Death at the Orange Locks

by Anja de Jager

  ‘I would love to go through all the company’s sales figures,’ Stefanie said. ‘That would make for very interesting reading.’

  I laughed. ‘Whatever floats your boat. Go ahead and do it if you like.’

  ‘Not that it’s got anything to do with this murder,’ she said, ‘but it would make a great case study on how not to run a company.’

  ‘With the second account and all that, you mean?’

  ‘We should check where the lump sums came from.’

  ‘From Patrick’s personal account, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, both payments were made by him, but where did he get the cash from in the first place?’

  ‘He was a company director. He was probably rich.’

  ‘This is a tiny firm, Lotte. An unsuccessful tiny firm at that. What I saw from the paperwork was that he paid in around half a million euros each time. That’s a lot of money.’

  ‘But he used the company account to pay his bill at the Clipper. If he did that all the time, he probably didn’t have many outgoings.’

  Stefanie shook her head. ‘All we know is that he used the company account to pay for a company dinner. There’s nothing wrong with that.’ She pointed at the large file she’d put on the back seat. ‘Karin gave me the statements for that account. I’ll check what else he did with it.’

  ‘Go nuts,’ I said. ‘Have fun.’

  ‘You don’t seem to care much about this.’

  ‘It’s not my thing,’ I said. It would have been fairer to say that I found it really boring.

  ‘I’ll write a summary in language you’ll understand. I’ll even draw you a picture.’

  ‘I’m not an eight-year-old.’

  ‘You just have the financial understanding of one. No, sorry, come to think of it, my daughter understood much more at eight than you do today. You’re more like a financial five-year-old.’

  It reminded me of the conversation I’d had with my stepsister-to-be, where her language became clearer and clearer the more she understood that I wasn’t getting what she was trying to say. ‘At least I was right in thinking there were financial difficulties,’ I said in my own defence. ‘That they were looking at new strategies because they were in trouble.’

  ‘It was far too late for them to think about new strategies,’ Stefanie said. ‘They had to think about how to pay the latest invoice. I’ve seen it in small firms before, where the owner keeps putting in his own money to keep the place afloat. I wonder if they were successful at one point and then the business climate changed. Companies are spending less money on billboards and advertising, and that hits firms like these who provide the hoardings.’

  ‘Was that what they did? I thought it was lights.’

  ‘Did you even look at their website? Their main business was outdoor advertising and small merchandise. I think my daughter has a T-shirt made by them; she got it at some gig of this boy band she’s crazy about. It’s pretty neat. The lights respond to the bass notes or something, and the logo on the shirt flashes to the beat – as long as it’s loud enough.’

  ‘How do they make it do that?’

  ‘I don’t know, Lotte, you could ask their lead designer.’ Her exasperation with me was only too clear in her voice. ‘I’ll go through their records, but it seems the downturn just hit them hard. If the margins are small to begin with, then a company can get into trouble really quickly.’ She parked the car. ‘I’ll get back to you. That’s what you wanted me for, wasn’t it?’

  Back at my desk, I checked the police database to see if any of the people working at Linde Lights showed up. Nico and Therese were pretty clean. Nico had had a speeding ticket three months ago, Therese a parking ticket. I was tempted to run my mother’s husband-to-be’s name through the database too. It would only take seconds. I really shouldn’t.

  ‘Have you guys made any progress?’ I asked Charlie, just to keep my mind, and fingers, away from temptation.

  ‘Just this and that.’ He kept looking at his computer screen.

  Next I checked Karin. She had a completely clean record.

  Thomas came in.

  ‘I took your advice,’ Charlie said, as if he felt he needed to cheer me up. ‘I tried to weigh up what was worse: cleaning up or being cleaned up.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’Thomas said. ‘Why would you listen to her advice?’

  ‘What did you decide?’ I asked, ignoring him. ‘Are you cleaning up?’

  Charlie nodded. ‘I’ve thrown away so much stuff,’ he said. ‘But my place looks as if a bomb hit it. It’s a total mess.’

