A Death in Rembrandt Square

by Anja de Jager

  Rain streamed down on all three of us as I felt for Remco’s pulse. It was very faint. I tapped his face. ‘Remco? Remco, wake up.’

  He didn’t move. I expected him to open his eyes, but he didn’t. I held my hand under his nose, but the only air I could feel was the gusting storm. I wasn’t going to take any chances: I closed his nostrils and blew oxygen into his lungs.

  Sandra kept her fingers on his wrist and nodded reassuringly every now and then. ‘He’s got a pulse,’ she said. ‘We’re good. We’re good.’

  I had to admit that she was solid under pressure. The rain washed us clean of fumes until I finally heard the sound of an ambulance in the distance. I prayed that it was ours. It was getting blessedly louder and eventually came haring round the corner.

  The paramedics bustled over, put an oxygen mask over Remco’s face and lifted him onto a stretcher.

  I rocked back on my heels and then sat down on the ground. Sandra collapsed beside me. Her hair streamed bedraggled around her face. She looked at me and grinned.

  ‘Well done, partner,’ I said.

  ‘I can’t believe you shot that lock out. I thought people only did that in the movies.’

  ‘That door had it coming.’

  She laughed, then joined Remco in the ambulance. I stayed behind on the pavement. Adrenaline was still coursing through every centimetre of my body, but I didn’t move. Not even when the rain drenched my hair to saturation and I could feel it running down the back of my neck. My shoulders ached and my biceps throbbed as if I’d finished a two-hour workout. My throat felt like I’d smoked a packet of cigarettes.

  It was strange to sit here. After the ambulance had left and taken its emergency siren with it, the street was silent and peaceful. Only the trees moved as they swayed in the wind. The clouds must be moving too, but the sky was so universally grey that there was no way of telling. The mangled garage door spoke of what had happened.

  I lifted my face to the sky. ‘I just saved your son’s life, Ruud Klaver,’ I whispered. ‘Did you see that?’

  Chapter 29

  It was a few hours later that I went to see Remco in the hospital. I’d gone home first to dry off and get changed, and then headed to the police station to talk to Forensics about what they’d found at the Klavers’ garage. This time I was sensible and had driven.

  I knew I’d been told to stay away from the family, but as Angela already knew that I had planned to see Remco, she must understand that I would want to check on his condition. But as soon as I came up the stairs, I saw her standing guard outside his room, glowering like a Cerberus.

  ‘Go away,’ she said.

  I paused.

  ‘Seriously, go away.’ Even though I’d saved her son’s life, she didn’t seem to hate me any less.

  ‘Can I just talk to him for a couple of minutes?’

  ‘He’s sleeping right now and can’t see any visitors. He needs his rest.’

  I didn’t believe her for a second, but a hospital corridor wasn’t the ideal place for an argument that I wasn’t going to win anyway, so I beat a tactical retreat and went back to the downstairs reception. I got myself a disgusting coffee in a plastic cup from a vending machine and sat down on the one blue plastic chair that had nobody sitting on either side. A hospital was a perfect place to catch a lurgy. I sent Remco a text, telling him that I was downstairs and would wait for him if he wanted to talk to me. Then I sent him a second text to give him the out that if he wanted me to get lost, he could tell me that as well.

  There was an almost instant response. Give me ten minutes. I wasn’t sure what he was going to say to get rid of his mother. I couldn’t imagine she was just going to let him escape to talk to me like that.

  Forensics hadn’t found anything untoward in the garage. Maybe the strangest thing had been that Angela hadn’t objected to the police going through her house. Concern about her son might have mellowed her somewhat towards us. Not enough to let me see Remco, of course, but then that was entirely personal. There had been three obvious sets of fingerprints in the house and garage: Remco, Angela and Dennis. Then they’d found my fingerprints, and Sandra’s, on the door and the car. Nothing that was out of sync with this being a suicide attempt, including the blankets that had been stuffed against the garage door from the inside. I just didn’t think Remco seemed the type, and I would have liked a note. If he couldn’t cope any more, I would have expected him to fly home to Dubai without giving any notice, but not to try and kill himself. Unfortunately, it was not that easy to tell who was going to commit suicide. I wished I hadn’t seen so many parents who’d insisted that their son or daughter would never have done a thing like that. That their children had been happy. People can be very good at faking happiness.

