A Death in Rembrandt Square

by Anja de Jager

  I left, as strongly decided as I had been before, regardless of what the boss had said. Still, his suggestion was an interesting one. How would I view this case if it had been someone else’s? When I got back to our office, I opened my files again. I had been too busy thinking about myself when I thought about Carlo Sondervelt’s murder.

  It was great that Thomas was back from his holiday. Ingrid and I hadn’t really talked since our falling-out on Friday, and having our third team member return defused the atmosphere. I wasn’t going to rate it any higher than that.

  ‘How was your break?’ I said to Thomas.

  ‘I’m glad to be back. My kids are more stressful than work.’

  He had two. Eight and ten years old.

  ‘Love your tan,’ Ingrid teased. ‘It even looks real this time.’

  ‘Very funny,’ he said.

  He did like to have a tan all year round. He’d once told me that he thought it made him look younger. I wasn’t sure about that, but it did make him look healthy.

  ‘I saw that your guy died. I didn’t think we were going to be working on that. Any leads?’

  ‘Nothing so far,’ Ingrid said. ‘We haven’t found the car. We haven’t found a motive for the murder. Carlo Sondervelt’s parents have got a very solid alibi, so it doesn’t seem to be revenge for that murder either. Klaver’s family are extremely uncooperative.’ She didn’t look in my direction.

  ‘That shouldn’t be a surprise. Ex-cons’ families normally are.’

  ‘Sandra Ngo says she’s got evidence of his innocence,’ I said.

  ‘Ruud Klaver was innocent?’ Thomas asked.

  ‘That’s what she says.’

  ‘Didn’t he confess?’

  Yes, he’d confessed and we had been relieved. Of course there had been weak points in his conviction. There always were. We never found the gun. There had been no gunpowder residue on Klaver’s hands.

  I looked at our whiteboard and chewed the end of my pen. The boss had suggested that I try to think of the case as Bauer’s work. Or maybe, even better, I could think of it as the work of an unnamed inexperienced CID detective desperate for a result. Someone willing to cut corners in order to get the results she wanted. Was that what I had done?

  It was so hard to think of this as someone else’s case. My memories of that time kept getting in the way.

  I remembered being exhausted during the long interrogation of Ruud Klaver. I’d been about to give up when I’d shifted in my chair and the tight waistband of my trousers had made me suddenly aware of my baby I’d protected at such a high cost.

  And even though I knew it was all in my head, I remembered that it felt as if my baby was saying: you’re doing well, Mummy, let’s get him to admit what he’s done and I’ll be here to listen to him say the words. I’ll be your witness as you make amends.

  I remembered that it gave me new energy so that it seemed as if both of us together got Ruud Klaver to confess. I was strengthened by the knowledge that there was a second being with me who noticed my every move, thought and emotion. At that moment, she was being fed by the feelings of deep relief that I wasn’t showing externally.

  And now I had to consider that it had all been wrong. How was I going to accept that this moment had been . . . what? An error? Force? Coercion?

  I closed the file that I had been reading and pushed it across to Thomas’s desk. It was pointless for me to look at it any longer.

  Thomas was the expert in finding my mistakes.

  Chapter 19

  I zipped up my thick coat against the gale that whipped cold air along the canals. Where the wind hit the skin around my neck, it felt as if it was wicking away any trace of body heat. Mark had told me to wear a scarf this morning, but I had laughingly scolded him for mothering me. Now I was regretting it. He’d been right. He often was.

  The house was on the corner of a road overlooking a little park. In spring and summer it would be a pleasant place to be; it would be green and there would be flowers. Today there was none of that. The trees were stripped bare of their leaves. The wind had free range and blew the empty branches this way and that. What might go back to being a lawn was now a brown expanse of mud edged with puddles. A play area off to the right was empty. The metal bars of the climbing frame were covered with beads of water. The shock-absorbing tiles underneath it were made slippery by the rain. All the kids who normally came here to play were sensibly indoors.

