A Death at the Hotel Mondrian (Lotte Meerman Book 5)

by Anja de Jager

  That I was hoping the pathologist or the forensic scientists would find something to suggest this wasn’t a suicide.

  It was only too obvious what had happened, and I didn’t like the obvious answer in this case. I told Thomas to check everything and I would come and see the pathologist in a couple of hours.

  Chapter 6

  ‘What was the time of death?’ I asked. I could tell he had been dead for at least twelve hours, but I wanted to know for sure.

  Baker, the pathologist, didn’t make eye contact but looked down at her notes. ‘More than twenty-four hours ago. Between twenty-four and twenty-six hours.’

  I quickly did the sums in my head. That meant he would have died between 7 and 9 a.m. yesterday. ‘That can’t be right.’ The words escaped from my mouth before my brain could get into gear.

  Now Baker did look up. ‘Doubting my work, Detective Meerman?’

  I shook my head. ‘Sorry, of course it can be right.’

  What time had I seen him? What time had it been when I’d decided not to talk to him?

  It had still been dark, I knew that. Ingrid had called me to go to the crime scene at around 5.15, and it had been about 6 a.m. when I was out there waiting for her. I wasn’t entirely sure how much time had passed between then and the man turning up. We had looked for CCTV cameras and then she’d made that phone call.

  It could have been any time between half past six and seven.

  Then he would have had to go back to the hotel, and that was probably a half-hour walk away from the Lange Niezel.

  ‘Had his body been moved after his death?’

  ‘No, the decay was all in line with the position he was found in.’

  I nodded, but still thought the earliest boundary of the time of death was off. I didn’t think he could have been dead at 7 a.m.

  The anger I’d felt when I’d seen him in the hotel flashed up again. He’d told me to speak to him and instead he’d killed himself? It didn’t make any sense.

  ‘Are you sure this was a suicide?’

  ‘Well, it looks like suicide. The medicine in the bottle matches the opioid in his bloodstream. The actual cause of death is asphyxiation, of course, but that’s absolutely as would be expected with an opioid overdose. There was heavy scarring on his right leg: a sign of substantial surgery that happened at least twelve months ago. Do you want to see?’

  ‘No, that’s okay,’ I said. ‘I trust you.’

  ‘That could well have been when he was first prescribed the opioids. This is only a guess, of course.’

  ‘Any fibres—’

  ‘In his nostrils? No, nothing. Nobody held a pillow over his face, if that was what you were thinking of. The only thing is some bruising around his eye socket.’

  I shook my head, because he’d already had that when I met him. I didn’t say it out loud. ‘That would have nothing to do with asphyxiation,’ I said instead.

  ‘Exactly. No marks around his throat, either.’

  ‘Water in his lungs?’

  ‘Nothing. We wouldn’t have missed that. He died from the pills by his bedside. There’s no bruising or marking around his mouth, or anything else that would indicate he was forced to take them. No sign of a struggle, either in the room or on his body. Why are you asking this?’

  If I hadn’t met the man yesterday morning, we would have done very little with this apart from notify the family and the necessary legal departments. Instead I was asking her questions. ‘It’s just that Charlie wants to know,’ I said. ‘It’s his first case and he seemed disappointed that there isn’t anything to investigate.’

  The pathologist smiled. ‘You’ve got a suicide, Detective Meerman. Congratulations on not adding to the Amsterdam crime statistics.’ She gave me a copy of her preliminary report and a bunch of photos. Normally I liked working from photos, but this time the images were heavy in my hand.

  As I walked back to our office, I couldn’t help but think about the timing again. I wondered if I’d been the last person to speak to this man.

  At my desk, I opened the folder that Edgar Ling had given me and took out the photos from the hotel room. I looked at Theo Brand’s face. Examining these photos was different from looking at his body when we found him. Because I was no longer in his presence, I could do my job; I could study him as I should have done then. As I would have done if I hadn’t met him a day beforehand.

