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

by Anja de Jager

  I wondered why Andre had kept these. Surely, like in my place, the mail must come into the communal area, so why was all this rubbish inside his flat?

  I wasn’t sure what London apartments generally looked like, but this was smaller than I’d expected: only a little bigger than Julia’s studio flat and definitely not as big as my own place on the canal. Places that weren’t lived in were always a little eerie, even if they had only been shut down because the owner had gone on holiday. It had been over a week since Andre had closed the door to his flat behind him to go to Amsterdam.

  I normally cleaned up before I went on holiday because I hated coming back to a messy apartment. Andre must have been different. Julia dropped her overnight bag on the floor, picked up some of the bills and put them in a small pile. I could tell that she was thinking how she was the one who was going to have to deal with them.

  I checked the rest of the flat. A door off the hallway opened to a bathroom. It had carpet on the floor. That was a terrible choice. Unlike the front room, it was tidy. Toiletries were tidied away in a glass-fronted cupboard. I would check everything later, after I’d finished the first scan. The bedroom to the right was filled from wall to wall with a small double bed. The wardrobe door stood open and I could see that half the clothes were missing. The items Andre had taken with him to Amsterdam most likely.

  I went back into the narrow corridor. When I opened the next door, I was greeted by another whirlwind of paper. A single bed was pushed up against the wall to show that this could be used as a spare bedroom, but it was dominated by a large red corkboard on the opposite wall crammed with printouts and pages of handwritten scribble. The state of this small study was reminiscent of what I’d seen in the lounge, but here all the papers were about the Body in the Dunes. I looked more closely at the printouts. These weren’t newspaper articles that had been kept for decades. He must have printed them in preparation for his trip.

  That was interesting.

  I took my phone out to take photos of everything. Here was evidence, if I needed it, that Andre had prepared before coming to Amsterdam. I’d known that he had looked into his own murder case – even just that thought was odd – but being confronted with it like this made it seem different. He had found many of the same articles that I had been looking at over the last couple of days. What must it have felt like to know that it was all wrong? Incorrect? But also, what must it feel like to read about your own death over and over again?

  My phone beeped again, but my eyes were glued to a photo in the bottom left-hand corner of the board. It was of Paul Verbaan. Not the one with the black bar over his eyes, but a picture of him smiling in the middle of a group of schoolchildren. With that smile, it was obvious how handsome he was. Dark-haired, suave, top button of his shirt undone, one hand up in the air in a victory salute. What had Julia said earlier on? That everybody had loved him. I could see it in the faces of the teenagers around him: all eyes were on him, their faces turned towards him. If a kid had come forward to say that he had abused them, who would have believed them? Even Andre’s parents had thought their son had forced his attentions on the teacher.

  Next to that photo was the one of Verbaan and his family being barred from the church, cut from a newspaper printout.

  The contrast between those two pictures hit me in the stomach. The family man and his hidden life as an abuser were here side by side. I could understand why Andre’s parents had found it easy to believe Verbaan’s wife.

  I might have believed her too if I hadn’t seen it before: those abusers hiding in plain sight, their so-called attraction and popularity a perfect camouflage. I’d worked on a case of domestic abuse early on in my career in which nobody had believed the wife because the husband was so nice, so popular, so successful. Surely he wouldn’t beat his wife as soon as the front door to their perfect house had closed? There had to be something wrong with her to have driven this man to hit her. Or she must be lying. But I had seen her the day after she’d been beaten, and the truth, which none of their friends had wanted to see, was that he was a narcissistic individual who thought the whole world turned around him, who felt he was allowed to do whatever he wanted, and when anybody stood in the way of that – his wife, for example – he would get violent. But only when nobody else could see it, of course.

  I looked at the photo of Paul Verbaan surrounded by those adoring boys and I could easily believe that here was someone with the same character trait.

  What must it have been like for Andre to look at these pictures? Why had he hung this photo of his abuser in his study?

