A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1)

by Jager, Anja de

  My fingers fumbled the front door open and as we went up to my flat I was followed by sound, first the soft whistle of one of my companions when I opened the main door to the marble-floored hallway with the chandelier, then the surprising clamour of multiple sets of boots on the wooden stairs. On the first-floor landing I unlocked the right-hand door. The wood on my personal flight of stairs was darker; fewer feet had walked and scuffed it over the centuries, and it had a certain smell, that of carpentry and sawmills, that the lower stairs lacked.

  The policewoman introduced herself as Ingrid and sat with me, while her colleague, Erik, put the kettle on to make me a cup of tea. ‘We’ll get you all warmed up,’ she said. And so it was that I had one more person in my apartment than ever before. It felt so empty, after they left.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  I walked to the office the next morning through frozen sunshine. I had searched for my bike for half an hour and become convinced that it had been stolen again before finally remembering that I’d cycled in yesterday morning and stumbled home on foot. Last night I’d been tempted to take one of the small blue pills but had not succumbed: I’d felt I could still do this without medication. I hadn’t slept much but at least I’d thought about Anton Lantinga, Otto Petersen and my father. The advantage of making new mistakes had been that I’d had other things to fret and worry about.

  The snow on the houses along the canal made it look like a picture postcard, a city scene by any one of our famous seventeenth-century painters. On my canal people were skating, holes in the ice were marked out and gaps under bridges signposted. The next canal along was still partially open, cut through by the tour boats every hour. There were requests to stop the sightseeing tours, in order to improve the ice and make a larger tour on skates possible. As long as there was some sort of compensation, I was sure the tour operators would agree to it. Their boats were largely empty in January anyway.

  As soon as I stepped into our office, Hans held up two pages. ‘I’ve got the list’, he said, ‘of all the people who worked for Petersen Capital in 1995.’

  ‘Any photos?’

  ‘No, none.’

  ‘That’s going to make it tricky. You know what we could do? We should also get the employee list of Omega Capital in 2004 or so. If someone from Omega took the files, then that would automatically point us to Karin and Anton. Those two would have asked someone they trusted. Someone they took with them from Petersen Capital to Omega. Someone who had worked with Anton for a long time.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You don’t sound convinced.’

  ‘It’s too convoluted. Let’s stick with the Petersen Capital list, find out if it’s one of them, then see if they are linked to the Lantingas or to Goosens. I’ll google the names, see if I can come up with any photos.’

  I had only wanted to make the list of names longer, so that it would take more time before anybody realised that both faces came out of my father’s imagination. ‘And use Facebook as well.’

  He grinned. ‘Of course. Our new favourite.’ He turned to his computer.

  My phone rang and I reached across my desk to answer it. It was Ronald again.

  ‘Hi, Ronald,’ I said. Hans looked at me. I shrugged – I didn’t know what he was calling for either. ‘Any news?’

  ‘I just wanted to make sure you were . . .’ he was silent for a few seconds, ‘following my advice.’

  ‘Your advice to do what?’

  He sighed. ‘I didn’t get through to you yesterday, did I?’

  ‘No, you didn’t. And no, I’m not going to drop it.’

  ‘You’re wrong, Lotte. Don’t do this. Leave it.’

  ‘Ronald, I can’t possibly leave it. One more man has been murdered. What happened to that paperwork is crucial, I just know it.’

  ‘Lotte, please.’

  ‘No, Ronald. We’re making real progress here.’

  ‘You know we didn’t find those files at Anton’s house.’

  ‘I know. I’m sure—’

  ‘Your father said he saw them in the shed at around six p.m.’

  ‘He did?’ I signalled to Hans. This was interesting. Did that mean that it had been Anton’s people who’d picked up the files, after all? That my father hadn’t destroyed them, but sold them? That made the case different. I wasn’t sure what it meant but I knew it was important.

  ‘We were there shortly after seven,’ Ronald went on. ‘We didn’t find anything. There was no large pile of shredding or any evidence of burnt paper. He’s now lying to me too, Lotte. He’s much more involved than I originally thought.’

