A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1)

by Jager, Anja de

  Hans’s house in one of Amsterdam’s suburbs was nice, and photos of his parents’ farm, the farmhouse, the land and the livestock adorned many of the walls, but I didn’t get the impression farming was Irene’s thing. She was a doctor at the VU Hospital and had slogged to get to where she was. It must be difficult to fit a life around two people on shifts. I’d been with my previous team for more than five years, but I’d never been to any of their houses. When I’d still been married, I would have had to take Arjen and he never had much interest in mingling with my colleagues and listening to police talk. After those early refusals, I wasn’t invited again.

  Irene had wanted to cook me another meal last week to thank me for swapping shifts with Hans over Christmas. She’d said I should come over for New Year’s, but I’d said I had other plans. I thought she was going to set me up with one of her friends and I couldn’t face having to make pleasant chit-chat with a stranger who I was supposed to like but inevitably had no intention of seeing again.

  ‘She says she’d like to give it a go. There’s good money to be made in farming.’

  ‘Don’t you dare leave me alone with Thomas. If you’re leaving, we’d be a two-person team.’

  ‘Hi Lotte. Hi Hans.’

  I turned round like a naughty schoolchild. ‘Hi, Stefanie. Ready to go?’

  ‘Geert-Jan Goosens, here we come.’

  ‘If there’s anything I can do to help.’ Hans said.

  ‘You could start getting us some pictures,’ I told him and pointed towards the whiteboard. I picked up my gun, fitted the holster around my waist and put on my suit jacket. The problem with suits was that they never fitted properly: the cloth wasn’t cut to accommodate the extra lump on your hip. When I’d first started as a plainclothes officer, I was young and cared what I looked like, and wanted to wear clothes that veiled the weapon. I’d stopped trying after a stupid incident in the fitting room of C&A. I was checking if the weapon showed through the cloth of the jacket I was trying on, undoing the buttons, turning round, readjusting where the gun sat on my hip, when a shop assistant saw me, around the edge of the badly closed fitting-room curtain. My eyes caught hers in the mirror. Only showing her my badge had stopped her from screaming and calling the police. Now I simply bought clothes a size too big.

  Geert-Jan Goosens worked in the glass and steel dominated business park around Amsterdam’s World Trade Center, as Director of Research at the Chicago Bank.

  ‘That must be a step down from running your own firm,’ I said to Stefanie. My ears popped halfway up our ride in the lift to the thirtieth floor.

  ‘He’s fifty-seven,’ she said. ‘Sold his company to Chicago Bank two years ago.’ She had done my homework for me. ‘This is more an honorary job than anything else. They’ve kept him on at a high level, possibly for his contacts. Old boys’ network and all that.’

  We were taken to Geert-Jan Goosens’s large corner office, past row upon row of young men and a few young women, often on the phone but always looking at some screen or other. I felt old walking amongst them. What chance would my father have had of understanding these people? Whatever I might think of her, Stefanie was useful as my guide and interpreter in this financial world.

  Geert-Jan Goosens sat behind a large desk, which seemed to have been created this size for intimidation only. There was a pile of papers on one corner, a PC on the other, a blotter in front of him, but otherwise acres of bare wooden surface. He was a large man, almost big enough to do his desk justice. When he stood up, he towered over me, and I estimated that he had to be around 2.10 metres tall. A well-fitting suit made his mass look intentional, as if he was supposed to be this big and had worked hard to achieve it.

  I shook his hand, then walked across to the window, looked out and surreptitiously wiped the palm of my hand against my leg. Outside, thirty floors below us, people and cars were so small they seemed made out of Lego. From this distance, their lives looked unreal and unimportant. That was probably why business people liked to be in their high buildings; it made it possible to ignore the normal people, to think they were just toys, whilst they made their decisions. A faint smell of cigars lingered in the fabric of the blinds. I pictured Goosens in the evenings, with the door shut because it was illegal even for a director to enjoy a cigar in his office to celebrate a job well done. Maybe a law to protect those unimportant men and women who worked to clean this office could be broken.

