A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1) (7 page)

‘I’m sorry.’ He lifted his arm from behind my seat and put out a hand. It never reached me, for he retracted it almost immediately and put it back on the steering wheel. ‘I had no idea.’ He coughed. ‘He looked so vulnerable, so small. He had these two circles’, he indicated a distance between finger and thumb, ‘shaved in his chest hair where they’d attached the electrodes.’ He was breathing faster and the sound filled the car. ‘And then these letters started to come’, his voice got louder, ‘from the Amsterdam investigator. That’s when I understood what he’d done. Before then, you know, I was telling myself he’d just taken the crates down, left them at Reception or waited for Amsterdam to pick them up. I never asked him; we never talked about it. But when these Requests For Information came,’ his voice lingered heavily on the capital letters, ‘I knew there was something wrong. But what could I do?’ He gave a lengthy sigh. ‘I just ignored it. And it went away.’

Ronald turned the key in the ignition; the engine started and the lights came back on. As he forced the gear into reverse he turned to me. ‘So Lantinga still walks free,’ he said. ‘So what. He shot a criminal. I’ve kept an eye on him – he’s done nothing since. It’s a small price to pay.’

My world had shrunk to the inside of my car and the triangle of light in front of me. It was five o’clock, just before rush hour, the snow was falling heavily and I was following a snowplough south. My windscreen wipers were creating piles of snow in the corners of the window. Their back-and-forth motion had a hypnotic quality and I found myself looking at them rather than the road. I needed to focus fifty metres further ahead, at the red tail-lights of the truck in front of me. My rearview mirror was full of the cordon of cars following. I’d been driving for almost half an hour and fatigue was building up behind my eyes from the strain of staring through the thick curtain of snow.

I was torn in two directions, just like those wipers. I knew I couldn’t tell anybody that Piet Huizen was my father and still expect to stay on the case. They would automatically take me off it, for obvious reasons. I’d known that this morning, when I was going the other way along the A9 all by myself. But now things were different. Should I protect him, just as Ronald had done, or should I tell the chief inspector that the Alkmaar Police had a witness and we should definitely reopen the case? My hands were clenched on the steering wheel. To tell or not to tell, that was the question. Could I mention the witness but leave my father out of it – talk and protect at the same time? But if that were possible, wouldn’t Ronald de Boer have already done exactly that?

Our cordon reached the tunnel under the Noordzeekanaal and I sat back in relief at the short interlude of respite from the snow. A car overtook me, speeding up in the improved visibility, but I stayed behind the snow truck and even fell back a bit more, hoping another car would slot in between, sheltering me from some of the truck’s spray. But apart from that one car, everybody else stayed in the chain we’d formed several kilometres ago.

I peeled off on the ring road around Amsterdam. When I finally parked along the canal, the new-fallen snow was almost twenty centimetres deep. It was a miracle that a spot outside the house was free – a black rectangle of road where another car had just left. I parked slowly and carefully.

I dragged my body up the almost vertical stairs. Once inside, I didn’t stop to take off my coat or boots before dialling my father’s number – only to get an answering machine.

My mother had been certain I’d chosen to join the police to be like my father, but until now I had never felt any connection with him. Knowing what he had done, however, created an unexpected bond.

For a brief moment I thought he might be able to understand my own problems, but that feeling quickly faded. I went into the bathroom and forced myself to look at my face in the mirror. I was much worse than him. He had just swiped some files. I had slept with a murderer. I brought my head forward, fast and hard. The sound of the shattering glass was followed by the comforting pain of cut skin.

I held my hands away from me, the fingers spread out so that I didn’t have to feel my own skin. Blood ran down my forehead, pooling in the corner of my left eye. Revulsion coursed through every pore of my body.

The first week after I’d found Wendy Leeuwenhoek’s body, I’d expected everybody to see through my lies, and I died a little every time someone believed me. I’d wanted to scream out the truth whenever they nodded gravely at my preposterous falsehoods. Now that impulse to loudly confess had ebbed away; what was left was fear of exposure and an ever-growing self-disgust. I went to work every day, as there I was doing something good, whereas here in my flat, in the dark, alone, all I could think of were my sins.

