A Death in Rembrandt Square

by Anja de Jager

  Thomas opened the file that Sandra had given me and turned over the pages I’d looked at earlier. ‘This guy Maarten ran a couple of restaurants and bars in Arnhem and Amsterdam?’

  ‘Yes. The police suspected they were a front for a money-laundering operation,’ I said. ‘He was shot twice. Once in the stomach and once in the head.’

  ‘There was nothing dodgy about Carlo Sondervelt, was there?’

  ‘No, nothing. I know we always say good things about the dead, but Carlo genuinely seemed to be just a hardworking student. Never been in trouble with the police. His fellow students, his professors, they only had good things to say about him.’

  ‘Apart from getting his girlfriend pregnant. Did the parents know?’

  ‘No, they didn’t. It was a total surprise to them.’

  ‘There was nothing iffy about the girlfriend either?’

  ‘No, no reason to suspect anything like that. So if there’s nothing that links Carlo and Maarten,’ I said as I made notes of things to check, ‘maybe the murders were committed with the same weapon but by two different people.’

  Thomas laughed. ‘You still don’t want to admit that maybe you were wrong?’

  ‘It’s not that.’

  ‘You know that people don’t trust evidence that goes contrary to their beliefs? Confirmation bias, it’s called.’

  ‘I know. I went on the same internal course.’

  From the corner of my eye I could see that Ingrid was flipping through the photos of Dennis’s birthday party. I tried to look away – I didn’t want to see Dennis as a kid – but I still caught glimpses of him with his parents, his friends, a cake and a pile of presents. When I’d been that age, I would always do the same thing on my birthday: we’d go bowling, I’d have some classmates round and my mother would make pancakes. Every year the same friends, every year the same thing. My mother didn’t have any imagination. Dennis’s brother was obviously absent from the photos, because what self-respecting eighteen-year-old would want to be at his baby brother’s birthday party?

  Ingrid looked up and caught my eye. ‘Are you still convinced that Ruud Klaver killed Carlo Sondervelt?’ she asked.

  I wasn’t convinced of anything any more. ‘It’s not that. It’s just that the murders took place under different circumstances, at very different locations and times of day. We can’t find a link between the victims.’

  ‘We’ve been looking for about five minutes! We’ll find something. And sometimes there just is no obvious link, you know that. It could have been a friend of Ruud Klaver’s who had also been involved in the earlier fight.’ Ingrid paused. ‘That’s actually possible, isn’t it? Was Ruud alone earlier in the evening?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ That was an interesting idea. Maybe someone else had known that we’d find Ruud’s DNA on Carlo and Carlo’s blood on Ruud, and had taken advantage of it. Someone could have seen the fight. The fact that I had been looking at these files ad nauseam for the past few days was now coming in handy. I knew exactly what was in them and where everything was located. ‘But Carlo Sondervelt was with one of his friends. Tristan.’

  ‘Did he come from Arnhem?’

  ‘I’ll check on that.’

  I also wanted to talk to Nancy Kluft again. I needed to verify exactly what she’d seen. I had postponed this meeting for as long as I could, but now I could no longer avoid it.

  I looked up her address and cycled to her house. I should have taken someone with me, but I was worried: not about the questions I was going to ask, or about the answers she was going to give, but about the questions she might ask me.

  That was why I was here by myself.

  I locked my bike and walked to her front door. As I paused with my finger centimetres away from the bell, I knew that this was my last chance to turn back. But I also knew I wouldn’t. I had to figure out where I’d gone wrong.

  I’d first spoken to Nancy at the scene of the crime, when I’d decided that I shouldn’t wait for Barry, but should talk to the crying girl myself.

  As I got closer, she turned towards me. Her eyes were swollen and red, and snot was coming down her nose. She had high cheekbones, and long dark hair streamed from underneath her bright-pink hat.

  I opened my handbag to get a pack of tissues out and handed them to her. ‘Can you answer a few questions?’

  She nodded and wiped her face with the back of her hand.

