‘Those glass panels,’ I said. ‘They’re supposed to withstand a certain amount of force, right?’
‘I don’t know. I’m just a decorator. Me and Frank, we stayed well away from that stuff.’
‘But he was out on that terrace.’
Robbert shook his head. ‘I know. It doesn’t make any sense.’ He said it softly. I could tell he was finding it hard to talk about Frank.
‘Did he get on with Kars?’
‘I just kept my head down. Look, I don’t want to get anybody in trouble.’
‘If you know anything, you should tell me.’
‘Frank’s death, it was just an accident. A stupid accident.’ He threw the empty Gatorade bottle into the corner, where it bounced and made a dent in the newly plastered wall.
As Ingrid and I walked back along the canal, I was still wondering what Frank Stapel had been distracted about. A removal van had stopped in the middle of the road and was blocking all traffic. A sofa jerked through the air, each upward movement caused by two men pulling the rope that made it fly. On the second floor, the windows had been removed. Three Chinese tourists stood behind the van, taking photos of the floating sofa. I stopped and watched the couch on its journey into the sky. Having windows as the only way to get your furniture into your flat was a good reason not to buy any. Ever. Behind the van, one of the cars beeped its horn. You could easily get stuck for half an hour on the canal. It was the risk of driving along here, where there was only enough room for one car. The van wasn’t going to move until the sofa had gone through that second-floor window, and then they would have to unhook the rope from the pulley.
‘That was very interesting,’ Ingrid said.
‘The sofa?’
She rubbed a hand through her short hair until it was bunched up in spikes. Everybody else pulled their hands through their hair to straighten or flatten it. Ingrid had a different motion, rubbing and twisting at the same time, which created chaos. ‘No, to finally see you in action, I guess. I read so much about you even before . . . well, before I moved to Amsterdam. Watching you, observing you, it’s really great. You know that I asked especially to work with you? Anyway. Is there anywhere else you want to go? Talk to Mark Visser?’
I shook my head and we went back to the police station.
Thomas greeted us from behind a desk covered with files. ‘This is a needle in a haystack,’ he said.
‘We’ll find this man, because nobody buries one arm,’ I said. ‘So that means there are more bones in the ground somewhere. We can find the rest of the second skeleton.’
‘It’s not at either of the two building sites,’ Ingrid said.
‘No, right, so it’s somewhere else.’
‘A forest, a field – hey, how about a cemetery?’ Thomas said. ‘Had you thought about that? Maybe the bones have come from a cemetery.’
‘No,’ I shook my head, ‘no, Francine said that her grandfather was never found.’
‘Because his body had been buried anonymously. It’s the simplest answer, isn’t it?’
I looked at Ingrid. She stared at her monitor. A cemetery. Thomas’s suggestion hooked itself in my mind. What if the body was one of the ones that Forensics had dug up to re-identify?
‘The second body is too recent,’ I said. ‘We have a builder and we have a skeleton. The simplest answer isn’t that the body came from a graveyard. The simplest answer is that a builder came across a skeleton as he was working on a building site. That’s how most of these get found. Thousands of victims from the Second World War are still missing on Dutch soil.’ I had known that spending an evening on Google would come in handy. There was nothing more effective in shutting Thomas up than some facts. ‘They are finding them all the time. Either soldiers or civilians. So that’s the simplest answer.’ I took a breath.
Thomas took advantage of the gap to talk. ‘But not on either of the two sites where Frank worked.’
‘So he worked somewhere else as well. A third site. We find it and then we’ll find the second body that’s still buried.’
‘Okay.’ He tapped his pen on his desk. ‘We identify the man whose arm bones we’ve got, and you locate this third site.’
‘Why me?’
‘You’re the only one interested in that builder.’
I drew a circle on my notepad. ‘Decorator.’
‘Whatever. And that girl.’
‘Thomas, can’t you see it’s all linked?’ I’d promised Tessa I’d look into Frank’s death. To investigate his accident properly, I needed to know where else he had worked. That would lead us to the second skeleton.
