A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1)

by Jager, Anja de

  ‘As I said, we’re reopening your son’s case.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can help you. I don’t know much,’ Mrs Petersen said.

  ‘Not much, but something?’

  She shrugged. ‘Probably nothing, but which mother wants to admit that?’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘As a child?’

  ‘Or a grown-up.’

  ‘It’s dangerous to ask an old lady to reminisce.’ She laughed with the sound of the little bell I’d taken from my mother’s Christmas tree. ‘He was a good child. Always fitted in.’

  The sound of our boots on the snow formed the rhythm section accompanying a bird singing in a tree. I looked up to see what it was, but couldn’t find it. I could only see two structures, which were partially hidden by the trees on our right. A corner of black wire mesh, the edge of a man-height cage, extruded from between the snow-covered branches. It must be an empty aviary or a monkey house, its inhabitants kept somewhere warm during the winter.

  ‘He fitted in too well,’ she added unexpectedly. ‘Otto seemed a different person from year to year.’

  A sign in front of the aviary would have told us what was normally kept there, if it hadn’t rusted to the point where all lettering was illegible. There was a cemented area where children could stand and poke their fingers through the mesh.

  We were both silent and just walked. The frost chewed at my cheeks until they felt stiff, as if all the water in my skin had frozen to crystals. I didn’t mind. Here, in the cold, in the park with only an old woman for company, time grew elastic. I didn’t know how long we’d been walking. By the falling temperature in my upper legs, just at the point where they were no longer covered by my jacket, I guessed fifteen minutes.

  ‘I saw changes in him all the time,’ she went on. ‘It showed in his clothes, his face.’

  ‘With different fashions?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t that.’ Another silence fell. Then she said, ‘He was what people expected him to be. “Our changeling”, we called him.’ She laughed again. ‘Makes him sound like something out of a fairy tale, doesn’t it? But that’s how he was.’ She looked at me. Her loosely tied knot was coming undone and wisps of hair were flowing around her face where they’d escaped their clips. ‘My husband was just a factory worker, you see, just a simple man. And my own parents were small farmers. I was clever enough, I suppose – nothing special. But then Otto – he was different. Highly intelligent, they called him at school, always the top of his class.’ A combination of pride and sadness radiated from her eyes. They showed me where her son had got his intelligence from. I wouldn’t call her ‘nothing special’. She was just from a class and generation where ability had been less noticed and appreciated in a woman.

  ‘The government paid for his education – he was the first in our family to go to university. We couldn’t tell him how to behave, how to act, what to do.’ She wrapped her scarf tighter around her neck with her bare hands, gnarled and bent like the twigs on the trees by the path. ‘He had to fit in from an early age. Going to school with the children of doctors and lawyers, he wanted to be like them, sound like them. And he was so ambitious. He had this hunger for success and money. It burned inside him. It drove him.’

  ‘Did he ever bring any friends home?’

  ‘No, never.’ What must it have been like for her to lose her gifted son? Or had she lost him years before, when he went to university and did all he could to remove all traces of his parents from his speech, his appearance and his entire life? Was that when she’d lost him?

  ‘And Karin?’

  ‘That was much, much later. When he married her, she was his secretary; he thought that was what he should do.’

  ‘I didn’t know she used to be his secretary.’

  ‘She’s different now.’

  The trees around us shrank the world to just me and Mrs Petersen. It was a colour-free world, the black of the branches and the white of the snow. We compressed it under our boots and walked for a while without speaking. Deep in the park I could no longer hear the traffic. There were no playing children; they must be back at school now that the Christmas break was over.

  ‘Do you like her?’ I said after the pause, my breath adding more white to the world around me.

  ‘She never visits me, but I don’t blame her for that. Yes, I liked her when they got married. I’m not sure I like what she turned into.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  The old lady led me down a left turn. ‘Like Otto, she changed her voice, her appearance and her manners. They were alike and they wanted the same thing. To fit in.’

  My fingers were starting to feel cold inside the gloves and I stuffed them deep in my pockets. ‘He must have taken the collapse of his company very hard.’

