A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1) (6 page)

This area was not what I’d expected, even though I’d seen the photos. We were in an ordinary suburb. This was not the house of a financial high-flyer, but a normal, average home. High shrubs formed a silent windbreak. Their two-toned solidity, deadly white at the top but vibrant green underneath, kept the world away from the front door. I walked a few steps along the leafy corridor until I could see the door. I hardly recognised the place from the photos. It had been repainted and, of course, the white outline around the body had long since been washed away. A green door with stained-glass windows was now protecting the house’s inhabitants. The path hadn’t been swept and was still covered with a layer of snow. The black parallel lines were the tracks of parents with a child on a sleigh enjoying the winter. In the garden at the back there’d be a snowman. It was that kind of house, that kind of area.

‘This is a nice place, isn’t it?’ Ronald said. His words floated past me in a cloud of breath.

This was the type of house I had dreamed of as a child, when my mother and I had been living in our two-bedroom flat in Amsterdam. It was not nearly as big as my father’s home, but everything about it spoke of safety and security. Not a car had passed since we arrived. The only sounds were my breath and the voices of children in the distance. This was the kind of place where you’d let your kids play out in the street. ‘Has this garden changed much?’ I asked.

‘The shrubs were a little smaller then, but still too high to look over. Anybody could have stood by the front door and the neighbours would never know.’

‘Any signs of a break-in?’

‘No, none at all. Everything seemed in perfect order. Apart from the dead body.’

‘And the neighbours called the police?’

‘They thought it was a car backfiring at first. But they didn’t quite trust it, so they came out to have a look.’

The net curtains twitched as the current inhabitants of the house noticed our attention.

‘We can go in if you like, but there’s nothing left of the way it was,’ Ronald said.

I shook my head and walked off down the side passage. It led to a small square where garages came together with paths to back gardens. The gardens were all fenced in with separate entry doors. It would be just as easy to enter unseen from the front as from the back. Easy for someone to hide in either place and wait for Otto Petersen to come home. I took notes and signalled to Ronald that I was done. We got back in the car.

‘What next?’ he enquired. ‘We could meet up with Wouter Vos if he’s in and if you have time. He’s the guy who saw Anton. He can tell you what he witnessed.’

It was still early. ‘That’s a good idea,’ I said. Now that I was here I might as well get all the information Alkmaar had. I clicked the seatbelt tight. ‘Before we see your witness,’ I went on, ‘what happened to those files? We asked for more information, but you never responded.’

Ronald acted as if I hadn’t spoken. He started the car and, as before, drove in silence through the centre of Alkmaar, to Wouter Vos’s apartment in an area where modern flats stood side by side with eighteenth-century gabled houses. The apartment block where Wouter Vos lived was built out of a yellow brick, the colour of the cheeses that got carried around Alkmaar’s cheese market on Fridays in summer, the market of which my father was so proud. It was the market Alkmaar got in the seventeenth century as a thank you for being the first town to come out in favour of William of Orange and against the Spaniards. My father would tell me these facts most weekend visits, whenever I said that Alkmaar didn’t have anything Amsterdam didn’t have, but we had never actually gone to this fabled market.

The balconies were painted sky-blue, giving the block the appearance of a faded Swedish flag. These were the types of flats appreciated by retired people who wanted to live close to the shops, cinemas and the theatre, and single men who liked the clean lines and modern look.

When he opened the door, I saw that Wouter was in his early fifties, not at retirement age yet. The first few centimetres of his grey-blond hair, from centre-parting to ear, were so heavy with gel that grooves showed where his fingers had combed it through, and he had shaved his stubble to create the impression of a straight jawline where his jowls became his neck.

He stuck out a hand and shook Ronald’s, saying, ‘What brings you here?’

‘This is Lotte Meerman, a colleague from Amsterdam police.’

‘Hi, nice to meet you.’ He shook my hand too. It was a firm grip, which didn’t crush my fingers but enclosed them in a comfortable warmth. He invited us in. ‘Can I get you anything? Tea? Coffee?’ Walking behind him down the hallway, I could see that at the back of his head the skin of his scalp showed through the hair.

