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

by Anja de Jager

  With the Body in the Dunes, we hadn’t done that. After all, hadn’t we identified him? Hadn’t the police closed the case? The Nieuwkerk family had held a funeral for their son. Their brother. Had cremated him. Had closure. A false closure.

  After the police had decided that this was Andre Nieuwkerk, they’d also decided that he’d most likely been murdered on the day he’d gone missing. That had been four years before the remains were found.

  I took a blue marker pen and walked up to our whiteboard. I drew a horizontal line to represent the timeline. The skeleton was found in April 1993. Given the stage of decomposition, the young man must have died between three and five years before then. So between 1988 and 1990. I marked those dates with my pen. Andre had been reported missing in February 1989, so that was comfortably within the timeline. I drew a cross in the middle of the section.

  Charlie came in. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

  I pointed to the whiteboard. ‘This is when Andre went missing. The police decided he’d been murdered the same day.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ he said as he took his coat off and hung it over the back of his chair.

  ‘Right. But there was no evidence really to suggest that he had been murdered at that point. There would have been a fourteen-month window after he went missing.’

  ‘Plus we know he definitely wasn’t murdered then,’ Charlie said, ‘because he was still alive. Can we go to the place where the skeleton was found?’

  ‘Do you want to go to the place where he was found?’ Thomas said. ‘We should look at the site.’

  I put down the page I was looking at and nodded. Getting out of the office wasn’t a bad idea. We waited for Thomas, and together we set out on the thirty-kilometre drive to the dunes near Haarlem.

  Time changed things. It changed how we looked at this case. What had been an astounding success for the police had now been revealed to be an abject failure. Time had also changed the landscape around me. At first glance, you might think these dunes had been there for ever, that the white sand that peeked from between the green marram grass was the same as it had been twenty-five years ago. Like then, these rolling hills stretched all the way to the beach. But I could see the changes as I looked at the photos the team had taken at the time.

  Decades of wind and rain had changed the landscape. The wind had blown sand from one place and deposited it in another. The path that had been a narrow red-brick track twenty-five years ago had now been asphalted. As far as I could tell, it was taking the same route, but I couldn’t be entirely sure.

  The width of the dunes would have changed; how far in the sea came would have altered. The wind whipped my hair around my face and a sand stream moved like water around my feet. With every step I took, I was destroying a piece of the dune as well as creating a new one. This particular part was not open to the public, the fragile landscape protected. It had already been a protected area when the body was found. It was the main reason that it had lain here undiscovered for years, until it had decomposed to a skeleton.

  My mobile rang. It was Julia. She apologised for bothering me again, but she had realised that she had to deal with the situation. She was going to go to London to look at her brother’s flat and sort out his belongings. But she was worried about going alone; could I go with her?

  I didn’t let my annoyance show about being used as a babysitter. I told her she was doing the right thing but it wasn’t really in my remit to go along with her. I suggested she take a friend because I appreciated this was going to be hard for her. She sounded disappointed when she said that she understood and disconnected the call.

  I went back to looking at the photos. I could tell that marram grass had grown above the remains by the time the skeleton was unearthed. The block of vegetation was particularly lush, having had access to far more nutrients than would normally be found in the white sand.

  ‘They thought the murderer drove here, probably with the body in the boot of his car,’ Charlie said. He was holding another set of pages in his hand. The paper flapped in the wind and he needed both hands to keep it still. ‘That makes sense, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it does,’ I said. ‘I think he was carried from the car to the nearest spot in the off-limit zone that couldn’t be seen from the road.’ From where we were standing, a dune top obscured our view of the road, but even though it was a gloomy morning, I could still see a few people on the walking paths, out with their dogs.

  ‘Okay,’ Charlie said. ‘Can we assume he was murdered somewhere else, driven to the dunes and buried here?’

  ‘That’s what the police thought when they still believed Andre had been murdered. That Paul Verbaan had driven him here at night.’ I shrugged. ‘It seems the logical explanation. During the day, too many people would have come along the road, as it takes you to the beach.’ A woman with a dog looked in my direction, obviously curious as to why three people were out walking in a restricted part of the dunes. ‘Even on a day like today, there’s no way you could carry a body from a car and not get noticed.’

  Charlie studied the pages again. ‘It was a shallow grave. The person was in a hurry.’ He glanced from where we were standing to the path higher up. ‘He rolled the body down.’

  ‘Or carried him,’ I said. The body would have decomposed quickly in a shallow grave. If the sand had been dry, the body would have been preserved better, but in the Netherlands, it rains a lot. Part of the reason why the dunes were a restricted area was that they contained large sand-filtered reservoirs that supplied drinking water to most of the coastal towns. The rainwater would have seeped through the sand, speeding up decomposition.

  ‘It’s a two-hour drive from Elspeet,’ Thomas said.

  ‘At one point, they speculated that Verbaan was still meeting with Andre after he’d left Elspeet. That maybe he had actually been killed closer to here: Haarlem or Amsterdam.’ I rubbed my eyes. I’d had a restless night and had been relieved when it was morning and I could go back to work.