  I heard Ronald’s warning but I ignored it. Only partially covering the mouthpiece of the phone with my hand so that Ronald could still hear what I had to say, I told Hans: ‘DI Huizen saw the files at Anton’s house.’

  Hans gave me a thumbs up and went over to our whiteboard with a marker pen in hand.

  ‘You’re not objective.’ Ronald’s voice sounded angry.

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘I’m not sure you should be involved at all.’

  ‘And you should? After what you told me in Alkmaar the first time?’ The click of our office door opening behind me, followed by the smell of cigarettes, warned that Stefanie was close and I had to watch my words carefully.

  ‘I never thought he was better than he really was. I can see him far more clearly than you can. I always saw his faults and decided I didn’t mind. You, on the other hand . . .’

  How dared he talk about my father like that? Ronald might have known my father for longer, but I knew him better, deeper, as he was so much like me. ‘Great that DI Huizen saw those files,’ I said loudly, my mouth close to the phone.

  ‘Lotte, please—’

  ‘Bye, Ronald. Talk to you later.’ I put the phone down.

  ‘Lovers’ tiff?’ Stefanie said.

  ‘Why don’t you just shut up.’

  ‘Rude and unnecessary.’ She walked over to Thomas’s old desk and sat down. ‘I saw them together the other evening, Hans. When we found Anton dead.’ There was a small smile around her thick red lips. ‘Very intimate they seemed for people who’d just met. Or who’d only seen each other twice. And a very odd place to behave like that as well, with Anton’s dead body still lying there.’

  ‘There was nothing intimate going on. It’s all in your mind,’ I said.

  ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘what I came to tell you is that I’ve got it. It’s a disk.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The evidence.’ At my blank look she said, ‘Remember the whistle-blower? His evidence? Well, I found it – in the archives. It was a computer disk with two files. One is the official fund performance – the one Otto Petersen gave to investors – the other is the real performance. His shadow accounts.’

  ‘And the shadow accounts show . . .’

  ‘All the losses Otto Petersen made in his investments.’

  ‘Who sent the disk?’

  ‘I don’t know. We’ll have to go through—’

  ‘Through this?’ I held up the list of the names of people who’d worked for Petersen Capital.

  ‘Yes.’ When I looked at her across our desks, she was smiling with an odd little smile, a crook in the corners of her mouth. ‘You’re ahead of me again, I see.’

  ‘He was.’ I pointed at Hans.

  ‘Well, anyway, with this shadow account it was easy to figure out what happened. Geert-Jan Goosens told the truth. There was never any embezzled money. Petersen made mistakes, he blew up the fund and tried to hide it.’ She shrugged. ‘Wipes out a whole list of suspects.’ She walked over to the whiteboard and stared at what Hans was writing. ‘Did you know what Ronald de Boer told me?’

  ‘I’ve got no idea,’ I said.

  ‘He told me that all these years, he’s been covering for DI Huizen. He thinks DI Huizen destroyed those files.’

  I sank in my chair and felt faint but kept a straight face as Stefanie was watching me for my reaction. Why had he told
her that, when he’d said he would protect my father? Why had he told her when I’d had to drag every word out of him when we’d talked about those bribes? Why had he told her when he’d warned me we had to be careful, that other people didn’t have my father’s best interests at heart? Was this some bizarre double-bluff? Why was he making things so difficult for us, discrediting my father’s testimony further in Stefanie’s eyes? My head spun; I couldn’t make sense of this. That was it though: it didn’t make any sense. So he probably hadn’t said it at all. She was lying, making it up to make it sound as if Ronald agreed with her. That was why. Conniving fat cow. My heart-rate slowed down.

  ‘Had he forgotten to tell you? Too busy talking about other things? That’s a shame. Anyway, we can take these’, Stefanie reached over Hans’s shoulder and pulled the two Photofits off the board, ‘and chuck them in the bin.’

  I dashed over and snatched the two bits of paper out of her hand before she could make her threat reality.

