A Death in Rembrandt Square

by Anja de Jager

  I was a little surprised by his attitude, even though I’d noticed the animosity between the two of them when I’d first seen them together at the hospital. ‘Can I buy you a coffee?’ I asked.

  He looked at his watch.

  ‘Or were you going to talk to Sandra?’

  ‘She can wait.’ He smiled. ‘It won’t do her any harm.’

  ‘You’re making it sound as if you’ve had run-ins with her yourself.’ I’d noticed a bar a few doors down from where Sandra lived, and I set off towards it, Remco walking beside me. The place was more a snack bar than a proper café, but it would do for our chat. I wasn’t surprised when the only coffee they did was filter.

  ‘Do you mind if I have something to eat?’ Remco wore a very thick V-neck sweater over what looked like a turtle-neck jumper.

  ‘Be my guest.’

  He ordered a veal croquette. I took my coat off and hung it over the back of the red plastic chair. The square table was covered in white Formica that had seen better days. Our coffee came in white mugs, and Remco’s croquette was crammed in a white plastic tray with lashings of mustard to the side.

  He looked at it as though it was the most exquisite food he’d seen in his life, or as if he hadn’t eaten in days. He dipped the croquette in the mustard. ‘They don’t have these in Dubai,’ he said. ‘It’s one of the things I really miss.’ He took a large bite and breathed with his mouth open. ‘Hot, hot,’ he said with a wide grin on his face.

  Nope, I didn’t really understand his attitude. It wasn’t what I’d come to expect from his family. Here he was badmouthing Sandra and seemingly happy enough to sit and have coffee with me. It wasn’t how he’d been the first couple of times I’d met him. It was, after all, the way he’d talked about me that had got Sandra interested in me and in this case.

  I waited for him to get his phone out again, like he had done last time, but he didn’t. ‘Don’t you want to record us?’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m not on Sandra’s side. My mother is, but I know what Sandra can be like. I’ve never seen her so puffed up as she is now. She’s a very happy woman.’

  ‘So why were you going to see her?’

  ‘She wanted to speak to me.’ He took another bite from his croquette. ‘She wants to know why we didn’t want her to talk about the arrest itself.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’

  He looked at me. ‘I’m really surprised you’ve kept it quiet.’

  ‘Why? Did you think we would have leaked it?’

  ‘No, but Dennis has been making all this trouble for you, by talking to Right to Justice. It must have been tempting.’

  ‘He was only twelve at the time.’

  ‘I know. Then I will say thank you on his behalf, because he won’t. How is the guy? Are you still in touch?’

  ‘Barry?’ I sat back on my chair. ‘Do you know, you’re the only one of your family ever to have asked after him. He’s in a wheelchair.’

  ‘I know that. We might not have asked after him, but we all know what happened to him.’

  I nodded. ‘Okay. Fair point.’

  ‘You know, that’s why Dennis has been so obsessed with our father’s innocence. Because if Dad wasn’t guilty, then you should never have arrested him, and therefore it wasn’t Dennis’s fault but yours. It’s messed up.’

  I got it. I probably shouldn’t have, but I totally did, because I’d been thinking about it the other way round. For me, he had to have been guilty, even though I had been surprised when Nancy and Tristan had first picked him out. Maybe my initial doubt had been right.

  ‘Is that why he got in touch with Sandra?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ Remco said. ‘And he had so much stuff already – he’s spent years looking into every detail – so that worked well for her. I don’t know what he’s going to do now. Find a proper job, I guess. Sandra was in her element. She likes digging for secrets and she doesn’t care if anybody gets hurt.’

  ‘How is he now? Happy?’ This had to have been good for somebody at least.

  ‘I worry about him. I think he’s at a bit of a loose end. His dream has come true and now he has to look for a new dream, you know.’

  ‘He’s young. He can study or something. You went to university, right? Wasn’t that where you met Sandra?’

  ‘Yes, I met her just as I was trying to keep my head down. I was running away. That’s what I’m good at.’ He put his croquette down. ‘My father was on trial for murdering a student. Sandra found out and started to play her little mind games. She said that if I told her something about myself, something I didn’t want her to know, then she wouldn’t tell anybody about my father.’

