‘I only helped out, mainly in clearing their office.’
‘Did you meet Otto?’
‘No, he had already been arrested. I only met Anton. I remember he put up quite a fight when we confiscated his PC. Wasn’t having any of it. Quite funny. He gave me all this who do you think you are stuff. I told him: police, and just took it. He was livid. Hopping up and down. He told me that unplugging that PC had just cost him more money than I’d make in my entire career. He was probably right.’ Karin sighed.
So I needed to find someone else who could tell me. ‘Who else might have met Otto?’
‘Not sure. Wasn’t Freek Veenstra the main guy working on it? He died last year, remember.’
‘Veenstra? God, I keep forgetting the Petersen Capital fraud was that long ago.’ I wondered if my father had known Otto. No reason he should have. He hadn’t called me back after my message.
‘Yes, it does seem a long time ago. That PC we took from Anton, officially it was probably portable but it was twice the size of the laptops we use now. It weighed a ton. That was state-of-the-art back then. They had all this advanced kit. Everybody ran round like headless chickens, trying to do their jobs and we were taking all their equipment away. I loved it. My best day at work ever. I can’t wait to see the look on his face when we arrest him again.’
I didn’t know what to say to that and Stefanie and I finished our walk in silence, the only sound that of our boots tramping through the snow.
‘Geert-Jan Goosens on Monday?’ I said as we walked past the gates of the police station. The curved modern statues in the garden, which would be partially covered by plants come spring, were now the only shapes that broke the square monotony of building and windows.
‘Good idea. I’ll call ahead and make an appointment. No point in trying to surprise him. I’m sure Karin has already let him know we’re looking at this.’
‘You think so?’ I wasn’t so sure. Karin Petersen, now Lantinga, had every reason not to help Goosens.
Chapter Ten
Outside the Cyber Salon hairdressers, I had the last appointment of the day at 5.45 p.m. My hands had difficulty in fastening the lock on my bike; they were as clumsy as the rest of me. I didn’t normally come here – all these trendy people, hairdressers with cuts you wouldn’t want to be seen dead with – but this time I mistakenly thought it would be a treat.
‘Hi, I’m here for a colour and just a trim. My name is Lotte,’ I hesitated, ‘Meerman.’ Even after more than a year, using my old name was an uncomfortable verbal admission of failure.
The man behind the counter pressed his finger along the names in the appointment book. It was hard not to stare at the orange triangle that studded his left eyebrow.
‘So, yes,’ his eyes took in my hair, ‘cut and colour. OK, come on through. Take your coat off and slip this on. Trudelies can see you now.’
Trudelies, young enough to be my daughter, had cherry-red hair, which was probably originally blonde, built up in spikes like skewers on her head. She combed through my hair with hands to appraise it.
I stared at my mirror image. The skin under my eyes was the deep purple of aubergines from lack of sleep and flecked with red where the skin had been inflamed from too much crying. My bedraggled hair hung limp around my shoulders. I looked as if I’d drowned a week ago; my face even had the waterlogged puffiness of the dead bodies we fished out of the canals. My hair disgusted me. I remembered how he’d touched it, how beautiful he’d said it was. He had played with it when we’d still been in bed. He’d said it was just like hers.
‘Just shave it all off,’ I whispered.
‘Pardon?’
‘I’ve changed my mind.’ I lifted my head and met Trudelies’s eyes in the mirror. ‘I want it all shaven off.’
Trudelies laughed nervously.
‘I’m serious. Just shave it. A number two all over, isn’t that what you call it?’
‘I – I can’t do that.’
‘Why not? I’m the customer.’
‘That’s not a Cyber Salon approved haircut.’
‘Sod that. Just do it.’
She picked up the scissors and held them behind her back. ‘No.’
‘Cut it.’
‘No.’
I started to undo the plastic coat.
‘Wait, wait.’ She rested a hand on my arm and put slight pressure on. ‘I’ll cut it short. If you don’t like it, come back in a week and I’ll shave it. Free of charge.’
