A Death in Rembrandt Square

by Anja de Jager

  ‘Hospitals are confusing, don’t you think?’ She smiled, but I could tell that she was trying not to cry.

  I thought hospitals were distressing, depressing and thoroughly unpleasant, with an overpowering disinfectant smell that didn’t hide the odour of illness. I decided it was best not to share that opinion with her. ‘Where are you trying to get to?’ I asked.

  ‘My husband’s in intensive care.’

  I stepped into the lift. ‘I know where that is. Come with me, I’ll take you there.’

  She nodded gratefully. ‘I’ve been up and down twice now. It’s good that he’s here. They’ll look after him. I really couldn’t.’

  ‘I’m sure they will.’ To ask her what was wrong with him seemed an intrusion.

  It was only one floor up to the ICU. I was going to point the woman in the right direction, but when the lift doors opened, instead of the normal hushed silence, I heard shouting.

  ‘You’re a murderer!’ a man yelled.

  I took the woman by the elbow and guided her out of the lift. ‘The ICU is just through there, but you’d better stay here for a moment,’ I said. ‘Have a seat. I’ll go and check it out.’ It was safe here, where a double set of doors separated her from whatever was happening on the other side.

  ‘Be careful,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll be okay.’ I gave her arm a reassuring squeeze. ‘I’m a police detective.’

  As soon as I had pushed the button to open the doors, I saw Dennis Klaver, standing toe to toe with his brother. A girl at the nurses’ station was on the phone. I guessed she was calling security. There was no time to wait for them.

  Dennis had his back to me as I rushed down the corridor. Remco didn’t make eye contact with his brother but stared at the wall over his shoulder. ‘It’s what he would have wanted,’ he said.

  ‘What he wanted? It’s what you wanted! I know you hated him.’

  Things had escalated severely in the three hours since I’d last been here.

  ‘Dennis, calm down,’ his mother said. ‘It wasn’t just Remco. We agreed.’

  ‘So what? We killed him because the majority of the family wanted it? Murder by democracy? This is crazy!’

  Killed him? Had Angela and Remco decided to switch off Ruud’s life-support machine? That seemed too fast.

  ‘He wasn’t going to wake up, Dennis.’ Remco looked pale but his voice was steady. ‘He had already died. He died when the car hit him. He wasn’t going to wake up.’

  ‘No! He was going to be fine. And you . . .’ Dennis fell silent. His body language changed. His arms tensed and his hands balled into fists. He was much taller and broader than his older brother.

  The problems always started when the shouting ended.

  ‘Stop!’ I yelled, but he didn’t listen. I ran the last couple of steps and managed to catch hold of his wrist before he could punch his brother.

  He spun round and pulled his arm up to get it away from my grip. He was on my left-hand side, my weaker side, otherwise I would have had a chance to restrain him. A small chance. But I couldn’t contain him, and his hand hit me in the face. It wasn’t hard – he wasn’t trying to punch me on purpose; it was just the momentum from the upward movement – but pain flared where his knuckles caught my cheekbone. Tears jumped to my eyes.

  He didn’t look at what he’d done; he just stormed away and didn’t turn back. I doubted he even knew he’d made contact. His mother followed him.

  He hadn’t meant to hurt me; it had been an accident.

  Just like last time.

  I wondered if he remembered that, because I certainly did.

  All these thoughts flashed through my mind as I sank to the floor with my back against the wall. I watched him leave. I didn’t try to stop him.

  The nurse put the phone down and rushed to me. ‘Are you okay?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine. Just give me a minute.’

  Remco sat down on the floor next to me. He leaned forward to examine my face. There probably wouldn’t be a mark; the punch hadn’t been that hard. Maybe only a graze.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Our father just passed away. My brother’s very upset.’ He leaned his head against the wall. ‘You should have let him hit me. It would have made both of us feel better.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘We’d said we didn’t want him to be resuscitated,’ Remco said. ‘But then, when it actually happened, when he went into cardiac arrest right before our eyes, I guess it was different. Reality is different, isn’t it?’

