Death at the Orange Locks

by Anja de Jager

  The thoughts kept going around and around in my head. They had called Arjen in for an interview after they’d thought I’d gone home. I only found out about it because I’d come back to the office after meeting with Margreet. Thomas and Charlie had stopped talking whenever I was within earshot.

  Surely not.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Michael said. ‘I do that all the time.

  They’re not expensive.’ His voice was distant. That couldn’t be the direction in which Thomas’s thoughts were going. Could he have interpreted the defensive posture over knowledge of the sexual assault as being defensive over having killed someone? Misinterpreted Arjen’s guilt?

  ‘Leave it,’ Michael said. ‘Leave it, I’ll get a broom and sweep it up. Careful.’

  I was embarrassed about having smashed their glass and looked around for a container to put the pieces in. It was important not to put broken glass straight in the bin bag, otherwise the bin men could cut their hands on it. A milk carton was good for that.

  ‘You’re bleeding,’ Michael said.

  I looked down at my hand and saw blood dripping down onto the floor. I hadn’t even felt the glass cutting into me.

  ‘Oh my God. Elise! Elise!’ His voice ended in a shout.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘It’s just a small cut.’

  Michael rushed out of the kitchen. I stared at the shard in my hand and didn’t know what to do for a second. Then I snapped out of my trance and rushed over to the sink, careful not to step on the rest of the glass. I turned on the tap and washed away the blood. It came streaming out of a cut along the length of my index finger. I used my other hand to close the wound. I needed to apply pressure to stop the bleeding. My hand was now dripping a mixture of water and blood into the sink. There was blood on the floor. I didn’t think the cut was all that deep; it was purely because I’d been drinking that I was bleeding so much.

  My mother came into the kitchen and paused on the threshold. I could only imagine what she thought of the mess I’d made.

  ‘You’re always like this,’ she said softly, so that nobody else could hear. ‘Couldn’t you be normal just for once? Why did you have to ruin this evening?’

  Mark came in behind her and wrapped his arm around my shoulders. ‘Let me look at that,’ he said. ‘Do you need stitches?’

  I still held the wound closed with my other hand. ‘It looks a lot worse than it is.’ My voice didn’t waver or falter. ‘I’m sorry about the mess. If you can find some kitchen roll, or plasters, then I’ll stop dripping blood all over the floor.’

  ‘Yes, here.’ Mark grabbed some kitchen roll and passed me a couple of sheets. I wrapped them around my hand. They were soaked through quickly.

  ‘You shouldn’t have drunk so much,’ my mother said. ‘Then this wouldn’t have happened.’

  Elise came in with a brush and dustpan. She was very pale.

  ‘Give me that,’ my mother said to her. ‘You’re not good with blood. I’ll do it.’ She knelt down at my feet and swept up the glass. The blood left long smears behind. She looked up at me. ‘You should go home,’ she said. ‘I’ll clear up here.’

  ‘I can help,’ I said.

  Mark’s arm around my shoulder steered me out of the way. ‘You need to have that looked at,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you to A and E.’

  ‘That’s really not necessary,’ I said. ‘I’m fine.’

  Michael arrived with a roll of bandage and held it out to me, counting on me to know what to do with it.

  ‘Get me some cotton wool,’ I said. ‘Something to soak up the blood.’ I sounded like a police officer ordering people around.

  Mark ignored me. He took the bandage from Michael, pushed more kitchen roll into my hand and guided me out of the kitchen. He picked up my handbag from the floor and got our coats. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

  ‘I think I said something wrong.’ I heard Michael’s voice behind me. ‘She looked really upset.’

  ‘She just had too much to drink,’ my mother said. ‘I’m sorry about all this. Your lovely floor, I hope it won’t stain.’

  Because we’d come on our bikes, I had to leave mine behind and sit on Mark’s luggage carrier, pressing my cut hand tightly against my chest, the roll of bandage in between to soak up the blood, holding on to Mark’s coat with my other hand.

  ‘If I’d known you were going to be this dramatic, I would have brought the car,’ he joked.

