‘Sure.’ He put his things down with some reluctance. It was odd to see him with anything other than the boundless energy he had previously displayed and that had made me think that having him join our team would not be a bad thing. That was what I’d told the chief inspector. It was hardly the glowing review that Thomas thought I’d given the guy.
Only then did I think about how telling Charlie to sit next to Thomas would look to him. As if even his one friend didn’t want him next to her. But to say now that I had changed my mind and that he should sit next to me instead would only draw more attention to it.
It was just like being back at school.
‘That was my old desk, but I never liked sitting there,’ I said instead. It was too obvious. I was trying too hard. He was a grown-up. He could deal with it. ‘Do you want a coffee?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m okay.’And he started to unpack his stuff. I popped down to the canteen to get myself one, just to get out for a bit.
There was something about that first coffee of the morning, the caffeine rushing through my veins, driving every last bit of sleepiness from my brain. Just one cup could make all the tiredness go away. I loved sipping it in the quiet canteen with just a few people sitting there, other cops taking ten minutes away from their desks and their cases, gathering their thoughts before getting back to whatever they were dealing with. I knew I was lucky that all I had to worry about right now was tricky colleagues.
When I got back to our office half an hour later,Thomas looked up from his screen. ‘Ingrid popped in just now and showed me this.’
‘What is it?’
‘Some news footage. He did another interview just now.’
I didn’t even have to ask who he was talking about. He likes doing all these interviews, Ingrid had said. She wasn’t wrong. ‘Is this about the assaults again?’ I said.
‘Yes. For a different channel.’ Thomas beckoned me over.
I looked at the screen over his shoulder. The news segment was just ending, the interviewer thanking the commissaris for his time.
‘If anybody saw anything last night,’ the commissaris said, ‘please contact us immediately.’ He stared directly into the camera, his eyes narrowed. ‘We’re going to get the people who are doing this.’
I could see what the police force had been going for when they chose him for the job. Unlike our previous commissaris, who retired a month ago, Commissaris Smits came across as an energetic man who looked as if he was personally going to chase the criminals who attacked and robbed people after they’d happily got drunk in the town centre.
I didn’t envy Ingrid her new job. The pressure to make an arrest was increasing with every interview the commissaris did. They should add the manpower to the investigation that he’d talked about this morning.
Or maybe they had, but nobody had come to talk to us. We probably didn’t have enough experience with what the commissaris kept saying was gang-related violence to be considered.
‘Did she fill you in?’ I asked Thomas.
‘She told me about your Erol Yilmaz guy,’ Thomas said. ‘I can’t see him for those other assaults. Beating up Peter de Waal, sure, but not the rest of them.’
I nodded.
‘From his history, he just isn’t the type,’ Thomas continued. ‘The others all seem to be aggravated robberies. The attacks happened around the station and the victims had their wallets and cameras stolen. Passports, smartphones, that kind of stuff. This one, from what Ingrid told me, was personal, and there was lots of stuff leading up to it: threats, harassment. Very different.’
‘And he had a restraining order.’
‘Yes, after he’d pelted the couple’s windows with dog excrement. That’s the official term used in the file.’
‘That’s nasty.’
‘Stuffed it through the letterbox too.’
‘But I’m wondering if this one really was different. Peter de Waal was robbed too,’ I said. ‘He had no wallet on him, and no phone either. That’s why we couldn’t identify him at first.’
‘Maybe Yilmaz tried to make it look like a robbery,’ Thomas said. ‘Or he punched the guy, knocked him unconscious and left him in the doorway, then someone else thought it was a great opportunity to take his stuff.’
‘I don’t think he did it,’ I said. ‘Didn’t Ingrid tell you that?’
Thomas continued as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘Who was the guy who called it in?’
‘A street cleaner,’ I said.
‘It could have been him.’
I thought back to my talk with the African man this morning. ‘He was nervous,’ I said, ‘but I think that was just because of me. Because he had to talk to the police, I mean. If he’d taken the wallet, he probably wouldn’t have called us.’
‘Maybe so,’ Thomas said. ‘Erol Yilmaz works in an office somewhere. He’s got a proper job. I just can’t see him for the other assaults. Apart from the hate campaign against the de Waals, he doesn’t have a criminal record.’
‘He said he worked for an insurance company,’ I said. ‘Anyway, I’m pretty sure he didn’t do it. Ingrid must see that too, surely?’
‘Is that what we’re working on?’ Charlie asked.
‘No, Lotte is just helping Ingrid,’ Thomas said.
‘I’m not really.’ I was only following it because I was interested to see what was going to happen with it. ‘Just this morning.’
But talking about this morning made me think of the other man I’d talked to. The man who’d said he wanted people to know that he wasn’t dead.
Even though he couldn’t possibly be the person he’d said he was, I woke up my PC and googled the name the man had used: Andre Martin Nieuwkerk. This huge success story for the police had happened so long ago that there wasn’t anything about it in our internal database, and I would have to check what was in the public domain.
