‘Fine.’ He made a few notes. ‘A sexual predator, but not a murderer. That means there’ll be fewer complaints.’
‘Complaints?’
‘If we can avoid any “hard-working teacher killed himself under wrongful police pressure” headlines, that will make things easier.’
I thought back to Daniel’s attitude yesterday. ‘His son might not accept the “sexual predator” label.’
He picked up his pen and crossed out what he’d just written. ‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know the exact details, but the son, Daniel Verbaan, sent us footage of a conversation he’d had with Andre Nieuwkerk on the day before he died. When they talked about the historic abuse, Daniel pointed out that the other boys withdrew their statements after his father killed himself. Nieuwkerk did describe the sexual acts, though, and he also claimed that the teacher’s wife knew about the abuse.’
‘Send me a copy of that footage. I want to see it.’
‘Of course. But to be honest, I don’t think we should talk about that. We don’t need to go on the attack. We should just be open and upfront about what happened.’ We should let everybody know that Andre Nieuwkerk had been alive. We should fulfil his wishes. ‘We could just say that improvements in forensic technology have allowed us to correct a previous mistaken identity. And we should inform the press. They’ll find out anyway.’
‘What about raising the skeleton? The original Body in the Dunes?’
‘I heard that they cremated the body,’ I said. ‘But I haven’t been able to check that yet.’ I threw the CI a glance, but he remained silent. It was unlike him to be so tongue-tied. I wondered what it must be like for him to report to someone younger than he was.
‘Okay, so find out what the deal was with the guy.’
‘Andre Nieuwkerk?’
‘Yes. Where he’d been, why he didn’t come forward. Why he had a British passport. Things like that.’
‘Sure, we’ll do that.’
‘He definitely committed suicide?’
‘There’s no evidence of foul play.’
‘Could it have been accidental?’
‘That’s what we’d like to call it, of course. There was no suicide note. I spoke to his ex-partner, who talked to him the morning he died, and he said there’d been nothing to suggest he was going to take his own life.’
‘Prescription painkillers?’
I wanted to smile and praise him for being well informed, but I didn’t of course. ‘That’s correct,’ I said. His short sentences made me fall into a similar pattern.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I think I’m all set with that.’
‘So you’ll schedule a press conference?’
‘If we can get the family to agree. Nieuwkerk’s family. There’s a sister, right?’
‘Julia. Yes.’
‘We need to show a united front.’
I nodded. ‘I’ll talk to her. Sir, can I say something about Peter de Waal?’
His eyes shot from his paper. ‘What about him?’
‘His witness statement isn’t credible.’
‘It’s not Yilmaz?’ he asked, but he didn’t seem overly surprised. Maybe he’d been aware all along that Bauer was stretching the evidence so that he’d get an arrest and improve his closure rate. I wished I’d spoken to him as soon as Ingrid started to voice her concerns.
‘I don’t know. All I’m saying is that it would never stand up in court.’ There was no need to throw Bauer under the bus. ‘If there’s no evidence apart from de Waal’s statement, we shouldn’t focus on Yilmaz.’
‘Fine. I’ll take it up with Bauer. Thanks, Detective Meerman.’
For a second I thought of saying that he should call me Lotte. But that would have been weird.
Chapter 12
I looked at my watch. It was just after 4 p.m. I was tired and thought it would do me good to get some fresh air, even though it was almost dark outside. I shut down my computer, put my coat on and was going down the stairs when I bumped into Ingrid.
Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘I went back to the hospital,’ she said.
‘When?’
‘After we talked. I wasn’t happy with de Waal’s statement. As you said, if Erol Yilmaz had punched him, I would have expected some marks on his hands. So I went to ask more questions.’
I felt proud of my ex-teammate. ‘You did the right thing,’ I said.
‘I looked at him, you know, really checked him out to match up his injuries with what he told us. To be honest, his face didn’t look as if it’d received just the one punch.’
‘I know.’ I remembered that from when we’d both been to see him. His right eye socket had been badly bruised. His nose had been broken. He’d had a split lip. His entire face had looked purple against the white of the pillow.
