Death at the Orange Locks

by Anja de Jager

  I remembered that. I’d watched that interview from the observation area. It was the moment I’d first started to get an inkling of the fact that Thomas saw him as a suspect.

  ‘Who’s the witness?’ I wanted it to be someone with an ulterior motive. Someone who could be a suspect himself.

  ‘The manager of the restaurant. She told us there had been problems with the bill, and she’d wished the other guy had come back sooner so he could have paid, instead of her having an argument with Patrick about it.’

  She’d told me about the problems with the bill too. She hadn’t told me about Arjen coming back to the restaurant. Probably because I hadn’t asked her about that, I told myself. This wasn’t suspicious or odd. I’d focused on Patrick failing to pay the bill because I’d been looking for money issues.

  ‘They finished their bottle of wine, but ended up shouting at each other,’ Charlie said. He was more forthcoming with information than Thomas.

  ‘About what?’ I asked, though I had a pretty shrewd idea.

  ‘She couldn’t hear. We’ll find out when we speak to Arjen.’

  ‘You didn’t ask him that last time? About this argument, I mean.’

  ‘We had the witness, but we were waiting for the fingerprints and DNA test to come back,’ Charlie said. Thomas shot him a look but didn’t tell him to stay quiet. ‘We took his DNA when he was here last time.’

  Arjen hadn’t told me that either.

  ‘There is another suspect,’ I said. ‘Someone else we should look into.’

  ‘We’re looking into Arjen Boogaard,’ Thomas said. ‘He’s our main suspect at the moment.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I don’t think you should be involved in this, Lotte.’

  ‘He isn’t a family member,’ I said. ‘I know him. I can be useful,’ I offered again.

  Thomas looked at me with what could only be described as pity. He felt really sorry for me.

  There wasn’t much that I hated more.

  ‘We’re going to interview him as soon as his lawyer gets here,’ Charlie volunteered.

  ‘Listen to me. There’s another suspect we need to investigate,’ I said. ‘Someone who actually has a motive. We should cover all possibilities.’

  ‘Of course. That’s a good thing for you to work on.’ Thomas did a lousy job of hiding the condescension in his voice.

  ‘Therese’s boyfriend, Fabrice, has prior. That’s what I was trying to tell you yesterday, but you weren’t interested. He beat up a guy in a drunken argument four years ago. Combine that with the fact that Patrick sexually harassed Therese and there’s definitely a motive there.’

  ‘You check that out,’ Thomas said. ‘You’re right, we shouldn’t focus purely on this one suspect. Why don’t you go and do that now?’

  I was trying to hide it, but inside I was seething. Normally, there was no way I would have taken this tone of voice from Thomas lying down. I would have pulled him up on it. Now, though, I had to pretend that I was taking it all in my stride. That I was fine with not being listened to, with having my status as the most experienced officer in the team effortlessly eroded by his assumption that my judgement was clouded.

  He wanted me nowhere near Arjen when they were questioning him, that much was obvious, though I didn’t know what he thought I’d do. I wouldn’t give information to his wife, or even to his defence lawyer if that was what he was concerned about. If he was certain of his evidence, he shouldn’t mind me trying to poke a hole in it. Surely that would only push him to build a better case.

  Unless he wasn’t really all that certain, of course.

  I couldn’t help but be concerned about the fact that Arjen had lied to me. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t done that before, but I thought he’d known better than to lie about police matters. Surely he knew me well enough to understand that I took my job seriously, that we were in the middle of a murder investigation and that his lies would come out eventually.

  I forced myself to visualise that night. I had to try to understand Thomas’s mindset. If I thought about everything that had happened at the restaurant, I could easily imagine that Patrick and Arjen had argued. I could picture the two of them outside, drinking and talking. That was easy. I could even imagine that it got physical. I’d never seen Arjen in a fight. I’d never seen him hit anybody. But I could imagine him throwing a punch, sure.

  If he had hit Patrick, causing him to fall and hit his head on the edge of the pavement or a piece of metal, and then had walked away, not knowing how bad the injuries were, for example, I could almost imagine that.