  She didn’t respond.

  ‘Mrs Petersen?’ I said.

  She looked over to me. ‘Are you his new girlfriend?’

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘Otto’s. All these questions.’

  ‘No, Mrs Petersen, I’m from the police. Remember? Your son’s murder?’ I said it as gently as I could.

  ‘They stitched him up.’ Her voice sounded louder in the frozen park.

  ‘They?’

  ‘Geert-Jan Goosens, Anton Lantinga – they’re all old money. Rich parents, rich children. Clearly, Otto wasn’t.’ She glanced at me and said more quietly, ‘I’m worried it was our fault.’

  ‘You’ve met them?’

  She shook her head from side to side, setting more strands of hair free. ‘I never did, but they all went to university together.’

  Goosens hadn’t mentioned that. ‘And then Karin started an affair with Anton.’

  Mrs Petersen laughed. ‘Otto probably expected that to happen. Isn’t it in all the movies and books? When you’re in jail, your wife runs off with one of your friends. He would’ve been disappointed if she’d been waiting, pining for him.’ She clasped her arms around her waist, her hands tucked away under her elbows.

  ‘Are you cold? Would you like my gloves?’ I took mine off. I reached out and she put her hand in my bare one. It was like a shard of glass under my fingers. ‘God, you’re freezing!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘I’m fine.’ She looked down at her hand. It was white with mottled pink around the edges where I was holding it.

  I took my other glove off too and wrapped both her hands inside my warm ones, careful not to rub them, until they weren’t cold to the touch any more. All the time, she stood still and looked over my shoulder at the trees in the park. ‘Here.’ I gave her my gloves.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she insisted again.

  ‘No, you’re not. Put them on.’ I pulled them over her hands as you did with a toddler. She held her hands up and wiggled her fingers. The cold bit mine. I pulled my sleeves down so that they covered my hands.

  A block of snow fell from a tree branch and landed on the ground with a loud plop. The trees opened out to a pond. Ducks and coots were huddled together in a small area, hemmed in by the ice.

  ‘We should have brought some bread,’ Mrs Petersen said. ‘Poor creatures.’

  ‘I read somewhere that bread’s bad for them.’

  ‘I’m sure they prefer it to nothing, don’t you?’ A large mallard, his green wing-feathers glistening with water, was clambering up the bank of the pond, sure we’d come to feed him. ‘Let’s go. We’ve got nothing to give them. It’s cruel to get their hopes up.’ She turned around and walked away.

  I looked at the waddling ducks and remembered feeding them, with my mother, in the Vondelpark, bags of leftover bread disappearing in their flat beaks. It never did them any harm; there had always been more ducks each Sunday than there’d been the week before. I remembered the feeling of my mother’s hand around mine, keeping me secure and safe. I followed Mrs Petersen’s footsteps. The compressed snow under my boots whispered with every step. It gave way for a centimetre or so, then supported and carried me.

  If Otto had adapted so well to his va
rying environments, what would seven years in prison have done to him? Made him violent? Made him feel he had to kill his wife’s lover?

  ‘Did you visit Otto in prison?’ I asked.

  She raised her head, probably as deep in thought as I had been. ‘Yes, I go once a month.’ She took a few more steps then stopped. ‘No, not go – went.’ She took her hands out of her pockets and swung her arms.

  ‘And he changed.’ It wasn’t even a question.

  ‘He always changed. This time, he put on weight and his vocabulary got coarser. He started to sound like his father again, back to his regional accent.’

  ‘Aggressive?’

  ‘Not towards me.’

  ‘Did he talk about life after getting out?’

  ‘Yes. He said he wanted to go into politics. A joke, of course. He said there was only one profession where getting caught with your fingers in the till was an advantage.’

  I smiled but didn’t reply. I let the silence last.

  His mother said softly, her voice barely louder than the crunch of the snow, ‘He was talking about revenge.’

  ‘Revenge for what?’

  ‘He didn’t say.’

  It all fitted. Otto arranged to see Anton, his old university friend, who had taken his wife. And hadn’t he taken his business also?

