‘Start from the beginning,’ I said. ‘He called you?’
‘No, my ex-wife called me and said there’d been another nutter – her term, not mine – at the house.’
‘Why did she say the man was a nutter?’
‘We’ve had a lot of people contact us over the years. People who want to make money out of us, crazy people, swindlers. A lot of psychics,’ he said with a hint of sarcasm in his voice. ‘The number of people trying to take advantage of our grief never ceases to amaze me. A man came a month after we placed the first ad and claimed he was Theo.’ Harry’s voice was gruff. ‘He was the right age. We believed him for a bit. We wanted to believe him, I guess.’
‘Why did he contact you?’
‘All he wanted was money,’ Harry said. ‘It was frightening in a way, how much he knew about Theo. He knew which school he’d gone to, he knew the names of some of his friends. He’d done his research. He even looked a bit like him. I wondered if that was what gave him the idea.’
‘Did you report him to the police?’
‘What was the point? We didn’t actually give him any cash. We had dinner a few times; he came round to visit us.’
‘And then he asked for money?’
‘Yes. He was going to buy a house and asked us if we could help. Not with the mortgage, just a couple of hundred euros to help him furnish the place. But we got suspicious. Well, actually I already was suspicious.’
‘Did you ask for a DNA test?’
‘No, I just followed him for a bit. He wasn’t particularly careful. I found out his name and tracked down his parents. He clearly wasn’t Theo. I called him, told him what I knew and told him never to visit my father again. Katja thought that the guy who’d come to see me was another one of these.’
‘Your ex-wife’s name is Katja?’
‘Yeah.’
That was the woman I’d talked to who’d told me there was no Harry living at that address. I could understand why she’d refused to let Andre in, but I thought she should have told me about that when I called her. It would have saved us a lot of time.
Maybe I should run Harry Brand’s records to see if he’d ever been in trouble with the police. ‘Are you still registered at that address?’ I wondered why Andre had gone there if Harry no longer lived there. He’d found Julia and Daniel’s details without any problems.
‘We divorced not that long ago and I moved here.’ He scratched his forehead. ‘It’s been good to live close to my dad, especially after my mother died.’
‘Your mother? When did she die?’
‘In September.’
The hairs at the back of my neck stood up. It wasn’t Andre’s mother who’d died but Theo Brand’s. This seemed significant to me, even if I couldn’t figure out why. He’d cried about the death of Theo’s mother. Had he known her? Had he realised what he’d done to the parents of the man whose identity he’d taken? Had that been when he’d decided to come here and tell them … tell them what? The truth? A version of the truth?
‘I created a family tree on every family history website I could find. I always thought maybe Theo would look there. At Mum’s funeral, I kept looking for him. I kept thinking that maybe he was going to turn up. But he never did.’ He looked down at his papers again. ‘Only more scam artists got in touch.’
‘That’s why you didn’t believe Andre.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘there wasn’t much to believe. He asked if I knew about the Body in the Dunes and said he thought that might be Theo. And I said: but the police identified that body. That man was Andre Nieuwkerk. And he said, no, because he was Andre. That can’t be right, can it? I can’t believe that he’s been alive all this time and never told his family.’
‘It was him,’Thomas said. ‘That man was definitely Andre. We ran a DNA test with his sister and confirmed it.’
‘His parents buried the wrong body? They’ve thought all this time that their son died?’ Harry shook his head. ‘That’s cruel, isn’t it? I mean, him knowing that his parents believed he was dead and not setting them straight, that’s … that’s extraordinary. Are any of his family still alive?’
‘Just his sister.’
‘She must be ecstatic.’ His voice held a hint of bitterness that might have come from jealousy.
‘Andre’s dead,’ Thomas said. ‘He killed himself four days ago.’
Harry leaned back. ‘So we can’t talk to him any more. We’ve got no way of telling if the dead guy was Theo.’
