Mark hung back. I was starting to thank him for his cooperation when he said, ‘I mentioned to my mother you were coming to ask me some questions. She said to give you her regards.’ He scratched the short stubble on the back of his head. The criss-cross wrinkles under his eyes deepened with his smile. ‘She still remembers you.’
So he’d known after all. He looked awkward. The professional front from earlier had gone, replaced by something more like the face a teenager would pull when introduced to a stranger. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have brought it up,’ he said.
The sound of digging stopped, and in the distance I could hear the cars driving along the straight road, the noise that had driven Old Karel crazy. From behind the house, a bird, a blackbird maybe, called out loudly that all intruders and possible rivals should stay out of the way. Thomas waited a few steps down the corridor. He was grinning at me with raised eyebrows.
‘How is your mother?’ I was glad my voice was under control.
‘Old. What can I say? She asked if you would come visit her some time. She’d like to see you again.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You have to make it soon. Really soon.’ His voice dropped. ‘Cancer.’
I nodded. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. The past wasn’t a good topic of conversation.
‘Can we go now?’ Thomas said.
Mark looked round and seemed surprised to see him still there. ‘Of course. Sorry.’ He stood aside and let me leave the office.
‘Well, that was just charming,’ Thomas said once we were in the car. ‘That wasn’t your ex-husband, was it?’
‘No it bloody well wasn’t.’ I clicked the seat belt in place and looked at my watch. The interview had lasted exactly half an hour. I stared at the landscape going by. The thick clouds that had threatened rain all day were still running across the sky. Mark Visser after all these years.
The last time I’d seen him, his mother had been screaming, I’d seen his dead sister’s body.
I’d failed to save her.
Chapter Thirteen
‘Are you going to tell me?’ Thomas had his hands clenched around the steering wheel and kept his eyes focused on the straight road ahead, which at some point, hundreds of years ago, had been under water.
It ought to be oppressive, the realization that as soon as the dykes burst, this part of the country would drown again, but to me it gave a feeling of power. A sign that everything could be beaten, even something as mighty as the sea, as long as you used the right methods to conquer it.
‘Nothing to tell. Hadn’t seen him in over thirty-five years.’ We would never let the land return to water, regardless of how much the sea level rose over the next decades. We would just build our defences higher and keep the water back.
‘University boyfriend?’ Thomas grinned.
‘Very funny.’ Not that there was any sign of the sea here. The only water in sight was the drainage ditch and the canals that ran along and across each of the fields. Herons kept watch at waterway crossroads, tall, stately birds with long feathers on the back of their heads, floating behind them like my old teacher’s ponytail.
Thomas was still talking about our interview ten minutes later when we got back to the office. ‘It was so charming,’ he said to Ingrid as he hung his coat up. ‘Like love at first sight, but a lifetime later.’
Ingrid looked at me with a watchful stare. Maybe she felt sorry for me, or maybe she was checking that I was okay with being teased.
‘And I was there to witness it. The meaningful glances across the desk, the lingering handshake. My wife reads all these books, you know, where women sink into the dark eyes of someone they meet—’
‘She’s reading those because she’s bored with you,’ I said.
Ingrid laughed.
‘At least she’s got someone to be bored with.’ His voice lost its playful edge.
‘But apart from Lotte meeting this man, did you get anything?’ Ingrid said. ‘Anything more on this skeleton? Where it could have come from?’
‘No, but thanks to Lotte,’ he tipped his head in my direction, ‘we’ve met the widow, the brother and have gone to two building sites where they couldn’t possibly have found it. Real progress, I think.’
‘And what would you have done?’ I asked.
‘I would not have driven out to the polder to meet my ex-lover at a site where the dead man had never even been.’
‘He’s not—’ I clenched my teeth together and stared out of the window. It had started to rain again.
The whiteboard taunted me with its blankness. I needed to write something to make sure Thomas and Ingrid saw this as much like a case as I did. I stood up and got a blue marker pen out. ‘On Friday, Frank Stapel falls to his death. On Monday, I open a locker at Centraal station and find a skeleton in a bin bag.’ I wrote Frank Stapel and skeleton on the whiteboard. I added an arrow and the words extra bones.