My thoughts were interrupted by the shrill ringing of my phone.
Chapter Sixteen
Francine Dutte frowned at me from across the table in Interview Room 1. ‘How’s the investigation going?’ It was normal for a prosecutor to ask for progress reports on a case, but this wasn’t Francine’s case. It never would be, because of the family connection. She knew that as well as I did, which was why she wasn’t wearing a suit but smart casuals. Jeans combined with a jacket and the same red scarf as yesterday.
‘We’re doing everything we can to—’
‘Don’t give me the official line. I know how things work.’
‘Then you also know what I can and cannot tell you.’
When I’d picked up the phone and said, ‘Hi, Francine,’ Thomas had arced an eyebrow at me that said: I told you so.
‘To you it’s just a skeleton, but that was my grandfather,’ Francine said. She folded her hands, put her elbows on the table and rested her chin on the hands. It made her look thoughtful but she also moved into my space.
I didn’t sit back. ‘Yes, I’m well aware of that.’
‘You need to find where his remains came from.’ With the index finger from the folded hands she pointed at me.
Francine had stipulated that she wanted to see me alone. When I told Thomas this, I could see something shift in his face, behind the obvious glee. It was one thing to feel that Francine was putting pressure on the weakest link; it was quite another to be excluded.
‘If we know where his body was buried, maybe we can find out who killed him,’ she said.
‘As I was saying, we’re doing all we can to do exactly that.’ I drew a circle on my notepad. I filled it and added some straight lines from the bottom of the circle. It started to resemble a jellyfish. ‘But Francine, it was during the war. We won’t find out who killed him.’
‘You don’t think it’s important?’
‘I do, but you have to be realistic. It was over seventy years ago. There isn’t much to find.’ My stomach grumbled its desire for lunch. I pressed my hand on it to stop the sound.
‘You don’t want to look, you mean.’
‘Trust me, we’re desperate to find out where he’d been buried.’
‘Desperate? Why?’
‘The bones we found weren’t all your grandfather’s, so we’re working very hard to find the rest of the other skeleton.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘Really? There are two war bodies?’
I didn’t respond.
‘Why did Frank Stapel have it anyway?’ she said.
‘We don’t know.’
‘What do you know?’
‘Frank Stapel put the bag with your grandfather’s remains in a locker at Amsterdam Centraal at 13.15 on Friday. He then had a fatal accident on Friday evening.’
She waited for more. There wasn’t any more. ‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Today’s Wednesday. You haven’t got very far.’
‘We visited both building sites where Frank worked. It seems unlikely that the skeleton came from either one of those. Neither his colleagues nor his family know anything. Or so they claim.’ I clammed up. I was already telling her too much.
‘I don’t think I need to tell you how important this is.’ She was making notes. ‘To me personally,’ she said to the notepad in front of her.
‘I und
erstand.’
‘I’m sure you do.’ She clicked the top of her pen and placed it across the paper. ‘Therefore I hope you understand that the prosecution service will keep a close eye on this. After all, it is your first case since you came back. We wouldn’t want you to mess this one up.’
I pushed my teeth together to stop myself from responding to her.
She smiled at me, had probably seen that I’d reacted to her needling. A smile of victory. ‘How are you anyway?’
As if she really cared about how I was. The fake pleasantries weren’t fooling me; I knew she was trying to catch me out. ‘I’m well.’
‘My husband’s very excited that you’re working on this case. After that dramatic shooting. He’s a big fan of yours.’
‘Thanks.’ I managed to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.
‘But he doesn’t know how either the police force or the prosecution service works. I’m not so happy. There are some within our department who question whether you should have come back at all. Your performance on the witness stand was . . . well, let’s say that it was to the point.’
I’d come out of hospital three days before testifying and had still been full of medication. It had been after my second set of operations. There’d been a nagging suspicion in the back of my mind that the only reason I’d still been employed was that they needed me to testify. It had been hard to look at the murderer and officially identify him. That I’d slept with him made me feel sick. It had been difficult just to stand up, so keeping my answers as short as possible had been the best plan of action. Getting him imprisoned for murder had been one of the hardest things I’d ever done. Afterwards, I’d needed the painkillers that had taken the edge off reality for a few weeks.