‘I asked him again what happened, and as I was talking, I studied the cuts on his face. The skin around his eye socket wasn’t broken. It hadn’t been a knuckleduster. He was adamant that it had been Erol Yilmaz. That he’d heard his name, turned around and then Erol had punched him.’ She rubbed her head, making her short hair stand up in spikes. ‘His wife was there as well. She clearly didn’t like my questions and said that the police were to blame for this. That she’d told us Erol was violent but that we’d just ignored her.’
‘There had been recent threats?’
‘No, nothing recent. It all seemed to line up with what Erol said: that he’d stopped harassing the couple. I asked him what he was wearing,’ Ingrid said.
‘Who?’
‘I asked Peter de Waal what Erol had been wearing. He said he wasn’t sure, that he’d mainly looked at his face. Then I asked him about his hands.’ She gave me a meaningful glance. ‘We both noticed there were no marks on Erol’s hands when we interviewed him. So I asked him: bare hands or gloves.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said he was absolutely sure about that one: his assailant had had bare hands.’
‘Peter de Waal had been drinking heavily, he heard someone shout, then he turned around and was punched in the face by a man with bare hands.’ A very drunk man was not a credible witness.
‘Funnily enough,’ Ingrid said, ‘I can almost believe that the assault happened like that. It fits with the pattern of the attacks so far. Some of the other victims said a similar thing: that they heard someone shout behind them, turned round and then got their lights punched out. I think he just saw a man and assumed it was Erol because he’d been harassing him.’
And after he’d said it, it became hard to back out and harder with every time he confirmed it. I’d seen that before: that the more people said something, the more they believed it themselves. But another possibility also crossed my mind. ‘Maybe he’s setting him up,’ I said. ‘Maybe he’s accusing him on purpose.’
‘Why would he do that?’ Ingrid said.
‘Because he can? Because the guy had been harassing him and now Peter is using this to get his own back? To make Erol’s life difficult for a bit?’
Ingrid nodded slowly. ‘Then he might not back down. Can you come with me to interview one of his younger colleagues? He’s been very hesitant to talk to me and I want to follow up.’
‘Seriously? Me?’ I looked around, but there was nobody else in the corridor. ‘What about Bauer?’
‘I don’t want to go with him. He’s telling me to stay away from … well, from anything negative.’
‘Really.’ I looked at my watch and then back at Ingrid. ‘Now?’
‘Just half an hour,’ she said. ‘Please?’
I didn’t want to go, but somehow I found it impossible to ignore her plea.
We went down the stairs to the basement car park and Ingrid drove us to the premises of the place where Peter de Waal worked. We were shown to a meeting room. A young man stood up from one of the seats at the large white table. ‘Hi, I’m Frank Termeulen,’ he said. He had slicked-back hair and he looked too small for his pinstriped suit and pink shirt. The sleeves
of his jacket came down to halfway over his hands. Almost as if he’d borrowed his father’s clothes. ‘I’m sorry, I should have met with you sooner,’ he said.
Ingrid held out her badge, but Frank waved it away as if he wanted her to keep it hidden. We took seats next to each other on the opposite side of the table from him.
‘Thanks for talking to us,’ she said. Her voice was dampened by the wallpaper. At the far end of the table a projector was ready to beam a presentation onto the wall.
I was going to let her run with this. I picked up one of the pencils marked with a small golden crown and the words Konings Markt.
‘You work for Peter?’ she asked.
‘He heads up this office.’ Frank nodded as he spoke, as if he would seem more honest if he agreed with himself. ‘He’s my boss’s boss.’
The door of the meeting room opened and a smartly dressed man poked his head around it. ‘Sorry to interrupt,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d check if you wanted any coffee? Tea? Anything?’
‘Yes please,’ I said. ‘I’ll have a coffee.’
‘I’m okay with just water,’ Frank said.
The man left.
‘That was my boss,’ he said with an apologetic smile.
