Death on the Canal

by Anja de Jager

  The rubber soles of my sandals made a squishy sound, and I sounded like a nurse walking down the corridors. ‘Piotr Mazur was dealing cocaine in the department store,’ I said.

  Tim shot me a quick glance. He was right to be annoyed.

  ‘Yes, sorry, I should have said something earlier. But you were right yesterday. Those texts between Natalie and Piotr were to set up drug deals. They weren’t in a relationship at all. Natalie lied because she was scared to admit to us that she was using.’

  ‘Katja could have contacted him because her sister used to buy from him.’

  ‘Not in the department store, because Piotr didn’t start work there until after Sylvie had been fired for stealing. So what reason could Katja have to kill him?’ I paused at a rattling noise behind me and quickly stepped sideways to let a teenager race past in a wheelchair.

  ‘Maybe she didn’t,’ Tim said. ‘Maybe she was a witness.’

  We arrived at the oncology department and showed our badges, and the nurse, a skinny waif of a girl who surely wasn’t able to lift any patient in and out of bed, looked through the appointments to see when Katja Bruyneel was due in next.

  ‘She has an appointment in an hour,’ she said with a smile, blissfully unaware that a murder suspect was about to walk into her department. ‘Oh, and here is her doctor.’

  As Tim called the police station, I talked to the doctor in his examination room. He was only willing to confirm what the parents had told us this morning: Katja was in the final stages of breast cancer and had refused all treatment. He said that in his opinion she had a couple of months left at most and he completely supported her decision to opt for a good quality of life rather than going through the invasive treatment that her parents would have preferred. Unlike the parents, he called her choice ‘wise’. I informed him why we wanted to talk to her. He agreed that he would contact us as soon as he saw her and not try to detain her.

  There was forty-five minutes to go until Katja’s appointment.

  We went back to the main hall and on the hospital map I did a quick check where the entrances were. If Katja came by car, it would be the same door we had come through fifteen minutes earlier. There was a metro station by the side of the hospital. The walking route ended up by the car park entrance as well. Perfect: we had one obvious place she would be approaching from.

  Unless she had an inkling we were going to be waiting for her.

  But then surely she wouldn’t turn up at all.

  Still, I gave the receptionists in the main hall Katja’s photo; the one I’d got from the door in the bathroom, not the blurry one from the security camera in the bar. I told them to call us straight away if they saw her. I hoped our back-up would get here soon, so that we would have more doors covered.

  This endless wait reminded me of waiting for Mark Visser at the bar a few days ago. The evening that had started all of this. If only I could stop thinking about him.

  Half an hour to go.

  ‘We should wait outside,’ I said to Tim. ‘Try to keep her away from here.’

  He agreed.

  As soon as I’d gone through the revolving door, the nursery to the left caught my eye. The kindergarten teachers had taken the group of kids outside to play in the sunshine in the little playground surrounding the school. My heart sank. I looked at my watch. Twenty-five minutes to go. I could warn them and get the children back inside before Katja arrived. ‘You stay here,’ I said to Tim and dashed up to one of the teachers. It was the same guy who had shown the kids the proper way to roll balls to each other.

  I showed him my badge. ‘Sorry, what’s your name?’

  ‘Vincent de Wolf.’

  ‘Okay Vincent, you need to get these kids back inside,’ I said in as calm a voice as I could muster. As I put my badge back in my handbag, I saw the photo of the little boy that Piotr Mazur had had in his wallet. I couldn’t get it out of my head that this child had something to do with Katja. If he lived with her, then maybe she had taken him with her when she had her appointments. Patients could place their children here so that they could play as their parents were going through their often stressful treatment.

  Twenty minutes. There was time. I showed Vincent the photo as he ushered the group of toddlers back indoors. They streamed past him in an orderly line, holding hands. ‘Have you ever seen this child?’ I said.

  He took the photo from me. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘he used to come here quite a bit, but I haven’t seen him in a while.’

