A Cold Case in Amsterdam Central

by Anja de Jager

  ‘I don’t understand: how do three bones from a recent skeleton get mixed up with a wartime one? Were they at the same place?’ If the man with the broken arm had died of natural causes, I couldn’t think of a reason why those bones had got combined.

  ‘I’ll run some more tests.’ Edgar pointed at the humerus with the back of his pen. ‘See here? There is soil residue on all the bones. Attached to it, not contaminated from being in the same bin bag.’ He nodded as if to himself. ‘We’ll be able to tell if it came from the same place.’

  My mobile rang. It was Thomas.

  ‘Where are you?’ he said. Maybe he had hoped that I wouldn’t have come back to work after yesterday’s little heart-to-heart.

  ‘I’m with Edgar Ling.’ He’d probably looked at my shift schedule to see when I was supposed to be at my desk. ‘There’s been a development. Where are you?’

  Thomas told me he’d just got back to the office. I said we’d be right up.

  ‘Come with me,’ I said to Edgar.

  He grabbed a folder and followed me up the stairs.

  ‘A man’s bones,’ I said. Our office had four L-shaped desks in it, pushed together to form a plus sign. Ingrid was to my left, by the window.

  ‘More old bones. It doesn’t matter.’ Thomas hung up his coat on the coat rack behind me. I had my old seat back, closest to the door. He sat down at his desk diagonally across from me. Behind him was the newest piece of art to adorn our office. State subsidies to artists translated into their works covering walls in many governmental buildings. I could imagine the desperate sighs when this latest monstrosity had turned up. They cycled round every few months, so hopefully it would go away soon.

  Edgar slumped at the spare desk opposite mine. I was embarrassed about Thomas’s lack of interest for Edgar’s sake. ‘They’re not old,’ I said. ‘Ten years at most. A man was buried more recently alongside an old war skeleton.’ I’d stared at the painting the whole week that I’d been back and still hadn’t managed to discover any meaning or pattern in the red and blue swirls and dots of paint, surrounded by a square of black. Half-eaten guppies in a fish tank maybe.

  Thomas stopped typing. ‘Was it just an arm?’

  ‘Humerus, ulna and radius,’ Edgar said. ‘Only the right arm. No sign of trauma.’

  ‘So the rest of the skeleton is still somewhere.’ I knew I’d jumped ahead, but I needed Thomas and Ingrid engaged. ‘We need to go to the sites where Frank Stapel worked.’ I held out the piece of paper with the names of both property developers that Tessa had given us yesterday. The whiteboard on the wall to my right was still empty, as evidence that Thomas didn’t think this was a case. ‘That’s the best place to start. Double-check if the skeleton we found in the bin bag came from either site.’

  I expected Thomas to object, but he nodded. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘we’ll do that. Edgar, what else have you got on the old skeleton?’

  ‘The main skeleton is most likely Second World War,’ Edgar said. ‘It’s a man, around thirty years old. We could tell from the wear on the teeth.’ He handed round photos from a cardboard folder. It showed the skull from various angles. If I hadn’t known how old it was, it could have been a recent professional hit, as the bullet mark showed a shot to the back of the head from close distance.

  ‘Was he a soldier?’ Ingrid asked.

  ‘Can’t tell. There are no fabric fibres of any kind on that skeleton. I did find some on the humerus of the recent one. I got good soil samples too, still stuck to the skull. I’ve mainly worked on the skull,’ he said. ‘It’s ironic. Second World War skeletons used to be my job. Before I came here.’

  ‘That’s a job?’ Ingrid asked.

  ‘Army Identification Unit. To deal with the bodies of soldiers. Identify them and bury them.’

  ‘A full-time job?’ Ingrid said.

  ‘Less and less so. I heard there were six or seven people employed in the late fifties, when they found a handful of bodies a week. Especially around Arnhem and closer to the German border. Now they deal with a couple a month. Did you know there are still thousands of soldiers missing, last deployed on Dutch soil?’

  ‘I had no idea,’ Ingrid said.

  ‘What’s the chance of identification?’ Thomas finally turned away from his computer screen. After all, that was the main thing the boss cared about.