I was too tired to fight. I sat back and grabbed my hair in one hand, saying, ‘Make this go away.’
‘And colour?’
‘No.’
‘Maybe back to your original colour?’
Whatever was that? I had dyed it as soon as my mother had let me, from mousy to sun-kissed. Mousy sounded appropriate: grey, matted – the colour of mourning.
I nodded. ‘This colour.’ I pressed my finger to my roots. ‘This colour all over.’
A smile crept onto the stylist’s face. The scissors made a snapping noise.
‘I’ll cut off the length, do the colour and shape it afterwards.’
I didn’t respond.
‘Can I get you anything? Tea? Coffee?’
‘Just cut.’
I kept my eyes on the mirror, so they wouldn’t drift to the growing pile of hair on the floor. It was only hair; it didn’t hurt. In fact, the more she cut off, the lighter my head felt. A weight was removed from my scalp. I closed my eyes as she mixed the new colour and spread it all over my head. It burned my scalp and the ammoniac smell burned my nose.
Cutting and burning. Burning and cutting.
Trudelies had warmed to her task and brought photos of example cuts for me to see. ‘How about this? It’s quite striking. Or this one, a bit softer.’
I didn’t even look at the book. ‘Do as you please. I wanted it shaved, you wouldn’t do that, now you make the decision.’
Her eyes met mine in the mirror. She tilted her head in a question. Her spiky hair never moved. I finally said to her, ‘Short, then. I want it really short.’
She took me to have my hair washed by some trainee. The young girl’s fingers found the bumps and hollows in my skull with a professionalism that made the intimacy bearable. The washing, conditioning and rinsing took exactly the same amount of time as number nineteen in the chart of the year, which was playing on the radio, most likely meant as a background sound but so deafening that it could not be contained there. When the trainee had finished, Trudelies squeezed the excess water from my hair and walked over to the cutting chair, expecting me to follow her. And of course I did.
She ruffled her hand through my hair, now dark, not mousy, then took up the scissors and began to clip the back of my hair until it just touched the base of my skull. I could feel air nip the nape of my neck, the top of my spine. She shaped it around my face, then blowdried it until the ends were as sharp as razors. When she had finished, she smoothed the top of my head with a gentle hand and said, ‘That’s great. It really suits you.’
I didn’t reply. I no longer looked like myself, but then I no longer felt like myself either.
* * *
There was something about the evening that unsettled me. The Christmas tree with its bowed branches that dripped their needles on the wooden floor seemed to mock me: it was time to undress it, I decided, and remove the ten baubles and the lights.
I uncorked a bottle of wine, filled a glass and put it on the table, then collected the plastic bag for the Christmas decorations from the cupboard in the hallway. Slowly, I removed the tree’s jewellery, each fragile golden globe easily crushable between my clumsy fingers, and rolled up its glossy tinsel. The smell of pine glued itself to my skin, sticky as sap, and the lights burned despondently amidst the green until I switched them off. The tree had gone back to its natural state, a mixture of green and brown mottled needles, sharp enough to sew with, and small brown nodules showing where new leaves would have grown if the tree had not been severed from
its roots. No longer heavily made-up for the festive season, it looked surprisingly ugly. I laid it flat on the floor. Somewhere I had the rope I had used to get it up here. I tied it with seven loops to the wooden cross that was nailed to the trunk and opened the curtains and then the window – only to be assaulted by the blast of freezing air.
The phone rang. I let the answermachine reply.
‘Hi, Lotte, it’s Stefanie. Sorry to disturb you so late, but I have been thinking . . . Are you at home?’
I didn’t step away from the window.
‘I’m outside your door, your light’s on. Is your window open? Pick up the phone.’
I sighed, closed the window and walked over to the table.
‘I know you’re there, Lotte. I saw you move – you live where the window was open, don’t you? Come on, pick up the phone.’
I reached a finger to the button on the machine but was not sure which one to press. Should I pick up or cut her off?
‘I’ve got some ideas about Piet Huizen.’
The decision was made. ‘Hi, Stefanie.’
‘Can I come in?’