  I scanned the other photos. There was one of Andre’s parents and Julia at the press conference where the police commissaris at the time had revealed the identity of the Body in the Dunes. It wasn’t the one I’d looked at yesterday but it had been taken on the same occasion. The photographer had caught them at a bad moment, and I wondered if that was why the papers had liked this picture too. Andre’s father wore an ill-fitting shirt, the collar only just coming down over the too-wide tie; his mother had her hair in a bun, her eyes large as an owl’s behind her round glasses. They didn’t look upset in this photo, unlike the one I’d seen yesterday. Instead they looked bewildered, as if they didn’t understand all this attention that had been turned on them. As if they wondered why everybody was so interested in the murder of their wayward son. Or why their choices had turned out to be so wrong, a feeling I understood only too well.

  I took a step back. I imagined Andre standing in this very spot, looking at these same pictures. Why put this photo up instead of the other one, the one in which his family were crying? What must have been going through his mind? Anger? Hatred, maybe? In light of the fact that he hadn’t died, was their confusion easier to bear than their tears? Why have the photo in plain sight, in pride of place even, where he couldn’t avoid it, where he had to see it whenever he came into his study?

  The need to figure out why he’d come to Amsterdam gnawed like hunger in my stomach, along with a desire to understand what he had meant to do. He’d told Daniel that soon everybody would know the truth, that everybody would know he’d still been alive. That hadn’t happened yet. It would once the commissaris gave his press conference, but had that been Andre’s plan? I couldn’t help but think he might have had something else in mind.

  A large PC stood on a dark-wood desk. It was likely that he had done all his research online and hadn’t printed everything out. I sat down at the desk. I had little hope of guessing a password, but I switched on the PC just in case it wasn’t password-protected.

  No such luck.

  I pulled the keyboard towards me, thinking I could at least start with ‘Body in the Dunes’.

  I stopped the movement when it revealed a handwritten note on A5 paper that had been hidden underneath.

  PEOPLE TO SEE, it said at the top in large underlined capitals. It was followed by a list of names. The first was Julia’s. Then Daniel Verbaan, with a question mark, and Laurens. At the bottom of the list were two more names, only one of which I knew: Robbert Brand + Harry. Harry, who couldn’t be reached on the address and number that I’d found in Andre’s diary, and who might be vitally important.

  If I hadn’t moved the keyboard, I would never have found that piece of paper. It made these names seem even more significant that they’d been hidden from view.

  Robbert Brand was the only new name. I didn’t think I’d seen it in relation to the Body in the Dunes. After all my study, I would have remembered it. A thought popped into my head. Brand. Theo Brand. I pushed that thought, and what it could mean, back down immediately. I folded up the piece of paper and decided that I wasn’t going to show it to Julia. I didn’t want the same thought that had popped into my head to pop into hers.

  I looked around the office for anything that could give me a hint as to who Robbert Brand and Harry were. I scanned the clippings on the corkboard, but I didn’t see them mentioned there. I studied every handwritten note but found nothing about
either of them. I closely studied every one of the photos, but the only people I didn’t know were the schoolkids in the photo with Paul Verbaan.

  I went in search of Julia. She was sitting on the sofa looking through a pile of what were really a stranger’s papers. A stranger who had been her brother.

  ‘Do you know a Robbert Brand?’ I asked her. ‘Or a Harry?’

  She glanced up from studying what appeared to be a gas bill. ‘Harry Brand? No, I don’t think so.’ She shook her head and went back to opening drawers and cupboards.

  I hadn’t made Julia’s assumption that Harry would be Harry Brand, but it seemed to make sense. ‘Did you know Andre’s friends?’ I asked.

  ‘Like his school friends, you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I knew some of the guys at the school, of course. But outside school, not really.’

  Just then, someone knocked on the door. Julia looked at me for a second, then went back to sorting through bills as if that was a safe occupation that had to be done anyway.