  We were back on the road her house was on. She slipped on the pavement, a small slide sideways, and I put my arm through hers to make sure she was safe. As I walked her to her door, I remembered what I’d come for. ‘Do you have a photo of Otto when he was young?’

  ‘I’ve got one from university somewhere, with a group of his friends.’

  She disappeared through the door and almost immediately came back. The photo must have been close by. She handed it to me, together with my gloves. ‘You will give it back to me, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course.’ It was the friends together, Otto Petersen, Anton Lantinga and a younger, thinner Geert-Jan Goosens with another young man I didn’t recognise. But one face was there as well, familiar from television and the financial papers: Ferdinand van Ravensberger, the man whose nephew claimed he’d killed someone.

  Stefanie showed no interest in Wouter’s art collection and walked straight past the paintings without stopping. She had already been waiting for me outside Wouter’s apartment building.

  Wouter wore a Ralph Lauren polo-shirt over a pair of jeans. He had tidied up: there were no computer magazines all over the sofa any more and the PC that had been in the process of being built had disappeared. We went through the same questions as before. He described Anton’s car and told us his story again.

  ‘Did you see Anton?’ Stefanie asked.

  Wouter shook his head. The slicked-back hair hardly moved and the curls at the back of his neck stayed in place. ‘I only saw the car.’ He lit up a cigarette and offered us one too. I was surprised when Stefanie refused. She probably didn’t think it was appropriate. ‘Then I heard that someone had been shot, and I told Piet about the car.’

  ‘OK. Let’s talk about what happened then.’ Stefanie got her notepad out to indicate that this was the part that she was actually interested in. ‘You gave a statement to DI Huizen?’

  ‘Yes, I came to the police station and signed it.’

  ‘Did you see what DI Huizen did with it?’

  I wanted to stop her questions but couldn’t interrupt her. I should have known she would turn the questioning to my father again.

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ Wouter said. ‘It was typed up, I signed it and that was it.’

  Stefanie took some notes.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ Wouter said. ‘Did something happen to my statement?’

  I looked at her, willed her not to tell him, but she ignored my silent plea. ‘It’s gone,’ she said, ‘your witness statement. It’s not in any of the files.’

  ‘That bastard.’ Wouter grimaced. ‘Sorry, didn’t mean to swear.’

  Stefanie gestured to indicate that she was far from offended.

  ‘So that’s how he got away with it,’ Wouter said. ‘I always wondered why Anton was never arrested.’

  ‘I’ve got no further questions.’ I stood up.

  ‘Sorry to put you through this inconvenience,’ Stefanie said, ‘but we’ll need your statement again. I’ll type it up and maybe you can come to Amsterdam to sign it.’

  ‘Fine. Or can I sign it here – in Alkmaar.’

  Stefanie shrugged. ‘Why not.’

  Wouter got up and walked us to the door. Even on the way out Stefanie didn’t look at the art. I lingered by the painting of the dream world, admired its vibrant colours for a few seconds before shaking Wouter’s hand and following Stefanie down the stairs.

  As she opened her car door she paused. ‘He’s a reliable witness,’ she said, ‘but there’s no way we’d get a conviction purely based on his evidence.’

  I got my car keys out of my handbag.

  ‘Why was Anton so concerned about it?’ Stefanie mused. ‘I don’t understand why he paid Piet Huizen to get rid of those files.’

  ‘I don’t think he did.’

  ‘You’re right. Piet Huizen probably ripped up the witness statement straight away. But there must have been something else as well. Was there another witness, maybe? More evidence?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Strange.’ She got in her car and slammed the door shut. I waited on the pavement until the engine started and her car moved forward. Then it stopped and the window was wound down. ‘Are you sure they told you everything?’ she called. ‘I bet they’re still holding something back. Anyway, I’ll see you at the office.’ She closed the window again before I could even respond.

  Alkmaar’s police station was becoming a familiar sight, as was the milkmaid on Reception. ‘I’ve come to see Ronald de Boer again,’ I told her.