Spotlights on metal wires highlighted pictures on the walls. I didn’t know much about modern art, but these weren’t prints; they looked like originals. A small painting, about sixty centimetres wide and forty high, of a man asleep under a tree, an entire world growing out of his head, stopped me in my tracks. The vibrant colours of his dreams were completely unlike the white and black of mine: red parrots flew through a verdant green forest, a deep-blue city floated above the trees. My fingers itched with the desire to own it.

‘I was just getting ready to go to a meeting,’ Wouter said to Ronald before turning to me. ‘You like it? It’s one of my favourites too.’

‘Are your dreams like that?’ I asked before I could stop myself.

‘I wish.’ He looked serious for a second, then smiled again. ‘Sorry, let me get these papers out of the way.’ He picked up a number of magazines from the sofa. They looked technical. Then he put his hand on Ronald’s back. ‘Good to see you. It’s been a while.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’m really sorry. I have to go in half an hour.’ He laughed and pulled at the crease in his trousers. ‘That’s why I’m dressed like this.’

‘What do you do?’ I tore myself away from the art on the wall and sat down on the sofa. Wouter sat in a large leather chair opposite.

‘I’m an IT consultant and do all sorts of things – IT installations for small firms and home networks for individuals. I’ve got this great partnership going with a local design firm.’ He took his gold-rimmed glasses off and polished the lenses with a handkerchief. ‘Halstra. Do you know them?’

‘Heard of them.’ Ronald sat down next to me. I moved further into the corner.

‘They do the interior design and decoration and get me in to work out the Wi-Fi and stuff. I build some PCs from scratch as well, on spec, for the lazy enthusiast.’ He gestured to a corner of the room, next to a large modern desk, where a dismantled PC showed its innards. ‘They want to choose every part but can’t be bothered to put it together.’ These were the things the layman preferred hidden away in the casing: yellow and green plastic intestines, thick and shiny like rain worms fresh out of the soil, attached frightening-looking electronic parts to one another.

‘Lotte is Amsterdam CID,’ Ronald said, ‘so I’m sure you can guess why we’re here. We’re having another look at Otto Petersen’s murder.’

I kept my eyes on Wouter’s face. His eyes moved from Ronald to me and back again.

Ronald said, ‘Just tell Lotte what you saw that evening.’

‘Very well.’ Wouter rested his arms on his thighs, his hands dangling between his knees. ‘I saw Anton Lantinga’s car on the street outside Petersen’s house that afternoon. Around five o’clock. But I didn’t think anything of it. He was there a lot, you know.’ He picked up a packet of cigarettes. ‘You don’t mind if I smoke, do you?’ I shook my head. It was hard to refuse a man permission to smoke in his own house. He put a cigarette in his mouth. ‘So, yes, Anton was there.’ Wouter offered the pack round but got no takers and lit up. ‘You couldn’t miss that car. It was a gold metallic Porsche.’ He inhaled then blew a smoke ring at the ceiling, his cigarette held loosely between his long fingers.

‘Did you see Lantinga himself?’ I asked.

‘Well, I saw his car. Someone was driving it but I couldn’t really see who it was.’

I nodded. It reminded me of the small blue car outside the petrol station and the difficulties I’d had in seeing the driver.

‘But when I heard on the news that Petersen had been shot, I immediately called Ronald and Piet – Piet Huizen – and told them what I’d seen.’

‘And you’re sure it was his car?’

‘Well, I wasn’t, but Piet was as soon as I described it. It was quite distinctive.’ He looked at Ronald with a smile and took another drag of his cigarette. ‘It’s good you’re reopening the case. I always wondered why Lantinga wasn’t arrested. What do you think?’ He turned his head to me.

I shrugged. At the moment I didn’t know what to think.

Ronald put his hands on his upper legs and pushed himself out of the sofa. ‘Thanks, Wouter,’ he said. ‘We won’t take any more of your time today.’

Wouter got up too. ‘It’s always good to see you, Ronald. Are we still on for Wednesday?’

‘Yes, we’ll see you then.’ Ronald put one hand on Wouter’s arm and gave it a squeeze. He gestured at me with the other. ‘Let’s go.’

As we walked down the stairs, he said, ‘You want to talk? Let’s talk.’ It sounded like a threat.

In the car, Ronald briefly looked over at me before focusing on the traffic. ‘You wanted to know why I never replied to the Amsterdam police,’ he said. It wasn’t a question.

‘My father seemed—’

‘Your father said you didn’t get on.’ Not taking his eyes off the road, he fished another piece of chewing gum out of his jacket pocket and stuck it in his mouth. He chewed noisily.