  People often resort to practical activities when they don’t want to accept reality. I could only guess that coming to her brother’s flat had made this all terribly real for her.

  I went to the door and opened it to a woman with grey-streaked dark hair and black-rimmed glasses.

  ‘Is Theo in?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s not. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I heard footsteps up here and he should be back from holiday by now.’ She rattled a set of keys in front of me that looked similar to the ones Julia had. ‘I’ve been feeding his cat.’

  A cat? I’d seen no sign of a cat. It was probably hiding. Then I realised I’d also seen no sign of food bowls or a litter tray.

  I showed the woman my badge. ‘I’m a police detective from Amsterdam,’ I said. ‘This is Andre’s sister, Julia.’

  ‘Andre?’

  ‘You probably know him as Theo Brand,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry to tell you that he died a few days ago.’

  The woman took her glasses off and rubbed her eyes. ‘I told him he shouldn’t go,’ she said.

  III

  The Murderer

  Chapter 18

  ‘You told him he shouldn’t go?’ I asked. ‘You knew why he was going?’ My heart rate sped up. Here, finally, was someone who might have known what Andre’s thinking was when he came to Amsterdam. I turned to Julia. ‘Can I leave you here by yourself? I’m going to have a chat with your brother’s neighbour.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said and went back to looking through Andre’s paperwork.

  ‘I’m Carol Reynolds,’ the woman said as she walked down the stairs in front of me.

  She opened the door to the downstairs flat with a key. A fluffy grey cat tried to escape. ‘No, Ginger,’ she said. ‘Stay here.’

  I didn’t understand why you would call a grey cat Ginger, but I didn’t comment. It was probably a British thing.

  ‘He’s Theo’s cat,’ Carol said, ‘but I thought he was probably lonely all by himself in that flat, so he’s been sleeping downstairs.’

  Well, that was one mystery solved. ‘Did you know Theo well?’

  ‘We got quite close over the last year. Have a seat.’ She gestured towards a sofa. Unlike Andre’s flat upstairs, this place was immaculate. It still wasn’t big, but as it wasn’t cluttered, at least there was a sense of space. ‘So you’re from Amsterdam? Like Theo? He spoke such wonderful English,’ Carol said. ‘So do you,’ she added with a beaming smile, as if it was a special compliment.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, doing my best to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.

  ‘We talked a lot after he got into a really bad accident last year.’

  I thought about the scars the pathologist had pointed out on his leg. ‘What happened?’

  ‘He was taken out by a lorry on a roundabout. He was on his bike. It was really nasty. He was in hospital for weeks.’

  ‘And they put him on strong painkillers,’ I said.

  Carol nodded. ‘He didn’t realise how addictive they were. I guess that’s what killed him?’

  ‘Yes.’ It was interesting that she’d automatically known it had been suicide.

  Tears started to roll down her face and she covered her eyes with her hands.

  My phone beeped. ‘Sorry about that,’ I muttered, and switched it off. I was struck by how his downstairs neighbour had so far been the only one who’d cried for Andre. Julia had been angry with him at first. Daniel had hit him and left him a slew of messages.

  ‘When he first got home from hospital, it was very hard for him to get up the stairs with his crutches, so I ended up helping him a lot. We started chatting.’

  ‘You said you thought he shouldn’t go to Amsterdam?’ I wanted to get her to talk about that.

  ‘He was having a tough time stopping taking the painkillers. He wasn’t feeling well.’ Carol wiped her face with the palms of her hands and took a deep breath. ‘I didn’t think digging up all the stuff about his past was a good idea.’

  ‘Did he tell you about his past? Or what he was planning?’

  ‘Well, he told me something weird about a month ago. I bumped into him near the shops and he seemed out of it a bit. I said: how are you? And he said: not great really. He said he was shaken up by his mother’s death.’

