A Cold Case in Amsterdam Central

by Anja de Jager

  Chapter Seventeen

  Francine noticed Michael Kraan coming towards her in the corridor of the Courts of Justice. For the last month, whenever she saw her fellow prosecutor’s round face with the scarce baby curls surrounding it, she wasn’t sure whether to speed up or slow down. Her black gown with the white collar was like armour, powerful enough to ward off whatever was coming her way. She held the files she was carrying in front of her as a paper shield.

  ‘Francine, good afternoon. This has been an interesting time for you.’ He took a step closer and lowered his voice. ‘Apologies about Sam.’

  He talked in a confidential whisper, as if Sam were a secret. All the people who walked past them, every paralegal and every defence lawyer, knew about Sam. There might be a couple of visitors to the Courts of Justice who didn’t know who Francine was, but even they would know Sam. She raised her chin. ‘You asked for the highest possible sentence and the judge agreed. No need to apologize.’

  ‘I didn’t see you in court for the trial.’

  ‘No, I’d taken a couple of days off. Spent some time with my father.’ No need to tell him that she hadn’t planned on coming this time anyway.

  ‘It must be hard for him to see his son in court.’

  ‘There’s been something else. Did you read about the bones in the locker at Centraal station? It turns out those remains were his father. My grandfather. He was a resistance hero. Did you know that?’

  ‘I had no idea.’ He studied his fingernails. ‘You’ve had lots of turmoil in your family this week.’

  She shrugged. ‘Sam’s not turmoil. That’s almost normality.’ She tried not to let her annoyance show that he kept bringing Sam up. Couldn’t they talk about her grandfather without mentioning the bad things? ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you something. You worked with Lotte Meerman, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’ He grinned. ‘Someone must like me. I keep getting the high-profile ones.’

  Francine had to swallow down the thought that her brother was one of them. ‘What’s your opinion of her?’

  He pushed his lip together and spoke carefully, as if she’d asked him for his legal opinion rather than hallway gossip. ‘She’s clearly dedicated. She’d only been released from hospital a couple of days before her testimony.’

  ‘I feel a “but” coming on.’

  ‘No, she performed well. Without her we might have been in trouble. She was perfect. If she’d been really pretty, there might have been other questions about what she’d done to get him to confess, if you see what I mean.’

  Francine thought of the woman she’d met. Not young, early forties. Could do more with her appearance. She needed a better haircut. As it was, the length was just over the shoulders, but it looked like a short cut that had grown out, and it was a pale brown that a quick dye job could easily turn into a more attractive blonde. More colour in her clothes would help. But presentable nonetheless.

  ‘As it was, the defence claimed police brutality against the suspect,’ Michael said. ‘He was injured during the arrest.’

  ‘She broke his cheekbone, didn’t she?’

  ‘Right. If it hadn’t been her . . . I don’t know. The judge might have been swayed by that. She’s a woman, so it was easier to argue that it hadn’t been excessive force. Did you ever meet the other guy in the team? Hans. He’s left now, but he was a man-mountain. If he’d been the one accused of brutality, it would have been much harder for us.’

  Lotte Meerman didn’t strike her as someone with a short fuse. She’d been calm when Francine had met her by herself. Even when she had tried to put pressure on, the detective across the table had stuck to the rules. No flashes of anger. If she had been like that on the stand too, the judge would absolutely have bought the argument that the violence had been out of necessity. It did make Francine wonder what the guy had actually done. Resisted arrest probably. How much force would you need to break a cheekbone?

  ‘But she was very gaunt and looked as if a small push would make her tumble over.’

  ‘Really? That surprises me.’ There was something about Lotte that screamed determination. The long strides when she’d walked away when she got that phone call, for example. ‘Must have been the surgery. She doesn’t seem fragile at all now.’

  ‘She was very skinny then and on a lot of meds. I had to keep my questioning brief, but that worked well.’

  ‘So she’s competent.’