  ‘We’re concerned about this boy.’A little girl smiled at me as she went into the school building. She was so cute. Only five children were left outdoors.

  The man frowned. ‘I didn’t know that. I talked to Petra the other day and she said he was fine. He’s her grandson.’

  ‘Petra?’

  ‘Petra Maasland. She’s a counsellor. She works here. This is her grandson, Oskar. She used to bring him here, but now her daughter has a job where they provide child care as well.’ All the kids were now indoors and the teacher was about to follow them in.

  Petra Maasland. Sylvie Bruyneel’s counsellor. It was okay to delay him for just one question. ‘Are you sure?’

  Vincent pointed at the photo. ‘I recognise the boat. He loves that boat.’

  I took the picture back. The teacher went inside and shut the door behind him.

  ‘Lotte,’ Tim hissed.

  I looked in the direction he was staring and could see her crossing the car park. Adrenaline was soaring through my veins. I put my hand on the gun on my hip as if to ensure that it hadn’t mysteriously disappeared in the last ten minutes. I checked my watch. Fifteen minutes early. I walked quickly towards Tim. If I’d sprinted, I might have caught her attention. ‘Is our back-up here?’

  ‘Not yet. They’re on their way.’

  She was wearing the same floral dress as the other night in the bar, as if she was trying to make it as easy as possible for us to identify her. She was even carrying the same jacket. She made eye contact with me. I thought she recognised me. I swallowed. This all felt very wrong.

  A man with his son, a teenager, got out of their car to my right. If there had been back-up, we could have temporarily closed down the car park. Now I had to deal with more innocent bystanders.

  ‘Please stay back,’ I said. Even though Katja looked calm, she was a murder suspect. I couldn’t see a weapon, but still it was better to be safe than sorry. The teenager kept walking. He had earphones in. Had he not heard me? His father shot one look at me, then took his son by the wrist and pulled him back.

  I concentrated again on the woman walking towards me in her floral dress. I had my hand on my gun but I didn’t take it out of the holster yet. ‘Katja Bruyneel?’ I said. As if I didn’t know the answer to that question.

  She stopped walking. ‘Yes.’

  ‘We need you to come to the police station and answer some questions.’

  ‘I can’t see my doctor first?’ she said as she held out her hands as if she expected handcuffs. Her composed voice surprised me.

  Tim rushed to her side and grabbed her by the upper arm.

  ‘The doctor has to wait,’ he said.

  ‘I understand,’ she said. ‘I guess I need a lawyer more than a doctor.’ Her voice was steady. I was willing to bet that her heart rate was slower than mine. This was a very unusual arrest. There were no attempts to justify or explain. I had the distinct feeling that she had known we were waiting here for her. And had come anyway.

  She wasn’t Piotr Mazur’s murderer.

  She lifted her head and looked me in the eye.

  ‘I did it,’ she said. ‘I killed him.’

  Chapter Twenty

  Katja Bruyneel had her hands loosely folded in front of her. Her nails were short and without any polish. She hadn’t lost her poise, not after her confession to murder, not as Tim read her her rights, not as she was waiting in her cell for a lawyer and not as she was sitting here opposite me in the interrogation room.

  ‘I
killed him to avenge my sister.’ Even when repeating the admission, she was relentlessly calm. She reminded me of one of the solid wooden posts you’d see on the beach; waves would hit it, but regardless of the incoming and outgoing tide the stakes would stand rooted in the sand, day after day. She looked older than her twenty-six years.

  ‘My client wants to make a complete confession,’ the lawyer said. He was a middle-aged black man. His hair was shaved close to his skull and did not hide a large scar that ran above his left ear. His dark-blue tie was the only item of clothing with any colour in it, an understated but definite contrast with the black shirt and dark-grey suit. ‘We’re not interested in a reduction of the sentence.’

  Of course not. It was likely that Katja would die before the case even came to trial.