  ‘Sounds familiar. She still does that.’

  ‘She does? That figures. It’s probably worked well for her.’

  ‘Did you do it? Did you tell her something?’

  He nodded. ‘Yeah, I did. It seemed a price worth paying for not having my father’s identity outed.’

  ‘What did you say? What secret did you tell her?’

  He leaned forward on the table and locked eyes with me. ‘That I wished my father was dead.’

  Chapter 25

  I stayed behind and watched him leave the snack bar, more confused than I’d been before. The first thing I did after the door closed behind him was to check his alibi. I cursed myself for not having done that before. But twenty minutes of foreign phone calls later, I had confirmed it: on the day his father had been hit by that car, he had definitely been in Dubai. However much he might have wanted his father dead ten years ago, he hadn’t killed him.

  Now I started to wonder if the murder of Carlo Sondervelt and the conviction of Ruud Klaver had caused a split in the family. On the one hand there was Dennis, who believed his father was innocent and who’d dedicated his life to clearing his name; and on the other hand there was Remco, who’d hated his father, wanted him dead, and who’d left the country. Suddenly the almost-fight in the hospital made total sense. On which side did the mother sit?

  Before I could think about it more, my phone rang. It was Nancy. She was in tears.

  ‘I heard the podcast,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand. I saw him. I saw him! It was him. And now . . .’ There was a muffled sob at the other end of the line. Maybe she was wiping her nose. ‘Now you’re saying that maybe he didn’t do it? I hadn’t been drinking. Was that why you asked me about it? Because that podcast woman suggested it?’

  It was the call I’d been dreading, and I had to take a gulp of coffee before I could talk. I didn’t want to say that it was irrelevant whether she’d been drinking or not, because she was right, I had asked her about it. ‘I’m sorry, Nancy. I’ve looked through the evidence and it seems probable that Ruud Klaver was innocent.’

  I hadn’t wanted to accept that, not after what had happened at the arrest. But Barry had warned me at the time. There were a lot of things I hadn’t wanted to accept.

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’ The initial anger was gone from Nancy’s voice and had been replaced with an immense sadness. ‘I saw him. It was him.’

  ‘It’s easy to misremember things.’ I said it gently. ‘Don’t blame yourself.’

  ‘But I can’t have done.’

  As I listened to the sound of her tears, I had to fight to keep mine back. ‘Can I ask you something? Do you remember where Carlo worked?’ I felt bad about asking her to remember stuff after we’d pretty much discredited her other memories.

  ‘It was a pizza place.’ She sniffed. ‘I definitely remember that because we used to joke about it.’ I thought I could hear a smile in her voice. ‘Because he was called Carlo and baked pizzas. Not that he was Italian in the slightest.’

  ‘Do you know what it was called?’

  ‘Something corny like Pizza Italy. I’m not sure of the name. It’s probably closed by now. It was always so quiet, Carlo would complain that there was never anything to do.’

  Had there been a pizza place on the list of restaurants that Maarten Hageman had owned? I
thought there might have been.

  ‘But Detective Meerman – Lotte – Ruud Klaver did it. I saw him,’ she said again, and I wondered if at this point she was trying to convince herself as much as me.

  I needed to talk through what I’d found so far, but when I got to our office, Thomas and Ingrid had gone. Even Charlie wasn’t there. He’d probably gone upstairs to talk to his traffic-cop colleagues. It was lunchtime; I should have eaten something when Remco had. Carlo had worked at a restaurant without any business. What if he’d seen something? It was very possible that he had. He was a smart kid. Tristan had said he’d never done anything illegal. It seemed very possible that he’d discovered the restaurant was just a front and had threatened to tell the police about it. I hadn’t looked in that direction at all. I’d been too focused on Ruud Klaver from the start, as Barry had said.

  Barry.

  I knew he’d been following the Right to Justice series. I’d also kept him informed of every detail when the case was happening and we were all still pretending he was going to be fine. I grabbed my bike and cycled to his house.

  When he opened the door, he didn’t look surprised. He glanced at his watch. ‘It’s time for lunch. Do you want to grab something to eat?’

  ‘Sure. Where do you want to go?’