‘I’ll buzz you up.’ I opened the door and waited until I saw her climb the stairs. Once inside, she peeled off her coat like the skin of an onion. ‘That’s a severe haircut.’
I ignored her comment and walked ahead of her to the front room. ‘Take a seat.’
She dropped the coat beside her on the sofa. My fingers ached to pick it up and put it on a hanger, but I left it where it was and sat down on the chair.
‘You shouldn’t be drinking by yourself,’ she said, pointing at my glass. ‘You’d better get me some too.’
I got a glass from the mahogany sideboard and poured a small amount, maybe two fingers high.
She took a large glug and emptied a fair amount of the wine in one go. ‘What’s with that tree? Why is it on the floor? Is this a bad time?’
Clearly it was. It would have been, regardless of what time it was.
‘This is a lovely flat,’ she said. ‘You’ve done well. I know divorced women who are much worse off.’ She raised her glass at me and rubbed her hand over the dark blue velvet of the sofa. ‘Bit stark for me, you know – no scatter cushions, no rugs. Bit empty, bit cold. Suits you though.’
I didn’t understand how she could think my pale-blue walls and dark wooden furniture cold. For me, the scarcity of fittings created a sense of space. Cushions and carpets would only break the lines that connected the windows to the table, the beautiful parallels of sideboard and picture rails. I had bought my flat from an interior decorator in financial difficulties. I was a cash-buyer and she needed the money. The deal, which included most of the furnishings, was done quickly. Where she kept some pieces for herself, I moved other things around to fill the gaps. She said I should come to her shop on the PC Hooftstraat, Amsterdam’s most prestigious shopping area, where it had been flanked by designer clothes shops. With the proceeds of our transaction, she could keep open a bit longer and she said that she would give me a discount. I hadn’t felt like buying anything, however. It had been one decision too many. Refusing her offer probably insulted her or maybe she had hoped to make more money out of me. I liked living in surroundings that somebody else had chosen.
Stefanie reached over and helped herself to a couple of mint chocolates out of a box I’d had open on the table for weeks, from before Christmas, as I liked the way the smell of chocolate and mint mingled with that of pine. I didn’t stop her from eating them.
‘Anyway, Piet Huizen. Did you meet him?’ She put a chocolate in her mouth in its entirety, almost pushing her fingers in after.
I imagined dust flying from between her teeth when she chewed. ‘I saw him before I met Ronald de Boer.’
‘Right, so you went to his house. Was it big?’
‘Comfortable.’
‘But big? Big like this flat?’ She laughed and washed the coating of chocolate from her tongue with another glug of wine. ‘Too big?’
‘Too big for what?’
‘Well, not too big for a woman who took half her ex-husband’s company just because she gave him the start-up capital.’
I clenched my fists between my knees to make sure I didn’t slap her. I should throw her out; she was poisoning my home. What did she know?
The evening he told me, I had come home early and opened the door to silence. I had stepped over the threshold, unzipped my coat and hung it up. My shoes echoed over the wooden floor – I wasn’t sure what to do. I sat down and switched on the TV, but as soon as a picture appeared on the screen, I pressed the remote control to go to the next channel and the next and the next, until I’d exhausted my options and switched it off. The room filled with the ticking of the clock his grandparents had given us for our wedding.
Eventually I heard keys in the door. Footsteps moved from the front door to the kitchen. They went up the stairs. I switched the TV on again. This time I left it on Nederland 1. A talking face, discussing something, hid the sound of the clock. The steps were above my head now.
I got up and walked around the table, pulled the curtains closed to ensure the neighbours couldn’t look in and sat down again, waiting for the next creak, which would tell me he was ready to talk. I heard him move down the stairs and across the wooden sea of the parquet floor until he stood beside me. He switched off the TV. I watched my mug of tea and listened as the leather sofa announced his weight. The clock measured out each second of our marriage. I waited as I didn’t wish to interrupt the loud ticking. I was not the one who wanted to talk.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘If you’re sorry, don’t do it.’
