A Cold Case in Amsterdam Central

by Anja de Jager

  ‘Your father was very young at the time,’ Lotte said. ‘He was what? Seven years old?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It was a very confusing time. All I’m saying is that seven-year-old boys, they might want to tell stories that are more interesting than what happened in reality.’

  ‘No.’ Francine shook her head. ‘There’s no way. It all happened.’

  ‘Do you have your grandmother’s death certificate?’

  Francine laughed, even though it seemed to grate in her throat. ‘Are you insane? As if the concentration camps handed out nice bits of paper for the people they killed.’

  Lotte nodded. ‘I understand. However, if your father says anything when you see him next, can you let me know? The person who mentioned it to me, let’s just say that I have reason to believe he knows what he’s talking about.’

  ‘Another war hero? Everybody is one these days.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Lotte gave the word a meaning that Francine really didn’t like.

  She wished she had talked to her father before doing all those interviews. Her life had this amazing ability to blow up in her face. Why did the story feel unreal to her all of a sudden, like something made up? She hadn’t told her father she was doing these interviews. That felt like a mistake suddenly. Francine felt how the smile around her mouth had turned into a rictus grin. As she walked out of the police station, she was happy that the sunshine forced her to hide her eyes behind her large sunglasses. She had to see her dad. Tomorrow. She would do it tomorrow.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  When I came back from the meeting with Francine, wondering if I’d made even more of an enemy of the woman, our office was empty. I’d missed the CI’s briefing and now I wasn’t entirely sure what everybody was working on. That I hadn’t needed to be there was a clear enough message: all the focus was going to be on Dollander, and Frank Stapel was only of minor importance now. How could they not see that it was Frank’s death that was the key to unlocking this puzzle?

  ‘Hi, Lotte, are you the only one left here?’ Edgar Ling sounded amused.

  ‘It appears so. What’s up? Have a seat.’ Keep me company, I thought, but didn’t say.

  ‘Did Thomas tell you? About the phone call?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I pulled my hair back from my face. It really needed a cut. ‘I just met with Francine.’

  Edgar frowned, which looked odd because of his lack of eyebrows. ‘Francine? No, the guy from the glass panel manufacturer. The ones that were installed on the roof terrace where Frank Stapel died.’

  I blinked and shook my head. ‘What guy? No, he didn’t tell me about that.’

  ‘This guy called because of the bad publicity. Of course it’s been all over the papers that those panels fell after him.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘The make of the panels was named and now they’ve had a few orders cancelled. He claims those panels should never have fallen down just because someone leant against them.’

  ‘Perfect. This is just what we need.’ Those panels had been bothering me from the beginning. Now we might finally get some answers. I pulled my notepad from my handbag.

  ‘Funny, that,’ Edgar said. ‘Thomas said the same words but in a very different tone of voice.’

  I laughed. ‘I can just imagine. No, all Thomas cares about now is Dollander, and I can’t blame him for that. I think he’s pretty much got every police officer in Amsterdam and the surroundings helping him out. Do you mind liaising with this panel guy? Maybe take him to the site where Frank died? If there’s anything wrong with those panels, that would be worth knowing.’

  ‘Sure, I can do that.’

  ‘So, Dollander. How do you think his arm got mixed up with the other skeleton? And just his arm?’

  ‘The simplest explanation is this.’ Edgar got a piece of paper out and made a quick drawing of two stick men lying side by side. ‘We found the main bones of Dollander’s right arm. If he was buried on his back, then he was on the left of Francine Dutte’s grandfather. Maybe his hand was on his stomach.’

  ‘And someone picked up those bones by mistake? They wouldn’t have noticed the rest of the skeleton?’

  Edgar sucked his lower lip between his teeth in thought. ‘Well, bones do move during decomposition. As flesh and ligaments disappear, the skeleton shifts.’ He redrew his leftmost stick man and put the arm into a triangle shape. ‘These bones move here.’ He added two arrows to show that they’d shifted towards his other stick man. ‘The hand stays behind and those bones fall into what used to be the stomach cavity.’

