Assignment in Amsterdam

by Carrie Bedford

  “We’ve collected all our things and locked up,” Sam said. “We’re waiting to hear from the lawyer about whether Pieter Janssen wishes to proceed with the sale of the house.” He rubbed his eyes. “Which I sincerely hope he does. At that point, we would be able to resume working again.”

  “Sit tight for now,” Nouwen said. “As part of our murder investigation, we will conduct a search of the house. Detective Lange will stay to explain the details to you. And she’ll give you my direct number. If anything happens, or if anything occurs to you, call me at once.”

  With that, he turned and left.

  Detective Lange sat down on Sam’s empty chair. She explained that, as the Janssen house wasn’t the scene of the crime, the search would simply be for any evidence that might cast light on Eline’s murder.

  “What about the tunnel and the office?” I asked. “Will you try to find out who’s using them?”

  “We’ll need to hear from Pieter Janssen, as the house owner, in order to initiate any enquiries in that direction. There’s no law against tunnels, you know, or having an office in your house.”

  “But what if they are connected in some way to Eline’s murder?” I asked.

  Lange tilted her head. “What makes you think that?”

  I wanted to tell her that Sam was in danger too, and to explain my theory that the house was the source of the threat to him. But I couldn’t talk about auras, especially with Sam listening, so I shrugged and said nothing. Lange closed her notebook and pulled a piece of blue elastic around it to keep it closed. “We’ll be in touch.”

  While Karen walked her back downstairs, we sat in silence for a while. I was still coming to terms with the fact that Eline’s death wasn’t an accident.

  “This is all very irritating,” Moresby said at last. “We have to keep the pressure on Bleeker to get the paperwork sorted out.”

  Sam and I looked at each other. It was as if Moresby hadn’t heard a word about Eline being murdered, he was so focused on the project.

  Sam nodded. “Well, we’ll know more today after Bleeker’s meeting with Pieter Janssen. We’ll either be closing down the project or setting things in motion again.”

  “Closing the project down is out of the question,” Moresby objected.

  “I hope you’re right. I’ll do everything I can to keep things moving forward, I promise.”

  “I’m going to my hotel. I can work from there,” Moresby went on. “Let’s plan on reconvening when we hear from Bleeker.”

  He must have passed Karen on the stairs as she came back up after seeing Lange out.

  “That man is quite rude,” she commented. “Listen, we have the bank appointment at ten, so I’m going to do a bit of work here until it’s time to leave.”

  “We probably should have mentioned the safety deposit box to the police,” Sam commented.

  Karen shrugged. “I think it will contain her mother’s jewelry. They don’t need to know about that sort of thing. And once we’ve done that, I think we should do some more research.”

  She raised an eyebrow at me, and I nodded. “We need to dig around for info on the nephew,” I said. “And track down the grey hoodie chap.”

  Sam was aghast. “What? You have to be kidding. Let the police do their job. There’s nothing we can do.”

  “We can’t rely on the police to move quickly enough to protect you,” I said. “We need to get involved and learn everything we possibly can.”

  “You’re not a detective, Kate. How can you achieve anything faster than the police can?”

  “I’ve had some practice. And I’m far more motivated than Nouwen. I know there’s another life at stake— yours— and he doesn’t.”

  “I want to find out who killed Eline,” Karen went on. “And if that helps us work out what threatens Sam here, all the better.”

  “The police are working on it,” Sam said. “They’ll find the killer. They just need some time.”

  Karen muttered something in Dutch. “I wouldn’t even trust the police to solve a crossword puzzle,” she translated for us.

  “I’ve never heard anything bad about the Dutch police,” I said.

  Karen shrugged. “I’m sure most are good. But not all. About ten years ago, my brother-in-law was accused of theft, a heist from an art gallery in The Hague. He wasn’t even in the city the night it happened and he’s a law-abiding citizen. They arrested him anyway and held him in a prison cell. Eventually, they let him go, when their so-called eyewitness turned out to be highly unreliable. But the experience traumatized him. I prefer to keep my distance from the police, and I don’t like that detective, Nouwen. What did you think of him?”

