‘He called me to thank me for dinner, and we chatted. Nothing special.’
Did he mention meeting me? I wanted to ask. Did he tell you I didn’t believe a word of what he’d said? ‘It was very early for a call like that,’ I said instead.
‘I’m always up early. Theo knows that. Knew that,’ he corrected himself.
‘You had dinner with him the first night he was in Amsterdam?’
‘Yes, he called me a few weeks ago to tell me he was coming on this trip and asked if I had time to meet up.’
What if Laurens had talked to Theo before Theo had met me? What if he really had been fine before he spoke to me? ‘Was there anything in particular that he wanted to discuss?’ I asked. ‘Did he seem distressed about anything? Depressed?’
‘Was it suicide? Is that why you’re asking that?’ He shook his head. Not to disagree with what I was saying, I thought, but out of shock at the situation. ‘It was really strange,’ he said. He fell silent.
‘What was?’ I prompted.
‘That he came to the Netherlands in the first place.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘He hated being here. He had a British passport, but he was Dutch originally. I don’t think he’d been to the Netherlands in twenty years or so.’
‘How do you know he hated it here?’
‘I know I said when you called that we were friends.’ He rubbed his hand over the bald part of his head again. ‘But really he was my ex.’
‘Your ex.’The last person Theo had spoken to was his ex-partner.
Unless the last person he had spoken to was me.
I could picture the two of them together, even if the man opposite me was a fair bit older than the man who’d died. Or maybe the partial baldness and being overweight made him seem older than he was.
‘We met in London. We lived together for over a decade. I returned to the Netherlands a few years after we split up.’
‘When was this?’
‘I came back to Amsterdam in 2012. Left London just in time to avoid the Olympics.’
‘And you stayed friends?’ I would have no interest in meeting my own ex for dinner, but then our separation had been rather acrimonious. I couldn’t tell if this had been a happy enough relationship while it lasted, or if it had been painful but time had rubbed away at the sharp edges until it had all been smoothed over.
‘We lost touch for a bit and his call came out of the blue, I have to admit. But it was great to see him again.’
‘Why did he have a British passport?’
‘He no longer wanted to be Dutch. He made a really big deal of it. Even though he didn’t need to because of the whole EU thing.’ He smiled at the memory. ‘He said it made him happy not to be Dutch.’
I automatically nodded in return, even if it was a sentiment I didn’t understand.
‘Theo hated this country,’ Laurens continued, ‘and everything to do with it.’
‘The people in the hotel didn’t realise he was originally Dutch.’
‘That would have made him very glad.’ He smiled again. ‘We never spoke Dutch to each other, not even at home.’
Theo’s Dutch had been awkward when I’d first met him, not because he didn’t speak the language fluently but probably because he hadn’t used it in such a long time. Add that to the fact that he’d hated this country for some reason I could only guess at, and it all made much more sense.
‘So why he would come here for a visit was beyond me,’ Laurens continued. ‘There are so many other places he could have gone instead.’
At that moment the lift closest to us made a pinging sound and the doors opened. Laurens had been about to say something else, but instead he had to exchange greetings with the people who came out of the lift.
‘Do you have the details of Theo’s family? Is there anybody else I should inform?’ It was a leading question. I waited for Laurens to tell me about Theo’s past.
‘He wasn’t in touch with any of his family. They’d had a big falling-out. I don’t even know if his parents are still alive.’
‘Do you know anything about them? Did Theo talk about them much?’
‘He never really wanted to discuss it. All I know was that he went through some tough times. His childhood was very unhappy and he would sometimes say that, because of that, he wasn’t wired for happiness.’
An unhappy childhood. It reminded me of my original assumption, that Theo had been abused as a child and that was why he identified with Andre Nieuwkerk. There was no point in speculating; the DNA test would show what the truth was.
‘I don’t know if he ever attempted to kill himself,’ Laurens said. ‘I hope not.’ He rubbed his face. ‘It makes me feel really sorry for him. If only he’d mentioned how he felt, maybe there was something I could have done.’
‘Do you have his UK address?’
‘Let me look it up.’ He scrolled through his phone and read the address out. I made a note of it.
‘And when he changed nationality, he kept his Dutch name?’
‘Yes, because he was lucky with his name. Brand works in both languages. Werda was always much trickier.’
I looked at Laurens Werda, scrutinising his face, but nothing showed other than sadness over his ex-partner’s death. ‘When you saw him, did he tell you why he’d come here?’
‘No, not really.’
‘What did you talk about when you had dinner? Did he say anything out of the ordinary?’
‘He seemed to be doing well. We chatted about his flat in London, his job, some of our old mutual friends. It was all really normal stuff.’
I nodded. ‘What about the Body in the Dunes? Does that mean anything to you?’
‘No.’
‘Theo never told you anything about that? Or about Andre Martin Nieuwkerk?’
‘No, never. Who’s that?’
I didn’t respond to his question. ‘That’s all for the moment,’ I said.
‘That’s it?’ Laurens seemed relieved that I didn’t have any further questions. He probably wanted some privacy to think about his friend.
