A Death in Rembrandt Square

by Anja de Jager

  ‘Yes. The guy was already dead when I got here.’

  ‘His name?’

  ‘Carlo Sondervelt.’

  Carlo’s body was covered by a sheet. He would be taken away as soon as Forensics were done with him.

  ‘Are there any witnesses?’

  ‘Only the girlfriend. Nancy Kluft.’ He nodded towards a girl who was sitting on the edge of the pavement. ‘She was with him.’ He scratched the back of his head. ‘She held his hand as he bled out.’

  Poor girl. I could hardly see anything of her face: a woollen hat was pulled down low, and she had covered her nose and mouth with the collar of her thick winter coat. Her arms were wrapped around her knees as if she was making herself into as tight a ball as she could.

  ‘It was a single shot to the chest. He was gone before the ambulance had probably even left the hospital.’

  I thanked my colleague. I was concerned that I was still the only CID detective here. I hadn’t been involved in many murder cases yet and didn’t want to make a mistake. I’d called Barry Hoog, the senior detective in the team, and he’d said he’d be on his way, after he’d stopped grumbling about having to get out of bed in the middle of the night.

  I liked Barry. He let me do a lot of stuff by myself but was there when I needed help. As a new detective on the team, I could not have asked for a better mentor. Maybe he’d be here soon, but it could easily take another twenty minutes.

  I was in two minds as to whether I should wait for him. What made up my mind was that, even though a lot of people were now here, the girl looked all alone. She sat around the corner, where she couldn’t see Carlo’s remains. Everybody avoided making eye contact with her. We did it to give her space in her grief, but it came across as if we were treating her like an outcast.

  I went up to her.

  Now, as I lay in bed with Mark’s hand on my stomach and the storm outside pounding the windows, I was worried about the memory of how excited that previous me had been.

  I must have fallen asleep at some point, because I was woken by the sound of silence. I opened my eyes a fraction and noticed that the morning light filtering through the curtains was an unfamiliar colour. Not the blue light that filled my bedroom in the morning, but a more yellow tint. The shapes of shadows on the ceiling were wrong, too. I listened for the sound of traffic rattling along the canal, but all I heard was birdsong.

  I opened my eyes fully and saw Mark’s face. He was fast asleep. His bare arm lay on top of the duvet. His hair was ruffled up into swirls. I reached out to smooth it out, but I didn’t want to wake him, so instead I propped my hand under my head and looked at him. I was content just to watch him sleep. Lying here like this made me feel secure.

  He opened his eyes to slits. ‘I can feel you looking at me,’ he murmured, sleep still thickening his voice.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.’

  ‘It’s okay.’ He didn’t move, but lay there with his gaze touching mine. ‘I’m sure it’ll be time to get up soon. It’s already light.’ He reached out and touched my cheekbone with a careful finger. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Better for being here.’ I suddenly felt self-conscious. ‘I’m sorry about getting so drunk last night.’

  ‘You can tell me at some point why you’re upset. I’ll listen. Or not, if that’s better for you.’ He pushed a lock of hair away from my forehead. ‘It’s not fully understanding someone that makes you love them.’

  I thought it was a quote from a poem but I didn’t know which one. I could think of plenty of flaws in the statement, but it made me smile. I closed my eyes and wished I could hold his words and take them out whenever I needed them.

  Because I knew I was going to need them.

  I was no longer that optimistic CID detective I’d been ten years ago, but I was also no longer the fragile and broken person I’d been last year. I knew I was strong enough to deal with this case. Even if that meant laying bare all my own mistakes.

  Maybe it was time to face up to them.

  I got up and cycled to my flat to feed my cat. Then I went to work and asked for my own files to be brought up from the archives.