  “Seems like a good chap,” Sam said.

  “Maybe we should tell him about the danger to Sam?” Karen said to me, but there was a tone of doubt in her voice.

  I thought back to my previous encounters with the police. There was the officer in London who’d thought my active participation in the investigation was a sign of guilt; for a while, I’d been the prime suspect in a murder case. I shivered at the memory. More recently, a dour Scottish detective had done his best to relinquish his preconceptions and had accepted, more or less, what I told him about auras and the imminent danger they represented. It had been a blessing to have his support. But Nouwen didn’t seem the type to collaborate, and his main objective right now was to find out what happened to Eline, a wealthy Dutch citizen. I doubted he’d pay me any attention or worry very much about Sam, a very alive Brit who happened to be passing through Amsterdam.

  “Not yet,” I said. “Let’s see what happens if we meet him again.”

  “If I get a vote,” Sam said. “I’d choose not to say anything to him. I don’t want him looking at me like a victim.” He raised his chin and stared at me. “I don’t want anyone to treat me like a victim. I’ve been through that once and that was enough.”

  Karen glared at him. “Don’t be hard on Kate,” she said. “That’s like shooting the messenger. She’s just doing her best to save your life.”

  19

  In the aftermath of the detectives’ visit, the flat felt very quiet and none of us seemed to want to talk much. Karen said she was going to mark papers in her room, and Sam went off to ring Terry, so I settled at the kitchen table and opened my laptop.

  A deluge of work emails from my colleagues had flooded my inbox. There were several from Alan, too, asking how the project was going. I sent a vaguely worded response, saying that the client liked my designs so far, which was true, and that we were on a temporary hold while the lawyer looked into some estate planning issues, which was sort of true. I decided it was all right to withhold the whole story until we knew more. At least until we could work out what came next.

  With my emails answered, my eyes came to rest on the papers that Karen had found in Eline’s safety deposit box, still neatly stacked on the kitchen table: the copy of the letter Tomas had written to Martin Eyghels, and the bank statements that didn’t show any large money transfers. Who was this Martin Eyghels? I wondered if he could be the man with the goatee who was following Eline and watching us.

  I opened my browser and googled his name, expecting a handful of entries. Most people had some sort of online presence but, strangely, Eyghels didn’t. In fact, his name only showed up once, on a Dutch history website, as a merchant trading with the Dutch East India Company, or the VOC as Sam called it, in the mid 1600s. He had sailed to Batavia where he stayed for almost ten years before traveling back to Amsterdam. I stared at the screen, bemused. Had he known Jacob Hals, the man who’d built this property? Could there be a modern-day Martin Eyghels who’d bought the house because of some centuries-old connection to it? Or was it just an assumed name? That was an interesting possibility.

  An alarm on my phone pinged. It was time to leave for the bank. I closed my computer and went into the living room to find Sam. He was standing at the window, staring out, and not on his phone for a change.

  “Are you all rig
ht?” I asked.

  He turned to me. “I’m worried about Alex. It’s gone ten-thirty. She must be awake by now but she’s not answering my texts.”

  A cold puddle of unease sloshed around in my stomach. Where was Alex? It didn’t seem like her to disappear on us, but then, I reflected, I didn’t really know her that well. Could it be that I’d misread her? She’d told us she acted in a theater group. Had she been playing a role here? Did she know more than she was letting on? Or was something really wrong?

  Summoning a forced smile, I joined Sam at the window. “Try not to worry. She’s probably doing something with her aunt.”

  “On a workday?”

  “She doesn’t have an aura, Sam. That means she’s going to be all right.”

  I wasn’t feeling as confident as I tried to sound. We’d stumbled into something frightening: the old house with all its secrets, Eline’s murder, Tessa’s death, the strange behavior of Pieter Janssen.

  “Come on. It’s time to go the bank,” I said, pushing those dark thoughts away.