  ‘Makes sense,’ I said.

  When Edgar had left, I stuck his stick men to the whiteboard. Ingrid came into the office and threw her handbag on her desk. ‘What did I tell you?’ she said. ‘I’m working with you. We were all in a briefing with the CI while you were away.’

  ‘I was talking to Francine Dutte,’ I said.

  Ingrid shrugged. ‘I looked at those files on Mark Visser’s sister. I found something interesting.’

  ‘What’s that?’ My voice had been sharper than I’d intended.

  Ingrid looked at me with a frown.

  I rubbed my face with my hand. ‘Okay, tell me.’

  ‘You’re not in the files. You don’t get a single mention. There was this, though.’ She held out a notebook. ‘It’s Mark Visser’s.’

  ‘Give me that.’ I wondered why I’d never looked at it. It was mine, of course, not Mark’s. The evidence of my first failure. Mark had figured out what I had missed. He’d come over to our flat to tell me. I could have rescued Agnes. The first time I’d rung the doorbell at Parkstraat 12, she’d still been alive.

  ‘They dug up the entire garden. They took down the shed, cut down the tree.’

  ‘No, that’s not right. The tree is still there.’

  ‘No it isn’t.’ She took a photo from one of the files and handed it to me.

  It was of the garden as I remembered it. From before the digging, before the destruction. The garden still intact. The shed still there.

  ‘They thought,’ Ingrid said, ‘well, that there could be more children, more girls, so they dug it all up.’ She handed me a second photo.

  They hadn’t just taken down the shed. They’d been thorough. The garden had been turned into a barren patch of earth. Not a single plant had been left standing. Even the tree had gone. Only the wall at the back and the shape of the fences between the houses showed that it was the garden we had been in a couple of days ago.

  ‘Who replanted the garden?’

  ‘It’s been more than thirty years, Lotte.’

  ‘Thirty-five,’ I said automatically. ‘We need to start this from scratch. We never looked at it as a murder investigation. We wrote it off too quickly as an accident, so we never even did the basics.’

  ‘You mean Frank Stapel’s death? You want to redo it as a murder investigation?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘Humour me. Think of our questioning as a sledgehammer to take a wall down.’

  She closed her eyes and shook her head but didn’t argue when I suggested we meet with Tessa Stapel again to check her alibi.

  ‘Tell me about the day Frank died,’ I said. Tessa’s flat was a lot tidier than it had been last week.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ she said.

  ‘Where were you that afternoon, that evening?’

  ‘I worked late. I was at work until about nine p.m. and—’

  ‘Is there someone who can confirm that?’ Ingrid interrupted. She had reluctantly come along, telling me on the way over what Thomas was working on and how talking to Tessa would be a waste of time.

  ‘Yes, my boss.’ Tessa gave the man’s name. ‘I’d been home for about ten minutes when you and that other guy arrived.’

  ‘Tessa, what was going on between Frank and Kars van Wiel? Was there any trouble?’

  ‘Well, there are a lot of foreigners on the site. Eastern Europeans. Polish, Bulg
arian. Frank didn’t have anything against them, don’t get me wrong, but they don’t speak any Dutch. And Frank thought that maybe it was dangerous. Couple of months ago, there was almost an accident.’

  ‘So were you on a late shift? Were you at home in the morning?’ I said.

  ‘No, we were doing month-end work and I was working overtime.’

  ‘Did Frank leave the flat before you?’

  Tessa pulled her eyebrows together. ‘No, I left first.’ She was dressed in the same jumper she’d worn at Centraal station. She pulled the too-long sleeves over her hands and made her fingers disappear. Her face was pale and gaunt, as if her skin had been stretched too tightly over her cheekbones.

  ‘Frank was still in bed when you left?’ I asked. I hoped my voice was encouraging her to think.

  Tessa started to cry. ‘He made me breakfast. It was the last time I saw him alive.’

  ‘Do you know what he had planned for the morning?’

  ‘Go to work?’

  ‘But not at the building site. Was he working for anybody else?’

