A Death in Rembrandt Square

by Anja de Jager

  ‘This has been a great help.’ I put my coat back on.

  She sat back on her chair. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t even ask you—’

  ‘Thanks for your time,’ I said quickly before she could voice what she’d been going to say. I walked back to the front door without looking right or left, as if I had blinkers on.

  Charlie Schippers came bouncing into the office like his enthusiastic canine namesake. ‘I didn’t think you’d do it,’ he said. He was wearing a pair of bright-orange trainers. Maybe they gave him the extra spring in his step.

  ‘It’s only temporary.’ I pointed at the desk opposite me.

  ‘What can I do?’ he asked before he’d even put his stuff down.

  ‘We’re looking at Maarten Hageman’s death.’

  ‘The Arnhem guy.’

  I narrowed my eyes. ‘You’re well informed.’

  ‘I did my homework.’ He blushed. ‘This is my big chance, you know. He was involved with money laundering, wasn’t he?’

  That was better than I’d expected, mainly as I’d expected nothing whatsoever after Thomas’s comments. ‘Yes, that’s what the original investigation focused on.’

  ‘We should look into that.’

  I pointed at the whiteboard behind him. ‘That’s what we’re doing.’

  He turned round on his chair like an obedient schoolboy.

  ‘We’re also looking at the possibility that someone framed Ruud Klaver. So we’re going to have a chat with everybody who knew about the fight earlier that night.’

  ‘Nancy and Tristan,’ he said over his shoulder.

  ‘Yes. And anybody else who saw it.’

  But if they’d framed Ruud, they must have had a reason to kill Carlo. Which meant it wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing as we had been assuming so far, but something much more calculated. And as Maarten Hageman had been laundering money, we should find out if there was more to Carlo Sondervelt than we’d originally thought too. Tristan had been there when Ruud and Carlo had had that fight. He would have known that Ruud probably had Carlo’s blood on his clothes. We should pay him a visit.

  Chapter 22

  Tristan de Kraan worked as a software developer in one of the office buildings on the Zuidas. When we’d called him, he’d been very willing to talk to us, and Charlie and I had taken the tram to meet him. He was no longer a dark-haired teenager. He was now an overweight young man with glasses who wore a Foo Fighters T-shirt and jeans.

  ‘I’ve been expecting you.’ Tristan smiled. ‘No, actually I’ve been expecting Sandra Ngo, but she hasn’t been here.’ The smile turned into a fake sulk.

  We were in a tiny room on the eighth floor, and from the window I had a perfect view of the train station way down below. One wall was lined with cardboard boxes that had once held computer equipment. They made the office look like a padded cell.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ Tristan said.

  ‘How well do you remember that punch-up between Carlo and Ruud Klaver?’

  ‘It’s been a while now. Ten years, right?’ He twirled a pen between his fingers and paid more attention to that than to my question.

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Do you still remember what it was about?’

  ‘I’m really not sure. I was still inside the bar when it all went off. I was talking to another one of my friends.’

  The cardboard boxes were giving me a mild feeling of claustrophobia. At any point, the closest pile could topple over and fall on my head. I shuffled my chair slightly forward.

  ‘When we spoke that evening, you had no doubts that it was Ruud Klaver.’

  Tristan shook his head. ‘I still don’t. It was definitely him. I saw the fight through the window and rushed outside to break it up.’ He stopped twirling for a second. ‘I grabbed Ruud’s arms and pulled him away. Nancy kept Carlo back.’ He finally made eye contact. ‘So yeah, I saw him really up close. It was easy to pick him out.’

  ‘You didn’t hear what the fight was about?’

  ‘Afterwards Carlo said that the guy had been obnoxious. He’d been touching up Nancy or something like that.’

  I nodded. That was what Nancy had told me as well. ‘Was Carlo ever involved in anything?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Anything criminal? Did he have a lot of money?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. I remember he had a car before the rest of us did – he had to drive us around all the time – but I think his parents bought that for him. We rented a flat together near the university.’

