Death at the Orange Locks

by Anja de Jager

  ‘That doesn’t mean anything. You know I run to work, but do you know where I live?’

  ‘I don’t know your exact address, but I know roughly which area it’s in. That’s all you need.’

  ‘Fine,’ the boss said. ‘Investigate the boyfriend by all means. I won’t stop you doing that. But don’t interfere in Thomas’s handling of the case or meet with your ex’s lawyer. Be careful, basically. Stay away from your ex, too. Remember that we’ve got CCTV near the holding cells. I don’t want you anywhere near him.’

  ‘I can do that,’ I said. ‘I can definitely do that.’

  ‘And go home for the day. I don’t want you in your office when Thomas and Charlie get back from their interview. Give them space to discuss what they need to, without you there. Stay out as much as possible.’

  I’d wanted to prepare for the Fabrice interrogation, but I could do that from home, so I nodded to indicate that I understood and would do what the boss wanted.

  ‘And fix things with Thomas!’

  I didn’t ask how I was supposed to do that if I had to stay away from him.

  I walked out of the CI’s office intending to go to my flat to do some work. But my plans were interrupted by a call from my mother.

  Chapter 28

  I got on my bike and cycled to my mother’s flat. It was odd to think that she wouldn’t be living there in a couple of weeks. It wasn’t our normal evening for eating together, but she had asked me to come over. She’d sounded upset.

  She opened the door without saying hello, or asking me if I’d had a good day, and came straight to the point. ‘They fired me.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Nadia called me to say that she didn’t want me to babysit for her any more.’

  ‘It’s because you’re getting married,’ I said. ‘Her mother’s going to do it.’

  ‘It’s not that, is it, Lotte?’ She gave me a sharp glance. ‘How long have you been planning for this moment?’ Her voice rose.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You’ve always wanted to get back at him for leaving you. I know that. I know what you’re like. You waited four years and now you have your chance.’

  ‘Hold on. Are you talking about—’

  ‘Nadia told me you’ve arrested Arjen.’

  ‘Mum, I did no such thing. I wasn’t involved in that.’

  ‘You’ve been working on the case.’

  ‘Yes, but I had nothing to do with Arjen’s arrest.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Fine. Don’t. If you think I’m capable of arresting an innocent man just because he divorced me four years ago, then you don’t know me at all.’

  ‘Michael told me why you cut yourself; that it happened after he’d told you the story about Nadia and Arjen being here. You got upset about that.’

  ‘I dropped a glass. Have you never dropped a glass? For goodness’ sake, what do I have to say to convince you?’

  ‘You don’t. Go through your stuff and sort it out. I don’t want it in the house any more.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m not taking your old stuff with me to Richard’s. Decide what you want to keep and get rid of the rest. I’ll be next door.’

  ‘Wow. I can’t believe you,’ I said.

  ‘And I can’t believe you. Nadia told me exactly what happened: that you were meeting with Arjen and had set up for the other guys to come and arrest him.’

  Well, I had been talking to him at the time, but I’d had no idea they were coming. I didn’t bother telling my mother that, as I knew that she wouldn’t believe me anyway. As she wouldn’t believe that dropping that glass had been a stupid accident. As she wouldn’t believe that I was trying my best to clear Arjen’s name. ‘I don’t believe Arjen is a murderer,’ I said instead.

  ‘So what is this? You just lock him up overnight to scare him or something?’

  ‘He’s been lying to the police. It made him look very suspicious.’

  ‘He was lying to you because it’s you.’

  ‘You’re saying it’s okay for him to lie to the police?’

  ‘You’re not a police detective in his eyes; you’re his exwife. I’m sure there are things you wouldn’t want your ex to know.’

  ‘That would be perfectly reasonable,’ I said, ‘if he had lied only to me. But he didn’t. He lied in an interrogation by my colleagues, when I wasn’t in the room, and that was what got him into trouble.’ But I knew what my mother meant, because I’d thought something very similar myself as I’d listened to the interview before the CI dragged me away.