  As last time, she dialled his number by heart. ‘Hi, Ronald, that Amsterdam detective woman is here again for you.’ She turned away and spoke quietly into the phone, so that I couldn’t hear. She laughed softly, then, turning back, she informed me, ‘He’ll be right down.’

  ‘Of course. Thank you.’

  Ronald was waiting for me at the lifts. ‘She’s nice, your receptionist,’ I said, and then wished I hadn’t.

  ‘Hi, Lotte. What’s up?’

  I looked around to see if anybody could hear us. The corridor was empty. ‘Can I talk to you about the Petersen files?’

  ‘Let’s have a coffee.’

  I followed him to the canteen. We sat at a table in the furthest corner, closest to the window, and drank coffee from brown plastic cups with white plastic stirrers. Over Ronald’s shoulder I saw the broad canal that linked Alkmaar to Amsterdam. A few boats kept the ice open. Seagulls followed them, hoping the movement of the engines would bring fish to the surface. Even the seagulls were more relaxed here than at home in Amsterdam, floating on the wind for longer, diving less often. The water, wider than a motorway, was a reminder that we were below sea-level.

  I leaned closer to Ronald and lowered my voice. ‘When these files went missing, was there ever any . . . any mention of money?’ I wouldn’t admit the possibility of bribes to my Amsterdam colleagues, but I wasn’t telling Ronald anything new.

  He frowned. ‘He never offered me money.’

  ‘No, that’s not what I mean. I mean . . . do you think he took money? My father?’

  ‘Took it? What – you mean stole it?’

  I sighed, frustrated that he wanted me to spell it out, was making sure he didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. It was apparent that he still didn’t trust me. ‘A pay-off,’ I explained. ‘One of my colleagues, she thought that maybe he took a pay-off – from Anton Lantinga. To get rid of those files.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said slowly, looking at me closely for a few seconds. He took a sip of coffee, grimaced and fished a sachet of sugar from the table next to us. As he stirred, the light showed up the scratches in the otherwise smooth surface of his gold weddi
ng ring.

  I understood his hesitation and sat back in my chair. ‘I’ll cover for him, if that’s what you’re worried about. But I’d like to know.’ I had a right to know.

  He nodded. ‘There were rumours. You’ve been to his house . . . Questions were asked.’

  Yes. It was exactly as I thought.

  ‘Have you asked him? Outright?’ Ronald enquired.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Maybe you should keep it like that – you know, don’t upset him too much. Think about his heart. And let me know if I can help. You can call me any time.’

  ‘Thanks, Ronald. I need all the help I can get.’ I held the brown cup between both hands. The plastic did nothing to stop the heat of the coffee hitting my skin, making my fingers tingle in delicious pain. ‘I saw Otto’s mother this morning.’

  Ronald laughed. One of his incisors was at an angle and overlapped the front tooth. ‘If you’d called me beforehand, I could have saved you the trip. Did she talk at all?’

  I took the photo she’d given me out of my bag and slid it to him over the table, past a small pile of spilled sugar.

  ‘She was rarely lucid when her son got killed,’ Ronald said. ‘We talked to her a few times, but there wasn’t any point.’ He bent his head over the photo and rubbed one greying eyebrow, making the hairs in the corner, longer than the others, stand on end. ‘Petersen, Goosens, Lantinga and this one.’ He moved his finger to the last figure. ‘Is that Van Ravensberger?’

  ‘Yes. Don’t know who the other guy is.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘I took her for a walk.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘She wanted to get out. She seemed perfectly compos mentis.’ I took a sip of coffee. ‘I had no idea she wasn’t quite with it. Then I noticed how cold her hands were. I felt so guilty. Can you imagine, bringing an old lady back with frostbite after a stroll in the park with a police officer?’

  ‘I’m sure she’s fine.’

  ‘I hope so. It was minus five and I let her walk around without gloves.’ I remembered reaching out to those fingers, the touch of her hand in mine, feeling the protrusion of her joints, swollen like catkins on a thin willow branch, and holding them as life returned to them. The first physical contact I’d sought in weeks.