  ‘Is there anybody else who was close to him at the time?’ Charlie asked. He had his notepad in front of him and his pen to the ready, keen to write down anything that Tristan said. I let him take over asking questions for a bit.

  Tristan must be at the bottom of the pile in this firm if his office had been turned into the cardboard recycling area. Maybe they wanted to get rid of him but couldn’t because he had a permanent contract, so they kept putting more boxes in his office in the hope that he’d leave. He could flatten them all and then he would have twice the space he had now.

  ‘I think I was probably one of their closest friends. They were really tight, Carlo and Nancy, always together. Preparing lunch together the evening before to take to university the next day, things like that. They were like Siamese twins. Still, it was a bit of a shock when it turned out she was pregnant.’

  ‘Did his parents know?’

  ‘No, he hadn’t told them yet. I don’t know how they would have reacted. Then of course Carlo was murdered and everything changed. Nancy became the beloved daughter, with the grandchild.’ His voice was bitter.

  ‘Did you like her?’ Charlie said. He and Tristan were probably the same age.

  ‘You know, it’s tricky when you’ve got a good friend and then he starts going out with a girl and you never see him without her,’ Tristan said.

  But Nancy had phoned him straight away.

  I’d driven Nancy to the police station to take her statement and create a montage of what the suspect looked like. She’d called Tristan from the car.

  Barry Hoog arrived just a few minutes after we got there. His blond hair was damp and combed back, his eyes thick with interrupted sleep, and he wore a pink T-shirt that was probably just on top of his pile of clothes when he was hurriedly getting dressed.

  His presence immediately relaxed me. I was now no longer walking this high-wire without a safety net. The very first thing he did was to tell me off for not giving Nancy a cup of tea. He asked her if she’d be okay for a minute, and at her nod, we walked away together to the coffee machine. It was his tried-and-tested excuse to discuss a case. We did some good thinking by this coffee machine. Even after just a year of working for Barry, I’d started to associate coffee with thinking time and drank more of the stuff than I ever had before.

  ‘I’m sorry I got you out of bed,’ I said, but my guilt was overridden by an enormous sense of relief that he was here. I loved working with him and hoped I’d be in his team for a long time.

  ‘Don’t worry about it. What have you got?’

  ‘The girlfriend saw him,’ I said as soon I’d checked that she couldn’t hear me any more. ‘She said Carlo was in a fight with a guy earlier in the evening. Around midnight. I told Forensics. Their friend helped break it up. He’s on his way. Then the guy came back for Carlo an hour later with a gun, and shot him.’

  ‘The same guy?’

  ‘Yes, the girl recognised him. They might be able to get his DNA from the victim’s hands.’

  ‘Good. That’s good. It seems you’ve got it all under control.’

  My phone rang: Carlo’s friend, the second witness, was here. Tristan was a dark-haired boy who would probably call himself a man, with a diamond earring, most likely fake, in his left ear. I took him to our office. As soon as he saw Nancy, he wrapped his arms around her and gave her a hug. She leaned against his shoulder and cried.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Tristan said softly, ‘I’m so sorry. They’ll get
who did this.’ He stroked her hair as if he was petting a beautiful and cherished dog. ‘I would never have left you if I’d thought . . .’

  ‘You couldn’t have known,’ she said. ‘Don’t feel guilty.’ She pulled back from the hug.

  He wiped the tears from her face with a careful thumb.

  I could picture it: two close friends, mates for a decade, share a flat and go to university together. And then one of them gets a girlfriend. Tristan must have felt left out. Jealous maybe. I couldn’t decide if he’d been jealous of Carlo or of Nancy. Or maybe both. I now saw the stack of cardboard boxes in a new light: they could be a barrier to keep people away. It would be very effective: I wouldn’t voluntarily step into his office and risk getting buried by them.

  ‘You’d known him for a long time?’ I asked.

  ‘We’d gone to primary school together. Best friends.’

  ‘Did he ever do anything illegal?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘He never even smoked a joint. Seriously.’