  ‘Why does Dennis blame you?’

  ‘I told the doctors not to do CPR. Not to shock him. I stopped them.’ He hid his face in his hands for a second. ‘I told them to let him go. I confirmed that that was what we wanted.’

  ‘Wasn’t that in his notes as well?’

  ‘I don’t know. Everything happened so fast, it was a bit of a blur. Dennis is only angry with me because that’s easier than being angry with the doctors or with our mother.’

  ‘It’s hard to make that kind of decision.’ My head was spinning even though it was supported by the cold wall behind me.

  ‘My brother knows it was the right thing to do. We talked about it as soon as I got here. He’d reluctantly agreed until . . . well, until it actually happened.’

  At least they hadn’t had to switch off the machine. ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ I said. If he’d been sitting within arm’s reach, I would have patted him on the shoulder.

  We stayed on the corridor floor in silence for a minute or so, both working hard to control our emotions, even though I could only imagine that our feelings about his father’s death were very different. Eventually I turned to face him. He’d got changed since this morning, and he looked years younger than he’d done when he was wearing his suit and talking into his phone. Maybe it wasn’t due to his lack of business attire; maybe you got this lost look when a parent died. Luckily I didn’t know that yet.

  ‘Did you fly in this morning?’ I said softly. ‘I heard you live in Dubai.’

  Remco smiled awkwardly. ‘Just in case my brother was accusing me of something else?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.’

  ‘It’s okay. I understand, especially with Dennis calling me a murderer. I was at home, in Dubai, and came here on the overnight flight after my mother called last night.’

  ‘And there are plenty of witnesses to that?’

  ‘A plane full. And airline personnel as well. Also, my colleagues can confirm that I was at work in Dubai on the day of my father’s accident. It’s a seven-hour flight.’

  ‘Good. That’s good.’ I felt bad about asking him that question, but with Ruud Klaver’s death, this had just turned into a murder case. I was pleased that at least someone had an alibi, especially someone whose brother had just accused him of being a murderer. ‘Can I ask you something else?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Do you know of anybody who wanted to kill your father? Have there been any threats?’

  ‘I don’t really know. You need to ask my mother. I haven’t heard of anything, but I haven’t been home that much. If there had been, they might not have told me, to be honest.’

  I hesitated before asking my final question. ‘Sandra Ngo said you talked about me in a certain way.’

  Remco’s face turned even paler. ‘She remembered that? I can’t tell you. I really can’t.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I won’t get mad at you.’

  Remco looked at me. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, but he didn’t answer my question.

  Chapter 9

  I headed off and cycled over to Mark Visser’s house. We’d been together for a little over three months now and had got to that stage where it was becoming difficult to decide how to describe him. Boyfriend sounded like we were teenagers, but partner was a bit too serious, even though he’d met my parents.

  I opened the front door with the key I’d now added to the set I carried around with me. Maybe once y
ou’d done the parent thing and had keys to each other’s place, you might as well admit that things were serious. I shouted out that I was here, and Mark answered from the kitchen.

  I hung my coat over the back of a dining-room chair and walked up to him to give him a hug from behind. He turned his head for a kiss. I loved seeing him busy in the kitchen. I lifted the lid on a pan. It was couscous. I knew I should really cook for him one day, but he was so much better at it than I was. It was embarrassing really.

  He ran his thumb carefully over my cheekbone. ‘What happened?’ There must have been a bruise or a scratch. It didn’t hurt much. ‘Do you want me to put some cream on that?’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I said. ‘Just an accident.’

  ‘How was your day otherwise?’ he asked. ‘Apart from being hit in the face by accident?’

  ‘I met Sandra Ngo.’

  ‘The woman from the podcast?’

  ‘She said she was going to release a special episode of Right to Justice tonight. Ruud Klaver died today.’

  ‘Oh.’ He paused. He clearly didn’t know whether he should say that he felt sorry about it, or that it was a good thing. He chose the smart option and went back to stirring the food.

  I smoothed the swirled-up hair at the back of his head.