  ‘Get him out,’ my mother said. ‘You know he’s not a murderer, so get him out.’

  If only it was as easy as that. ‘What do you suggest I do? Open the cell door and let him escape? There are procedures.’

  She shook her head. ‘You’re more interested in your job than in doing the right thing. You’re not objective.’

  Nice to know that my mother and my colleagues agreed on that. ‘I’m keeping away from it because I can’t think about it objectively, don’t you see? It’s the same reason we don’t investigate family members. I have too much history with him. Who knows what he’s been up to for the last four years? I don’t think he’s capable of murder, but there’s no telling what happened between him and his father-in-law.’ I shut up abruptly. I shouldn’t talk to her about any of this, as it was very possible that she would call Nadia and repeat it as soon as I left the flat.

  ‘What do you want me to clear out?’ I said, to change the topic back to what I was here for.

  My mother gestured around the room. ‘All of this. Go through it and take what you want to keep. Anything that’s still here tomorrow morning, I’ll take to the dump.’

  ‘You don’t want any of it?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Mothers sometimes like to keep things their children have made.’

  She sighed. ‘I’ve already gone through it. Anything I wanted, I’ve taken.’

  ‘What are you doing with all your furniture?’

  ‘Why? Do you want any of it?’

  ‘No thanks.’ I laughed. ‘I have a flat full of stuff. I was just curious.’

  ‘I’m not taking anything. Richard’s house is lovely and I don’t need any of my old things. I want to make a fresh start.’

  ‘You’re going to move in with just a suitcase?’

  ‘Yes, I’m planning on taking only my clothes. There’s nothing else from here that I want. This hasn’t been a particularly happy place for me.’

  ‘You’ve lived here so long.’

  ‘I don’t know why I didn’t move ages ago. It’s convenient, but it’s a bit small and not very nice.’

  ‘Because this was what you could afford,’ I said.

  ‘You’re right. I was stuck here.’

  I thought about Margreet, now living in a flat on the Barcelonaplein after her husband sold their house to pay the bills at his company. I wondered if she felt stuck there, as my mother seemed to have felt stuck in this flat.

  I went into my old bedroom and opened the drawers of the chest nearest to me. What did I want to keep? Here were my university books. Any information in them would be dated by now. My papers were useless.

  Even when Arjen and I had got divorced and I had moved out of his house in a rush, I hadn’t gone back to my mother’s flat to collect any belongings. I hadn’t asked her if I could borrow pots or pans. To be honest, I hadn’t asked her for anything. She probably would have loved to help me, but I hadn’t even considered coming here.

  Was that for the same reason that my mother had given for wanting to move out: that this place felt like failure? This was the place I had left behind. The place I had outgrown as I’d become an adult. But my mother had been stuck here for decades. It was great that she was leaving it now. Some of the furniture here was stuff she had taken with her after her own divorce, pieces that were too big for the space. Items that would hav
e reminded her every day for over thirty years of what had gone wrong in her marriage.

  It was a good thing she didn’t want to keep any of them; not the table nor the chairs. Not the ancient sofa.

  I closed the door to my old room behind me. ‘You’re doing the right thing,’ I said to her. ‘Getting rid of everything. Feel free to get rid of all my stuff too.’

  ‘You don’t want anything?’

  ‘Nope,’ I said. ‘You can recycle the lot.’

  ‘That’s typical, making me deal with it.’

  ‘I can organise movers to clear the place out,’ I said. ‘If that’s helpful.’

  ‘No,’ my mother said. ‘It’s fine. I’ve got people coming in at the end of the week. But your things will end up in a skip. I’m warning you, don’t come crying to me later when there’s something you desperately wanted.’

  The skip could well be the best place for the majority of the past. ‘If there was anything I desperately wanted, I would have come for it years ago. I would have taken it with me when I moved out.’

  ‘Final warning,’ she said.

  I gave her a hug. She struggled against my embrace and I let go. ‘Be happy,’ I said to her. ‘I want you to be happy.’