  I sat down next to her on the damp pavement. The waistband of my jeans dug into my stomach. It was only just starting to feel tight. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Nancy. Nancy Kluft. I’m Carlo’s girlfriend.’

  She used the present tense. The reality of what had happened obviously hadn’t sunk in yet. In the distance, three men sang an old André Hazes song about a lover who would never return. This girl’s lover would never come back either.

  ‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ I said. The words were inadequate. I wondered how many years I would have to do this job before they became routine. ‘What did you see?’

  ‘The guy came from around that corner,’ she pointed down a dark alley paved with cobblestones, ‘and then he shot Carlo.’ She started to sob.

  I put my hand on her back and felt her ragged breaths. I stared down the darkness of the alley and waited as she slowly calmed down. I rubbed her back until she could talk again.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  ‘It’s okay. Take your time. Where did you come from?’

  ‘We were in this bar.’ She nodded backwards to the place she was sitting in front of. She breathed deeply as if to pull herself together. White fog streamed from her mouth. ‘He was waiting for us.’ She put her hands in front of her face.

  ‘And then what happened?’

  ‘He disappeared down the alley again.’

  ‘What gave you the idea he was waiting for you?’

  ‘Because I’d seen him before.’ Her voice was as steady as it could be between gulps of tears.

  I felt excitement building up in my body. ‘You got a good look at him?’

  ‘Yes, yes I did. They’d been fighting earlier.’

  The door opened. Nancy was as beautiful as she had been ten years ago. Maybe she no longer had the perfect skin and glow of a twenty-year-old, but she would still turn heads in the street. It had been those looks that had started the fight in the first place. Sometimes it really didn’t pay to be too pretty. She looked at me, puzzled at first, with the expression on her face that people get when they’re expecting someone else – a delivery man or a friend – and find a stranger standing on their doorstep instead. Only I wasn’t a stranger.

  It took her a few seconds before she realised. Then her face broke out in a wide smile and she opened her arms as if to give me a hug, before quickly dropping them when she realised it would probably be inappropriate to hug a police detective.

  ‘Detective Meerman,’ she said.

  I smiled. ‘Call me Lotte. You used to, remember?’

  Her smile grew wider, displaying perfectly white teeth. She reached out and put a hand on my arm. ‘Come in, come in.’

  I followed her down a corridor plastered with photos that I tried my best not to look at. My eyes were firmly on Nancy’s back. I was doing well, I thought.

  ‘Can I get you anything? Tea? Coffee?’

  ‘No, I’m fine.’ But I smiled, because the warm welcome I was receiving was a wonderful antidote to the attitude of the Klaver family. This was the difference in reaction between the family of the victim and the family of the perpetrator. The only odd thing about this case was that the family of the perpetrator had become the family of the victim. And I was about to ask this lovely girl if it was possible that she’d been wrong all these years. Maybe turning my friends into enemies would turn my enemies into friends. I unzipped my coat. Experience had taught me that it was far more likely that I was going to turn my friends into enemies and then only have enemies left.

  Nancy sat down at a table that had a pile of laundry on top
of it. I sat opposite her, trying not to look at any of the photos dotted around the room.

  She pointed at the pile of washing in front of her. ‘Do you mind if I continue with this?’

  ‘No, go ahead.’

  She grabbed a dark-blue T-shirt from the pile and gave it a shake to bounce out any creases. ‘I thought you might come to see me. Jelte called me after you’d visited them.’

  ‘Yeah, we talked to them a couple of days ago.’

  She smoothed the fabric of the T-shirt, folded the sleeves to the centre and then the other side over. She brought the bottom seam up to the neck and folded it double again. All in a few seconds, a few practised hand movements.

  I knew I was only watching her because I didn’t want to ask the questions I was going to have to. I was here now; there was no point in stalling any longer. ‘So you know that Ruud Klaver died?’

  ‘Yes, Jelte called me straight away. I might not have known otherwise. I don’t really follow the news, but he reads the entire paper. Even scans the obituaries religiously to see if any of his friends have died.’ She picked up a second T-shirt, a red one. ‘And this was a big story, after Klaver had been on that podcast and lied about being innocent.’ Her hand paused with the flat of it resting on the red fabric. ‘Jelte said you asked him questions about the night of Ruud Klaver’s accident, but you can’t think we have anything to do with it?’

