Death on the Canal

by Anja de Jager

  I’d been a fool. I pulled up Petra’s personal records. She didn’t have a daughter. She didn’t have a son either. She had no children at all.

  Why had I ever believed the story that Oskar was Petra’s grandson? He wasn’t her grandson; he was Sylvie Bruyneel’s son. It all seemed so obvious now. Sylvie must have told her counsellor that she was pregnant and Petra had helped her keep the baby a secret. So had Petra killed Piotr? Had she been the one to wield the knife?

  I knew someone had to come with me to bring Petra in. We had to question her. Was this enough to get the boss and Bauer to agree with me?

  I didn’t have time to argue with them. Instead I called Thomas. He wasn’t even annoyed with me. He was at my flat within ten minutes. I’d called ahead to the hospital and they had confirmed that Petra was working today. Apparently Sundays were very busy days for counsellors specialising in drug-related issues.

  Thomas drove me to the hospital. I filled him in on exactly what I’d found out. That Petra’s car had been parked in the side street. That she’d lied to us. That Katja had lied to us. It didn’t take long, and I had finished well before we pulled in to the car park of the hospital.

  We came past the nursery on the way to the entrance. I recognised Vincent de Wolf, the guy I’d talked to when we’d arrested Katja. He called me over. ‘That child you were worried about; I wanted to let you know he’s been coming here again.’

  ‘Is he here now?’

  ‘No, not yet.’

  ‘Come on, Lotte, we need to interview Petra Maasland. We can come back here afterwards,’ Thomas said.

  I gave Vincent my card again. ‘Let me know as soon as he gets here.’

  I followed Thomas into the hospital, throwing one last glance at the nursery before I entered. We went up to Petra’s floor, pushed into her office and told her patient that she had to wait outside until we were done.

  ‘I hope this is urgent,’ Petra said.

  We were back in the boudoir, and this time it seemed overwhelmingly cloying. ‘Did you kill him?’ I said. My voice was harsh. Petra had helped Sylvie to hide her child. How far had she been willing to go to keep that child’s existence a secret? Far enough to actually kill a man?

  ‘Kill who?’

  ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know who I’m talking about. Did you kill Piotr Mazur?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘But you were there.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Your car was there.’ I showed her the records from the parking machine.

  ‘Katja must have stolen it.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Stop this. You keep saying that you don’t know Katja that well, and now you want us to believe that she stole your car and took a photo of your grandson to lure Piotr to the bar?’

  ‘Isn’t that what she told you?’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  Petra didn’t respond, just shook her head, which made her dandelion hair bounce.

  ‘Did you report your car stolen?’

  ‘No.’

  I was reminded of the first time I’d met Petra; learning how she had been upset that Sylvie had overdosed and had flagged it up with the police, but had then withdrawn her concern. Now I knew that it hadn’t been because Katja had told her it was suicide but because she had Sylvie’s son living with her. A boy who hadn’t been registered as Sylvie’s child.

  ‘Oskar is Sylvie’s child, isn’t he?’

  ‘No, he’s our grandson.’

  ‘Your daughter’s child?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t have a daughter.’

  She didn’t miss a beat, I had to give her that. ‘My husband’s daughter from an earlier relationship.’

  I shook my head. ‘I’m calling Social Services. I’m going to have them look after him until I can see some paperwork. I need to see birth certificates.’

  Petra deflated. ‘I want a lawyer.’

  I wanted to swear and sank back in the sofa.

  ‘Sure,’ Thomas said. ‘That is your right.’

  It was going to be hard to prove who had actually killed Piotr unless Katja would retract her statement. Unless Petra confessed. Thomas and I looked at each other. That was the end of our questioning. I rested my head against the squishy sofa.

  ‘You know the real murderer is only just around the corner, don’t you?’ Petra said.

  At her voice I quickly brought my head up. ‘Who do you mean?’

  ‘All out of jealousy. She told me.’

  ‘Who are you talking about?’

  But Petra glued her lips together and shook her head. Why tell me anything that she could use as a bargaining chip later? I thought bitterly.