  I frowned. Julia had told me that her mother had died three years ago. Had he only just found out? Given the state of his relationship with his parents, I was surprised that he’d been upset. It must have been the realisation that he would never be able to make amends. He’d had thirty years to get back in touch and tell them he hadn’t died. Maybe the shock was because he’d waited too long and missed the opportunity. ‘When exactly was this?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Late September, I think?’

  ‘He really didn’t know before?’

  ‘I don’t think so. He was very upset. He had no reason to lie to me.’ She smiled, but tears started to stream from her eyes again. ‘He was going through a tough patch anyway. He’d lost his job after the accident because he couldn’t go to work for so long, and it probably all just got to him.’

  I could see her point.

  ‘He said he should find out what had happened.’

  ‘With his mother?’

  ‘I think so. What else could he have meant? We talked about it again a week later. I bumped into him at Water-stones and we ended up having a coffee together at the café.’ She stroked the cat. Ginger purred, seemingly unconcerned that his owner was never coming back again.

  ‘And that was when you told him he shouldn’t go to Amsterdam?’ I asked.

  ‘He said he had to do something, but he wasn’t sure what. That seemed a weird decision, or no decision at all. Now I think he wanted to say goodbye to people or something like that. To people and to places. Get closure. That was what he was going to Amsterdam for.’

  I could see why she thought that, but it didn’t feel right to me. He’d said to Daniel that soon everybody was going to know. ‘Did he tell you that everybody thought he’d been murdered?’

  ‘He’d been murdered? How could that possibly be the case?’

  ‘And you didn’t know that his name wasn’t really Theo? That his real name was Andre Nieuwkerk?’

  ‘No, I had no idea. People really thought he’d been murdered?’

  I nodded.

  Carol kept talking, as if to herself. ‘I don’t know what I would do if I thought I’d been murdered. Or that everybody thought I had been. I would probably go to the police and tell them I was still alive.’

  ‘Thanks for your time,’ I said. I probably didn’t have any jurisdiction to ask questions here, so I wanted to make sure it would just be seen as a chat. I also wanted to walk away from her suggestion about telling the police, because that was exactly what Andre had tried to do and I hadn’t listened to him.

  I returned to Andre’s flat. Before heading back to the airport, I took one final look around the study, taking photographs of every cen
timetre of it. I wanted to document what Andre had been thinking. Who were Robbert Brand and Harry, and why were their names on the list of people that Andre had been going to see? What was their relationship to the murder? Suddenly I was keen to get back to Amsterdam and do some digging. To find out if there’d been a real Theo Brand.

  I said a quick goodbye to Julia. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in seeing anything of London; it was more that I needed to get back to Amsterdam as soon as I could, so that I could talk to Robbert Brand and find this Harry.

  ‘Already? You could stay overnight,’ she said. ‘I saw that there’s a spare room.’

  Even if I hadn’t wanted to get back to Amsterdam straight away, I couldn’t have slept in that bed, right underneath all the photos of people that Andre hated.

  ‘Let me at least walk you to the station,’ she added.

  Because she sounded disappointed, I gave in. The quiet little street ended in a park with tennis courts, and we’d only walked fifty metres or so before we came to the wide water of the Thames.

  ‘The flat is worth a fortune,’ Julia said. ‘I looked it up online. Maybe even more than half a million euros.’

  ‘That’s crazy,’ I said. In the distance I could see a bridge and red double-decker buses crossing it. Rowing clubs named after schools lined the river’s edge, as well as, at the end, a bar called The Rowing Club. It wasn’t very original, but then I guessed it didn’t have to be. The boats were stacked on shelves as if waiting for spring to return. They looked like the eights that would cross the Bosbaan in Buitenveldert. Maybe Putney was more like Buitenveldert than Watergraafsmeer.

  If house prices here were like those in Buitenveldert as well, then maybe Julia’s estimate wasn’t far out.

  ‘You haven’t found a husband, have you?’ Julia asked.

  ‘Who, me?’ That reminded me: I really should buy Mark a present at the airport.