  This morning, Thomas and Ingrid had spent an hour trying to talk me out of doing this. She’d even played me clips of the previous Right to Justice series, where the cop on the case had been completely crucified. This was my last chance to follow her advice. I could just not turn up. That way I would keep my identity hidden. But I would also not get the information I needed.

  I had to do this.

  I had expected a proper recording studio, like the TV channels had. I’d been on Opsporing Verzocht in the past, when we were looking for information from the public on a case where a single witness would make all the difference. Instead this seemed to be Sandra’s house. Or maybe her parents’. I triple-checked the address. I knew I was at the right place and only procrastinating. There was no point in delaying any longer.

  I rang the doorbell. I wasn’t surprised when it opened only seconds later. Sandra must have been waiting for me. Maybe she’d even watched me as I dilly-dallied on her doorstep.

  As soon as I stepped through the front door, she gestured towards a door off to the right.

  ‘There’s a light on your left.’ She closed the front door behind me before I’d even found the switch.

  When I flipped it, a bare light bulb illuminated the tiny corridor. There were wooden steps down. The walls were painted a deep red. The sound of every footstep on the stairs told me that this was a bad idea, but I kept going down.

  ‘It’s straight in front of you.’

  I opened a thick metal door and saw a basement room with padded walls. As if I needed a reminder of my total insanity in being here.

  ‘We’ve soundproofed it so you can’t hear the traffic on the recording,’ Sandra said.

  Two people were already crammed into the room, and there was paper everywhere and yellow Post-its plastered over every surface. It reminded me of Dennis’s newspapered walls. There were no windows. I looked at the Post-its. Sandra didn’t stop me, so I knew there wasn’t any information about Ruud Klaver’s case on any of them. What I could see were recording schedules and notes about the software. A timeline for the podcasts: whom to interview when.

  My name was on a Post-it right in the centre. Lotte Meerman: 16 October @ 11.45. It was written in red ink.

  In the privacy of her own home, Sandra seemed to have made an effort to look as slovenly as possible. One advantage of doing a podcast was that your appearance didn’t matter. Her light-grey jumper had a large red food stain down the front that might have once had something to do with tomatoes. Her hair was released from its customary topknot and fell down to skim the edge of her jaw. As she walked ahead of me through the basement, her moccasin slippers made a swishy sound on the concrete floor.

  The other two people in the room were a young girl with lanky hair, who stared at me as though she needed glasses but was too vain to get them; and a man a little older than me with a bald head and pale skin. Both of them looked as if they never went outside but were stuck in this basement forever, forced to research crimes. It wasn’t so different from my own life, but at least I was allowed out every now and then.

  ‘Please sit here,’ the bald man said. He pointed at an office chair by a black table. This must be the guy who’d visited Carlo’s parents with Sandra. The guy with the same first name as Ruud Klaver’s son.

  ‘Thanks, Dennis,’ I said, to mess with him, because he hadn’t told me his name.

  I was successful, because he stared at me open-mouthed like he was a goldfish. Then he almost fell onto a chair behind a desk and put on a large set of headphones, as if that would guard hi
m against my special mind-reading powers. To avoid looking me in the eye, he focused on the screen of the laptop in front of him.

  All this time, while I was playing mind games with her staff, Sandra had been watching me with a courteous smile that didn’t fool me in the slightest. She might be holding papers in her hands but she might as well be brandishing a knife. Now that I was here, I was reminded of the boss’s advice that I shouldn’t be doing this. That nothing good was going to come from it. But if I wanted the information on Ruud Klaver that I so desperately needed, I had no choice.

  ‘I’m not your enemy,’ Sandra said.

  Well, it sure felt as if I’d infiltrated behind enemy lines.

  The girl picked up a pile of books from the floor, put them on the table and placed a small silver recording device on top so that it was close to our mouths. Even though I couldn’t see the spines of the books, I knew they had been chosen for their thickness rather than the quality of the writing within.

  ‘Can you say something?’ the bald man said.

  ‘Can I have some water, please?’ I asked.

  ‘Perfect. I can hear you clearly.’