  There was bruising around his left eye. If I had to guess, I would say a single punch. The kind of bruising that should have been on Peter de Waal’s face if his assault had happened the way he said. I scanned the pathologist’s report, then looked at the victim’s phone. There’d been no fingerprints on the device apart from his own. Maybe it would tell me if there was a next of kin I should contact.

  The truth was that I was interested to find out whether he’d told anybody else he wasn’t dead. I checked the last call he had made. That morning, at 6.43 a.m., he’d talked to someone called Laurens for eight minutes and twelve seconds. So at least we knew he’d still been alive at that point.

  I tried to remember everything I could about yesterday morning, but I couldn’t be sure if I’d spoken to him before or after 6.43 a.m.

  I hoped it had been before.

  I paged through his diary. He’d come to Amsterdam less than a week ago, and since then had arranged to meet with, in order of dates, Laurens, Julia, Harry and Daniel. Underneath each name there was an address and a telephone number. Theo had obviously been a meticulous person. I thought of the man I’d met yesterday morning: his smart clothes and long woollen coat matched that image.

  I put a call in to the hotel and asked them if they had checked what time Theo had come back to his room yesterday. They told me it was 8.37 a.m.

  At least an hour and a half after I’d talked to him.

  He must have taken the overdose just after he’d got back to his room. Come back and seen the bottle of pills. Somehow that made it seem like a more impulsive act. Spur of the moment, not necessarily long-planned.

  Why did that make it feel worse?

  ‘Our new team member here wants Forensics to investigate everything because he thinks this suicide looks suspicious,’ Thomas said as he and Charlie came into the office. ‘We’ve got a limited budget and limited resources and we can’t waste it all on obvious suicides.’

  ‘There was no note,’ Charlie said. ‘The man died of asphyxiation.’

  ‘That’s perfectly normal for an opioid overdose. You stop breathing.’

  It sounded as if they had been having this discussion for the last hour or so already.

  ‘There was bruising on his face,’ Charlie said. ‘Around his left eye.’

  ‘It could well have been old,’ Thomas said.

  I could have told them that it had already been there yesterday morning, but I kept my mouth shut. The full pathologist’s report would tell us more. Still, a bruise around the eye wasn’t related to asphyxiation, and I would have disregarded it even if I hadn’t seen it earlier.

  I opened the diary again and looked at the meetings Theo had arranged. If these were people he’d met with to say goodbye, it would be a good thing to contact all four of them: Laurens, Julia, Harry and Daniel.

  Julia.

  Andre Nieuwkerk had had a sister named Julia; I remembered it from the newspaper article I’d read yesterday. Surely not.

  I dialled the number underneath her name. The phone rang four, five, six times. Then a woman answered. ‘This is Julia Nieuwkerk,’ she said.

  I clutched my phone tighter in my hand. ‘Good afternoon,’ I said. ‘This is Detective Lotte Meerman from the Amsterdam police.’

  ‘Is this about that guy?’ she said.

  Her response surprised me. ‘What guy?’ I asked. I had to work hard to make my voice sound calm. To sound normal.

  ‘That guy who came to my house a few days ago,’ Julia said. ‘That nutter claiming to be my dead brother.’

  Chapter 7

  Julia Nieuwkerk’s
flat was in the Watergraafsmeer, an area of Amsterdam where low rows of houses gave the impression of being part of a village instead of the capital city. As Charlie parked the car, four small children stopped playing in the street, not to avoid being hit but out of curiosity to see who we were. I waved at them, and that made them decide that their game was infinitely more interesting than these two strangers in their street.

  The flat took up the ground floor of a house. Three bicycles were parked right outside the window, and one of them, a child’s pale blue tricycle, had fallen over. Julia opened the door. She wasn’t young, probably only a few years younger than me, but she had an elfin quality about her. Her long blonde hair was tied back in a messy ponytail, and she wore a dark-blue jumper with wide sleeves that were embroidered in white around the cuffs. She asked to see our IDs, scrutinising them carefully. When she was finally satisfied, she opened the door wider and invited us in.