  There was a double-height row of thick books on his desk, manuals for programming languages. If Tristan ducked his head down, nobody would even be able to see him. It all spoke of a man who wanted to be left alone.

  ‘Were you surprised that Carlo got into a fight?’ I asked.

  The twirling pen stopped again. ‘You know, I was actually. I can’t remember that he ever did that before. The other guy must have started it.’

  ‘And you got in between them to break it up?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I couldn’t picture the overweight man I saw in front of me breaking up a fight. At the time, ten years ago, I hadn’t doubted him at all. Today I doubted everything. I should have done so at the time. Either this wasn’t what had happened, or he must have cared about his friend a great deal. His friend who had moved his girlfriend into their flat, who had been doing everything together with her.

  ‘We’d been drinking,’ Tristan continued. ‘It was all a bit of a blur, you know. One minute I was inside having a beer, the next I was trying not to get hit.’

  ‘Okay. So the fight stopped, what happened then? Did Ruud say anything? Was he shouting at Carlo? Swearing?’ I asked.

  ‘Not that I can remember. I went home.’

  ‘Straight away?’

  ‘Yeah, I’d sobered up by then. A fight is a bit of a buzz-kill, you know.’

  ‘Carlo and Nancy stayed?’

  ‘Yes. I think they were going to get some food.’

  ‘They had another drink.’

  ‘Okay, well, it’s been a while, I can’t really remember.’

  ‘And then she called you to come to the police station.’

  ‘Yes. I was still watching TV. I’d been home for an hour or so. I must have been waiting for them. I was so shocked that Carlo had been murdered. Especially when she said it was the guy who’d beaten him up earlier on.’

  ‘She said that?’

  ‘That’s why I came to the police station. To identify that guy he’d been in a fight with.’

  I thought about how they were when he’d seen her in the station.

  ‘You came in and gave her a hug.’ I was probably mistaken about the animosity I’d imagined between them.

  ‘I knew how she felt about him. He was everything to her.’

  I nodded. That moment had seemed real. ‘And you said: “I shouldn’t have left you alone”, or something like that.’

  ‘I don’t remember that.’

  ‘But you remember picking out Ruud Klaver? Picking out his photo?’

  ‘Are you ready to look at some photos?’ I asked when I thought I’d given them enough time.

  ‘I remember what the guy looked like,’ Tristan said. ‘I had to break up the fight.’

  I got the books of mugshots out and put them in front of the two of them. ‘Take your time,’ I said.

  ‘Remember that it is very possible we haven’t got a photo for him,’ Barry added. ‘And don’t say it’s him unless you’re sure.’

  Both Tristan and Nancy nodded like the serious students they clearly were. For the next few minutes, the silence was only interrupted by the slap of plastic on plastic as pages of the album were turned over.

  ‘What was the fight about?’ I asked.

  Tristan and Nancy exchanged glances.

  ‘It was about me,’ Nancy finally said.

  ‘You?’

  ‘Yeah, the guy was obnoxious in the bar. Touching me and looking down my top. Carlo told him to stop and then the guy started laying into him.’ Tears were streaming down her face. ‘They went outside. He punched Carlo a couple of times and Carlo punched him back. And then Tristan got in between them and broke it up.’

  Tristan wrapped an arm around her shoulders. Such a pointless death; such a waste of a life. Nancy went back to turning the pages of the book. I left them to it and called Forensics from the room next door.

  They told me they had recovered the bullet from the body. It had been wedged in one of the internal organs so it had hardly been damaged. That was good news. It hadn’t been misshapen by bone or a wall. If we ever found the weapon, it would be straightforward getting a match. The guy was still telling me about the marks he’d found on Carlo’s hands, and that he was going to see if he could get any DNA from them, when I heard Nancy call my name. I disconnected the call and went over to her as quickly as I could.

  ‘This is him.’ Her voice was high and excited. Her face was lit up, as if she expected that identifying the killer would bring Carlo back to life. ‘This is the man who shot Carlo.’