  ‘Off with you.’ She gave me a push against my upper arm. ‘Go home.’

  I waved and started walking down the stairs.

  ‘Be happy yourself,’ she shouted after me.

  ‘I’m doing my best.’

  And I thought that maybe I was doing just fine.

  Chapter 29

  I called Stefanie the next morning, and asked her to meet me at my flat, so that we could interview Fabrice together. She said she’d be there in half an hour. That was perfect. I could use the intervening time to feed my cat and prepare for the interview. Pippi was pleased to get attention, rewarding me with headbutts and purring. I went into my study and looked at the drawing of the case I’d made earlier. I’d written Fabrice and Therese’s names on the left-hand side of the page and the family’s names on the right. That right-hand side was where Thomas thought the murderer came from.

  My mother might think I could just tell my colleagues to let Arjen go, but in reality, the only way was to find another suspect who was more plausible. One who was actually guilty, I corrected myself. I could try to show why Arjen couldn’t possibly have done it, but that would also really annoy Thomas and the CI, and in this situation it would be best not to annoy anybody.

  I needed to look at the case with fresh eyes. I drew large circles around Patrick’s name in the centre of the sheet of paper. Was it possible that he had just run into the wrong person at the wrong time? Arjen had said that he had been belligerent and drunk. He could have had an argument with a complete stranger on his walk home. It hadn’t been a mugging, because nothing had been stolen. His wallet had been still secure in the inside pocket of his coat. Water-damaged, but not stolen.

  At this stage, there were two clear motives for someone to have killed him: first, his behaviour towards women; and second, his company possibly going bust and the financial repercussions of that. I wrote down the names of the other people in Linde Lights underneath those of Therese and Fabrice. Karin. Nico. I drew a dotted line between the two sets of names. Above the line I wrote women; below the line I wrote money.

  My eye was drawn to Fabrice’s name, as if my division into two groups was really there to highlight him. He was my main suspect. It wasn’t that hard to picture him hitting Patrick, and Therese pushing him into the canal. In fact, it was very easy to imagine that.

  I knew that Therese and Fabrice had left the Clipper whilst Patrick was still alive. Therese might well have told Fabrice why she was so upset. She could have told him that while they were still in the car. If she had, Fabrice could have insisted on turning around and driving back to the restaurant. In my head, they parked their car out front, knowing only too well that Patrick would be having a final smoke at the back, because he always did that. Then what?

  Arjen was there, of course, talking to Patrick. Arguing with him about his behaviour.

  Patrick had said that it was an affair. That Therese had wanted it. That she was only embarrassed and upset because Nico had walked in on them.

  Of course. This could have had a major impact.

  If Therese had heard that, she would be doubly upset at this perfect example of victim-blaming. She really wanted it, Your Honour. She would have been livid. She would have told Fabrice that this was absolutely not what had happened. That Patrick had been pestering her for months. That he’d pushed her up against the wall and forced himself on her. She might even have started to cry again at this point. Arjen left, Patrick set off towards home and then Fabrice attacked him. To teach him a lesson maybe.

  No, that was wrong. I had to remember that Patrick wasn’t some stranger; he was their boss. They would have wanted to talk to him. Maybe they’d asked him for money. They probably both wanted to leave their jobs at this point. If he paid them off, gave them some cash, they wouldn’t go to the police. Only there was no money.

  Also, Patrick probably thought there was no problem with what he’d done. He might even have said that to Therese: that she hadn’t been so reluctant before she started sleeping with Fabrice, and that she was a hypocrite.

  At that, Fabrice punched him in the face, and Patrick fell and hit the back of his head. Or no, Patrick turned to walk away and Fabrice smacked him with something: a brick, a rock.

  Now they had a problem. Best roll him into the canal. He was unconscious anyway. They hated him. They would have had no qualms about killing him.

  Did I even need the rest of this drawing? This made so much sense.

  Now came the tricky part: I needed to prove it. I chewed the end of my pen. Without any CCTV footage, this was going to be very hard.

