A Cold Case in Amsterdam Central

by Anja de Jager

  ‘Christiaan, your husband, will he be joining you later?’ Ella smiled. It was a hopeful smile. As if seeing her husband would be a good thing.

  ‘No, he’s at work today.’

  ‘That’s a shame.’

  Did the girl think she’d dressed up for nothing? Styled her long blonde hair straight for nothing? What was there behind her smile? Was that pity Francine was seeing? Ella reminded her of someone. She pushed that thought to the back of her mind. ‘Why a shame?’ Her voice was sharp.

  ‘Just thought it might be nice to get some photographs of the two of you together. The power couple, so to speak.’

  Prosecutor Francine Dutte and her successful husband, the PR guru Christiaan Dermezjia, at their elegant house in Amsterdam. ‘No, just me in the photos.’ She was overshadowed by him often enough; he didn’t need to take this away as well. This was her chance to shine, Christiaan had said, her chance to make herself stand out from everybody else in the prosecution department.

  ‘So, your grandfather, he was important to you?’

  Hadn’t they had that question already? Was this girl really that good, or did she just have perfect skin and pert tits? ‘He has always been a role model to me. He was one of the reasons why, after law school, I became a prosecutor. Like my grandfather, I wanted to do the right thing, do something for society.’ Why had she said that? Francine felt slightly sick. She thought she’d opened the door to a question about Sam; something like: if you felt that way, why didn’t your brother? She imagined the pretty girl turning into one of the horde. But this was a journalist who’d been hand-picked by her husband. She forced a smile on to her face. Maybe she should keep talking before Ella could ask that inevitable follow-up question. ‘My grandfather really influenced every choice I made in life. He and my grandmother, who died in a concentration camp. Even though both of them died long before I was born, they’ve had a huge impact on me.’ Shut up, Francine, you’re rambling.

  ‘It must have been a shock how they found his skeleton.’

  ‘Yes, it was a shock, but we never had anything to remember him by. It has been very important to me to find something of him. To at last be able to bury him, have a place to put flowers. Have some closure.’ Francine felt how saccharine the words were on her lips. Her husband had helped her prepare for the interview. You have to give them sound bites, he’d said. He’d even written some of the sentences for her. Such as ‘have closure’ and ‘at last be able to bury him’. Did Ella, the journalist, notice how fake the words were? The feelings were much deeper, much more fundamental than the platitudes made them sound.

  ‘So your grandfather played a big part in the resistance?’

  ‘Yes, he and my grandmother both. That’s why she was arrested. My father told me that wasn’t long after my grandfather disappeared. Someone must have betrayed them.’

  ‘Do you know what they did? What they were involved in?’

  ‘It was mainly the underground newspaper. The printing press was hidden away in the cellar, with whatever food they had left, and came out once a week.’ Francine smiled. ‘My father said he used to listen to the sound it made as he was lying in bed.’

  ‘Tell me what happened to your father.’

  ‘He was only seven when his mother was arrested. He got scared and ran away. He walked north, almost seventy kilometres, until he came to his aunt and uncle’s farm. It took him a whole week.’ Whenever she told the story, she pictured her father as that little boy, wearing socks that came up to his knees and short trousers, with a knitted vest over a buttoned shirt. She had no idea where the image came from. There were no photos of her father from those days, no childhood photos at all, and she had a suspicion that it was actually from a movie or a TV programme that she’d seen as a child. If it seemed like something from the TV to her, was it because it was too perfect a story? ‘His mother had stitched the address inside the waistband of his trousers. She knew that the day would come when they’d come for her. She knew she had to give him at least a chance to get somewhere safe.’ Was it now starting to sound unreal to her as well?

  ‘But she was too late to save herself.’

  ‘My father told me she rehearsed the route with him, the place names that he had to pass. Do you have children?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘She wanted to keep her son with her for as long as she could.’