  Thomas took Petra to the station to wait for her lawyer so that she could be interrogated later, and I told her patient that she should go home; that Petra wouldn’t be able to listen to her any time soon.

  I stared out of the window as I called Social Services. I would wait at the hospital for them to turn up. Downstairs I saw Ronald de Boer cross the car park and enter the hospital. I could guess why he was here. Had he come in my car?

  Chapter Thirty-One

  I found Ronald easily enough. I stayed outside the door and out of sight. I knew Natalie would be much more willing to speak if she didn’t know I was here. I trusted Ronald to ask the right questions. He still knew how to do this job and Natalie seemed to like him.

  ‘Nobody has come to see me.’ Her voice was petulant.

  ‘Not even Koen?’ Ronald said.

  ‘No. I called him but he refused to come.’

  ‘Are you being discharged already?’

  ‘Yes, just a couple of forms left to fill in and then I can go. I’ll be an outpatient and just “under observation”.’ She made speech marks in the air with her fingers.

  ‘Because you told them you tried to kill yourself.’

  ‘I’m so tired, Ronald.’

  Compared to Ronald and the few hours of sleep he was getting, she was probably well rested. I knew she wasn’t talking about sleep, though, but of that deeper tiredness that sadness brought. She must have been if she’d tried to take her own life. I peeked into the room. Natalie was fully dressed. She stood with her back towards me.

  ‘You used to be a cop, didn’t you?’ she said.

  ‘I was.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ As he grabbed her bag, he threw me a quick glance. He’d noticed that I was here. I didn’t think Natalie had.

  ‘You tell me your secret and I’ll tell you mine,’ she said.

  ‘Just tell me yours. You’ll feel better for it.’

  ‘I could have saved my friend.’

  ‘Who are you talking about? Sylvie?’ Ronald sat down on the edge of the bed with his back towards me. He patted the space next to him. Natalie slumped down. It was clever of him, because now I could step closer to them and there was less of a chance that Natalie would see me. I took my phone out and pressed record. It wouldn’t be admissible in court, of course.

  Natalie dropped her head into her hands. ‘I hadn’t seen her in almost a year. She looked well. Much better than she had in a while. We were all together, me, Koen and Piotr. He’d popped round to see us. He stayed for a drink. Anyway, we’d done a couple of lines and Sylvie came round. Said she needed to talk to Koen. They went into the bedroom together. Piotr and I stayed behind.’

  ‘Did another line?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  That was different to what Khalil had told us. He’d said that Natalie had gone into the bedroom too. Maybe Piotr hadn’t wanted him to know that he and Natalie had stayed behind to do a line of coke.

  ‘We heard the screaming and shouting behind the door,’ Natalie continued. ‘Piotr wanted to interfere but I held him back. Koen is always so wired after. I’m good at staying out of the way when he’s like that.’

  I remembered Natalie’s black eye. I wanted to step into the hospital room but I knew sh
e would stop talking. It was better to listen in and to get her to give me an official statement afterwards. It was always hard with these domestics. Women who’d been beaten were often afraid to testify, or they changed their minds when things were ‘better’.

  ‘When Sylvie came out,’ Natalie continued, ‘I couldn’t look her in the eye. He’d hit her, I could tell that. She was quiet for a bit. Then she said: he’s your child. At that I could have hit her myself, so I didn’t feel too bad that he’d punched her.’

  ‘What did Piotr do?’

  ‘He stood up as if he was going to interfere. But I think maybe he was scared to. Sylvie left.’ Natalie stopped talking.

  ‘You didn’t kill her. You didn’t get between her and your boyfriend but you didn’t kill her.’

  Natalie grimaced. ‘Not then. But she came back. Two hours later. She stood outside the door of the flat and screamed that she was going to go to the police, tell them about the drug dealing. Unless he paid. He opened the door really quickly and got her to go inside.’

  ‘Was Piotr still there?’

  ‘No, he had left. Anyway, Koen said that she was right, that if the kid was his child, he would pay child support. Sylvie smiled. She looked so pretty, even though the bruises were already showing on her face. He had split her lip. I don’t know why she believed him. He suggested we celebrate. He gave her a line. To make up for hitting her, he said. It would make her feel better.’

