A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1) (12 page)

‘When Wendy went missing, she’d just lost her first milk tooth, so there were all these photos with a smile with a single gap, but in the paintings more teeth went and later new teeth came. It made me think of what my daughter would have looked like. It was more than four years since she’d died and here I was, looking at this photo of six-year-old Wendy with a tooth missing, holding a watering can in her hands, wearing a pink dress and pink wellington boots, and I thought: This is what she would have looked like. This is how big my Poppy would have been.’ I covered my eyes with my hands and took a few deep breaths. ‘I kept those photos. It was as if my little girl, my Poppy, had grown, hadn’t died, but was there in those photos.’ Those first days after I’d held the photos, collected them and had taken them home, I’d even thought that this could be my new family, that this could be my new daughter. Of course Wendy wouldn’t be six, she would be twenty-one, a student maybe or working, but she could be mine. She could be my girl. A replacement for Poppy.

‘And now . . .’

‘Now even Wendy’s photos are gone.’ And with the loss of the photos, Poppy seemed dead all over again.

‘I understand why this case has been so hard for you. How is your husband coping? Do you talk about this?’

‘We’re not together any more.’

I took my gloves off and stuffed them in the pockets of my jacket. Even protected, the tips of my fingers had turned white and cold. I pressed the buzzer of Flat 6. It was 11 a.m. She would be surprised I was here, but she would definitely be home.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi, it’s me.’

Without a comment the door clicked open and I went in. I took the concrete steps two at a time. If I looked closely at them, I could see traces of the thousands of times I had walked up here. It was no warmer in the cavernous communal hallway than it had been outside.

The door to my mother’s flat was slightly ajar. I pushed it fully open, went through and hung my coat on its usual hook. My mother sat at the table, reading the newspaper and drinking a cup of tea. My visit didn’t mean she’d break with her morning routine of scanning every page of the
Telegraaf
.

She looked up over the edge of the paper. ‘Oh no,’ she said, reaching out with her hand to touch my hair. ‘What’s happened to my lovely blonde daughter?’

‘I only had it cut.’ I pulled out a chair and sat down.

‘Never mind, it’ll grow back. You must be regretting it.’

I tucked a strand of my newly dark hair behind my ear. ‘I like it actually.’

‘Much more practical, I suppose.’

‘I like the way it looks.’

‘Really? Had you been to this hairdresser before?’ She peered at me, her head at a slight angle like a robin looking at a worm on the grass, ready to pounce.

‘First time.’

‘That figures. It’s not quite even, not symmetrical.’

‘It’s not supposed to be.’

She nodded. ‘You did it because you were angry. It’s some form of self-harm – I read about that in the paper.’

‘I wasn’t angry. I’m not self-harming. Want to see my arms?’ I pulled at the sleeves of my jumper to stop my hand touching the red cut I had inflicted on my forehead.

‘Don’t be stupid.’ She put the paper up again and made the pages rustle. ‘You must be very lonely,’ she said from behind the
Telegraaf
.

‘I’m fine.’

She lowered it again and looked at me. ‘So why are you here on a Saturday morning?’

I avoided her question. ‘You haven’t taken your Christmas tree down yet?’ I asked.

‘Oh, we can do it now if you like.’ She opened a cupboard and got the cardboard box for the baubles out. Sellotape held the corners together. I picked a silver bauble from the tree. Its skin was dulled by age.

‘I remember when we bought these,’ I said.

‘Was it ninety or ninety-one?’

‘Must have been ninety-one.’

‘Yes, you were already going to university.’

We had bought them to replace the ones I’d broken the year before, when I’d come home drunk from a Christmas party at one of my few friends’ places and had forgotten the tree was there.

‘I want to talk about you and Dad,’ I said.

She had never been willing to tell me what had happened between them. Even now she was silent. I could hear the traffic outside the flat. I plucked the silver bird with its glass-fibre tail from the tree. The texture of the tail was like metallic satin under my fingers. I remembered the first year I had been allowed to hold it. I must have been eight or nine. A few strands affixed themselves to my fingers, staying behind when I put the bird down. It was getting old, just like me, just like my mother.

‘Mum, it’s important,’ I said.

