‘Can you give me their names?’
Peter lay back against the pillow with his eyes closed. He seemed to find it hard to breathe even with the mask. I looked around for the doctor.
‘What’s the point?’ Caroline said. ‘He told you who did this.’
‘We’ll still have to check the details. If one of your colleagues can confirm the time you left and the bar you were in, that would be a big help.’
‘Just arrest Erol. Before he leaves the country.’
The doctor came back into the room. ‘Please leave for now. The patient needs to rest.’
‘Sure.’ I left and waited in the hallway until the doctor came out. ‘What’s his prognosis?’
‘He’s got a shattered cheekbone and a broken nose. Probably concussion from the fall. Also a couple of broken ribs.’
‘He’s on oxygen?’
‘Yes, bruised lungs.’
‘He says he only remembers a single punch. This wasn’t a single punch, was it?’
‘No, definitely not. From the bruising around his torso, I would guess he was kicked when he was on the ground.’
That was what it had looked like to me as well. Maybe the first blow had knocked him out and he hadn’t been aware of the rest of the assault. The punches and kicks could indicate that there’d been more than one person. Had Erol Yilmaz brought some cousins to rough Peter de Waal up? It wouldn’t be the first time that a group of Turkish men with a grudge had attacked someone.
‘If you have more questions, come back this afternoon,’ the doctor said. Without waiting for an answer, he strode off.
Ingrid joined me. ‘I’ve got the address,’ she said. ‘Let’s have a chat with Erol Yilmaz.’
We were going through the revolving doors of the hospital when the sound of engines destroyed what had been a peaceful lull. I expected ambulances, but over Ingrid’s shoulder I saw a large car pull up, followed by a van, stopping on the edge of the hospital car park. The emblem of the main Dutch TV channel was printed on the side of the van.
‘Ah shit,’ I said. ‘What are they doing here?’
The car doors opened and Commissaris Smits got out. Our new chief of police was the youngest we’d had in a long time. Modern, we’d been told in the initial introduction. He didn’t look our way, but turned towards a woman, who handed him a hat to complete his uniform. She positioned it carefully and straightened it out.
‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ I said. ‘Why’s he here?’ ‘Modern’ clearly meant talking to the press a lot.
‘Isn’t that obvious?’ Ingrid said. ‘He looks good on the screen. It’s that strong jawline.’
I shot her a glance. ‘Please tell me you’re joking.’
She winked. ‘It’s what my mum said when she saw him on TV when he first got the job.’
We could have walked to the car and driven off. Instead we watched the preparations for the interview. The van spat out the camera crew. I recognised the interviewer: Monique Blom had been on the NOS Journaal last night, asking the Minister for Economic Affairs about rising unemployment numbers. This whole media circus seemed over the top and inconsiderate.
They set up about thirty metres away from where we stood, ignoring us completely. They probably didn’t know we were police detectives; they must have assumed we were visiting sick relatives. The crew finally seemed happy with how the interviewer and the commissaris were positioned and gave them a nod.
‘We’re outside the hospital where the victim is recovering,’ Monique Blom said. ‘I’m here with Commissaris Smits to ask him for his comments. Thanks for your time, Commissaris.’ The wind messed with her perfect hair, but it also blew her words in our direction.
‘My pleasure.’ The commissaris’s dark hair was better protected by the cap that was part of his uniform.
I suddenly realised why they were here. A TV crew was the last thing we needed.
‘This is a disaster,’ I muttered.
‘It’ll help us get witnesses,’ Ingrid said.
I threw her a glance. The publicity would only get her extra headaches, because it would increase the pressure on the team to get results. It wasn’t worth it for the small chance that seeing the coverage on TV would shame someone into coming forward. None of the tourists who had been here last night would watch the Dutch news anyway.
‘But still, doing an interview here? Now?’ I shook my head. ‘That’s quick. Peter de Waal has only just regained consciousness.’ Maybe ‘modern’ meant enjoying the attention. To my eyes, Smits looked more like a youthful politician than a chief of police.
