Death at the Orange Locks

by Anja de Jager

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ There was something about the complete certainty in Mark’s voice that soothed me. ‘She was probably worried you wouldn’t like him, or maybe you were busy.’

  ‘She wants us all to meet.’

  ‘That’s a good idea. Tell me when it is.’ As always, his calm felt like a security blanket. Maybe this didn’t sound very romantic, but he was the normality in my otherwise crazy life. He was so grounded that he stopped me from spiralling out of control. I considered telling him about the drowned man we’d found this morning, but decided not to.

  I was always careful not to overload him with what had happened to me during the day. It would be so easy to talk about cases and murders and all the bad stuff I saw, but that would be unfair on him. He would listen to me and he would be calm but I knew that he would soak it all up and it would change him as it had changed me. It would damage his view of the world and make it as cynical as mine. Sometimes not talking about something was the way to protect people from what was going on. It wasn’t to shut them out; it was for their own good. Not taking him into my confidence meant not taking him into the darkness of my job. Talking to Mark always reminded me that there was a world out there that wasn’t obsessed with crime, where people didn’t get divided into either victims or perpetrators, where the majority of those you met were happy, law-abiding citizens going on with their lives, with their own little worries and concerns.

  Why would I destroy his world view when I was getting so much solace from it? It was better to talk about an upcoming wedding than about death and violence.

  ‘I’ll ask my mother for some dates,’ I said. ‘We could all have dinner together.’

  ‘Do you want me to come?’

  ‘God, I need you to come,’ I said.

  He laughed, but I hadn’t been joking.

  Chapter 6

  The next morning, I went to talk to Chief Inspector Moerdijk without stopping off at my desk first. I had to tell him about the relationship between me and the dead man. Well, there wasn’t a relationship as such, but I was sure that if I explained the situation, he would probably remove me from the case. I’d worked for him for a while now and he knew me well enough to appreciate that I didn’t often ask to be excused from something.

  Moerdijk had changed since our new commissaris joined us a few months ago. Having to report to someone younger than him had driven it home that he was never going to be the chief of police in Amsterdam. His aspirations would now only be fulfilled if he left to head up a smaller police station somewhere else. He wouldn’t make that move. His edge seemed to have dulled.

  For another middle-aged man that might have caused him to let himself go and put on weight. Not so for Moerdijk. He seemed to have embraced his love of running even more. He’d told me that he was training for an Ironman next month. His extreme health regime bordered on the fanatical. The crazy amount of exercise he did made him too thin, and even though he was less than ten years older than me, his face was shot through with wrinkles.

  I could see his running gear lying behind his desk. If I was going to psychoanalyse him, I would suggest that exercise was a part of his life that he could control, unlike his career. Of course I wouldn’t mention anything like this to Moerdijk. He wouldn’t appreciate it.

  He gestured at me as soon as he saw me, indicating that I should come in. ‘I was waiting for you to talk to me,’ he said. ‘Thomas told me yesterday.’

  ‘Told you?’

  ‘Yes, he came to see me yesterday evening and explained it all. The dead man is your ex-husband’s father-in-law?’

  ‘Yes, and I would prefer not to work on the case.’

  ‘That’s not an option, I’m afraid. We’re really short at the moment because of the attack at Centraal station. There are no other teams available. Just do your best. Thomas said he would lead the investigation; that he’d talked to you about that and you were fine with it.’ He raised his eyebrows.

  I shouldn’t have gone home early yesterday to have dinner with my mother; I should have talked to the boss. Now I was left with no other solution than to agree that this was what I’d said to Thomas. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I’m surprised. It’s not like you not to want to be involved. Not without a solid reason, anyway.’

  It was a solid enough reason for me. ‘I prefer to stay far away from this case. That’s what I wanted to say.’