  A bright orange safety jacket and a builder’s helmet were hanging from hooks on the wall. Mud-covered sturdy boots stood by the door. They looked far too big to be Julia’s: she would be swimming in them. Also, the safety jacket didn’t seem to go with her checked skirt and the slippers with bows on the front.

  The kid’s tricycle and at least one of the other bikes outside must have belonged to the upstairs neighbours, because as soon as I was inside, I could tell that this was a single person’s studio flat. There was a kitchen and a long table at one end of the room, and a large double bed occupied the space by the window on the other side. Even though the place was small, it was warm and full of light. The owner of the builder’s gear didn’t seem to be here.

  ‘I thought it was a very tasteless joke,’ Julia said before I could even ask a question, ‘but I didn’t think it was illegal.’ She pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and sat down. Charlie and I took seats opposite her. Freckles touched the skin on her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose, even though it was winter. She must have spent a lot of time outdoors. ‘I was pleasantly surprised when you contacted me, and then I got a bit suspicious. Sorry that I was being paranoid, but I thought maybe you were in it with him.’

  So that was why she’d looked at our IDs so closely.

  ‘In it with him?’ Charlie asked. ‘In what way?’

  ‘I’ve had trouble in the past,’ she said. ‘Reporters coming here, or some of those true-crime writers. All wanting to talk about the story of the Body in the Dunes.’ Her voice was sharp. ‘For them it is a story. For me it’s my brother.’ She swallowed down the words to stop herself from saying more.

  ‘It was all so strange,’ she said after a pause. ‘That’s why I thought that maybe it was an elaborate set-up.’

  ‘When exactly did the man come here?’ I asked.

  ‘Saturday evening,’ she said. ‘I think it was about six, because I was going to have dinner with a friend and I was just getting ready to go out.’

  ‘Did he phone you beforehand?’

  ‘No, he just showed up. If he’d called, I would have told him not to come.’

  ‘What did he say when he got here?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘He asked if he could come in. At first, I just thought he was trying to sell me something, or was a religious nut, so I said that no, he couldn’t. Then he said he was my brother Andre. That he was alive. He said he was really sorry for what had happened.’

  I looked for sadness on Julia’s face, but saw none. There was only annoyance. It was the same emotion I’d had, but it bothered me to see it on someone else’s face.

  ‘You didn’t believe him,’ I said.

  ‘Of course I didn’t.’ She frowned at my question. ‘My brother was murdered thirty years ago.’

  ‘You didn’t think the man looked like him?’ I asked. ‘Or like your father?’

  ‘Like my father?’ A laugh escaped from her mouth as if that was the funniest thing she’d heard all day. ‘No.’The word was conclusive. ‘He definitely did not look like my father.’

  ‘You were young when you last saw your brother.’

  ‘I was twelve when he went missing. I wanted him to come back every single day. Even when the police came four years later and told us he’d probably died, I still didn’t believe it.’ She rested her elbows on the table in front of her. ‘Do you know when I finally accepted that he was really dead? It was when that bastard killed himself. Even if he only did it because he got kicked out of the church, still, that was when I knew that he’d not only abused him but also murdered him, and that Andre was never going to come back.’

  I remembered seeing the photo of Paul Verbaan and his family being publicly stopped from going into the church on Sunday morning. That was the photo that had made it to the front page of the paper, the one where Paul Verbaan had been only too easy to identify.

  Julia’s voice started to sound more heated. ‘So when someone turns up on my doorstep with a crazy story, asking to be let in, of course I don’t believe him.’

  ‘How long did you two talk for?’

  ‘Not long. It was five minutes at most,’ Julia said. ‘As soon as he said he was my dead brother, I tried to close the door on him.’

  ‘Did he speak to you in English?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ Julia said, ‘he spoke in Dutch. I’m sure he was Dutch.’

  ‘Dutch?’ Charlie said. ‘We thought he was British.’

  ‘Well, he spoke Dutch to me.’ Julia looked down at some typed-up notes on a piece of paper in front of her. She must have prepared for our visit. ‘What are you going to do about him? He knows where I live. It’s because I’m in the phone directory, I know that. I’m easy to find. But I don’t want him to come back here. It’s really disgusting that he’s pretending to be my brother.’