  He pointed at a café across the road. ‘That place is pretty good. It’s wheelchair-friendly too.’

  As soon as I stepped inside, I noticed the group of young women wearing headscarves in all the colours of the rainbow, chattering like a group of brightly coloured birds. In fact, I was the only woman, apart from the one behind the counter, who wasn’t wearing a headscarf. There was no way they would serve a cheese sandwich with a glass of milk in here.

  I removed a chair and Barry wheeled himself into the gap. I sat down opposite him. To avoid watching him carefully manoeuvre himself into place at the table, I looked at the menu. I didn’t recognise any of the dishes apart from Soup of the Day with bread. Above the door, a line of TV screens pumped Turkish music videos into the room. If I were a short, bald man, I probably wouldn’t make a video of myself crawling all over a sports car surrounded by tall women. Now he was getting a wad of cash out of his pocket and throwing it in the air. Hmm, maybe that was the point: even if you were fat and short and bald, as long as you had a sports car and money, you could get attractive women. It was so nice to see that certain values were truly universal.

  ‘What are you having?’ I said.

  ‘Cacik and bread, I think. Maybe some baba ganoush as well. You?’

  ‘Soup,’ I said. It felt like a failure.

  ‘Okay.’

  The bald man was replaced by a Turkish version of Gary Barlow playing a small stringed instrument. A lute maybe? Who knows. I looked around me. We were the only Dutch people here. The only Dutch people who weren’t of Turkish descent, I corrected myself in my head.

  ‘This was timely,’ Barry said. ‘I was going to give you a call anyway.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘You go first.’

  The door opened again and a blonde girl came in. We were now in a minority of three. She bought a bag full of loaves of bread to take away, and left again. But not without having thrown me a quick glance.

  ‘Should we have looked more closely at the place where Carlo worked?’ I asked.

  ‘Where he worked? What’s brought this up?’

  ‘The other guy who was shot with the same gun, Maarten Hageman, he ran a string of restaurants that were fronts for money laundering. Carlo Sondervelt worked in a pizza place that never had any customers.’

  ‘Did you investigate it at the time?’

  ‘No, we had Ruud. He confessed. We were done, remember?’

  The soup arrived. It was red, with bits in it. I took a bite of the bread. It melted in my mouth, soft and fluffy, and tasted of something other than just flour. I picked up another piece. ‘What are these?’ I pointed to the bits on top.

  ‘Sesame seeds. Do you like it?’

  ‘It’s great.’ I was relieved that I could be honest. ‘How’s yours?’

  ‘Very nice.’ What he’d called cacik looked like a thick yoghurt with things in it. He scooped some up with his bread. ‘Why did you want to talk to me?’

  ‘You were my mentor. You know about this case. Who else should I talk to?’

  He smiled. ‘Happy to help.’

  ‘Did you think there was anything wrong at the time? We had forensic evidence.’ I had been with him when the call came.

  I picked up the phone with one hand and held Barry’s with the other. ‘What have you got?’ My mouth was dry and my question was more like a croak.

  ‘We found blood on Carlo. Someone else’s blood. We paid extra attention to his hands after you told us he’d been in a fight with the potential killer.’

  ‘And?

  ‘We’ve got a match. It’s Ruud Klaver’s.’

  ‘Thank you!’ I squeezed Barry’s hand and disconnected the call with a huge grin. ‘We’ve got him,’ I said. ‘It’s him.’

  ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ Barry said. ‘This is only evidence of the fight. It doesn’t mean we’ve proved Klaver shot him.’

  ‘I know. But at least it’s evidence that he’s lying and that his alibi is fake too. He wasn’t home at midnight.’ He squeezed my hand back as I was talking. That had to be a good sign? Right? ‘If nothing else, the judge will give us an extension to keep him for another twenty-four hours.’

  I left the hospital in a better mood than when I’d arrived.

  Forensics emailed me through their report. They’d found Ruud’s blood on Carlo’s hands and on his jacket. They were still testing the clothes that we’d got from Ruud’s house. The ones he’d been wearing when we arrested him had been clean. I’d pinned my hopes on a dirty pair of jeans that we’d found stuffed in the bottom of the washing basket.

