‘Can I talk to you for a second?’ I said. ‘I want your advice.’
Moerdijk clicked his mouse to close down whatever he had been looking at. ‘Of course. Come in. Take a seat. What’s up?’
‘Remco Klaver just told me that his father killed Carlo Sondervelt. He saw him come home covered in blood. He saw the gun. Then his father went out, probably to discard his clothes and his weapon at the bottom of a canal.’
The boss frowned. ‘He never said this at the time.’
‘I think he was afraid. He was scared of his father and didn’t dare go against his mother and brother. He was only eighteen.’
‘Do you believe him?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Why did he tell you this now?’
‘Because I saved his life. I think he didn’t want me to feel guilty about having locked up an innocent man. He said he won’t testify in court. He’d like the case closed. Ruud’s death treated as an accident.’
‘What about Maarten Hageman?’
I shook my head. ‘He didn’t know anything about that.’
Moerdijk scratched his head. ‘He won’t testify?’
‘No. I asked him twice. He refused.’
‘If we leave it, it will look like we locked up an innocent man.’ He looked at me. ‘It will look like you were wrong.’
I hadn’t even thought about that. ‘I guess so, but I don’t really care about that, to be honest.’
‘You don’t have a burning desire to show Sandra Ngo that she was wrong and you were right all along?’
Maybe yesterday I would have, but since we saved Remco’s life together, I felt far less acrimonious towards her. If she hadn’t insisted on giving me a lift, Remco would have died. If she hadn’t helped me pull open the garage door, he might have died. ‘She can have this one,’ I said.
‘That’s surprisingly magnanimous of you,’ Moerdijk said. ‘If you’re sure, I’m tempted to go with what Remco wants.’
It certainly made a difference that I knew I had been right all along, but I didn’t need the whole country to know as well. This was enough. I was grateful to Remco for having told me and I fully appreciated how hard his position with his family was going to be if I revealed the truth. That might have been the reason why he’d wanted to kill himself in the first place.
If Remco had committed suicide, I would never have known that Ruud had been guilty. This was the universe’s way of rewarding me for having saved a life.
‘Okay,’ the boss finally said. ‘We’ll dismantle the team, but the family will have to agree. I don’t want to get into any more trouble with Angela Klaver. Tell Remco to have his mother confirm his request, and we won’t call it an accident but we’ll scale the investigation down. If we ever find the car, then great, we’ll look at it again, but I’m not holding out hope after all this time.’
I called Remco and he said he’d talk to his mother. I didn’t know what he said, but an hour later, Angela emailed the boss, and in addition, Dennis withdrew his official complaint against me.
There was only one problem.
I didn’t know what to say to Carlo’s family. I had no idea what I was going to tell Nancy.
Chapter 31
I had to talk to Nancy at some point, but I had no idea how I was going to approach it. I couldn’t let her believe that she’d been wrong about the events of that night, but I felt caught between a rock and a hard place, responsible towards both Nancy and Remco. How was I going to balance both their needs? It was easy for us to say that we were just going to drop the case or reduce the scale of the investigation, but the last time I’d talked to Nancy I’d tried to get her to understand that she’d misremembered the events of that night. Now I knew that she had been right all along. I wanted to tell her that she had seen Ruud, but I also had to explain that we wouldn’t take this any further. I knew full well that she wouldn’t be happy, and so I delayed it.
Neither Ingrid nor Thomas was surprised by the boss’s decision. If this had been a normal suspicious car accident, without the extra tension of the victim being a murderer-who-might-have-been-innocent, this would have been roughly the amount of time we’d afford it anyway. As we hadn’t found the car or any new witnesses, scaling the investigation down was the usual chain of events.
There was only one person who was upset, and that was Charlie.
‘Can’t we look at this for a bit longer?’ he said.
‘No, we’re calling it a day,’ I said. I slowly packed up the files that I would send back to the Arnhem police force. They’d done a good job investigating Maarten Hageman’s background.
