A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1)

by Jager, Anja de

  ‘Embarrassed, I think. As if he couldn’t believe this had happened . . .’ Ferdinand’s eyes moved down towards my bag. He stopped talking and frowned. I wasn’t sure if it was at the interruption or if he’d seen the photo. I took my phone out of its pocket.

  The display told me it was Hans. I gestured an apology to Stefanie and Ferdinand, mimed ‘sorry’, then got up and answered the call. ‘Hi Hans. What’s up?’ I walked past shelves laden with a large number of DVDs and turned to keep Stefanie and Van Ravensberger in my sight as they continued the interview.

  ‘Hi, Lotte. Sorry, but I had a call from Anton Lantinga and thought I should let you know.’ I took a DVD from the shelf. It was in a white cover. In square handwriting in black ink it said: Nova interview, 23 Dec 2012.

  ‘What did he want?’ I talked softly. I read the spines of the other DVDs. NOS Journaal interview, 15 June 2012, CNN interview, 3 March 2013. Ferdinand van Ravensberger had a long row of these, all recordings of his own television appearances. What kind of a man would keep such a collection of his own image?

  Hans said, ‘He wants to talk to you.’

  ‘What about?’ I put the DVD back and looked out through the window, where two small children dressed in thick skisuits and identical red wellington boots were building a snowman on a large lawn in front of a rhododendron. They had two balls of snow stuck on top of each other. The girl took her scarf off and tied it around the snowman to indicate where its neck was supposed to be. They looked too young to be Ferdinand van Ravensberger’s children – unless there was a younger wife, of course. But his nephew had said he was still married to his first wife.

  ‘Don’t know, wouldn’t say. Just wants you to go to his house tonight at eight,’ Hans said.

  ‘Thanks, Hans. Look, I’ve got to go. We’re in the middle of an interview. Thanks for the call.’ I clicked the mobile closed and rejoined the others.

  ‘. . . Geert-Jan looked up to Petersen’, Ferdinand was saying, ‘and found him wanting. It was the making of him really.’

  ‘In what way?’ Stefanie asked.

  ‘He moved out of Petersen’s shadow, set up his own firm,’ Ferdinand explained.

  ‘Only you didn’t invest with him any more.’ Stefanie smiled.

  ‘Oh, but I did. I gave him five million euros to run and he quadrupled it by the time Petersen came out of jail. Made me all my money back and more.’ He waved at the office around him as if to indicate what that money had bought. ‘And he has kept on going. He has done well by me. The best revenge I could have had.’

  ‘And Anton?’ Stefanie asked.

  ‘Never spoke to him,’ Ferdinand said.

  ‘You never spoke to him?’ I said and sat back in the Le Corbusier chair.

  Ferdinand went slightly pale underneath what must be a fake winter tan.

  ‘You don’t think Geert-Jan Goosens had anything to do with the fraud?’ Stefanie tried to come back to the original line of questioning.

  He moved his eyes from me to Stefanie and forced his shoulders down and back in a more relaxed posture. ‘I wouldn’t have invested with him again if I had. I wanted to make that gesture, so that other investors would follow. Actions speak louder than words.’

  Of course. Ferdinand van Ravensberger voted with his money – the only thing that mattered in these circles. He’d given a vote of confidence in Goosens. I was sure other investors had watched that and followed his lead. What had he got in return? Was all his current wealth based on the money that Goosens had made him?

  ‘In your opinion, what happened? How did Petersen Capital lose that money?’

  ‘It was all Petersen’s doing. He never thought he could be wrong . . . In his eyes, he was always right. It was the market that was wrong. The market would recognise the error of its ways and come over to his views.’ His eyes stayed on me and Stefanie. Not once did he glance over our shoulders at the playing children outside. The windows must be well insulated as I couldn’t hear them at all.

  ‘So why hide the losses?’

  Ferdinand van Ravensberger shrugged. ‘I’m not sure he did. I think he didn’t feel he had to tell us. We were only the investors, you see. He was the brain. He made the decisions without any need to justify himself.’