‘It wasn’t the same.’ We took off the lights together. I picked one from the tree like a small ripe fruit from the closest branch and handed it to my mother. ‘We weren’t like you and Arjen,’ she said. ‘Knowing about us won’t help.’

I couldn’t tell if I was getting angry or irate. It was probably a mixture of both. ‘Mum, please tell me. You need to tell me at some point.’

‘You made your own mistakes. This was different.’ I passed a second light to her and she wrapped them around her hand, tying her fingers together with the green plastic wire. ‘It won’t help you, Lotte.’

She’d always said the same thing. We had been in the kitchen, doing the dishes, when I’d told her about my marriage breakdown. I had been nervous. My hands were sweating and I’d wiped them on the dishcloth. I had difficulties forming the words that admitted to my mother that Arjen had left me.

She’d said, ‘What did you do?’

The first words out of her mouth:
what did you do?
I told her I hadn’t done anything. She said that I must have done or he wouldn’t have left me. In her eyes, the injured party walked, as she had done. I said that it wasn’t anything that I did, that it was more what he had done. With somebody else. She shrugged and returned to her scrubbing. The back of my throat felt like sandpaper.

‘Mum, what am I going to do now?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Don’t look at me for help.’

It made my heart ache.

She said, ‘You’ll sort it out yourself. You never listened to any of my advice before.’ She was going to say:
I told you so
, but managed to swallow the words. She would have been justified – she
had
told me a hundred times. She had told me to put my husband before my career, to have another child before it was too late, that work wouldn’t make me happy in the long run, that I’d be more fulfilled if I stayed at home, cooked dinner and washed nappies. I never told her that after losing one child I was afraid – terrified, in fact – that the same thing would happen again. I stood there, dishcloth hanging down to the floor, and my body ached from the need of a hug that wasn’t going to come.

Now we finished taking the lights off the Christmas tree, leaving it bare. I collapsed it, folded up its metal stand and put it back in its cardboard tube, all ready for next year. It was much easier than my real one. It never lost its needles but it also never smelled of pine.

After putting the Christmas things in the cupboard, I fingered a plain wineglass in the cabinet. The cheap glass was in stark contrast to the cut-crystal ones at my father’s place. ‘Why didn’t you take his money?’ I said without taking my eyes off the cabinet.

‘You look cold. I’ll make you a cup of tea.’ She didn’t ask me if I wanted one. She got up and walked out of the room. I followed her to the kitchen and stood between her and the door. She turned on the tap and filled the metal kettle. We both stared at it and said nothing, waiting for the water to boil. The gas flame danced orange. A bank of appliances behind cupboard doors with chipped paintwork led from the door that I was guarding to a small window at the other end. A washing machine with a soap dispenser that had cracked when I still lived here doubled as a windowsill and let a set of old tin cans filled with herbs catch any light that entered the small space.

The whistle of the kettle tore through the silence. My mother reached in the cupboard and got my old mug out, a large white porcelain one with the ketchup-red and mayonnaise-yellow face of a smiling clown. I caressed my mug by its often held ear, took it from the kitchen and we both sat back down at the table.

‘When did you get me this?’ I said.

She smiled. ‘It was your first real one, after the plastic drinking cup you had. You must have been three or four.’

Warmth flowed through my body with the hot tea. It was touching that she still gave me tea in this mug. The clown smiled his wide grin at me. ‘I saw Dad last week,’ I said.

‘Really? Where?’

‘Alkmaar. I went to see him.’

‘After all these years, you turn to him.’

‘I didn’t turn to him.’

‘You should come to me for advice.’

‘I didn’t go to him for advice. It was only work.’

‘So that’s where all these questions come from.’

‘Yes.’ I was pleased she understood. ‘I’m reopening this case he worked on—’

‘What lies did he tell you about me? What did he say about me?’

‘We didn’t talk about you.’ I immediately realised it was the wrong thing to say.

She raised her eyebrows. ‘You were sitting in his house and he let the chance to blacken me go by?’ Her voice sounded harsh and disappointed.

‘We talked about work.’

‘He still lies.’

‘And we talked about cars.’ I couldn’t stop the small smile at the memory.