  I looked at the girl. ‘Could you get me some water?’ My mouth was dry, as if all the moisture in my body had gone to my sweating hands.

  ‘Oh, sorry. Of course.’ She darted off.

  ‘Sorry, Lotte, I should have offered,’ Sandra said. ‘Do you mind if I call you Lotte for this?’

  ‘Detective Meerman will be fine.’ The temperature in the room seemed to drop by a degree. I smiled to take the sting from the words. ‘I think your listeners will find it easier to follow our conversation if you do that.’

  ‘Sure. If that’s what you prefer.’ She smiled back as sincerely as I had done. ‘I want you to be comfortable.’

  ‘And just to be clear, after we’ve done this interview, you will give me the information you’ve got on Ruud Klaver. You will tell me why you think he didn’t kill Carlo Sondervelt.’

  ‘Why I know he didn’t,’ Sandra corrected me. ‘And yes, I will tell you that. That was the deal, after all.’

  I put my phone on the table and pressed record. ‘I’m sure you won’t mind if I have a record of this conversation as well.’

  ‘Are you concerned about how we’re going to edit it? Worried we’ll take your words out of context?’

  ‘I’m sure you wouldn’t do a thing like that.’

  ‘Go ahead. I don’t mind at all.’

  ‘When are you going to broadcast it?’

  ‘It’s scheduled for Wednesday.’

  I was glad when the girl returned with a glass of water. I took a small sip, just enough to moisten my tongue. ‘Can we start?’ The sooner we began, the sooner it would be over.

  Sandra looked at her sound man, who nodded. ‘I’ll record the introduction later; no need to go over that now.’

  ‘Sure.’

  She got an elastic band out of her trouser pocket and tied her hair back. That must be part of her Right to Justice persona. ‘I’m here with Detective Lotte Meerman to talk about Ruud Klaver.’ The timbre of her voice had changed, dropping maybe half an octave and taking on a mellow honey characteristic. In contrast, her face didn’t change at all. She looked at me with a mixture of politeness and mischief that I found disconcerting. There was a half-smile around her lips that threatened to change into a smirk. ‘Welcome, Detective Meerman, to our Right to Justice podcast.’

  ‘Thank you, Sandra, it’s interesting to be here.’

  She bit her lip both at my use of her first name and at my choice of words. I should have just said: nice to be here. Who cared that it would have been a lie.

  ‘I’m sure the listeners will be very interested in what you have to say about Carlo Sondervelt’s murder. You were the investigating detective on that case, is that right?’

  ‘I was one of the team, to be precise, but yes, I worked on that case.’

  ‘For those people who tuned in to the previous episode, Ruud Klaver told us he’d felt coerced into a confession. You were the detective questioning him, weren’t you?’

  ‘I was. What Klaver didn’t tell you, or at least I didn’t hear it on the podcast, was that his lawyer was with us in the room the whole time. I’m sure she would have stopped the interview if she’d felt I was putting undue pressure on the suspect. Actually,’ I took a sip of water, ‘before we get into the details, I do want to say how sorry I am that Ruud Klaver died. My sympathies are with his family at what must be a tough time for them.’ I didn’t think Sandra would leave that in, but it was worth a try.

  ‘Are you saying that because you no longer believe he was guilty?’

  ‘Whether he was guilty or not is irrelevant in this.’ Sandra’s eyebrows shot up, but I kept talking. ‘A man has died and that’s hard on his family.’

  ‘But if he was a murderer—’

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ I interrupted her. ‘He was convicted of a crime, he was sentenced to time in jail and he served that time. We treat his murder as we would anybody else’s.’

  ‘Right.’ The scepticism was clear in her voice. ‘Let’s go back to Carlo Sondervelt. I hear what you’re saying, but in my eyes, someone was imprisoned wrongly for ten years. You might think his innocence or guilt is irrelevant, but I think Ruud’s death has made it even more heartbreaking that he was locked up for a crime he didn’t commit.’