  ‘Oh, absolutely. She was word-perfect on the stand. Very diligent in her work, too. You should have seen the files.’

  ‘But there have been rumours about irregularities.’

  ‘Those were just rumours.’ He smiled again. ‘Maybe people were just jealous, I don’t know. There were some colleagues who thought . . .’ he straightened the black gown with a self-conscious gesture, ‘who might have thought they should have been prosecuting this case instead. There was that thing with her father, of course, but nothing serious.’

  ‘Thomas Jansen isn’t a fan.’

  ‘I talked to Thomas and for a while I was worried there was going to be a problem, but I was wrong, thankfully.’

  ‘What kind of problem?’

  ‘There was some talk of suspension and that would have looked bad. And Thomas . . .’ He scratched his head under the small prosecutor’s wig. ‘Every time he came to see me, I worried that he was going to tell me something I didn’t want to hear.’

  ‘Did you ask?’

  ‘No, I didn’t ask any questions and neither did anybody else.’ Michael grinned. ‘I think there was just some bad blood between the two of them.’

  ‘Thanks, Michael, this has been useful.’

  ‘Francine, I just want to say that I am really sorry about Sam.’ He put out a hand and rested it on her shoulder.

  ‘Don’t be. Seriously.’ Somehow sympathy was the worst thing to deal with. Maybe her husband was right. Maybe it was time her colleagues heard about her grandfather instead of her brother.

  Chapter Eighteen

  As soon as I put my key in the door, Pippi greeted me noisily. It had been some time since anyone had been pleased to see me come home. She rubbed her body against my legs all the way on my walk to the kitchen. I put some food in her bowl. I opened the door to the spare bedroom carefully. My mother was asleep. I placed the bag with her clothes as quietly as I could into a corner of the room. The rhythm of her breathing through her mouth, which was slack and slightly open, didn’t change. I put her toiletries in the bathroom.

  I had my dinner, a cheese sandwich and an apple, and read the section about failing health in Surviving Your Elderly Parents again. This time I paid attention, especially with the pages about losing balance and osteoporosis. Pippi jumped on my lap, nestled against me and purred, so I ended up reading for longer than I normally would. Only when I’d finished the section did I put her on the floor. I went into my study and looked at the drawing I’d made of the case so far. Pippi joined me and sat under the table.

  Frank Stapel’s name was still in the middle of my drawing, and I wasn’t going to supplant him with Francine’s grandfather. I wrote Dutte in pencil above the box with the word skeleton in it. Pippi whimpered softly with the start of a meow that she couldn’t be bothered to finish, and I bent down to give her a little rub behind her ear, just at that really soft spot. She bumped her head into my hand for more stroking, which I did for five minutes, until she decided she’d had enough and ambled back to a spot closer to the door frame.

  Frank Stapel never worked at a site when they were preparing the ground. He was a painter and decorator, brought in long after any digging had been finished. We knew the skeleton had been buried, so maybe someone else had unearthed it and stored it somewhere – perhaps in a cupboard – or left it lying around to be dealt with later. Alternatively, one of the property developers could have paid Frank to dispose of it. I drew two boxes, one for Mark Visser and one for Kars and Tony van Wiel. I added two straight lines to the box with Frank Stapel’s name, to show tha
t he’d worked for both men. I noticed I’d made the line from Mark’s name lighter than the one from the Van Wiels. Was it because I found it hard to believe that he was caught up in this? Because I owed him something for abandoning him that day when we were kids? And now he wanted me to see his mother.

  The day I had first seen her was when she had come to our school. We had been reading from Pim, Frits en Ida. I was bored; I’d already read the whole book three weeks ago, after I’d got it from the library. It was much better to read by myself anyway. Outside in the playground, a blackbird was hopping from paving stone to paving stone. Agnes wasn’t in today; the chair across from me in our group of four was empty. She had been ill for a few days last week as well. My mum had said that measles was doing the rounds and she thought I might get it soon. I would have liked to have measles. Then I wouldn’t have to go to school and could lie in bed and read my book all day. I didn’t like school but I liked Agnes, and if she gave me the measles, I’d be happy.

