Only when we got to the downstairs hallway did I acknowledge the existence of my colleague. ‘Finally there.’
She put the tree upright and I rested it against my shoulder. I passed her the keys, she opened the front door and I dragged the Christmas tree out of the house onto the pavement. The council would pick it up tomorrow and chip it into little pieces.
‘Thanks for your help,’ I said. It wasn’t even that hard.
She smiled. ‘Thanks for the wine and chocolates. I’ll see you Monday.’ She waved and walked to her car. I went back upstairs, got a broom out, and removed all the needles from the steps and the marble floor in the hallway. The festive season was over for this year.
Stefanie could well be right. My father’s house was bigger than it should be for a retired policeman, especially in the high-priced commuter belt of Alkmaar. Just over half an hour by train to Amsterdam, house prices had sky-rocketed there in the last ten years. In my study, which used to be the interior designer’s studio, I opened my laptop and googled the address. It didn’t take long to find out that he lived next door to Alkmaar’s mayor and opposite two company directors. Even when he’d still been working he shouldn’t have been able to afford a house in the Oranjepark.
I picked up a pen and walked over to the architect’s table that dominated the study. It was perfect as a horizontal version of our office whiteboard. I paused with the pen above the virginally white sheet of paper, hesitant to spoil its pure beauty with my bad thoughts. In the centre of the white page I wrote Otto Petersen. I drew a careful square around the name of the dead man. Two lines went from the bottom corners of the square to new boxes with the names of the two other directors in Petersen Capital: Anton Lantinga and Geert-Jan Goosens, my father’s and my boss’s main suspects respectively. With a see-through green plastic ruler, I measured the distance between those two names, and drew a vertical line from the middle. At the bottom of that line I hung the amount of money missing: forty million euros. I picked up a red pen, put the witness’s name to the left of Anton Lantinga and drew a dotted arrow along my ruler. I left it dotted, because Wouter Vos’s evidence wasn’t enough. He’d seen Anton’s car; that didn’t mean Anton was driving it.
At the top of the page, exactly above the box containing Otto’s name, I drew a box for his wife. I put a curved line between her and Anton Lantinga and wrote affair above it. With a pencil I wrote Piet Huizen below Anton’s name, inside a thin pencil square. I made it as faint as I could, hesitant to believe Stefanie’s slander of my father. Ronald had told me that my father had never passed the files on to the team from Amsterdam – but he’d said it was just out of spite. Did he pay him? I questioned above the line. Six boxes around six names, six people linked, five alive, one dead.
Chapter Eleven
The next morning, when I opened the curtains, I revealed a world slowly turning from night to day. Children ran to wherever it was they went on Saturday morning, slid on the snow-covered pavement and threw snowballs. Their laughter sounded like the peal of church bells between the canal houses. A council truck drove along, scraping up mounds of snow, which ran off the sides of the shovel like water off the bow of a ship, heaping up in piles of ammunition for the kids. In its wake the truck left a trail of salt on the road. Soon only the gables of the houses would be white.
The thin winter light struggled through the window and barely reached the floor. I sat at my table and let the morning sun touch my face. The light made a small angle with the floor and intruded less than it did in summer.
I started my laptop to see if I had new mail, but there was nothing. I got up and went out looking for human contact. I closed my apartment door and climbed down the stairs. Now that I’d lived here for over a year, I was getting used to the extreme steepness of them, each step barely deep enough to take the length of a foot.
It wasn’t far to the baker on the corner but the cold was biting my cheeks and nose even on this short stretch. I greeted the girl behind the counter. This was normality; this is what everybody did every day: talking, smiling and buying bread. But I differed from the other people in the shop with their uncomplicated dreams and concerns. I bet none of them had dreamed of dead girls or hugging skulls last night. I walked home, dropped my bread off, and cycled to my psychiatrist appointment.
I’d chosen her at random. I didn’t want people to know that I was seeking help so I couldn’t ask anybody to recommend one. Even if I could have asked, I didn’t know if any of my friends or colleagues had ever been to counselling and I would be embarrassed to bring it up. So instead I’d picked someone whose name I liked and who was within cycling distance of my flat.
Maria Kerkstra held her practice in a flat in the Jordaan. She was young. Probably recently graduated, probably still building up her group of clients. As soon as I walked through the door and shook her limp hand, I knew I wouldn’t come back. She had a couch, a long leather affair, a desk and an office chair. It all looked correct; only the flowered wallpaper was different from what I’d expected a psychiatrist’s place of work to be like and it jarred.
I sat on the sofa, faced the table and was given a glass of water.
‘What do you want to talk about?’ Her voice was soft and probably meant to be soothing, but I had to strain to hear what she was saying. ‘When you called me yesterday, it sounded like an emergency. Sounded urgent.’
‘I’m having problems at work.’
‘What kind of work do you do?’
‘I’m a police officer.’ I didn’t want to talk about this but what was the point in coming here if I didn’t at least try. I buried my head in my hands. I was falling over the edge of the cliff and knew I needed help. ‘I worked on this case that really shook me up. I can’t get over it. I . . . It’s haunting me.’ I took a sip of water.
