That focus on equal rights for all road users had created crossings like the one we were standing by, with separate cycle lanes and wide pavements, all divided from each other by knee-high shrubs. The plants were kept low to provide good visibility at any time of the day, and the crossing point for pedestrians and cyclists was controlled by traffic lights. The Comeniusstraat ran due east–west and the Johan Huizingalaan north to south, and the extreme centimetre-perfect right angles of the roads should have provided further safety and security. High poplars were planted close to the houses to break the flat monotony of the roads and shield the people living there from the uninspiring view of a continuous stream of cars.
Today the leaves of those trees whispered in the storm. They whispered of pain and suffering; of blood soaked into the tarmac. They hummed of a life damaged. I wouldn’t have been able to hear it if it hadn’t been so close to the humming of the blood in my veins, as though we were linked via an umbilical cord. The storm gusted down the main road, where it had free rein. It made my jacket flap, and I did up the zip to stop the noise. An empty plastic water bottle came barrelling down the pavement, accelerated by the wind, until its bid for speed was thwarted by a tree trunk.
The road had returned to cleanliness now. Two nights of heavy rain and a street-cleaning team had made sure there was no trace of blood left on the tarmac. But of course there was still evidence of the accident. Not just in the sound of the poplars or the voice of the wind, but in more concrete terms, because Charlie had brought the photos with him, and I could now match up what he had tried to show me in the office with the reality of this crossroads. Ingrid looked over my shoulder.
A car came past. I instinctively took a step back, further onto the safety of the pavement. We were standing in the shadow of a row of three-storey apartment blocks, in front of a florist.
‘Was it here?’ I looked at the gutter in case some shards from a shattered headlight had landed there.
On the other side of the crossing was a carpet shop. Rolls of carpet were stacked up in the window. Even if my flat hadn’t had wooden floors in all the rooms, I wouldn’t have been interested in the rolls in fifty shades of beige. It made me wonder if these blocks of flats were actually an old people’s home or sheltered accommodation, and the shop across the road was purely here to service their needs and cater for their tastes.
‘I think it was on the opposite side,’ Ingrid said.
‘He was walking east to west along the Comeniusstraat,’ Charlie said, eager to help out, ‘and he crossed the Johan Huizingalaan.’
I knew that he’d crossed the main road, because I knew exactly where he’d been going.
‘Forensics swiped the area,’ Charlie continued. ‘We’re still hoping to find some paint fragments from the car. Work out what colour it was, analyse the paint and – if we’re lucky – identify the make of the vehicle.’
‘Sure.’ I pressed the button for the pedestrian light. Even though there were no cars coming, I waited for the little man to turn green. While I waited, I looked at the next photo. More blood. A pair of broken spectacles. He’d crossed at the lights. I looked up at the crossing. It had been dark when these photos had been taken. The road looked different in broad daylight. Not the patchy light from the street lamps, but the scattered light of beams bouncing off clouds. The main road, the Johan Huizingalaan, widened out as it approached the crossing, with an extra lane for cars turning left. Between the two streams of traffic there was a slim raised central reservation of grass, like the world’s narrowest lawn, not even a metre wide.
The lights changed and we crossed the first lane of the road. As I walked, I threw a glance at the photo I was still holding. I could hear a car coming from my left.
‘The second part of this crossing is where Ruud Klaver was hit,’ Charlie said.
I froze. All my muscles tensed. Charlie and Ingrid walked on as if nothing had happened, but I turned to look at the car. It was dark blue. The woman driving it had stopped for the red light. Of course she had stopped.
‘Sorry, the victim, I mean,’ Charlie corrected himself.
The driver and I made eye contact for a second. I didn’t know her. I hurried to catch up with the others to cross the second half of the road. I looked at the photo again and walked to the safety of the pavement as if nothing had happened.
‘He was on this section of the crossing, walking east to west.’
East to west. He’d come from the florist side and crossed to the carpet-shop side. ‘He was walking home, wasn’t he?’ I said.
