Shadow Sister (14 page)

My eyes clear. Bright colour returns to the world. Something catches my attention. It’s not the passers-by; it’s a persistent shadow in my field of vision. Someone is standing on the other side of the road, in front of the Pathé cinema. I can’t have seen him clearly in those couple of seconds, but warning signals pulse through my body.

Bilal.

‘My mummy is dead,’ says Valerie. She’s sitting at the kitchen table colouring and looks up at me. It’s approaching five on a Wednesday afternoon, my parents are looking after her and I’ve just dropped round on my bike.

It’s strange to be in my sister’s house and to watch my mother making coffee without Lydia being here dominating the conversation. Her absence fills every nook and cranny.

‘Mummy is in the clouds,’ Valerie says.

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘and that’s not nice for you.’

‘Why not?’ Valerie asks. ‘Papa says it’s lovely there and Mummy comes back often.’

‘Oh darling,’ my mother says with a strangled voice, adding to me in a subdued tone, ‘She always talks about Lydia in the present tense, have you noticed that?’

‘It’s true, you know,’ Valerie continues her colouring. ‘She comes to visit me, and then she goes away again.’

Her hand hovers over the coloured pencils, in two minds as to
which colour the roof of the house should be.

I rummage around the pencil tin. ‘Red?’ I suggest.

Valerie shakes her head, takes a purple pencil and sets to work. She immerses herself in her task, making the grass blue, the sun red, the sky green and the roof purple. My father stands over the kitchen table and admires her picture.

‘That’s very pretty, Valerie,’ he says. ‘You’re using happy colours, aren’t you? What a lovely roof. Why is it purple?’

‘That’s what Mummy likes best,’ Valerie answers without looking up.

My father’s eyes meet mine over her head. My mother comes in with the mugs of coffee shaking in her hands.

I’m worried that my parents will never get over Lydia’s death. Particularly my mother. Every day she writes a letter to Lydia.

I don’t think Lydia was ever aware that she was our mother’s favourite. I’ve heard that favourites never realise it. In their experience they get the attention they deserve, without really thinking that another person might be damaged by it. It’s not that I blame her for having a deep bond with my mother, they had so much in common. They both liked nice clothes and shopping. They both made their own jewellery. I can still picture them sitting at the dining room table, with all those boxes of beads and fastenings. I had no desire to join them, but at the same time I felt excluded when they were together, talking and laughing.

I directed my attentions towards my father instead, but that was a different kind of relationship to the one Lydia and my mother had. Neither of us are real talkers, but we would take photos together or go for a bike ride.

Now we’re all sitting together and I have no idea how to reach them. We chat a little, about the daily grind, things like my studio. I tell them that I don’t go there much anymore.

‘That’s not good,’ my father says. ‘You have to go back to work, it’ll help you.’

I shrug and sharpen a few pencils for Valerie.

‘All in good time, Maarten,’ my mother says. ‘She’ll pick it up again presently.’

‘I hope so.’ My father runs a hand through his white hair and looks up. He nods at the bay window and says, ‘Someone’s coming. Looks like that policeman.’

We all exchange a look. The doorbell rings and my mother gets up first, brushing down her jeans and saying, ‘What do you think he wants? Maybe there’s news?’

The thought that Lydia’s murderer is still on the loose is frustrating. An arrest wouldn’t bring her back, but we’d be able to cope better if we knew that the perpetrator was behind bars.

The front door opens and Noorda’s voice fills the hall. An instant later, he comes into the sitting room with my mother.

‘Good afternoon.’ He pats Valerie on the head.

‘Good afternoon, Inspector,’ my father says, and I mumble something similar.

‘Is there some news?’ My mother searches the detective’s neutral face, as if hoping to read on it that the murderer has been hung, drawn and quartered.

‘We have a new lead,’ Noorda confirms. ‘It’s a small lead, but worth following. That’s why I came round, to ask a few questions. It was my understanding that Mister Salentijn always came home early on a Wednesday.’

‘Not today,’ my father says, ‘we’re looking after our granddaughter so that he can stay longer in the office.’

‘That doesn’t matter, I wanted to talk to you too. It’s lucky to have found you all together.’ Noorda nods at the table. ‘May I sit down?’

‘Yes, of course!’ my mother pulls out a chair and heads towards the kitchen. ‘Would you like a coffee?’

