‘It’s not as straightforward as that. For me, the worst thing was that the boy was his pupil. If he wanted to be with a man, he could have slept around with grown-ups. You know, above the age of consent.’
‘And he killed him …’
‘It’s possible he didn’t.’ As soon as the words left my mouth, I wondered when I’d started to believe that. At what point it had become possible for me that Theo really was Andre.
‘Did he do all those other things?’
I thought of Theo talking to Daniel. Of telling him exactly what had happened. About the wife finding out. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m pretty sure he did all those other things. He sexually abused his pupils.’ I reshuffled the cards in my hand and formed a run of high clubs. I put them on the table, hoping that she could use my cards to get rid of her last two.
‘Pupils? More than one?’
‘Some other students came forward who later retracted their statements.’
She sighed and picked a new card from the stack. ‘It’s terrible, the things that people do.’ She held her last three cards between her fingers as she checked the ones on the table. Then she put them face down on the table and took a sip of tea.
I slotted a ten in the middle of a run. We were both silent for a bit.
‘Still, that poor family,’ my mother said before laying out the three cards in one set: a run of diamonds from seven to nine. Her gesture had a sense of finality about it, as if the last word about this case had been said.
She’d proved that she could win, even without cheating.
I threw my handful of cards on the table. It wasn’t that she was better at this than I was. I hadn’t been able to concentrate. Nor had I brought up the subject of Sinterklaas, so I’d just come here and maybe ask Mark to join us.
‘Oh, there was something I wanted to talk to you about,’ she said. ‘Sinterklaas.’
It was as if she’d read my mind.
‘Richard asked me to come to his. They’re having a big family do. Kids, grandkids.’
‘Nice. Meeting the kids, are we?’ I still hadn’t been introduced to this Richard; I just knew of his existence, that was all. When you were my mother’s age, meeting the kids was probably the equivalent of meeting people’s parents when you were younger. ‘That makes it sound serious.’
She blushed.
I laughed. ‘Go and spend Sinterklaas with them.’
My mother handed me a present. It had the shape of a thick paperback, but I knew it wasn’t a book.
‘Can I open it?’
‘You know what it is anyway.’
Of course I did: it was the traditional chocolate letter in a cardboard gift box. When I was a kid, it had always seemed that a chocolate L for Lotte was smaller than something like the M for Mark. Even if the box said they were all the same weight, it never looked like that. It would have meant changing my name, though, and that would have been too much effort just to get a larger piece of chocolate once a year. ‘I haven’t got yours yet.’
‘It’s okay, I don’t eat that much chocolate any more. You can get me something else.’
She didn’t say what she’d want instead, but I was pleased that we’d sorted out Sinterklaas without me having to bring it up. I gave her a hug and said goodbye. Now all I had to do was buy Mark some presents.
As I cycled home in the dark, I thought about the fact that, for my mother, it had all been about the family. Then I saw Theo as he had been yesterday, vehemently telling me that he was alive and that he should let people know about it. I had ignored him. I had looked at my watch to make it clear that he was wasting my time, and he had been embarrassed.
If only he hadn’t committed suicide when he had, I could have asked him questions. I could have asked him why he was here, why it had taken him so long. Why not five years ago, or ten years ago, or even as soon as he realised that the police had misidentified the body? What had kept him out of the country all this time? What had made him take a different nationality?
I hadn’t asked any of those questions. Instead, I had turned away from him to help Ingrid take the statement of a man who hadn’t told the truth. I realised I no longer doubted that Theo had been Andre Nieuwkerk. Even though his sister didn’t believe it and his ex-partner didn’t know anything about it, deep down I felt that he had been telling the truth. Watching the footage that Daniel had recorded had convinced me.
Andre Nieuwkerk had come back to Amsterdam to let everybody know that he wasn’t dead, but had ended up killing himself.
