All there was between Amsterdam and Alkmaar was a stretch of entirely flat land. A few small villages broke the monotony of the landscape, their churches the only mountains in sight. In the flat land, there was nothing to slow the wind down as it drove across the country, rushing straight from the sea. A strong gust grabbed my car and pulled it sideways. I had to steer against the wind. It seemed to get stronger by the hour. It had been windy yesterday, but today it felt more like a proper storm.
It was quiet on the road, though not so long ago rush hour had filled the grey tarmac with colourful cars. The land all around seemed pushed even flatter by the wind. Storms ruled the country at this time of year, when westerly winds brought rain, easterly winds frost, southerly winds sunshine and northerly winds all three together. The wind might not be your friend, but it was your constant neighbour.
I hit Alkmaar’s roundabout and then there were only a few turnings before I was at my father’s house. I parked behind his BMW. Every time I visited him, I thought that no ex-detective should live in a house this big. It had at one point made me wonder where he had got his money from, but now I knew it was all my stepmother Maaike’s. I rang the doorbell, which made an old-fashioned sound like a bicycle bell.
Maaike opened the door and greeted me with a big smile. She might technically be my stepmother, but it was weird to call someone that when you were already in your forties. She’d insisted I use her first name and I had been only too happy to comply.
My father came out of the kitchen.
‘Hi, Dad,’ I said.
He gave me a kiss on the cheek. ‘Hi, Lotte, how are you?’
‘Fine, I’m fine.’
‘You sit down,’ Maaike said, ‘and I’ll finish making dinner. And no work talk,’ she added.
I smiled and made a zip sign across my lips. I did have other topics of conversation. It was just that when I was with my father, we often ended up talking shop. There weren’t many people who understood the ins and outs of police work as well as he did. I waited until Maaike had gone back into the kitchen before I turned to him.
‘How’s work?’ he asked.
I grinned, because I wasn’t the first one to ignore Maaike’s request. It made me feel as if we were co-conspirators. ‘I’m stuck,’ I said, ‘and I really don’t know what to do.’
‘That doesn’t sound like you.’
‘Well, it’s a truly delightful mix of things. I’ve got an unsolvable case where the police did everything wrong, and a case where we’re doing too much wrong at the moment. You’d think we hadn’t learned our lessons from the past.’
‘People want us to find answers,’ my father said. ‘They’re used to watching crime shows on TV where the answers are hard to find but at the end there will be a solution to the riddle. It’s good in a way. They trust us.’
‘I get that,’ I said. ‘I totally do. But what’s the point in giving the wrong answers just for the sake of saying something? Isn’t that worse than saying nothing at all? We now know we misidentified the Body in the Dunes. Do you remember that one?’
‘Of course I do,’ my father said. ‘They got that wrong? That’s a terrible mistake.’
‘But I can understand how it happened. Even considering the old-fashioned thinking and the way they went about identifying the remains, the police didn’t necessarily do anything wrong. Apart from allowing the press to find out about the suspect, of course.’
‘You think they did the best they could with the techniques available to them at the time?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Unfortunately, they were totally wrong. It’s a mess. And I’m even more worried about what to do with these assault cases.’
‘Are you working on that?’
‘I’m not, and that’s part of the problem.’ I sighed. ‘Ingrid asked me to help her out with one of them. As it turned out, the problematic one. The guy woke up and said he knew who’d done it. His wife’s ex-husband had been harassing him for a while, had a restraining order and, according to the victim, had now punched him in the face.’
‘You’re talking about the Turkish guy?’
‘The Turkish guy. That’s exactly it.’
‘I saw that.’
‘You think he was guilty too, don’t you?’
‘It sounds plausible and everything fits.’
‘Doesn’t it just. Only when we went to talk to the guy an hour later, he had no visible wounds on his hands. Not a single scratch. Not a bruise. No marks at all.’
My father raised his eyebrows. ‘You’re sure about this?’
‘Yeah, absolutely. I was surprised too. Anyway, Ingrid went back to the victim to ask if maybe his attacker had been wearing gloves or used some kind of weapon. But no, the guy was adamant it was a bare-handed punch. Then we talked to one of his colleagues about what had happened that night, and it seemed that he was extremely drunk and argumentative.’
‘And you have no other witnesses?’
‘No witnesses, no CCTV.’
‘Well, then you can’t arrest your suspect. The testimony of a drunken guy is going to count for nothing. Plus he didn’t look as if he’d done it.’
‘And his car hadn’t left the car park outside his flat.’
‘Oh well. Back to square one.’
‘I don’t know what to do,’ I said. ‘I want to trust Ingrid and the commissaris to do the right thing.’
‘You don’t trust the commissaris?’