‘That would be nice,’ Noorda responds. He turns to me.

I’m uncomfortable under his scrutiny. I feel myself blushing.

‘You studied in Amsterdam, didn’t you?’ Noorda asks.

‘Yes,’ I say, surprised at the direction the conversation has started off in.

‘On the Korte Prinsengracht, if I’m not wrong,’ Noorda says as he consults his notebook.

‘Yes.’

‘That’s not far from the police station on the Prinsengracht.’

I exchange a look of incomprehension with my father.

‘What do you want to know, Inspector?’ he enquires.

‘I’m looking for a certain Hubert Ykema. You don’t happen to know him?’

‘No,’ I say without a moment’s thought.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes. I’ve got a good memory. I still know all the names of the kids I went to primary school with.’

My mother returns with a cup of coffee and sets it down in front of the inspector.

‘Thank you, madam.’ Noorda looks at her, nods and smiles. ‘I wanted to ask you the same question.’

‘What was it?’ my mother asks.

‘If we knew anyone called Hubert Ykema,’ I say.

‘Hubert Ykema? No, never heard of him,’ my mother says. ‘Maarten?’

My father shakes his head and stirs his coffee. ‘Unless it was a former student…My wife and I were both teachers, you see. I’m afraid that I’ve forgotten most of the names of my students by now.’

‘Ah, so you were a teacher too,’ Noorda says.

‘Yes, at a school for difficult children,’ my mother says. ‘Tough work but rewarding.’

‘Hmmm.’

There’s silence while we drink our coffee, until Valerie holds up her picture. ‘Finished!’

We admire her work with appropriate seriousness, even Noorda pays attention to it, which is very kind of him. It’s still
quiet and I wonder who Hubert Ykema is and what he’s got to do with us.

‘Where did you get the name Hubert Ykema?’ I ask when still nothing is said.

Noorda looks away, and when he begins to talk, he sounds almost casual, as if he’s making an offhand comment. Only he’s not.

‘Hubert Ykema is a policeman who worked on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam. Years ago he reported his service gun missing, a Walther P5. The weapon was never recovered, but the ballistic analysis has revealed that the bullets that killed Lydia came from that same gun. Hubert Ykema’s Walther P5.’

Silence descends.

‘So you’ll understand,’ Noorda continues, ‘that I’m trying to find out what the connection might be between an Amsterdam policeman and Lydia Salentijn.’

‘Does there have to be one?’ I ask. ‘The gun could have ended up anywhere.’

‘That’s true,’ Noorda admits. ‘There may not have been a direct link to your sister. The gun was probably flogged on the black market. But of course we need to investigate it. There’s also the possibility that Hubert Ykema registered his gun as missing when it wasn’t. These things happen, but we can’t find any reason for him to have done that. We have questioned him, but he was at work on the evening of the murder. Several colleagues can confirm that Ykema didn’t leave the police station in Amsterdam. He claims not to know Lydia, and none of his colleagues recognised her, which doesn’t mean he and Lydia didn’t know each other.’ He directs his question at nobody in
particular, ‘Do you know if Lydia knew anyone in the police force?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ I say.

‘A boyfriend or an ex-boyfriend, perhaps?’ Noorda proposes. ‘Or someone she met recently?’

‘I don’t have a clue,’ my father says, and my mother shakes her head.

‘You should ask my son-in-law,’ she says.

Noorda nods. ‘If I might wait for him here.?’

‘Of course,’ my mother says.

Noorda turns to me again. ‘You’re the only link I’ve been able to find.’ He gives me an almost apologetic look, which he should, because what he is suggesting is not pleasant.

‘Because I used to live in Amsterdam?’ I say with raised eyebrows.

Noorda shrugs. ‘It’s not much, I’ll admit it. Your college was on the Korte Prinsengracht. Hubert Ykema worked at the police station on the Prinsengracht. That’s not far away.’

I stare at the inspector, wondering if he’s lost his mind.

‘And so?’ I ask.

‘Have you ever been to that police station?’

I reflect. ‘Once. My purse was stolen and I reported it.’

‘And did you meet Mr Ykema on that occasion?’

‘Certainly not. Well, at least not that I know. As I said, I don’t know the man.’

Noorda sighs. Every wrinkle and groove in his weathered face expresses doubt.