  I smiled. My hand didn’t even hurt that much. I rested my face against his back. ‘It was just an accident. Everybody made such a big deal out of it.’

  ‘You were standing in a puddle of blood and broken glass. It might not be a big deal for you, but it looked really dramatic. I’m sure everybody will remember it for a long time. It’s one way of making a lasting impression.’

  I was sure he’d heard what Michael had said about upsetting me, but he didn’t ask what had happened, and accepted what I said about it being an accident.

  We were lucky that it was the quiet time at A&E. The normal household mishaps – the fallen kids, the broken arms – had been dealt with, and the drunken accidents would come later. Even if my mum thought I had done this because I’d been drinking too much, I didn’t think that two or three glasses of wine at dinner and half a small glass with Margreet would have made me drunk in any way.

  Four stitches later, I was sent home with my hand swaddled up and with clear instructions that I had to keep moving my fingers to stop them from getting stiff.

  Mark insisted on calling us a cab. When I protested, he said that he wasn’t going to cycle back with me in this state. I looked down at my clothes and saw what he meant. My coat was probably ruined, as was my nice top. I wanted to call my mother to tell her I was okay, but she was annoyed with me and I knew it was better to call her tomorrow. I felt like lying down and getting some sleep. My hand had started to throb.

  I remembered falling as a child and my mum would always be more worried about my clothes than about any injuries. A grazed knee would heal, she’d say; ruined clothes had to be thrown away. Even tonight she’d been more concerned about the floor in Michael and Elise’s house than about my hand.

  She was right, of course: if the blood had stained the tiles, they would never get that out. My hand would be fine in a few days when the stitches had dissolved.

  Mark helped me undress. I’d better buy a big bunch of flowers for Elise and Michael, for when I went to collect my bike from their front doorstep tomorrow. ‘I ruined everything, didn’t I? And it was such a nice evening.’

  Mark gave me a hug. ‘You dropped a glass. It could have happened to anybody.’

  ‘It really was just a stupid accident,’ I muttered.

  ‘Of course it was,’ he said.

  Chapter 18

  I called Thomas the next morning and told him that I’d been in a small accident and would come in later. I was in two minds as to whether I should ask him about the investigation, but before I’d made my decision, he’d disconnected the call. Mark had gone to work. He’d said I should take it easy today, but my concerns swirled around my brain. My hand wasn’t in too bad a state, swaddled up in bandages and a little bit sore, but nothing that a couple of ibuprofen wouldn’t solve.

  What was going on in my head was harder to deal with.

  I made myself breakfast in his kitchen, using his amazing coffee machine to get my first cappuccino of the morning and devouring a slice of bread with cheese. I couldn’t sit around too long, because I wasn’t the only one who wanted food, so I took the tram back to my flat to feed my cat.

  Pippi meowed loudly as soon as she heard the key in the door. It was nice to be welcomed but it also made me feel guilty that I wasn’t spending enough time with her. I’d play with her for a few minutes before going to the office.

  I held up my hand. ‘Look at this,’ I said. ‘Hope you feel sorry for me.’

  She rubbed her head against my legs and meowed again. I knew what she was telling me: a bandaged hand
shouldn’t be a major impediment to feeding her. She was right, of course.

  I opened a sachet of cat food and put it in her bowl in the kitchen, cleaned out her litter tray and refreshed her water. Then I sat down on the sofa and listened to her eat. I felt bad about leaving her alone so much of the time, but I hadn’t been able to come up with a better solution. She jumped onto my lap after she’d inhaled half the contents of her food bowl and purred loudly when I scratched the little soft spot behind her ear.

  ‘Your owner was very clumsy, Pippi,’ I said. ‘I dropped a glass and cut myself. Got four stitches to show for it and a huge bandage.’ I reached for my bag – without disturbing the cat, of course – and got my phone out. I thought about calling my mother, but she would only make a fuss, and I wasn’t in the mood for fuss. I wasn’t in the mood for anything. I sat on the sofa and stared out over the canal. Had I ever felt this paralysed, this unable to act, in the middle of an inquiry?