‘But I went through all this paperwork.’
Maybe he’d realise that traffic policing wasn’t so bad after all, if he was already complaining after having checked only one box full of files.
‘And I found this link,’ he continued. ‘I checked all the restaurants against the employment records. It took me forever.’
I took pity on him. ‘Show me,’ I said. I could do the Arnhem police a favour by looking at what Charlie had found in their documents before sending them back, though I knew I was just procrastinating.
‘There were four restaurants that Maarten owned that the police paid particular attention to. These were the ones that they were certain were only fronts for money laundering.’
‘Okay.’
‘Then there were a few more that they thought were legitimate businesses. Those were right at the back.’ He sounded indignant about having to read to the end of a fifty-two-page document. ‘You said it was something like Pizza Italy, but that wasn’t it. It was Casa Italy, and I pulled up their employment records from that time. Carlo’s name was on the list, as well as Tristan’s.’
‘So?’ I asked. ‘We were pretty sure about that already, weren’t we? Pizza Italy, Casa Italy, same difference.’
‘But it’s proof.’
‘You’re right. But it’s not new. It’s proof of information that we were already pretty sure of. So it won’t change things at all. We’re still going to ship all these boxes back to Arnhem.’
‘Okay.’ He looked so disappointed that I felt sorry for him.
‘It’s great for the Arnhem team that you’ve uncovered this. It will really help them.’
‘Can’t we see Tristan? Interview him once more? Can I ask him some questions?’
And as had happened so often with my ex-boyfriend’s parents’ dog, I couldn’t help myself. I threw the stick one more time.
The stack of cardboard boxes seemed to have grown since we’d last been here. There was now a double wall of them on the left-hand side. Tristan was twirling his pen, flicking it up and turning it around his thumb without even looking at it as he asked me how he could help us this time.
‘Casa Italy,’ I said.
The pen clattered onto the desk.
I looked around, but the wall of boxes held steady, unaffected by the shock I’d clearly given Tristan.
‘What about it?’ he said.
‘You worked there,’ Charlie said.
I’d forgotten that I’d promised him he could do the questioning. I now stayed silent.
‘Yes,’ Tristan said.
‘You and Carlo.’
‘That’s right.’
‘What was the place like?’
‘It was just a pizza takeaway joint. We mainly did deliveries.’ He picked up his pen and started twirling it again.
I couldn’t help but watch the spinning pen. I wondered how he rotated it around his thumb. I wished I could do that.
‘Was it busy?’ Charlie asked.
‘No, it was probably the easiest job I’d ever done. We didn’t have many orders so there was a lot of time to study. It was perfect really.’
‘Did you ever meet the owner?’
‘You mean Maarten Hageman?’
Charlie nodded.
‘He didn’t come often,’ Tristan said. ‘He wasn’t Italian enough, he used to say, so he stayed away. He would be ther
e one evening every other week, mainly Fridays. Carlo told me he’d sit at a table in the corner, mostly on the phone.’
‘Had you ever seen Ruud Klaver before the fight with Carlo?’
‘No, I hadn’t.’
‘Not with Maarten?’
Tristan shook his head.
‘Did you listen to Maarten’s conversations?’
‘No, I only saw him a couple of times. I did Wednesday and Thursday nights, Carlo did Friday and Saturday. That paid more.’
So Carlo would have been there on the nights that Maarten came in. Suddenly a whole lot of things became much clearer to me. I gave Charlie a sign to wind it up.
After we left, I bought Charlie a coffee in the café on the ground floor of the office building. It would be unfair to leave it at this. I was reminded of the many times that Barry Hoog and I had talked about our cases. It was appropriate to do this over coffee. He and I had always talked in the office by the coffee machine.
‘What did you learn from that?’ I asked as soon as we were sitting down. Just for today, I could treat Charlie as if he was my star pupil.
‘That they worked at the same place?’
I took a sip of my latte. It gave me enough of a pause that I could calmly say, ‘Okay, but you knew that already. It was in the employment records.’
