Hans laughed. ‘Whatever did we do before Google?’
‘It’s much easier with people who like publicity.’ Stefanie took Thomas’s chair and sat down. I perched on his desk and looked at the wall. Hans had the marker pen in his hand and stood by the whiteboard looking like a young, but over-sized, geography teacher with his sleeves slightly too short and the leather patches protecting his upper arm rather than the elbow.
‘He doesn’t fit in, does he?’ I picked up a pen from Thomas’s desk and twiddled with it.
‘Who?’
‘Otto Petersen. He stands out like a sore thumb.’
‘Well, he is the only one who’s dead.’ Stefanie laughed at her own joke.
‘That’s not what I mean.’ I got up. ‘Look at him, stubble on his face, rolls of fat . . .’
‘The man’s just come out of jail.’ Hans tapped the back of the marker on his photo. ‘Of course he looks different.’
‘I want another photo. I want one that shows what he looked like nineteen years ago. When he was still rich and powerful, like the rest of them.’ I looked at Stefanie. ‘There must be one in the original Petersen Capital file.’
‘It’s not necessary. It’s crystal-clear what happened.’
‘Just get the whole file while you’re at it.’ I sat back on the edge of the desk, my feet off the floor.
‘I’ll go tomorrow.’ She planted herself more firmly in her chair as if she expected I wanted her to go straight away. ‘But it’s overkill, this wall. It’s a straightforward case, isn’t it? Otto Petersen arranges to meet with Anton Lantinga on his release, angry that his friend has been sleeping with his wife while he was in jail. He asks Karin to pick him up, so she’s out of the way and he and Anton can have a heart-to-heart. Things get out of hand, they argue or something and Lantinga shoots Petersen. He’s seen by Wouter Vos. Case closed. All we need to do now is figure out if we can get that old guy, Piet Huizen, on taking bribes or perverting the course of justice.’ She got up, grabbed Hans’s black pen and wrote my father’s name on the board.
‘Leave him alone.’ It was different seeing his name up there. Contemplating his guilt in the privacy of my own flat was one thing; having him exposed here was quite another.
‘We can’t.’
‘Of course we can.’
‘No, we can’t. CI Moerdijk looks an idiot if we don’t do something about the Alkmaar police.’ She drew an arrow between my father’s name and Anton Lantinga.
‘Why?’ I couldn’t take my eyes from that arrow and was reminded of what my mother had said about my father’s money.
‘Simple case, perfectly obvious who did it, but Moerdijk fails to close it. Won’t look good for him.’
‘What do you care?’ I began, but Hans sat down next to me, prodded me in the side with a pen, and I shut up immediately.
‘What doesn’t look good for him, isn’t good for me,’ she snapped in reply. ‘I’m not risking my career for some old retired policeman. We need to make it clear that the files never got here. Make things difficult for the Alkmaar police.’ She put the pen in its holder to the side of the board and wiped her hands on her skirt. ‘I’ll see you guys tomorrow.’
I waited until I could no longer hear her footsteps, then picked up the eraser and made my father’s name disappear.
Hans said, ‘She’s right. It’ll make things easier for the boss.’
I shook my head. ‘Tough.’
‘You don’t think he did anything then?’
‘I don’t know.’ I sat back at my desk. Hans looked at me. ‘I don’t know,’ I said again, louder. ‘He was taken off the case because he retired. Was made to retire. Maybe he was annoyed, wanted to delay Amsterdam and not just hand them the glory on a silver platter. Then he had a heart attack and couldn’t put it right. Who knows? But there’s no way Lantinga was involved in that.’ There it was: my first lie on my father’s behalf. The best type of lie: one with a grain of truth in it, one that I could almost believe myself.
Hans shrugged and turned his chair round. ‘If he took those files, he should be on that wall,’ he mumbled to his PC.
Unlike Stefanie, I thought grimly, I was risking my career for some old retired policeman.
‘Oh,’ Hans added, without taking his eyes off his PC monitor, ‘I almost forgot to tell you, Thomas was here this morning. He’s coming back to work tomorrow.’