‘No, sorry. I . . .’ The clock had ticked like a metronome, counting out a requiem. ‘I’ve been stupid,’ he said. ‘I’ve been’, tick tick tick, ‘seeing someone.’
I put my mug on the table with a loud bang, unable to control my hand. The glass coffee table held. ‘Stop seeing her.’
‘I can’t.’
My eyes closed. I leaned back against the sofa. Its leather sighed and cried for me. I shielded my face with my hand and pressed it hard against my eyes. Then I made myself face him. His eyes seemed like little blue pebbles in a stream. I looked around me, at our room, and battled with my tears. I swallowed them with the bitter last dregs of my tea. I watched his face in the glass of the table. It had that strange unfamiliarity that mirrors give. I held my tea mug close to my chest. This wasn’t supposed to happen to me.
‘Please,’ I said.
‘She’s pregnant.’
I could no longer hear the clock over the beat of my heart as I stared at him. I was frozen, robbed of ways to react.
Then I raised my tea mug and smashed it with force into the table’s reflection of his face. The glass cracked. The mug split down the middle and landed on the wooden floor in two halves.
‘You bastard, you fucking bastard,’ I whispered. I got up and felt with my hand on the back of my right hip. My husband backed away. ‘Get out of here. Get the fuck out of here.’ It was fortunate my fingers hadn’t found my gun.
The ticking of the clock reverberated through the room. I took one step over to the mantelpiece, grabbed the bloody clock and hurled it on the floor. When the screws, wheels and glass splinters stopped trying to get away from me, there was finally silence . . .
Stefanie’s voice dragged me back to the here and now. ‘Is his house too big for a retired policeman?’ she said. She helped herself to another couple of chocolates without taking her eyes off me. ‘He could have taken a backhander.’
I’d missed what she was talking about.
‘I read the files,’ she went on. ‘It was his last case before retirement. His last case, a witness statement disappears, a rich guy gets off the hook.’
‘And?’
‘Don’t you see? Anton Lantinga is a multi-millionaire. He’d pay a lot to see this go away.’ She took another big gulp of wine and topped her glass up from my bottle.
‘I don’t th
ink so.’ I brought my glass to my lips to give my hands something to do and to hide my mouth. I swallowed the tiniest amount.
‘But was there money? Did he have money?’
‘Are you driving? Because if you are—’
‘I’m fine. Nowhere near the limit. So was there money?’
‘Not that I could tell,’ I lied. I could check what her numberplate was and tip-off Traffic Control.
‘Shame. Still, that doesn’t mean he didn’t do something else with it. We should question him.’
‘We’ll question Goosens on Monday morning. That’s much higher profile.’
‘First thing?’ She sounded like a child demanding her St Nicolaas presents right on time.
‘First thing.’ I smiled a fake smile and pushed the box of chocolates closer. It would be good if she ate them all, saved me throwing them out.
But she refused them with a quick wave of her hand, knocked back her wine and picked up her coat. ‘Gotta rush. Patrick’s waiting with dinner.’ I followed her to the door.
She turned. ‘Let me help you with that tree,’ she said. ‘We can carry it down the stairs together.’
I hesitated.
‘How are you going to do it otherwise?’
Getting it through the window would be do-able – after all, that’s how I got it up here – but it would be difficult. I nodded and we went back to the tree.
I slid the key ring around the thumb of my right hand and got a firm grip on the base of the trunk. As Stefanie stabilised the top, I lifted the bottom. I let the weight extend my left arm as far as the socket would allow. Tied together by the tree, we walked down the stairs. As I was three steps lower than her, her head was finally higher than mine. My hand hurt, but she was not stopping so neither would I. Even on the landing, where I would have put it down normally, I kept it lifted as I opened the door. My fingers had difficulty holding the weight even though the needles were like anchors in my flesh and the sap stuck tree and skin together like superglue. I didn’t look round, but kept going down, careful step by careful step, my eyes on the floor, measuring the width of each step and counting each wooden block down, twenty-two steps in total. She took a step whenever I did, our feet making twin noises on the floor.
A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1) Page 8