  ‘No we don’t.’ I turned to Hans. ‘We keep looking for those two people – and find out who they are. This is important. I’m not letting it go.’ I carefully folded up the Photofits, put them in my bag and sat down. ‘I think Ronald de Boer is losing it. There may be too much pressure on him.’

  ‘He wants us to stop doing what we’re doing,’ Hans stated. It wasn’t a question.

  ‘But we’re not. We’re going on.’ I picked up my pencil and traced down the list of the employees of Petersen Capital, ignoring Stefanie as she came round to look at what I was reading.

  Her hand on the back tipped my chair and she whispered in my ear, ‘Why does it matter so much, Lotte?’

  I sat up with a jolt and cursed under my breath. A long scratch of my pencil now ran all the way down the page.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  I had been expecting the summons ever since yesterday’s run-in with Thomas. He was the vengeful type and I should have known he’d call the prosecutor as soon as he’d finished shouting at me. If I hadn’t annoyed Thomas, I wouldn’t be having this meeting that I’d done so much to avoid. When the phone call from Prosecutor Kraan himself had come, with a request to join him in his office, I knew that there was no avoiding it any longer.

  Amsterdam Zuid, where the prosecutors were based, always seemed a different place from the centre, where I lived and worked. As I cycled south, the city changed from seventeenth to nineteenth century, from narrow roads along canals to wide pavements, from flats to houses. Then, when I got closer to the place of the appointment, it changed again to new build and main roads. It was like time-travelling four centuries in an easy fifteen-minute cycle journey.

  Prosecutor Kraan, or Michael as he asked me to call him, was sitting behind a desk strewn with files – files that I recognised because they were my files. He was looking at my little girl’s photos, the ones in the green cardboard folder. He was reading through my notes. He was touching my photos.

  I was so busy looking at those photos and checking which files he had, or didn’t have, open on his desk, that I missed his outstretched hand until he made a movement to retract it. I managed to apologise and shake it just in time to avoid embarrassment.

  ‘Detective Meerman, thanks for coming in and my apologies that I haven’t had time to arrange a meeting with you sooner. I thought you would deliver the files to me yourself and that this would be the time to discuss the investigation.’

  ‘I was working on a new case.’

  ‘Yes, so the chief inspector told me. He was a bit overzealous with what he dropped off.’ Michael Kraan picked up some pages and dropped them back again on the desk.

  I recognised which bits of paper they were: they weren’t important. But I wasn’t sure what I’d do if he treated Wendy’s photo with the same contempt. My reports were one thing, my little girl quite another.

  ‘I’ve also been working with Thomas, who has helped me find my way through the hours and days of recordings. He has pointed me to the places that the defence are likely to question. But clearly, what I need to talk to you about is the missing tape.’

  Tape. Not tapes. That was a good sign.

  ‘You didn’t record the final meeting with Paul Leeuwenhoek.’

  ‘Correct. The investigation was officially over. You yourself had called it over, I understand.’

  ‘Yes, we thought we had our murderer.’

  ‘Exactly. So I met with Paul in order to give him the news.’ I was getting good at this. How often had I told this new version of events? It almost felt as if this was actually what had happened.

  Hans had called me that afternoon, ecstatic, because they had arrested someone for Wendy’s murder. It had been a paedophile after all, the one that he’d been investigating. Hans said he’d been to the guy’s house and found a cellar full of photos of Wendy. The paedo had confessed to Hans that he’d killed Wendy, after he’d found her alone in the park, and had burned the body. The prosecutor had called the investigation closed and I stopped recording. I went to Wendy’s mother and told her. She reacted strangely, almost as if this was an anti-climax for her and that she found it hard to believe. Afterwards I went to Paul’s house, and we had a few glasses of wine. I thought we’d arrested the killer so I dropped my defences and did what my feelings had urged me to do. Now that I thought I knew for certain that he was innocent, I was relieved. I was sad too, because my dream of an immediate family was gone with Wendy’s death, but I thought that at least I’d started a new relationship. I thought this would give Paul closure, and that he could move on with me.

  ‘And then he just came out with it?’ the prosecutor asked.

