I’ve been helpful.’ I tried to keep my tone light. Would Tim have recognised the woman in that centre photo from the image from the security camera? It had been easier for me to identify her because I’d seen her in person.

  ‘That’s not the issue.’ He grinned with the same level of joy as if he had a toothache. ‘Whenever anybody talks about reorganisation, they always mean finding ways of doing the same job with fewer people. They talk about finding efficiencies but they really mean finding who we can get rid of. Having you here,’ he gestured towards me with his chin, ‘means I’ve got an extra resource, and it’s damaging my negotiating position with Moerdijk.’

  ‘We had a breakthrough,’ Tim said.

  ‘I’m not sure if that has made things better or worse,’ Bauer said. ‘We now have two heroin ODs and a potential connection between the two. I don’t like it. Tim, I told Moerdijk he could have you. Oddly enough, he wasn’t interested.’ He laughed as if it had been a joke.

  ‘It’s not certain there’s a link.’ Tim ploughed ahead as if talking about the case would stop any threat of him being moved to another team.

  ‘No, I get that.’ Bauer cut him short. ‘But the defence lawyer is going to find this very useful.’

  ‘According to the parents,’ Tim said, ‘the two girls were no longer on speaking terms. They also said something about the girl being just like her mother. At that point I thought they were talking about Sylvie, but maybe they meant Katja. Maybe she was using drugs too.’

  ‘We found no drugs in her flat,’ I said.

  ‘Those girls were adopted?’ Bauer asked.

  I’d told him this already yesterday, but only now did he show any interest. ‘Yes. At three and five years old.’

  ‘Sylvie seems to have been using from her mid-teens,’ Tim said. ‘She lived with the sister until three years ago, when Katja kicked her out. A year later, she was arrested for theft. That was about two years ago. Went into rehab. No contact with the police since. Also no contact with the parents.’

  ‘I bet the parents know where the sister is,’ Bauer said. ‘Did they seem nervous when you talked to them?’

  I l
ooked at Tim.

  ‘Not really,’ he said, ‘but we weren’t asking about Katja.’

  ‘Talk to them again. Get them to come here. Make them uncomfortable. They know something. So, Tim, you were supposed to monitor any suspicious ODs and you completely missed this one.’

  ‘Six months ago, this didn’t look suspicious,’ I said. ‘Everything has changed because the sister is the main suspect in Piotr Mazur’s killing.’

  ‘I’m sure Tim can explain himself, Lotte. No need for you to get involved.’

  ‘The only reason we identified the woman who is still our main suspect,’ I said, ‘is because we were checking these old ODs.’

  ‘But you haven’t actually found her,’ Bauer said. ‘And whatever work you two have been doing, you’re destroying my previous case.’

  ‘We’re investigating Piotr Mazur’s death.’

  ‘I don’t care about his death.’ He wheeled round on his chair, reached out to the whiteboard and tore Mazur’s photo down. He threw it towards me. ‘I want to make sure that the guy who killed all these people’ – he tapped a knuckle on each of the photos of the drug victims in turn – ‘gets locked away for a long time. I want their families to get justice.’

  ‘But if someone else is also swapping drugs—’

  ‘Then I don’t want to know about it!’ Bauer bellowed the words. His face turned puce. I wanted to say that he should calm down or he’d give himself a heart attack, but experience had taught me that this kind of useful comment only ever fanned the flames.

  Tim slunk away towards his desk. I was in the eye of the storm. I picked the photo of Piotr up off the floor. ‘This man,’ I held it up, ‘was stabbed to death.’ Sweat was running down between my shoulder blades but I kept my voice steady. ‘If you’d like me to take this case back downstairs and bring your resource numbers down, I’m happy to do that. I’m sure CI Moerdijk would allow it.’ I would have loved to rush out of the office, but I fought that impulse and kept eye contact with Bauer. I wasn’t going to back down on this. ‘Do you think a Polish immigrant doesn’t deserve justice but those tourists who’d come to Amsterdam to score drugs do?’

  ‘Don’t give me the hard-working-immigrant spiel. It doesn’t work so well when the guy’s a dealer.’

  ‘You can’t blame us for doing our job just because you don’t like the answers,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe not you, but I expected better from Tim.’ Bauer slicked his hair back from his face. At least he was calming down. ‘Oh no, actually I didn’t.’

  ‘We’ll trace Katja Bruyneel,’ I said. ‘We’ll find out why she was with Piotr Mazur in that bar.’

  ‘As long as Mazur wasn’t the sister’s dealer, we’re still okay.’ Bauer looked at his watch. ‘I’ll see you guys tomorrow.’ He got up and left the office.

  I took a deep breath in.

  ‘We normally just shut up,’ Maarten said. ‘It’s a better strategy than arguing with him. He’s always like this when he comes out of an internal meeting.’

  ‘I’ll check his calendar and make sure I’m out of the office after the next one.’ I sat down at my desk. My hands were shaking and I hid them by rummaging in my handbag.

  ‘I’ll give the parents a call,’ Tim said, ‘and get them to come in here.’

  ‘I’ve got nothing on Mazur,’ Maarten said to me as soon as Tim was talking on the phone. ‘None of my informants know him. Nobody knew he was dealing. He must have been very careful.’

  ‘And where was he keeping his stash? I’d thought it could have been at Katja’s, before I knew she was Sylvie’s sister, but her flat was clean. No sign of drugs.’

