A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1)

by Jager, Anja de

  ‘Mum, what am I going to do now?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Don’t look at me for help.’

  It made my heart ache.

  She said, ‘You’ll sort it out yourself. You never listened to any of my advice before.’ She was going to say: I told you so, but managed to swallow the words. She would have been justified – she had told me a hundred times. She had told me to put my husband before my career, to have another child before it was too late, that work wouldn’t make me happy in the long run, that I’d be more fulfilled if I stayed at home, cooked dinner and washed nappies. I never told her that after losing one child I was afraid – terrified, in fact – that the same thing would happen again. I stood there, dishcloth hanging down to the floor, and my body ached from the need of a hug that wasn’t going to come.

  Now we finished taking the lights off the Christmas tree, leaving it bare. I collapsed it, folded up its metal stand and put it back in its cardboard tube, all ready for next year. It was much easier than my real one. It never lost its needles but it also never smelled of pine.

  After putting the Christmas things in the cupboard, I fingered a plain wineglass in the cabinet. The cheap glass was in stark contrast to the cut-crystal ones at my father’s place. ‘Why didn’t you take his money?’ I said without taking my eyes off the cabinet.

  ‘You look cold. I’ll make you a cup of tea.’ She didn’t ask me if I wanted one. She got up and walked out of the room. I followed her to the kitchen and stood between her and the door. She turned on the tap and filled the metal kettle. We both stared at it and said nothing, waiting for the water to boil. The gas flame danced orange. A bank of appliances behind cupboard doors with chipped paintwork led from the door that I was guarding to a small window at the other end. A washing machine with a soap dispenser that had cracked when I still lived here doubled as a windowsill and let a set of old tin cans filled with herbs catch any light that entered the small space.

  The whistle of the kettle tore through the silence. My mother reached in the cupboard and got my old mug out, a large white porcelain one with the ketchup-red and mayonnaise-yellow face of a smiling clown. I caressed my mug by its often held ear, took it from the kitchen and we both sat back down at the table.

  ‘When did you get me this?’ I said.

  She smiled. ‘It was your first real one, after the plastic drinking cup you had. You must have been three or four.’

  Warmth flowed through my body with the hot tea. It was touching that she still gave me tea in this mug. The clown smiled his wide grin at me. ‘I saw Dad last week,’ I said.

  ‘Really? Where?’

  ‘Alkmaar. I went to see him.’

  ‘After all these years, you turn to him.’

  ‘I didn’t turn to him.’

  ‘You should come to me for advice.’

  ‘I didn’t go to him for advice. It was only work.’

  ‘So that’s where all these questions come from.’

  ‘Yes.’ I was pleased she understood. ‘I’m reopening this case he worked on—’

  ‘What lies did he tell you about me? What did he say about me?’

  ‘We didn’t talk about you.’ I immediately realised it was the wrong thing to say.

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘You were sitting in his house and he let the chance to blacken me go by?’ Her voice sounded harsh and disappointed.

  ‘We talked about work.’

  ‘He still lies.’

  ‘And we talked about cars.’ I couldn’t stop the small smile at the memory.

  ‘Cars? Since when are you interested in cars?’

  ‘I have bought a new car . . .’

  ‘You didn’t tell me. Where is it?’ She went to the window.

  ‘I came by bike.’

  ‘But you showed him your new car?’

  ‘I could hardly go to Alkmaar by bike,’ I said, trying to be reasonable and joke about it.

  ‘You could have shown me your car.’

  ‘Next time I’ll drive.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ She sat back down and opened the paper again, turned a page and pretended to read. Then she said, ‘So what were your father’s wise words on your lonely life?’

  ‘I didn’t talk to him about that. As I said, it was work.’

  ‘You’re saying that a bit too often.’

  I raised my hands. ‘But you’re not listening.’

  ‘And he was?’

  ‘We’re reopening a case he used to work on. I had to find out what he knew.’

  ‘And he lied.’

  I shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Is he still married to that woman?’

  ‘Maaike? I suppose so. There were photos of the two of them together.’