  Her challenging look made it hard, but I managed to stay silent. I knew that I didn’t have to win every argument. In an interview like this, it was easy to get dragged off course, and I should only say what I was willing to.

  ‘You were convinced that Klaver was guilty because you had a witness,’ she said.

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘A witness who saw Ruud shoot Carlo.’

  ‘That is correct.’ All of this was in the court records anyway.

  ‘And you believed her.’

  ‘There was no reason not to. She was a reliable witness.’

  ‘But you only had her testimony.’

  ‘Well, her witness statement backed up a large amount of circumstantial evidence, such as the blood we found on Klaver’s clothes.’

  ‘For the listeners, let me just point out that Klaver always maintained that this blood came from the fist fight he’d had earlier in the evening with Carlo Sondervelt.’

  ‘Our forensics team argued that this was highly unlikely, based on the pattern that the blood had formed on his clothes.’

  ‘But highly unlikely doesn’t mean impossible.’

  ‘Correct. Highly unlikely just means highly unlikely.’ I thought I managed to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. However much I wanted to aggravate Sandra, I knew it wouldn’t sound good. ‘So when that was backed up by the witness, we felt there was a very strong case to arrest Ruud Klaver for Carlo Sondervelt’s murder.’

  ‘I find this very interesting,’ Sandra said.

  I was wondering what the girl with the lanky hair was doing at this point. She was busy behind me somewhere. If I looked for her, I would probably miss Sandra’s next question. I hated having someone at my back that I couldn’t see.

  The bald man with the headphones was still staring intently at the screen of his laptop. Our voices must be coming through loud and clear because he didn’t give us any signals to the contrary.

  ‘The reason why I’m bringing this up,’ Sandra said, ‘is because it interests me to see why you believe one person and not another. I know that this is the job of the police, but you are still human beings and you can be swayed.’

  ‘Of course we’re still human, and that is why we like to have our opinions backed up by forensic evidence.’

  ‘But there was no CCTV footage of Carlo’s murder.’ She took the elastic band from her hair, shook it loose and tied it back again. All without making a sound.

  ‘Correct.’ Instead of looking at Sandra playing with her hair, I tried to read one of the Post-its on the wall behind her. The writing was tiny.

  ‘Do yo
u think you believed the witness, Carlo’s girlfriend, because she was pregnant?’

  ‘If her pregnancy had anything to do with it, it was only because it meant she wasn’t drinking and therefore was a very reliable witness.’

  ‘Did you breathalyse her?’

  I stopped looking at the yellow Post-its. ‘I can’t remember, to be honest. I would have to check in the files.’

  ‘I know you mentioned this same point in court, and I went through the case files, but I couldn’t find anything that mentioned a breathalyser test. You just made the assumption that she was sober, but maybe she wasn’t. Not everybody is responsible during their pregnancy.’

  ‘She told us—’

  ‘Well she would have done, wouldn’t she? She was the only witness who was going to get the suspect locked up. What was she going to say otherwise?’

  I was in two minds now. Would staying silent be the wise choice, or would it look as if I was giving in and agreeing with Sandra? I took another sip of water and put the glass down carefully so that it wouldn’t make a sound on the recording. ‘What she saw lined up with our forensic evidence.’ It seemed a safe factual statement to go with.

  ‘But there was someone else who saw the incident, wasn’t there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And this person didn’t identify Ruud Klaver.’

  Ruud’s defence lawyer hadn’t done nearly as thorough a job. ‘To clarify: the other witness said he didn’t get a good view of the perpetrator and therefore couldn’t identify him. It’s not as if he said that he’d seen the murderer and it wasn’t Klaver.’

  ‘But you had two witnesses, one the pregnant girlfriend, the other a neutral bystander, and one of them identified Ruud, the other didn’t. You don’t think that’s strange?’

  ‘No, it’s not strange at all. One of them got a clear view, the other didn’t. That happens a lot. And don’t forget that Ruud Klaver pleaded guilty.’

  ‘What if I told you that the barman in the pub said that your pregnant witness had been drinking?’