  ‘If it’s a soldier, about twenty per cent. When they’re buried with some of their belongings, there’s a better chance. It’s hard when they’re in the state our skeleton is in.’ He got two photos out of his folder and put them in front of me. ‘No uniform, no insignia.’

  ‘They’re normally found with their things?’ Thomas said.

  ‘If only. Diggers go out around Arnhem, search the battlefields with metal detectors to find memorabilia. Some of the ruthless ones will dig up the bodies, strip them of their lighters, watches and anything else that they can sell on eBay and leave the remains behind.’

  ‘People buy that stuff?’

  ‘Have a look on eBay when you get home tonight,’ Edgar Ling said. ‘There are people willing to pay a lot of money for something that’s been stolen from a dead soldier.’

  I shivered. ‘That’s what could have happened with this body then? Someone dug up the war skeleton and left the newer one behind but picked up recent bones by mistake?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Edgar said. ‘If that was the case, I would have expected some of the clothes to be there. Socks, shoes.’ He smiled, but it was only a movement of the lips out of politeness, as if to show what he thought of those diggers. ‘In my experience, war skeletons are normally found for one of three reasons: first of all, when a new road or house is built. Then the diggers, of course. But sometimes we find them because people feel remorse and tell us where bodies are buried.’

  ‘And what about fingerprints?’ Thomas asked.

  ‘There were no prints on any of the bones. On the bin bag we found Frank’s and Tessa’s.’

  ‘So he wore gloves when he dug up the bones but not when he carried the bag to the station?’

  ‘You could draw that conclusion,’ Edgar said.

  ‘Can we go back to these extra bones? Can you tell if they came from a building site?’ Thomas asked. ‘And the same for the old bones?’

  Edgar folded both hands together and pressed them against his mouth. ‘I’ll do some tests. Get the National Forensic Institute involved too. We can even detect pollen, you know, see what plants were growing close by.’ He fished a piece of paper from the pocket of his jacket and scribbled a reminder to himself. ‘So yes, we’ve taken a DNA sample from the skull. The one from the arm bones should be here tomorrow.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s a day behind, as I’d thought I was only dealing with one skeleton at first.’

  ‘What are the chances of identifying him through DNA?’

  ‘All we need is one descendant who’s a criminal. That’s all.’

  ‘When will you know?’ Thomas said.

  ‘The computer is churning through it as we speak.’ He looked at each one of us in turn, like a schoolteacher checking to see if his pupils had any questions. When we didn’t, he closed the cardboard folder, put it on my desk, and left.

  Chapter Nine

  We should probably have gone to Kars van Wiel the minute we found the skeleton. It would have been our last chance to take the manager of the building site where Frank Stapel had died unawares. Now he knew what we’d found in that luggage locker.

  At least nobody knew about the extra bones. Nobody knew about the rest of the skeleton that was probably still buried somewhere.

  Our skeleton had been on the news last night. This morning it was all over the papers. Was it a Second World War body? Was it the result of a gangland killing? Was it a body that had been dug up at one of Amsterdam’s cemeteries last month? Was it a prank by some students? There’d been no comment from the police, of course.

  A photo taken on a kid’s iPhone had accompanied the piece in De Telegraaf. It showed me from th
e back, my head close to that of one of my colleagues in uniform, seemingly whispering in his ear.

  ‘Have you seen this?’ Thomas showed me the photo before we left to visit the building site again.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Didn’t know you liked them that young.’

  ‘If you look closely, you can see that I’m actually in front of him and talking to Edgar Ling.’

  Thomas grinned. I shook my head. We drove back to Zuid. We parked and walked over to the distinctive office block where Frank Stapel had fallen to his death. A man waved at us as soon as we approached. Even from a distance I recognized the man who seemed as wide as one of his bulldozers.

  ‘You want me to show you everything again? You miss something last time?’ Kars van Wiel grinned, then rubbed his eyes. Now that I was standing close to him, his bulk was even more noticeable. His eyes were red and swollen, as if someone had socked him. ‘I always tell my guys that it saves time to do everything right first time. I guess it’s the same for the police.’ His voice was nasal.

