Death at the Orange Locks

by Anja de Jager

‘We’d spoken earlier anyway, and I thought it would make sense if I talked to you again.’

  There must have been more to this. Something more recent than the flirting that the boyfriend was now unhappy about. ‘Did something happen at the dinner? Before Patrick went missing?’

  ‘I don’t know, I wasn’t there.’

  ‘Were you the only one who didn’t go?’

  ‘As I said, it was only for sales and design.’

  ‘Everybody from those departments went?’

  ‘Yes, and that shows it, doesn’t it? Therese didn’t mind, otherwise she wouldn’t have gone.’

  ‘Didn’t she have to go? If it was a work do?’

  ‘If she was uncomfortable with how Patrick acted, she could have thought of an excuse.’

  It was quite possible that it would have been more awkward to refuse the invitation than to endure Patrick’s behaviour. ‘Did Patrick act differently after he’d had a drink?’

  ‘He was a bit more tactile, but not in a bad way. He was a nice man. A good boss.’

  ‘I think you should give me Therese’s surname and her details. I need to talk to her myself.’ I recalled the pretty young woman with the dark hair. Uncalled for, a memory popped into my head of Margreet talking about her lovely husband who had always been so good to her. ‘Was that why she stood up when I asked if anybody had information? She didn’t want to talk to you about invoicing. She wanted to speak to me about what Patrick got up to after he’d had a couple of drinks.’

  Karin looked down at her glass of wine. ‘I don’t want this to be how he’s remembered. He did a lot of good things. He helped me when I went through some tricky times financially. It’s not fair that those girls want to damage his reputation.’

  The waiter came across. He had dark hair tied back in a man bun. That was probably a requirement for going anywhere near the kitchen. ‘Can I get you ladies another drink? One more glass of Pinot Grigio?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘We’re done. Just the bill, please.’

  Karin finished the rest of her wine.

  ‘Patrick was murdered,’ I said after the waiter had walked away. ‘This isn’t about protecting his reputation any more.’

  But part of me understood her reluctance to speak ill of the dead. I wouldn’t want to tell Margreet about this either.

  Chapter 12

  I walked back with Karin to the office. It only took ten minutes to get there, to move from the north side to the south side of the thin strip of land, crossing the road that bisected it from east to west. She opened the door to the premises and I automatically went into Patrick’s office again. As Nico had said, it was the only space that had any privacy. I was also reminded of the other thing Nico had said: that maybe it was wrong to use this space. I was here to talk about what Patrick might have done wrong, looking into his life. Digging up things about the victim’s past was always a large part of any investigation. Even when it bordered on victim shaming – what had they done to get themselves killed? – it was essential. We had to find any leads we could.

  I looked at the framed documents on the wall. They were evidence of the company’s success: new clients and new partnerships announced to show this was a thriving firm. I looked at them closely as Karin fetched Therese, scanning the headlines and the articles.

  They were successes from over a decade ago.

  I was sure they were hung there to show prospective clients that this was a blossoming company that knew what it was doing, but the dates on the clippings spoke not so much of success as of recent failure. It was of course possible that Patrick hadn’t been interested in hanging anything in his office recently, but it seemed odd that none of the articles were from less than ten years ago.

  Ah no, here was a more recent one. A smiling Patrick van der Linde stood in front of the office building. Lighting design firm Linde Lights signs with Enviro Build for office refurbishment. I’d heard of that company: they were Mark’s main competitors in Amsterdam. The article was three years old.

  Therese joined me as I was still studying the documents on the wall. ‘Am I interrupting?’ she asked, popping her head around the door.

  ‘I was waiting for you,’ I said. ‘Take a seat.’

  Therese was very beautiful. Her long dark hair was glossy and straight. She wore a white shirt tucked into a smart skirt, and even though the outfit was simple, on her it looked perfect. She was wearing make-up, but it was understated, only necessary to enhance what nature had provided her with. Not like mine, which was to hide the dark circles under my eyes.