  The CI tapped his pen on his notebook thoughtfully. For a few seconds everything hung in the balance. ‘Normally I might have agreed with you,’ he said finally, ‘but I don’t have that luxury at the moment. There isn’t much manpower available, and because this wasn’t an accidental death, I’m left with no room for manoeuvre. Thomas is willing to take the lead. He was very keen to do so, I should say.’

  ‘He’s welcome to it,’ I said. ‘I’m good with him running the investigation.’ I could take holiday or stay in the office and type up reports.

  ‘Come and talk to me again if you change your mind,’ the CI said.

  My mobile rang before I’d even reached my desk. It was the duty officer. There was a visitor for me: Margreet van der Linde. Like her daughter, she clearly liked calling on people without giving them any notice. It was easiest to tell her straight away that I couldn’t be her point of contact. I should get that out of the way, so I turned around and went back downstairs.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you,’ she said, ‘rather than the guy who came with you yesterday. He’s fine – don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem dealing with him – but I think it’s easier to talk to you, as you’re a friend of my daughter.’

  ‘A friend?’ I had wondered if Margreet knew who I was, and how I was connected to her daughter and son-in-law, and here was my answer: obviously not.

  ‘Because of the connection, I’m actually going to be less involved,’ I said, being deliberately vague. ‘If you have information, you should talk to Thomas Jansen. He’s leading the investigation.’

  ‘Oh,’ Margreet said. ‘I didn’t know about that. My mistake.’ Her face fell.

  She wore the same shoes as she’d had on last time – leather, with sparkling stones on the toes – but her socks didn’t match. The left one was blue, the right black. It reminded me of the washing on the line on that moored ship. I immediately felt sorry for her. Whatever I had said to the CI about not wanting to get involved, and however much I wanted to stay away from this case, I couldn’t find it in me to just send her away. But neither did I want to become her go-to point of contact. This was a fine balance to walk.

  Even though she was indoors, she shivered. Grief or lack of sleep had caused that, not the temperature in the police station. Also, she was wearing a thick coat, buttoned up all the way to the top, and a scarf tied around her neck. She wasn’t a small woman, but she seemed shrunken inside her clothes, like a child swaddled in too many layers. I should probably ask her to go, tell her to come back later when Thomas got in, but my eyes fell on those mismatched socks again and I just couldn’t do it. Things couldn’t be easy for her.

  ‘Can I get you a coffee? Or a cup of tea?’ Doing that would make me feel less of an evil person. After all, there was no reason to dislike the mother of a woman I hated. I could be kind. ‘What did you want to talk about?’

  ‘I want to make sure there was no mistake.’

  ‘A mistake?’

  ‘I still don’t think it’s possible that it’s him. My daughter must have been wrong.’

  ‘She went with her husband. They were certain, my colleague told me.’

  ‘Do you think I could talk to your colleague? I didn’t sleep all night. There must have been a mix-up somewhere. She must have misidentified him.’

  I remembered grief. I remembered only too well how hard it was just to get dressed in the morning, how you tried to keep up appearances but failed. You tried to pretend that you were dealing with everything well and then you put on mismatched socks.

  Margreet was doing her utmost to convince her
self that her husband hadn’t died. She didn’t want to accept it. I didn’t think talking to Charlie would make her believe that this was real.

  ‘There’s a café really close,’ I said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  She smiled in gratitude. ‘That would be nice,’ she said, as if this was a friendly chat and not a meeting with the detective investigating her husband’s murder. It would only be a friendly chat, I corrected myself; I was going to have nothing more to do with the case. ‘Wait here for a minute; I’ll just pop up to get some things.’ The photos of the postmortem were still on my desk. I could bring them with me.

  When I got into our office, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Charlie was already here. This might work out well. ‘The identification yesterday,’ I said. ‘Were there any issues?’

  ‘Issues?’

  ‘They were certain, weren’t they?’

  ‘Oh yes, absolutely. She saw immediately that it was her father. I mean, the guy’s face was bruised and swollen, but not so much as to make him hard to recognise.’