  ‘My sister had been clean for so long,’ she continued, as if the lawyer hadn’t spoken, ‘and then this guy tempted her back. It had been so hard for her to stop. She said the drugs made her feel invincible, as if she could take on the world, and that was what she needed to get out of bed in the morning.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ I said. ‘You were no longer in touch with your sister.’

  Bauer sat next to me. The large lump of his body was a clear reminder of the outcome he wanted. He felt more of an adversary than the lawyer.

  ‘I feel very bad about that. I met her counsellor, Petra Maasland. She also works at the hospital and I talked to her after I got my diagnosis. I recognised her from the funeral and she told me about Sylvie. How well she had been doing. Stupid woman, she completely failed my sister. Anyway, I knew I only had a few months left and I might as well rid the world of the person who killed Sylvie and make sure he couldn’t do it to anybody else.’

  ‘You’re telling me that Petra Maasland told you to murder Piotr Mazur?’

  ‘No, of course not. But she made me realise how much damage he had caused.’

  ‘Did you know the man?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You had never met him before?’

  ‘No.’ Katja held eye contact during the interview. She wasn’t fidgeting or scribbling on a piece of paper or biting her nails. She wasn’t looking away from me like she would if she was inventing answers to my questions.

  ‘You called him out of the blue.’

  ‘Did you know that I had to identify my sister’s body?’

  I nodded. I’d seen that in the file.

  ‘Afterwards they gave me her possessions. They gave me her phone. I found his details. I dialled the number and set up a meeting.’

  ‘In the bar? Why would you meet up with him in a bar?’

  ‘It seemed to make sense.’ Often people who were interrogated when guilty showed some emotion. Anger, a need to explain or justify, remorse. They would fidget. Katja was completely still, as if her mind was in a different place from her body.

  ‘Why not just set up a deal?’

  ‘He’d be more on his guard.’

  ‘Why did he turn up?’

  ‘I told him I wanted to discuss something with him. About Sylvie’s death.’

  ‘And then you stabbed him.’

  ‘Yes.’ Katja’s voice was so serene it was starting to infuriate me. It was as if stabbing someone was no different from doing the weekly shopping. Even if she hadn’t killed him, a man was still dead.

  ‘How many times did you stab him?’ I needed to puncture that tranquillity that was surely a facade. I hadn’t been this calm in front of the Bureau of Internal Investigation when I had had to explain why I had shot a criminal.

  ‘I stabbed him three times.’

  ‘And what did you do with the knife?’

  ‘I threw it away.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In a canal. I can’t quite remember.’

  ‘You can’t remember. Of course.’ I stacked my papers together and leaned forward. ‘I don’t believe a word you’re saying.’

  ‘It is the truth.’

  ‘You’re telling me that you called him out of the blue, using a number you found on your sister’s phone; you’d never met him before, you wanted to kill him and you met at a bar?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You left together and then you stabbed him to death.’

  ‘Yes.’ The girl could be a psychiatrist listening dispassionately to a patient unburdening himself, or a priest remaining unshocked by a parishioner’s confession.

  ‘What happened with the German guy with the beard?’ I said.

  ‘He came up to us and asked for heroin. The dealer gave it to him.’

  ‘Heroin,’ Bauer said.

  ‘Yes.

  ‘Not cocaine?’

  ‘No.’ Katja’s gaze moved slowly to Bauer. ‘He asked for heroin.’

  If Bauer could have closed the interview right there and then, he would have done so. Not me, though. ‘Are you sure?’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell me exactly what he said.’

  ‘He said: “I want to score some heroin.”’

  ‘He snorted it. People don’t snort heroin. It doesn’t give you a nice high.’

  ‘Maybe he got confused. Maybe he was so drunk he’d forgotten what he’d bought.’

  ‘And Piotr Mazur sold your sister heroin as well?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She didn’t want cocaine either.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Okay, let’s talk about something else. What about the child in this photo?’

  ‘It’s not mine.’

  ‘We know that. It’s Petra Maasland’s grandson. Where did you get the photo from?’