‘He’s very cosy with the press. I saw him give an interview about all these assaults on the morning that Peter de Waal was beaten up. And in the meantime, we’ve got this old case where we’ve clearly misidentified the body. Seeing as the victim wasn’t actually dead.’ I rubbed my face. ‘No, that’s wrong, he died two days ago.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘Suicide. Overdose of prescription painkillers. He’d lived abroad for a long time and came back to Amsterdam to tell people that he was still alive. I think he’d expected his sister to welcome him with open arms, and the family of the guy accused of his murder to be happy that he was here to set things straight. Instead everybody dismissed him. Or was angry with him.’
‘It’s terrible,’ my father said. ‘Nobody knew he was still alive?’
‘No. I had a long chat with his sister this afternoon. She’s really shaken up. All this time she’d thought her brother had been killed.’
‘And he’d just gone abroad instead?’
‘According to his sister, his parents threw him out of the house after they’d found out he’d been abused by his teacher.’
‘They threw him out?’
‘Strict orthodox family.’
‘How old was his sister at the time?’
‘Twelve. There wasn’t a big age gap.’
‘But even if this guy was still alive,’ my father said, ‘there really was a victim, I assume?’
‘Yes, but the remains were cremated, so we can’t use forensic science. It would have been so much easier if we’d had DNA evidence.’
‘This wouldn’t have happened if they could have used DNA tests at the time. We didn’t have any of that. So you’ve got an unsolvable case, and you’ve got evidence on another case that everybody hates.’
‘Yup,’ I said. ‘That’s it in a nutshell.’
‘Maybe you should run away,’ my father said jokingly. ‘But do let us know you’re all right.’
His words stuck in my head all the way through dinner and during my trip back to Amsterdam along the quiet dark motorway.
Chapter 17
I got to Schiphol the next morning with not much time to spare before my flight. This was on purpose. I had no desire to spend a lot of time at the airport and had cut it as close as I’d dared. I’d checked in online at the same time as I’d bought my ticket, and didn’t see Julia until I got to the gate when the plane was ready for boarding. She had a seat a couple of rows in front of me and I could mainly see the back of her head, her hair fair and thin like a girl’s down her ba
ck. She was wearing the same blue jumper with the white embroidery that she had worn when Charlie and I had first come to her door.
It was Saturday and the plane was full of people going to London for a fun weekend: the theatre maybe, some shopping, seeing the Christmas lights. We were going to look at the flat of a man who’d died. As everybody else was placing their wheelie bags in the overhead lockers, pushing and shoving for space, I slid my handbag underneath my seat. Going only for a day was expensive, but at least you could travel light. I didn’t think I’d be able to claim the money back. In fact I was sure the chief inspector would have preferred that I didn’t go, but sometimes that wasn’t what was important. This weekend I didn’t have to work, so I could do what I wanted.
My phone beeped with a message, but we were getting ready for take-off so I switched it off, put it away and settled down to sleep for an hour. It had been an early start.
I woke up when we landed at Gatwick. My brain was still half asleep as we trundled off the plane like a bunch of docile sheep. Not thinking was the best way of dealing with airports, and I went with the stream of people around me to get to passport control. I put my passport on the scanner, the computer matched up my face with my photo and the gates opened. I didn’t have to engage with a single human being.
When Andre had first come to London, it would have been different. He would have had to show his passport to an actual person. But then it was very possible that he hadn’t flown. If I’d been a teenager, running away from home, I would have gone by bus and boat. Flying was much more likely to get you stopped. I didn’t know how old you had to be before you could fly alone. And where would he have got the money to buy the ticket in the first place? I didn’t know exactly when he had arrived here, as it was of course very possible that he’d lived in the Netherlands by himself for a while after his parents had kicked him out. But if he’d travelled by bus, he probably wouldn’t even have had to show his passport. Nobody would have stopped a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old from going to London.
Julia waited for me at the other end of Customs.
‘Had Andre ever left the Netherlands before?’ I asked her.
She extended the handle of her wheelie bag and started walking towards the signs for the train without responding.
I was that outcast again: I should have talked about something else first, maybe asked her if she’d had a good journey, or if she was feeling okay about going to her brother’s flat.
But she paused and let me catch up with her. ‘You’re wondering if he had a passport?’ she said. Her thinking was along the same lines as mine.
I nodded. ‘Exactly.’
‘I don’t think so. I first got mine when I was seventeen or so and we went on a school trip to Germany. We never took holidays abroad when we were kids. We went to the coast in a caravan, that was it.’
That didn’t surprise me.
We walked through the airport to the train station together and bought tickets to London from a confusing machine.
‘Get a ticket to Putney,’ Julia said. ‘That’s where the flat is. I looked it up. We have to change at Clapham Junction.’
It was so expensive that I double-checked we hadn’t bought first-class tickets by mistake. We stood on the chilly platform, alongside all those other people from all over the world. Again, not having luggage was an advantage. I should always travel like this. It was fortunate that we got seats next to each other. I let Julia sit by the window.
Outside, the countryside rolled by. The ticket had probably been so expensive because Gatwick was nowhere near London. This long a journey would have taken me from Amsterdam to Rotterdam with time to spare. Opposite us, a man was concentrating on his newspaper.