  ‘We didn’t miss anything,’ Thomas said. ‘There’s new information.’

  ‘Of course. That skeleton.’ Kars inhaled sharply through his nose and cleared excess snot into the back of his throat with a gurgling sound.

  ‘Yes,’ Thomas said, ‘there’s that skeleton. So show me around the site again. I want to see if Frank could have found it here.’

  ‘Here?’ Kars scanned the area as if trying to spot a bone sticking out of the ground. ‘Unlikely. Not at this stage. Tone . . . hey, Tony!’ he shouted out at a man carrying a clipboard. ‘We didn’t find a skeleton here, did we?’

  The clipboard looked out of place in Tony’s hands, which were made to break breeze blocks in half. His skin had the pitted red surface of a brick.

  ‘My brother.’ Kars pointed at him with a thumb.

  I wasn’t sure if I’d hire the brothers to run a large-scale building project, but if I ever needed anybody to destroy a wall by hand, I’d know who to call.

  ‘We found some bones on our last project.’ Tony’s voice was surprisingly light, coming out of such a big body. ‘But that was on fallow land. We found them early on, when we were putting the foundations in.’

  ‘Soldiers?’ I said.

  ‘There were no insignia, so your guys said they wouldn’t be able to identify them.’

  ‘How long did work stop for?’ Thomas asked.

  ‘A week or so. Because they weren’t army. No risk of ammunition or bombs lying around. But it was a bloody nuisance.’

  The foundations of this building would have been dug and hammered into the ground months ago. Amsterdam’s soil was soft, and concrete underpinnings were always necessary. A children’s song spoke of Amsterdam as the city built on poles. This particular new office block was already taking shape: the walls were up, the floors placed, the roof done.

  ‘They put the bones in one of those unnamed graves,’ Kars said. ‘And now they’re digging them up again, I read in the paper. Waste of money. They couldn’t identify them a year ago, so why they think they can now is beyond me.’

  ‘New technology,’ Thomas said, ‘so we can bury them with some dignity rather than just dumping them in a nameless grave.’

  ‘No, that isn’t it,’ Kars said. ‘It’s to keep people in a job. That’s all. Thanks, Tony.’

  Kars guided us to the front of the building. To the right, two doors down, smartly dressed men and women were dripping through revolving doors into a tower of office space. Most of them had their eyes cast down to their mobiles, as if it was important to have a final check of their emails before they reached their destination. It was the building where the witness Maarten Schuur, the man with the orange boat shoes, worked. By the time our colleagues in uniform had got here, people could be split into two groups: those who stopped and stared and those who walked quickly by and avoided looking at the broken body on the ground. When Thomas and I arrived, most people had left.

  ‘This is the only place where we’re digging.’ Kars gestured to the cordoned-off area. They were adding the final touches: lifting a few street tiles to put in the bike racks and a raised flower bed. ‘But we had to stop. After Frank . . . after Frank’s death.’

  The drawn outline was still here, right next to the plants. They were in bloom, clumps of bright pink tulips, edged by purple violets. This was where Frank had landed. I couldn’t think of it any other way. His body had missed the corner of the flower planter by a metre or so. I looked up to trace the trajectory of his fall. ‘What was Frank working on?’

  Thomas looked at me with a deep frown, lips pursed. I’d told Pippi this morning as I fed her that I definitely would not ask any questions about anybody’s job.

  ‘As I told your colleague here the other day,’ Kars said, ‘he was plastering on the seventh floor. Just on the second tier. We want to have that area done so we can show people round. The view’s great. I still don’t know why he was out on the terrace. To have a smoke, maybe.’ He shrugged.

  I looked back up, glanced at the roof terrace. I’d never had a head for heights and couldn’t understand why someone would walk around there just to smoke. ‘Did anybody see him?’

  Kars shook his head. ‘He’d bunked off in the morning, so was making up the hours. Everybody else had already left.’

  ‘Can we go up?’ I said.

  ‘Sure.’