  ‘It’s a great story. I can see why it was such an inspiration to you. Let’s go back to why finding your grandfather’s remains was so important. After all, you knew he had died, that wasn’t news to you.’

  How could she explain it, how could she tell Ella of the hero worship she had always felt for her grandfather even though she had never met him? How in her mind her grandfather was like one of those characters in the movies: fearless, fighting for his country, doing the right thing. And how that had informed the choices that Francine had made in her own life. After all, she was the granddaughter of a man who’d been in the resistance, a man who hadn’t stood aside when the Germans had invaded the country. ‘My father told me stories about my grandfather. It made me what I am today, trying to live up to his example.’ Was she repeating herself? Keep to the story you want to tell, her husband had said.

  ‘But now you know he was shot. How does that feel?’

  ‘We knew he’d probably died a violent death. He died during the war. It’s as we’d expected. I don’t know, and will probably never know, who killed him: if he was caught at a drop of the underground newspaper, or if he was just rounded up with a group of other people and shot as a reprisal for the death of a German, this we’ll never know. But we have his body. We can bury him.’ She paused at the click of the camera shutter. ‘We never found my grandmother’s body either. As I said, she died in a concentration camp. We’ll never have anything of hers, nothing to remember her by. But now we can at least bury my grandfather. I am truly grateful to the police for finding him. For identifying him. Even though I would have wished he was found somewhere else, in a different way, it’s better than not having found him at all.’

  ‘How did your father react?’

  ‘He’s confused these days. He lives in the past more and more.’ It was the answer Francine and her husband had decided on.

  She didn’t want to tell the journalist about her father’s reaction. As she and Christiaan had discussed, if she just said that her father was muddled and couldn’t remember things very well any more, they wouldn’t try to interview him. If she told the truth, said that her father was upset and angry, they might want to talk to him. She couldn’t let them meet him at the nursing home. He had many more lucid days than she’d admitted to Ella, but she didn’t want journalists or the police anywhere near him: he was an old man and deserved to be left in peace.

  ‘And of course you have your work as a prosecutor. A high-profile role.’

  ‘Yes, that’s my way of doing something for society.’ And this story was going to make her career. She smiled as the camera clicked again and hoped she didn’t look too smug.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Mark was parked two cars in front of us.

  Here, Amsterdam was for living. Not for working or sightseeing. The streets were empty and wide. The houses were squat. They gave a sense of dependability, with their wide bases and low ceilings. They seemed sturdy. Solid. Looking at this house, nobody would have thought a little girl had been murdered here. But all the muscles in my body were tensed. Because I knew. I knew what had happened here thirty-five years ago.

  Mark’s parents had moved out of Amsterdam almost immediately afterwards. At the age of eight, having a friend in another town was like having a long-distance relationship. I had no memories of meeting Mark after that moment when we’d seen his sister’s body. I remembered that I ran. I remembered his mother’s screams. Adults must have turned up at some point. Someone must have called the police. Those things must have happened but I had no memory of them. Looking back at early childhood was like that: a
set of scenes, flashes into a past, not linked together, just horrible moments that shone brightly through the fog of history.

  Mark got out of his car. He walked towards ours. I lowered the window.

  ‘Have you changed your mind?’ he said.

  I shook my head but made no move to get out. For a moment it felt as if we were two children again.

  ‘We can just drive back.’ His eyes were pleading with me. The morning sunlight picked out the hair on his temples, more white than brown. ‘There’s nothing to see here. Can we turn back? Not go inside the house?’

  I wanted to. Every fibre in my body shouted that I should go back. A brick in the middle of my stomach pushed its way towards my mouth. I don’t know what I would have done if Ingrid hadn’t been sitting beside me. ‘You can stay here,’ I told Mark.

  Ingrid depressed the button on the handbrake and pulled it up. It complained with the sound of unwilling metal. ‘As long as your workmen are there to let us in,’ she said.

  ‘They’re not here today.’ He sighed. ‘No, I’ll come.’

