Death at the Orange Locks

by Anja de Jager

  I stayed behind in Patrick’s office and wrote down my thoughts about the interview in my notebook. My anger was still simmering away just beneath my skin. So Patrick had been a boss with wandering hands if I believed Karin’s statement, or a sexual harasser if I believed Therese. It didn’t necessarily give me a lead in his murder case but it did give me an interesting insight into what this guy was like. Not the kind, nice husband and boss that I’d been told about so far, but a guy who liked touching up the pretty women who worked for him, who had called Therese to make sure she was going to be there and who had pinned her against the wall. She’d been so upset she’d thrown up.

  The door opened and Nico came in.

  I gestured towards the chair opposite me. He sat down without saying anything. I let the silence last.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He finally filled the void. ‘She asked me not to say anything.’

  ‘I’m sure she meant that she didn’t want you to gossip. She didn’t know that we were going to be dealing with a murder inquiry. That changes things somewhat, don’t you think?’

  ‘I’m not sure what it would have to do with Patrick’s murder,’ Nico said with a defensive tone in his voice. ‘I didn’t think it was relevant. I didn’t want everybody to know what had happened if Therese didn’t want that herself.’

  Perfect, so he thought the sexual assault would have looked bad for the victim not the perpetrator. ‘Give me your version of events,’ I said.

  ‘Patrick was really drunk. I hadn’t seen him drink that much in a while. He’d made sure that Therese was coming. He called her, asked what she wanted to eat, insisted really. I think she was avoiding him. She hadn’t wanted to come. She’d been like that ever since she and Fabrice got together. I’d made sure she didn’t have to sit next to him.’

  ‘You knew what he was like then?’

  ‘Before Fabrice, I didn’t think she minded. She would smile at him.’

  No doubt the kind of smile that women gave when they were uncomfortable about the situation but keeping their head down in order to hang on to their job. The kind of smile that was harder to maintain when your boyfriend was watching. ‘I heard that someone complained last year as well.’

  ‘That was nothing. He’d made a couple of remarks.’

  I was surprised that he still thought that, after what he’d witnessed. Covering for his boss might have become second nature. It made me appreciate just how bad this grope in the hallway must have been for him to intervene. ‘Therese said he was waiting for her when she got out of the bathroom,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t see that. I saw them in the hallway. She was trying to push him away. And he was …’ Nico coughed. ‘This is hard to talk about now that Patrick is dead.’

  I knew it would be easier for him to talk about his own actions rather than Patrick’s. I decided to help him. ‘Therese was grateful that you stepped in. You pulled him away.’

  ‘I grabbed his arm. He came to his senses when he saw me. He was embarrassed.’

  Embarrassed at being spotted probably, not at what he’d done.

  ‘He went back inside the restaurant. I stayed with Therese. She was really upset. She was shaking. I called Fabrice for her. She asked me not to tell him, so I said that she wasn’t feeling well, had drunk too much, and could he come and get her. They live quite close by, so he was there in fifteen minutes.’

  That matched with what Therese had told me. ‘What happened then?’

  ‘Patrick was in a foul mood. Everybody seemed to pick up on that and people started to leave.’ He shrugged. ‘Or maybe I’m reading too much into it and it was purely because Therese had gone home, so others could go too. It’s often like that, isn’t it? Once one person leaves, everybody starts to look at their watch. I went not long after. It was no longer a fun evening. I’d talked to the son-in-law, Arjen, I’d done my duty and I’d had enough.’

  ‘What was Patrick’s son-in-law going to do at the company?’

  ‘I’m really not sure. Patrick was talking about trying new strategies, but I don’t know why.’

  ‘What does that mean: new strategies?’

  Nico shrugged. ‘Beats me. Patrick didn’t tell me. Arjen never actually started, of course. I’m not even sure that Patrick told him much, but he was going to parachute the guy in. Maybe he needed a new job. Patrick was like that: he cared about his family. Now that’s all fallen through.’