  I heard a chair being pulled back and knew Stefanie had taken a place opposite the man. I turned round. She beckoned to me to come over and sit next to her, but I remained standing and watched the pair from where I stood. I could do what I liked as well – I could break rules too. I leaned against the windowsill. The view was perfect: Stefanie and Goosens opposite one another, like a talk-show host and his guest, separated by the barrier of the desk, and me, their audience, just outside that circle.

  Goosens opened the exchange. ‘Otto Petersen, eh? I hope you know something about finance. Not like that idiot who was investigating it before. What was his name?’

  ‘DI Huizen?’ Stefanie said.

  ‘No, that’s not right. The guy from Amsterdam Police.’

  ‘Moerdijk?’

  ‘Right, that’s it. Complete idiot.’ Goosens’s voice reached every corner of his office as he called our boss an idiot. I imagined his voice could fill this trading floor or break the window if he really let rip.

  ‘In what way?’ Stefanie asked. She crossed her arms. Her left foot pulsed in the empty air.

  ‘He kept going on about the money. Said it had disappeared and that I must have it.’ The big man laughed. ‘Can you imagine? No, if we still had that money, there wouldn’t be a problem.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘We lost it in the market, of course.’

  Stefanie nodded. She paused for five bounces of her foot, then asked, ‘How?’

  He picked up a pen and clicked the top. ‘Otto made some bad investments.’ He got a handful of papers from the pile in the corner and started to read, scribbling with the pen, which looked small between his large fingers, the ends of which were bulbous like upside-down carrots.

  ‘I’d like some more details, please.’

  He looked up from his papers for a second, then started to write again. ‘I explained it all to that guy last time. He didn’t get it. I don’t see the point in doing it again.’ A small smile played around his fleshy lips. The top one was even thicker than the bottom, but they were still proportionally small in the expanse of flesh in his face.

  ‘Sir, please answer the question.’

  He signed the papers he was reading, then put the pen down and looked up at Stefanie. ‘How about I write it down and email it to you, then someone who’d understand can take a look.’

  Stefanie put both feet on the floor and pulled her shoulders back. ‘You tell me now,’ she said quietly but with force.

  ‘I already told you that I don’t see the point.’ He took the next set of papers from the stack. ‘You won’t comprehend and I’ll be wasting my time.’

  ‘Or you could come with us to the police station and we’ll continue the interview there.’

  He picked up his pen again, clicked the top three times and crossed out something on the first page. ‘I don’t suppose you know what calls are.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Not telephone calls.’

  ‘I know what you mean.’

  ‘Gosh.’ He turned the page over and scribbled something on page two. ‘Well, he sold those at the back end of 1994, as the market was going down. But then the market turned and he lost a lot of money and blew up the fund. That answer your question?’

  ‘Why didn’t he close out the position?’

  Goosens raised his eyebrows. I didn’t understand what she meant, so it must have been financial jargon. ‘He said he had. Are we done here? I’ve got another meeting in five minutes.’

  Stefanie didn’t budge. ‘But you must have known.’

  ‘K
nown what?’

  ‘What positions he had on. You must have discussed these things.’

  ‘I told him to close them out when he’d lost twenty million on the trade. He told me he had. Only he hadn’t.’

  ‘Had you worked with Otto Petersen before?’

  Goosens got up, moved his bulk from his chair and would have walked to the window if I hadn’t been standing there. He started when he saw me and instead turned to look at the bookshelves behind his desk.

  ‘We were at ABN together for three years when we decided to set up Petersen Capital.’

  ‘Why not Goosens Capital?’

  He rested an arm on a bookshelf. It creaked under the weight. His mouth tightened on the words he didn’t want to say. ‘Otto brought in most of the money.’ He put his free hand in his pocket as if he wanted to protect any change he carried there.

  ‘So he made the investment decisions?’

  ‘No, he ran one book – Europe. I ran the US one.’ Running a book. Just like real gamblers. Bookmakers but higher on the social ladder. Goosens started tapping fingers on the shelf he was leaning on.