  ‘Do you want to listen to it?’ he said.

  ‘To what?’

  ‘The podcast. If you want to, I can hook up my iPad to the speakers. I’ll listen to it with you.’

  Even though I wasn’t worried about what Right to Justice was going to come up with, it would be comforting to listen to it with someone else. It would also be good not to hear Sandra’s voice via my headphones, where it often seemed she was talking directly to my mind.

  At my nod, Mark gave me another quick kiss and then took his iPad out of its sleeve to find the podcast. ‘Do you want to serve up while I do this?’ he asked. ‘I think it’s ready.’

  ‘Sure.’ I ladled the stew onto big plates and added some couscous. I wasn’t entirely sure how much to dole out, but we could always come back for seconds. I told myself I wasn’t nervous, and my hands didn’t shake as I carried our plates to the table. The six previous episodes of Right to Justice hadn’t uncovered anything. They’d gone through every detail of the murder of Carlo Sondervelt, but there hadn’t been any new information so far. Or at least nothing that was new to me. There was probably plenty that was new to the listeners, who were glued to their earphones with every broadcast, hoping Right to Justice would repeat the success of the previous series and find that someone who’d spent years in prison had actually been innocent.

  The theme tune started. I took a forkful of stew as if to prove that I had nothing to worry about. ‘Mm, this is nice,’ I said.

  ‘Shh. If we’re going to listen to this, let’s listen.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Welcome to the latest edition of Right to Justice.’ Sandra’s voice came out of the speakers. ‘Because Ruud Klaver passed away earlier today, we’re broadcasting our last interview with him. Our thoughts are with his family at this tough time.’

  I thought back to the two brothers fighting in the hospital. A tough time indeed.

  ‘Last week, we stopped at the point where Ruud Klaver had been arrested. Let’s give you a quick recap of what we’d covered so far. Ten years ago, Carlo Sondervelt was shot, and died, in the heart of Amsterdam’s nightlife district, just around the corner from Rembrandt Square. He was with his girlfriend, Nancy. She saw the attacker and recognised him as the man Carlo had been in a fight with earlier in the evening. Based on her witness statement, the police were quick to arrest Ruud Klaver.’

  I ate some more. Mark looked at me intently, as if he wanted to read my every reaction from my face. He understood how important this was to me.

  ‘Now we’ll go to the interview,’ Sandra said. ‘And I want to thank Ruud Klaver’s family for letting us air this.’

  The quality of the sound changed. It was no longer as crisp as it had been when it had just been Sandra talking. Instead there was a hum in the background. I thought it was probably traffic, and I wondered where they had recorded this. Then I wondered when they had recorded it. Maybe it had been on the day of his accident. I would check that with Sandra later. It seemed important.

  ‘I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill Carlo.’ It was strange to hear the dead man’s voice. There had been only fragments of his words in the previous episodes. He sounded exactly the same as he’d done ten years ago. ‘I punched him, I hit him, we had a fight, but I left. I was going to go home.’

  ‘But you didn’t go home.’

  ‘No. If only I had, because then I would have had an alibi. But I knew my wife would be upset with me for drinking and fighting, and I wanted to clear my head.’

  ‘What did you do?’ Sandra’s voice wasn’t confrontational, but soothing, as if she wanted to coax the whole story from him. I wondered if she’d ever meant for this interview to be broadcast like this, in its entirety.

  ‘I walked around for a while,’ he said.

  ‘And you finally got home . . .’

  ‘A couple of hours later.’

  That famous I-was-just-walking-around excuse. The truth of the matter was that, after the fight, Ruud had waited for them. Carlo had gone to another bar with his girlfriend and had one more drink. Ruud had waited with a gun for him to come out. Then he’d shot him. And why? Because Carlo had punched him in the face an hour and a half earlier. Because this young kid, this student, had been stronger than the forty-year-old Ruud. Or maybe just because he could. Or maybe he had only been trying to teach him a lesson and had never meant to actually kill him.