  ‘Yes, out of the blue he told me that Wendy’s body was buried in his garden.’ We had been naked and in bed; he had been playing with my hair when he began to speak.

  ‘After all these years.’

  ‘He said he wanted to come clean, that he needed to confess.’ And he had thought he’d put me in such a position that I could never tell what had happened. That I would have no option than to keep quiet.

  I had woken up and his green eyes were staring into mine. I hadn’t slept long, maybe dozed for half an hour or so. The afternoon sun was creeping around the corner of the curtains. He looked at me with an intensity I hadn’t seen before, not even an hour ago. I smiled at the memory of his body in and on mine. He took a strand of my blonde hair and raised it to his lips. I felt the tug as he pulled it closer. He wound it around his fingers. My face followed my hair and I enjoyed the feeling of his mouth on mine.

  ‘We shouldn’t be doing this,’ he said. The smell of his breath wasn’t off-putting, as it would have been with anybody else, anywhere else.

  ‘It’s OK, you’re no longer a suspect,’ I said, the first time I’d admitted to myself that he ever was. ‘You’re in the clear – case closed.’ My voice sounded smug to me, as smug as I felt. His hand was exploring the curve of my stomach and moving slowly down. We could become a perfect family. We could become complete.

  ‘But I’m sure this is against all protocol, isn’t it?’ he persisted. ‘What would your boss say if he found out?’

  ‘I wasn’t planning on telling him.’

  ‘I bet nothing I tell you now can be used in court,’ he said.

  I smiled.

  He played with my hair again. ‘Such lovely blonde hair,’ he murmured, ‘just the same colour as hers. I’ve kept quiet for fifteen years but all the photos will come back, all the press coverage is starting up again, and it hurts. Every year it hurts more – the hurt grows until it will make me burst. I need to tell someone.’ He looked at me with his green eyes. ‘You know she’s here?’ he said.

  My fingers, on their caressing path, stopped. My breathing stopped. I was sure even my heart stopped. ‘Here?’ I repeated.

  ‘I buried her here,’ he said. ‘The man you arrested . . . He didn’t do it.’

  I moved my hand from his face to the side of the bed. My fingers were feeling for my gun but couldn’t find it. Over his shou
lder I could see it lying on his bedside table. He must have moved it when I was asleep. I saw something under his pleasant smile, something I hadn’t seen there before. How had I managed to miss it? It was so clearly there underneath the layers of attractiveness. Now he allowed me to see his secret coldness. Oh my God, he had planned this.

  ‘Where is she?’ I whispered.

  ‘She’s in the garden.’

  ‘But we looked . . .’

  ‘I moved her there much later,’ he said. ‘From the park. When the police had stopped searching the house.’ His fingers slid further down and now only created revulsion.

  I stopped his hand.

  ‘Monique was right,’ he said. ‘She told me you’re a fool. That’s why I knew you were perfect – recently divorced, needy, easy to manipulate. I had to tell someone. Her photos in the papers again, people talking, I had to find someone to hear my confession. When I first went away,’ his fingers continued to run over my hair, ‘I found people who couldn’t speak English and told them. But it’s not the same if they don’t understand. You are perfect. You haven’t been recording our last conversation; you’ve got no proof. You slept with me – how are you going to explain that in court? Instead you’re left with a paedophile in prison. You’ll know, but you won’t be able to do anything with that knowledge. How does that feel?’ He smiled lazily. ‘Maybe it’s best to keep your innocent suspect in jail.’

  ‘Why did you kill her? Was it an accident?’

  He ran the back of his finger over my jaw and said, ‘What does it matter? You will never know.’

  I tried to judge the angle and the space between the two of us before I struck out at him. My elbow connected with his cheekbone – I heard it crack. His eyes closed and his head fell back on the pillow. I grabbed my pillow between both hands and held it centimetres above his face. I had to use all my willpower to stop my myself from pushing it down. Instead I threw it on the floor, took my gun, checked that he hadn’t removed the bullets, pointed it at him and waited until he came round.