A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1) (11 page)

Stefanie’s voice dragged me back to the here and now. ‘Is his house too big for a retired policeman?’ she said. She helped herself to another couple of chocolates without taking her eyes off me. ‘He could have taken a backhander.’

I’d missed what she was talking about.

‘I read the files,’ she went on. ‘It was his last case before retirement. His last case, a witness statement disappears, a rich guy gets off the hook.’

‘And?’

‘Don’t you see? Anton Lantinga is a multi-millionaire. He’d pay a lot to see this go away.’ She took another big gulp of wine and topped her glass up from my bottle.

‘I don’t think so.’ I brought my glass to my lips to give my hands something to do and to hide my mouth. I swallowed the tiniest amount.

‘But was there money? Did he have money?’

‘Are you driving? Because if you are—’

‘I’m fine. Nowhere near the limit. So was there money?’

‘Not that I could tell,’ I lied. I could check what her numberplate was and tip-off Traffic Control.

‘Shame. Still, that doesn’t mean he didn’t do something else with it. We should question him.’

‘We’ll question Goosens on Monday morning. That’s much higher profile.’

‘First thing?’ She sounded like a child demanding her St Nicolaas presents right on time.

‘First thing.’ I smiled a fake smile and pushed the box of chocolates closer. It would be good if she ate them all, saved me throwing them out.

But she refused them with a quick wave of her hand, knocked back her wine and picked up her coat. ‘Gotta rush. Patrick’s waiting with dinner.’ I followed her to the door.

She turned. ‘Let me help you with that tree,’ she said. ‘We can carry it down the stairs together.’

I hesitated.

‘How are you going to do it otherwise?’

Getting it through the window would be do-able – after all, that’s how I got it up here – but it would be difficult. I nodded and we went back to the tree.

I slid the key ring around the thumb of my right hand and got a firm grip on the base of the trunk. As Stefanie stabilised the top, I lifted the bottom. I let the weight extend my left arm as far as the socket would allow. Tied together by the tree, we walked down the stairs. As I was three steps lower than her, her head was finally higher than mine. My hand hurt, but she was not stopping so neither would I. Even on the landing, where I would have put it down normally, I kept it lifted as I opened the door. My fingers had difficulty holding the weight even though the needles were like anchors in my flesh and the sap stuck tree and skin together like superglue. I didn’t look round, but kept going down, careful step by careful step, my eyes on the floor, measuring the width of each step and counting each wooden block down, twenty-two steps in total. She took a step whenever I did, our feet making twin noises on the floor.

Only when we got to the downstairs hallway did I acknowledge the existence of my colleague. ‘Finally there.’

She put the tree upright and I rested it against my shoulder. I passed her the keys, she opened the front door and I dragged the Christmas tree out of the house onto the pavement. The council would pick it up tomorrow and chip it into little pieces.

‘Thanks for your help,’ I said. It wasn’t even that hard.

She smiled. ‘Thanks for the wine and chocolates. I’ll see you Monday.’ She waved and walked to her car. I went back upstairs, got a broom out, and removed all the needles from the steps and the marble floor in the hallway. The festive season was over for this year.

Stefanie could well be right. My father’s house was bigger than it should be for a retired policeman, especially in the high-priced commuter belt of Alkmaar. Just over half an hour by train to Amsterdam, house prices had sky-rocketed there in the last ten years. In my study, which used to be the interior designer’s studio, I opened my laptop and googled the address. It didn’t take long to find out that he lived next door to Alkmaar’s mayor and opposite two company directors. Even when he’d still been working he shouldn’t have been able to afford a house in the Oranjepark.

I picked up a pen and walked over to the architect’s table that dominated the study. It was perfect as a horizontal version of our office whiteboard. I paused with the pen above the virginally white sheet of paper, hesitant to spoil its pure beauty with my bad thoughts. In the centre of the white page I wrote
Otto Petersen
. I drew a careful square around the name of the dead man. Two lines went from the bottom corners of the square to new boxes with the names of the two other directors in Petersen Capital: Anton Lantinga and Geert-Jan Goosens, my father’s and my boss’s main suspects respectively. With a see-through green plastic ruler, I measured the distance between those two names, and drew a vertical line from the middle. At the bottom of that line I hung the amount of money missing: forty million euros. I picked up a red pen, put the witness’s name to the left of Anton Lantinga and drew a dotted arrow along my ruler. I left it dotted, because Wouter Vos’s evidence wasn’t enough. He’d seen Anton’s car; that didn’t mean Anton was driving it.