I wasn’t really cyber-skiving as I read old newspaper articles about the Body in the Dunes. That was what the press had called the case, which had been widely reported twenty-five years ago, after the bones had been found by a man walking his dog. I’d seen all the articles before.
I remembered old cases as clearly as other people remembered football teams. I’d read somewhere that the music you liked when you were a teenager influenced your music taste for ever. I hadn’t really been into music. I hadn’t really been into football, even though I’d worn orange the whole week after the Netherlands won the European Championship in ’88. What I had been into was looking at crime cases. It had started when I was a kid. My parents had divorced and I didn’t see my father; my mother told me that he was too busy with his job as a policeman to meet with me.
It had led to me scanning every photo of every crime in the papers, hoping to catch a glimpse of my father. If he was so busy, then he would be working on some of these high-profile cases, I’d thought. I’d been the strange kid, not into anything other than reading about crime and trying to follow every clue available to the general public in all the cases that were reported.
I never saw my father in any of the photos. He hadn’t been too busy; my mother was just too angry with him to allow him access. Even when people loved you, they still lied to you.
Everything changed when I went to university, around the time the Body in the Dunes case was closed. All of a sudden I was no longer the strange kid because everybody else around me was just as fascinated with this case as I was. Together with my fellow students, I tried to puzzle out what had happened. There had been no clothes or any other items that would help identification. The bones had been those of a male between fifteen and twenty-five years old, and the victim had been dead for at least four years because the body had decomposed entirely to a skeleton. The cause of death had been strangulation. We decided that there must have been fractures in the small bones of his throat, otherwise they would not have been able to establish that.
I remembered so many things about this case because it was the first one I looked at after I�
��d found my tribe. After I’d met all the other people who understood, who were as fascinated with it as I was, who also tried to make sense of the world around them by making sense of crime. Suddenly my weird obsession was normal. In fact, it was useful. I never felt as if I was studying; I was just continuing to do what I had always done, only in a more structured way, with other people who did the same thing. This wasn’t hard work; this was heaven.
I found a photo of Nieuwkerk’s parents and his younger sister Julia. It had been taken at a press conference, not after he’d initially gone missing, when you’d normally see the crying parents, but four years later, when his body had been found.
After he’d been identified.
The press had given the family a hard time because they’d waited for days after they’d last seen him before they’d gone to the police. In class, we’d been taught that the first twenty-four hours were vital. We had made judgements on what this family must have been like to have missed that crucial slot. Had not going to the police immediately made them suspicious?
The suspicion had only lasted until the real murderer had been caught.
One of the papers had carried a picture of Andre’s geography teacher. The press had had a field day with this. The investigation into Andre’s death had quickly honed in on the teacher, a man Andre had seemed very close to, and when police detectives had started asking questions in the school, more students had come forward to say that he’d abused them. Rumours had started to fly around. Those rumours had reached a number of journalists, leaked by either the police or parents. The article had called for the man’s arrest. Screamed for it was probably a more accurate description.
I looked at the photo on the front page of that old paper. Even though there were some privacy laws that the press had to stick to, his identity hadn’t been protected at all by the small black bar that covered his eyes, or by calling him Paul V. rather than using his full surname. It wasn’t that hard to track down a geography teacher called Paul V. Paul Verbaan. A married man with a child. An entire article had been written about how he and his family had been refused access to their local church.
The remains had been found near Haarlem, by the coast, in the west of the country, close enough to my home town Alkmaar that my father could have worked on the case. Only he hadn’t. I’d looked for that like a reflex, checking for his face in the photos, even though we’d been in touch by this point.
But the victim and the murderer hadn’t come from Haarlem. They had lived in Elspeet. Right in the heart of the Dutch Bible Belt. The place where there’d been an outbreak of polio in the seventies because the orthodox Calvinist community had refused to vaccinate their children. The place where, even today, eighty per cent of people voted for one of the ultra-religious political parties.
It had of course given the whole story a new twist, or made it even sadder, depending on what your views were.
In my eyes, with my background, it had made it even more interesting.
I still remembered that I had been surprised to be surrounded by people who had totally agreed with me.
Chapter 4
After work, I went home, got changed and cycled to Mark’s place in Amsterdam Zuid. Tomorrow morning, I would cycle back to my flat on the canal to feed my cat, get changed again and go to work. We’d got into this routine of being at his place on Tuesday nights, at mine on Thursday nights, and at either place, open to negotiation, at the weekend. It was very good, but not ideal. But then could you expect any relationship to be perfect? Everything took compromise.
The trick was to find a relationship in which you could live with the compromises you had to make.
I unlocked the door to Mark’s house with my own key. However much I liked being greeted by him at the door, I liked the sense of belonging that the key gave me even more. It was the same when he came to my flat. I liked the anticipation of the sound of the bell, but I loved the sense of permanence when I heard his key in the door. I hoped he felt the same when he heard me come in.
‘Hi, Mark, I’m home,’ I said loudly, in case he’d missed the sound of the door. What the hell was I saying? When had his house become home? This wasn’t home. My flat by the canal was home. I shook my head. It was just something you said. I was clearly over-thinking things.