  We walked up the path to the front door. It was smaller than I remembered. It had only seemed large compared to the flat we’d lived in. The front door had been dark brown before. Strange I remembered that detail but not so many other things about that day. Now it was painted blue. It was the same colour as the neighbours’. It still smelled of paint. Mark got his keys out, reached past me and opened the door.

  Inside it was bright. The walls were painted bone white. The skirting board was one tint darker. The colour of old ivory. Light was reflected into all corners. The wood of the window frames was painted in a rusty-red primer. There was nowhere to hide. ‘Did Frank Stapel do all the decorating?’ I said.

  ‘Most of it. He’d nearly finished when . . .’ He glanced up to the ceiling and blinked. ‘When he died.’

  I nodded. There was no furniture in the rooms, and with plastic still covering the carpet against any building stains, it looked like a crime scene. Ingrid went up the stairs and I went into the kitchen. Mark followed me. Through the large window above the work surface, I saw that the garden was a forsaken wilderness of hawthorn and waist-high hogweed. There was still one large tree. I forced myself to look at the bottom right-hand corner. The shed was gone. ‘Did you take the shed down?’ Now that Ingrid was out of earshot, I could talk about Agnes.

  Mark joined me but rested against a kitchen cabinet, his back towards the window. ‘The police destroyed it. They were concerned that there were other children. Other girls.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mark. I’m sorry for putting you through this. Please go back to the car.’

  ‘I’ve been avoiding coming here. Maybe this is good.’

  ‘It’s not. It’ll just bring it back.’

  He grimaced. ‘You don’t believe in closure?’

  ‘The more you think about something, the clearer the memory becomes. I’ll dream of her tonight.’

  ‘Will you dream of me?’

  I didn’t respond, even though I knew that in my dream I would feel his hand in mine as I saw his sister’s body. I would see the purple hair ribbon flutter in the wind, stuck at one end of a branch. That tree was still there. I could tell exactly where the purple ribbon had been. Frank could have seen something here.

  In the garden next door, the garden of the house where Mark had lived, two children were playing on a slide. I could hear them through the double glazing. They wore raincoats and wellies. They were laughing. They climbed up to the top of the slide again. Screamed high-pitched screams as they skidded down. A little boy and a slightly bigger girl. Siblings maybe, one or two years apart. The garden looked so much smaller than I’d remembered. At the bottom of the slide the girl waited, whispered something in the boy’s ear, looked over to the fence between their garden and that of the neighbour, the garden at the back of the house I was in. The girl climbed the steps to the top of the slide. Stood there staring over the fence. She looked down at the boy. He shook his head. His hair flew out to the side with the force of his denial. She slid down. Walked to the fence. Stood on tiptoes but still couldn’t see over it. She jumped up and down but didn’t get anywhere near the top. I was rooted to the spot, could only watch the two children. The girl had a couple more goes, looked for something higher to climb. Then a woman’s voice shouted to them that there were biscuits. Treats were more compelling than a look into a forbidden garden. The children went inside and I was released from my trance.

  I could hear Ingrid’s footsteps above my head as she walked around the upstairs rooms. ‘When your sister died,’ I said to Mark, ‘when she disappeared, I had no friends any more. She was my only friend and she went away. I lost her, as I’d lost my father before. Then you became my friend and you left too.’

  He turned to face me. ‘I’m here now,’ he said. ‘I’m not planning on going anywhere.’

  I put my hand on his chest, right on the place where mine felt tight. His heart thumped rapidly.

  He covered my hand with his. I measured the hollows under his cheekbones with my thumb as I’d wanted to do from the first time I’d seen him again. He was so close that I could see his pupils expand in desire until his eyes were more black than blue. When he exhaled, his breath tickled my lips.

  His mouth found mine. I opened my lips and welcomed his tongue. Pleasure ran like electricity over my skin. His fingers mingled with my hair. His thumb ran over the base of my skull. My legs could no longer carry me and I stumbled against him. Desire made me almost forget about dead girls.