  ‘So you’re blaming me,’ she said in a fake-resigned tone of voice.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For your marriage breaking up. Clearly your father can manage to stay married all these years, whereas all I’ve done was look after you.’

  ‘I’m not blaming you.’ But I did know I didn’t want to end up like her, still bitter and angry forty years later. What was the point? ‘Tell me about the money.’

  She pulled her grey eyebrows together. ‘What money?’

  ‘I’ve been to his house—’

  ‘You’ve been there before.’

  ‘I know, but it’s never struck me this clearly before’, I played with the edge of the tattered tablecloth, rolled it up and down, and rubbed my finger over the mark in the wood, ‘that he has a lot of money. That we used to have none. That you still have none.’

  She turned a page of the newspaper with an annoyed rustle. ‘Not none.’

  ‘OK, little.’ What was the last piece of furniture my mother had bought? Everything in this flat had already been here when I left home after university. And that was almost twenty years ago. The sofa’s grey leather had cracked and roughened up where she sat most evenings; pieces of the faded flower-patterned beige wallpaper had peeled down from the edge closest to the ceiling.

  ‘Do you wish I’d left you with him? Look at this!’ She turned the paper round and pointed to a photo of some C celebrity with hardly any clothes on. ‘What is she wearing?’

  ‘No, of course not.’ I pushed the paper back towards her.

  ‘Are you saying I didn’t take good care of you?’ She angrily turned another page over.

  ‘I’m not saying that at all.’ I wanted to grab hold of her chin and lift her head until she had to meet my eyes.

  ‘I worked two jobs to raise you and bring you up.’

  ‘And I appreciate that. I just want to know why you didn’t take any of his cash.’

  When I was about twelve, my mother had bought a pair of trousers for me at C&A. They had been the coolest I’d ever had, purple-blue cords with a white stripe sewn into the seam. Mum had told me to be careful with them, but I was playing after school and I fell. It was the tear in the trousers more than the pain that made me cry. I didn’t go home and roller-bladed endless circles on the school playground long after all the other children had left. A teacher stopped me and asked what was wrong. ‘I can come with you,’ he said after I’d told him what had happened. ‘I can explain to your mother that it was just an accident.’

  But it hadn’t been fear that stopped me from going home: it was embarrassment and shame. I knew how long she’d saved to get the money for those trousers. I should have made them last for a couple of years at least and now there was a huge rip right over my knee. My skin underneath the cloth was torn and grazed, but the pain was from letting my mother down. When I got home, she didn’t say anything, simply gestured for me to take the trousers off, got her sewing machine out and stitched both frayed edges together in silence. I’d worn those trousers for another year or so, the left trouser leg always slightly shorter than the right. And even now she had little spare money even though I gave her a hundred euros a week. She wouldn’t accept more.

  ‘I didn’t take any of hi
s money because I didn’t want to.’ She closed the paper, folded it in two and got up. ‘We should move this table back to where it was. Before the Christmas tree.’

  ‘But it must have been tempting.’ I got up as well. ‘You were working so hard all the time – why not let him pay something for my upbringing?’

  ‘You were my daughter. You were my responsibility.’

  ‘I’m his daughter too, aren’t I?’

  She looked round the room, which had a hole like a scar where the Christmas tree used to be. She pulled an oak chair out towards its gap. ‘Of course you are.’

  ‘So why not make him pay alimony? Child support? If he didn’t want to pay, you could have forced him.’

  ‘You won’t understand.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘It was pride, OK? My silly pride. It was probably wrong of me to leave him – we had you together.’ She went to one end of the table and signalled to me to go to the other. ‘My parents were very angry and upset. They wanted me to stay with him. Marriage was supposed to be forever, through thick and thin, through sickness and health, sanctified by God, but I just couldn’t stay, not after I’d found out . . . OK, one – two – lift.’

  We picked up the table and shuffled it back to its pre-Christmas place, the legs fitting into the original holes in the carpet. ‘Right, that’ll do.’ She rested against a chair. ‘And when I left, my guilt for leaving told me that if I had wanted his money, I should have stayed with him and shared my life with him. Give him something back in return. That probably doesn’t make any sense to you.’