  The thought had crossed my mind that Remco, of course, had timed it perfectly to be rescued by me. Maybe this had been a cry for help more than anything else.

  Ten minutes crawled by, and I watched patients and visitors come and go. A doctor walked past. Her headscarf had a bold pink pattern that brightened up the hospital. A young woman rushed through the door, her wheelie bag rattling loudly behind her. The sound of the wheels on the floor echoed in the corridor. She stopped, threw me an embarrassed look, pushed the handle down and lifted the bag instead. That was how Remco must have arrived a week ago when he first went to see his father, straight from the plane.

  Sitting here reinforced my dislike of hospitals. It brought back far too many memories. I would forever equate the smell of antiseptic with pain. Being here reminded me of that overriding feeling of powerlessness as nurses and doctors did things to you that made you feel like a puppet, no longer an individual but an object to be handled and dealt with, no matter how kind and careful they were. You were no longer a person but a patient. I’d been here too often.

  But then more than once was probably too often.

  In the end, it was almost twenty minutes later when Remco came out of the elevator in his pyjamas and dressing gown. It jolted me back in time. He looked no older than he’d done when I’d arrested his father.

  ‘How are you?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve got a terrible headache. Otherwise I’m fine.’

  ‘You did this to yourself?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes. I blocked off the garage door with blankets, set the engine running and took the pills. I wanted it to be peaceful.’

  ‘And you wanted me to find you.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I couldn’t do that to my mother. Not so soon after my father had died.’

  ‘And she would have coped with your death just fine? Just not with finding your body?’

  ‘I know. I wasn’t thinking straight.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I’m just curious about one thing,’ he said. ‘Did you get to the house early?’

  Of course. I’d forgotten about that. ‘Yes, about ten minutes early.’

  ‘Interesting.’ He nodded again slowly. ‘Well, thanks to that, I’m alive.’

  If I hadn’t waited right in front of the garage door, I wouldn’t have heard the engine running. I wouldn’t have been able to save him. I wouldn’t even have known he was there.

  ‘How long are they going to keep you in?’

  ‘Just overnight. Under observation.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘Then I’m going to take the first flight home to Dubai.’ He shrugged. ‘I need the sunshine. Not working, constant rain, it’s depressing me. I guess that’s why I did it.’ With his grey face and in his pyjamas, he did seem a different person from the confident tanned guy he’d been last week.

  ‘Do you want a coffee?’ I asked. ‘Or something else?’

  ‘I’ll have some tea.’

  It came out of the machine looking like brown water with white scum on top, but he drank it. ‘If I ask you a question,’ he said, ‘will you give me an honest answer?’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  ‘Do you still think my father murdered Carlo Sondervelt?’

&n
bsp; I swallowed. ‘I’m no longer sure,’ I admitted.

  ‘That’s interesting.’ He leaned forward and studied my face. ‘Are you hedging your bets?’

  I didn’t break the eye contact. ‘No, I’m being totally honest with you. Until about a week ago, I was one hundred per cent sure that he’d killed him. Now we know that the gun was used for a second murder, and there are problems with Nancy’s witness statement. I’m no longer as sure as I used to be.’

  ‘But you don’t think he’s definitely innocent either.’

  ‘You’re right, I don’t. All I can say for sure is that if the case had come to trial, with the information we have today about the second murder, your father wouldn’t have been convicted.’ I paused. ‘Your family would still have been together.’

  Remco took another sip of his tea. It must be his way of buying time, because it couldn’t taste very nice. ‘You saved me,’ he said.

  ‘You were just lucky that I was there.’