‘Thank you for your time. We’ll get back in touch if there is anything else.’
I watched as he walked back to the reception area.
I took the lift down. I rested against the back wall and felt tired. These conversations were draining.
Had Theo not given any thought to what was going to happen after his death? He must have known the effect it would have on everybody he had talked to. He’d raised questions in their minds and then died before he could give them answers. It seemed a spiteful thing to do.
I thought back to the man I’d met the other morning. He hadn’t seemed the spiteful type. I was sure he had wanted me to believe him. What was it he’d said? That he thought it was important that everybody knew he was still alive? Julia had said that he had kept repeating that he was sorry, over and over again. Unless he’d been apologising for what he was going to do – taking his own life – it didn’t make any sense.
I knew that this wasn’t always how it worked, though; that a person’s existence could get so black that there was no space to think about the consequences.
We would know much more once we’d got the result of the DNA test; we’d be able to say for sure if this man had been Andre Nieuwkerk. Julia was certain that he wasn’t, Daniel was certain that he was. I was in two minds, somewhere between the two. Like the tide, coming in and going out, my opinion about Theo Brand kept changing.
At first I’d thought there was no way that he was Nieuwkerk, that he was only using the name. Then I’d thought, after talking to Julia, that maybe he was crazy after all. That it was a delusion. After seeing the footage that Daniel had recorded, it had struck me that he’d known a lot about the Nieuwkerk family. That didn’t mean he was Andre, though; he could have been one of his close friends.
It was possible that he had been another of Paul Verbaan’s abuse victims. Someone taking a different type of revenge by makin
g life difficult for Verbaan’s son.
I didn’t want him to be the real Andre. I didn’t want him to be this dead man come alive again. Because it would be awful if he’d come here to tell people he hadn’t died, only to end up killing himself.
Chapter 10
I looked at the cards in my hand but there were none that I could get rid of, so I had to take one from the pile in the middle. It was a ten of spades. I sighed. I already had one of those, and now I had that useless card twice.
My mother sat at the head of the table and I was in the seat opposite her as we played our Wednesday-evening game of cards. I used to sit next to her, but when we first played at my flat, I became suspicious when she insisted on having that same seat. It had only taken me thirty years or so to understand this advantage that my mother had had all along: peeking at my cards when I wasn’t paying attention. I used to think she was just better at the game than I was. After a few months of meeting at mine, we had now returned to my mother’s place. It was probably because she didn’t like my cat. The feeling was entirely mutual.
‘How’s Mark?’ my mother asked as she added another queen to the set of three already out. It was easier to talk when you had something else to concentrate on.
‘He’s very well. He said hi.’ I took the queen of spades from the set of four and put it in front of me.
‘Don’t mess this up,’ my mother said.
I knew she wasn’t talking about the cards. ‘I wasn’t planning on it.’ I added the jack and the ten of spades to the queen, then sat back and folded my free hand around my mug of tea. The mug with the smiling clown was the same one I’d had since I was five. If things weren’t broken, there was no reason to replace them.
We’d always been together at Sinterklaas and now I was going to change that. I didn’t want my mother to be upset about being by herself. Even if it was mainly a celebration that kids loved, I hated to think of her being alone. I couldn’t bring myself to start the subject and decided to talk about work instead.
‘I was wondering,’ I said, ‘what was it like, growing up in Elspeet?’
She threw me a quick glance before examining her cards again. ‘What brought this up?’ She took one from the stack. ‘Something you’re working on?’
‘Can’t I show interest in your life?’ I looked at the cards on the table and those in my hands, as if studying them deeply would hide the fact that she’d seen right through me.
‘So it is something you’re working on.’ She had little flesh on her and you could see every bone. Her cheekbones were so sharp that they looked as though they could cut through the wrinkled skin that hung off them. I really needed to get into cooking and enjoying my food, otherwise when I got to her age I would be as skinny as she was.
In my head, I immediately corrected myself. It would be different for me. I wouldn’t live and eat alone. Mark would still be cooking for me.
I reached out, took a card and added it to my hand. I managed not to smile even though the nine of spades was useful. Julia’s words came to mind. ‘A woman told me today that someone killed himself not because of guilt but because he got barred from the church.’
‘In Elspeet?’
‘Yes.’
‘Things have changed, even there. Everybody’s got access to the internet now; the church no longer controls what people are supposed to think.’
‘This happened in the nineties.’
‘Ah, okay, well that’s different. Still, one thing doesn’t rule out the other.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You said he killed himself not because of guilt but because of being barred. It could be both, or maybe it’s the same thing. The church is your conscience. Being barred from the church means that your conscience, your religion, is telling you that what you’ve done is beyond the pale. Beyond forgiveness and redemption.’ She picked up a new card from the stack and grimaced, then slid the blue-backed card between two red ones. The backs of both packs were equally faded, the red cards now the colour of my mother’s cracked lips, the others the shade of her eyes, bleached by age from sky to duck-egg blue. We always used this double set; not a single card had been lost in over twenty years of playing. Another thing that didn’t need replacing.