  ‘But he made the decisions for Europe.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So there was nothing unusual about what he did?’

  Goosens remained silent.

  ‘When he decided not to close the position,’ Stefanie continued. ‘It was his book, right, so he could do what he wanted?’

  ‘Yes, but he should have informed the investors and me, not forged the statements.’

  ‘Sure.’

  I studied the outside world again. Otto Petersen as more senior, more powerful than this man created a different picture. Not someone who had done what Goosens had told him, but the senior partner, the one with the capital, the money, in an industry where money was all that mattered.

  ‘Is that it? I’m rather busy.’

  ‘Was it out of character?’ I said to the window.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Otto Petersen. Forging the books, lying to you and the investors.’ I turned to face him. ‘Was it out of character? Had he done anything like that before?’

  Goosens moved away from the bookshelves. ‘No,’ he said abruptly, ‘I don’t think he had. In my opinion, I think he just got sucked in. He was losing money, losing the firm he’d set up, all his capital, and didn’t know what to do. Maybe his wife told him to lie, that wouldn’t surprise me, or maybe he thought his luck would turn. Just one more roll of the dice, one turn of the market, and nobody need ever know. Poor bastard, his luck didn’t turn.’

  ‘Thank you for your cooperation.’ Stefanie stood up and didn’t extend her hand. I avoided the handshake too and just walked out behind Stefanie, along the trading desks, where people rolled the dice.

  ‘That condescending fat toad,’ Stefanie said when we were back in the car. ‘I’ll see if I can find the trade that made the loss. Unfortunately, Goosens doesn’t have much of a motive if his story is true.’ She snapped her seatbelt closed.

  On the streets, vehicles and exhaust fumes had churned the snow into grey mush.

  ‘There are still plenty of reasons for Geert-Jan Goosens to kill Otto Petersen,’ I said. ‘By the time Otto was released, Goosens had landed on his feet and was running his own company. And it was his own company, right? Nothing to do with Anton Lantinga.’

  ‘Correct. He and Lantinga set up a fund each.’

  ‘So he didn’t want his ex-partner out on the street, telling his version of events in the same clubs, on the same golf courses, in the same bars.’

  ‘You see now why I’m so keen on getting one of them?’ Stefanie stopped the car at a red light and looked at me. ‘One of the high and mighty ones, who think they are above everybody and everything else, including the law.’

  ‘It should all be in the notes on the original fraud case,’ I pointed out. ‘They must have gone through all these trades then.’

  The lights changed and we were moving again. ‘True – I’ll find them. And what about Lantinga? Shame he’s in New York.’

  ‘He’ll be back soon enough.’

  ‘I hope he won’t do a runner.’

  ‘To run would be to admit guilt. Anton Lantinga will be back when he said he would be.’

  Stefanie wanted us to stop for a coffee at a department store in the centre. It wasn’t the kind of place I would normally have chosen to get a caffeine fix, but I was in no mood to argue. I drank mine slowly, enjoying the warmth on my tongue, craving its bitterness. The caffeine streamed through my veins and drove some of the tiredness away. The noises all around us in the cafeteria were intrusive, a prickly blanket of sound – but I found I didn’t mind.

  ‘Do you want to know what all that financial stuff meant?’ Stefanie asked.

  Not really. I just wanted to sit here and enjoy my coffee. ‘OK,’ I lied.

  ‘Do you know what calls are?’

  ‘No.’ A waitress walked by, carrying a tray of drinks, some beers, some coffees, a couple of pieces of cake. It looked like apple cake – very appetising. If I’d been on my own, I might have ordered one, but here with Stefanie, she would never have let me eat it in peace.

  ‘They are the rights to buy something at a set price.’

  The waitress delivered the drinks to a large group in the corner, a bunch of students, skipping lectures to socialise instead.

  ‘So if you buy a call, you expect the market to rise. Say you buy a call on Shell shares with a strike price of a hundred euros. Now you have the right to buy a share in Shell for a hundred euros. If the price of the share goes past a hundred, your call is worth money, as you have the right to buy it for a hundred but it’s worth more. It’s “in-the-money” as it’s called.’