  ‘Do you think they would actually have convicted Verbaan for the murder if he hadn’t killed himself?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘Probably not,’ I said. ‘Without knowing what day or even what year Andre was killed, it would have been virtually impossible to prove.’ The original team never found the car the murderer had used, but then what traces of evidence would there have been four years later? The lack of evidence hadn’t bothered them, and they’d decided the car would have been easy to get rid of.

  ‘Did you see the paper this morning?’ Thomas asked.

  I nodded. A newspaper had been lying on the doormat in our communal area as I’d left home. Political correctness gone mad, the headline screamed. Turkish attacker with restraining order not arrested by the police.

  I’d scanned the article. The journalist had clearly talked to Peter de Waal and his wife.

  I saw who did it but the police won’t believe me, victim says. They treated me like the criminal.

  ‘No mention of the fact that Peter de Waal was drunk,’ I said, ‘or that it all happened in a second.’

  ‘Of course not; that would make the story far less interesting.’

  I tried to push it out of my head. I had enough problems dealing with Andre Nieuwkerk’s case. With the Body in the Dunes. ‘Let’s just focus on this,’ I said.

  ‘The boss said he thinks it’s pointless,’ Charlie said. ‘That it’s just an exercise in covering our backs.’

  Thomas had filled him in on our conversation then, as they were going to Julia’s.

  ‘Maybe it is,’ I said. ‘To be honest, from looking through these reports, the previous team did a pretty decent job. Apart from misidentifying the victim, of course. A lot of the cold cases that get solved are because of the improvements in forensics, sure, but even more are solved because of things like this.’

  Charlie frowned. ‘Things like what?’

  ‘The kind of thing that drove Andre to come back and talk to people. We still don’t know why h
e did that, but maybe he felt guilty.’ I looked at an empty sweet wrapper that was being blown about in the wind. ‘Guilt can be a very strong driving force. As can fear.’

  I looked around me. The answers wouldn’t be found here, I was sure of that. I made my way out of the dunes. It was heavy going as my feet kept sinking down into the loose sand. Slowly I made my way up the hill, then back down to the road. With solid asphalt under my feet once more, I wiped the sand off my boots.

  I looked through the file for the original missing persons report. The name on it pulled me up: Andre’s disappearance had been reported by his sister. Julia Nieuwkerk, his twelve-year-old sister, was the one who’d gone to the police four days after he’d left.

  Of course, I knew now that there were a lot of details missing: there was no mention of the blazing row Julia said her parents had had with her brother the evening he disappeared. The evening they’d thrown him out of their house. Nothing about Paul Verbaan’s wife coming to the house.

  According to the report, Julia had said he’d just gone missing that evening. Had walked out of the house and hadn’t come back. She’d said there’d been no reason for it. She’d said she didn’t understand what had caused it.

  I put the page down. It was hard to read.

  I decided to check a different angle. If Andre had gone to the UK, he must have had a passport. There must be a paper trail of him giving up Dutch citizenship.

  A paper trail that the police had missed.

  I could see how this could have happened: the information had all been there, but they just hadn’t looked. They’d identified a young man who’d gone missing four years earlier and they’d never checked to see if there had been any signs of him abroad. The police could have looked into that when his sister had first filed the report, but this was before everything had been computerised, and he had fallen through the cracks. With runaway teenagers, it was often the parents who insisted the police continued to check every detail. In Andre’s case, that pressure wouldn’t have been there. His parents hadn’t even considered their son ‘missing’, as they had shown him the door. The police would have stopped investigating very quickly, and probably well before Andre had changed his nationality.

  I could also see how Andre might not have realised that his sister had reported him missing. He had probably thought: they wanted me to go, I’ve taken my stuff. What did they think I was going to do?

  It was even more plausible that, being thrown out of the house, with nowhere to go, he hadn’t thought at all.

  Had his parents expected him to come back a few days later? Was that why his sister had gone to the police when he hadn’t returned? I turned back to reading the files.

  What evidence had there been against Paul Verbaan? I looked for the reports on his questioning. The answer was: not a great deal. Yes, more boys had come forward about abuse, as Andre had said on that recording. The rumours were there.

  Verbaan had said that it was all lies.

  The police of course had not believed him. The newspapers hadn’t believed him and had put pictures of him on the front page. The reverend had kicked him out of the church.

  And then he’d killed himself and nobody was going to believe him ever again.

  I realised that none of the police work from twenty-five years ago was going to be useful to me. This had been an investigation into a murder that had never happened. I might as well tape up this box again and send it straight back to the archives, because it was all pointless.

  We had to start from scratch with identifying the victim.

  I sat back in my chair. Andre’s family had cremated the body, as if they wanted to erase him totally from the face of the earth. All the forensic advances we’d made in the twenty-five years since this case was originally investigated were useless, because we had nothing. There was no evidence left apart from what was in these boxes.

  If we wanted to reopen the case, we’d have to do it without a body, without a proper time of death – or even a year of death – and without knowing who the victim was.

  It was impossible.

  So why did I still want to try? Why did I feel I had a duty to investigate?