  And Ferdinand van Ravensberger wouldn’t have liked that. The collection of DVDs of his interviews showed how important Ferdinand thought he was. For someone with such an amount of self-worth to be seen as not being worthy of information would have been a real insult. But being insulted was not a reason for killing someone seven years later. Also, the money that Goosens had made him would have taken the edge off any bad feelings. It was clear like never before that Ferdinand van Ravensberger didn’t have anything to do with Petersen’s murder, at least not with money or insults as a reason. I was still intrigued by the early connection between the men that the photo revealed – a connection to which Ferdinand so far had not referred.

  ‘Was he already like that at university?’ I asked.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You said that Otto saw himself as the brain, not telling you anything. You knew him from university, didn’t you?’

  ‘I didn’t know him well.’

  ‘Not as well as Geert-Jan Goosens and Anton Lantinga, you mean?’

  ‘Yes, I knew them much better.’

  ‘But you said you never spoke to Anton.’

  ‘Not about the fraud, not at Petersen Capital, I meant.’

  ‘But you talked to him about other things.’

  ‘Yes, but much more social, not work-related.’

  ‘And Otto wasn’t a friend.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because he thought he was better than you?’

  ‘It wasn’t that.’ Ferdinand waited for a bit and looked at the ceiling, seemingly for inspiration. ‘He hung around us all the time. Didn’t really join in, didn’t do anything, just followed us around like a kid brother. He watched us all the time and then did whatever it was we were doing. Always imitating us, never with any ideas of his own.’

  ‘Annoying?’

  ‘Yes, sometimes.’ The phone on Ferdinand’s desk rang. He let it ring for a few seconds, looking to see who it was, then said, ‘Sorry, I have to take this.’ He seemed happy to be interrupted. Ferdinand van Ravensberger turned away and talked in such a low voice that I couldn’t make out any of the words although I was trying hard. Apart from his obvious lies, he was too open with us, too willing to answer our questions. But the obvious lies made me doubt every answer he gave.

  ‘What did Hans want?’ Stefanie whispered.

  ‘He had a call from Anton Lantinga. Anton wants to talk to us.’

  ‘Did he say why?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So we’ll go after this?’

  ‘No. Anton said to be at his house at eight o’clock tonight.’

  ‘I’m not on lates, but I can come along,’ Stefanie said.

  I nodded. I shouldn’t go by myself anyway and there was no way she’d let me leave her behind.

  Her large face glowed a deep pink. ‘He’s going to confess,’ she hissed. ‘This is it.’

  I disagreed but didn’t contradict her. I didn’t have an alternative suggestion, but confession seemed unlikely.

  Ferdinand finished his call and apologised.

  Stefanie continued my line of questioning. ‘Otto Petersen might have been annoying, but when he set up his investment firm, you gave him money.’

  ‘I gave Geert-Jan money. He told me of this company he was starting with Petersen.’

  ‘You thought it was a good idea?’

  ‘I never trusted Petersen, but Geert-Jan was my friend. He asked me for the money, had some good ideas and I was willing to invest with them.’

  ‘So you lost all your money in your friend’s firm.’

  ‘As I said: he made it up to me. Made me a fortune.’

  ‘Do you think he knew about the fraud?’

  ‘I don’t think anybody did.’

  ‘Otto�
�s wife might have known . . .’

  ‘Maybe. But only if he thought she needed to know. He probably decided it was better to keep her in the dark.’

  ‘So she couldn’t tell the investors?’

  ‘Or anybody else. When more than two people know something,’ Ferdinand said with a smile, ‘it’s no longer a secret.’

  Stefanie drove us back to the office. During the journey, I thought about the things that more than two people knew. I stared out of the window for a long time and watched the landscape go by, past the faint reflection of my own face. I’d thought that Paul had loved my face, had desired my body. I wondered if he’d told his lawyer, and whether the lawyer would try to use it. Did more than two people know what happened between Paul and me? I would never talk about it, of that I was certain. I would never want anybody else to know this about me.

  What Ferdinand van Ravensberger had told us about Otto Petersen – that he had watched his fellow students and tried to ape the way they were acting – fitted in with what his mother had said: that he was her changeling. What had he changed into in prison?