Chapter 11
As soon as I walked into the office the next morning, before I’d even taken my coat off, Charlie started talking. ‘It was him,’ he said, as happy as a child with a particularly nice Sinterklaas present, or maybe a dog with a new bouncy ball. ‘It was definitely him.’ When he saw that Thomas wasn’t smiling, the grin dropped from his face.
‘What the DNA test showed,’Thomas corrected him, ‘was that the dead man,Theo Brand, was definitely Julia Nieuwkerk’s brother.’
‘So he was Andre Nieuwkerk,’ I said. I wasn’t surprised at what they were telling me.
‘Theoretically, there could have been another brother.’
‘There’s no evidence of another brother,’ I said. I’d checked the birth registers beforehand.
‘I know. I’m just telling Charlie what conclusions we can officially draw.’
I knew he was just nit-picking to be annoying.
I wanted to check a couple of things before we went to talk to the boss about it. Maybe my conversation with my mother last night had influenced me, but I was struck by the way Paul Verbaan’s family had been hounded by the press. Daniel had only been thirteen years old when Andre had gone missing, but by the time the skeleton had been found and mistakenly identified, he’d just turned eighteen and was therefore fair game. He’d been photographed at his father’s funeral, a young man in mourning, in a dark suit, standing all alone at a graveside. There was no sign of his mother, the woman who according to Andre had known all about the sexual abuse and blamed him.
They must have taken this photo with a telescopic lens, because Daniel seemed unaware that he’d been observed. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what must have been going on in his head.
Or what he must have felt when Theo turned up on his doorstep. Not Theo, I corrected myself. Andre. Daniel had hit him. Had anything happened afterwards?
‘Do you think that maybe it wasn’t suicide?’ Charlie asked, as if he could tell the direction in which my thoughts were going.
‘There’s no evidence of that,’ Thomas said.
I found exactly what I wanted on one of the front pages: a photo of Andre and Julia Nieuwkerk’s parents, taken at a press conference to say how grateful they were to the police for finally finding their son, so that, even though their hopes had been dashed, they now at least knew what had happened to him. The father had a rough-hewn farmer’s face with a large nose and ears. He could have come straight out of Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters. I understood why Julia had laughed when I’d asked if the man who’d come to her door had looked like her father. There seemed to be no greater contrast than between the well-dressed man I’d seen that morning and this man in his old-fashioned clothes. The mother had tears streaming down her face.
The abused kid had been thrown out of the house by those parents, fled to London, made a life for himself and then came back to Amsterdam thirty years later, only to kill himself. Daniel’s words, that he’d wanted to stir things up, kept going round in my head. It could so easily be true. He could have come back to cause trouble for his abuser’s family.
‘He met with Julia Nieuwkerk and with Daniel Verbaan and told both of them that he was Andre. Don’t you think it’s suspicious?’ Charlie said. ‘Daniel punched him when he came to his house and was careful to film him leaving. When he came to Julia’s flat, he was very angry. He was convinced Andre’s family had known all along that he wasn’t dead.’
‘You’ve watched too many
movies,’ I said, but I didn’t mind him throwing theories around. I wanted him to think. ‘Daniel would want him alive, so that he could clear his father’s name.’
‘He had the recording,’ Charlie said. ‘Surely that’s enough.’
‘He would want Andre to withdraw the abuse claim too—’
‘Let’s go.’ Thomas interrupted us as if he knew that I was procrastinating. ‘Let’s talk to the boss.’
But before he had even got up, Ingrid came into the office, closing the door behind her. ‘So did you hear?’ She said it softly, as if she wanted to make sure that nobody else who had any interest in this case could listen in. She sat down at my old desk.
I didn’t know what she was talking about. ‘What happened?’
‘It’s spiralling out of control. Bauer thinks we’ve got grounds to arrest him.’ Detective Inspector Bauer was her boss. ‘And then the commissaris got word of it and was over the moon. He insisted on scheduling a press conference straight away. I only just managed to stop him.’