  “You don’t need me for that. I’ll wait for you here.”

  “No. You’re coming with us. We need to stay together until this is all sorted.”

  I didn’t mean to, but my eyes drifted up to the space over his head.

  “It’s still there then.”

  I nodded.

  Karen came in, buttoning up her wool coat. “Time to go.”

  I was tying my scarf around my neck when Sam’s phone pinged. “It’s a text from Alex.” He smiled and lifted the screen for me to see.

  “Sorry I’m running late! Be there soon as I can!!”

  “I’ll tell her not to rush, that we’ll be back here at midday.” Sam said, typing the message.

  Karen had ordered a taxi to take us to the bank, an impressive building, with stone steps leading to a columned porch. Glass doors opened to a marble-clad lobby filled with people. It was very different from the local branch of my bank in Bayswater, crammed into a sad building from the 1970s.

  Karen went off to find the manager and soon came back, accompanied by a middle-aged woman with cat-eye glasses. “I will take you down,” she said. “But only two of you, for security reasons.”

  “Sam, you go with Karen,” I said. “I’ll wait.”

  Sam would be safe in a bank vault, I reasoned, more than he would be in this busy lobby with so many people coming and going. I was sorry to miss the experience of opening a safety deposit box, but I settled on an upholstered chair in a corner and flipped through a glossy magazine, looking at pictures of elegant homes without understanding a word of the articles.

  Several minutes later, the skin on the back of my neck prickled. I looked up and glimpsed the man with the goatee beard. Dressed today in a black anorak, he was leaning against a marble pillar, pretending to look at his phone, but he wasn’t. He was scanning the lobby. When he saw me watching him, he gave a slow smile. More of a smirk really.

  I shivered. His eyes were very light, not blue like the detective’s, but almost colorless. I gripped the pages of the magazine so that my hands wouldn’t shake. The place was crowded. He wouldn’t dare to try anything here, surely. I looked for a security guard and saw two, one near the front door and one closer to the teller windows.

  I relinquished the magazine and pulled out my phone. Quickly, I texted Detective Nouwen. When I looked up, the goatee man had disappeared. Damn. I should have kept my eyes on him. This might have been a good place to confront him, to demand he tell me why he was following us. I hurried to the doors and peered along the crowded street. There was no sign of him. As I walked slowly back to my seat, my phone pinged with a message from Nouwen, telling me not to follow the man and to stay safe.

  A few minutes later, Sam and Karen appeared.

  “That man was here,” I said at once. “The one with the goatee. He’s definitely following us.”

  Karen grabbed my hand. “Are you all right? We should tell the police.”

  “I did.”

  “Good, because we have things to tell you. Let’s go get a coffee.”

  Opposite the bank, we found a bright, modern cafe furnished with white tables and lime green chairs. The smell of coffee and sugar blended with the scent of dozens of vanilla candles lit along the bar and on each table. We sat in a corner and ordered coffees and poffertejs, those delicious little pancakes covered with powdered sugar.

  While we ate, Karen showed me a photo of some expensive-looking jewelry. “This was all in the box. I know Eline intended me to have it, but, really, what would I do with it? I left it there for now. But there’s also this.”

  She lifted a large white envelope from her bag and showed it to me. Some Dutch words were neatly hand-printed on it. “It says ‘Important. Do Not Throw Away.’ And that is Tomas’s writing, not Eline’s.”

  Sam held out a small velvet box. “We found this in there too.” He opened it to reveal a man’s signet ring.

  “That was Tomas’s,” Karen said. It was a simple platinum band with a small, square face bearing a heraldic design of some kind.

  “He wore it all the time. I assume Eline put it in the safety deposit box after he died. Maybe at the same time as she wrote this note to me.” She showed me a lavender-colored envelope. “I haven’t read it yet.” Her voice broke.

  I put my hand on her arm. “I’m so sorry you lost your friend.”

  Karen pushed her plate away and wiped her fingers on her napkin. “Well, let’s take a look, shall we? There’s no point in putting it off.”