‘He likes doing all these interviews,’ Ingrid said.
The scarf around the commissaris’s neck was the same blue as the band around his cap. The flame, the symbol of the Dutch police force, was clearly visible on the front of the hat. I thought he was brave to wear it, as the wind could easily grab the peak of it and blow it from his head, and the resultant clip would be on the internet in seconds.
‘We’ve increased the number of police officers dealing with this current series of assaults,’ he was telling the interviewer.
I exchanged a look with Ingrid. If only he had increased the size of the team, she wouldn’t have had to call me this morning in a panic to help her out.
‘We’re doing everything we can to stop these gangs from terrorising people in the area,’ he continued. ‘That’s our number one priority at the moment.’
‘Seriously,’ Ingrid muttered, and shook her head.
I didn’t like the emotive language he was using. Words like ‘gangs’ and ‘terrorising’ should be kept for when we actually knew what was going on with these violent muggings. The attack on Peter de Waal sounded as if it had been entirely personal.
‘These are deeply worrying incidents,’ Monique Blom said, seemingly revelling in the sensationalism. ‘What’s your advice for people?’
‘We’re asking everyone to be extremely vigilant and contact us if they witness anything. As I said, we’ve got additional manpower on this case, including one of our most decorated detectives.’ Suddenly the commissaris’s eyes swung my way. I’d had no idea he actually knew who I was. The cameras followed his line of vision. I quickly turned my back on them to stop my face from plastering the screens again. My previous cases had brought me more recognition than I’d ever wanted, and I hated being singled out.
‘Additional manpower’, he’d said, only to make himself look good. I wondered if he even knew who was actually working on the cases. Ingrid must be pissed off about this.
I stood in silence with my back turned until the interview had finished. Then I had a look to see what was going on. Once the cameras had stopped rolling, Commissaris Smits had a pleasant chat with Monique Blom. They seemed to know each other well enough. He shook her hand and went back to his car. As he opened the door, he looked over his shoulder in my direction and gave me a nod.
I was still puzzling over that as Ingrid drove us to Erol Yilmaz’s house.
The man who opened the door was smiling, but as soon as he saw us, the smile disappeared and was replaced by a frown so deep that it made his eyebrows meet in the middle. He had been expecting someone, but it wasn’t us. He started to push the door shut again, but I put out my hand and stopped it. I normally only got that kind of reaction after I’d identified myself. It seemed that for this man, most strangers who came to his front door were bad news.
Or maybe he’d been expecting the police.
‘Are you Erol Yilmaz?’ I asked.
The sides of his head were shaved and the rest of his dark hair was brushed up and gelled in the centre. His skin was darkened by the emergence of a beard. He was tall and muscular. His biceps bulged from under the sleeves of a black T-shirt.
‘What do you want?’ His voice was aggressive and confrontational. I could imagine him taking out Peter de Waal with a single punch.
‘Detective Lotte Meerman,’ I said, showing my badge to identify myself.
He rubbed the b
ack of his neck. ‘What is it this time?’ He didn’t look like an innocent man.
‘Can we come in? We want to ask you a few questions,’ Ingrid said.
‘Do I have a choice?’ Anybody who looked at him would say: yup, I can imagine that this guy has beaten someone up. I could feel the anger radiating from him.
‘Not really,’ I said.
He sighed and pulled the door open. Ingrid and I followed him down the small hallway, past a rack full of coats. I wondered how many people lived here. The weight of my gun sat comfortably under my jacket. He paused at the end of the hallway as if he was considering where to take us, then led us into a living room.
It was chaos. The floor was covered with an explosion of colourful children’s toys. A blue mouse, a doll, an elephant and three balls sat in a line behind a teddy bear, as if it was a train, with the bear the engine pulling the other toys. In one corner someone had started a building project with Lego. It looked like a small castle, but the roof and one wall were still missing.