‘Oh yes. True.’ He added sugar to his cappuccino and stirred thoroughly. ‘Oh!’ He pointed at me with the spoon. ‘That they worked on different days.’
I waited for him to continue and make the connection, but if he did, he didn’t say it out loud. ‘And that’s important why?’ I prompted him.
‘Because . . .’ He took a gulp of coffee. Then he put the cup down on the saucer and sat back on his chair. ‘Because one of them was there on the nights that the main guy came.’
I nodded.
‘And that was the one who was shot.’ He prodded the spoon into the air rapidly. ‘With the same gun!’
I couldn’t help it, his enthusiasm made me smile. ‘Well done,’ I said, and then wished I hadn’t because it sounded more condescending than I’d meant it to. ‘I think he must have overheard something, or seen Maarten with someone he shouldn’t have.’
‘But I thought he’d been killed because Ruud Klaver got into an argument with him over the girlfriend?’
I drank some more of my coffee and let Charlie figure it out for himself.
He finally did. ‘She lied,’ he said. ‘It was never about her.’
‘Shall we go and see her?’ I said.
He jumped up straight away.
‘After you’ve finished your coffee,’ I added. Maybe I hadn’t annoyed Barry as much as I’d always thought.
At least Nancy wasn’t folding her laundry this time.
‘I’m really sorry about barging in like that before,’ she said. ‘With Carlo’s mother. I hadn’t listened to the podcast properly. We were just angry.’ Her eyes flicked from me to Charlie.
We were sitting on the sofa. Thick drops of rain were hanging from the windows. Sheltered from the wind by the gutters, they were clinging on and fighting gravity. A bare rosebush at the end of the garden swung angrily in the wind, pushed down by every gust and then straightening itself after the air had passed to next door’s garden.
‘You were right,’ I said. ‘You saw him. You saw Ruud Klaver.’
Nancy put her hands to her mouth. ‘He did it?’
I nodded. ‘He did it.’
‘Didn’t he have an alibi?’
‘Only for the other murder. Not for Carlo’s. I’m sorry I doubted you.’
Nancy buried her face in her hands for a second. She took a couple of deep breaths. Then she had herself under control again. ‘What’s going to happen now?’
‘Nothing. I’m sorry.’
‘But Right to Justice has to tell everybody they were wrong. That we were right.’
‘Nancy, Ruud Klaver served his time in prison for the murder.’
‘So they can just say that I’m a liar?’
‘They didn’t say that. They said that I never checked certain things. It’s definitely grey, but there is no problem legally. As long as they don’t defame you – and she didn’t – they can speculate, they can make any statement they like. At the end of the day, the Klaver family is going to stop pursuing this.’
Nancy slowly nodded. ‘It’s strange, isn’t it? We’re back to where we were months ago, but somehow it doesn’t feel like that any more. It feels as if everything was raked over again for no reason. Anybody who listened to those podcasts will think Klaver was innocent. It feels unfair.’
‘I know. But with his death, this is the best outcome.’ Especially given that Remco was unwilling to testify. It was that thought of Remco and his reluctance to speak out and point the finger at his father that made me say, ‘You were brave, Nancy. You were really brave to identify Ruud Klaver and to be a witness.’
Nancy broke down in tears. She covered her face with her hands.
‘Without you,’ I continued, ‘Klaver would never have been convicted. Without your testimony, he would never have been put away.’
She wiped her face and blew her nose in a tissue. She threw it in a bin and sat back down. I took one of her hands in mine.
‘And you were smart, too,’ I said. ‘Smart to lie about the reason for the fight. Because that was a lie, wasn’t it? The fight wasn’t about you. It was about what Carlo had seen in Casa Italy. Had he overheard Maarten saying something? Did he know something about Maarten’s murder?’
‘He always said there was something odd about the restaurant,’ Nancy said. ‘There was never anything to do, so he couldn’t understand why it was still going. He did some digging into their finances, checked what the rent was and things like that, and he said it should have gone out of business years ago. Then when the boss of the place was murdered, he got worried but he didn’t actually tell me why.’