  ‘Wouldn’t he have kept you informed as the lead designer?’ The only new strategy I could think of would be to try a new line of products, whatever that might be in the lighting business, and wouldn’t they need to be designed? In the back of my mind I realised that I was probably thinking about it too simplistically, but what did I know about this business – or about business in general, if I was completely honest with myself.

  ‘I don’t think there were any new strategies,’ Nico said. ‘No new plans. It was a manufactured job for his son-in-law. There was no need for us to change anything. Things were fine as they were.’

  I wished I had someone who could go through the books and tell me if there was a problem with this business. There was an obvious candidate for that in the financial fraud department, but I wasn’t going to ask her.

  I had to stay focused. There was clearly a problem with the way Patrick had behaved towards some of the women in his company. I shouldn’t get sidetracked by thinking about what Arjen was being asked to do at the firm or what his prospective colleagues were thinking about him.

  It wasn’t that I thought Margreet was the kind of woman to have killed her husband because he had tried to shove his tongue down the throat of someone who worked for him, but it did mean that Patrick had a different personality from what we’d been told so far. He would not be the first person to behave inappropriately after he’d had too much to drink. The question was: was there anything else he had done whilst under the influence? Something that might have given someone a reason to murder him? Who knew what had happened after he’d left the Clipper drunk and in a bad mood.

  He could have annoyed the wrong person, and someone could have taken a swing at him. I would have to read through the pathologist’s report again, but what if he’d been punched and landed with the back of his head against a hard object, and that had killed him? There had been plenty of bruising on his face to substantiate that theory. It all depended on exactly which of those marks were postmortem and which weren’t. But I remembered what Thomas had told me about the shape of the wound and how someone had brought down a heavy object on the back of his head.

  As I was still thinking about that, my mobile rang. It was my mother. She and Richard were having dinner at his daughter’s house. If I wanted to come and meet them, I was very welcome.

  She knew how to drive me mad. I was in the middle of a murder investigation. ‘I’m a bit busy, Mum,’ I said.

  ‘Okay, well that’s fine. If you’re busy, I’ll tell Richard you can’t make it.’

  After I’d disconnected the call, I thought that I could have told her who the victim was. She might care about this murder. She’d always liked Arjen, and I knew that she sometimes babysat for their daughter.

  Now I wondered why Nadia hadn’t asked her own mother to help out instead.

  Chapter 14

  When I got back to the office, Thomas and Charlie were deep in conversation. As soon as they saw me, they stopped. It was the kind of silence that fell when you walked into a room where everybody had been talking about you. But that didn’t make sense, because I was pretty sure they’d been talking about Patrick van der Linde. What was it about the victim that I wasn’t allowed to hear?

  To fill the hiatus, I told them about what had happened at the company do: that Patrick had forcefully kissed one of the sales girls and Nico had stepped in.

  ‘I hadn’t heard about that,’ Thomas said. ‘I met with the son-in-law and he didn’t mention it at all.’

  Suddenly the silence made sense: they had been to interview Arjen again and didn’t
want me to know about that after yesterday’s meltdown. ‘I don’t think they told anybody,’ I said quickly, to show that I couldn’t care less about them talking to my ex. ‘Therese didn’t want anybody at the company to know; her boyfriend works there as well and it would have made things very awkward. Nico said he hadn’t told anybody either. The girl was upset and went straight home.’

  ‘Is that possible?’ Charlie asked. ‘That nobody noticed something like that happening?’

  ‘It depends on how much people had had to drink,’ Thomas said. ‘How late it was.’

  ‘Plus how normal it was,’ I added. ‘There were rumours about Patrick. Apparently last year another woman made a complaint but it was brushed under the carpet and she left the company shortly afterwards.’

  ‘Did she report it to the police?’ Charlie said.

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Even if she had, I don’t think we would have done much with it,’ Thomas said. ‘Unless it was rape. Are we talking rape?’