  My mobile rang and I pulled a few centimetres back. I shook my head in disbelief, both at the kiss and the interruption. ‘Sorry,’ I said. I was breathing hard. I answered the phone.

  It was Thomas. ‘Where are you guys?’ he said.

  For a minute I’d forgotten I was here with Ingrid. She was upstairs while I was kissing Mark. ‘We’re at Parkstraat 12. With Mark Visser.’ I looked at Mark. His hand covered his mouth. ‘But we’re pretty much done here.’

  There were a few seconds of silence on the other end of the line. I stepped further away from Mark. ‘He’s got nothing to do with it,’ I said to Thomas.

  ‘Like hell he doesn’t,’ Thomas said and disconnected the call.

  I went out into the garden to wait for Ingrid. I knew Mark wouldn’t follow me. He would stay inside and watch me through the window, safe behind the glass.

  Like next door, there was a patch of grass in the middle of the garden. Here there was no slide. The grass reached my knees. I couldn’t see any footsteps other than the ones I’d left behind. Where next door’s borders had been filled with roses and colourful bedding plants, here there were only weeds. They didn’t look new. How long did it take for giant hogweed to get this big? The leaves spread wider than my umbrella. Cow parsley flowered in small parasols. Bindweed was tying other plants together, its white trumpets shouting that there was much further still for it to grow. It also shouted that it had been there for a while. There wasn’t a single spot that wasn’t covered by a plant that looked as if it had been growing for more than a month. These were the weeds I used to fight when I still lived in a house with a garden.

  I’d avoided the back right corner of the garden so far. The same tree was still there. It was big and bushy and its branches dominated a quarter of the garden. Two giant hog-weeds were standing guard. I skirted around them, making sure I didn’t touch their poisonous leaves, and got so close to the tree that I could touch its trunk. Which branch had held the ribbon? In the thirty-five years that had passed, that particular branch must have grown far up, so that it now had a view of the garden next door and could see the children playing on the slide.

  The back door opened. I turned around at the sound of footsteps. I stepped back, wanted to get back on to the grass, out in the open, no longer under the shadow of the tree.

  ‘Nothing upstairs,’ Ingrid said. ‘And there’s been no digging here, has there?’

  ‘No, this all looks pretty well-e
stablished.’

  ‘Coming?’ Ingrid said.

  I nodded and went back indoors.

  Mark was still standing where I’d left him, rooted to the spot, just like the tree. ‘So am I cleared then, Lotte?’ His voice sounded tired. Resigned. As if he knew that if I answered, I’d say that no, he wasn’t.

  ‘My mother said you still hadn’t visited. Could you go and see her?’ He bit his bottom lip. ‘You can check out the story about the house, if you still doubt me.’

  ‘I was going to, but my mother’s had an accident. It’s been rather hectic.’ My excuse sounded feeble even to myself. He’d said she didn’t have much time left and I hadn’t bothered to go round.

  ‘Is she all right?’ Mark said.

  I nodded. ‘Yeah, not too bad. She’s fractured her wrist.’

  ‘Give her my regards.’

  ‘Will do.’

  He followed us out of the house, closed the door behind him and drove off.

  Ingrid and I got back in the car.

  ‘His mother knows you?’ Ingrid said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know him well, then? You avoided the question last time.’

  I didn’t respond. Behind us were the thick clouds that had been hanging threateningly close. They overtook us as we reached the ring road, and the change in visibility together with the falling light levels made it seem that golden sunshine was banned from our capital city these days.

  Ingrid parked the car in the basement garage at the police station. She looked at me. More than ever she reminded me of that high-jumper eyeing up how high the bar was. ‘What’s between you and Mark?’ she said.

  ‘We held hands once. When we were children.’ I wanted to take her mind off what could be between me and Mark. I wanted to take my own mind off it as well. ‘When we found his little sister, Agnes, dead.’