  ‘I downloaded it from her Facebook page.’

  ‘You know Petra well?’

  ‘She was Sylvie’s completely useless counsellor. Kept telling me how much she’d helped her. She even dared to come to her funeral, even though she was equally to blame for Sylvie’s death.’

  ‘The photo has your fingerprints on it.’

  ‘I showed it to him.’

  ‘Why?’

  Katja shrugged. ‘I just thought he would trust me more if he thought I had a child.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘It worked.’

  ‘Why did he keep the photo?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Why did you let him?’

  She shrugged again. ‘Wasn’t my kid. What did I care.’

  ‘Tell me how you killed him. You left the bar together and walked along the canal then turned into the Korte de Wittekade?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘The street was empty. I said his name, he turned to look at me and that’s when I stabbed him three times. Once in the chest, twice in the stomach.’

  ‘And he didn’t try to defend himself.’

  ‘No.’ Katja’s face wasn’t just immobile, it was like a wall. The words bounced from a layer of clingfilm that the woman had wrapped around herself. No emotions were allowed in or out.

  ‘He didn’t try to stop you?’

  ‘Maybe he wanted to die. Like me. It can’t come soon enough. I’d like to see my doctor. Or at least get some painkillers.’

  ‘You’re covering for somebody.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘I don’t believe a word you’re saying.’

  ‘That’s too bad, because it’s the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’ She grinned. It was the first emotion she had shown during the entire interview. ‘And Mabel would add: so help me God.’

  ‘I thought you said your client wanted to make a full confession,’ I said to the lawyer. ‘So please stop her from spouting all this crap.’

  * * *

  Bauer couldn’t have been happier. He acted as if all his birthdays had come at once. As soon as Katja had been escorted from the interview room, he went as far as to hug me. I could have done without his sweaty skin touching mine.

  I couldn’t help but wonder if he knew Katja was lying but didn’t care. If she had known what she needed to do to b
e believed, she couldn’t have played it any better. It was Bauer’s perfect scenario. Piotr Mazur hadn’t swapped heroin for cocaine. His precious previous case was not in jeopardy. We had a confession. We had forensic evidence that linked Katja to Mazur: her fingerprint on the photo in his wallet. We had eyewitnesses who placed her at the scene of the crime. I was one of them. This case was closed: she’d had the opportunity and she had a motive. Nobody seemed to care that she was so obviously not telling the truth.

  I moved back to my old team. Bauer wanted me out of that room, to take my doubts elsewhere. He wanted me to stop asking questions. He wanted to keep his team numbers down. I tried not to care but I couldn’t help it. There were too many things that hadn’t been solved.

  ‘Good job, Lotte,’ he kept saying whenever he saw me in the corridor.

  It hadn’t been a good job. Yes, Katja had been locked up, with constant medical care, but the problem with someone innocent going to prison, or dying in prison, was that there was still a murderer out there. There wouldn’t even be a trial. It didn’t matter that it was just a drug dealer who’d been killed.

  I couldn’t stop thinking that Katja had been forced to take the fall for this one. That whoever had really killed Piotr had coerced her into giving herself up. Into taking the blame.

  But there was nothing I could do, so we released Piotr’s body and his funeral was arranged.

  I thought about taking a holiday.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Normally Pippi would come to the door as soon as she heard the key in the lock and greet me noisily. This evening there was none of that. There was only silence. The flat was remarkably tidy. The dirty breakfast dishes that I had left in the kitchen had been washed and put away. The cat’s litter tray was clean. Her food bowl was full. Only the jelly had gone. She always licked that off first and left the rest to be eaten later; it was a clear sign that she had been fed recently.

  ‘You lucky cat,’ I said in the silence.

  I had always thought Pippi was happy to see me when I came home. But now I realised that she only meowed at me because she wanted her dinner. Someone else had been feeding her and so I was suddenly less popular. Nice. Having Ronald here told me a truth that I could have done without.