  ‘He won’t come back,’ I said. ‘He died yesterday morning.’

  She leaned back on her chair and smiled, but immediately bit her lower lip to keep the smile hidden. I had seen it, though. I’d seen that she was happy that this man had died.

  I wanted to grab her by the arm and shake her.

  I wanted to tell her to show some respect.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked.

  ‘We think he killed himself,’ Charlie said. ‘We found him in his hotel room.’

  ‘So we’re just trying to piece together what happened,’ I added. ‘Why he’d come here. What was he like when he talked to you?’ I tried to keep the harsh edge out of my voice.

  Julia rubbed her face. ‘Whoever he was, he was really good. Really convincing.’ She slicked her fringe back. ‘He had tears in his eyes. I felt a bit bad for him; I feel bad now, but what was I supposed to do? Should I have gone along with his crazy story? Even after I’d shut the door, I heard him banging, pleading with me to listen to him. He said he was so sorry. He kept saying it over and over again.’

  I exchanged a glance with Charlie, then made a note. I’m sorry. What could he possibly have been apologising for? I drew a large circle around the words, then wrote, Should I have gone along with his crazy story?

  ‘Then what happened?’ I asked.

  Julia sighed. ‘This place doesn’t have a back door, so I couldn’t leave. I felt trapped. I didn’t want him to see me, so I stayed in my bathroom. He was outside for at least ten minutes, banging on the door. Finally I got fed up with it and shouted: “Leave, just leave.” And he did. I was surprised, but he actually went away. I was quite shaken up and thought I should get the police involved, but he hadn’t threatened me.’ She laughed. ‘I could hardly report a man for apologising, now could I?’

  ‘Were you scared of him?’ I asked.

  ‘It just felt wrong.’ Julia pulled the piece of paper closer to her. ‘I know my brother was murdered a long time ago,’ she said, ‘but sometimes something happens that brings it all back, and I’ll feel overwhelmed. That’s why I didn’t want him here. I wanted him to go away. I didn’t want my brother’s death to be shoved in my face by this man.’

  I nodded, because I understood only too well how everyday
things could remind you of grief.

  I’d been there.

  I tried to stop being angry at Julia and to put myself in her position instead. Theo’s visit must have been surreal, a stranger knocking on her door claiming to be her dead brother. As she had said, it must have been a reminder of what had happened all those years ago that she could have done without.

  I looked down at the notes I’d scribbled. I’m sorry. Should I have gone along with his crazy story? They were Julia’s words, but my sentiments too. I folded up the piece of paper and put it in the back pocket of my trousers.

  It also made me think about the effect Julia’s reaction must have had on Theo. Initially I had assumed that he had been another victim of child abuse and that was why he’d identified with Andre Nieuwkerk. I was beginning to realise that this assumption had been wrong, and that he hadn’t used the name to expose another crime; it was possible that he had believed he really was Andre Nieuwkerk. If that was the case, he must have expected a very different response.

  What had he thought was going to happen? Maybe he had hoped his sister would welcome him with open arms. It was all speculation, of course, but either way, I didn’t think he would have expected to be doubted. Was that why he’d killed himself?

  ‘Did he offer you any evidence for who he was?’ I asked. ‘Did he say he could prove his identity or anything like that?’

  ‘No,’ Julia said. ‘Nothing. What could there have been? He wasn’t my brother.’

  ‘I know you’re sure he wasn’t,’ I said it carefully, ‘but we would like to rule it out.’

  The doorbell rang. Julia looked at me. ‘Can I answer that?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, and she went to the door.

  ‘You bitch!’ I heard an angry voice yell. I turned around to check what was going on. Over Julia’s shoulder, I could see her visitor. He was probably her age. He had a thin moustache with a hint of a matching goatee beard, and wore a baseball cap backwards. He was too old to be wearing a cap like that. His dark hair reached down to the furry collar of his thick green coat. His face was pale and intense, and his fists were balled. ‘Did you know?’ He lowered his voice. ‘Have you always known?’