Charlie looked at me but didn’t ask me how I knew.
‘That can’t be right,’ Ingrid said. ‘The injuries are on his left-hand side?’
Charlie nodded.
‘But if he was here, they should have been on his right. It must have been a car coming from the other direction.’ She took the photo from my hands.
‘No, the witnesses said that the car came from there.’ He pointed towards the viaduct where the S106 crossed high above the Johan Huizingalaan south of where we were. ‘And hit the victim here.’
In my mind, I could see the route the car had taken. It must have formed an arc to the left. He had been hit whilst he was on the leftmost strip of tarmac. That wasn’t where the car should have been. It should have been driving on the right-hand side of the road. I understood why Charlie thought this was a suspicious accident.
‘The car was on the wrong side of the road,’ Ingrid said.
‘Or it swerved to hit him,’ I added. ‘Unless the body was flung up and landed further to the left.’
‘No, that’s why Forensics examined this so closely.’
I looked at the raised central reservation. Unless the car had taken the wrong lane after the roundabout, it must have driven over the grass. Had Forensics checked this? There were no cars coming, so I crossed back to the middle and balanced on the concrete edge of the reservation, careful not to add any footprints to the soft ground. The wind grabbed my hair and whipped it around my face. It tried to push me over. I crouched down and checked the ground. There were faint tyre marks.
‘Look at these,’ I said.
‘Exactly. They’re not as clear as we’d like because of the weather,’ Charlie said. ‘But we recorded the tracks. As soon as we find the car, we’ll be able to match them up.’
This should have been the first thing he showed me. This was the crucial point. The tracks were about two metres away from the crossing. Someone had made a sudden decision to drive over the central reservation and into the oncoming traffic. They had cut across the grass specifically to hit the guy on the crossing.
‘Were there any robberies in the vicinity?’ Ingrid asked. ‘Was this a getaway car? Have you checked?’
‘We checked,’ Charlie replied, ‘but we haven’t found anything. Nothing big happened that night.’
I pulled my hair away from my face.
‘Is there anything else you want to look at?’ he asked me.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen all I need to see for now. We can always come back later.’
It felt as if a ton of weight had landed on my shoulders. I could picture in my head how this had happened. The car would have slowed down as it approached the red light, and the driver would have seen the guy walk across in front of it, just as I had walked in front of the car driven by that woman just now. He’d recognised him, floored the accelerator, bumped over the central reservation and struck him at speed just as he was crossing the second lane.
Charlie was right. This hadn’t been an accident. ‘You guys go ahead and I’ll catch you later,’ I said. ‘There’s something I need to do.’
I had no choice. I had to go to the hospital and see the victim.
Not the murderer, I repeated in my mind, the victim.
I had to do this by myself because I was the only one who couldn’t think of him like that.
Chapter 6
I wasn’t a big fan of hospitals. You could argue that they were places w
here doctors made you better, but to be made better you always had to be ill or injured in the first place. Large sections of this part of Amsterdam had been built in the late sixties and early seventies, all in that architectural no-man’s-land between historic and modern. The buildings of the Slotervaart hospital were blocks of the kind of grey cement that had been the height of fashion in those days, and there’d been uproar some years ago when someone pointed out that from the air their shape formed a swastika. The best that could be said for it was that it was extremely functional.
Nobody stopped me or asked me who I was as I followed the signs leading to the intensive care unit and went up in the lift. As soon as I got out, I noticed a small group of people: two men in their twenties accompanied by an older woman. The older of the two men was dressed in a suit and tie with a long dark-blue overcoat. He had slicked-back blond hair and a suntan. He stood a couple of paces away from the others and was looking down at his phone. The younger was dressed in jeans and a jumper and had small round glasses and a beard. His jeans were dirty and his jumper was unravelling at the cuffs. He was the bear-shaped man I’d seen yesterday with his arm around the woman’s shoulders. The woman was today dressed entirely in black, and her grey hair was smoothed down, as if her outward appearance needed to reflect how serious her husband’s condition was.