  It was easy to imagine that her clients loved her, but also that Karin of the short crop and triangle earrings hated her.

  ‘I don’t feel good about this,’ she said. ‘I mean, Patrick is dead. That’s why I asked Karin to talk to you.’

  That surprised me. I’d assumed that Karin had taken it on herself to tell the story. ‘Why did you ask her?’

  Therese shrugged. ‘She’d known Patrick for a long time. It didn’t seem so bad if she did it.’

  ‘She implied that something happened at the company do. Tell me about that.’

  ‘It was no big deal. Patrick was just drunk. Do I need to go into this now? It doesn’t make a difference any more.’

  ‘Your boss was murdered. The company dinner might have been the last time anybody saw him alive. It’s crucially important that you tell me what happened.’

  ‘His murder had nothing to do with me.’

  ‘I never said it did,’ I said to allay her worries, ‘but it’s important to establish Patrick’s behaviour in general.’

  ‘Behaviour? He was our boss. We cared about him. I don’t like how you talk about his behaviour.’ Her voice rose. ‘As if he was a criminal. Someone killed him.’

  I’d misread the situation. She wasn’t keen to talk about this at all. Instead of a boss who’d been harassing her, it seemed that she had actually liked him. I was reminded of Karin telling me that they had been flirting at one point. I had seen him as a middle-aged man cheating on his wife by touching up his subordinates, but what if my distorted opinion of this family was influencing how I judged everything that had happened here?

  I needed to backtrack to get Therese to talk to me openly.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘That came out wrong. Can you tell me about that evening? We’re not sure of the exact time Patrick died, but it could be that it was shortly after the dinner. It would be very useful for me to hear exactly what happened. Karin couldn’t tell me that because she wasn’t there.’

  Whenever you interviewed a witness who had difficulty remembering a certain event or was reluctant to talk about it, going back to an earlier moment in the day and working up to the moment that you wanted them to talk about was a very useful method.

  ‘Had the event been planned for a while?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ Therese said. ‘It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. Patrick did that a lot.’ She smiled. ‘He would say: let’s all go out, it’s been a tough day. Not many bosses were like that, but he was generous.’

  ‘So you were all working and then he said: let’s go out?’

  ‘He’d introduced his son-in-law, Arjen, to everybody and said that it would be good for us to talk to him in a less formal setting. That was what he called it. Less formal. As if this office was formal.’ She looked at me. ‘I think he thought that this way we could talk to the guy about things other than work. See what he was really like. Patrick thought that mattered, since this is only a small office. His second family, he called it.’

  ‘Was it odd that only sales and design were invited?’

  ‘No, not really. I guess he thought other people wouldn’t have to work with Arjen as closely.’

  Just like with any family, in this second family certain people were more important than others. I was getting a sense of where the lines had been drawn in Linde Lights.

  ‘What time did you head out?’

  ‘The others left at around five thirty, six. I still ha
d a bit of work that I needed to finish. Someone has to get new accounts in.’ She grinned. ‘I arrived at the venue just before seven, I’d say.’

  ‘What was the name of the place?’ This company dinner seemed to be rather important.

  ‘Didn’t you meet Karin there? It was at the Clipper. She said she’d show you.’

  ‘I see.’ The place where she’d just had a glass of wine. ‘She didn’t mention that this was where you went the other night too.’

  ‘Patrick went there a lot. It’s close to the office.’

  ‘You got there around seven,’ I said to get the interview back on track. ‘Then what happened?’

  She shrugged. ‘It was a normal evening. We talked about work until Patrick told us to change the subject.’ Her eyes teared up. ‘I can’t believe he’s dead. He was always so larger-than-life, a man with so much energy.’ She wiped away her tears and blew her nose.

  ‘Take your time,’ I said. I’d seen this before too: something that might have been annoying at the time had turned into a lovely memory postmortem. Maybe the entire sales team had complained about these company events. I definitely wouldn’t like it if CI Moerdijk, for example, told us with only a few minutes’ warning that we had to all go out. I would probably have other plans I would have to rearrange or cancel. Therese might have been annoyed that everybody had headed out and left her alone in the office to get on with work. She might have wanted to go to the cinema that evening, or have an early night.