  I nodded. That made sense. After all, I had recognised him straight away from the photo on his driver’s licence. I scanned through the photographs on my desk but quickly realised that many of them were too graphic to show Margreet. I chose a couple that only showed his face. That weren’t too horrific.

  In the back of my mind, I hoped it wouldn’t be necessary to show them to her. I didn’t think she actually doubted her husband was dead. She just wasn’t ready to accept it yet.

  The little café wasn’t busy. Only a couple of tables were occupied. A young man who looked rather bleary-eyed was obviously trying to wake himself up with caffeine but seemed to still be struggling. I picked a table far enough away from the other people that nobody could overhear us.

  ‘I don’t know what Nadia told you,’ Margreet said, ‘but Patrick was such a loving man.’

  I managed not to choke on my cappuccino. ‘We’ve never talked about her father,’ I said, entirely truthfully. That she used the past tense told me enough. This chat wasn’t about wondering if her husband was still alive; it was because she needed to talk to someone. I was happy enough to be used as a sounding board by a woman coming to terms with her loss. It would have been easy to object – I wasn’t a social worker; having this conversation wasn’t part of my job – but there had been enough situations where a chat just like this one had given me useful information. In a way, it was part of the investigation.

  Not that I would stay on the case for long, of course, but if there was anything relevant, I could pass it on to Thomas.

  ‘Today people look at it differently; they think fathers should spend time with their children. I totally get that, but it was different when Nadia was a child. Patrick always worked hard to provide for his family.’

  She made it sound as if Patrick had been eighty instead of in his late fifties. It was odd, but I could read between the lines: Patrick had been a workaholic and Margreet was concerned that Nadia had complained about him. She was getting her defence of him in first. I tried not to do the maths to figure out if I was closer to Margreet’s age or her daughter’s.

  ‘Because of his work, because of the money he made,’ she continued, ‘I could afford to stay at home. That’s how we did things. That worked for us. I told Nadia she can make her own mistakes.’

  ‘Her own mistakes? Has something happened between you and your daughter?’

  ‘We had a bit of an argument last night. Nothing serious.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing. I just know that you and Nadia know each other from before, and … well, I don’t know what she said, but I don’t want you to have the wrong idea about Patrick. That’s why I wanted to talk to you, really. He was a good father and a good husband. I want to make sure you know that.’

  Was she worried that we wouldn’t investigate his death properly if we thought he wasn’t a good man? If that were the case, the police’s workload would be hugely reduced. I could just imagine families having to fill out a questionnaire about the habits of the deceased, and us using it to decide how many man hours we were going to dedicate. It didn’t work like that. If someone had been murdered, sure, we helped the family get justice through the courts, but it was much more about stopping a murderer.

  ‘Are you sure she identified my husband correctly? It’s what I wanted to check with the other detective.’ She took off her scarf and coat, revealing more signs of how much she was struggling. She was wearing her blouse inside out; I could see the reverse stitching on the seams. I suspected she would be appalled if I pointed it out to her; it would be even more embarrassing than telling someone their fly was undone.

  I took a sip of my coffee. ‘It really was him. Your daughter identified him but I could tell from the photo on his driving licence too. There was no mistake.’ I said it kindly. ‘I understand it’s hard to accept.’

  ‘It’s my own fault; I should have gone to identify him instead.’

  ‘You can see him if you want to.’

  She shook her head. ‘I trust my daughter. Was it murder?’

  ‘We don’t know for sure yet,’ I said. ‘We know he drowned, but we don’t know why he fell in the water.’

  ‘He didn’t kill himself,’ Margreet said. ‘He wasn’t the type.’

  You never knew, I could have told her that. People tried to kill themselves for a number of reasons, many of which the family didn’t know about. But in this case, I tended to agree with her. That he still had his wallet on him, and all his clothes on, ruled out a mugging, and the head injuries were the wrong shape for a suicide. I nodded.

  ‘It could have been an accident,’ she said. ‘He could have just fallen in.’

