A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1)
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Authors: Anja de Jager
A COLD DEATH
IN AMSTERDAM
IN AMSTERDAM
ANJA DE JAGER
Constable • London
CONSTABLE
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Constable
Copyright © Anja de Jager, 2015
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-47212-061-8
Constable
is an imprint of
Constable & Robinson Ltd
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK Company
www.hachette.co.uk
Voor mijn vader
They were strange, those minutes that ticked by slowly as I waited for the ambulance to turn up. My concentration never wandered; my focus was purely on stemming the bleeding.
I’d had no real reason to pull into the petrol station, but the streaming lights had drawn my eye from more than a kilometre away, promising company and warmth on this deadly cold night. Although I was only ten minutes away from home, I had glanced down at the petrol gauge, and the half-empty tank had given me enough of an excuse to pull in. I put my indicator light on. It was 2 a.m. and there was nobody else on the road, but it was a reflex – an action that came from muscle memory not from thought, as was grabbing my handbag when I got out, and holstering my gun.
Outside the car it was icy cold; fog flowed from my mouth with each breath. A shiver ran down my arm when my hand touched the metal cap on the petrol tank. If I had kept it there for much longer, my skin would have frozen tight to the car. I put the petrol pump in with my free hand tucked under my arm.
I didn’t often get out of the car on these nightly drives that took me from one end of the country to the other. In the Netherlands that didn’t take much, of course: a two-hour drive east from my home in Amsterdam got me to the German border; one hour south would make me cross into Belgium, and forty-five minutes north would land me in the sea. I tried to limit myself to one hour, with just the hum of the car’s engine to keep me company along the dark roads. It was normally enough to help me get to sleep when I got back home. When it was one of those nights, I couldn’t stay in my flat; I needed to get out. I’d been offered counselling, but so far I’d refused it. Counselling would mean talking about it. Telling somebody would mean reliving it. Why would I want to do that, when I was trying so hard to forget?
As I watched the counter on the petrol pump tick up, I realised I was finally feeling calm. I could face myself in the mirror without wanting to attack my own skin. Tonight had been a bad one.
Just then, another car pulled up on to the forecourt and stopped in front of the shop. A man got out but I couldn’t see him properly as some of the steel construction holding the roof up blocked my view. He’d probably just run out of cigarettes, or maybe he too was just looking for someone to talk to. I turned back to watch the numbers on the display race up.
The jolt on the pump came when the meter wasn’t even on 20 euros. I dribbled in a few more drops to get it to the round figure then walked over to pay. The path of lights deepened the winter darkness even further and made the ice crystals on the ground sparkle like diamonds. Now that I’d been outside for a few minutes, my toes were cold inside my boots. The weather forecasters had been predicting snow for a few days now, but none had fallen. The only thing that was falling was the temperature: with the clear skies, it was getting down to minus ten. It would grow colder still before dawn, in that lonely time before the sun came up and created a new day.
I bunched my fingers into fists inside the pockets of my jacket to keep my hands as warm as I could, grateful when the door to the shop opened automatically and I was greeted by a blast of heat and some modern rendition of ‘Silent Night’.
The man behind the counter – young, a student maybe – turned to me and the warning look in his eyes made me come to a halt. I saw the other man, one hand in his pocket. He was wearing a balaclava so I could only see his eyes. I wished I could have had a better look at him when he’d arrived.
‘Stop right there,’ the man warned me.
I stood still. The automatic door behind me opened and closed again with a whoosh, followed by a short stream of cold air on my neck. I didn’t move. It opened and closed again and I took a step forward.
‘I said stop.’
I pointed behind me. ‘The doors.’
He nodded, one hand still in his pocket, and addressed the guy behind the counter. ‘Give me the cash now and nobody gets hurt.’
When he said the clichéd words, I wanted to smile but kept a straight face. ‘I’m a police officer,’ I told him. ‘You’re under arrest.’ I felt completely calm even when the man pulled a gun out of his pocket and pointed it at me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the shop assistant duck behind the counter, his head now hidden by a small plastic Christmas tree.
‘You don’t want to do this,’ I said. ‘You want to put the gun away now and come with me quietly.’
The gun in his hand wobbled all over the place. He should be using his other hand to keep it steady.
‘Because right now, your options are either to put the gun away or to shoot me,’ I said. All the textbooks would tell me to keep talking. Instead, my hand went to my own gun and I undid the button on the holster without my eyes ever leaving his. The palm of my hand fitted around the grip of the weapon. Against my cold fingers it felt warm, heated up from sitting on my hip. I pulled it out slowly.