  Chapter 10

  With Ruud Klaver’s death, the boss called Ingrid and me into his office and declared that this was now a full murder investigation, and we’d get extra resources to help us. They would focus on the traffic cameras and see if they could discover where the car had been before it hit the victim, and maybe find a number plate. Unfortunately it seemed that the tyre tracks over the central reservation had been too shallow to give us anything useful. The heavy rain on the night of the accident had washed most of them away before Forensics had turned up.

  The boss told us that we should follow the normal procedures. I agreed, because it would take some time before my old files arrived anyway.

  As Ingrid and I walked back to our office, I wondered if that last comment had been a dig at me. I knew I would have behaved differently if Ruud Klaver had been, say, an old-age pensioner rather than a murderer. I wished there was a reset button to my brain and that I could go back to first principles. If he had been anybody else, what would I have done first?

  ‘Did you check if he had any enemies?’ Ingrid asked, as if she’d read my mind and wanted to solve my problem for me.

  ‘Well, he’d murdered someone, so I’m guessing that yes, he did.’ This wasn’t helping.

  ‘There might have been something after those Right to Justice podcasts. We should look into that.’

  Remco had told me yesterday that he didn’t have much knowledge about it and that I should talk to his mother. She wouldn’t be pleased to have to talk to me. I opened the Right to Justice website and scrolled through the comments section. There were no obvious threats. Nobody openly saying that they wanted to kill Ruud Klaver. Most comments were very supportive. A number of people wrote that they couldn’t wait to hear how Sandra was going to prove Ruud’s innocence. Many people had left messages of condolence and said their thoughts were with the family.

  Everybody seemed to believe Sandra Ngo when she’d said she had conclusive evidence.

  I picked up the phone and called her. At first she stayed silent, but eventually she agreed to give me her evidence. Before I could even be surprised about that, she added that she would only do so if I was willing to be interviewed for her podcast. I flat-out refused and she hung up on me.

  I looked out of the window. Yesterday’s downpour had turned into drizzle. I had to trust that we would be able to find the same information that Sandra had. All I needed to do was get the family to tell me. I called Angela Klaver to ask if I could come to her house to ask her a few questions. She probably also knew what the normal procedures were, because she didn’t refuse.

  Ingrid and I went down to the garage to get her car. At the first crossing with a bridge, I looked out of the window to make sure there weren’t any cars coming at us from the side. The traffic was still light, there were no delivery vans parked along the canal to hold us up, and we made it out of the canal ring in no time. Most cyclists in the bike lane were going in the opposite direction, from Amsterdam’s outskirts into the centre. Students were cycling to classes and kids were cycling to school.

  If we kept going straight ahead here, we would cross the exact spot where Ruud Klaver had been hit. Instead, Ingrid took a right. I appreciated the small detour. We drove along the edge of a park. There was only one more turning before we’d be at the house. That turn would lead us onto a road that was a small loop dangling off the main road. As if to make up for that circle, each house was a perfectly square freestanding box.

  It wasn’t the only thing that I knew about the dwellings in this street. I also knew that the ground floor had no window at the front but instead a garage door. That there was a path leading to the front door on the right-hand side. That the living space was on the first floor of the cube.

  I knew all that because I’d been here before.

  Then there’d b
een six of us in a van, all suited up. It was just after 5 a.m. I hadn’t been to bed yet. As we drove to the house, the tension was so thick that I could feel it through to my fingertips. It felt as if we were going to war, and there was no way I was going to let the rest of the squad go without me, no matter what Arjen, my husband, would like me to do. I had been the first detective on the scene; I had talked to the witness. It was the first murder case where I had been this instrumental. There was no way I wasn’t going to be present as we arrested Ruud Klaver.

  But I was going to be careful. It was the least I could do.

  Adrenaline coursed through my veins and it would keep me going despite the tiredness. I wanted to put a hand on my stomach, but stopped myself from making that telltale gesture. Instead I mentally hummed a tune to calm myself down and held onto the hand grip as we were going at high speed around a left-hand bend.