  The more I thought back to Thomas interviewing Arjen, the more I knew my realisation of last night had been correct: he saw him as a suspect. How long had that been going on? What had triggered it? There was nothing I had come across that would point the finger at my ex-husband: no motive, no evidence. Quite apart from the fact that I couldn’t see him as a murderer because I knew him, I couldn’t understand why anybody else would either.

  There was something Thomas had discovered that he hadn’t told me about. That was the only plausible explanation. Something about Arjen. Something about that evening, maybe. I rubbed Pippi’s head. It was absolutely inconceivable that Arjen had killed his father-in-law. Whatever Thomas thought he’d found, he was wrong. That meant that he and Charlie were concentrating on the wrong angle. I knew what it was like to go off in the wrong direction early on in an investigation: other motives, other evidence, could get ignored if it didn’t fit in with the hunch of the lead detective, especially if the team was under-resourced, which we clearly were. It was like taking a left turn where you should have taken a right, and then keeping going, certain that you’d made the correct decision but getting further and further away from where you wanted to go. What you needed was someone to open a map and show you where you’d gone wrong. The tricky thing was that they wouldn’t take my word for it. Not with my ex-husband involved.

  In an investigation, finding irrefutable evidence for the right direction was the equivalent of opening that map. I needed to focus on what was going on at the company, because nobody else would.

  Urgh, I hated anything to do with numbers. Even Arjen had said I didn’t know anything about business. It popped into my head that maybe he’d said that to annoy me. To keep me away? Or to prod me into taking action? He’d known me for long enough to understand what I was like.

  I had to do this because otherwise they would keep honing in on Arjen and we would never get back on track. I comforted myself by thinking that the financial side wasn’t the only obvious angle of investigation. Why had Patrick brought Arjen in as a strategist? That couldn’t be Thomas’s motive for Patrick’s murder, because if it was, he would have kept me well away from the company. Second-guessing what Thomas was thinking was doing my head in. All I was certain of was that what he wanted me to look into wasn’t relevant, but a way of keeping me out of the way. I’d bet that by now he regretted telling the CI that I should be part of this investigation. Actually, in view of his suspicions, I was surprised that he hadn’t gone to Moerdijk and had me taken off the case. I guessed that I wasn’t getting in the way, I wasn’t interfering. I should continue to do that. Not talk about my ex-husband at all, and investigate other angles.

  Having made that decision, I pushed Pippi from my lap and went into my study. I always used my big architect’s table to make drawings of the cases I worked on. It helped me to think. The empty white sheet mocked me. I picked up a blue marker pen and wrote Patrick van der Linde’s name in the centre.

  What did we know? He’d been bashed on the back of the head, then thrown into – or had fallen into – the IJ and drowned. He’d floated all the way out towards the Orange Locks. It was bothersome that we had such a wide window for his time of death, but I knew it was difficult to be more precise, with the temperature fluctuating from the edges to the centre of the water and not knowing exactly how long he had been floating for. So yes, sometime after the do.

  Had his murder had something to do with the company? There was of course his sexual harassment of Therese and the fact that Therese’s boyfriend Fabrice worked there. I wrote their names down on the left-hand side of the page. Then there was the family. Margreet, Nadia and Arjen. I wrote their names on the right. Looking at these names, I thought it still quite possible that Patrick had been murdered by a stranger. He could so easily have got into an argument with someone on the way home. There was no concrete evidence about the actual place where he had been murdered.

  Or maybe something else was going on at the company. I had the list of the Chinese suppliers they were working with. Goods were being sent straight from China to companies in the Netherlands. Was that suspicious? It wouldn’t be that hard to add something to a shipment of small lights. To take a cut. How did the company make money anyway?

  There was nothing to be gained from staring at the page, I decided. I left my flat to go to the office and then realised I should pick my bike up first. I got on the tram to Amsterdam Zuid, where Elise lived. It was ten stops away from my canal. A young girl wearing headphones looked at my bandaged hand and gave me her seat. This was a result! Being injured wasn’t all bad.