‘I saw the missing person report on your brother,’ I said. ‘I noticed you were the one who went to the police.’ Speaking a language that nobody around us spoke provided us with a certain amount of privacy. I couldn’t have had this conversation on the Amsterdam–Rotterdam train.
‘My parents were angry with me for that,’ she said, her face turned away from me. ‘They said I should leave it, but I was worried about where he was. Where he could have gone. When they kicked him out, I really thought he was going to be back in a couple of days. They would have let him back in, I’m sure of that. They were just angry. But he never came back.’
I wasn’t so sure, but I didn’t question it. I just let her talk. It was what she had wanted to do the other night, but I’d cut her short and asked her questions about what I wanted to know. It did interest me what her opinion was a few days after Andre had been identified. I could only imagine that she had been turning this round and round in her head.
‘We didn’t talk about him for four years. Didn’t pursue where he might have gone. It was as if he was already dead to my parents. But when we heard he’d been murdered, they felt so guilty. Everything changed when the church barred Verbaan. Then they started to question what they’d done.’ She turned to look at me. ‘Up to then, they thought it had been the right thing, casting their sinning son away from their doorstep.’
‘What did you think?’
‘It’s so hard to remember. Hard to think of those years when we were silent about what had happened. Even though I knew about the sexual relationship that Verbaan had had with my brother, I never told anybody. I don’t know what I was thinking. Everybody loved Verbaan. He was such a popular teacher. And maybe people thought differently then. I definitely didn’t argue with my parents over what they’d done. Teachers, the school, they were all such figures of authority, beyond questioning.’ She looked out of the window again. ‘As my parents were,’ she added, more to the glass than to me.
‘Apart from reporting him missing.’
‘I guess so. But when the reverend said Verbaan had been in the wrong, had been abusing his pupils, that his wife had condoned the abuse and had been covering for him, it was as if my eyes were opened. That was when I realised that what I’d accepted was actually immoral.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Seventeen. I finished school, I left home, became a social worker.’ She shook her head. ‘A psychiatrist would have a field day with that. I couldn’t stop my brother being abused, I couldn’t even stop my parents from throwing him out of the house, so now I’m trying to stop that happening to other children.’
My phone beeped again, but I ignored it. ‘That’s a good reason,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with that.’
‘My parents found all of it hard to live with, but we never really talked about it. It was this great cloud that hung between us, the words not said, the topic not discussed. Then my father died almost ten years ago and my mother three years ago, and now we’ll never talk about it. But maybe it’s a good thing they’re no longer alive. Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m rambling on. I think I’m quite nervous about what we’re going to find in Andre’s flat. I’m all over the place. I didn’t sleep at all last night.’ She closed her eyes, shutting me out as effectively as if she’d picked up a newspaper like the man opposite us.
I could well imagine how she felt. Even I wasn’t sure what we were going to find, and I had plenty of experience of going into the houses of people who’d died.
Getting from the station to the flat was an interesting experience, especially with cars coming from all directions. The people who lived here must have trouble with that too, as it was painted on the streets which way you had to look before crossing the road.
Even Amsterdam wasn’t as complicated as this.
Andre’s flat was in a quiet road. The houses were small and old, painted in colours ranging from white to a steel grey. The neighbours had a family of pottery Dalmatians in their front window. I didn’t know anything about London so I couldn’t tell what kind of an area this was. The neat paintwork seemed to suggest that the people who lived here at least had enough money to keep their houses tidy and done up, even if the houses weren’t very big.
Up to this point, my main focus had been on
helping Julia, but now it was starting to feel like part of an investigation. I stepped aside as she opened the front door with the keys that Andre had left in his hotel room. I hadn’t actually questioned if those keys would open the door, and it struck me that I should have contacted the Metropolitan Police about coming to London. I had no jurisdiction here. This was just a day trip. It was definitely not part of an investigation, I kept telling myself.
The house was divided into two flats. I found it interesting that Andre had lived in a very similar type of place to his sister, as if there had still been a connection between them. Putney reminded me of Watergraafsmeer: both in big cities but a little way out of the centre.
We went up the stairs to the second floor, and as I followed Julia, her brother’s life gained a new reality for me. He’d had a whole life outside of the Netherlands. Someone had to inform his friends and colleagues about his demise.
At Andre’s front door, Julia looked through the bunch of keys to find the correct one for this lock. It suddenly came to me that if Andre had a burglar alarm, we would set it off. I breathed a sigh of relief when the door opened to silence.
The flat was a mess, as if Andre had left in a hurry and hadn’t had time to tidy up. There were papers on most of the surfaces. Old newspapers, discarded magazines and unpaid bills fought for space on the coffee table. The room was dominated by a green sofa that would seat three people and took up more than half the space. A few bits of paper had fallen onto the floor. I picked up the one closest to me. It was a leaflet for pizza delivery. Others were cards with taxi numbers on them and postcards with information from estate agents.
A Death at the Hotel Mondrian (Lotte Meerman Book 5) Page 13