  The van stopped around the corner from where Ruud Klaver lived. His family would be at home as well: a wife and two sons. We waited for the second van to arrive. It was cold, and I stamped my feet on the ground to get warmth into my body. I blew air into the dead of night and watched my white breath disintegrate in the circle of lamplight.

  All the houses were dark. This wasn’t a bad area. I was less worried here than I would have been if we’d been in the Bijlmer. It was a false sense of security: we were going to pick up a man we suspected had shot someone dead three hours ago. It meant we were going in with our guns drawn.

  I looked at Barry Hoog. His presence made me feel more secure. Close to fifty years old, he was the most senior detective in our team, my mentor, and one of the most easy-going people in our department. He was one of those people who smiled a lot, but now his face wore an expression of total concentration. His blond hair was pale against his dark clothes. The circles under his eyes were picked out by the glow coming from the street lights. My call a few hours earlier had woken him up. He fiddled with the straps on his Kevlar vest. It showed that he was nervous too.

  The second van arrived and parked behind ours. Now there were ten of us in total, all in full gear, all fully armed. We gathered behind the vans.

  ‘These houses are all identical: there’s a garage on the ground floor and the main entrance is at the side. There is also an entrance at the back.’ Barry pointed at the house we were standing outside. ‘You two go around the back; you two guard the garage to make sure he doesn’t make a run for it that way. The rest come with me.’ He looked at me.

  I nodded. ‘Yes, boss.’ My heart was pounding but I convinced myself that I wasn’t scared.

  Now I was here again because Ruud Klaver had moved back to where he’d lived when we’d arrested him, after he’d served his prison time. As Ingrid parked the car at the side of the road, it struck me that being here in broad daylight made this very different from the time of the arrest. The sound of traffic on the S106 was audible in the distance like a background hum as we walked towards the house.

  Angela Klaver opened the door before I had even rung the doorbell. She wore the same skin-tight black trousers as she’d been wearing in the hospital yesterday, but had matched them with a black coat with a fleur-de-lis pattern that skimmed the top of her thighs. Her short grey hair was combed away from her forehead.

  She introduced herself to Ingrid, ignoring me. ‘Come on in,’ she said, but she had one hand on the door frame and one on the handle, as if she was going to bar us from entering. ‘My son Remco is here as well.’ She turned her back on me and went up the stairs.

  So many memories came back as I followed her inside. Barry had warned us about those stairs.

  ‘We’ll have to go to the first floor, so there won’t be much room for manoeuvre. The living area is above the garage, and that makes it a little trickier.’

  It was much easier if we could go straight through a front door into a house. The stairs would be steep and narrow, if the architect had kept to normal Amsterdam building conventions.

  ‘You four are on the search team,’ Barry said, pointing to the team that had arrived in the second van. ‘Go in after we’ve secured the premises. Look for the gun.’

  For a moment I thought about asking if I could be on the search team too, but I couldn’t bring myself to say the words. I would just make sure I wasn’t the first one in.

  We streamed down the road towards the house. I paused to let three guys go ahead of me up the path, then followed them. Two of my colleagues came behind me, covering my back. I was pleased that I had successfully manoeuvred myself into the safest position. I got my gun out from the holster on my hip.

  My boots were solid and secure on the paving slabs of the path between the house and the neighbours’ fence. A motion-detection light on the side of the house came on and made our approach easy. The front man had arrived at the door and took up position at the far side of it. The second man paused and looked behind him until the last man in our team nodded that he was in place too. Then the first man banged on the door and shouted to open up, that it was the police.

  A light came on on the first floor.

  The house next door stayed dark. That was good. Interfering neighbours would only distract.

  The front guy banged on the door again. ‘Police! Open up.’

  The door was opened by a short-haired woman in her pyjamas. The front guy took her by the arm and pulled her out of the way. The second guy stood on her other side and explained that we had an arrest warrant.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I heard her say. My colleague’s response was drowned out by the sound of my boots clunking on the stairs. With my gun to the ready, I followed the third man in the column, a guy dressed in dark blue, my eyes on the back of his bulletproof vest.