That evening, at home, the curtains hid the outside world. On my sideboard, the wedding photo of my parents had pride of place. My mother hated looking at it, so when she came round I hid it, as much to protect the photo as to protect her. I understood her feelings. There were no other photos in my flat any more. My own wedding photo had gone up in a bonfire of gleefully destructive flames.
I had obtained my parents’ photo on a Saturday more than three decades ago. My mother and I had come back from a walk and she’d decided we were going to have a tidy up. Out came boxes that hadn’t seen the light of day in years; out went clothes that hadn’t been worn. I was curious about a sea-green square box and wanted to open it, but my mother beat me to it. She knew what was inside. When she opened the box, the dusty smell of family secrets flew into the room. Hidden amongst a pile of photos of boring family members better forgotten was the wedding portrait of my parents in a richly decorated silver frame. She loved that frame, but she hated that photo. She hated the sight of her and my father standing side by side and smiling that youthful smile of hope and happiness that disappointment would tear off her face not so many years later, just as it had removed it from mine. She hated seeing his arm around her waist, her arm around his – proof she had once enjoyed this close physical contact.
As soon as I saw it, I wanted it. It was before the weekend visits had started and I wanted to see what the forbidden figure looked like, the man we never spoke of but whose part in creating me was visually so obvious. It was my first memory of lying to her. I said I wanted the photo because she was like a princess. That she looked lovely. As my lips clumsily formed the words, I waited for her to see through my lie and tear up the photo as punishment. But she slid it over the table. I took it and ran out of the room, not wanting her to see how happy I was. She kept the frame.
Now I picked up the photo and carried it by its new demure black frame to the light. My father was so much taller than my mother. I rubbed the dust off the sharp edges with the sleeve of my jacket. It was clear what I was risking by keeping him out of this. If anybody found out, I’d be suspended immediately. I sat down on the sofa, photo in hand. If I didn’t have work, what would I do? Even with work, with the daily contact with my colleagues, it was hard to keep going. Was my father worth putting all that on the line?
In my study, I picked up a pen to finish my drawing. Work was the only thing that provided me with stability, the only thing that kept me sane. When I was working, I was a different person: I thought clearly and I had a purpose. I knew I was doing something that was important and worthwhile. Also, the need to pretend that everything was fine made the days strangely more bearable, as if what I was pretending became reality. I talked only about the case we were working on. Trying to catch another murderer made me forget that I had slept with one.
I erased Karin Petersen’s surname with Tippex. I blew over the thick liquid to make it set. If I didn’t work, my life would be empty, just like my womb, exactly like my mind would be. My mother would come round and she’d scold me, say I should look for another job, that I was throwing my life away; she’d sit opposite me, her wrinkled face pulled into folds of concern, but she wouldn’t get through to me. My entire day would be as dark as currently only my nights were. I’d stare at the ceiling for the whole day, my mistakes floating in front of me like the horses on a merry-go-round.
Until I couldn’t take it any longer.
I wrote Karin’s new surname in the box. To the side of the box, I wrote, her husband wanted her away from the house. I drew a quarter circle between the missing forty million euros and Geert-Jan G
oosens, and made a note of his statement that the money was lost in the market.
My mother would also point out that work was responsible for putting me in the state I was in now. She’d only be partially right. With Thomas returning to work, I was more worried than ever that someone would find out what I had done.
Chapter Thirteen
The next day, Stefanie was lecturing us on the vagaries of the stock market and financial investments. I was a reluctant student, but we were all in this together so I pretended to listen. So did Hans – or maybe he was genuinely interested.
‘We need to track that money,’ Stefanie said. At least she hadn’t noticed that I’d wiped my father’s name off the whiteboard. ‘So, let’s go back to it. Forty million euros is lost on a trade, according to Goosens.’ She wrote the amount in the centre of the board and drew a circle around it. The circle didn’t meet at the top, but I would sort that out when she was gone. ‘CI Moerdijk thought Goosens had it.’ She wrote his name down. ‘Goosens says it’s lost on a single trade.’ She turned to Hans and pointed with the pen. ‘This is perfectly possible. I looked at the prices on the AEX index for the beginning of 1995: there was a sharp correction in the market. If he was on the wrong side, it would have been costly. In order to lose forty million, he had to have a position of . . .’ she turned to the board like a good teacher and wrote down the calculation: enormous numbers, multiplication signs, divisions, pluses and minuses. ‘These are normal-size trades.’ She shrugged. ‘Perfectly possible,’ she repeated.