I could no longer pretend I didn’t know who these people were. I rubbed my hand over my eyes as if that would wipe away my anger. This was the last moment I had before I became involved in the case.
‘You can’t do this,’ the guy in the glasses was saying.
Suntan stopped looking at his phone for just a second.
‘Seriously, Remco, this is wrong!’ Glasses turned to the woman. ‘Mum? Say something.’
The guy with the suntan was Remco Klaver. I’d only briefly spoken to him at the time. He’d been a teenager then, just about to start university.
‘Dennis,’ Remco said, ‘we’ve got to do the right thing for Dad.’
I felt nauseous. The bearded man with the glasses was Dennis Klaver. I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it, but really I’d known from the first time I saw him outside the hospital. I had just hoped he was someone else. A second cousin once removed, for example.
I had wanted to keep that possibility alive.
The two men didn’t look like brothers at all: one of them so well groomed and the other an obvious mess.
If Dennis had been anybody else, I would have assumed he hadn’t paid attention to what he had put on this morning because his father was in a coma. I would have thought that the bleary look in his eyes was due to worry and lack of sleep. Instead, I wondered if he was homeless. His hair was long and his beard was overly bushy. I wondered if he had been drinking.
I wondered what the last ten years had been like for him.
‘You can’t do this. Not now. Why not wait?’ He grabbed Remco’s arm. ‘You just fly in and make these decisions.’
‘We had a vote.’
‘You’re killing him. You don’t have the right. I know why you’re doing this! You hate him. You’ve always hated him.’
‘Dennis, it isn’t just me. Mum thinks it’s the right thing too.’ Remco looked up, but didn’t really pay attention to me. He only noticed that there was another person listening. ‘And this isn’t the time or the place to be having this conversation.’
‘Oh, there’s a right time and place for deciding to kill your father?’
‘Dennis, that’s enough.’ The mother’s voice was sharp, like a whiplash.
Dennis took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘He can’t decide this.’
His mother put her arm around his shoulders. ‘It’s what Dad would want. He wouldn’t want to suffer.’ Suddenly Angela Klaver looked at me. ‘You look familiar,’ she said. She paused. ‘Oh my God, you’re that policewoman.’
I only nodded. I shouldn’t have been surprised that she’d recognised me. After all, I’d recognised her immediately as well.
Dennis’s face turned ashen. He took a step towards me and then stopped. ‘Have you come to have a look?’ he said. Anger made his voice shoot up so that it sounded like it was on the verge of breaking. Like that of a teenager.
Like that of the kid he’d been at the time.
Remco was momentarily distracted from his phone screen. Now he really looked at me. His eyes were very pale blue against his suntan. He put the phone in his pocket as if he was on autopilot, as if my presence had hypnotised him.
‘What are you doing here?’ Angela glared. ‘This is crazy.’
As if I didn’t know that. I put a hand against the wall to keep myself steady.
‘God, you people really are useless,’ she said.
The two sons were four or five years apart, if I remembered correctly. Ten years ago, Remco had been one of those tall, lanky kids who would grow into their body later. Dennis had just started middle school, was twelve or thirteen, with a spotty face and greasy hair. I tried not to see those kids in the grown-up men in front of me now. They were no longer a murderer’s family. They were a victim’s family. But I remembered that they’d both been at home when we’d arrested their father. Dennis had been a bullet of anger. Remco had reacted differently. If anything, he’d seemed to hang back. He hadn’t got involved. Even when I’d interviewed him later, with his mother present, of course, he hadn’t said much.
He didn’t seem to want to get involved even now. After a ten-second pause, he got his phone out of his pocket again, and turned to it as though what was on the screen was all-important, a life-saver to distract him from the reality of what was going on around him.
Over his shoulder, I saw someone else walking towards us. She was wearing the same coat as yesterday. Her hair was no longer tied in a topknot but hung loose and floppy.