  ‘It was your birthday, wasn’t it? You had dinner with Carlo’s parents and your daughter, Wietske. I managed not to grimace at saying the girl’s name.

  ‘Yeah, and we were all at our favourite Chinese restaurant.’

  ‘That’s why I don’t think you’ve got anything to do with it. But there is something I want to check with you.’ I leaned forward in my chair and gave Nancy a deep look.

  She stopped folding.

  ‘Be honest with me. It doesn’t matter any more because Ruud is dead and it’s all a long time ago.’ I swallowed, not too happy with what I was going to ask her. ‘But if you didn’t see Ruud shoot Carlo that night, you should tell me now.’

  She picked up another T-shirt and folded it with abrupt movements. As if to punish me for my questions, she had chosen a pink one printed with golden stars and emblazoned with the word ‘PRINCESS’ on the front. It was a T-shirt that a ten-year-old girl would wear.

  ‘I won’t think badly of you.’ I continued to look into Nancy’s eyes, if only not to have to see that T-shirt. ‘If you just caught a brief glimpse of him . . .’

  ‘You think I lied?’

  ‘No.’ The word came out of my mouth automatically, but I realised it was the truth. ‘But it’s easy to make a mistake under those circumstances.’

  ‘You think I lied.’ The words were harsher this time.

  She’d been so secure when she’d told me what had happened. I hadn’t doubted her words. Especially as her evidence was so crucial. How often did you get a witness who saw everything as clearly as she had?

  ‘They’d been fighting earlier,’ she said.

  ‘They were in a physical fight?’

  ‘Yes. Carlo punched the guy a couple of times. But the other guy started it.’

  ‘He punched him? Hold on just a second.’ I rushed over to the forensic scientist and told him. If Carlo had hit the guy, there might be some of the gunman’s blood on his hands and clothing. There was always a high chance with gun crime that there was some previous form, and that this person would be on our DNA database.

  ‘Let me take you to the police station. We’ll look at some photos and see if you can pick him out.’

  ‘He had blond hair and he was a little taller than Carlo. Maybe one-ninety?’ Some life returned to her eyes. She took her hands out of her pockets as if she could drive me on towards finding the murderer if only she was more animated.

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Thirty-ish.’

  ‘This is all really useful,’ I said.

  ‘I recognised him straight away,’ she said. ‘I’ll call Carlo’s friend too. Tristan broke up the fight. He can help me identify him.’ She got her phone out.

  ‘Had you been drinking?’ I said before she could make the call.

  ‘Carlo had. I hadn’t.’ She looked at me with large brown eyes. ‘I’m four months pregnant.’

  I covered her hand with mine. I wanted to say: so am I, but I had to keep quiet in case any of my colleagues overheard me.

  I’d had a miscarriage before. I’d told everybody about the pregnancy, exactly at the three-month point, and when I’d lost the baby afterwards, I had to tell them all about that too. The sympathy in my colleagues’ eyes made the loss harder to bear, and I’d started to realise that it was better not to tell anybody. This time I was going to keep it a secret until I showed.

  Nancy folded up another ‘PRINCESS’T-shirt. This one was lilac. I’d never liked those T-shirts that confirmed girls’ roles. I would have . . . No. I stopped myself. Don’t think about that. Get on with this interview. Get it over with.

  ‘I honestly don’t think you lied,’ I said, but I knew only too well that people misremembered things. They thought they’d seen something but they hadn’t. They thought something had happened at three o’clock but it had actually happened at four.

  ‘My boyfriend was shot dead and you think I lied about that?’ Nancy pulled two matching socks out of the pile, lined them up, toe to toe, and folded them in half. She rolled the top of the ankle over the toe. It became a perfect little parcel.

  ‘I’m concerned,’ I said it compassionately, ‘because there might be proof that Ruud was innocent. I know that night must have been really confusing. Everything happened so fast.’ Witness statements were notoriously unreliable. People looked at the weapon, not the face of the attacker.