  ‘No, just the two of them. But they were always getting him to do stuff. Their house, a bedroom here, a bathroom there, their kids’ houses, their parents’ houses. He worked hard, did a good job. It was cash in hand.’ She stopped. ‘I shouldn’t tell you this, should I?’

  ‘It’s okay. I’m not looking to do anybody for tax evasion. His colleagues must know more than they’re saying. They’ve been paid cash. They’re reluctant to say where they worked. I get it. But I don’t care if none of it was declared to the taxman. I want to know where Frank could have found the skeleton.’

  ‘He didn’t tell me all the addresses. But someone at the funeral said something about a house they’re working on that was . . . What word did he use? Creepy, I think.’

  I might have thought that was the house where Mark’s sister had died, only we now knew it couldn’t have been. ‘But you don’t know the address?’ I asked.

  ‘No. Sorry.’ Tessa chewed her thumb. The nails on her other hand were bitten to the quick.

  Ingrid and I drove back to the office through beautiful spring weather. The wind had blown three different seasons across the sky in half an hour. The sun warmed the tulips that were out in people’s front gardens. The daffodils planted on the roundabout were already past their best, their yellow trumpets drooping as if silenced.

  ‘She’s lying,’ Ingrid said.

  We overtook a kid on a scooter, his helmet hanging from his handlebars and pushing a girl on a bicycle, his foot on the luggage carrier of her bike. They were only a few years younger than Tessa, but carefree, school kids, not a widow with a job and bills to pay. Widows were women my mother’s age.

  Tessa’s smile came to mind. I thought of the way she had run across the grass outside her flat to talk to me at the tram stop. She had called me from the station. She could have called Thomas, but she’d called me. She trusted me.

  ‘Did we check the ticket for fingerprints?’ Ingrid said.

  ‘Yes, only mine and Tessa’s were clear. Otherwise there were partials, but they couldn’t lift any other full prints.’

  ‘So Tessa, then,’ Ingrid said. ‘She had the ticket.’

  I remembered Tessa’s cries when she’d opened that bin bag, and how small she’d looked when she’d asked me to investigate her husband’s death properly. ‘There were partials,’ I repeated, ‘so other hands touched it before Tessa’s. Plus she can’t have been on the terrace, because she’s got an alibi.’

  ‘For the time of his death. But what about earlier? She could have met with him any time in the afternoon. We’d better check that and her alibi.’

  ‘Didn’t you see what the girl looked like? Her husband just died, for God’s sake. If you had seen how she looked when she opened that bin bag . . .’

  ‘No need to shout. I know you like her.’

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with liking her. She was truly upset.’

  ‘Good actress?’

  I swallowed the angry retort and ground my teeth together so that I wouldn’t react. When you were accused of defending someone, every angry response was seen as proof that you felt you were in the wrong. Ingrid had said she wanted to learn from me. It hadn’t taken her long to start doubting me.

  We drove back to the office in silence. It gave me time to think and to figure out how the jacket had got back to Tessa’s flat. As soon as I’d hung up my coat in the office, I grabbed a blue marker pen to write on the whiteboard. ‘There was someone with Frank Stapel on the roof terrace,’ I said. ‘There must have been.’ I wrote names down: Frank’s brother Eelke, Mark Visser, Kars van Wiel. ‘Someone gave that jacket with the ticket in it back to Tessa.’

  ‘Tessa was probably in cahoots with that person,’ Ingrid said, ‘and stirred up trouble at the station so you’d turn up and witness her retrieving the bin bag. She argued with the guard and called you.’ She drew an arrow that linked Tessa and Frank. ‘She knew what he had planned.’

  ‘You weren’t there.’ Someone walked past the open door to our office and turned his head. I was talking too loudly. I pushed my chair back and rushed to the canteen.

  I sat in my favourite seat, drinking coffee in silence, and sent Edgar Ling a text to ask him to join me when he came back from his investigation on the roof terrace. He turned up half an hour later.

  ‘How did things go with the glass-panel manufacturer?’ I said.