  If I’d taken Andre seriously that morning, I could have asked him things. I could have asked him what he’d known. Whether he’d just run away from difficult parents or if there was more behind him leaving the country. I could have asked him why he’d been so adamant about changing nationality and why he’d hated the Netherlands so much. I could have asked him why he’d come back, why now; why he had tried to talk to his sister and to Daniel.

  But I hadn’t taken him seriously, all the talks he’d had with people had gone very differently from what he’d expected, and he’d killed himself.

  It wasn’t just that, though. There was also this feeling that twenty-five years ago the police had committed … well, not a crime, but at least a miscarriage of justice. A mistake that we had touted as a huge achievement. Clearly I wasn’t responsible for that, but didn’t I owe it to all involved to at least have a go? Try to investigate?

  Thomas stared at the timeline I’d drawn on the whiteboard earlier. ‘We should look at missing young men again. We should check anybody who disappeared during this time.’ He tapped with his marker pen on the section that I’d marked out earlier.

  ‘We need to check three years’ worth?’ Charlie’s voice was that of a child being told to do his homework.

  He probably wished he’d stayed with the traffic police.

  Looking at this paperwork, especially the missing persons report, made me think about Julia’s phone call again. I called her and said I wanted to talk to her. She told me to come over to hers. I asked her to give me half an hour.

  Chapter 15

  The orange builder’s jacket and the boots were no longer in Julia’s hallway. I wondered what had happened to them but didn’t ask. We sat down at the big table in her kitchen. I was facing her bed at the other side of the room. This was the problem with studio flats: when someone came to visit, you displayed parts of your life you probably wanted to keep behind closed doors. I didn’t necessarily want to know what colour bedsheets Julia had, or that she hadn’t straightened the duvet since she’d got out of bed.

  ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ she asked. She had her back towards the bed. Maybe she didn’t want to see her own messy room either.

  ‘We’re in your flat; you can do what you want.’

  ‘What’s up?’ she said.

  ‘Remember that request from the commissaris? He wants to do a press conference about your brother and he’d really like you there.’

  ‘I bet he would. He needs me to back him up, right?’ She rummaged through her handbag until she found her lighter. ‘I’m there to show that I’m not pissed off with him. What if I say no?’

  ‘The press conference will still go ahead. It won’t look good for the police force if you’re not there.’

  ‘I’ve got no reason to help him.’

  ‘But what happened wasn’t his fault. Misidentifying your brother wasn’t his fault.’

  She took a drag from her cigarette. ‘I know, I know. I’m just so pissed off. At the time, it seemed so amazing that after all those years they’d managed to identify my brother. That Verbaan got some punishment.’

  It hadn’t actually been the police who’d done that, but I knew better than to say it was the church who’d judged the man.

  ‘That it was all wrong has just hit me really hard. I can’t believe they messed it up so badly.’

  ‘This was before DNA was widely used. Plus we all make mistakes, don’t you think?’ I had definitely made my share of them. I couldn’t imagine that Julia had always been right either. We were human, after all, however much the general public wanted to think otherwise.

  ‘I understand that,’ she said, ‘but what is this press conference going to be about? What do they want me to do?’

  ‘The commissaris is going to say that the police got it wrong twenty-five y
ears ago, that the Body in the Dunes was misidentified, because …’ I paused.

  ‘Because my brother came back and then died.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I know how these things work, Lotte, remember? No need to wrap me in cotton wool.’

  ‘He was still your brother.’ I said it kindly. ‘However much you’re used to this sort of thing from work, I know it has come as a shock to you.’

  ‘Sure.’ She tapped the cigarette against the ashtray. ‘He can go ahead with it, but I won’t be there.’

  ‘He wants to put up a united front.’

  ‘You can tell your commissaris that I have the utmost faith in the police force to get it right this time, but I don’t want to be involved. I didn’t recognise my own brother. I’m probably more to blame for this debacle than the commissaris is.’ She took a deep drag from the cigarette and looked at me through the smoke.

  I thought again about the papers I’d seen this morning, the ones that told me she’d been the one who’d gone to the police. She’d reported her brother missing against the wishes of her parents.

  ‘I know you refused before.’ She hesitated when I stayed silent, but then continued. ‘Please come to London with me, to look at Andre’s flat. I was given his things from the hotel; I have his keys, I have his address. I know I should go, but I really don’t want to do it by myself.’

  Previously I’d said no because I had been annoyed with Julia. Now I knew that she’d reported her brother missing. She’d done what she could at the time.

  What had I done?

  Deep down inside, I knew I was more to blame for Andre’s death than either Julia or the commissaris. ‘When are you going?’ I said.

  Chapter 16

  After I’d left Julia’s, I didn’t go home but drove north, to Alkmaar, to have a chat with my father. He’d still been a policeman when Andre’s murder case had been going on. I felt pulled in too many directions, all of which set me on a straight collision course with my ultimate boss. I wasn’t sure what to do about Peter de Waal’s case. Part of me wanted to just trust Ingrid, but I also knew that she was junior in her team and that her boyfriend would be keen to do what his boss wanted. I’d worked with her for long enough to know that she had integrity and would want to do the right thing, but being pushed from two sides might make her go in a direction that she wouldn’t normally.