As in school, numbers rapidly made me lose interest. ‘Did you go back to the Petersen Capital case?’ I asked. ‘See what evidence they had?’
‘I’ve got the files in my office. Want to join me – go through it?’
‘No, you’re much better at the financial stuff.’
‘So what do we want to know?’ She wrote down a number 1 on the board and turned back to me.
‘What happened to the money?’ I replied obediently and saw Hans grin.
‘OK.’ She wrote it down, then turned to me again, saying, ‘But we saw it could have been a trading loss.’ She waited for me to nod, so I nodded. Stefanie drew a messy arrow between the word money and her calculation before writing down a 2 and How much did Goosens know? without asking us.
I wasn’t sure how we were going to find that out. My mind wandered and I started thinking about Thomas’s return. In the weeks after I had found Wendy’s skeleton, Thomas and I had barely spoken. He’d been pissed off from the start about working on the Leeuwenhoek case. No, that was wrong. He’d understood why we were looking at that case again – after all, it was only a month before the fifteenth anniversary of her disappearance and all the papers would be full of her photos again and the police would get a kicking in the press for never having found out what happened to her. We had to be seen to do something. What annoyed him was the way the boss had divided the work. He’d told Hans to look at all the known paedophiles in the area, asked me to focus on the parents, and said that Thomas had to listen to the tapes. It was the job we all hated: checking what the previous team had done, finding mistakes in your colleagues’ work. But everybody knew this was what Thomas was good at: detecting nuances in voices, in faces, that others had missed; sniffing out everybody else’s mistakes.
‘And’, Hans now said, ‘how we found out about the fraud in the first place.’
‘Could Geert-Jan Goosens have gone to the police himself?’ I asked, putting the thought of Thomas finding my mistakes to the back of my mind.
‘Who knows. If he could frame Petersen and keep his own reputation intact, he might have,’ Hans said.
‘You’re right,’ Stefanie said. ‘It is important to know how we found out. Fraud cases are like drug busts in one aspect only: you need someone to tell you about it. You need a whistle-blower – a disgruntled employee if we’re talking finance, a pissed-off gang member in the case of the drugs.’
My phone rang. It was the front desk to say they had Piet Huizen on the phone for me. I told them to put him through.
‘Lotte Meerman,’ I said. Hans and Stefanie looked engrossed in the whiteboard, but I was not taking any chances and gave my normal greeting.
‘Hi, Lotte,’ my father said. ‘I’ve been thinking about my reports.’
‘Right.’
‘I don’t understand how they could have gone missing. Two people picked them up. I gave them everything.’
‘I see.’ I wanted to tell him that I wouldn’t help him come clean, that he would have to find somebody else. I wanted to tell him to stop lying to me. The circles on my notepad came closer and closer together, the pen digging deeply into the paper.
‘And now you say the boxes of files never arrived in Amsterdam.’
My other line rang. Hand over mouthpiece, I gestured to Stefanie to pick it up from Thomas’s desk.
‘You should check it with them,’ my father was saying.
‘Do you remember their names?’
Stefanie tried to get my attention but I ignored her.
‘Of course I do. I remember everything about that day.’ He laughed. ‘I’ve had a lot of time to think about it.’ He managed to sound so sincere.
Stefanie put the phone down and gestured more urgently. When I continued to ignore her, she tore a sheet of paper from my notepad and wrote something down, leaning over my desk.
‘So what were their names?’ I prompted my father.
Stefanie pushed the paper under my nose. Lantinga is at the airport, it said. I turned to her and frowned. ‘A day early,’ I whispered. She nodded.
‘. . . a man and a woman.’