‘How was your day?’ he called from the kitchen. He liked cooking and had once said that making dinner for me was his way of taking care of me.
‘It was fine.’ My way of taking care of him was to not dump what had happened to me during the day on him the moment I walked through the door. I walked a careful balance between letting him into my experiences without talking about death and crime every time I saw him. It wasn’t always an easy tightrope to negotiate.
I gave him a hug from behind and sneakily looked over his shoulder to see what was for dinner. The chicken breasts were easy to recognise, but I struggled to identify the small things floating in the mustard-yellow sauce. ‘What are those green bits?’
‘The green bits are capers.’ I couldn’t see his face, but I could hear that he was laughing at me.
‘Okay.’ I didn’t think I’d ever knowingly eaten anything with capers in. Maybe they tasted like raisins. They were the same size. I didn’t dare ask, because that would give away, once again, that I really didn’t know anything about food or cooking, even if Mark did his best to educate me. ‘And how was your day?’
As he stirred the sauce, he told me about his latest project. With my arms around his waist and my chin resting on his shoulder, I made encouraging noises to keep him talking and to show I was listening. I liked hearing about his job. I didn’t want him to think that dealing with death and crime was by definition more important than redeveloping office blocks and houses. There was something creative and constructive in what he did: he was building things up, whereas I too often dealt with the aftermath of when things had irrevocably fallen down. If I talked about my work, I would always be discussing crime. It was a subject that was easy to talk to colleagues about, but I had to be careful at home.
‘What do you want to do for Sinterklaas?’ Mark said.
I wondered for how many years we’d continue the Dutch tradition of swapping gifts on 5 December. More and more people were moving to presents at Christmas instead. A number of the large department stores didn’t have Sinterklaas decorations any more but already had Christmas trees. It was too early for that – only late November.
The controversy around Sinterklaas and Black Peter had flared up in earnest this year. I remembered being glued to the screen when I was small for the annual live TV broadcast of Sinterklaas coming to the country. I still believed he was a real bishop, based in Madrid, and of course he had to travel to the Netherlands on a special steamboat to deliver our presents. That Madrid was nowhere near the coast and that a bishop would have more important things to do than hand out gifts never entered my mind. At age six or seven, it hadn’t seemed weird at all that a different town was chosen every year to host this big event. Once Sinterklaas had arrived, the period of about two weeks leading up to the 5 December celebrations would start. There would be more candy, especially chocolate, and then there would be presents. The shops would begin their seasonal advertising. It was the start of something good happening. That was the point.
This year there had been police presence at Sinterklaas’s festive entry by boat to keep apart the protesters against Black Peter and those who hated what they saw as an attack on a children’s festivity. However much I loved our childhood tradition, you had to accept that when part of the population saw the blacked-up face of Sinterklaas’s helper as inherently racist, there was a problem. And when the people who wanted to protect what they saw as our national heritage used violence at what should have been a happy occasion, there was also a problem.
I could imagine that a decade from now, nobody would celebrate Sinterklaas any more. When the Dutch had first settled in New York, then New Amsterdam, they had taken the Sinterklaas with them, where o
ver time he’d morphed into Santa Claus. It was ironic to think that maybe Santa was going to be the present-giver of choice here in years to come. Elves were far less controversial than Black Peter. But the traditional Sinterklaas celebration was a lower-key affair than the Christmas that American and UK television and movies showed. I liked low-key. I’d always spent the evening with my mum; we would swap a few presents and have almond pastries and pepernoten. What was I going to do this year?
‘I need to check,’ I said. ‘I’m seeing my mother tomorrow anyway.’
‘Sure. Just let me know.’
When we were together, the rule was no TV during dinner. So there was no escape when I felt Mark’s eyes on me before I’d even cut the first bit of chicken breast. ‘Something’s happened,’ he said. ‘I can tell.’
‘It was bizarre.’ I sighed. ‘A man came up to me this morning and made a point of telling me he wasn’t dead.’ I speared one of the green capers with my fork and tried it.
‘That’s …’ he seemed to be searching for the right reaction, ‘odd.’
Capers very much did not taste like raisins, but I managed not to pull a face. It wasn’t that they tasted bad; I’d just expected something else. Sweet, not salty. I should have guessed that they wouldn’t taste like raisins, because raisins with mustard would be revolting, and Mark never cooked anything that was revolting. Well, I’d learned something new, again.
‘Odd. Yes. It was a very strange situation. He said he should let people know that he wasn’t dead. Or at least I think that’s how he phrased it.’
‘Did he say who he was?’
‘Yes. He said he was Andre Martin Nieuwkerk.’
Mark nodded, lifted a piece of chicken on his fork and examined it. ‘Maybe I’ve overcooked it a little bit.’
The name clearly meant nothing to him. There was no reason why it should.
‘It tastes good to me,’ I said. ‘Thanks for cooking.’ He was less obsessed with murders and death than I was. That was probably a good thing. ‘You haven’t heard of Andre Martin Nieuwkerk?’
A Death at the Hotel Mondrian (Lotte Meerman Book 5) Page 3