At the top of the page, exactly above the box containing Otto’s name, I drew a box for his wife. I put a curved line between her and Anton Lantinga and wrote
affair
above it. With a pencil I wrote
Piet Huizen
below Anton’s name, inside a thin pencil square. I made it as faint as I could, hesitant to believe Stefanie’s slander of my father. Ronald had told me that my father had never passed the files on to the team from Amsterdam – but he’d said it was just out of spite.
Did he pay him?
I questioned above the line. Six boxes around six names, six people linked, five alive, one dead.

The next morning, when I opened the curtains, I revealed a world slowly turning from night to day. Children ran to wherever it was they went on Saturday morning, slid on the snow-covered pavement and threw snowballs. Their laughter sounded like the peal of church bells between the canal houses. A council truck drove along, scraping up mounds of snow, which ran off the sides of the shovel like water off the bow of a ship, heaping up in piles of ammunition for the kids. In its wake the truck left a trail of salt on the road. Soon only the gables of the houses would be white.

The thin winter light struggled through the window and barely reached the floor. I sat at my table and let the morning sun touch my face. The light made a small angle with the floor and intruded less than it did in summer.

I started my laptop to see if I had new mail, but there was nothing. I got up and went out looking for human contact. I closed my apartment door and climbed down the stairs. Now that I’d lived here for over a year, I was getting used to the extreme steepness of them, each step barely deep enough to take the length of a foot.

It wasn’t far to the baker on the corner but the cold was biting my cheeks and nose even on this short stretch. I greeted the girl behind the counter. This was normality; this is what everybody did every day: talking, smiling and buying bread. But I differed from the other people in the shop with their uncomplicated dreams and concerns. I bet none of them had dreamed of dead girls or hugging skulls last night. I walked home, dropped my bread off, and cycled to my psychiatrist appointment.

I’d chosen her at random. I didn’t want people to know that I was seeking help so I couldn’t ask anybody to recommend one. Even if I could have asked, I didn’t know if any of my friends or colleagues had ever been to counselling and I would be embarrassed to bring it up. So instead I’d picked someone whose name I liked and who was within cycling distance of my flat.

Maria Kerkstra held her practice in a flat in the Jordaan. She was young. Probably recently graduated, probably still building up her group of clients. As soon as I walked through the door and shook her limp hand, I knew I wouldn’t come back. She had a couch, a long leather affair, a desk and an office chair. It all looked correct; only the flowered wallpaper was different from what I’d expected a psychiatrist’s place of work to be like and it jarred.

I sat on the sofa, faced the table and was given a glass of water.

‘What do you want to talk about?’ Her voice was soft and probably meant to be soothing, but I had to strain to hear what she was saying. ‘When you called me yesterday, it sounded like an emergency. Sounded urgent.’

‘I’m having problems at work.’

‘What kind of work do you do?’

‘I’m a police officer.’ I didn’t want to talk about this but what was the point in coming here if I didn’t at least try. I buried my head in my hands. I was falling over the edge of the cliff and knew I needed help. ‘I worked on this case that really shook me up. I can’t get over it. I . . . It’s haunting me.’ I took a sip of water.

‘Have you been offered counselling at work?’

‘Yes, but it would go on my record. Plus I don’t trust them to keep their mouth shut.’

‘Everything you say here is completely confidential.’

‘Nor do I want somebody I see on a daily basis to know this stuff about me.’ You, I don’t ever have to see again, I thought.

Maria Kerkstra nodded. ‘So tell me about this case.’

‘It was a little girl. Wendy Leeuwenhoek.’ I picked my glass up again. ‘You’ve probably read about her. She disappeared fifteen years ago. Because the anniversary of her disappearance was coming up, our boss wanted us to go through the files again, make an appeal on television. You’ve probably seen it . . .’