My hands started to tremble. My father must have felt like this for over a decade. He’d kept those crates behind to delay his colleagues, as a protest to his boss who clearly thought he wasn’t competent any more, just because he was old. It had been a prank, a minor misdemeanour that had gone wrong when he’d had his heart attack. The thought of my father’s protest action made me smile. My hands stopped shaking. I’d keep my father out of trouble, I promised myself. I pressed my hands against my face and felt the wetness of tears on my cheeks. I opened the tap, scooped handfuls of ice-cold water up and rinsed the blood from my forehead and out of my eyes.

The next morning in the office, my words of greeting to Hans stuck in my throat. My desk was a picture of emptiness, naked and exposed like never before. The grain in the wood was visible for the first time in a while. Lines came together and veered apart as if they were attracted and repelled at irregular intervals by magnets at either side of the desk. My papers and files had disappeared. Where yesterday my reports on the Wendy Leeuwenhoek case and my photos had marked out part of our shared office as mine, today my space looked as if it was ready for somebody new to move in. Could they have found out about my father so quickly? Or had they finally found out the truth about Wendy?

I traced the lines of the wood grain with a finger and wondered if I was touching my desk for the last time. I hugged my pink folder to my chest with the other hand, afraid to put it down and have it swallowed up as seemed to have happened with everything else I owned. In the shadow of my PC monitor, my pen holder with seven blue biros and a pencil stood alone on the desk like a solitary scarecrow in a field. I found my phone on the floor. I picked it up and put it back where it belonged.

‘Where’s my stuff?’ I asked the room in general. I tried to sound calm.

‘Oh, the boss took it,’ Hans said, his eyes not leaving his PC screen.

‘Chief Inspector Moerdijk?’ I was working hard to control my voice.

Hans nodded but didn’t say anything.

I walked over to his chair and looked at his screen over his shoulder. He didn’t even try to hide the fact that he was looking at Facebook. ‘Everything?’

He turned round. ‘As you can see,’ and pointed out the emptiness of our office with a sweep of his large hand as if he was sowing grains on barren ground.

‘And you let him?’ My hands started to tremble. ‘You let him take my files? Why? Am I sacked?’

‘Sacked? Why would you be?’ He swivelled back to his screen. ‘He was really angry with you though. Muttered about some meeting with the prosecution. You weren’t here. Where were you anyway?’

Relief that I hadn’t been fired, that the CI hadn’t found out why I had gone to Alkmaar, battled with sudden anger. ‘He’s taken all of it to the prosecution? I didn’t want to give them everything, just my report.’ I picked up yesterday’s newspaper to look underneath. ‘Did he leave anything behind?’ I didn’t bother putting it back, but let it fall on the floor, discarding it like a pair of laddered tights. He might have missed some photos, some scraps of paper.

Hans stared at me as I opened the drawers to the left and right of him. I knelt down and looked past his legs and his feet in black leather shoes with the worn-down heels to check in his bin. He reached out a hand to place on my shoulder. I got up quickly and avoided the contact. I paced through the office, looking under desks even though in some cells of my now fevered brain I knew it was pointless. In the corner, the boxes of files in the Petersen case stood as a reminder that I should have been here rather than in Alkmaar. I took my frustration out on each of them as I dug through the papers. Photos, reports and forms in duplicate floated through the air, creating a white snowstorm inside our four walls.

‘Lotte,’ Hans said, ‘he took everything away. You can stop looking. Talk to the CI. He was rather meticulous. There’s nothing left here.’

‘How could he take it without telling me?’ By now I was panicking, taking shallow breaths. Oxygen only filled the top layer of my lungs. I tried to calm down, tried to focus on the modern art on the wall, a still-life of blue and red intestines combined in a frame, oddly reminiscent of the open PC in Wouter Vos’s apartment, but I couldn’t get myself under control.