‘He was convicted,’ I said.
‘Yes, he was. I think the judge gave you some leeway.’
‘He understood my circumstances.’
‘I guess he did. I also understand your circumstances now. You’re being watched. You’re the one being judged.’
I smiled, as fake as the one she had shown me earlier. ‘We’re always judged.’
‘Judged by us and judged by your own people, from what I hear.’
I knew who Francine had been talking to. ‘You’ve heard wrong. I’ve been cleared.’
‘Officially. But you know that’s not how it works. What your colleagues think is important, what the top cadre think is important. Yes, you’ve been cleared, but you wouldn’t want to go back to uniformed service, would you?’
I took a gulp of coffee. The caffeine hit the back of my tongue as bitter as bile. ‘Who’s talking about that?’
She folded her hands. Her eyes looked steadily into mine. ‘Lotte, let’s be honest with each other. You do this one right and you’ll get a lot of credit within the prosecution service. That’ll make your boss happy. It’ll make the rest of your team happy. You know who I mean.’
For a second I considered biting the hook Francine was fishing with. I needed help with Thomas. His words came to mind, that Francine was good at applying pressure wherever the weak spot was. She was actually doing something smarter. She was offering me what I wanted. ‘It’s all in hand,’ I said, however. ‘We’re doing a final check on the skeleton, taking ground samples so that we’ll be able to make a positive match when we know where the remains came from, and we think we can release them for burial soon.’
‘Don’t make it too soon; better do it right. I’m not at all sure about you. I don’t like what I’ve heard about your previous case.’
‘Thanks for coming in, Francine, we’ll talk again.’
‘Lotte, if you mess up, I’ll make sure it’s the last time you do.’
‘Francine, I promise you—’ My mobile rang. ‘Just hold on a second,’ I said before picking up. I didn’t recognize the number.
‘This is the Slotervaart hospital,’ a male voice said. ‘Could you come and collect your mother?’
‘Sorry, what?’
‘Your mother. She’s had an accident.’
My mother sat in the middle of a row of plastic seats. To her left was a man with his leg in plaster and another man holding his hand. She seemed as fragile as the petals on a parched rose. Her face was swollen. Her clouded blue eyes were set back in puffy sockets. She was staring ahead of her but wasn’t actually watching anything. On the phone, the doctor had told me my mother had broken her wrist in a fall. They needed someone to look after her as she couldn’t go home by herself. Even though Francine was threatening me and Tessa was counting on me, what else was I going to do? When I’d told the doctor that I would come straight over, Francine had looked at me as if I’d just proved to her that all her misgivings had been correct.
In the waiting area, the harsh scent of disinfectant failed to completely mask the sour odour of sweat coming from the man with the plastered leg. Even though I’d stayed in a different hospital, these smells brought back memories of the time after my shoulder operation. None of those memories were good. I moved forward to hug my mother. She raised her good hand slowly, as if it weighed ten kilos, and put it on my arm to stop me. A nurse walked by, the rubber soles of his shoes squeaking on the linoleum floor. That sound and the bright lights on the ceiling reminded me of lying on a stretcher and being pushed to the operating theatre. I covered my mother’s hand with mine and together we slowly followed the blue line on the floor that would take us out of here.
My phone rang. It was Thomas. ‘Where are you?’ he said.
I’d completely forgotten to tell him. I explained the situation and heard the annoyance in his voice. I drove my mother to my flat, walked behind her up the stairs and settled her in the spare bedroom. ‘I’ll get some clothes from your place. Are you going to be all right on your own for half an hour or so?’
She closed her eyes. Blue veins intersected her eyelids. ‘I know you have to do this.’ Her voice was slurred, and there were spit bubbles on her lips. ‘But please touch as little as possible.’ The words floated away on the draught of the open door.
‘I’ll just get what’s necessary.’
‘No need to rush.’ She rested against the pillow. ‘I’d rather be alone.’