  If I had measles, Mum would stay home from work to look after me.

  The classroom door opened and a woman walked in. I hadn’t seen her before and I liked her dress. It had large flowers on it and was tucked in with a wide red belt around her waist. Her face was crumpled up the way Piet’s had been when he was reading. He had stopped when the door opened and returned to normal. The woman walked to the front and spoke to Teacher. They talked softly and I couldn’t hear them. Teacher’s eyes went to the empty seat opposite me.

  ‘Everybody,’ he said, ‘this is Agnes’s mother. Has anybody seen Agnes today? Anybody? Lotte, Patrick, Piet?’ He looked at me and the two others who were in our group of four desks.

  I shook my head. ‘Doesn’t she have measles?’ I asked.

  Agnes’s mother said, ‘No, she’s fine. She went to school this morning but didn’t come home for lunch.’

  ‘She hasn’t been here,’ Teacher said to Agnes’s mother. ‘We should call the police.’

  That got my attention. Maybe my father would come to Amsterdam, if there was really important police work to do. He told me that policemen from different towns sometimes came together to work on big cases. That was why he once had to go away for a week. Agnes was my friend, and if my father had to work here, he might have a little bit of time to see me. If he knew I was in the same class as the missing girl, he might even interview me. If I had some information, I could call him to tell him. Then I wouldn’t be bothering him, wasting his time, my mum called it; I would be helping the police.

  How had I gone from being a child helping the police to now actually being the police? It seemed as if there hadn’t been enough years in between. I drew circles and oblongs on a piece of scrap paper that I had lying in my study. The oblongs resembled bin bags. Bodies. Maybe Forensics would be able to tell me how long the body had been in that bag. Hadn’t Edgar Ling mentioned that he’d found pollen in the soil sample he’d taken from the skull? Pollen didn’t last for ever in a bin bag.

  I looked at the box with Francine’s grandfather’s name. Was he important? Or was he just a pile of bones? Frank Stapel had put the bin bag in the locker. We knew that because his fingerprints had been all over the bag, as well as the locker, along with Tessa’s from when she got the bin bag out. Frank had taken the ticket and put it in the inside pocket of his leather jacket. He went straight to work; he wouldn’t have had time to go home. He worked late because he hadn’t been on site that morning, and then, when everybody else had gone, he had his accident.

  But the leather jacket somehow got back to their flat and Tessa found the ticket in the pocket three days later. That was odd. I wrote leather jacket below Frank’s name and drew a circle around the word. I should talk to Tessa tomorrow.

  I went to bed. In the night, I heard my mother rummaging around, heard her footsteps going from her bedroom to the bathroom. I listened to the sounds she made, listened to her brushing her teeth and gargling with mouthwash. I listened out for her steps returning to her room, the two of us only separated by one thin wall.

  I thought I could hear my mother’s breathing through that wall, and imagined her listening out for mine.

  Chapter Nineteen

  There was a noise in my flat. Someone was moving round. I listened to the sounds more closely. Something clattered on the floor of the bathroom. My mother was probably rearranging things, and had dropped them as she moved my toiletries to make way for hers. It didn’t sound as if anything had broken. The bright red numbers on the alarm clock by the side of my bed read 7.03 a.m. It was time to get up anyway. The sound of teeth being brushed came from the bathroom. Running water. Gargling. Then a sound like heavy rain, water falling into water from a height. I hated the picture it created in my mind.

  I pushed Pippi from my stomach and got out of bed. She meowed and followed my every movement with her big green eyes, as if she wanted to make sure that this human would continue to take care of her and not stick her in a pet carrier. I told her I would be there for her, then fed her and made a cup of tea. The bathroom door clicked, the door to my mother’s room opened and closed. A cupboard was being pulled open. Stumbling behind the door.