Maria’s face didn’t change. She scribbled something but didn’t give a sign that she knew anything about Wendy. She must do. Everybody did. Everybody thought they knew exactly what happened. Nobody did.

‘Was this any different from other cases?’

‘It was tough but I guess not that different.’

‘But it was different for you. This is a new reaction for you. Or do you think it’s just the build-up of stress over the years?’

‘No, it was this one case.’

‘What was it about this one?’

I couldn’t talk any more. I shook my head and got up. ‘This has been a mistake. I shouldn’t have come.’

‘You’ve paid. Let’s at least talk for the hour. Talk about something else if you like. Anything you want.’

‘The weather? Sports?’ But I sat back down.

‘Whatever you like.’

‘It was because it was a little girl.’ I repeated my mother’s words. I was here because I needed help with this and I summoned all my courage to at least try.

‘Do you have children?’

‘I had a daughter. She died. Cot death.’ I whispered the answer. Poppy, who had finally arrived after I’d already had two miscarriages and was almost ready to give up on motherhood. Poppy, who’d cried most nights. Then came the morning when I’d woken refreshed after a good night’s sleep, the first in months. Arjen had gone to work after sticking his head in to say that she was still fast asleep, but when I saw her, I knew she wasn’t asleep. I touched her and she was cold. ‘These things happen,’ the doctor had said. ‘Nobody knows why.’ It was something I never talked about. When I’d come back from maternity leave early, because what else was I possibly going to do other than work and the walls seemed to have collapsed on me after the death of my baby, nobody asked, nobody said much. My boss at the time had tried but I’d cut him short. If I didn’t speak of it, it had never happened. But I had been sick, nauseous, all day, every day, from the tears that I had locked inside. It had felt as if I had a rock in my stomach, which was heavy with sharp edges like my grief. By the time we looked into Wendy Leeuwenhoek’s disappearance, I’d been back at work for years and the rock had become small and almost smooth like a pebble in a river – but it hadn’t disappeared.

‘So here was this other little girl,’ I said. ‘And her mother refused to believe she’d died.’

My role in the investigation had been to get close to the parents. They had been critical of the original investigation and the CI had wanted to make amends. The parents had divorced six months after Wendy disappeared. I met Monique, Wendy’s mother, often. Not because I’d suspected her of killing her daughter but because it had been what the boss had asked me to do. Monique had kept her distance, kept herself closed to me. She probably would have been like that with everybody, with every policeman or policewoman.

She gave restrained consent when I asked her if I could record our conversations. Her pale face and long blonde hair, so devoid of colour it was almost white, gave the impression of fragility. She looked as if she was made of glass, as if any intrusion in her personal life would fracture and destroy her. I didn’t want to break her, I understood her sorrow, but I just didn’t have the will to treat her as kindly as she needed me to. There was never any proof of neglect or evidence that she’d abandoned her daughter in the park where the little blue shoe was found, but I had to ask her why she had let her little girl out to play that late in the evening. She told me she had been preparing dinner and could see Wendy from their kitchen window. Then she looked again and her daughter was gone. She still wasn’t worried; it was a game Wendy played. Paul went to get her but came back an hour later, upset because he couldn’t find her.

I hadn’t expected Monique to cry. She’d answered this same question so often. The tears came as if they’d been inside for the last fifteen years and were only now allowed out. I offered her my handkerchief but she used her own tissues instead. Her house was immaculately clean and she looked ready to fluff up the cushions on the sofa as soon as I left. There was a large photo of Wendy on the mantelpiece but no others. No sign of other children, a new husband, a lover or even a pet. Only her in perfect isolation.

‘She made a painting every month of what Wendy would have looked like,’ I told the psychiatrist. ‘She studied girls on the street to get the fashion right: the right haircut, the right clothes. She had a room full of these paintings, almost two hundred of them. It was spooky. I asked her if she got pleasure out of them. She looked at me as if I was crazy and said, “No, I don’t get pleasure out of anything any more. My only pleasure is the absence of pain.”’ I took a sip of my water. The words had so exactly described how I felt that I had listened to Wendy’s mother say them a number of times on the tape, listening, rewinding, listening, rewinding.