‘The girl must have known something. Tessa.’ Thomas got up and wrote her name down.
‘I don’t think so. But either way, we need to look further into Frank’s death. If we know why he died—’
‘He died because he fell.’
‘Sure, he fell, but maybe someone gave him a hand.’ I’d been fairly certain it had been an accident, but Tessa’s words at the funeral did make me wonder if we had drawn that conclusion too quickly. ‘Either way, we still need to know where the rest of that second skeleton is buried.’
I pushed the file on the Second World War skeleton to the side and opened the one on Frank Stapel’s accident. I turned over the first photo. The body wore a T-shirt and jeans. The next one was a close-up of Frank’s leg at an unnatural angle. Then that face with the mouth and chin covered in blood. I picked up the picture and examined it closely. His face was as I’d remembered it and yet subtly different. He was now a case, no longer real life. The skin grazed. All his injuries consistent with a fall from seven floors up. Immediate cause of death: broken neck. The statements and documents from the building site showed that, as Thomas had said, they’d had a perfect safety record until Frank’s death. I stuck the photo on the whiteboard.
‘I’m heading out,’ Ingrid said. ‘Want to come for a drink?’
I shook my head. ‘I’m going to have another look through these.’ I gestured at the second set of photos, the ones of the Second World War skeleton that Edgar had left on my desk. ‘Maybe some other time.’
I went back to the photos that showed the skull from the front. When I’d first seen it in that bin bag, I’d thought there would be a corresponding puncture wound at the front of the skull, but as Edgar Ling had said, and the photos showed, there wasn’t one. I could picture the man, Francine Dutte’s grandfather, on his knees with the gun pressed to the back of his head.
‘I’m glad you’re so interested in that old skeleton,’ Thomas said. ‘That means Ingrid and I can concentrate on the missing man.’
‘That’s a change of heart, isn’t it? Finally acknowledging that I was right? That this is important?’
He left without replying.
It was eight o’clock in the evening when my doorbell rang. I put Pippi on the floor, got up and pressed the button on the intercom.
‘Hi, Lotte, it’s Ingrid. Can I come in?’
‘Hold on a second. I’ll come down.’
‘But—’
I cut her off and ambled down both flights of stairs. I opened the external door a fraction. ‘I brought you these,’ Ingrid said and held out a bunch of fire-red tulips.
‘You shouldn’t have.’ I kept my hand on the doorknob.
‘We got off on the wrong foot.’
Over her shoulder I could see the canal. A tourist boat came past. Now, in high season, one came by every fifteen minutes or so, on its circular route through Amsterdam. ‘No, not at all,’ I said. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘I told Thomas you should have the desk.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ Hans’s old desk by the wi
ndow. No longer with my back towards the door. I didn’t want to tell Ingrid that I wished nobody had taken that desk, so that it would still be free when Hans got bored with farming.
‘Whose sofa is this?’
The four abandoned kitchen chairs had disappeared during the day. Someone must have taken them home. The sofa was still there, getting sodden in the drizzle. If nobody had taken it by tomorrow, I would call the council to have it removed.
‘My downstairs neighbours moved back to the States and left a bunch of furniture behind.’
‘Thomas said . . .’ Ingrid’s voice faltered. ‘I only relocated to Amsterdam two months ago.’
‘You’re not in need of a sofa, are you?’ It was a poor joke. I was dry in the doorway, but mist from the drizzle was forming in Ingrid’s hair. Then a raindrop fell on a short dark strand and beaded up like dew on a blade of grass. ‘This is stupid,’ I said. I should have accepted her invitation for a drink. ‘Come on in.’
‘The rain doesn’t matter.’ She wiped a big drop from her eyes. ‘I don’t mind.’
‘To the right. Up the stairs. I’ll get you a towel.’
She stepped into the communal hallway and looked at the chandelier and the black and white tiled floor. ‘This is nice,’ she said.