  Even as I made breakfast I kept listening out for her. She would call for my aid soon. I would have to help her and be tied to the flat all day. Ingrid and Thomas would have to do without me on the investigation. They would prefer that anyway. Could I get moved to another team while I was absent? I drank my tea too quickly and the hot liquid burnt away some of my anxiety along with the roof of my mouth.

  My mother came in, fully dressed, with her arm in a sling. ‘I thought you’d gone to work already. I thought I’d slept so soundly that I hadn’t heard you leave.’

  ‘Do you want me to stay home today?’

  ‘Of course not, don’t be silly.’

  I smiled and offered her a cup of tea.

  ‘You’ve got a cat, I see. I thought you didn’t like cats.’

  ‘I do.’ I bent down to rub Mrs Pippi-puss’s soft head, just in case she’d heard what my mother had said. ‘It’s you that doesn’t.’

  ‘How long have you had this one?’

  ‘She’s not mine.’ I started to prepare my mother’s breakfast. ‘Maybe she will be. That would be nice, wouldn’t it, puss?’ I stroked Pippi’s soft fur. She purred. ‘I don’t think her owners want her any more.’ I’d pop into the bookshop that afternoon to get a book on cats, now that she was staying for longer.

  The canal was like a floating garden. Every houseboat had been planted with a verdant roof terrace, the owners using plants in pots and raised beds to make a green outdoor room, additional space to sit in if the weather allowed. Nobody was sitting outside today; rain was falling steadily. The sofa that was still outside my front door was now completely sodden. I would call the council to make sure it was taken away. Two bicycles had fallen over, their wheels, handlebars and pedals entangled as in a lovers’ embrace. Ahead of me, a woman in a dress that clung soaked to her legs cycled with her dog in the front basket. The white terrier didn’t seem to mind that he was getting wet. His tongue was hanging out of his mouth as if he were drinking straight from the sky.

  After I’d locked my bike, I went up the stairs to our office, newspaper under my arm. ‘Sorry I had to leave yesterday afternoon. I had to look after my mother,’ I said to Thomas.

  ‘Lotte, I talked to the boss,’ Thomas said. ‘He’s concerned about the extra bones.’ He tapped the boxes of files, which had shrunk from a tower to a two-storey building.

  ‘Can I help with those? I can go through some too.’ I dropped the paper on my desk.

  My phone rang. I threw my coat on the hook and dashed to pick up the call.

  ‘I don’t like what I just read about Mark Visser,’ Francine said.

  I sat down and picked up a pencil. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘There are unusual things in his past.’ Her voice was smooth as oil but also persistent, with the fluid power of water forcing through a small gap.

 
‘Unusual?’ I turned my chair round. The coat dripped water on the vinyl floor.

  ‘You knew his sister died?’

  ‘Yes, I knew that,’ I said.

  ‘He found her. His sister,’ Francine said. ‘Did you know that?’

  Her emphasis on the word ‘that’ made me smile. If she was hoping that she knew something about Mark’s sister that I didn’t, she was wrong. ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘You don’t think that’s interesting?’

  ‘I think it’s sad.’

  ‘Okay. So what about the house?’

  ‘Which house?’

  ‘The one where he found her. Where she died. He’s bought it. He’s redeveloping it.’

  My mouth filled with saliva and I couldn’t talk.

  ‘See, that’s not normal,’ Francine said after a few seconds’ silence. ‘Even you think that’s not normal.’

  I swallowed. ‘Thanks, Francine.’ I put the phone down and stared past Ingrid’s empty seat out of the window.

  Mark had bought the house. The first time I’d really talked to him had been in the park as he was walking to school.

  ‘What do you want?’ he’d said.

  ‘I’m investigating—’

  ‘That’s the police’s job. You’re just a nosy girl with no friends and nothing better to do.’ He walked faster.