  ‘And she overdosed.’

  Natalie closed her eyes. Tears were running from the corners. ‘Swapping the drugs. It was such an easy thing to do. And I’ – she looked at him – ‘I hated her so much, because she’d slept with him. Because she’d always have this tie with him. His child. I forgot that she used to be my friend.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘I never called an ambulance. I watched her and she died.’ She laughed, a joyless sound. ‘I called an ambulance for myself while I still could. But Sylvie, I just helped carry to the alley around the corner.’ She tied her hair into a ponytail, getting ready to leave the room. ‘I’ve got this counsellor, because of the suicide. I told her the story. She called me a callous bitch.’ She looked at Ronald. ‘I thought she was going to hit me. I actually was scared. Do you think I should report her? I’ve got her name and address. That fat cow. And she had such terrible hair.’

  ‘What happened to the child?’

  ‘That’s what I asked Koen yesterday afternoon. He said: what’s with all the questions? Then he said he was going to sort it out.’

  ‘He was going to sort it out.’ There was clear anger in Ronald’s voice. ‘You didn’t try to kill yourself at all, did you?’

  He didn’t think this had been an accident or a suicide attempt; he thought someone had swapped Natalie’s drugs as well.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  My phone rang with an unknown number. I gave up listening to Ronald trying to convince Natalie to make a statement and walked down the corridor to take the call. It was Vincent de Wolf. Oskar had arrived at the nursery. I rushed over there.

  ‘You were worried about this boy, weren’t you?’Vincent said. ‘Well, you needn’t be. His grandfather just dropped him off. I didn’t mention anything to him. I wasn’t sure what to do.’

  ‘His grandfather? I thought you said Petra Maasland always brought him here.’

  ‘Oh yes, she does sometimes as well. But her husband works here too. Gerard Campert.’ He nodded towards the hospital entrance, where a man was just going inside. I must have missed him by seconds.

  He needn’t have said the name. I recognised the man immediately. The last time I’d seen him, we’d both been sitting on the kerb drinking tea, covered in Piotr Mazur’s blood. It was the man in the yellow T-shirt, the doctor who’d tried to keep Piotr alive until the ambulance turned up. Or had he not tried as hard as he should have?

  I wasn’t sure what to do next. Should I get the child out of here, or should I talk to the doctor? The husband of the woman who had just been taken to the police station to be questioned over Piotr’s death. I turned to Vincent. ‘Social Services are going to come and pick the child up soon. I had to contact them. Keep Oskar safe here until then. Don’t let him out of your sight.’

  Vincent frowned. ‘Social Services? Why?’

  ‘No time to explain,’ I said, and ran after the doctor. I caught up with him just as he was waiting for the elevator and grabbed him by the arm. ‘What did you know?’ I said.

  He didn’t even ask what I was talking about. ‘I was wondering when you were going to come here,’ he said. There was none of the defiance his wife had shown. He just looked tired. ‘Do you want to come to my office?’

  ‘Sure.’ I felt some connection with him because we had tried to save a man together. I still believed that. Just looking at him brought that night back to me. The heat, the smell of Piotr’s blood, the yellow T-shirt in my hands. I cut him some slack because of that.

  He also seemed very willing to talk to me. I looked at his face. If anything, he seemed relieved that I was finally here.

  We went up in the elevator to the third floor and along a corridor. He opened the door to a small room and offered me a seat.

  ‘I knew you’d come. It all went so wrong.’ He didn’t even wait for me to start asking questions. He just started talking. ‘We wanted to show him Oskar. We thought that if he saw the child, saw that he was well taken care of, he would stop all the questions. Katja would meet him in the bar to talk to him and see what kind of man he was. I was there as well to keep an eye out, in case things went very wrong. Katja somehow thought that maybe he wasn’t so bad; after all, her sister had liked him.’

  ‘And what changed?’