I climbed the stairs. Amsterdam’s houses were tall, the steps narrow and the stairways long. Ingrid’s footsteps echoed close behind me. As I pushed the door open, I could hear her puffing.
‘This is a great place you’ve got,’ she said.
‘Thanks.’ I was proud of my flat, pleased with how it looked even now that the warm honey colour of the floorboards was dimmed by a thin layer of dust.
‘Give me the tour,’ she said.
‘This is the front room, as you can see; my bedroom is through here, spare bedroom,’ I indicated it with my hand, ‘and here’s my study.’ I gave her a brief glimpse of the large architect’s table and the rows of books. ‘Come through to the kitchen.’
‘Have you lived here long?’
‘A couple of years.’ I filled the kettle and switched it on. ‘I was lucky.’ I rested my hip against the dishwasher. ‘Sorry the place is such a tip. Haven’t had time to clean. I’ve only been back a week.’
‘Don’t worry about it.’ Ingrid put the bunch of tulips on the work surface. The pollen stained the green paper they were wrapped in. All the colours of the crayons we used in primary school: red, yellow, green.
‘Cup of tea?’ At least the kitchen wasn’t too much of a mess. The dishwasher whirred behind me.
‘Yes, that would be great.’
I reached past her, and took two mugs from the cupboard.
‘Shall I put the tulips in some water?’
‘No, leave them there. I’ll do it later.’
‘No, let me,’ Ingrid said. ‘Got a vase?’
I took the tea towel, entirely white, from its hook. Lifting it to my face, I was relieved that it didn’t smell mouldy. I rubbed the dust from the two white mugs. The dishwasher clicked to warn that it was going into its drying cycle.
‘The boss says it’s important to identify the skeleton,’ she said.
‘I know. He said the same to me. But that was before we knew there was another body buried somewhere.’ I went into the front room to grab a vase and some scissors. ‘Plus I’d like to get Tessa some answers. About what happened to her husband.’
‘You’ve got a lot of books,’ Ingrid said, looking at my bookshelf and pulling out How to Be a Woman.
I didn’t answer that they helped me make sense of the world.
‘Thailand, Indonesia . . .’ She trailed her finger over the row of travel guides. ‘I would love to go.’
‘My father’s in Thailand at the moment.’
‘You’ve been?’
I shook my head. ‘No, never.’ I just liked reading the books.
‘So what can I do to help?’
‘Nothing at the moment.’
She took her coat off. Held it in the crook of her arm. The sleeves of her shirt weren’t long enough and exposed the knots of her wrists. ‘What about Frank Stapel?’
‘His wife asked me to investigate. His widow, I should say.’ Frank Stapel seemed more real after I’d seen the photo of him on the beach with his feet dug into the sand; no longer just a body or a victim.
I remembered that feeling of the beach between my toes, the way my feet would suddenly hit cold sand as soon as they’d gone through the layer that the sun had warmed up and found the water level. I had enjoyed my four-month stay on the coast. Every day I’d walked a few kilometres on the beach, trying to time my stroll to low tide so that I could walk on the firm footing between the sea and the high-tide mark of shells, stranded jellyfish and seaweed.
‘We did a project at school about Second World War corpses.’ Ingrid filled the vase at the tap. Unwrapped the tulips, spread them out on the countertop and cut a few centimetres off each stem. ‘They used to find them all the time, soldiers from both sides. But it’s been a while now. The war, I mean.’
I turned to watch the kettle. I missed my old one with the whistle that could cut through conversations and memories. This one only clicked off. I poured steaming water into the mugs. I moved the tea bag up and down in one mug then the other, holding it by its label until the tea was the same colour as Frank Stapel’s leather jacket. I opened the bin with my foot, shook the tea bag above the mug until it stopped dripping, and threw it away. I put Ingrid’s mug next to the tulips.
Ingrid pointed with her shoe to the bowl on the floor. ‘You’ve got a cat?’
‘Just temporarily. Rescued her from some thugs last night.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Pippi.’