‘Have you been offered counselling at work?’
‘Yes, but it would go on my record. Plus I don’t trust them to keep their mouth shut.’
‘Everything you say here is completely confidential.’
‘Nor do I want somebody I see on a daily basis to know this stuff about me.’ You, I don’t ever have to see again, I thought.
Maria Kerkstra nodded. ‘So tell me about this case.’
‘It was a little girl. Wendy Leeuwenhoek.’ I picked my glass up again. ‘You’ve probably read about her. She disappeared fifteen years ago. Because the anniversary of her disappearance was coming up, our boss wanted us to go through the files again, make an appeal on television. You’ve probably seen it . . .’
Maria’s face didn’t change. She scribbled something but didn’t give a sign that she knew anything about Wendy. She must do. Everybody did. Everybody thought they knew exactly what happened. Nobody did.
‘Was this any different from other cases?’
‘It was tough but I guess not that different.’
‘But it was different for you. This is a new reaction for you. Or do you think it’s just the build-up of stress over the years?’
‘No, it was this one case.’
‘What was it about this one?’
I couldn’t talk any more. I shook my head and got up. ‘This has been a mistake. I shouldn’t have come.’
‘You’ve paid. Let’s at least talk for the hour. Talk about something else if you like. Anything you want.’
‘The weather? Sports?’ But I sat back down.
‘Whatever you like.’
‘It was because it was a little girl.’ I repeated my mother’s words. I was here because I needed help with this and I summoned all my courage to at least try.
‘Do you have children?’
‘I had a daughter. She died. Cot death.’ I whispered the answer. Poppy, who had finally arrived after I’d already had two miscarriages and was almost ready to give up on motherhood. Poppy, who’d cried most nights. Then came the morning when I’d woken refreshed after a good night’s sleep, the first in months. Arjen had gone to work after sticking his head in to say that she was still fas
t asleep, but when I saw her, I knew she wasn’t asleep. I touched her and she was cold. ‘These things happen,’ the doctor had said. ‘Nobody knows why.’ It was something I never talked about. When I’d come back from maternity leave early, because what else was I possibly going to do other than work and the walls seemed to have collapsed on me after the death of my baby, nobody asked, nobody said much. My boss at the time had tried but I’d cut him short. If I didn’t speak of it, it had never happened. But I had been sick, nauseous, all day, every day, from the tears that I had locked inside. It had felt as if I had a rock in my stomach, which was heavy with sharp edges like my grief. By the time we looked into Wendy Leeuwenhoek’s disappearance, I’d been back at work for years and the rock had become small and almost smooth like a pebble in a river – but it hadn’t disappeared.
‘So here was this other little girl,’ I said. ‘And her mother refused to believe she’d died.’
My role in the investigation had been to get close to the parents. They had been critical of the original investigation and the CI had wanted to make amends. The parents had divorced six months after Wendy disappeared. I met Monique, Wendy’s mother, often. Not because I’d suspected her of killing her daughter but because it had been what the boss had asked me to do. Monique had kept her distance, kept herself closed to me. She probably would have been like that with everybody, with every policeman or policewoman.
She gave restrained consent when I asked her if I could record our conversations. Her pale face and long blonde hair, so devoid of colour it was almost white, gave the impression of fragility. She looked as if she was made of glass, as if any intrusion in her personal life would fracture and destroy her. I didn’t want to break her, I understood her sorrow, but I just didn’t have the will to treat her as kindly as she needed me to. There was never any proof of neglect or evidence that she’d abandoned her daughter in the park where the little blue shoe was found, but I had to ask her why she had let her little girl out to play that late in the evening. She told me she had been preparing dinner and could see Wendy from their kitchen window. Then she looked again and her daughter was gone. She still wasn’t worried; it was a game Wendy played. Paul went to get her but came back an hour later, upset because he couldn’t find her.
I hadn’t expected Monique to cry. She’d answered this same question so often. The tears came as if they’d been inside for the last fifteen years and were only now allowed out. I offered her my handkerchief but she used her own tissues instead. Her house was immaculately clean and she looked ready to fluff up the cushions on the sofa as soon as I left. There was a large photo of Wendy on the mantelpiece but no others. No sign of other children, a new husband, a lover or even a pet. Only her in perfect isolation.
‘She made a painting every month of what Wendy would have looked like,’ I told the psychiatrist. ‘She studied girls on the street to get the fashion right: the right haircut, the right clothes. She had a room full of these paintings, almost two hundred of them. It was spooky. I asked her if she got pleasure out of them. She looked at me as if I was crazy and said, “No, I don’t get pleasure out of anything any more. My only pleasure is the absence of pain.”’ I took a sip of my water. The words had so exactly described how I felt that I had listened to Wendy’s mother say them a number of times on the tape, listening, rewinding, listening, rewinding.