  ‘If you lived in the same place, how come you didn’t go home together?’ Charlie said.

  ‘I probably wanted to give them some time alone.’

  Instead of being the interloper who had broken the two friends apart, maybe Nancy had fitted in well with their lives. They could have been three friends instead of two friends and a girlfriend. ‘Are you still in touch with her?’

  ‘She lived in the flat for a few months and then moved in with Carlo’s parents. We lost touch after she had the baby.’

  I thanked him for his time and got up, careful not to disturb the boxes.

  I thought about the two students sharing a flat. I’d studied as well, the education my mother kept telling me I’d thrown away by joining the police force. I had lived with my mother all the way through. I couldn’t afford to move out. ‘Did your parents pay for your flat?’ I managed to keep the jealousy out of my voice.

  Tristan grinned. ‘No, we worked. Earned our own money.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘This and that. All part-time jobs.’

  ‘Did you ever work in a restaurant?’

  ‘I did some kitchen work.’

  ‘Did Carlo?’

  ‘Yes, we worked at the same place, on different days.’

  ‘Do you remember where?’

  ‘I have no idea. It was such a long time ago.’ Tristan ducked back behind his computer-manual wall.

  I couldn’t help but wonder if it was in one of the restaurants that Maarten Hageman had owned.

  Chapter 23

  Charlie and I went back to the office. He seemed pleased that he had a temporary desk on our floor, because he sat down with a huge smile. ‘Van Persie,’ he said. ‘He’s my favourite. I have a picture of that goal against Spain as my wallpaper.’

  There was no arguing with taste. At least someone liked our new artwork.

  ‘Do you mind if we look at these?’ He held up a CD-ROM that he’d got from one of the boxes with my investigation notes. ‘It would really help if you could talk me through what happened during Ruud Klaver’s interrogation.’

  I didn’t like watching myself on the screen. It was excruciating, like hearing a recording of your own voice. I would have liked Thomas to go through my old interviews, but his time was now taken up with re-interviewing the elderly woman who had witnessed Ruud Klaver’s fatal accident. Maybe he thought his good looks would persuade her to remember some vital bit of inf
ormation. I wasn’t holding out much hope.

  ‘We can have a look,’ I said. The CD-ROM had the time and date written on the front in blue marker pen. It was an early one, before we’d had any evidence, and it had been hard going. I had sat opposite the suspect and his lawyer, a stern-faced woman with dark hair tied back in a ponytail.

  ‘What should I look out for?’ Charlie asked as he slotted the CD-ROM into the slot.

  ‘He was still denying everything at this point,’ I said, ‘probably because his wife had given him an alibi.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure he came home around midnight,’ Angela said.

  He must have told her to give him an alibi for the fight too. Nancy had told me that the punch-up was after midnight, so as long as she and Tristan had identified the right person, Angela was lying. If I’d been Ruud, I would have confessed to the fight and only denied the shooting. We already had two witnesses to the fight.

  Or maybe he hadn’t had a chance to brief his wife. Maybe he had still been wearing his jeans because he’d only just come home, not because he’d been planning to go out again. And now Angela was guessing as to what lie she had to tell. This could work out well for us.

  ‘Were you still up?’

  ‘No, I’d already gone to bed.’

  ‘But you’re sure it was midnight, not later?’

  Two of my colleagues came out of the bedroom with clothes in a bag. The coat rack at the top of the stairs had been emptied already. If we had the jacket that Ruud had been wearing this evening, it could make things a lot easier. I would expect gunpowder residue on the sleeve, and maybe some of Carlo’s blood.

  ‘No, it was midnight.’ Her voice was firmer now, as if she had talked herself into believing it, or as if she had decided that she might as well stick with the lie.

  I made a show of getting my notebook out and writing down the time. Remco had stopped studying the ground and was back to staring at me.

  The guy who’d been at my side when we’d burst through the door now came up to me and pulled me into the kitchen. ‘No gun,’ he said.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘But we’ve got his clothes, plus what he was wearing when we arrived. Let’s call it a day.’