  But that wasn’t how Patrick van der Linde’s death had happened. Forensic evidence had shown it was probable that the impact had been from above, someone hitting the back of Patrick’s head with a heavy straight-edged object – in other words, a brick.

  And it was this next step, the escalation of the fight, that I had problems with. I couldn’t imagine Arjen picking up a brick and bashing Patrick’s head in. I couldn’t imagine him dumping him in the canal, still alive.

  Thomas’s phone rang and cut through my thoughts. ‘We’ll be right down,’ he said, and disconnected the call. ‘The lawyer’s here,’ he said to Charlie. ‘Ready?’ He didn’t look in my direction as together they left the office.

  Rolling an unconscious man into the water, still alive: I had a really hard time squaring that behaviour with the type of person I knew my ex-husband to be.

  I hid my face in my hands. If it had been anybody else, I would probably have agreed with Thomas, and would have been excited about the arrest. It was the fact that I knew Arjen so well that skewed my thoughts. It was what made me certain that someone else had killed Patrick. It was why I kept focusing on Fabrice; why I was keen to find proof that it had been him, regardless of whatever forensic evidence Thomas had found.

  But as I pulled up Fabrice’s records again, a second conclusion offered itself. What if Thomas’s evidence stood up and he had the right perpetrator, only Patrick’s death had happened differently to how we’d assumed?

  Chapter 27

  Arjen and his lawyer sat side by side in the interrogation room. This was the point when the clock started to tick and we would have twenty-four hours to get enough to officially charge him.

  The smart thing to do would be to go and interview Fabrice. After all, he was the number one suspect in my eyes. But my idea that Arjen might be guilty, just not of murder, made me invested in hearing what he was going to say. What he was going to admit to. I wanted to hear something from him that ruled that possibility out.

  I’d sneaked into the observation area again. Even though I’d waited for a few minutes after Thomas and Charlie had left, just to make sure they didn’t see me, I didn’t think I’d fooled anybody. After last time, Thomas probably expected me to be there.

  ‘You went back,’Thomas said. ‘You met with Patrick outside the restaurant, had another glass of wine and ended up arguing.’

  ‘Yes,’ Arjen said. ‘That’s right.’ He didn’t look at his lawyer. He didn’t pause and think. His answer was immediate. It meant that he was trying to come across as open and cooperative.

  It was the smart choice.

  ‘That’s not what you said last time.’

  ‘My father-in-law had died. I didn’t want to drag his name through the mud. Everybody wanted to keep quiet about what happened that night, and I’ll admit I was no different.’

  ‘You understand that this is a police inquiry? That you have a duty to tell the truth?’

  ‘My client was not brought in as a suspect,’ the lawyer interrupted. ‘I think I’m right in saying you hadn’t cautioned him at that stage.’

  Thomas ignored the comment. ‘What did you argue about?’

  ‘The woman. His behaviour.’

  ‘You mean Therese?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you were aware of what Patrick had done.’

  ‘I’m still not sure what he did,’ Arjen said. ‘I know what you think he did
, but those things are hard to verify.’

  ‘It seemed rather clear-cut in my eyes,’ Charlie said.

  ‘You might think so.’ Arjen exchanged a glance with his lawyer. ‘But all I can say for certain is that I saw him get up and follow her.’ He was trying to balance agreeing with the detectives and defending his father-in-law. He still didn’t see police officers in the way people being interviewed normally did. He saw them as people to discuss matters with. I realised it was an extension of having once been married to a detective. These were my colleagues, the type of people he’d socialised with when we’d been together. Not the type of people who could arrest him for murder. He needed to change this. He needed to take the situation seriously. His lawyer needed to make him, if nothing else.

  ‘When he came back a bit later,’ Arjen continued, ‘he looked pissed off. I wanted to know what had happened, so I got up from the table. Then I saw Nico and Therese sitting on the steps outside, and she was crying. I heard her ask him not to talk about it to anybody, and I went back inside.’