  ‘He gave those drugs to the guy with the beard. Suddenly Katja said that we couldn’t introduce Oskar to his father as the guy was a drug dealer. She said: I can’t do it.’

  ‘He wasn’t Oskar’s father.’

  ‘He was. He was watching our house all the time. We would see him outside in his car. It was actually getting worrying. I would leave to go to work and he would be there. We couldn’t go to the police.’

  ‘He’d heard Natalie and Koen arguing over the child. When Sylvie OD’d, he was concerned. That’s all. He liked children. He was worried about the child’s welfare. And you killed him because of his questions.’

  ‘Petra should never have told Katja, but she thought it would make her final months better, to know that her sister had a child. We agreed that Katja could move in with us and look after Oskar. That way we didn’t have to bring him to the nursery here. But Piotr followed Katja. He saw her in a toyshop and followed her to our house.’

  I was reminded of how happy Piotr had looked when Katja showed him the photo. Now I knew that he’d been happy because the boy was safe. How ironic that really everybody had wanted the same thing. ‘Why did she kill him?’

  Gerard paused before answering the question. ‘I’m not sure what happened. All I know was that Petra was waiting in the car with Oskar. There must have been an argument. I don’t know. Petra won’t tell me.’ He sighed and folded his arms. ‘When I heard that guy shout for help, I was so worried that it was Petra or Katja who’d been injured. When I saw Piotr on the floor, I was relieved.’ He rested his head in his hands. ‘It was awful that a man died and I was happy about it.’

  ‘You ran so fast you almost overtook me.’

  ‘We could never have kept him alive.’

  I looked him in the eye. ‘I believe you.’

  ‘If we hadn’t invited Katja to live with us, none of this would have happened.’

  ‘It would have come out at some point. The child isn’t registered as Sylvie’s.’

  ‘She was worried that Oskar would be taken into care. The closer it came to the due date, the more fractious she got. She became hysterical, so in the end, for her safety and the baby’s, we agreed. She had the child at our house. I helped her but we had no midwife. We had agreed that we would call an ambulan
ce if it looked as if anything was going wrong, but luckily there were no complications. I’d been present at the birth, so I could register him. I used Sylvie’s original name from before she was adopted. Sonja Aak.’

  ‘So why did Sylvie go to Katja that night? And then to the father?’

  ‘She’d argued with Petra. It was just a stupid little argument over vaccinations, but Sylvie got it into her head that she wanted to leave and live by herself. But of course she needed money for that. She’d probably thought that Katja would let her stay with her. Katja was so cut up about that.’

  ‘About turning her sister away. Yes, I understand that. You know you’ll have to come to the police station with me too.’

  ‘Yes. I know.’

  ‘I have to wait for Social Services to turn up and then I’ll accompany you. An innocent man was murdered. A man whose worst crime was to be worried about a child.’

  ‘He was a drug dealer.’

  ‘No, he just had some cocaine on him for his own consumption and he gave that to the German guy. Still, that’s irrelevant.’

  ‘But it wasn’t cocaine; it was heroin.’

  Of course. I’d forgotten about that. From the toxicology report after the post-mortem, I knew that Piotr hadn’t had heroin in his system. I was pretty sure that he’d believed it was cocaine he was giving to that German. That meant that maybe someone had been trying to kill Piotr. The same person who had swapped the drugs and got Sylvie Bruyneel to overdose. How very sad that those drugs had caused Piotr to die after all.

  Gerard Campert looked at his watch. ‘Sorry, I need to scrub up. I have one more surgery scheduled for today. Will you let me finish that?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes. Yes, that’s fine. I’ll wait.’

  He left. I wasn’t sure, I probably shouldn’t have allowed him to do that, but I trusted him. Having been together on the night that Piotr was killed had created some link between us. I called Social Services to see when they would be coming. The woman said they were on their way. They would be there in ten minutes at most. I went down the stairs to the nursery area to wait for them to turn up. Even though this was absolutely not what Sylvie had wanted, it wasn’t going to be as bad for Oskar as she had feared. A child needed to be looked after properly. We couldn’t have him stay with a woman I suspected of being a murderer.