I didn’t have to ask her who she was talking about. I threw a glance at Thomas, who pretended to be interested in what was on his screen. ‘Bauer didn’t even try to stop him, I guess?’
Ingrid shook her head.
‘That figures.’ I’d worked with DI Bauer on a case before. I knew exactly what he was like and where his priorities lay. ‘So now what?’
‘I persuaded him to just call Erol in for questioning,’ Ingrid said. ‘We’ve got no evidence.’
‘I know what the pressure’s like.’
‘It’s a mess. But you know, maybe Yilmaz did it. It’s a possibility.’
I shook my head. ‘Don’t go there. Not just because you need to make arrests.’
‘He could have beaten up Peter de Waal, you know that.’
‘Sure, if de Waal had said someone had beaten him with a baseball bat, I might have believed it was Yilmaz. But even then it would have been his word against Yilmaz’s and we couldn’t have done anything. Not without a witness or CCTV. Not without any forensic evidence. I’m guessing you haven’t found any traces of blood on Yilmaz?’
‘You know we found nothing.’
‘Has Peter de Waal changed his testimony at all?’ Thomas asked.
‘Nope, he’s still sticking with what he originally said.’
‘That he came out of a bar, heard someone say his name, turned around, and Erol Yilmaz punched him in the face?’
‘Yup, that’s it.’
‘What time was that? Around three a.m.?’ I said.
‘That’s right.’
‘I’m guessing he was far from sober.’
Ingrid stayed quiet for a bit, then nodded and tapped the armrests of her chair with both hands. ‘Thanks, Lotte.’ She got up.
‘Shouldn’t we help her?’ Charlie said as soon as she was out of earshot.
‘You can help her by not talking about this to anybody,’ Thomas said.
Charlie grinned and drew his finger across his mouth to indicate that his lips were sealed. His suggestion made me think, though. There was a thin line between helping and interfering, and I would do Ingrid an injustice if I stepped over it. She would ask if she needed more concrete help, as she had done that first morning, when she’d called me to the crime scene in the Lange Niezel.
I knew that whatever my motivation was, it didn’t matter a great deal to CI Moerdijk. Just because I thought something was important didn’t mean that he was automatically going to agree. I’d worked for him long enough. There were some real advantages to not changing teams and not changing reporting lines.
‘I heard,’ was the first thing he said when I came through the door of his office.
‘What are we going to do?’
‘You’ll want to investigate,’ he said. The other advantage was that he knew what I wanted to do too.
‘Do you disagree?’ Thomas asked.
‘Not necessarily,’ the boss said. ‘The story is going to come out, I know that. As soon as the press get hold of it, we’ll be on the back foot. We can’t be seen to be doing nothing. We made a terrible mistake all those years ago.’
Of course it had been a miscarriage of justice, but watching that footage of Theo telling Daniel about the abuse made the fact that the abuser had been falsely accused of murder feel less important. That said, I’d never before been so pleased to be involved with an exercise to cover our backs.
‘We need to be seen to be making amends for that, and of course we’re the right team for the job. I just don’t know how much we can do, and you have to be careful what you say to the families.’
‘Andre Nieuwkerk wasn’t the Body in the Dunes,’ Thomas said, ‘so someone else has been murdered. We should start with the same list of missing men. Check if any of them have turned up.’
I hadn’t thought of that. I’d been so preoccupied with Andre and with Paul Verbaan’s family that I’d almost forgotten that a young man really had been killed.
That there was another victim out there.
‘You do realise that you don’t have anything we didn’t have in the early nineties?’ the CI said.
‘We’ve got improved forensics,’ I said. ‘We can raise the skeleton and do a DNA test.’
‘You didn’t check?’ the CI said. ‘How unlike you. The remains don’t exist any more. The family cremated the body.’
‘Ah shit,’ Thomas said.
‘We can—’ I started, but the boss interrupted me.
‘I’m serious,’ he said. ‘Don’t assume that you’re going to be able to solve this just because you’ve got more modern techniques. We need to prepare ourselves for failure.’