The CD of Christmas songs finished and the night was silent at last. I anticipated the impact of the bullet in my body, the pain that would take away all other pains, and bring the final end to everything. The events of the past six months, which had led to the discovery of Wendy Leeuwenhoek’s body, ran through my mind – each incident and each mistake as clear and urgent to me as what was happening right now, in the petrol station shop. I made the movement slow, raising the gun centimetre by centimetre, inviting him to shoot and giving him time to make up his mind. Maybe I should have gone fast and drawn an automatic reaction. His eyes were locked into mine. We stood like that for a few seconds, which my total concentration turned into an eternity.
Everything I’d noticed before became insignificant: the half-price Christmas cards and reduced boxes of candles in a bin to the side, the rows of chocolate bars in front of the counter and the packs of cigarettes behind it. All I was aware of were his eyes, which seemed incredibly blue, staring at me from the black balaclava. Every thump of my heart against my ribcage felt slow even though I knew my pulse must be racing. I took a deep breath.
When the shot finally came, the sound was harsh in the silence. My ears rang with the bang. I could smell the smoke, but I couldn’t feel anything. For a second I thought it was just the adrenaline that kept the pain at bay and I waited for the agony to kick in. Then I looked down and realised he’d missed. He was only a few metres away and he’d missed.
I increased the pressure on the trigger and shot his arm. It was a textbook manoeuvre: left hand under right wrist to stabilise the gun, and it wasn’t hard from this distance. He dropped his gun with what seemed like relief and sagged to his knees. I took three steps towards him, bent over, put my left hand to his arm to stop the bleeding and asked the youth behind the counter to call 112. After I’d holstered my gun, one hand still applying pressure to his arm, I pulled off his balaclava and saw his blond curls. He was young, maybe a teenager. I felt sick. Why hadn’t I let him have another go? Had the guy behind the counter ever really been in danger?
The kid wanted to talk and I read him his rights. He told me his name: Ben van Ravensberger. I told him he should have a lawyer. I tried to keep him silent because I didn’t want to hear what he had to say. But he kept repeating: ‘Don’t you know who I am? My uncle is famous.’
I waited for what seemed a long time, but would turn out to have been less than ten minutes, until my legs started to cramp from crouching by his side and my voice was hoarse from talking to him continuously. I’d put a tourniquet on his arm to stop the bleeding. Apart from calling the emergency services, the guy manning the shop was useless. He looked in a state of shock: his face white, his hands shaking too much to help me with Ben.
Now I heard the siren of an ambulance and the sound had never been more welcome: I could finally take my eyes from the kid. The paramedics took over, bandaged him up and took him out on a stretcher that was only a precaution. One of the paramedics told me it was just a flesh wound and that the kid should be fine. My colleagues would meet me at the hospital. It wouldn’t be a problem for me: the kid had shot first, his bullet still wedged in the wall of the petrol station, and I had followed the correct procedure.
I drove behind the ambulance to Amsterdam’s Slotervaart Hospital, walked beside the stretcher through the corridors and waited with Ben until the doctors could see him. It was warmer here indoors, but I didn’t take my coat off: I was only wearing my pyjama top underneath.
Ben was telling me again about his famous uncle.
I didn’t want to listen any more.
‘I’m a law student,’ he said. ‘This is just a mistake.’
‘You can forget all about law now.’
‘But I can tell you something that—’
‘What’s a law student doing holding up a petrol station?’ I interrupted him. He wanted to hold my hand as if I was his mother or something, and tears were rolling down his cheeks.
‘Can’t we make a deal? I can tell you—’
‘Be quiet now. Tell my colleagues later.’
‘My uncle, he’s famous. But he’s killed someone.’ Ben’s eyes drifted close. ‘Or at least he said he did.’ His last words sounded mumbled.
I didn’t say anything but just sat there with his hand in mine until the nurse wheeled him away.
The bells of the Westerkerk rang out over the streets of Amsterdam. It was 7 a.m. and still dark outside. I’d been home for three hours. As I reached out to switch on the light by the side of my bed, my hand bumped against something and I heard the rattle of the pills the doctor had prescribed two weeks ago. He’d said that these would make me sleep deeply and stop the dreams. He said I was suffering from post-traumatic stress and that he’d recently seen a number of other police officers with the same complaint, many of them women. I’d been annoyed with the generalisation. After all, I’d been in CID for over ten years and in uniform before then and I’d never needed pills or anything else. I didn’t take the medication. I deserved my dreams.
I slid my legs from under the duvet. The parquet floor sucked the warmth from my feet and the pale blue walls, which normally reminded me of a washed-out hazy summer sky, seemed the colour of frozen limbs. I peeked around the curtain and saw that the forecasted snow had arrived in the night and most of Amsterdam’s sins and dirt were now hidden beneath it. The snow had come too late for a white Christmas but just in time to swaddle the newborn year in a blanket of innocence. The wasteland of roofs before me were covered with centimetres of white that took away the edges and left everything with a smooth contour.