  That was what my life felt like: as if a bomb had hit it.

  ‘It’s weird, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘You try to tidy things away, and it makes it so much worse.’

  ‘It’s rubbish that you’ve accumulated over the years,’ I said. ‘It’ll take a while to sort through all of it.’

  ‘I’m enjoying it in a way. Throwing everything out makes it feel that we’re making a fresh start. Together.’ He blushed. ‘Does that sound weird?’

  ‘Yes,’ Thomas said. ‘And I have no idea what you’re on about.’

  ‘Not weird,’ I said. ‘I think it’s rather sweet. And I’m pleased you decided to do that.’

  ‘We need to go,’ Thomas said to Charlie.

  I didn’t ask why. He wouldn’t tell me anyway. Instead I searched for Fabrice Timmer in our database and found that he had prior.

  Three years ago, he’d been arrested for GBH. He’d punched a guy in a drunken fight. In the end, nothing had come of it and the case had been dropped, but this was very interesting.

  I felt a sense of relief. Compared to looking into the company’s finances, I was suddenly on much firmer ground. Even though I was being shut out by Thomas and Charlie and lectured by Stefanie, I didn’t feel like a huge idiot any more.

  Amazing what one little bit of information could do.

  Stefanie might think this was all about money, but on the other hand there was a girl who had been harassed and her boyfriend was the kind of person who punched people. As grounds for murder, I liked this one much more than money or whatever reason Thomas might have to think that Arjen was involved.

  ‘Look at this,’ I said. ‘Therese’s boyfriend. We should talk to him.’

  ‘Ready?’ Thomas said to Charlie. He didn’t even look at me.

  ‘Thomas, it’s the boyfriend of the girl that Patrick touched up.’

  Charlie hesitated. I got the feeling he wanted to stay behind and look at what I’d found.

  ‘This seems very similar to what happened to Patrick,’ I said. ‘Three years ago, he—’

  ‘Later, Lotte.’ Thomas cut me short. ‘If you want to do something useful, could you go and talk to Margreet? She’s been calling me continuously.’

  Charlie got up and put his coat on, and they both disappeared. I was left sitting at my desk, not sure what had just happened. Thomas and I had had our run-ins in the past, but I’d thought we’d sorted things out over the last year or so after working closely together on a number of cases.

  I’d never thought I was going to be ostracised in my own office.

  Other people might reach for the chocolate when they felt like crap. I typed my mother’s fiancé’s name into the database and hit enter. Nothing. Wow. Not even a ticket. It would have been remiss of me not to check that my mother wasn’t marrying a criminal, I told myself. Not that he looked like a criminal, but it was better to be safe than sorry. Now at least she couldn’t blame me if it all went horribly wrong.

  Not that it would, of course.

  Then forensics called me. They’d found nothing. There were no signs of blood on that particular spot by the pile of bricks. Did I want them to look further along the water?

  It was clear from the tone of the question that the correct answer would be no. There was a shortage of resources and we couldn’t have a team looking for a needle in a haystack along kilometres of waterfront. I told them not to bother and thanked them
for their work.

  Chapter 25

  ‘I was surprised when you called,’ Margreet said when she opened the door. ‘I thought I was supposed to talk to that Thomas Jansen guy. I called him quite a few times, but he never seemed to have time.’ She seemed more together today. The circles under her eyes were deep and dark and she looked as if she’d aged a decade in the last few days, but at least her socks matched and her cardigan wasn’t inside out. ‘I think he’s avoiding me.’

  ‘It’s not that he doesn’t want to talk to you,’ I said, covering for Thomas. ‘He just has a lot going on.’

  ‘And you don’t?’

  ‘Something like that.’ I hoped my smile didn’t look as fake as it felt. ‘This is my colleague Stefanie Dekkers.’