‘Sandra, good to have you here,’ Dennis said. ‘Thanks for coming.’
‘Of course I was going to come.’ Sandra Ngo shook Dennis’s hand, her other hand grabbing his elbow as if she was a vote-winning politician. Then she held out her hand to the man in the suit. ‘Remco, I heard you were here. It’s been a while.’
Remco seemed to pause before he accepted the handshake.
The mother got a hug.
Sandra saw me, but it took her a couple of seconds before she recognised me. ‘Detective Meerman? What are you doing here?’
‘Don’t mind her,’ Dennis said. He pushed open the door to the nearest room. The rest of the family followed him in.
‘I hope your father recovers,’ I said. I was talking to their backs.
Only Sandra threw a glance at me over her shoulder, but even she didn’t say anything.
Through the open door, I could see that a doctor had been waiting at the man’s bedside. Now he was talking to the family. He was speaking softly and I couldn’t catch his words. I did see that the wife was nodding and the younger son bit his lower lip.
When the doctor left the room, I followed him down the corridor. ‘Excuse me.’ I showed my badge. ‘Can I ask you a question?’
The man paused and looked at his watch. ‘If you’re quick.’
‘Of course.’
‘Your patient,’ I said. ‘What’s the prognosis?’
‘He’s in a vegetative state. His brain is damaged from the impact and his heart had stopped for too long. Even though they got it going again in the ambulance, he was oxygen-deprived. He’s also got a broken neck and is paralysed from the neck down.’
Paralysed. If anything was crazy, as Angela had said, it was that. ‘The family . . .’
‘Are going to have to make a decision.’
I nodded. ‘Thank you.’
The doctor rushed away. There was a hushed silence in the intensive care unit that was only interrupted by the beeping of a heart monitor. I peered into the room. Nobody was looking in my direction.
Angela sat at her husband’s side on a small red stool, holding his hand. The only thing that betrayed that she was going through a hard time was the
make-up smudged beneath her eyes.
A phone buzzed. At the sound, she looked up.
‘Sorry,’ Remco said, and silenced it.
‘Oh Remco,’ his mother whispered. ‘You didn’t have to come.’
‘Of course I did.’
‘I was going to call you when he woke up. Then he would have known that you were here.’
‘Mum.’ Remco stayed standing at the foot of his father’s bed. ‘We need to talk about what we’re going to do.’
I knew I was intruding on their privacy, on their moment together, but I couldn’t tear myself away.
Angela Klaver shook her head. ‘He wouldn’t want to be like this.’ Her voice wobbled. ‘He’s locked up all over again.’
Dennis walked up to her and put an arm around her shoulders. He put his other hand on his father’s, careful not to disturb the drip.
With his face largely hidden by the oxygen mask, the man in the bed didn’t look like Ruud Klaver any more. He looked like a stranger. The heart monitor showed a steady beat, and the ventilator making him breathe was moving his ribcage up and down.
He no longer looked like a murderer but like a patient.
Maybe even like a victim.
I left the hospital slowly, pausing under the glass awning. I could wait here, or I could find the nearest tram stop and take line 2 to the Leidseplein, and walk back to the police station from there. The rain was coming down in streams again. It pummelled the awning with the sound of drums, forming a waterfall where there was a dip in the glass.
Instead of going to the Louwesweg to get on the 2, I walked to the Johan Huizingalaan. My umbrella wasn’t big enough to keep me dry, and I felt the rain seeping into the hems of my trousers. The wide road was busy with traffic. I came past the shopping mall with the Albert Heijn supermarket. Cars were speeding in either direction. How come only two people had seen the accident? The car had crashed into the man around 8 p.m. The shops closed at 6 p.m. on Tuesdays, so traffic would have died down quite a bit by then. Most people would have been at home. My left arm was getting soaked where the umbrella didn’t cover me. An elderly man coming in the opposite direction stared at me.
A Death in Rembrandt Square Page 4