  But the fact remained that Nancy had seen Ruud, had seen him shoot her boyfriend and had recognised him. She had picked him out of a line-up afterwards too.

  ‘So the police arrested you . . .’

  I had to give Sandra credit: she still didn’t mention my name. She always referred to ‘the police’, or ‘the detective’, or ‘a police officer’. I knew that she was talking about me, of course.

  ‘Yes. Even then I thought it was going to be fine. Sure, I’d beaten the kid up earlier, but I hadn’t killed him.’

  ‘But you couldn’t prove that.’

  ‘No, I couldn’t. I didn’t see anybody, or at least nobody I knew. Nobody could vouch for me.’

  Listening to him now, Ruud sounded like a totally reasonable man. Maybe he had been a totally reasonable man in the last year.

  ‘And you confessed. Is that right?’

  ‘That confession was all lies. The police put so much pressure on me, over and over again, that I didn’t know what I was saying any more. I hadn’t been sleeping, hadn’t been eating, and I just . . . I don’t know . . . I wanted it to be over.’

  ‘Would you say they forced your confession?’

  ‘Oh yes. Definitely. It was coerced.’

  Memories of that moment overwhelmed me. Waves of emotion rolled over me until I had to stop eating. My ears seemed to fill with a high-pitched squeaking noise that pierced my brain. It was as if my mind knew that I could no longer cope with listening to Ruud Klaver’s voice and was providing me with a sound to drown it out.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Mark said.

  I wanted to reach out and stop the podcast.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine.’ At what point in a relationship do you reveal the most painful parts of your past? Just having someone else’s key doesn’t mean that everything has to be out in the open.

  He didn’t press me. He knew that whatever there was to tell, I’d talk to him about it when I was ready.

  I really should tell him why listening made me so upset. He must think I couldn’t listen any more because I was being accused of having coerced a confession. I hadn’t, because Ruud Klaver had had his lawyer with him at all times. Maybe Mark thought, like my mother, that I was worried Sandra Ngo would discover something about the case that I’d missed. I wasn’t. I was confident that this conviction was solid.
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br />   Because whatever Ruud Klaver might have said, he’d done it. He’d murdered Carlo Sondervelt.

  The rain tapped incessantly at the window like a memory demanding to be let in. I was warm and protected, wrapped in the duvet with Mark’s arm draped over my waist. The weight of his arm actually made me feel grounded. Compared to a year ago, when I’d been a fragile mess, I was solid. I knew that it would take a lot of force to push me over and break me again. It was a very pleasing feeling, this sense that I was strong. Maybe at the age of forty-three I had finally grown up.

  Mark moved in his sleep and nestled his face closer into the corner between my shoulder and my neck. His hand was resting on my stomach and I covered it with mine. I knew I’d messed up in this case, but I also knew I’d done everything within my power to make things right.

  Or at least as right as I could make them.

  In my guilt, had I pushed too hard? That was possible. Because the only way to atone had been to put the murderer in prison, especially when another perpetrator was out of reach.

  It was mildly ironic that being happy with someone else made me feel safe enough to think back to the first time I’d met Nancy, at the crime scene, ten years ago. I could picture it all again now.

  Even though the police cordon had kept people away from the place where Carlo Sondervelt had died, the noises they made kept streaming over from Rembrandt Square: laughter, shouting and singing. The sound of fun coming from further down the street bumped into the sound of grief in this part of the alley. I’d been in CID for a couple of years and started to recognise the noises of a late-night crime scene: the swishing of the forensic scientists’ footsteps like drums played with a brush, the clicking of the cameras and the wail of crying. On the corner of the narrow street was a bar. The shooting had cleared it out. Unfortunately, nobody had seen anything. Now the wind blew a discarded McDonald’s wrapper down the alley until it was halted by the wheel of one of the many bikes that were stacked against the wall.

  One of my uniformed colleagues approached me.

  ‘You just caught me at the end of my shift,’ I said. I looked like a Michelin man in my thick coat, and warmth radiated from my stomach. ‘Were you the first officer on the scene?’