I walked back to my desk, thinking feverishly. He had touched my photos. They were
my
photos! I should have kept them at home. If only I hadn’t been in Alkmaar, I could have given them my reports and kept all my photos. The pink folder lay on my desk in silent condemnation. Someone else would be looking at those photos now. Someone else would be holding the photo I’d touched every day: Wendy Leeuwenhoek as everybody in the country knew her, the photo her parents, Paul and Monique, had given to the press and to us fifteen years ago, when Wendy had disappeared, the one they had thought best represented their daughter. It had been taken when Wendy was six years old, five months before she’d gone missing. In the photo, her hair was tied in short blonde pigtails, one either side of her head, which dangled down in corkscrews onto her shoulders. She wore a pair of jeans, white trainers and a pink T-shirt decorated with splatters of mud. She held a small plastic watering can, white with yellow daisies, with both hands crammed together side by side in the handle, straining to carry the weight. She stood in the vegetable garden at the back of her grandparents’ house, smiling widely at whoever was taking the photo. One of her front teeth was missing.

I knew all these details without having to look at the photo. I also knew that she would never get her grown-up teeth. Today she should have been twenty-one, going to university maybe. Instead she’d never changed from this picture that was now part of the nation’s memory.

‘I can’t let it go like this. I didn’t get a chance to say . . .’ I raised my hand to my forehead, trying to stop the pain exploding from my mind.

Hans got up from his chair. ‘Calm down, Lotte.’ The sound of his voice was as about soothing as sandpaper.

My heart punched the inside of my ribcage at small intervals. ‘Fuck you – you let him take her.’ Forcing the words out made my throat hurt. Two of my colleagues stopped and stared in the hallway. ‘Fuck you too!’ I screamed. Hans put a hand on my arm. I shook it off.

‘He should have told me! Why didn’t he call me?’ The pressure behind my eyes was growing; my tongue blocked the back of my throat. ‘Fuck him,’ I whispered. The office started to swirl; the world went black. I gripped the back of my chair and blinked hard. My surroundings returned in a grey-red colour.

‘Lotte.’ Hans put his hand on my arm again, with more strength than before, getting a solid grip. It hurt. I forced my breathing to slow. Breathed in 1-2-3. Breathed out 1-2-3.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Sorry, Hans.’ I peeled his hand off my arm and stormed away to the last place of privacy: the toilets.

Hans was gone when I got back but he’d left a yellow stickie on my phone with a message in his square handwriting:
the boss wants to talk to you
.

I picked up the phone, but not to call the boss. I dialled the number of a psychiatrist. I could no longer deny that I needed help. Her first free appointment was the next morning. I had to try to hold it together for one more day.

My footsteps dragged as I slowly made my way down the corridor to Chief Inspector Moerdijk’s office. The door was closed. I knocked, balancing a plastic cup of water on a new notepad.

‘Lotte? Yes, come in.’ The CI’s face was drawn into lines of disapproval. Like a sheet of origami paper that had been previously used for another pattern, laughter lines were still visible, but faint. ‘Take a seat.’

I sat down opposite his desk, on the edge of my chair. I refused the temptation to slump and stayed upright, my spine long, my back straight, the majority of my weight carried by my own muscles in a display of total control. I put the plastic cup on my side of his desk, opened my notepad and waited for him to start the conversation.

‘Where were you yesterday?’ The chief inspector folded his arms together.

On the wall, the books lined up together on their shelves gave me strength. They kept their knowledge hidden inside until someone pulled the covers apart. ‘In Alkmaar.’

The frown between his eyebrows deepened. ‘You were supposed to take the evidence to the prosecutor’s office.’

I looked at my notepad for inspiration but found none. The circles of the ring binding were almost parallel, apart from the third, which sloped down and encroached on the next spiral’s space. I bent it into place with the back of my pencil. ‘I know. But the Petersen case—’

‘That’s no excuse. I had to cover for you.’ His PC emitted a beep and the chief inspector’s close scrutiny travelled from me to his screen. He double-clicked with the mouse then rolled its scrolling wheel with a rapid whirr. ‘Did you at least find anything interesting?’

‘There might be something,’ I said.

He kept his eyes on the screen, typed some text with two fingers and hit Enter with a distinct movement. Then he looked back at me. ‘Like what? Come on, Lotte, don’t make me drag this out of you.’

I sat still, didn’t move my hands or my feet and looked the CI straight in the eye. ‘Give me a couple of days. I need to check it further.’