Erol stopped in the middle of the room. His fists were balled at his sides, so I couldn’t get a good look at his hands. His body language was so incongruous among the toys that he was like a raven in a meadow full of flowers and butterflies.
The smell of cinnamon and cumin drifted in from the kitchen.
‘Where were you between two and four o’clock this morning?’ I asked.
‘I was at home.’ There is a particular look on a suspect’s face that makes them seem guilty, and Erol’s was a textbook example of it: a mixture of aggression and defensiveness. It implied that whatever he was going to say, we weren’t going to believe it anyway and therefore answering was a complete waste of everybody’s time. ‘I was asleep.’
I looked at the toys. ‘Any witnesses to that?’
‘No, I live by myself.’
The door slowly opened and a small girl waddled into the room, dressed in a miniature pink princess dress. She was a toddler, too young to be the builder of the castle. Dark curls circled her round face. As she wobbled up to Erol, she stared at me with her thumb in her mouth. She collided with his jeans-clad leg and wrapped one arm around him for stability. He stroked the top of her head and finally his hands relaxed. There were no marks on them. No cuts, no bruises.
‘She’s cute, your daughter.’ I smiled at the child and made a little waving gesture at her.
The girl didn’t respond but only sucked her thumb with more concentration.
‘She’s not my daughter.’ His abrupt tone of voice made it clear he didn’t want to talk about the child.
‘Okay.’Whoever she was, she was clearly comfortable with him. My attempt at casual conversation had fallen flat, so I decided to come straight to the point. ‘Peter de Waal was beaten up last night. He said it was you.’
Erol shook his head. ‘It wasn’t me. I was here all night.’
‘Any witnesses?’
‘No, as I said, I was alone.’
‘You divorced two years ago,’ Ingrid said. ‘You’ve been harassing Peter and Caroline de Waal for almost a year now.’
Erol slowly shook his head again but didn’t respond. It seemed more a gesture of exasperation than a denial of what he was hearing.
‘But Caroline de Waal is your ex-wife?’ I said.
‘That’s right.’
‘Did you beat up her husband?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘You’ve made trouble for him and his wife before.’ I kept my tone light, so as not to scare the kid.
‘I stopped that.’
If only this didn’t look so much like the sad aftermath of a mixed-culture marriage gone horribly wrong.
Ingrid made a show of scrolling through a report on her phone. ‘You broke their windows,’ she said. ‘You sent them threatening emails.’
‘I haven’t been near them in over a year,’ Erol said.
‘They took out a restraining order against you.’
Erol shook his head once more. He took hold of the child as she tried to duck further behind his legs and lifted her up to his chest. The little girl squirmed and fought to get her freedom, and he eased her back to the floor. She toddled to the train of animals, grabbed the elephant and sat down in a corner, hugging the toy to her chest.
‘Were you violent towards Caroline?’
‘No. Never.’
‘So what happened?’
‘We got divorced. What does it matter? Stop coming here!’ His voice was suddenly loud.
‘That doesn’t give you the right to threaten her.’
He balled his fists again, then looked over at the child with the elephant and uncurled his fingers with a definite effort. ‘I know that.’ His voice was softer now.
‘So tell us what happened, Erol.’ Ingrid leaned forward. ‘You saw him? You were in the red-light district and you saw Peter and hit him?’
The door opened again and a second child – a boy – walked into the room. He had to be eight or nine years old. The Lego castle’s architect.
Erol turned to face him. ‘Didn’t I tell you to stay in your room when there are visitors?’
‘I need to go to the toilet.’
‘Okay, but be quick about it.’
The boy rushed down the corridor. As soon as he was out of sight, Erol took a couple of deep breaths and pulled a hand through his hair. He looked down at the floor in front of him. The boy’s interruption must have made him realise that being aggressive was counterproductive when trying to prove you hadn’t beaten someone up in a flare of red mist.
Ingrid continued with her questions. ‘Are you involved in any gang-related activities?’