  ‘We went to the terrace, as you suggested. The guy was mortified: it seemed they’d installed those panels all wrong. Upside down. That meant,’ he took out a notepad, ‘that where there should have been a ridge to hold them together, now they slid out of the groove.’ He looked at me. ‘The bevelled edge that should have been at the top of the panels was at the bottom. The panels pivoted and Frank Stapel fell through the gap. There were a lot of foreigners there. Nobody spoke any Dutch. If they misunderstood the instructions . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe this was just an accident.’

  That was what Robbert Kloos had said the other day when he angrily chucked his Gatorade bottle against the newly plastered wall. Tessa had mentioned a previous incident. So we’d found Dollander’s bones due to something that could have been an accident?

  * * *

  It was late when I finally went home. From outside the building I could see that the lights were on behind the windows of the top floor. I hadn’t asked my mother when she was going back to her own flat. The doctor said it would take six weeks for the broken bone to heal but she could probably leave sooner if she wanted to. I could help her with the shopping and the washing. I locked up the bike in the storage area under the stairs and went up.

  When I got close to my front door, I heard voices. I froze with my keys in my hand. I tried to breathe without making a sound. My heart was pumping fast, partially from walking up the stairs but partially from the concern of who might be behind that door. I covered my eyes with my hand and rested my forehead carefully on the door. My mother was talking. I couldn’t make out the words. I crouched. I pressed my ear against the keyhole. A man’s voice, no more than a deep rumble. I stood up. My mother had visitors in my flat. The idea that it could be my ex-husband Arjen and his new family made me turn and flee down both flights of stairs to the communal hallway.

  Standing on the black and white tiled floor, underneath the chandelier, I wondered where I could go. Back to work? I didn’t want to. It was my flat. Why was I standing here with nowhere to go while she was entertaining people in my home? I dashed back up the stairs, taking them two at a time, and put the key in the lock. I uncurled and extended my fingers. I’d been holding the keys so tightly that a locksmith could have made a spare from the imprint in my palm. I turned the key and pushed the door open before I could change my mind. There was no sound of another woman and also no sound of a child. My breathing became easier. My mother wasn’t babysitting, then.

  ‘There you are,’ my mother said. ‘We’ve been waiting for you.’

 
; Opposite her was the owner of the man’s voice. Mark Visser.

  ‘Why are you here?’ I said.

  ‘I wanted to thank you for visiting my mother,’ he said. ‘It meant a lot to her.’

  I liked that he’d made up an excuse to see me again, but had he been in my study? Had he seen my drawing? He didn’t know about Dollander. Nobody did apart from our team, the CI and the burgemeester. And of course Francine and wherever she had heard it. Mark didn’t know that there was still a body in the ground that we were desperate to find. I stared into his eyes, noticed his black polo-neck jumper under the charcoal-grey suit, the same one he’d worn when we first interviewed him. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘you’ve thanked me. Now you’d better go.’

  ‘Lotte,’ my mother said. So much disappointment in one word.

  ‘You need to leave now.’

  ‘I made tea,’ my mother said.

  Mark stared at me. His eyebrows pulled together in a frown. He put both hands flat on the table and got up slowly. ‘You think I have something to do with—’

  ‘I don’t think anything,’ I said quickly, because I wanted to say that I was worried that he could have.

  He shook my mother’s hand, said it had been nice to meet her again after all these years. He said he’d see himself out, but I followed him down the stairs.

  He stopped under the chandelier and stood where I’d paused earlier. I tipped my head back to look at him.

  ‘How can you possibly think I’m involved in this?’ he said. ‘You’ve known me for so long.’

  I shook my head. ‘I knew you when we were kids. I haven’t talked to you for thirty-five years. I don’t know you.’

  ‘I don’t understand why you’re so angry.’

  ‘I’m not angry.’

  ‘Why did you just throw me out of your flat, then?’

  ‘We’re still investigating . . .’

  He frowned again. ‘I thought Frank’s death was an accident. I thought you’d identified the skeleton.’

  I thought of Dollander. ‘We haven’t concluded the investigation. That’s all I can say.’

  ‘Two of your colleagues came to see me today. They were asking about Tim Dollander.’