  ‘Surely with that it was watertight? Why didn’t you say anything at the time?’ I asked.

  ‘I had a lot of things going on.’ He tapped on the wheelchair. I managed not to flinch. ‘So I didn’t follow your daily updates as closely as I should have, but I remember being surprised by Ruud’s confession. I didn’t like it.’

  My stomach sank. ‘No? I believed him.’

  ‘I know you did. Sure, we had him for the fight, but the evidence for the murder relied purely on your witness. I was sure we’d have to let him go, and then he confessed.’

  I didn’t remember it like that at all. In my memory, I had felt triumphant that we had finally broken him down. Maybe I wouldn’t have noticed if there’d been anything wrong at the time.

  ‘And now I’m thinking, if he was innocent, as it seems he was, why did he confess?’

  ‘People do.’

  ‘Sure. But his lawyer didn’t stop him. That lawyer bothered me.’

  I remembered the footage that Charlie and I had been looking at yesterday, where it had seemed Ruud had checked with her to see what exactly he’d been admitting to.

  Barry ate some more of his food. ‘Do you want to try a bit?’ he said. ‘It’s really good.’

  ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘Yoghurt, cucumber and dill, mainly.’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Try. Try it.’

  I was uncomfortably aware that I was attracting a lot of attention from the table next to us by refusing. I tried a bit on my bread. It had quite a sting to it. Not from chilli, but from something else. ‘What’s in it? Apart from what you listed.’

  ‘Salt and pepper. Oh and a lot of garlic.’

  ‘Thomas and Ingrid are going to hate me when I get back.’

  ‘It’s not that bad.’

  ‘It’s easy for you to say; you’re working on your second career. I have to sit in a small space with two colleagues.’ I took a spoonful of soup, hoping that it would wash the garlic from my tongue.

  ‘Anyway,’ Barry continued, ‘I wondered if someone made it worth his while to confess.’

 
; ‘You think he was paid to take the fall?’

  ‘Exactly. Ruud Klaver pleads guilty to shooting someone after a random fight over a girl, and we never find out about the money-laundering link, and never connect the two murders. Because we didn’t, did we?’

  I took some more bread and dipped it in my soup. On the screen, Turkish Gary Barlow was replaced by a man dancing with a large crowd behind him in a style that I would have thought was Indian because it reminded me of Bollywood movies. Even though I now doubted Nancy’s witness statement, there had been forensic evidence. There had been blood on Ruud’s clothes. Carlo’s blood.

  ‘You think he made a deal with whoever killed Carlo Sondervelt and Maarten Hageman,’ I said.

  ‘He only had to take the fall for killing Sondervelt, because we didn’t know Hageman was killed with the same gun, remember?’

  I shook my head. ‘No, he got ten years, Barry. Nobody goes to prison for ten years in return for some money.’

  ‘Who knows how much they offered. Maybe he thought it wasn’t going to be that long. Maybe he’d thought he’d get away with just a few years.’ Barry shrugged. ‘Perhaps he thought that as we’d found Carlo’s blood on his clothes, he was going to get done for it anyway so he might as well take the cash.’

  ‘Ruud falsely confesses, keeps his mouth shut all these years and then starts spouting off on Right to Justice about how he didn’t actually do it?’

  ‘And then he gets killed.’

  I nodded. ‘And then he gets killed.’

  ‘He was an idiot to go on Right to Justice.’

  I thought about Dennis’s fight to prove his father’s innocence all these years. Maybe Ruud had done it for his son. ‘Remco Klaver told me that his brother has been fixated on his father’s innocence because of . . . well, because of you.’

  Barry put down the bit of bread that he was using as a scoop for his garlic yoghurt. ‘If he ever wants to talk to me,’ he looked down at his plate, ‘tell him to call me. I’ll talk to him.’

  That afternoon, there was a special edition of Right to Justice. Sandra Ngo talked about the new direction the investigation was taking. She said that we were now looking at money laundering and organised crime. I listened in shock. How could she know that? Of course she could have figured out for herself what the link between the two cases was, but she wouldn’t have known for certain that this was what we were looking at. Had it just been an educated guess? No, that wouldn’t have been worth a special podcast. Someone had told her.