  At the table behind Stefanie, a woman with shopping bags strewn around her chair was trying to get her daughter, a pixie of about four or five, to drink her apple juice. The little girl had two pigtails, held together with elastic bands adorned with fake snowballs.

  ‘So, if you sell a call, as Otto Petersen did, you get money up front, but you have to sell the share at the strike price of the call. If you sell a call with a hundred strike price, you have to accept a hundred for that share, even if the price on the stock exchange has now climbed to two hundred.’

  The girl was drinking her apple juice from a red straw – no, she wasn’t drinking it, she was blowing bubbles in her glass. Her mother drank her cappuccino and stared out of the window at life outside this department store.

  ‘It was a strategy that worked for a long time, getting paid up front and the calls expiring worthless or close to worthless. But Otto’s continued success eventually became his downfall. As he was making money he had to invest larger sums and was doing these trades in larger and larger sizes. Then the shit hit the fan and it all went horribly wrong. Petersen sold that final ASX call – the Amsterdam Stock Exchange call – the price went through the roof and he lost a fortune. And bankrupted his company.’

  When the little girl smiled I could see she was missing two of her front teeth.

  ‘Did that make sense?’

  I took my eyes off the child and looked at Stefanie. ‘Yes, perfect sense, thanks. That helped a lot.’

  The mother twisted one of her daughter’s pigtails around her finger, twizzling it round and round until all the hair was gone, then let go. The hair had turned into a corkscrew curl. The girl shook her head back and forth, put her finger in her mouth and used the wet finger to straighten out her hair. ‘Mummy, I don’t like curls,’ she said loudly. I smiled. So did her mother. Our eyes met.

  ‘Surely it would have been better for Petersen to just go bankrupt rather than end up in jail. He must have been certain the market was going to turn,’ Stefanie said.

  The mother looked at me, then smiled again. ‘Drink your juice, poppet,’ she said. ‘We’ve got to meet Daddy soon.’

  ‘It’s clearly Anton Lantinga,’ she concluded. ‘Let’s put this case in front of the committee and get a proper team working on i
t. Have Lantinga picked up as soon as he arrives at Schiphol.’

  ‘The CI is happy to let you, me and Hans work on it together for the time being,’ I told her.

  Stefanie downed her coffee. ‘Right.’

  I finished my coffee as well, only too ready to leave.

  Back at the office, Hans had started the wall. Pictures and black marker pen were filling the whiteboard opposite our desks. The dead man took pride of place in the middle. The drawing looked different from the one in my study, but that was the whole point: two different pairs of eyes, two different drawings. Hans’s lines and arrows were curved and dipped in the middle like overlong telephone cables. He had photos of two men at the top.

  I recognised Goosens as the second man, but didn’t know the first: an elegant middle-aged man in a tuxedo. ‘Who’s that?’ I pointed to the photo.

  ‘Anton Lantinga. The philanthropic financier at the opening night of Tosca at the Concertgebouw,’ he read from the screen.

  Of course. The two men who had started firms out of the ruins of Petersen Capital, Anton Lantinga and Geert-Jan Goosens, were at the head of Hans’s drawing; Otto’s former business partners took the space I reserved for Otto Petersen’s widow, Karin. It was Stefanie who made us focus on the money.

  She walked over to the whiteboard and looked at the photo from up close. ‘He hasn’t changed much,’ she said. ‘He’s less angry than the last time I saw him, of course, but he has that sheen of money.’

  Karin was equally stunning in a long, off-the-shoulder night-blue dress. ‘Same occasion?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. A charity event for Unicef. She seems to do a lot for them.’

  Geert-Jan Goosens, in the photo next to Anton’s, looked serious and professional, holding a pen as if he was ready to sign someone’s pay-cheque, the faintest hint of a smile around his lips, probably at how small their pay was compared to his. ‘Corporate brochure, I bet,’ I said. ‘He still has the same desk.’