I drove over to her flat. She would hate that I had to go through her cupboards and drawers while she wasn’t there. It worried me that she hadn’t insisted on coming with me. My father had done the same for me after I’d been shot: taken my keys and packed a bag with underwear, pyjamas and toiletries.
My mother’s front door was reluctant to respond to my attempts with the spare key that I hadn’t used in years, but eventually it opened. At least all the boxes in the front room had gone. The room felt empty without her. Her presence had filled it and was as much a part of the furniture as the oak table. I rested my hand on the back of the chair where she always sat. She rotated them so that they wore out evenly. Every three months we would move the chairs one place anticlockwise round the table. So I had used this chair exactly one quarter of the time I lived here, but never at this place at the table. I pulled the chair back and sat down. It was as strange as drinking from her mug or eating from her plate would be. I had the view that my mother had for the last thirty-five years or so. A corner of the middle strip of wallpaper had peeled. Would my flat look like this after I’d lived there on my own for four decades?
We’d moved to this flat when I was eight. When we talked about that time, my mother always said that the move from Alkmaar to Amsterdam had been easy for both of us, that I was only going to primary school and that if you had to change schools, this was the perfect time to do so. It hadn’t felt easy. We’d stayed with my grandparents for a couple of years and then moved to another part of Amsterdam. I wasn’t sure if my mother needed her independence back, or if they’d argued, but the end result was that we had to move again. I didn’t know anybody, and worse, everybody else knew each other. For me, it was all new: the school, the children and the neighbourhood; all new, all equally frightening. My mother said that it was this that had
made me so fixated on Mark Visser’s sister Agnes. After all, we’d only been at school together for six months before she disappeared. My mother had been wrong. What had made me obsessed was that Agnes had been my only friend.
She would suck the end of one of her blonde pigtails as she drew. They were always tied with purple ribbons. She loved purple. She even had a lilac pen. When I pictured her now, the few times when I didn’t see her dead body, I imagined those blonde pigtails and those violet ribbons flying back from her head as she ran the kilometre home from school.
I shook my head to get rid of the memories, then got up and opened the door to my mother’s bedroom. I’d slept in her bed when I’d been little and ill, but I had no memory of ever having been here on my own. She used to close this door behind her. I opened drawers and stared at the contents. It was a relief to see they were organized differently from mine. Putting some T-shirts, two pairs of trousers and seven pairs of socks in a bag, I pictured my father opening every cupboard in my bedroom to find what I needed.
I grabbed seven pairs of knickers and seven bras from her underwear drawer. I didn’t check if they matched. I hesitated over the vests. I lifted one by my fingertips. It was made of pale-yellow cotton with spaghetti straps and lace trimming on the front. It was strange to think that this was what my mother wore under her jumpers. Something pretty that nobody would ever see. I stuffed two in the bag.
I heard a noise. I imagined that at any point my mother could open the door behind me and ask in a quiet but sharp voice what I thought I was doing. It was only the downstairs neighbours’ toilet flushing. I slammed the drawer shut. It seemed that my whole life my mother had been at home, waiting patiently to check that I’d returned safely. She never went out. Even after I left home, she’d always been here. Had I ever rung the doorbell unanswered? I didn’t think so.
A couple of shirts and a cardigan completed the packing. I went into the bedroom that used to be mine. Here was my single bed with the crocheted bedspread, the shelves with the rows of books, mainly detective novels, and the small desk that I’d used all the way through university. The room was all in white, with green curtains and green carpet, the only colour scheme that my mother and I had been able to agree on. I knew so many details about this small space: for example that the room was a perfect square, that the bed fitted tightly lengthways as well as widthways, and that if I opened the curtains, I’d see the silver birch trees at the back of the block of flats, the canal at the end of the street and the little park across the canal. With the curtains closed, everything was the same as it had been twenty years ago, when I’d moved out with little more than I’d just packed for my mother to start my first job as a police officer. I wondered if my ex-husband’s child slept here when my mother was babysitting.
A Cold Case in Amsterdam Central Page 11