  ‘In Therese’s case, no. He forcefully kissed her, had her up against a wall when Nico stepped in.’ I thought about what Therese and Nico had told me. ‘She said he had his hands all over her. But of course you never really know what happened.’ Or what had happened on previous occasions. He could well have gone further. Therese throwing up afterwards indicated trauma, brought on either by the attack or by memories of a previous assault.

  ‘It’s really hard to prove any of this, and as the perpetrator was the owner of the firm, complaining would have been next to impossible,’ Thomas said.

  Just because that was factually correct didn’t mean his comment didn’t piss me off.

  ‘It’s not right, though, is it?’ Charlie said. ‘What a terrible place to work. My girlfriend told me about something that happened at her company too. A guy was touching one of her colleagues all the time, asked her to go out for drinks.’

  ‘She could just have said no,’ Thomas said.

  ‘But he was her boss and he kept making the excuse that there were work issues they needed to talk about. It was very difficult. My girlfriend was annoyed with me when I told her it wasn’t something for the police to get involved in.’

  ‘You can just tell how that would play out,’ I said. ‘The boss would imply that he truly wanted to help the girl. That he didn’t think he was touching her inappropriately, that he was only being friendly. That she had misunderstood his intentions. I’ve worked for people like that.’

  ‘You have? When?’

  ‘A long time ago. Luckily there aren’t many of them. Most of my bosses and team leaders have been decent human beings.’

  ‘You were too pretty for the guy to control themselves.’

  I shook my head. ‘It’s never about that. It’s not that they’re head over heels in love. It’s because they can. It’s a power trip. Don’t get me wrong,’ I said as Charlie started to say something, ‘I’m not talking about relationships at work. I’m talking about unwanted attention and people in authority who won’t take no for an answer.’

  ‘It can be an advantage for women too,’ Thomas said, ‘to have a boss who’s like that. They get invited, promoted, involved in everything.’

  It was on the tip of my tongue to jump at his comment, but I remembered Karin telling me that Therese had been quite flirtatious with Patrick until recently. Until she started dating Fabrice. ‘Whatever the case may be, when it gets to the point where someone has you pinned against a wall when you don’t want to be, I think we can agree there’s a problem.’

  ‘Do you think this has anything to do with the murder?’

  ‘From what I’ve seen,’ I said, ‘men who don’t behave like decent human beings around women often aren’t decent human beings in other areas either.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The boss who gave me difficulties was a shit to the guys in his team too. Anyone who thinks that having power means he can get away with touching up the women who work for him will think he can get away with other stuff too.’

  ‘What you’re saying is that Patrick probably isn’t the squeaky-clean family man his wife portrayed him as,’ Charlie said.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I didn’t get anything from the family,’ Thomas said. ‘Does the business sound dodgy? Anything that rang alarm bells?’

  ‘Their products are manufactured in China,’ Charlie replied, ‘and then sometimes shipped directly to the clients.’

  ‘That could be a front for something,’ Thomas said. ‘You should look into that, Lotte. Is it possible to get the list of the clients where that happened?’

  ‘I can call Karin Lems. I’m sure she’s got that information.’

  ‘Perfect.’

  It hadn’t taken him long to slip into the role of boss. I reminded myself that this was what I wanted. This was what I’d suggested to Moerdijk.

  It took me one phone call to Karin to request the information, and the list was in my inbox five minutes later. That made me think there was probably nothing suspicious about this working method, or that if there was, Karin wasn’t aware of it.

  If I was going to work on this case properly, I should start with the forensic documents. I would have looked at those first thing if I hadn’t been trying to stay as far away from the case as possible. Now I checked through the photos. I always studied the photos, and it felt odd that I hadn’t done so in this case. I hadn’t felt the same need to get acquainted with the victim. I would normally have started with photos of his face, but now I was mainly interested in the ones that showed the back of his head. I read the forensic report at the same time: the shape of the wound implied that he had been struck with force with an object at least ten centimetres long. Forensics suggested that it could have been a brick, or something of a similar size and heft. Something with a straight, sharp edge.