  But whatever she’d wanted at the time, that annoyance had been erased and now it was a nice evening because it was the last evening her boss had been alive.

  There was a reason why people didn’t speak ill of the dead, and it wasn’t purely because they could no longer defend themselves. It was because they could no longer take any action at all. They couldn’t be annoying, funny, caring, hard-working or anything else, so why not think of them kindly? Why not remember the good things they had done and gloss over the bad?

  It was normal behaviour but it wasn’t very useful for a police investigation.

  I needed to hear about the bad as well as the good. I needed to coax Therese into telling me what had happened that evening – the bit that she was so reluctant to discuss. The part that she preferred Karin tell me about instead.

  ‘The rest of the group had been there for almost an hour when you joined,’ I said. ‘Was everybody eating?’

  ‘Oh no, they’d waited for me, of course. They called me from the restaurant, asked what I wanted to eat.’ She smiled. ‘They were so caring; they wanted to make sure I was coming.’

  ‘Who called you? Was it Patrick?’

  ‘Yes, it was.’ Her smile wavered only slightly. ‘He was always the one to get the entire team there. He felt bad that I was still working after everybody had gone out.’

  Perhaps she hadn’t wanted to go but then her boss had called her and she’d had no choice. ‘He called you, asked you what you wanted to eat and ordered for you?’

  ‘Yes, wasn’t that kind? That’s exactly the sort of thing he did.’

  It didn’t come across to me as kind. It felt manipulative. My mother would say that I always saw the worst in people since I dealt with criminals and crime all the time. Maybe she would agree with Therese that it had been a kind gesture. But I doubt he paid overtime for the hours his employees were forced to spend having a company dinner.

  ‘You arrived,’ I said, ‘and the food was served?’

  ‘Yes, as soon as I got there.’

  ‘The others had been drinking.’

  ‘Of course.’

  A solid hour of drinking time without eating anything.

  ‘Tell me what happened then. You got there, the others had been drinking for a while, I guess it was pretty lively?’

  ‘It wasn’t for that long.’ True to form, as soon as I asked about anything that could be seen as controversial, Therese stepped in to defend them. ‘It was only an hour. It wasn’t as if they were drunk or anything.’

  I had to be careful how I asked these questions, so as to stop her retracting into her shell. ‘Who were you sitting next to?’

  ‘I was at the far end of the table. Frank was to my right and Paula opposite. I don’t think you’ve met them. They’re in sales too. They were in the middle of a conversation. I think it was about running – they both run marathons – but I’m not sure. That could have been a little later.’

  ‘And Patrick?’

  ‘Was at the other end of the table.’

  ‘How many people were there?’

  ‘Seven of us plus the son-in-law.’

  I wanted to ask her what she’d thought of him, but I was having enough trouble getting her to the bit I really needed to hear without giving her an excuse to move sideways to another topic of conversation altogether.

  ‘Olaf couldn’t make it,’ Therese continued. ‘He’s in design with Nico, and his wife was away that evening so he had to babysit. Patrick made a joke about that.’ She stopped talking and looked down at her hands. ‘Not a mean joke. Olaf thought it was funny too.’

  I nodded. I was starting to get a much clearer idea of what Patrick had been like. It wasn’t a particularly flattering picture. ‘Was that normal for him?’

  ‘He didn’t make fun of people, if that’s what you’re asking.’

  ‘I understand. I’m only trying to see if he was behaving differently that last evening.’

  Therese paused. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said eventually, maybe stuck between a desire to lie and make her boss a nicer person than he had been, and the realisation that it wasn’t a good thing to lie to a detective in the middle of a murder inquiry.

  ‘Did you talk to Patrick much that evening?’