  ‘No, I mean you saved me ten years ago. I knew it at the time. You saved all of us. You locked my father away.’

  I wanted to ask him to explain himself, the words on the tip of my tongue, but if experience had taught me anything, it was when to keep quiet and just let people talk.

  He stared at the wall as if he could see the past projected there. ‘Dennis is probably too young to remember what it was like, but I don’t understand why my mother refuses to accept it.’

  She’d even given him a false alibi at the time.

  He fell silent as a man in a wheelchair was pushed past by a nurse. Push faster, I wanted to urge her. My heart beat hard as I waited for Remco to continue. His mother or his brother could arrive at any minute and stop him.

  ‘Remember when Dennis said that I hated my father? He was absolutely right. I did. I told you, didn’t I, that I wished he was dead?’

  I nodded.

  He rested his elbows on his knees. ‘If I think back to my childhood, my overriding memory is of always being scared. Of hearing his footsteps coming up the stairs and trying to hide. Of smelling alcohol on his breath and knowing I should stay as far away as I could. You might not know whether my father was innocent,’ he turned his head, no longer staring at the wall but looking me straight in the eye, ‘but I know. He was guilty as hell. I remember the night of Carlo Sondervelt’s death. I saw him when he got home. My father shot that guy, that student who was only a year older than I was. He did it.’

  Chapter 30

  I was shocked at Remco’s words. Having finally accepted that I could have been wrong and arrested an innocent man, it took me a few seconds to process what he was telling me.

  ‘He did it? You saw him?’ I asked. That wasn’t what he had said at the time.

  I’d had to stay behind after Ruud had been arrested. Dennis had been taken away, and I was careful not to look at the blood on the floor. I’d wanted to go with the ambulance, but I had to continue doing my job. I had to watch the family as my colleagues searched the house. It wouldn’t be the first time a criminal had hidden a gun in his child’s bedroom.

  Angela had still been wearing her pyjamas. She’d put a thick jumper on over the top. She was sitting on the sofa. Remco sat apart from his mother, slouched in a chair. His cheekbones and nose were too big for his face, as if they had grown up first and the rest of his features had to play catch-up. He observed me in total silence. I couldn’t read his expression, but unlike his brother, he didn’t seem angry. I didn’t think he was a threat.

  ‘How long is this going to take?’ Angela asked.

  It also wouldn’t be the first time that a wife had covered for her husband.

  ‘If you have somewhere else you can stay, with family, friends, I would call them.’ If they left, I could leave as well, go to the hospital, check on how Barry was doing.

  ‘We’re not leaving the house,’ Angela said.

  You’re also not leaving this room, I thought, but I didn’t say it.

  ‘Do you know what time your husband came home last night?’ I asked.

  ‘Around midnight, I think,’ Angela said.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that Remco was shifting in his chair. He was looking down at the floor, no longer watching me. ‘Did you hear your father come home?’ I asked him.

  He didn’t say anything; just slowly shook his head.

  Now his testimony was the complete opposite. ‘He came home for a few minutes. I heard him. I was still awake; I used to stay up all night playing GTA. I looked at him around the door, as I always did, to check what state he was in, and I saw his clothes. His jacket was covered in blood. He had a gun. I was petrified. I knew it was different from normal. This wasn’t just a fight. I switched off the lights, switched off my PlayStation, made sure I didn’t make any noise and pretended to be asleep. Then I heard the front door open and close again. Fifteen, twenty minutes later I heard him come back, but I didn’t leave my room. Not until you showed up.’

  ‘And you’re sure he had a gun?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you willing to testify to that?’

  Remco shook his head. ‘No. I wanted to tell you so that you didn’t think you locked up an innocent man. It’s the least I can do for you for saving my life. Don’t feel guilty. He did it.’ He paused to drink some of his tea, holding the plastic cup between both hands. ‘I told you, didn’t I, that I wanted my father dead? But now that he is, I don’t know any more. My mother keeps telling me that he’d changed. That I should have come home and seen for myself. I feel terrible. As if I’d got the thing I’d always wished for and then found out it sucked. And like Dennis said, I was the one who killed him.’