‘I know,’ Ingrid said. ‘I talked to him yesterday.’
Frank opened one of the bottles of mineral water that stood in the centre of the table and filled a glass. His hands were shaking. He looked almost too young to work. Maybe the nerves and the fright had taken a few years off his face.
Did you get coffee yesterday? I wrote on my notepad and pushed it to Ingrid.
Nope, she wrote back as Frank filled glasses of water for us as well.
‘You were with Peter that evening, weren’t you?’ Ingrid asked.
‘Yes, I was. It was a company do. Our whole team had to go because the big boss had come over from the States to visit clients here in Amsterdam.’
‘And you went straight from work?’
Frank nodded again. ‘Yes. We had meetings until five then came back to the office. A group of us were supposed to go to the restaurant together. We had dinner at six.’
‘It’s a restaurant that you go to a lot?’
‘Yeah, it’s close to here.’The nods that accompanied every syllable were beginning to get annoying. It must be a nervous tic. ‘Sometimes there’s a band playing. It’s a pretty cool place.’
As if Ingrid was asking the questions to get a dinner recommendation.
‘Peter joined you later?’ Ingrid said. She must have heard that from the other people she’d interviewed. I had the feeling that some of her questions were for my benefit.
‘That’s right.’ His eyes dropped down to the table and he picked up his glass and turned it round in his fingers.
‘Tony told me that you were late turning up at the restaurant.’
As if he’d heard his name, Frank’s boss came back in with my coffee. It was only too obvious that he was doing this to eavesdrop; perhaps to make sure that Frank wasn’t telling us anything we shouldn’t know. The apparent control made me more interested in Frank’s story.
Frank didn’t say anything whilst his boss was within earshot but answered my question as soon as the door had shut behind him. ‘I was waiting for Peter and the big boss. We’d all agreed to meet downstairs but they didn’t turn up.’ The nodding stopped. ‘I waited fifteen minutes.’ He sounded as if he was explaining his actions to a headmistress who’d caught him misbehaving.
‘And then you left.’
‘No, I called Peter on his mobile a few times. Went straight to voicemail. But he knew where we were, so I left him a message to join us there.’
‘They arrived how much later?’
‘About an hour or so.’
‘Did you ask him where he’d been?’
Frank guffawed. ‘He’s not the kind of man to answer those sort of questions.’ He drank some of his water. ‘I didn’t even ask,’ he said more quietly.
‘Okay, so you had food and then went on to the bar in the red-light district?’
‘Yeah, that’s where they wanted to go. Some people went home but I think there were six of us who went to the bar. I’m not much of a drinker, but I thought I’d go with them.’
‘You stayed in the same bar for the rest of the evening?’
‘Yes,’ Frank said. ‘Until about half ten or so. Then the big boss said he’d had enough and called it a day. I was quite relieved. I need my sleep in order to function. Tony took the boss back to the hotel. It was on his way home anyway. Plus he probably wanted to chat to him about something. I don’t know.’
‘This was at half past ten?’ I asked. ‘You all left then?’
‘Well, most of us. Tony had told us beforehand that we should keep it tidy. The big boss apparently doesn’t like it when people get too drunk, and we had an important meeting here at nine the next morning.’
‘So it was almost frowned upon to stay, but Peter didn’t come with you when you left?’
He nodded in response. ‘Yeah, that’s right. He stayed.’
‘Was anybody else with him?’
‘Nope.’
I looked up from my notebook. ‘He was by himself in that bar for the next five hours?’
‘Yup.’
‘Didn’t you think that was strange?’ I asked.
‘He … erm …’ Frank scratched the back of his head, then picked up a pencil.
I let the silence last.
Finally he filled it with ‘He refused to come.’
‘He refused?’
‘I tried to get him to leave.’ He gestured around him. ‘A bunch of clients were supposed to come here for a presentation.’ The pitch of his voice was rising. He opened the bottle of water in front of him and filled his glass again. After he’d drunk it, he sounded calmer. ‘So yes, I really tried to get him to leave, but he became aggressive. Started shouting that I wasn’t his mother, that he could look after himself.’