  ‘What kind of work did your husband do?’ If he’d been a builder, or someone working near the docks, an accident was much more likely.

  ‘He ran his own company. That was why he worked so hard: he was responsible for all the people who worked for him too. They were his extended family in a way. That’s what he always used to say. It’s why he cared so much.’

  Arjen had run his own company too. So Nadia had picked someone just like her father. Only ten years younger than her father, too. I hoped my coffee cup hid the grimace on my face. This was madness. This was why I shouldn’t be involved in this case. Even a casual chat with the victim’s widow reminded me of my cheating ex. In the past, it had often been sympathy for the victim’s family that had driven me. Sympathy with the victim’s daughter was in short supply in this case.

  ‘What kind of company is it?’

  ‘They design all kinds of speciality lights.’

  ‘Outdoor lighting?’ I was still thinking about something that could have made an accident more likely. He could have been struck from above by a fallen rig or something like that. ‘Something that needed scaffolding?’

  ‘No, nothing like that. It’s small lighting to incorporate in cards and T-shirts. Maybe you’ve seen the T-shirts with the lights that blink in time with the beat? It’s their bestseller. They sell a lot of them at gigs. Of course they do corporate gifts too, but working with bands and music was always Patrick’s favourite.’

  ‘Not really my thing,’ I said. Maybe I should tell Margreet who I was and how I knew her daughter.

  ‘I’m so glad I came to see you,’ she said. ‘I don’t know who else to talk to about these things. My friends are ignoring me, or they don’t understand. My swimming friends asked me where I was this morning. As if I could go swimming in that water. I felt really weird about it, so I cancelled. But that was good, because now I can have a coffee with you.’

  There were many things I could have said, such as that it wasn’t the police’s duty to have coffee with people, or that I wouldn’t be working this case for much longer. But as she turned round to catch the waitress’s attention, I saw the label sticking out at the back of her blouse, and I couldn’t get the words out.

  Chapter 7

  Thoma
s was standing by his desk, shuffling a pile of papers together, when I walked into our office.

  ‘I’m going to talk to the daughter,’ he said. ‘We need to ask her if she has any idea why somebody would have wanted to murder her father. Do you want to come?’

  His eyes challenged me, but I didn’t respond. I didn’t need to prove myself to him, though if I had even the slightest inclination to work on this case, I needed to prove something to myself. I hadn’t completely changed my mind about wanting out of this investigation, but Margreet’s efforts to cope, and the evidence that she was failing to do so, had moved me. I felt a connection with her. After all, I’d been there myself. I’d pretended everything was fine when really I’d been falling apart. Still, I had to make sure I could do this. However sorry I might feel for Patrick’s widow, I wasn’t going to stay involved if it hurt too much. It felt like stepping carefully onto the ice to check if it was going to hold your weight or if you were going to fall through. Had the ice around my pain grown thick enough over the last four years for it to hold firm under the onslaught of meeting Nadia again?

  ‘If you don’t want to, just tell me,’ Thomas said. ‘If you’re that worried about seeing her, I can wait for Charlie to come back. Is she really pretty?’

  He could be such a total git. ‘If your wife ever cheats on you with someone,’ I said, ‘I’ll make sure to check the guy out, because he’ll be much nicer than you. And younger.’

  Thomas grinned. ‘I like the fighting spirit. I agreed to go to their house.’

  ‘Where do they live?’

  ‘You don’t know? I thought you would have checked them out.’

  ‘Very funny. No, I didn’t want to see him ever again, so the last thing I would have done was sit outside his house watching him and that woman.’

  ‘They’re outside Amsterdam,’ he said. ‘They live in Haarlem.’

  That was probably why I hadn’t seen him around in four years. I knew my mother had stayed in touch with them. I didn’t ask her about it and she didn’t tell me. At the time, she and I had fallen out, and she had contacted Arjen for reasons that had seemed like revenge but that had probably been loneliness. That was one good thing about her getting married: she wouldn’t need my ex for company if she and I were ever on bad terms again.