  I thought back to Katja’s parents telling us that Katja had thrown her sister out three years ago. That flat wasn’t big enough to live in with a sister who stole from you. That reminded me that Petra had told us that Sylvie had been in rehab as part of her sentence. I pulled her criminal record. ‘Look at this,’ I said to Maarten. I shook my head at my own stupidity: I should have done this earlier. Two years ago, Sylvie had been caught stealing dresses from the department store where Piotr Mazur had worked. I spotted Natalie Schuurman’s name. It was Natalie who had reported Sylvie Bruyneel to the police. ‘There’s another link.’ It was odd that she’d contacted the police and hadn’t just called security.

  He read over my shoulder. ‘It could be a coincidence. But Bauer’s going to go spare.’

  Maarten left and Tim finished his phone call. ‘The parents are in Maastricht. It’s after five o’clock now so it would be late before they could get here. I told them to turn up first thing tomorrow.’

  ‘Okay. That’s fine.’

  ‘Lotte, thanks for standing up for me. You didn’t have to, and I appreciate it.’ He looked at me across the desks. ‘I actually deserved the bollocking this time.’

  I shook my head. ‘You couldn’t have known. I wasn’t really standing up for you; I meant what I said to Bauer: there was nothing suspicious about Sylvie’s death until now. Until Piotr Mazur was murdered.’

  ‘Still. Thanks. Let me buy you dinner.’

  I was on lates, so I would be here for another couple of hours before I could go home. I wanted to study the file on Sylvie Bruyneel’s death more closely. I wanted to check where she had been working and where her body had been found. ‘I’m going to stay here for a bit.’

  ‘You need to eat something. Just something quick.’ He was insistent.

  I was reminded of the message I’d sent Mark last night: that I thought Tim fancied me. He’d called our drinks a ‘hot date’. ‘Thanks, but I’m just going to grab something in the canteen.’

  ‘You got shouted at by Bauer on my behalf. The least I can do is make sure you get something to eat outside of the office.’

  ‘You must have better things to do than having dinner with me.’ With someone as old as me. I could convince myself I wasn’t really fishing for a compliment.

  ‘Well, yes, actually I was going to get a bite to eat with someone else, but she won’t mind if you come along.’

  So he hadn’t been offering dinner with just the two of us. I needed to adjust what I’d been thinking. ‘Anyone I know?’

  ‘Hold on, let me just WhatsApp her.’ He got his phone out and started typing. ‘Yes, she says let’s all meet downstairs in five minutes.’

  ‘Downstairs in five minutes?’ I tipped my head sideways and faked a smile. ‘So a colleague is joining us? This gets more and more mysterious by the minute.’

  He blushed.

  I narrowed my eyes. He’d blushed earlier today when I’d asked him how he knew about Mark Visser and me. He’d replied that someone had told him last night. Many things about last night were a blur, but I remembered that he’d asked me to hang around for another ten minutes because more people were joining them for drinks. Someone had arrived after I’d left. She had been his ‘hot date’ and she had told him about Mark. There weren’t many people who knew.

  He knew I’d saved a colleague’s life. The admiration in his eyes hadn’t been for my bravery but out of gratitude for the person who was still alive because of me. Because I’d done what she couldn’t. I closed my eyes and rubbed my fingers over the wrinkles on my forehead as if that would erase them.

  ‘How long have you and Ingrid been seeing each other?’ I even managed to sound happy about it. Thank God I hadn’t made a fool of myself last night.

  Ingrid and Tim looked good together, I had to admit that. We were in the Indonesian restaurant down one of the side streets just a short walk from the police station. If I were seeing a colleague, I would have gone somewhere else, but maybe they weren’t concerned about who knew, or maybe bringing me along was the perfect disguise. I felt like an ageing chaperone or the maiden aunt. The thing I liked about this restaurant right now was that they had been quick to bring our food. I’d ordered without looking at the menu because I had the same thing every time I came here: babi panggang with steamed rice.

  ‘I didn’t even have to tell her I was s
eeing you,’Tim told Ingrid. ‘She figured it out.’ He said it with pride in his voice, as if he was talking about a smart dog that had managed to perform a particularly difficult trick. ‘And she had a go at Bauer.’ He broke the large prawn cracker that had come with his nasi rames in two and passed half to Ingrid.

  ‘Is he still on your case?’

  ‘He’s not going to stop that any time soon,’ he said.

  They swapped skewers of beef and chicken satay without asking. He grabbed her hand and licked sauce from her thumb.

  A lurid picture of a golden dragon flying against a red background hung on the wall to my right. I took a large bite of my food and tried to concentrate on how the sourness of the pickled vegetables that accompanied the meat bit the inside of my mouth. A flow of guppies drifted in a fish tank strategically placed to provide privacy that I could do without. The sooner I finished my dinner, the sooner I could leave.

  ‘What’s Bauer’s problem?’ Ingrid said.

  ‘He just doesn’t think I’m any good.’

  ‘But you are. Don’t you agree, Lotte?’

  The fact that I had my mouth full gave me time to phrase a suitable reply. I swallowed. ‘Well, we’ve identified our suspect.’

  ‘Thanks to Tim?’

  I might not have recognised Katja if he hadn’t thought that it was really funny to shut me in a bathroom. Oh well, why not make him look good in front of his new girlfriend. ‘Yeah, thanks to Tim,’ I said.

  ‘You should tell Bauer that.’

  ‘She did. That’s why I’m buying her dinner.’

  I looked at my watch. ‘Guys, I need to get back to work soon. Do you want to finish the rest of my babi panggang? You’re paying for it anyway.’

  ‘Don’t go yet,’ Ingrid said. ‘I want to know how the case is going.’

  ‘It’s going,’ I said. ‘I’ve come to realise that Bauer and I want very different things. I seem to be the only one who’s interested in finding out who stabbed the Polish guy.’

  ‘What about his girlfriend? Isn’t she putting pressure on you at all?’

  ‘What girlfriend?’ Tim said.