  Kars took us to the back. We walked around the outside area. There were gaps where they’d stopped laying new tiles, an area where the soil was visible, but there were no signs that it had been dug up in the last week or so. Stamped down, evened out, yes, I could see that, but dug up? There was no way the skeleton could have come from the flower bed. It wasn’t big enough. No, if it had come from this particular site, it must have been dug up months ago, when they’d put the foundations in. But then what had Frank done with it in the meantime?

  Kars opened a door with a swipe card. We took the goods lift up and got out on seven. The cement floor was fish-scale grey and the bare walls amplified our footsteps as if we were in a cave. It smelled of paint but there was nobody working. A pile of deserted building materials had taken over one corner. Otherwise the floor was empty. It would be impressive once there were some walls and furniture, but now it was only a cavernous space. A fireproof door led to the terrace. Large safety signs were plastered all over the door: Hard-hat area, do not enter without safety equipment. I hesitated before I pushed the door open. I didn’t go out. Heights always seemed to pull on my stomach, as if gravity were tempting me to jump.

  ‘Were these signs already here?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ Thomas answered. ‘When I came up here on the evening of Frank’s accident, I saw all of these.’

  ‘I was probably a bit hard on Frank making him work that late,’ Kars said to Thomas. ‘But I was annoyed that he’d taken the morning off. We were waiting for him. He was holding everybody up.’

  ‘I know what that’s like,’ Thomas said.

  ‘Right. And I thought: it’s not fair on everybody else.’

  ‘That they have to work harder because someone is doing stuff for themselves, you mean? Pursuing their own aims, their own goals.’

  ‘That’s it. That’s exactly it,’ Kars said. ‘And sometimes a guy will come to me saying he can manage his own time, but they never can.’

  ‘They always have difficulty judging when they’re wrong,’ Thomas said.

  ‘Or when to—’

  ‘Any CCTV up here?’ I interrupted them. I glanced round but didn’t see any obvious cameras.

  ‘No point,’ Kars van Wiel said. ‘There’s nothing here to steal.’

  Thomas walked around on the terrace. From the safety of the door, I looked at the missing panels, the gap now covered with plastic sheeting. I was glad when Thomas finished his tour and came back in. We said goodbye to Kars van Wiel, told him we’d be in touch, and headed back down.

  On either side of the path to the car park, office build
ings full of workers towered over us. After we’d passed two of the buildings, I could see that the next one had a ground-floor canteen. I bet it was overpriced: here was a captive audience and not many places to eat, unless you wanted to sit outside on the concrete steps and munch on sandwiches you’d brought from home.

  ‘Coffee?’ I said. It would give me the caffeine boost to make the upcoming car journey with Thomas bearable.

  He looked at his watch.

  ‘Just a takeaway,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t want to keep you out of the office for too long.’

  His look turned into a grin. ‘I didn’t think you were quite awake,’ he said. ‘You didn’t ask that many pointless questions.’

  We went in.

  ‘I would have said “stupid questions”,’ Thomas said as we were waiting in the queue. ‘But you’d be offended. You think you only ask clever questions. That’s why you’re checking my work, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m not checking anything.’

  ‘So why—’

  ‘I’m not checking your work,’ I said. I gave my order and looked at Thomas. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I’ll get my own.’

  ‘We need to find that man’s skeleton,’ I said.

  Thomas ordered his coffee and seemed completely engrossed in watching the girl make it.

  ‘Was Kars different the last time you talked to him? He seemed pretty relaxed to me, for the developer of a site where someone’s fallen to his death.’

  ‘It was an accident.’ Thomas put a plastic lid on his paper coffee cup.

  ‘Right, but he didn’t seem upset at all. If one of your workers died, wouldn’t you at least stop joking about giving him a hard time?’

  ‘Depends on whether you liked them or not.’ He raised his cup to his lips and the coffee gurgled through the lid, sounding remarkably like Kars van Wiel clearing his nose.

  I took a sip of mine. The caffeine felt good. ‘So you don’t think Kars liked Frank Stapel much?’

  ‘I don’t know. He seemed more concerned on Friday. More . . . Not sure how to describe it.’ He shrugged. ‘Made more of an effort, I’d say.’