‘Ginger?’
‘Black and white. ‘
‘Pippi, Pippi,’ Ingrid called in the hallway, but Mrs Cat was too wary of strangers to appear. She was probably hiding under the bed in the spare room.
Ingrid put the first tulip in the vase. She’d cut it too short. The flower, its petals still closed and shaped more like an arrow than a cup, only just peeked over the glass edge. Yellow snaked through the red, from the stem to the arrow’s tip. ‘So Thomas,’ she said. ‘What’s his problem?’
Thomas’s problem with me was that he’d seen my mistakes in a previous case and had listened to tapes that had recorded my poor judgement. Tapes that could have got me fired. My problem with Thomas was that he knew what I had done. My other issue was that I cared. ‘Is there a problem?’ I said.
‘Why did he insist I take the desk by the window?’ She put all the flowers in. Spread them. Lifted them up so that they held their heads high above the water. Let go. They slipped back down.
‘What difference does it make?’
She moved the flowers up again, entangled the stems so that the friction of leaf on leaf kept them up. She smiled, pleased with her handiwork. ‘Is he afraid of you? Scared because you’re too good?’
I smiled. ‘I doubt it.’
‘Because you are, you know. Much better than he is. You solved that financier’s murder. What has Thomas done?’
‘He worked on a spate of armed robberies. Plus it wasn’t just me. It’s never just me. It was a team of people.’ I hoped Thomas didn’t see things the way Ingrid did. I remembered what he’d said, that I was checking his work.
‘But you’re the one in the papers,’ she said. ‘You did the interviews. You did such a great job, we all followed it. You’re the one whose name everybody knows.’
‘Let’s go through,’ I said. ‘Sit down.’ I carried the vase and placed it on the table, my typical single-person dining table, with a place mat on one end and a pile of papers on the other.
‘They look nice,’ Ingrid said. ‘Cheer the room up a bit.’
The red was too bright. It made the pale blue of the walls, the colour of the sky in March, look insipid and cold.
‘How do you know Mark Visser?’ Ingrid said. ‘I felt bad when Thomas was teasing you, but I
didn’t know if I should interfere or not.’
This conversation had started to feel like an interrogation. ‘No need.’
‘You’ve only just come back. If there’s anything I can help with . . .’
‘We have a man’s body to find. We need to find out where the skeleton came from. There’s enough to do.’
‘I meant with Thomas. Or with the boss. I chatted to Justin de Lange yesterday. He said there’d been some resistance.’ She caught my sudden look and shut up. ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’
I shivered. The room was chilly, but I wasn’t going to turn the heating back on in April. Wasn’t everything I’d told the Bureau for Internal Investigations confidential? ‘It’s not your fault. It’s his. He shouldn’t have mentioned anything.’ Justin de Lange knew too much about me. I had known there would be a meeting with his department even before my first day back: we’d agreed on that as soon as I’d given the CI the date on which I’d return to work. In that interview, three weeks ago, there had been two of them in the second-floor meeting room: Justin de Lange and a woman, neither one of whom I had met before, neither one of whom looked sincere when they smiled.
I had a mug of coffee with me and sat down on the other side of the table. The BII agents sat opposite me, their notepads in front of them to make sure it was clear who was conducting this interview. The woman was dressed in a light-grey suit over a bright-green shirt, probably inspired by the leaves of the tulips at the stalls on the square. The man didn’t wear a suit or a tie; his pink shirt was open at the neck and tucked into brown trousers. Maybe he was trying to brighten the department up a bit. Years of only meeting with criminals and colleagues would drum it into him that grey was a more appropriate colour to wear than pink.
‘We won’t take much of your time,’ the woman said.
I didn’t reply. Silence was always the best option when you doubted your best response in a meeting with Internal Investigations.
‘How’s your shoulder?’ the woman asked.
‘Much better.’ I moved my hand to rub it, but stopped myself and picked up my coffee mug.
‘Can you give us the details?’
A Cold Case in Amsterdam Central Page 9