  Stefanie had of course complained when I’d asked her to come with me to the Barcelonaplein. She’d suggested that I was using her as my personal taxi driver. There might have been some truth in her comment, but she was ultimately interested enough in meeting other people related to Patrick’s murder that she drove me here without giving me too long a lecture.

  ‘Well, come on in,’ Margreet said.

  We followed her into the flat. I hadn’t had a good look around when I came here the first time. At that point, we hadn’t been sure that it had been murder, and I hadn’t known she was Nadia’s mother.

  ‘When did you move here?’ I asked.

  ‘Twenty sixteen,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t sure at first. I loved our old house, but Patrick said we didn’t need six bedrooms. He was sensible like that.’

  A long hallway ran through to the kitchen. There was a large lounge and, I guessed, two bedrooms. It was a decent-size flat, roughly the size of mine on the canal, but it must have been a definite step down for her, and I could guess the reason for that. Now that Stefanie had pointed out that managing directors of small companies didn’t necessarily have half a million euros lying around to invest in their own companies, I could see the signs.

  We were standing in an awkward triangle in the middle of the room. Stefanie was looking around her, probably estimating the value of the property. ‘Did you own your other house?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. We got a good price for it. Patrick had such an amazing head for business. It was just before the housing market turned. We sold it at precisely the right time.’

  ‘What did you do with the money? Buy this flat?’

  ‘No, we’re renting this one. Patrick said it was more tax efficient because we’d no longer have a mortgage.’

  ‘Was this in April?’ Stefanie said. ‘April 2016.’

  ‘Yes, it must have been. Why?’

  ‘That’s when Patrick personally invested more money into his company. I wondered if the cash came from the sale of the house,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t have thought so. Would you like a cup of tea?’

  ‘I’m fine, thanks,’ I said.

  ‘You said that Patrick put more money into the company? That sounds unlikely.’

  ‘You didn’t hear anything about financial problems at Linde Lights?’ Stefanie asked.

  ‘There can’t have been. He always worked so hard,’ Margreet said. ‘Actually, before you sit down, let me show you his office. Then you can see for yourselves how successful he was. He worked a lot from here in the evenings.’

  We followed her to a room off the main hallway. She opened the door carefully, as if she was displaying a sacred area. ‘I haven’t gone through his things yet. This is exactly as he left it. I’m sure the people working for him will want to collect it all at some point. It will be very useful for them, don’t you think?’

  I nodded, though I wasn’t sure what exactly I was looking at. It was a poky room, with a desk at one end, dominated by the computer screen, and filing cabinets along the sides.

  ‘See this.’ She pointed at a square glass trophy. ‘They kept getting awards for their innovative designs.’

  I bent close to examine it. It was very ugly; something you would only keep because it had your name engraved on it. Linde Lights. Innovation Prize 2004.

  ‘This is well over a decade old,’ Stefanie said. She’d clearly noticed the same thing I had, only she had no qualms about mentioning it to the grieving widow. ‘How have things been going recently? Did Patrick talk about the company?’

  ‘A decade? It only seems like yesterday we went to collect that.’ She picked up the award. ‘Yes, you’re right. I never would have guessed it was that long ago. It was a great evening. Nadia came with us too. Such a special occasion.’

  How nice that he’d brought his entire family.

  ‘Patrick was beside himself with pride,’ she continued, ‘and Nico was so happy I thought he’d explode.’

  I scanned the room. As with the press clippings in Patrick’s office at Linde Lights, there was nothing here that was recent. How long could a company survive on past glory? Past innovation?

  ‘Did Patrick say anything about how work was going recently?’ Stefanie asked again. ‘Did he talk about new deals they’d won?’

  ‘We didn’t really talk about his work much,’ Margreet said. She picked up another award. That one was from 2003. ‘He was always busy. It was different when Nadia worked there; she still lived at home back then, and the two of them would talk about it over dinner, so I would hear about it as well.’

  That surprised me. I hadn’t known that Nadia had worked at Linde Lights.

  ‘Why did she stop working for her father?’ I asked.