‘When Wendy went missing, she’d just lost her first milk tooth, so there were all these photos with a smile with a single gap, but in the paintings more teeth went and later new teeth came. It made me think of what my daughter would have looked like. It was more than four years since she’d died and here I was, looking at this photo of six-year-old Wendy with a tooth missing, holding a watering can in her hands, wearing a pink dress and pink wellington boots, and I thought: This is what she would have looked like. This is how big my Poppy would have been.’ I covered my eyes with my hands and took a few deep breaths. ‘I kept those photos. It was as if my little girl, my Poppy, had grown, hadn’t died, but was there in those photos.’ Those first days after I’d held the photos, collected them and had taken them home, I’d even thought that this could be my new family, that this could be my new daughter. Of course Wendy wouldn’t be six, she would be twenty-one, a student maybe or working, but she could be mine. She could be my girl. A replacement for Poppy.
‘And now . . .’
‘Now even Wendy’s photos are gone.’ And with the loss of the photos, Poppy seemed dead all over again.
‘I understand why this case has been so hard for you. How is your husband coping? Do you talk about this?’
‘We’re not together any more.’
I took my gloves off and stuffed them in the pockets of my jacket. Even protected, the tips of my fingers had turned white and cold. I pressed the buzzer of Flat 6. It was 11 a.m. She would be surprised I was here, but she would definitely be home.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi, it’s me.’
Without a comment the door clicked open and I went in. I took the concrete steps two at a time. If I looked closely at them, I could see traces of the thousands of times I had walked up here. It was no warmer in the cavernous communal hallway than it had been outside.
The door to my mother’s flat was slightly ajar. I pushed it fully open, went through and hung my coat on its usual hook. My mother sat at the table, reading the newspaper and drinking a cup of tea. My visit didn’t mean she’d break with her morning routine of scanning every page of the Telegraaf.
She looked up over the edge of the paper. ‘Oh no,’ she said, reaching out with her hand to touch my hair. ‘What’s happened to my lovely blonde daughter?’
‘I only had it cut.’ I pulled out a chair and sat down.
‘Never mind, it’ll grow back. You must be regretting it.’
I tucked a strand of my newly dark hair behind my ear. ‘I like it actually.’
‘Much more practical, I suppose.’
‘I like the way it looks.’
‘Really? Had you been to this hairdresser before?’ She peered at me, her head at a slight angle like a robin looking at a worm on the grass, ready to pounce.
‘First time.’
‘That figures. It’s not quite even, not symmetrical.’
‘It’s not supposed to be.’
She nodded. ‘You did it because you were angry. It’s some form of self-harm – I read about that in the paper.’
‘I wasn’t angry. I’m not self-harming. Want to see my arms?’ I pulled at the sleeves of my jumper to stop my hand touching the red cut I had inflicted on my forehead.
‘Don’t be stupid.’ She put the paper up again and made the pages rustle. ‘You must be very lonely,’ she said from behind the Telegraaf.
‘I’m fine.’
She lowered it again and looked at me. ‘So why are you here on a Saturday morning?’
I avoided her question. ‘You haven’t taken your Christmas tree down yet?’ I asked.
‘Oh, we can do it now if you like.’ She opened a cupboard and got the cardboard box for the baubles out. Sellotape held the corners together. I picked a silver bauble from the tree. Its skin was dulled by age.
‘I remember when we bought these,’ I said.
‘Was it ninety or ninety-one?’
‘Must have been ninety-one.’
‘Yes, you were already going to university.’
We had bought them to replace the ones I’d broken the year before, when I’d come home drunk from a Christmas party at one of my few friends’ places and had forgotten the tree was there.
‘I want to talk about you and Dad,’ I said.
She had never been willing to tell me what had happened between them. Even now she was silent. I could hear the traffic outside the flat. I plucked the silver bird with its glass-fibre tail from the tree. The texture of the tail was like metallic satin under my fingers. I remembered the first year I had been allowed to hold it. I must have been eight or nine. A few strands affixed themselves t
o my fingers, staying behind when I put the bird down. It was getting old, just like me, just like my mother.
‘Mum, it’s important,’ I said.
‘It wasn’t the same.’ We took off the lights together. I picked one from the tree like a small ripe fruit from the closest branch and handed it to my mother. ‘We weren’t like you and Arjen,’ she said. ‘Knowing about us won’t help.’
I couldn’t tell if I was getting angry or irate. It was probably a mixture of both. ‘Mum, please tell me. You need to tell me at some point.’
‘You made your own mistakes. This was different.’ I passed a second light to her and she wrapped them around her hand, tying her fingers together with the green plastic wire. ‘It won’t help you, Lotte.’
She’d always said the same thing. We had been in the kitchen, doing the dishes, when I’d told her about my marriage breakdown. I had been nervous. My hands were sweating and I’d wiped them on the dishcloth. I had difficulties forming the words that admitted to my mother that Arjen had left me.
She’d said, ‘What did you do?’
The first words out of her mouth: what did you do? I told her I hadn’t done anything. She said that I must have done or he wouldn’t have left me. In her eyes, the injured party walked, as she had done. I said that it wasn’t anything that I did, that it was more what he had done. With somebody else. She shrugged and returned to her scrubbing. The back of my throat felt like sandpaper.
A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1) Page 9