  I waited, but he didn’t say anything else. ‘Your father’s death wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘I was the one who stopped the doctors. I keep wondering what would have happened if I’d let them resuscitate him.’

  ‘He was in a vegetative state. He’d broken his neck. This wasn’t your doing.’

  ‘Maybe. Anyway,’ he made an effort to change his tone of voice, ‘I heard Sandra was there. That she helped you.’

  ‘Yeah, it was lucky she was. I might not have got that garage door open by myself.’

  He leaned forward and put a hand on my arm. ‘Can you stop her? Stop this? My father killed Carlo, but he’d done time in prison for that anyway. Sure, he claimed that he was innocent, but now that he’s dead, what difference does it make? He had an alibi for the other murder. He was hit by a car, but that was probably just an accident.’ He shivered and wrapped his dressing gown tighter around himself. ‘I’m going home as soon as I’m allowed to leave. I’m hoping you won’t stop me. This place is getting me down.’

  ‘Are you sure you won’t testify?’ I had to ask him again.

  ‘There’s no point. Why not let the rest of my family believe what they want to? I was happy when he got convicted and I didn’t have to tell anybody what I’d seen. Anyway, I would like this to stay between us.’

  ‘You never told them?’

  He shook his head. ‘No. At first I couldn’t, because Dennis was locked up.’

  Of course. I knew that he’d spent a year in a juvenile detention centre.

  ‘And when he came back, he wanted to believe in his father so much. It would have been like telling a six-year-old that Santa didn’t exist. Even though he was a teenager by then, but you know what I mean. Later, I tried to persuade him that maybe our father was guilty, but it was too late by then. Maybe that’s why I left Amsterdam, left the country, because I couldn’t look at them. Whenever Dennis and my mother were talking about how wonderful our father was and how unfair the police were, I couldn’t join in. But I was also too cowardly to go against them. I didn’t like being a coward. It was easier to just leave. And now it’s all got too much.’ He shrugged. ‘It’ll be fine when I’m back in Dubai. I’ll be busy and won’t have so much time to think.’ His face was pale as death. As pale as it had been w
hen he’d been lying on the pavement. ‘I think I’ll go back to bed now. I’m exhausted.’

  I nodded. ‘You do that. Thanks for telling me this.’

  As I watched his pyjama-clad figure go back up the stairs, I felt immensely sorry for him. It must have been hard to be the only person in his family who knew the truth. I remembered his watchful stares as I’d arrested his father. I remembered the way he’d looked at me during the court case. I wondered how he would have reacted if the judge had decided that we hadn’t done enough to prove his father’s guilt. Would he have spoken out then? Probably not. He would have been too scared to go against his father. It was lucky that the judge had ruled in our favour.

  This confession had been his present to me, but it had also come with a request: that we drop the investigation into his father’s death. It was different from how Sandra operated. Unlike her, Remco had made a trade without forcing me to accept or refuse it.

  I left the hospital and thought about what to do next. As I drove back to the police station, rain streaked the window and the wipers had to work hard to give me any kind of view. I understood why Remco found the weather depressing.

  Could we do what he’d asked and leave things the way they were? Ruud Klaver was dead and we might never find the driver who caused the hit-and-run accident. We’d had the right man for the murder of Carlo Sondervelt all along. Maarten Hageman’s murder was still unsolved, but at least we knew that he was shot with a weapon that later ended up in Ruud Klaver’s hands. The Arnhem police could take that information and run with it. If it helped them in any way, then great. If not, nothing had changed.

  I was still pondering on it as I drove up to the station entrance. I looked at the statues that represented the duties the police force was supposed to uphold: to protect the people and provide justice. I parked, swiped my card at the entry gate and went through the turnstile. I walked up the stairs and paused at the door of the boss’s office. It was open.