‘Cars? Since when are you interested in cars?’

‘I have bought a new car . . .’

‘You didn’t tell me. Where is it?’ She went to the window.

‘I came by bike.’

‘But you showed him your new car?’

‘I could hardly go to Alkmaar by bike,’ I said, trying to be reasonable and joke about it.

‘You could have shown me your car.’

‘Next time I’ll drive.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ She sat back down and opened the paper again, turned a page and pretended to read. Then she said, ‘So what were your father’s wise words on your lonely life?’

‘I didn’t talk to him about that. As I said, it was work.’

‘You’re saying that a bit too often.’

I raised my hands. ‘But you’re not listening.’

‘And he was?’

‘We’re reopening a case he used to work on. I had to find out what he knew.’

‘And he lied.’

I shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

‘Is he still married to that woman?’

‘Maaike? I suppose so. There were photos of the two of them together.’

‘So you’re blaming me,’ she said in a fake-resigned tone of voice.

‘For what?’

‘For your marriage breaking up. Clearly your father can manage to stay married all these years, whereas all I’ve done was look after you.’

‘I’m not blaming you.’ But I did know I didn’t want to end up like her, still bitter and angry forty years later. What was the point? ‘Tell me about the money.’

She pulled her grey eyebrows together. ‘What money?’

‘I’ve been to his house—’

‘You’ve been there before.’

‘I know, but it’s never struck me this clearly before’, I played with the edge of the tattered tablecloth, rolled it up and down, and rubbed my finger over the mark in the wood, ‘that he has a lot of money. That we used to have none. That you still have none.’

She turned a page of the newspaper with an annoyed rustle. ‘Not none.’

‘OK, little.’ What was the last piece of furniture my mother had bought? Everything in this flat had already been here when I left home after university. And that was almost twenty years ago. The sofa’s grey leather had cracked and roughened up where she sat most evenings; pieces of the faded flower-patterned beige wallpaper had peeled down from the edge closest to the ceiling.

‘Do you wish I’d left you with him? Look at this!’ She turned the paper round and pointed to a photo of some C celebrity with hardly any clothes on. ‘What is she wearing?’

‘No, of course not.’ I pushed the paper back towards her.

‘Are you saying I didn’t take good care of you?’ She angrily turned another page over.

‘I’m not saying that at all.’ I wanted to grab hold of her chin and lift her head until she had to meet my eyes.

‘I worked two jobs to raise you and bring you up.’

‘And I appreciate that. I just want to know why you didn’t take any of his cash.’

When I was about twelve, my mother had bought a pair of trousers for me at C&A. They had been the coolest I’d ever had, purple-blue cords with a white stripe sewn into the seam. Mum had told me to be careful with them, but I was playing after school and I fell. It was the tear in the trousers more than the pain that made me cry. I didn’t go home and roller-bladed endless circles on the school playground long after all the other children had left. A teacher stopped me and asked what was wrong. ‘I can come with you,’ he said after I’d told him what had happened. ‘I can explain to your mother that it was just an accident.’

But it hadn’t been fear that stopped me from going home: it was embarrassment and shame. I knew how long she’d saved to get the money for those trousers. I should have made them last for a couple of years at least and now there was a huge rip right over my knee. My skin underneath the cloth was torn and grazed, but the pain was from letting my mother down. When I got home, she didn’t say anything, simply gestured for me to take the trousers off, got her sewing machine out and stitched both frayed edges together in silence. I’d worn those trousers for another year or so, the left trouser leg always slightly shorter than the right. And even now she had little spare money even though I gave her a hundred euros a week. She wouldn’t accept more.

‘I didn’t take any of his money because I didn’t want to.’ She closed the paper, folded it in two and got up. ‘We should move this table back to where it was. Before the Christmas tree.’

‘But it must have been tempting.’ I got up as well. ‘You were working so hard all the time – why not let him pay something for my upbringing?’

‘You were my daughter. You were my responsibility.’

‘I’m his daughter too, aren’t I?’

She looked round the room, which had a hole like a scar where the Christmas tree used to be. She pulled an oak chair out towards its gap. ‘Of course you are.’