  Pippi jumped on top of my drawing, meowing for attention. I scratched her behind the ear, then checked my watch. What was keeping Stefanie? Immediately, as if she could hear my thoughts, the doorbell rang.

  As I went down the stairs to join her, I was thinking how my mother had tried to keep quiet about why she was babysitting because she thought I’d be upset. Therese hadn’t initially told Fabrice about what had happened with Patrick because she thought he’d be upset. I hadn’t told Mark that my current case involved my ex-husband because I thought he’d be upset.

  How would I have reacted if my mother had told me from the beginning that she was babysitting purely for the money, and not because she wanted to have a grandchild and was lonely? I would have been annoyed with her, but I wouldn’t have been hurt. Not like I’d been hurt when I’d discovered that she was seeing this perfect little family on the sly, behind my back.

  Fabrice had found out anyway. It had seemed to me that he and Nico hadn’t got on well in the past. Was Fabrice annoyed with Therese for not letting him play the part of the hero? For allowing Nico to get the plaudits by taking the role of the rescuer, a role that he might have thought should have been his by rights. Was that why he’d resorted to murder? It was a stretch, but one I was willing to consider.

  Stefanie insisted we drive. This was the downside of working with her – she refused to cycle anywhere. I’d called Therese to see if she was going to be at work, but she’d told me that nobody was coming into work any more. The company would probably fold within the next couple of days. I felt sorry for the people who would lose their jobs, but at least she and Fabrice were both at home. This was perfect, because it allowed me to talk to them at the same time without tipping off Fabrice that he was the person we actually wanted to interrogate.

  ‘I hope you’re proud of me,’ Stefanie said as soon as I’d fastened my seat belt. ‘I didn’t call you earlier to ask what the hell was going on, but waited until now.’ She pushed the car into gear and moved off.

  ‘You waited until you had me locked up in your car,’ I said.

  ‘It was my cunning plan. I think it’s working out well. So now tell me.’

  ‘I
think Fabrice killed Patrick van der Linde and that’s why we’re going to interview him and Therese.’

  ‘Not that. Tell me about meeting up with your ex the night before he was arrested.’

  ‘He called me and said he wanted to talk to me. That’s all.’

  ‘Why did you go?’

  ‘I thought he wanted to tell me something about the case.’

  ‘And you went by yourself? He made it sound as if you met up for a drink.’

  ‘I recorded our conversation. But it wasn’t about the case. It was about something else.’

  ‘You don’t trust him then. If you recorded him.’

  ‘Of course I don’t trust him. He lied to me and cheated on me. Why would I trust him? But,’ I said quickly before she could open her mouth, ‘that doesn’t make him a murderer.’

  ‘That’s fair. I looked into Fabrice Timmer after you called, and I like your thinking. We’d be fools not to at least question him.’

  ‘Right. I’ve come to realise that my team should never have taken this case. Arjen being my ex doesn’t just colour my thinking, but Thomas’s and Charlie’s too. They look at him differently because of it.’

  ‘I think the issue isn’t that they look at him differently,’ Stefanie said, ‘but that they look at you differently. They no longer trust your judgement, and I get that. I think I’m the same, especially after hearing you’d met him by yourself the other day.’ She stopped at a traffic light and looked at me. ‘If Fabrice hadn’t had prior, I wouldn’t have come with you this morning. I think you should know that.’

  Stefanie parked outside the houseboat where Fabrice and Therese lived. Across the wide water of the Schinkel was the Olympic stadium, which had originally been built for the 1928 Olympics. On the other side of the road was a little drawbridge over the Olympia Canal. This was Amsterdam’s outskirts. The centre of town, full of tourists, felt a million miles away. Here, it was as if you were halfway to the countryside. It was a false feeling, of course, as it was only a twenty-minute bike ride to Centraal station, but for anybody who wanted to see green around them, Schinkel Island with its numerous houseboats was the perfect place to live. If you liked living on a boat, that was, with water your close neighbour.