  Chapter Eighteen

  The A9 north to Alkmaar was starting to look familiar on my third trip in a week. Music bounced off the inside of the windows and around the car seats. The engine hummed an additional little one-note tune in the dark. Softly, under my breath, I sang along with Massive Attack’s ‘Safe from Harm’, and glanced sideways to check that Stefanie was still asleep. She was leaning with her head against the door, snoring softly; only her seatbelt kept her upright. Under the sound of the radio I also heard the whirr of the heating, which was gallantly fighting the severe frost in an attempt to keep us warm. As in my other nightly drives, I felt that my car protected me from the outside world where the snow-covered fields were eerily luminescent under the glow of the full moon, and villages and houses twinkled at scattered irregular intervals like decaying Christmas lights. On the other side of the road, every now and then, cars enveloped by vague haloes of light hurtled towards me on a collision course until they bent to my left, steered there by the central crash barrier.

  The road surface shone for one breath in the headlights of the car, then got run over by the wheels. They consumed the kilometres until the football stadium at Alkmaar’s roundabout outshone the moon. Come match day it would swallow up thousands of supporters, attracted by its light like moths to a flame. They would come on foot or by bicycle, wearing their club’s red and white team colours in scarves and T-shirts, come in the hope of victory, not even considering the possibility of defeat and crushed dreams.

  We left the motorway and passed some cyclists, dressed like Michelin men in order to protect themselves against the freezing temperatures. The cry of a siren rose then fell and a blue light tore through the darkness.

  ‘What’s that?’ Stefanie had woken up.

  ‘Just a police car. We’re nearly there.’ Ice flowers started brave attempts to establish themselves on the corners of the windscreen, but the car heating destroyed them as quickly as they bloomed.

  Nerves marched around in my stomach. When people wanted to talk, it was not always a good thing. Being told the truth could be a painful experience.

  Eight o’clock, Anton had said. The green clock on the dashboard showed 19.23. We had plenty of time to get to Bergen. Before she’d fallen asleep, all Stefanie had talked about was how Anton obviously wanted to confess that he’d killed Otto Petersen and would claim it was in self-defence. I bet she’d already picked out what she was going to wear at the press conference. She was wrong. It was probably about those blasted files. Why else would he have written down my father’s name?

  I wanted to speed up, get to our destination more quickly, but needed to slow down to make sure we weren’t early.

  In the village of Bergen, curtains were closed against the cold and the dark. I imagined a whole multitude of sins hidden behind those pieces of cloth: rowing couples, people eating in a resentful silence, screaming children. Or worse. Somebody hitting somebody, hurting them with fists or with words, a thief coming in through the window at the back. My mother had been right. A side-effect of this job was that you always expected the worst of people. It was because we always saw the worst. It altered your view of the world.

  A second police car overtook us.

  I took the same turning as the blue light. This was the road where Anton and Karin Lantinga lived. Giant houses on both sides proclaimed the wealth of their owners.

  A group of police cars and an ambulance were parked at the end of the street. I took my foot off the accelerator and slowed the car down to walking speed.

  ‘Oh shit,’ Stefanie said.

  I switched the radio off. We crawled along and I hoped to see number 32 on one of the houses before we got to the swirling sirens. However, as I counted the numbers, I already knew that these emergency vehicles were parked where Anton lived. I knew it deep down inside. I had been right to expect the worst.

  ‘Now he’s not going to talk any more, is he? Do you think Karin shot a second husband?’ Stefanie almost sounded as if she was laughing.

  ‘Shut up!’ This was our fault. If we hadn’t pressurised him, if we hadn’t pushed him . . . I knew this wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t wanted to talk. I hoped he hadn’t killed himself. Maybe he’d had a heart attack or maybe Karin had. I parked the car behind the ambulance, pushed the door open, flashed my badge to the paramedic with one hand and grabbed my coat with the other.

  ‘What happened?’ I heard Stefanie ask. But I didn’t stop. I didn’t want to hear an explanation. I wanted to see it. I was putting my coat on as I moved, no time to stop. A flash lit up the dark sky. A photographer. No need for that ambulance then. Who was it, Karin or Anton?