  This time I followed Ingrid. I could smell it again, that metallic smell of blood. In my mouth was a bitter taste like coffee, but it wasn’t caffeine that had set my pulse racing. I took hold of the handrail by the stairs and gripped it hard. There was a door at the top. I remembered it. We’d stood there.

  Third Man and I paused by the closed door to the living area. Guns drawn, we looked each other in the eye. He wasn’t part of my immediate team – his group had the office two doors down from ours – but in this moment he seemed closer to me than my husband. My gun felt alien and cold under my fingers, and for a second it flashed through my mind that I had never done anything like this before. I ignored that thought and gave my colleague a single nod to confirm that I was ready.

  Then we burst through the door.

  The memories of that night threatened to overwhelm me, and kept slipping in front of my vision until reality became like a doubly exposed photograph. On the other side of that door there would be a blue sofa, a leather chair, a table covered with school books, and a wooden floor. A floor that would later be stained with blood.

  I blinked to get back to today’s reality, focusing on one of the small pictures that lined the stairs. It was a painting of a blood-red starfish. Ingrid pushed the handle and opened the door. I closed my eyes for a second, then opened them to look at the room I could now see. The floor wasn’t wood. There was a dove-grey carpet. The sofa was no longer blue but white. No school books, but a bunch of flowers stood in the middle of the table. Angela had redone the whole interior. Maybe before her husband was released from prison. Maybe when her sons had left home.

  Maybe immediately after that day.

  The inside was so altered that I could push the memories back to the corner of my mind. I could almost fool myself into thinking that this was a different place altogether and that the man who greeted us was not the eighteen-year-old who’d been there that night.

  The garage took up the ground floor of the house. The L-shaped layout of the first floor was reversed, with the open kitchen at the front, looking out over the street. The sitting area was at the back, to make the most of the view of the large expanse of water of the Sloterplas. Two sofas were tucked into the corner above the stairs. A dining table with six chairs was positioned in front of
a window that took up an entire wall.

  On a sunny morning, it would be a great place to have breakfast. Now it wasn’t sunny, and the window just told me how grey the world was. The clouds were so thick that the sky seemed lowered. Under the strong wind, they must be racing along, but it wasn’t possible to see where one cloud started and the other ended.

  To fit in with the outdoor colour scheme, Remco wasn’t wearing his suit but a very thick charcoal-grey jumper. Having flown in from Dubai yesterday morning, he must be feeling the cold. He must also be exhausted, but it didn’t show because of the tan. His startling light-blue eyes were so pale, they reminded me of what my mother’s eyes had looked like before she’d had her cataracts fixed.

  ‘How are you?’ he said.

  ‘I’m fine.’ There was only a small bruise on my cheekbone that I’d managed to disguise quite well with make-up. I had hoped Angela would offer me some coffee, but she didn’t, and I wasn’t going to ask.

  Remco pulled a chair out from the dining table. ‘Have a seat,’ he said. ‘Do you mind if I record this?’

  Ingrid and I exchanged a glance. At least he’d asked. ‘Go ahead,’ Ingrid said.

  He put his phone in the middle of the table and pressed the record button.

  I waited until Angela had sat down next to him. ‘This is a great view,’ I said to make small talk.

  Neither Angela nor her son responded.

  ‘We’re looking into your husband’s – your father’s – accident,’ Ingrid said.

  Still silence from the other side of the table.

  In my decades as a police detective, I’d come to expect certain attitudes towards the police force based on where and how people lived. Yes, they were my own personal stereotypes, but if you go to the different areas of Amsterdam often enough, you come to realise that sometimes stereotypes exist for a reason.

  ‘Actually, we’re thinking it may not have been an accident,’ Ingrid continued. ‘We’re concerned it might have been deliberate.’