  She slid a sheet of notepaper from the lavender envelope and read it slowly. “It starts off by saying… well, I won’t read it out loud. It’s just a personal note to me. But then Eline goes on to say that she’s worried that before he died, Tomas had got caught up in something bad.”

  “We already knew that, didn’t we?” I asked through a mouthful of pancake. “That she thought Tomas had a problem with a business deal— the agreement to sell the house back to the previous owner?”

  She shook her head. “No, this is different. Eline says that she’d overheard Tomas talking on the phone about someone called Zeckendorf. Tomas seemed very upset, she said. He begged whoever was on the line to tell Zeckendorf to get off his back.”

  “Who is he? This Zeckendorf? Wait, I’ll take a look online.” I fished in my handbag for my mobile. “No first name?”

  “No—” She was interrupted by Sam, who’d jumped to his feet. Startled, I looked up to see a big grin on his face as he waved to someone across the room. Alex was making her way through the tables. But, when she came closer, my heart clenched. Under the bright lights of the cafe, her blonde hair shimmered. And over it, the air fluttered and coiled.

  20

  The sounds of the cafe receded, drowned out by the rush of blood pulsing in my temples. My heart raced. Alex had an aura. She hadn’t before, so something had to have changed. It must have something to do with her prolonged absence. After several deep breaths, my heart rate settled. The clink of china and cutlery came back into focus, mundane sounds against a soft hum of Dutch conversation.

  “Tell me everything you’ve been up to,” she said, beckoning a waiter over to take her coffee order. “I bet you missed me.”

  “We did.” Sam was gazing at her with his puppy-dog eyes and a broad smile. How could I tell him about her aura?

  “Did you hear about Eline?” Karen paused and took a deep breath. “She was murdered. A detective interviewed us all this morning. He wants to talk to you as well.”

  “Murdered? But I thought she’d drowned.”

  Sam told her what we’d learned from the detective, which wasn’t much really. “And we have other news,” he said. “We broke into the top floor of the Janssen house last night. You won’t believe what we found up there.”

  He waited when the waiter came by with Alex’s coffee and then told her about the office and the vault.

  Her eyes went wide. “Oh my god. That’s incredible. I’m gutted tha
t I missed it.” She picked up her cup and wrapped both hands around it, tapping her fingertips against the white china. She seemed upset.

  “I'm sorry you weren’t there,” I said. “We couldn’t wait. There wasn’t much time. If we hadn’t broken in when we did, we’d have missed the chance completely.”

  “Of course, I understand. Did you tell the detective about it?”

  “Yes,” Sam said. “But before they investigate, they want to hear from Pieter Janssen— who seems to have gone missing.”

  “Missing?”

  “Well, no one has heard from him since we saw him on Tuesday.”

  “That’s strange.” Alex sipped her coffee. “What now? We can’t work on the project anymore? Are we leaving?”

  “Kate and I are planning to stay for another day or two at least to see if Pieter confirms that the sale can go ahead. Bleeker, the lawyer, will let us know as soon as he hears anything. The detectives suggested we hang around in case of further questions, so Moresby is hanging out at his hotel.”

  Sam looked exhausted. He’d put so much work into the building renovation, and now it seemed to have fallen apart. I knew he was worried about the money too.

  Alex put her cup down and rubbed her eyes. She seemed to be on the verge of tears.

  “Is everything all right?” I asked her.

  She shook her head. “No, my aunt isn’t well, which is why I was late. I stayed home with her until I was sure she could manage by herself.”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “I think it’s migraines. She’s had them before.”

  “That’s too bad. I hope she feels better soon.” I pushed my last piece of pancake around on my plate. “How was last night? Did you see Willem? Did he have anything useful to say?”

  Sam shot me a look. “The Spanish Inquisition ended a long time ago,” he said.

  “Sorry. I was just interested, that’s all.” And desperate for any information that might cast light on why Alex was suddenly in danger.