  ‘I saw him. Yes, I only saw him briefly, but I recognised him because he and Carlo had been in that fight earlier. He’d been pestering me in the bar, so I’d got a good look at him then.’ There were tears in her eyes. Tears of anger, I thought. ‘So yes, it all happened in a flash, as you said, but it was long enough to recognise him.’ She still sounded so certain.

  ‘Did you drink that night?’

  ‘No, of course I didn’t. I was pregnant.’

  ‘The barman said that maybe you did.’

  She frowned as if she was trying to remember everything about the night. ‘I bought drinks, sure. For Carlo and Tristan. And there are only so many soft drinks you can have in an evening, so later on I probably only bought drinks for them. Maybe that’s what he meant.’

  ‘Maybe.’ That was definitely possible. ‘If you hadn’t seen Klaver earlier in the evening, would you have been able to pick him out?’

  Her hands stopped moving and she looked at me. ‘How can I answer that now? These what-if questions are really hard. I had seen him before and I can’t erase that from my brain.’ She was such a thoughtful witness. She considered the options and then was honest. It was why I’d believed her. ‘Maybe I wouldn’t have been as sure, but it’s like when you see a friend, you look at them for a second and you recognise them.’

  ‘Were you worried that he’d follow you after the fight? Ruud Klaver, I mean.’

  ‘Yes, I was. That’s why I was annoyed with Carlo for wanting another drink. He said he needed to calm down, but I wanted to go home. I was really worried Klaver was going to come after us. He seemed the type.’

  ‘So when someone shot Carlo . . .’

  ‘I automatically assumed that it was him? Is that what you’re suggesting?’

  ‘It was a cold night. Everybody was wearing hats and scarves.’

  ‘Lotte, it was him. Yes, he was wearing a hat and a scarf, but I recognised him from before.’

  ‘There was a second witness . . .’

  ‘Who wasn’t as sure.’ She finished my sentence. ‘I know. I was at the trial, remember? That guy just didn’t get a good look at his face. I was right behind Carlo.’

  I wished I’d accepted her offer of a cup of tea, as that would have
given me the chance to break the intensity of her stare. I only hoped my sudden worry wasn’t visible on my face.

  ‘Ruud was facing us when he shot Carlo,’ she continued. ‘I saw him. It was him.’ She swallowed. ‘I dream about it most nights, me behind Carlo, Ruud coming at us, shooting him. The other guy, the one who called the ambulance, off to the left.’

  ‘You’ve always dreamed about it, haven’t you?’ I rummaged through my handbag.

  ‘Yes, right from the start.’

  I got my notebook out, and a pen. ‘Draw it for me,’ I said. ‘Draw where you were, where Carlo was, and the other witness.’

  ‘I was here, right behind Carlo. Ruud came from here. The other guy was here.’ She drew the street with the pub quickly, stabbed crosses where she had been, where the others had been. That the pen was so certain in her hand only increased my doubt.

  Because the picture was all wrong.

  She hadn’t been behind Carlo. She’d been to the side. Ruud had come between the two of them. The other witness had come out of a side street, but to the right rather than the left. Even where she’d said the scene had taken place in relation to the pub was wrong. It was the opposite side of the road.

  This was how it looked in her dreams, not how it had been in reality. As I studied the drawing, my hair fell down in front of my face and I pushed it back behind my ear. Had I asked her to do this when I interviewed her initially? Her certainty hadn’t worried me a day after the murder. Not like it worried me today, when she was still so adamant ten years later. When there had been no doubt, no pause, no I can’t remember it as clearly; what was it I said?

  It didn’t mean that she’d been wrong, of course. It could just be that over time, how she dreamed it had replaced the actual memory. I was more grateful than ever that we’d had forensic evidence to back her story up.

  I put the notepad back in my bag. I only hoped that I’d asked her for this same drawing ten years ago. That then she’d drawn it correctly. That then it had been right.

  ‘You believe me now, don’t you?’ she said. ‘Now that you see that I still remember it all as clearly as if it had happened yesterday.’