  ‘The two of them were always arguing,’ Margreet said with a smile. ‘She thought they should diversify, he thought they should concentrate on what they were good at. They would have the same discussion every evening, until she got fed up with it. It was Patrick’s firm in the end. He would never budge. He wanted to run things the way he thought best. You can understand that.’

  I could understand it, only it seemed that he’d run it into the ground in the last years and had used his own money to shore things up. He must have kept Margreet completely in the dark about that. He had sold their house from under her without telling her what he was going to use the proceeds for. I wondered if that had been legal. I wondered if he’d asked her to sign something.

  There was nothing else to look at in the small office, and we went back to the sitting room. Margreet indicated one of the two sofas, and Stefanie and I sat down side by side. She offered us tea again, and once more we refused. She took the other sofa but seemed unfocused now that she had nothing to do.

  ‘Was the house in your name as well as his?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh no, everything was in Patrick’s name.’

  Stefanie’s face told me quite clearly what she thought about that.

  ‘I didn’t get involved in the finances much,’ Margreet continued. ‘It’s a real headache now. I don’t even have access to my bank account. Luckily Nadia and Arjen are helping me out.’

  I was concerned that the problems with paying the bills at Patrick’s company would spill over into Margreet’s life. I took some comfort from the fact that their personal credit card hadn’t been maxed out, because that was what Patrick had used to pay the bill at the Clipper. Part of me wanted to sit Margreet down and tell her that she should really check her finances. More precisely, I wanted to tell her to let Stefanie help her check her finances. I hoped for her sake that there was money left. I hoped that Patrick had had life insurance. I sincerely hoped that she was going to be fine, though I had a nasty suspicion that she was not going to be. I worried that all the cash had gone, sunk into a company that now needed another heap of money. The sale of a six-bedroom house could easily explain the 2016 payment. I wondered where the later money had come from.

  ‘Did you have any other properties?’ Stefanie asked. ‘Something you sold in 2018?’ She was clearly thinking along the same lines as me.

  ‘Another house? I think you’ve got the wrong idea,’ Margreet said. ‘We’re not the kind of people to have a second home in the south of France or Tuscan
y.’

  The doorbell rang.

  ‘That must be Arjen,’ she said. ‘I hope you don’t mind. He insisted on coming when I told him you were going to be here.’ She smiled sheepishly. ‘It’s weird. It’s really weird.’

  You tell me, I wanted to say.

  She went to open the door. Stefanie mouthed something at me. I ignored her.

  ‘Hey,’ she whispered. She prodded me in the arm.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That your ex?’

  I waved her words away as if they were nothing more than annoying flies.

  She nodded and grinned as if that had answered her question perfectly.

  Having Stefanie here made me feel that Arjen’s appearance was also a judgement on me. Would she think that my ex was attractive, or would she consider the slightly overweight man who had stepped into the room an embarrassment? Was my desire to defend him really a desire to defend myself? He didn’t always wear jeans that were a bit tight around his waistline. He didn’t always wear boring polo shirts. He scrubbed up quite well, I wanted to tell her.

  Margreet sat back down on the sofa and looked at her hands. ‘How’s Nadia? She was so angry with me when I said I’d had a drink with Lotte.’

  ‘You had a drink together?’ Stefanie said in a casual tone that wasn’t fooling anybody. If she was concerned about that, she definitely shouldn’t know that I’d had a drink with Arjen last night.

  ‘Sorry,’ Margreet said. ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned it.’ She seemed confused, uncertain how to behave in this situation. ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned Nadia’s name, should I?’ How to behave in front of your son-in-law’s ex-wife wasn’t covered in any social handbook, I was sure.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said. When Stefanie and I had turned up, Margreet had been relaxed, but Arjen’s presence seemed to have reminded her what the relationship between us all was. ‘Why was she angry?’

  ‘It’s been really tough for her,’ Arjen answered when Margreet stayed silent. ‘Her father’s death hit her hard.’