  ‘Only later. When I was getting ready to leave.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It really wasn’t a big deal. I don’t know why you think it was.’

  The more reluctant she was to tell me, the more I wanted to know. ‘It could be important,’ I said.

  Therese sighed. ‘Well, I’d been to the bathroom. It was down the corridor, a bit of a walk from where we were sitting. When I came out, he was waiting in the hallway. Do I really have to tell you this? I’d prefer not to.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I got a feeling that I knew where this story was going. ‘You really have to. I understand you don’t want to say anything bad about Patrick now that he’s dead, but this might help solve his murder.’

  ‘It really wasn’t important,’ she said again.

  ‘If it has nothing to do with the murder, nobody else will need to know. Not his family, not your colleagues. We can keep it between ourselves.’

  She tucked her hair behind her ear. Her hands were shaking. ‘Some of them know already anyway,’ she said.

  That suggested to me that some people might have seen what happened. ‘If someone else was a witness to this,’ I said, because I could tell how hard it was for Therese to talk to me, ‘would you like me to ask them what happened instead?’ I had thought she wanted to paint Patrick in a better light, but now I suspected her reluctance meant that this was really difficult to relive. I hadn’t appreciated that. It also made me think whatever had happened wasn’t as unimportant as she kept insisting.

  She shook her head. ‘No, I should tell you myself. He … how shall I say it … he stopped me from going back into the restaurant. I told him I wanted to, but he wouldn’t let me. He tried to kiss me. I think he was really drunk.’

  I put my hand out and touched her arm. ‘Take your time,’ I said.

  The perfect veneer of her face seemed to crack. Tears started to stream down her face. Ugly tears. Not the kind of tears that Karin had held in earlier; not tears of sadness at her boss’s death, but tears because she was reliving something traumatic. ‘He knew I wasn’t interested. He knew I was seeing someone here. But he wouldn’t let me go. He had me pinned up against the wall. His hands were all over me. I couldn’t get away.’ She looked at the ceiling, clearly
waiting for the tears to stop. She rubbed them away with a deliberate gesture, as if she wanted to get on with the story now that she had started it. ‘I don’t know what would have happened if Nico hadn’t stepped in.’

  I wanted to tell her that eventually someone would have stepped in and helped her, but experience had taught me that this wasn’t true. I kept control of my anger, grateful on her behalf that someone had rescued her from that situation.

  ‘When you say Nico, do you mean Nico Verhoef?’ I wondered why he hadn’t mentioned that.

  ‘Yes. He saw what was happening, grabbed Patrick and pulled him away. I asked him not to tell anybody. Not any of our colleagues, especially not Fabrice. It wasn’t a big deal, and I didn’t want everybody to know.’

  ‘He didn’t tell me.’ At least I now knew why.

  ‘Good,’ Therese said. ‘That’s good. I didn’t go back into the restaurant. I waited for Fabrice and went straight home.’

  ‘You didn’t tell your boyfriend what had happened?’

  She shook her head. ‘I told him I’d had too much to drink and that was why Nico had called him to come and fetch me.’ She looked at me. ‘We both work there. We need our jobs. Fabrice would have been so pissed off. He wouldn’t have let it go. Even if I wanted to leave, there was no reason for Fabrice to do the same. I kept quiet. That was the easiest thing to do, especially when Patrick wasn’t there on Monday. That’s why I didn’t want to tell you either. Karin knew about the girl last year, and I thought she could tell you about that and leave me out of it. Please don’t tell anybody.’

  ‘I won’t if I don’t have to. I’ll talk to Nico about it and ask him some questions. I need to know what he saw and what happened afterwards.’

  ‘Of course. That’s fine. Fabrice and I left immediately. I told him I didn’t feel too good, and he gave me a hard time for drinking so much during company time.’ She smiled. ‘He’s sweet. He held my hair when I was throwing up.’ She paused for a few seconds. Her hands were shaking. ‘I hadn’t realised how shocked I was until I had to be sick. Isn’t that weird?’

  Chapter 13