‘He was barred on a Sunday morning, in front of the whole congregation.’ That was what I’d seen in the newspaper photo: the shocked faces of the other people around, the preacher stopping the man from entering the church. If they’d thrown tar and feathers over him, it couldn’t have been more obvious.
‘And everybody knew what it was about?’
‘I would have thought so: it had been in all the papers that he’d murdered his student.’
‘You’re talking about that school teacher. That Body in the Dunes case.’
‘Do you remember it?’
‘I remember you asking the same questions at the time as well. Wasn’t it your university project?’ She picked up her mug, her other hand holding her cards close to her chest. I hoped the heat would warm up her fingers, with their swollen knuckles. ‘That was the one you worked on with your friend, wasn’t it? What was her name? Karin something?’
‘That’s right. I’m surprised you remember.’
‘I remember because she stole your work.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Didn’t she hand it in as her own? Then you had to write about another case.’
I shrugged. ‘She didn’t really steal it.’ I’d been too happy that I could share my interest with somebody to really care about that.
‘You had to work all night. Don’t you remember? Till five or six in the morning, days in a row. Wasn’t there a deadline for the project?’
‘You probably cared more than I did, because the light kept you awake.’ It hadn’t been a big deal; it was supposed to be an individual project, not a group one, and she had handed it in instead of me. ‘Whose turn is it?’
‘Yours. Just pick a card.’
I looked at the large handful I had. I couldn’t seem to get rid of any of them so had to pick up a new one, a three of clubs. I counted how many I had in my hand. ‘Fifteen. That’s more than I started with.’
‘If you checked properly,’ she said, ‘I’m sure some of them must be in a set. You’re not paying attention.’
‘What about you? You’re just as bad.’
She scanned the cards on the table, as if it would cause sets to miraculously form.
‘Was it hard for you to move from Elspeet to Alkmaar?’
‘It’s Elspeet.’ Her voice was defensive. ‘It’s a town, not a tiny village, not like Staphorst.’
‘But you left your church behind.’
‘I didn’t leave anything behind. I joined another church.’
When I was a kid, we would still go to church twice on a Sunday. I stopped going when I was a teenager, and, to be fair, my mother never pressured me into coming with her. She said I was old enough to make my own choices. My own mistakes, I think she called it.
‘Hold on,’ she said. ‘I think there’s something I can do with those cards.’ She took three runs, hearts, spades and diamonds, and rearranged them into three sets of the same numbers. The cards moved over the table with the sound of old hymnbooks being opened. Her smile bunched up the skin on her cheekbones.
I split up some of the half-sets I had and put down a run of four, including the three of clubs. Eleven cards left, finally fewer than I’d started with.
‘See,’ she said. ‘I could tell you weren’t paying attention. Your mind is on your work. That school teacher, I feel sorry for his family.’
‘I met his son earlier today. He’s turned into a very angry man.’
‘Everybody in Elspeet must have known who he was. All his friends, his classmates. He probably went to the school where his father taught.’
‘He did. He was in the same class as the victim’s sister.’
‘It must have been terrible for him, to find something like that out about h
is own father.’
He’d still referred to him as ‘Dad’, though. He still wanted to believe that his father had been innocent. ‘He knew the victim. The murdered boy. He used to talk to him.’
‘Ah yes, it was a boy, wasn’t it? I wondered if that was why he was thrown out of the church.’ She took my three of clubs and added two more threes from her hand.
‘Because it was a boy?’ I worked hard to keep my voice under control. ‘It would have been okay if he’d abused and murdered a girl?’
‘No, you’re right. Of course not. How old was the boy?’
‘Fourteen when the abuse started. Fifteen when he disappeared.’ I added another three to the set that my mother had just formed. ‘That’s messed up. That you think he should have been allowed to stay if he’d had sex with one of his female pupils and killed her. That the homosexuality was what made the church act.’
‘I meant that the fact that it was a boy made it worse. Made it abhorrent in the eyes of some of those orthodox churches.’
Hearing those words come out of my mother’s mouth seemed strange. I was reminded of the man in Daniel’s recording recounting how his parents had thrown him out of the house. ‘You don’t think that,’ I said. ‘Do you? If I’d been gay, would you have shown me the door?’
‘Of course not. And just because you’re a member of a church, that doesn’t mean you have to agree with every single thing that’s being said.’
‘Doesn’t it? I thought that was the point.’
‘There were a lot of things that didn’t sit well with me. I didn’t just leave that church because I married your father. My parents didn’t just leave over the polio vaccinations. I remember talking to my father about it. He cared deeply about individual freedom, and the preacher coming around on Sundays to check what channel they were listening to on the radio really bothered him. Being told how to live every second of his life rubbed him up the wrong way.’ She added a six to the set on the table. She only had two cards left in her hand. ‘But that it was a boy does make it worse, don’t you think?’
‘Why?’
‘The teacher was married, and had a kid. That meant he’d lived a lie all his life. If you prefer men, you shouldn’t get married to a woman.’
A Death at the Hotel Mondrian (Lotte Meerman Book 5) Page 8