‘But there has to be a connection,’ he says as he taps his notebook on his knee. ‘You and your sister look very alike.’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘that’s often the case with identical twins.’

‘Undoubtedly you’ve often been mistaken for each other,’ Noorda hypothesises.

I nod.

‘I used to be friends with identical twins,’ Noorda says in a
confiding tone. ‘We had so much fun together, especially when they swapped classes with each other at school. They weren’t in the same class, you know. One was good at maths, the other at English. They took each other’s place in tests. It was wonderful!’

I smile. ‘Lydia and I did that once or twice as well.’

‘Only as children, I presume,’ Noorda says. ‘Or did you do it as adults too?’

‘No.’

‘Never?’

‘Never.’

Noorda seems disappointed by this reply. ‘So it’s not possible that someone mistook one of you for the other.’

‘Well, yes, of course it’s possible. But we wouldn’t have intended them to.’ I look at my parents and see that they are feeling as uncomfortable as I am. My father puts his coffee cup down on the table with more force than necessary.

‘Do you think someone wanted to shoot Elisa instead of Lydia, Inspector?’

‘We do have to take that into account. I’d like you to think about that, Miss van Woerkom.’

I nod, but I suspect that my face says it all. Who on earth would want to murder me? On the other hand, who would want to murder Lydia…?

Raoul doesn’t know who Hubert Ykema is either, he’s never heard of the man, and so Noorda leaves none the wiser. I wonder what he’d expected. That gun must have been sold on the black market and passed from hand to hand. Try tracking down the murderer that way. But it strengthens my feeling that some kind of criminal was settling accounts with Lydia, and that leads to just one person: Bilal.

As I’m seeing Noorda out, I ask him why they’ve let Bilal go, why it’s so difficult to build a case against him. We stand in the
sun in the front garden and I light up a cigarette. It’s a lovely evening in early June and a light breeze shakes the heavy foliage of the trees lining the street. I’m surprised when Noorda lights up a cigarette too.

‘If you bring someone up before the judge, you have to have enough evidence to be able to convict them,’ he says. ‘We don’t have any evidence, only suspicions. Assrouti would certainly get off and then we wouldn’t be able to charge him a second time if some evidence did turn up, Miss van Woerkom.’

‘Call me Elisa. Do you think Bilal managed to get hold of Hubert Ykema’s gun?’

‘I’m not ruling anything out.’

I sigh and tap the ash from my cigarette. ‘Are you having Bilal followed? I mean, he might not have done it himself, but he’s got friends who could have done it.’

‘I’d like to, but I just don’t have sufficient manpower.’

‘What’s going to happen now?’ I persist.

Noorda stares out at the sunny street. His silence continues for so long that he doesn’t need to give me an answer. Anger and a feeling of impotence flare up inside me.

‘I don’t understand this!’ I burst out. ‘That boy threatened my sister with a knife, which makes him not just guilty of intimidation, but also of carrying an illegal weapon, and the police aren’t doing a thing. She gets an anonymous letter and not a single one of you has been able to work out who sent it.’

‘We can’t just—’ begins Noorda, but I interrupt him.

‘If you policemen paid less attention to the rules when questioning people, perhaps the truth might come out. We’d be better off considering the victim’s rights for once.’

I throw my cigarette onto the ground and when Noorda doesn’t react, I head for the door.

‘Miss van Woerkom,’ Noorda says. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that Bilal Assrouti might be innocent? That someone has taken advantage of his row with your sister?’

Noorda’s words haunt me all evening, but each time I consider his theory, I dismiss it. I can’t imagine, won’t imagine, it being anyone other than Bilal.

On Saturday I go to the zoo with Raoul and Valerie. There have been so many beautiful days in a row, but we’ve chosen the one cold, cloudy day for an afternoon out. Valerie runs ahead, rushing to see everything, though she seems most interested in the round white stones lining the paths. We walk along behind her.

‘Something strange happened recently,’ I tell Raoul.

He turns to me, ‘What?’

I hesitate.

‘Hey!’ Raoul jabs me in the arm. ‘You know you can tell me anything.’

‘I’m sure you won’t believe me.’

Raoul looks at me and raises one eyebrow. ‘I might surprise you.’

Valerie comes running up to us. ‘Daddy! Daddy! Look how pretty!’ She opens her hand and shows him a smooth, oval-shaped stone.