‘Hold on, hold on.’ I ripped the page of doodles from my notepad and said, ‘Shoot.’ I wondered who he’d come up with.
‘The man’s name was Freek Veenstra; the woman was Stefanie Dekkers.’
‘Stefanie Dekkers? Are you sure?’ I turned round to look at her. How did my father know her name?
She raised her eyebrows at the sound of her own name. ‘What?’ she mouthed. I shook my head to show I couldn’t talk yet.
‘Yes, absolutely sure,’ my father said.
‘I’ve got her right here.’
‘She’ll remember.’
I half-covered the mouthpiece of the phone with my hand, making sure he’d hear the refusal that I knew was about to come. In a clear voice, I asked Stefanie, ‘Did you pick up the files from Piet Huizen?’
‘What?’ She looked baffled.
‘Twelve years ago. Did you go to Alkmaar to pick up files?’
‘No, I didn’t.’ She tapped her finger on her watch. ‘That was Schiphol. The airport has got Anton Lantinga in a holding cell waiting for us.’
I nodded and took my hand off the mouthpiece. ‘Stefanie says she didn’t.’ Of course she didn’t! It would have been so much easier if my father stopped being deceitful for a change.
‘But—’
‘I’ve got to go. Can we talk about this later?’
‘Sure. You’ve got my number?’
I wrote it down on the same piece of paper, said goodbye and hastily grabbed my coat. Stefanie and I hurried down the hall and took the stairs to the car park. ‘Are you sure?’ I asked her.
‘Of course. We’ve been talking about these files all along. I would have remembered.’
‘What about Freek Veenstra?’
‘What does he have to do with this?’
‘Piet Huizen told me that you and Freek Veenstra came to the Alkmaar police station and picked up the crates containing the files on the Otto Petersen case.’
Stefanie double-bleeped at a row of cars in the garage. An angry-red car responded with a flash of indicator lights. ‘Veenstra? Wasn’t he already retired then? It must have been around that time. I’ll check the dates.’ She looked at me over the roof of her car and said, ‘But it’s pointless. You know he’s lying – for money would be my guess,’ before getting in.
Anton Lantinga was held in a small room at the airport. In the
background I heard the sound of snow-delayed departures and arrivals announced in three different languages. The Schiphol police officer, who had kept him company for the half an hour it took us to get here, left the room. There was none of the light-green paint of our interrogation room. Estate agents would call the decorating scheme here ‘exposed brick’. It didn’t work as well when it wasn’t just a section, but four entire walls. I shivered and wrapped my arms around my waist against the damp that radiated from the bare stone.
Stefanie walked over to the man seated behind the small table. Anton looked pale, but he had just come off an overnight flight from New York. His short hair was blond, bleached to the colour of set honey by the intermingled grey, and combed back in a side parting. He got up and shook her hand. ‘Amsterdam police, I assume?’
Stefanie nodded, speechless for a change.
‘My wife told me to expect you,’ he said pleasantly.
I shut the door behind me, which cut off the multi-lingual voice in the middle of an announcement about the 10.54 KLM flight to Istanbul, urging Mr van Dam to hurry up, as he was delaying the flight.
Anton’s receding hairline created an impression of a high forehead that wouldn’t look amiss on a maths professor. His eyes, nose and mouth were huddled together as if they were worried they’d take up too much space and encroach on the area kept for thinking. Stefanie rustled some papers, rearranging them into another random order. She looked at me and raised her eyebrows as if she needed permission to start. I wanted to give her a shrug, but nodded instead.
Anton rubbed the face of his large, expensive-looking golden watch with his left hand as if he was hoping he could rub away the time. ‘Will this take long?’
‘I hope it won’t. I’m Inspector Dekkers. This is my colleague Detective Meerman.’ Stefanie smiled. He smiled back in an automatic gesture, moving his eyes to include me. His teeth were too straight. His cheeks showed no hint of stubble; he must have shaved either just before he got on the plane last night or even on arrival. ‘We are re-investigating the murder of Otto Petersen, your former business partner—’
A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1) Page 12