‘Even by your normally optimistic standards, that’s quite something,’ I said.
‘You know what I mean. Go through the motions, keep the families happy, especially Paul Verbaan’s.’
Verbaan’s family, the abuser’s family, needed to be pacified now that it was certain he’d been incorrectly accused of murder. I understood it, but I didn’t feel good about it. ‘I’ll see what I can do. Try to get the commissaris to talk about this instead of those assaults.’
‘Talk about a police failure?’
I shook my head. ‘It’s talking about a failure or creating another one. Peter de Waal is a very unreliable witness. Nobody else has come forward.’
‘Don’t interfere, Lotte.’
‘I don’t want to interfere.’ I paused and looked at CI Moerdijk. ‘The victim was drunk and the assault clearly didn’t happen in the way he described.’
‘We need to show some progress, after all those interviews the commissaris did.’
‘He’s making a problem for himself. He doesn’t need to do those interviews; it’s not as if he’s an elected official or something.’
The CI gave me a long glance. Before he could make a decision either way, his phone rang. As if he’d known we were talking about him, the commissaris was calling. He’d heard about the Body in the Dunes, and could we come and speak to him about it?
The commissaris looked busy behind his desk. ‘Give me a second,’ he said. ‘I just need to finish this and then I’m all yours.’
I didn’t mind. It gave me a chance to mentally prepare. This was the first time I’d spoken to him in person. He’d only joined us a month ago. His sleek hair reminded me of an otter I’d seen in a nature documentary the other night. It was combed back, with a side parting. I remembered that on the morning I’d first met Theo – Andre, I corrected myself – the commissaris had done that interview and wearing his cap hadn’t even ruffled his hair. I imagined that if I touched it, it would be hard, slicked down with a mixture of gel and hairspray.
He was dressed in his uniform. In my jumper, I felt at a disadvantage, as if my casual clothes diminished me. I wondered if the CI felt like that even though he was at least wearing a suit. He sat down and I took the seat next to him. Thomas had smartly made himself scarce and escaped. He was going with Charlie to give Julia the news. I would have pre
ferred to be the person doing that, but I’d got stuck with the official bureaucracy.
Behind the commissaris, a row of framed photos lined the wall. It was a cabinet of high-profile criminals that our police force had apprehended. Many of them were posing in front of their house or car, or with a powerful person. I knew why those particular photos had been chosen. They said that no matter how wealthy or well connected you were, you could not get away with breaking the law.
What was more interesting was that they were exactly the same photos as the previous commissaris had had on his wall. The new guy hadn’t changed them at all. These were all cases that had been solved before Commissaris Smits had even been in Amsterdam. Was he trying to take credit for his predecessor’s work, or did he just not really care what his office looked like?
I wished I knew. It would give me a useful insight into his character. It was strange to sit here and really have no idea how this man was going to react to what had happened.
That he was new should work in our favour: if I were him, I would want to reopen the case and make amends. He could put the blame on the old team of twenty-five years ago and promise to do a better job.
‘Right,’ he said, and turned away from his computer screen to focus on us. It was odd to have a commissaris who was this young. He couldn’t be more than a few years older than me. ‘So, you’ve unearthed a huge police failure and miscarriage of justice.’
‘I wouldn’t put it like that.’
He waved his hand. ‘I’m not blaming you, I’m stating the facts. This is how it’s going to look. We misidentified a skeleton and the man who was under investigation for the murder committed suicide. Have I got that correct?’
‘He wasn’t an innocent man.’
The commissaris raised his eyebrows. ‘He was innocent of murdering Andre Nieuwkerk, because Andre was still alive.’
‘He didn’t murder him, but he sexually abused him. Andre was his pupil at school, only fifteen at the time. And there seems to have been evidence that he wasn’t the only victim.’
A Death at the Hotel Mondrian (Lotte Meerman Book 5) Page 9