‘No. I work in IT for an insurance company.’ The answer was soft, as if he had to say the words but didn’t expect us to believe them.
And he would be right. What he said didn’t make me think he hadn’t done it, but I could see that his hands didn’t have any cuts on them. Peter de Waal had said he’d been punched, and I would have expected some marks on the knuckles of the guy who’d done it. When your hands connect with someone’s bones, they normally don’t come away unscathed. I couldn’t see a single scrape or bruise on Erol’s hands.
‘Is there somebody who can vouch for where you were last night?’ I looked at the girl in the corner. ‘Like the children’s mother?’
‘As I said, they’re not my kids. They’re my sister’s. She’ll come and pick them up soon.’
He’d probably been expecting his sister when he’d opened the door and was faced with us instead.
We could have done with some witnesses. Not everybody would be willing to admit they’d been in the red-light district and had seen an assault, even though the place where it had happened featured more bars than brothels. Even under normal circumstances it was hard, because people liked to keep their heads down.
‘You can check my car, my mobile phone. I was at home from about seven last night. I took a day off to help my sister out.’
He could have walked or cycled, and he could have left his phone at home. Neither of those things proved anything. Still, there was nothing that proved he’d done it either. Until there was a witness, it was one man’s word against another’s, and Erol’s unscathed hands made me inclined to believe him. For now at least.
‘Thanks for your time,’ I said. ‘We might come back with some more questions.’
‘I’m sure you will.’
As we left, the boy came out of the bathroom as if he had been waiting there until we were gone. ‘Who were they?’ I heard the high-pitched young voice say.
‘It’s okay,’ his uncle answered. ‘They just had some things they needed to ask.’ For the first time since we’d arrived, he sounded calm and natural.
Ingrid and I walked back to her car.
‘What do you think?’ she said. ‘Did you notice his hands? He must have worn gloves.’
‘Or maybe he didn’t do it.’ I was glad I’d gone with Ingrid this morning, instead of talking to the crazy man.
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Chapter 3
I missed Ingrid in our team, but there was one good thing about her having left: I finally had my long-wished-for seat by the window. It meant that I could observe the seasonal thick clouds outside with renewed clarity. Our office had four L-shaped desks in it, pushed together to form a plus sign. When you only have two people in a space that was originally meant for four, those two people automatically get to sit by the window.
‘You know this is entirely your fault, don’t you?’ my colleague Thomas Jansen said, pulling me out of my thoughts. He had the desk opposite mine. He always wore a blue shirt because he thought it brought out the colour of his eyes. He also had a year-round tan. He was vain like that.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ I looked studiously at the clouds, then turned to throw him my best innocent look. We’d worked together for long enough that we knew each other very well, and I knew he wasn’t buying it. But I hadn’t put in a good word with the chief inspector, whatever Thomas might believe. I was going to see how it worked out, and deny any responsibility if it all went horribly wrong.
‘I’m going to watch him closely, and as soon as he messes up, he can go straight back to traffic police.’
‘It will be fine. He’ll be fine.’
‘I was talking to one of his colleagues, and the guy really isn’t very smart.’
I was going to defend him, but then I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. Charlie Schippers was standing in the doorway with his box of stuff.
‘Where do you guys want me?’ he said.
When I’d worked with him before, he had reminded me of an overexcited spaniel who could never stay still. Now he stood there with a fixed smile on his face that told me he had heard at least part of what we’d been talking about. However smart he might or might not be, there was no way he didn’t know he’d been the topic of our conversation. He was about ten years younger than Thomas, and I wondered if part of the other man’s animosity came from nothing more than jealousy.
‘Sit there.’ I pointed to the desk diagonally opposite mine. ‘Next to Thomas.’The one next to me was my old desk. I’d always hated sitting there, with my back towards the door, and I didn’t want Charlie to have to deal with that.
A Death at the Hotel Mondrian (Lotte Meerman Book 5) Page 2