‘Was anybody else still there?
‘Tony had left with the boss, but a guy who lives around the corner from the office tried as well, said he had to go home to his family and that Peter should go home too, but Peter wasn’t having any of it. We tried for half an hour and then we left him there.’ He filled the glass again.
I looked at Ingrid.
‘I was waiting for him to show up the next morning, and when he didn’t, I called him. I was sure he was still in bed with a hangover, but I spoke to his wife and she told me he was in the hospital.’ He swallowed. ‘As soon as I found out, I called the clients to cancel. The big boss was angry. Maybe we should have gone ahead with the meeting – Peter wouldn’t have said much anyway – but I panicked. I didn’t know what to do.’ His voice had a note of anger. ‘I shouldn’t say this, I’ll probably get sacked when he gets back to the office, but he always does this. He stays out late and I have to do all the work the next morning.’
‘He can’t stop drinking?’
‘I guess so.’
I looked over at Ingrid. ‘So on the night he was assaulted, he’d been drinking a lot, he was argumentative and he was refusing to go home.’
Frank nodded with a miserable look on his face.
‘And all his colleagues left that bar five hours before he was beaten up.’
He nodded again.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You’ve been a great help.’
The guy looked as if he already regretted talking to us.
Chapter 13
It was Thursday evening, the evening that Mark would normally come to my place. This time, we decided to go out for a drink and something to eat. Thursdays were good evenings to go out: the city centre was lively but not jam-packed. Plus my cooking was terrible. It was a good solution all round.
We chose one of the many bars that specialised in home-cooked-style food, where they might only have one or two dishes. Like many of my favourite things in my beloved home town, this café warmly embraced its past but also acknowledged that time
had irrevocably moved on. What had been a greengrocer’s in a previous life was now a light and spacious bar called Groen. Behind the large windows where fruit and veg would have been displayed, an elderly couple sipped their beers in silent contentment. The café had retained many of the original features, which gave it a quirky trendiness, such as the cubicles behind the bar that had once held pots of herbs and spices and now housed glasses of different shapes and sizes. A pregnant woman sat at a table by herself, looking at her glass of water as if she hoped it would miraculously turn into wine. The evening was quiet and peaceful. It was just after 6 p.m. and already pitch dark, but a few people sat on the bar’s large terrace, wearing their winter coats zipped up all the way to their chins, convinced by their need for nicotine that it was a good idea to be outside.
Mark and I were at our usual corner table, which gave us privacy. Unless someone wanted to use the toilet, of course, because then they had to walk behind Mark to get to the stairs. I liked this bar. I liked our evenings here. Two middle-aged ladies in colourful tracksuits were sitting a couple of tables along. We had exchanged greetings when they’d come in; they were often here on Thursdays too.
Mark tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, careful to keep his arm high over the small tub of mustard in the centre of the table. I reached out, held his hand in place and ran my thumb over the inside of his wrist. I felt his heartbeat. Or maybe it was mine. Not being able to tell seemed more intimate than a kiss.
‘I love you,’ he mouthed silently. The words brought a smile to my face. I mouthed them back.
Through the open door, a gust of wind brought in the sound of the Line 10 tram rattling past. It also brought in a group of women, one of whom I recognised.
Julia Nieuwkerk saw me too. She said something to her friends and then came over to our table.
‘I’m sorry to interrupt,’ she said.
Not sorry enough not to have done it.
‘It’s such a mess in my head,’ she continued, ‘and I’m really worried.’
‘What are you worried about?’ I said.
‘I’m worried about me.’ She laughed. ‘Okay, that sounds weird. It’s just that I feel as if I’m standing on quicksand. Everything I believed about myself and my life has turned out to be wrong, and I don’t know what to do.’ She took a chair from the table next to us, turned it round and sat down. ‘I know that DNA test wasn’t wrong, but it feels so strange.’
A Death at the Hotel Mondrian (Lotte Meerman Book 5) Page 10