  ‘As a matter of fact it does.’ Avoiding her eyes, I pushed the other chairs back around the table. Each slotted in where it used to be.

  ‘I couldn’t take any of his money,’ she said quietly. ‘Not even when there was plenty.’

  ‘Did you leave him because of the money?’

  ‘Because of where it came from.’ She visibly braced herself. ‘What he got paid for.’

  As my mother confirmed what Stefanie had thought and what I’d already suspected last night, a mixture of feelings invaded me. It was hard to unravel and make sense of them all. Part of it was shock, the jump of my stomach, similar to when Ronald had told me about my father’s heart attack. But it was mainly anger. My heart raced and I would have loved to kick something. Why hadn’t my father told me this when I saw him? Why had he asked me to reopen the Otto Petersen case? Why had he wanted me to talk to Ronald? It didn’t make sense. Did he want to be found out? In my abdomen, the nerve endings tied themselves in knots as if somebody was knitting my intestines together. Did he want me to expose him? I wasn’t sure that I could. I would be exposing myself too. No way would I jeopardise my job just to help his absolution! I gripped the back of the last chair I was putting in its pre-Christmas spot and shoved it under the table. Why did he have to make things difficult for me yet again?

  ‘What did he get paid for?’ I asked tersely.

  ‘I can’t talk about that. It’s too . . .’

  I waited, but she didn’t complete her sentence. ‘Too what?’

  ‘I can’t tell you, Lotte. Please don’t force me. I don’t want to tell you these things about your father.’

  I gave my mother a quick hug, grateful that she had tried to protect me from this.

  ‘You’re going now? I told you what you needed to hear, now you’re off?’

  ‘Yes, Mum, I’m going back to work.’ I said it loudly.

  She nodded. ‘On a Saturday? Right. I’ll see you Wednesday.’ She kissed me on my cheek.

  ‘If I have time.’

  ‘If you have time? I’ve got nothing left of importance to tell you, so now you might not even come on Wednesday?’

  I gave her arm a rub. ‘That’s not what I said.’

  ‘That’s what it sounded like to me.’

  ‘Mum, I’m sorry, that’s not how I meant it. You know what it’s like when I’m in the middle of a case.’

  ‘That’s what he used to say.’ She sat back at the table and started reading the paper again.

  ‘Thanks for your help, Mum. I know this is hard for you.’

  She didn’t reply but kept reading. I got up, touched her head with a light caress, freed my coat and left, almost running down the concrete steps.

  My feet pushed against the pedals of my bicycle and I moved back in time from the new-build area where my mother lived to my home in the belt of old canal houses. My back felt as if boiling water was running down my spinal cord. It was from being pulled in so many different directions, by a kaleidoscope of feelings from sadness to anger.

  Snow was falling again. Without the wind, the snowflakes brushed softly against my cheeks and eyelashes. I took one hand off the handlebar and put it in my pocket for an extra layer of cover. The snow was getting heavier as I arrived at the first canal ring. A car overtook me on the narrow stretch of road and I was pushed to the outside, close to the small metal bollards with the three Xs in relief that were Amsterdam’s symbol.

  I kept my head down as much as possible whilst still looking ahead, and soon passed the Westerkerk. The garish blue paint on the adornments of the steeple and Amsterdam’s symbol in vibrant red and black stood out against the demure grey of the rest of the church. Three skulls above each of the side doors reminded every churchgoer of the brevity of their lives. The postcard shops, currently closed for the winter, would open to hordes of tourists in a few months. People from all over the world would come with their cameras out, eternalising Amsterdam’s picturesque historic heart of canals and bridges, as well as its seedier side closer to the station. They would record the slight tilt of the tower of the Westerkerk or the Homo monument to the gay community, situated just behind the seventeenth-century church, and talk about how interestingly mixed the city was.

  Now, in January, cleansed of visitors, the city felt empty. I hadn’t seen a living soul since the car went past. On this stretch there were only tall houses on one side and frozen water on the other. The signs of life were all indoors, where lights were on to drive away the dark of the snow clouds, even though it was still morning.