  Thomas and Charlie didn’t return to the conversation they had been having when I walked in. Whatever angle they were working on, they obviously weren’t going to include me. I started to feel uncomfortable at my own desk. I should probably just go home.

  Instead of working late, as I had originally planned, I called Mark and asked if he could come with me to meet my mother’s new family. I needed him to give me moral support. He said that of course he would. That made me feel a bit better.

  I called my mother and told her we could join her and Richard for dinner after all. She sounded surprised, but gave me the address with only the slightest hesitation in her voice. Her tone had a hint of something else to it too. As if she had hoped I wouldn’t come and was nervous now that I was going to make it after all.

  She was probably worried that I would try to interrogate Richard about his life and check that he wasn’t a criminal who was only after her money. That she had no money made this unlikely, so I wasn’t particularly concerned about that. All I needed to do was meet Richard and his daughter and make pleasant chitchat. Have a relaxing evening. With Mark by my side, I might even be able to do that.

  I checked my watch. I had an hour or so before I needed to leave. I was going to have a shower and get changed, and buy a bottle of wine and a bunch of flowers to take with me.

  I went back to the pathologist’s report and read through it again. Patrick could have died immediately after the company do, or up to five hours later.

  ‘Have you found any sign of him after the dinner?’ I asked Charlie.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘We checked CCTV from around the restaurant but didn’t see him leave.’

  Thomas shot him a glance.

  ‘You think he was murdered there?’ I was shocked. I’d assumed he’d drunkenly bumped into someone on his way home.

  ‘Well, CCTV is sketchy in that area,’ Thomas said. ‘We just know he never went to the tram stop, or got on the ferry, or left through the front of the restaurant. But there’s an open area at the back, so it doesn’t rule anything out.’

  I tried to picture where the Clipper was in relation to his house. What route would h
e have taken?

  ‘Forensics checked out that area at the back but didn’t find any traces of blood,’ Thomas said. ‘He could have walked anywhere. We might still catch him on CCTV somewhere else, but it will be hard. A needle in a haystack.’

  ‘There’s no CCTV at the Clipper itself?’

  ‘Just inside and at the front,’ Charlie said. ‘Nothing at the back.’

  I wondered if they’d contacted the restaurant while I was in there with Karin Lems. If forensics had been checking the area at the back, I hadn’t seen them. It was possible of course that you couldn’t see that space from inside the restaurant, plus I’d been concentrating on what Karin was telling me. Still, I thought that if officers had been walking around, I would have noticed them. They must have got there after I’d left.

  If Patrick had walked along the water’s edge at the back, he could have gone for miles before being caught on CCTV again. Finding the scene of the murder was going to be difficult, but it was crucial for the investigation.

  Just as I was about to leave the office, I got a call from the duty officer. I had a visitor: Margreet van der Linde. She wanted to speak to me specifically. I shot a quick look at Thomas. I had told Margreet that I would be less involved in the investigation, that Thomas was leading it, and she had seemed to accept that, so if she was here asking for me, maybe there was something urgent. Karin had said she wanted to talk to me without Charlie there; what if Margreet also wanted to mention something she didn’t feel comfortable talking to a man about? I should meet with her and hear it out.

  I told the duty officer I would be straight down.

  Chapter 15

  Part of me was curious to find out what Margreet wanted to speak to me about, but a much larger part felt very awkward about this, especially in light of the things I now knew about Patrick.

  ‘Can we go where we went last time?’ she said. ‘That little café? It’s a bit strange talking here.’

  Going outside meant that we would have to talk for at least the amount of time it took to finish our drinks, which could well be longer than I wanted to spend with her. Then I reminded myself that she’d recently become a widow and that none of what had happened had been her fault.