We drove along the Singel, the waterway that was the remnant of the old moat around Alkmaar’s town centre. It wasn’t even four o’clock yet, but the last drop of daylight had already drained from the sky. The large wings of the windmill on the corner were like ghosts, their white sails barely visible as they churned the air. I wasn’t sure if the mill was still functioning, milling something or pumping water, or just for show. This was the kind of thing I’d asked my father when I’d come to see him on one of the rare weekend visits. The way I remembered it, he’d never known the answers and we’d walked together in an uncomfortable silence along the defence walls. He hadn’t known what to talk to a teenager about.

There had been an eight-year gap after my parents’ divorce during which I hadn’t seen him, hadn’t heard from him and hadn’t received any birthday cards or telephone calls from him. Those eight years had made it perfectly clear that he didn’t love me and had little interest in me. When it was arranged that I should see him again, I was thirteen and had no great desire for a reunion. They didn’t last long, those visits, only continued for about six months, as my mother had never been happy about the idea from the beginning and I had been messed-up and angry enough to agree with her, hurt that it had taken my father all those years to contact me.

‘Not getting on is too strong,’ I told Ronald. The traffic light ahead of us was red and we waited. No cars came out of the crossroad. ‘You seemed to know him well,’ I said. At Ronald’s silence I continued, ‘Wouter Vos?’

Ronald turned the car into a parking bay, pulled the hand-brake on and switched the engine off. The headlights died; the car was engulfed in falling darkness. He unbuckled his seatbelt. ‘OK, let’s talk.’

I undid my own and reached for the door handle, but Ronald said, ‘Stay in the car. I don’t want anybody to overhear us.’ I turned towards him. He was staring straight ahead. He didn’t click the inside light on and the dark gave a sense of isolation and anonymity. He kept his hands on the steering wheel and I could see him chewing his bottom lip. I stayed silent to give him time to gather his thoughts.

After a few moments, he looked over at me with his grey eyes as if to weigh me up. ‘You look a lot like him, you know that?’ he said. ‘It reminds me of working with him, talking to you, sitting together in the car like this.’

I gazed out of the window. Snow was starting to fall again – fat drifting flakes. They got stuck on the windscreen and slid their way down. The streetlights revealed the poplars behind the parking bay, swaying in the wind. Pearls of snow rained on the ground at the end of each pendulum movement. The drive home would be a nightmare. With the engine off, the car was getting cold and I hugged my coat around me.

‘That last day,’ Ronald was saying, ‘I don’t think he meant to do it. He just . . .’ He sighed and ran both hands through his hair. ‘That Thursday, the commander called your father into his office. Told him he was taking him off the Petersen case as his retirement was only two weeks away. Piet would have understood if I’d taken over, I’m sure of it, as we’d worked on it together, but instead the commander gave the case to Amsterdam. Probably agreed to it with his Amsterdam buddy over a drink on the golf course.’ He gave a bark of laughter, loosened his tie and undid the top button of his shirt. ‘Anyway,’ he went on, lowering his voice, ‘when Piet got back to his desk, he was livid. I could see that his hands were shaking with rage. He was rifling through his desk, piling all these papers, all our files and reports, into a few large yellow crates. You know the kind I mean. “I’ve only got one hour,” he said. “I need to get this all together.” His voice was hoarse. When we had it all packed, he wanted to carry it down himself. I offered to help, but he wouldn’t hear of it. “Better if you stay here,” he said. I think he wanted me to keep out of it – you know, not get involved.’ Ronald drummed his fingers on the back of my seat. They tapped out a rhythm against my spine, which resonated through to my stomach.

‘Anyway, that’s the last I saw of those files. I don’t know what he did with them. I’m sure he just wanted to delay Amsterdam a bit, the big-town boys, but of course that night he collapsed. Had his heart attack.’

My breath stopped in my throat and I raised my hand to my mouth.

Ronald stopped tapping. ‘You didn’t know?’

I wanted to say that of course I’d known, that I had visited him every day in hospital, but Ronald would be able to read the truth from the tears that were forming in my eyes. I shook my head. ‘Nobody . . .’ My voice broke and I coughed before trying again. ‘Nobody told me. I hadn’t seen him for a while.’ I wiped the tears away. I didn’t know why I was so upset.