  ‘Explain it to me,’ Thomas said in a sarcastic tone of voice, ‘because I don’t understand. You didn’t ask Patrick what had happened? Or did you already have a pretty good idea?’

  ‘I know what you’re getting at,’ Arjen said.

  Thomas raised his eyebrows at Arjen using those words again. This time he didn’t pull him up on them.

  ‘I did ask him about it, but afterwards. Outside the Clipper, as you said. I knew he’d stay behind for a smoke; he always did that behind Margreet’s back. I asked him why Therese had been upset, and he told me it was because Nico had walked in on the two of them. She had wanted to keep the affair a secret from her boyfriend and thought that Nico wouldn’t keep his mouth shut. You can understand that, can’t you?’ He waited for an affirmative nod from Thomas that didn’t come. ‘Patrick asked me not to tell Margreet.’ He ruffled his hair in a gesture I recognised; he always did that when he was embarrassed.

  I used to find it cute. Now I was disturbed by it. Was it because of what he had been forced to reveal about his father-in-law, or did it indicate he still wasn’t telling the whole truth? Was there one more layer hidden underneath what he had admitted to?

  ‘Patrick swore that whatever had been going on between him and Therese had finished, and they’d only had a kiss for old times’ sake.’

  ‘Did you believe him?’ Charlie sounded genuinely curious.

  Arjen shrugged. ‘He said they’d been having an affair, that she called an end to it when she started dating that guy in IT. But that she’d been looking at him all evening. They’d had a bit of a snog – his words, not mine – and then Nico turned up and got totally the wrong idea.’

  It hadn’t been like that, I was sure of it. Therese had been looking at him because she was keeping an eye on him. She wanted to stay out of his way. She and Nico had both told me that Nico had pulled Patrick away. I was pretty sure he wouldn’t have done that if he’d thought the kiss was consensual.

  ‘Why the argument, then?’ Thomas said. ‘If that’s all that happened, why the heated discussion? You make it sound amicable, but that’s not what the manager described to me.’

  ‘You have to understand, Patrick was drunk and not pleased that I asked him about it. He was embarrassed, and whenever he was in the wrong, he’d become belligerent. I believe it was a consensual kiss, but that still meant he was cheating on his wife, my mother-in-law.’

  ‘Then what happened? You punched him?’

  ‘No. God, no. Of course not. He asked me to keep quiet and I said I would.’

  This wasn’t enough to hold Arjen. He had a believable story. Unless Thomas and Charlie had something else on him, they’d have to let him go. But it was very possible I didn’t know the half of it.

  I was looking for reasons why he hadn’t done it. I was willing to believe him. They would look at it from entirely the opposite angle. They would think that of course he would say that – what else was he going to say: that he’d killed him? Of course he wouldn’t. Denying it with a plausible story didn’t make him innocent.

  I was drawing circles on my notebook when I felt a hand on my arm. It made me jump. I’d been concentrating so hard on what was going on on the other side of the window that I must have missed the click of the door opening.

  It was Chief Inspector Moerdijk. ‘You need to get out of here right now,’ he said.

  I grabbed my notebook and got up to follow him out. He dropped his hand from my arm as soon as we were outside the observation area. He wouldn’t want anybody in the corridors to see him dragging me along.

  ‘My office,’ he said.

  I followed him without a word. He didn’t start to talk until he’d shut the door behind me.

  ‘When you told me you didn’t want to be involved in this case, I should have accepted that,’ he said. ‘What’s happened is partly my fault. I should have listened to you.’

  ‘I hear that a lot.’ I tried to lighten the mood. It was a mistake. He wasn’t interested in being amicable.

  ‘You can’t be involved in this case any more.’ He was deadly serious.

  ‘Of course I can.’ I had to be. I needed to stay involved now. Whatever I’d told him before, when I’d wanted out, I now felt completely different. ‘I won’t mess it up. I promise.’

  ‘Do you think your ex is capable of murder?’

  It was a good thing I had my notebook with me, because doodling circles helped me to think. It wasn’t a question of whether Arjen was capable of murder, but what the right answer was to what the CI had asked. ‘Everybody is capable of killing someone,’ I said carefully, ‘if the situation calls for it, or if they’re unlucky. If they cause an accident.’