  I got off the tram and walked down the street to Elise’s house. Last night I’d thought I’d better bring them a big bunch of flowers to apologise, but I’d forgotten all about that. I could unchain my bike from their railings and send them a note later.

  But as I was unlocking it, the front door of the house opened and Elise came out.

  ‘Lotte,’ she said. ‘Come in. Are you okay? We were really worried and phoned your mother this morning. She said she didn’t know how you were.’

  I waved my bandaged hand. ‘It’s just a few stitches, that’s all.’

  ‘Come in. I’ve got tea ready anyway.’

  It would be rude to refuse. I locked my bike up again and followed her into the house. It was odd to think that these people were going to be family. That officially this woman was going to be my stepsister. When those things happen when you’re both in your forties, it’s strange. At this age, you expect your family to shrink, not grow.

  ‘Is your floor okay?’ I asked. ‘I hope I didn’t ruin it.’ See, I was slowly turning into my mother: caring more about damage to objects than to people.

  ‘No, not at all. It came up clean no problem. See for yourself.’

  I followed her to the kitchen, which was once again spotless and tidy. There was no sign of the mess from the night before. ‘If the blood hadn’t come out, I could have given you the number of a firm who are really good at …’ I saw the look on her face and stopped talking. People didn’t like to think about who cleaned up the crime scenes we were involved in. People didn’t like to hear about blood, especially not people who worked in normal office jobs.

  ‘Luckily we didn’t need that.’

  No. Luckily not.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea? I’ve made a pot of green, if you like that.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. I suddenly remembered what we had talked about last night, before my dramatic exit. I restrained myself from asking Elise about this until she had at least poured me a cup.

  ‘Michael isn’t in right now,’ she said. ‘But he wanted to apologise. He felt really bad about what happened.’

  ‘Why? It wasn’t his fault. I was clumsy. It was just an accident.’

  ‘He didn’t know.’ She leant forward to give extra emphasis to her words. ‘He had no idea that the guy he’d met at your mother’s place was your ex-husband. He was absolutely mortified when your mother told him.’

  ‘He couldn’t have known.’
/>   ‘He realised it couldn’t have been nice for Nadia either, that he called her by your name.’ Elise tried not to laugh. ‘He was so embarrassed.’

  ‘Really, tell him not to worry about it. It’s not his fault that my mum didn’t bother to explain the situation to him.’

  ‘I guess she couldn’t have done that with them still in the room,’ Elise said. ‘Can you imagine? She’d have had to say: no, no, that’s not my daughter, that’s my ex-son-in-law’s wife.’ The smile that she’d been trying to suppress danced around her mouth. Like Mark, she seemed to have the knack of seeing the amusing side of everything.

  It made me see the funny side too. ‘I didn’t cut myself because of that. I should drink less when around sharp objects. That’s the lesson I learned.’

  ‘It’s nice that everybody is still friends,’ Elise said. ‘That your mother babysits for them. So often you hear about really acrimonious divorces. My parents’ divorce was unpleasant.’

  ‘Your parents are divorced too? I thought your father was a widower.’ Had my mother told me that, or was it just the impression I’d got?

  ‘My mum died last year, but they’d got divorced in the nineties. My mum fell in love with our neighbour. It got very messy, huge rows about us, what was the best thing for teenagers, nobody asking us what we wanted.’

  ‘My parents got divorced when I was five. I was too young to be asked anyway. My own divorce was acrimonious, but at least it wasn’t messy. The courts decided what I was owed and I left it like that. No children, no pets; just money to argue over and that was sorted out quickly enough.’

  ‘Oh, I thought it had been amicable, given that your mother was still meeting him.’

  ‘Amicable. No, I wouldn’t call it that. But my mother didn’t see the need to cut ties just because he and I had fallen out.’

  Elise nodded. ‘I see. And you? Are you still in touch with his parents?’

  ‘Nope.’ I said it shortly. ‘They hate my guts.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t ask all these questions.’