‘What really happened that evening?’
‘What really happened? You’re not pursuing this any further, right?’ She looked at Charlie, who was taking copious notes.
‘We’re only investigating Maarten Hageman’s murder. You won’t get into trouble for lying.’ This was actually the best outcome, I thought. Now everybody had a reason to keep quiet.
‘Okay.’ Nancy sighed. ‘Carlo, Tristan and I were in that bar. It was after midnight. Klaver must have been waiting until we were on our own, because as soon as Tristan went to the toilet, he accosted us. He said that Carlo had to keep his mouth shut if he knew what was good for him. Then he dragged him outside and started to beat him up.’
‘Nobody in the bar stopped him?’
‘Carlo got a couple of punches in, he was defending himself, and then Tristan came and managed to hold Klaver back. Klaver pulled free and ran away. Tristan went home, but Carlo was really shaken and had another drink. I asked him what was going on, but he told me it was a lot of bad stuff and that I shouldn’t get involved. These were dangerous people, he said.’
‘So you lied about the reason.’
‘I thought it was safer. I didn’t say anything about the money laundering, I didn’t say anything about the boss’s murder. But I couldn’t keep quiet about who killed Carlo. I’d seen him. I’d seen him clearly.’
‘Thanks, Nancy. I’ll tell my colleagues in Arnhem. It might help them solve Maarten Hageman’s murder.’
‘Will I get into trouble?’
‘For lying under oath?’ At Nancy’s nod, I said, ‘I’ll keep your name out of it.’ At the back of my mind I thought that here was Nancy’s reason to stop pushing Right to Justice into making a public apology. I could just tell the Arnhem police that Carlo had worked at Hageman’s restaurant, and they would make the association themselves. It could be significant in that murder case, because whoever was running the money-laundering business had probably supplied Ruud Klaver with the gun.
Charlie and I went back to the office and finished packing up the files to be shipped back to Arnhem. He
thanked me for having taken him to the two interviews. Again he said he’d learned a lot, but he was subdued as he went back upstairs to his old department.
Chapter 32
‘What do you want for dinner?’ Mark asked. He was over at my flat. ‘Shall I order a takeaway?’
‘No, I’m going to cook for you. I’m going to make pancakes.’
‘Really? Do you know how to?’
‘Doesn’t everybody?’ I measured out the flour. ‘What do you want in them? I’ve got bacon or apple, or you can have plain ones.’
Mark grinned.
‘What?’ I said with a little lift of my chin.
‘I don’t know. When you invited me round for dinner, I wasn’t expecting this.’
I had agonised for at least an hour as to what to make. I wanted to cook something that I wouldn’t mess up, but I also didn’t want to just heat something up. Nor did I want to make it too special, because then it would be obvious that I was just following a recipe from a book. In the end, I hadn’t really had the time to think about cooking because of Remco’s suicide attempt, his subsequent rescue and confession, and I had gone back to the default recipe that I knew how to make. ‘What’s wrong with pancakes? I like pancakes.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with pancakes,’ he said with a smile in his voice.
‘So, what kind do you want?’
‘Bacon, please.’ He got a bottle of red wine from a plastic bag. ‘It’s a good thing I brought something decent to drink with your pancakes.’
I handed him the corkscrew over my shoulder. ‘You can open that. I need to concentrate.’
I heard him laugh behind me, but I ignored him, because this was the complicated stage where I had to add the milk slowly enough that there were no lumps. ‘Oh, an egg. I need an egg as well.’ I took one out of the fridge and added it. I beat the mixture with a fork. There were some lumps. It would be fine once I started cooking it. I got both my frying pans out. I always started by frying the bacon rashers so that they were nice and crispy.
‘What’s going on with your case?’ Mark asked. ‘I heard that Right to Justice cancelled the current series.’
A Death in Rembrandt Square Page 21