  ‘What about Patrick van der Linde. Do you think Arjen could have murdered him?’

  There was no right way to respond to any of this. I had to come across as if I had an open mind, but I didn’t want to sound as if I thought Arjen was guilty. ‘I think that if Boogaard killed him, it didn’t happen the way we currently imagine.’ I used his surname because that was what I would have done with any other suspect at this point.

  ‘You’re not ruling it out.’

  ‘I trust that Thomas and Charlie have done a good job so far.’ Even if they had deliberately kept me away from it. ‘They wouldn’t have cautioned him if they weren’t certain of their case. However, I think there are some other suspects too, and it would be a mistake to rule them out at this stage and solely focus on Boogaard. If you take me off the case, it won’t be easy to follow up on the other avenues, and we need to do that.’

  ‘What have you got?’

  ‘The boyfriend of the girl that Patrick van der Linde sexually harassed has got prior for assault. We know he went to the Clipper to pick her up, and he could easily have come back later. He’d have had pretty good grounds to have a go at van der Linde.’

  ‘The same grounds that Boogaard had for arguing with him.’

  ‘Correct. Only it would be a bit more personal. You’d get angrier with the guy who assaulted your girlfriend than with a man who cheated on your mother-in-law.’

  ‘Yes,’ the CI said. ‘I can see that.’

  ‘He came to collect his girlfriend from the venue. She thought he didn’t know what was going on, but this was a small firm. Even without her telling him anything, I’m sure he had a pretty shrewd idea what Patrick van der Linde was like.’

  ‘But Boogaard was the last person to be seen with van der Linde.’

  ‘As far as we know. Look, it would have been hard to get him into the water from the back of the Clipper, but if someone saw him walking home along the waterfront path, it would have been much easier to shove him in. There’s a sheer drop at the back of the Clipper; you’d need to get an unconscious man over the railings. Further down, it would take far less effort.’

  ‘You think that after Boogaard argued with him, someone else had a go?’

  ‘It’s been difficult to establish the exact tim
e of death. We don’t know precisely where he entered the water. It’s all been guesswork so far. But we haven’t found any traces of blood at the Clipper, and I would have expected there to be some if Boogaard hit him there.’

  ‘You don’t think he did it.’

  ‘As I said earlier: if he did it, it didn’t happen the way we imagine. I can see van der Linde and Boogaard arguing.’ I kept the exasperation out of my voice. ‘I can imagine Boogaard punching him, and van der Linde falling and hitting his head. What I have a hard time with is imagining Boogaard tipping him over those railings at the back at the Clipper.’

  ‘Did you tell Thomas that?’

  ‘Things have happened so quickly, I haven’t had a chance to talk to him about it yet,’ I said.

  ‘Seriously? There wasn’t one moment when you could have told him he probably had the location of the murder wrong? That forensics should check somewhere different?’

  ‘I had forensics check one of the possible locations, but they didn’t find anything.’

  ‘But you didn’t tell Thomas. That’s not how teams should work. There’s no excuse for whatever has been going on. Get your act together.’

  Why hadn’t I told him? It might have ruled Arjen out. I’d been annoyed with Thomas for excluding me. I’d thought I knew better than him. It hadn’t been a decision as such to keep it to myself, but I realised I’d wanted to treat him in the same way he’d been treating me. It had been petty behaviour that had only come back to bite me.

  ‘So you think the murder took place somewhere en route from the Clipper to Patrick’s flat?’

  ‘Yes. And everybody knew where he lived.’

  ‘That doesn’t rule Boogaard out,’ the CI said.

  ‘You’re right. He could have decided to walk home with Patrick and got into a fight with him on the way. Who knows what Patrick said to him? Or someone else could have returned to have words. Or just to beat him up.’

  ‘Does the boyfriend know where van der Linde lived?’

  ‘He worked at Patrick’s company. He must have known that Patrick liked going to the Clipper because it was close to his home.’