  I hurried along the path towards the garden where the snow was being trampled by myriad feet. As I added my footsteps to those of my local colleagues, the snow underneath my boots whispered of death. Tall trees stood like black-dressed undertakers at the edge of the white lawn. Making for the flashing lights of the photographer, I passed an orderly row of box shrubs. As I turned the corner at the end of the row I saw the feet of a forensic scientist clad in what could be camouflage gear, the white of the plastic identical to the colour of the snow. Between the footsteps, between the marks of the people who photographed, examined and investigated the dead body, was the trail of a bird, the small tracks leading over the ground from the box hedge to the shed. I followed the bird’s trail with my eyes to avoid looking at the body lying in a pool of coral-red snow. My chest felt tight and there was a large lump in the place where the two underwires of my bra met. I held out my badge to nobody in particular and forced myself to have a closer look. The tears in my eyes froze to small sharp icicles. Frost bit my face and the cold air burned my lungs when I inhaled.

  I looked at my watch. It was eight o’clock, exactly the time we were supposed to meet. The body was wearing a pair of jeans, brown loafers and a dark blue V-neck jumper over a T-shirt. Why wasn’t he wearing a coat? It was well below zero. He must have thought he’d only be outside for a short time. Had he heard something? Seen somebody?

  A hand gripped my arm and I pulled free without taking my eyes off the dead man. He was lying on his right-hand side and there was a hole in his left temple. Maybe shot from close range. There might be traces of powder on the skin.

  ‘Lotte, what are you doing here?’ The hand was on my arm again, more insistent this time. I didn’t like the physical restraint and I tried to shake it off, but the hand wasn’t budging. I looked up and saw Ronald de Boer. His hair had escaped its severe control and rioted over his forehead. Another flash of the photographer drew his face out of the darkness. It looked criss-crossed with wrinkles like dark pencil lines on his skin, which had a pallor that made it almost as grey as his eyes.

  ‘I . . . we were supposed to meet up with Anton tonight.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Yes, I’m here with Stefanie Dekkers.’

  Ronald cursed softl
y. He looked over my shoulder to check who was nearby and tugged me off to a darker and more secluded corner of the garden. ‘We’ve got to be careful,’ he said. He took one glove off, cupped my jaw with his palm, then ran his thumb along my cheekbone. His skin felt warm and alive to the cold of my face, and on my arms goose bumps rose. Nerve-endings on the skin of my face came alive and contracted in my stomach.

  He brought his face close. ‘Your father was here tonight,’ he whispered. His breath tickled my eardrum and ran a shiver down my spine. I could see the white cloud of his exhalation more clearly than I could hear the words. The rasp of his stubble grated my cheek. I stumbled and put my hand on his shoulder. I could smell cigarette smoke in his hair. I closed my eyes.

  ‘Not everybody here has his best interests at heart.’

  I took a step back and looked at him. His grey eyes weren’t on me but on the group of people around Anton’s body. ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘I knew you would. Leave it to me, Lotte. I’ll deal with everything.’ He traced my cheek again with his thumb; the skin felt rough like grains of sand. ‘I’ll protect him, just like I did before.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I’ll talk to you later.’ He moved his hand to the back of my neck, to that vulnerable place that used to be protected by hair, and gave it a squeeze before he walked off to join the group.

  I stood and watched him.

  He approached Stefanie and shook her hand. She offered him a cigarette out of the packet she always had in her pocket. Two small lights glowed side by side. He gestured at me with the cigarette between his fingers. Stefanie nodded, her mouth sucking nicotine into her lungs. She breathed out a white cloud of cancer-causing smoke.

  I left the garden and walked up the drive to the cavernous house. The front door was ajar and I pushed it further open, running my fingers over the knocker that was in the shape of a bronze lion, his teeth exposed in an eternal growl. I paused on the doorstep. Parquet floors and high ceilings, a chandelier in the hallway and mirrors on either side were meant to give an even greater impression of space. Dirty footprints covered the hallway where people had traipsed a mixture of mud and snow into the otherwise clean house, and now the mirrors reflected how it had been soiled. I tried to scrub my boots as clean as possible, reluctant to add to the mess on the floor. From behind a door to the left I heard voices. Female voices. Crying. I followed the sound and pushed the door open.