  Should I call my father? Demand an explanation? Tell him that I knew anyway? Explain that I had to protect myself so that I would have to cover for him, even if that wasn’t what he wanted? He still hadn’t called me back. He obviously didn’t care. Didn’t want to talk to me. I could still see him – old, shrunken, standing in front of his house, waving, saying it had been nice to see me. If it had been nice, why hadn’t he contacted me?

  I rammed my bicycle in an open slot, chained the front wheel to the metal stand and stumped up the stairs to my flat. My cheeks were wet, numb from the snow’s embrace. I took my coat, gloves and shoes off, put my slippers on, lay down on the sofa and stared at the light coming through the window. My whole body was heavy; even my fingers resting on top of each other felt as if strings attached to the earth’s core were pulling them down. The amber pot of pills called to me from the bedroom. The thoughts from earlier came back.

  Ronald had said I looked like my father. I dragged my body upright and looked at my parents’ wedding photo, which I kept on the sideboard. They both looked so young. Not all of my features were like his but I recognised his long nose with the flattened end on my face. So I was mentally like him as well: I too could not tell wrong from right. I straightened the photo, my mind made up. I couldn’t tell CI Moerdijk about him or about the bribes. I wouldn’t get him into trouble. More importantly, I wouldn’t get myself in more trouble than I already was. If he wanted to unload the weight on his conscience, someone else could be his confessor.

  In my study I took a pen and coloured thickly over my foolishly optimistic faint pencil lines. He’d been on the take, my mother had said, so it was likely he had been bought by Anton Lantinga to destroy the files.

  Chapter Twelve

  I was reading through files on Otto Petersen at the shelter of my desk, when Hans came in. I hadn’t seen my colleague since Friday morning. �
�Hans, I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t have shouted at you.’ This must be what it was like to have a younger brother: you fought, then you apologised.

  ‘It’s OK, Lotte. I’ve been shouted at before. I can cope.’ He hung his coat beside mine on the hooks on the inside of the door.

  ‘Still, I was wrong—’

  ‘Let’s not talk about it.’ He rested his hand on my shoulder as he moved past me to reach his own desk. I tried not to flinch. ‘I know how stressed you’ve been,’ he said.

  ‘It’s no excuse. Anyway, I spoke to the boss on Friday. Did he talk to you afterwards?’

  ‘Yeah, he told me that you’ve dug up a new witness . . .’

  So the die was cast. There was no turning back now. ‘Well, not new exactly,’ I said.

  ‘New to him, right?’

  I nodded.

  ‘So we’re officially reopening it, you and I. And that Stefanie Dekkers—’

  ‘She came round Friday night.’ I bent closer to Hans. ‘Can you believe it? Made me pour her a drink . . .’

  ‘What I can’t believe is that you let her in.’

  I smiled and covered my mouth with my hand to cup and hold the unexpected feeling. ‘I bet she just wanted to see where I live. How was your weekend?’

  ‘I saw my parents.’ Hans pulled his large hands through his potato-peel hair and readjusted his body in the seat, which contained him tightly. ‘They’re still talking about selling up. They say they’re getting too old for farming and have no reason to keep going without any of us wanting to take it over.’ He scratched the back of his head. ‘I have been thinking about it . . .’

  ‘You wouldn’t.’

  ‘If I thought I’d be any good at it, I might.’

  ‘But Irene wouldn’t want to give up her job, surely.’ Hans and his fiancée were going to get married in April and I couldn’t see her as a farmer’s wife. I had met her three weeks after I joined the team. We had just started working on the Wendy Leeuwenhoek case and Hans had invited me for dinner at their house. He’d told me that Irene wanted to meet me and I assumed that she wanted to check me out. She had nothing to fear from me because, even though I’m the latest addition to the team, I am a good ten years older than either her or Hans. But I was wrong – that wasn’t what she was after at all. She was obsessed with Wendy Leeuwenhoek and wanted to hear from me what the parents were like. I didn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know from the newspapers’ endless speculation and the annual interviews the parents gave to keep their daughter in the public eye.