He’d cottoned on quickly to what the real problem was. ‘We have no idea,’ I said honestly. ‘All I know is that Andre seemed to think it was possible, from what he told you. That’s why I want to know exactly what he said. Why he thought it was Theo. Something must have given him that idea.’
‘I wish I’d recorded the conversation,’ Harry said. ‘As far as I can remember, he didn’t actually say why he thought that.’
‘Was it possible that they knew each other?’
‘We followed the case at the time,’ Harry said, ‘because Theo had gone missing. I’d never heard of Andre before then. I didn’t know him. They hadn’t gone to school together.’
So maybe they had purely been two runaways who’d met somewhere, and somehow one of them had ended up with the other’s passport.
‘And you met Andre just that one time? He only came here once?’
‘Yes,’ Harry said. ‘He apologised. He said he was really sorry for what had happened.’ He glanced down at his hands. ‘I’m sure he wouldn’t have come here if he thought Theo was still alive.’ He looked up. ‘My father has never given up hope. He still believes my brother is alive.’
‘He told me he just wants to know what happened to him.’
Harry shook his head. ‘That’s what he says, but I don’t actually think it’s how he really feels. He still hopes that he just ran away, or that he was in an accident and lost his memory.’ He rubbed his hand through his greying hair. ‘Dad’s had a lot of crazy theories over the years. It’s what’s been driving him all this time, following up on anybody who said they’d seen someone who looked like Theo in some part of the country. Once he even travelled to Portugal and met with this Dutch man, who was very nice about it.’
‘What do you think happened to your brother? Not what you want to believe,’ I added quickly, ‘but how you feel, deep down, after having met Andre. What was your instinctive reaction? That can often be useful.’
Harry folded his arms as if he wanted to keep the answer inside, but in the end he didn’t shy away from saying the words. ‘I think maybe he spoke the truth. That it was my brother who was killed thirty years ago. That it was my brother whose body decayed into the Body in the Dunes. I didn’t tell my father, but it sounded to me as if Andre had information about Theo’s death. More than just guesswork. That’s what I didn’t want him to hear. It would be so hard on him.’
‘What gave you that idea?’
Harry looked me in the eye. ‘Why would he have come here otherwise? There were quite a few young men who went missing around the same time. He didn’t visit anybody else, did he?’
I thought back to the list I had seen on Andre’s desk. ‘No, you’re right. I found your name on a piece of paper in his study, but nobody else’s.’
As Thomas drove us back, I wondered which was worse: thinking your brother was dead and then finding out he was still alive, or thinking he was alive and then realising he’d been dead all along. It wasn’t actually a competition, of course.
It all depended on whether you preferred hope or closure. Both families were in the worst possible position right now. If they believed Andre, then Theo Brand’s family had had their hopes dashed without finding any answers. Julia had found out that her brother had still been alive, but now he was dead anyway. I wouldn’t wish their situation on anybody.
Deep down inside, I thought both families had been better off before Andre had come back to the Netherlands and talked to them all.
Chapter 21
‘Do you want to go for a drink?’ I was tired. It had been a long day, and a beer would round it off nicely.
He looked at his watch. ‘Sure, I can say my shift’s finished for the day.’
‘Or you can have something non-alcoholic and call it work.’
‘I don’t know. I’ve got a feeling I need a stiff drink for this conversation.’
This wasn’t a particularly appetising part of town. Grey blocks of flats lined a busy road. On the other side of the street, across the four lanes and the tramline in the middle, there was a kebab shop that looked as if it would give you instant food poisoning. From the debris on the street, there must be a KFC west of here. Next door, a tiling showroom was already closed. Two doors down there was a bar with posters for upcoming gigs covering the windows. I suggested going there. There was something about being a police detective, and being accompanied by another police detective, that made you unafraid to drink anywhere.
It was only after we’d gone in that I realised we were probably the same age as the parents of everybody else in here. It wasn’t dangerous – the vibe was pretty chilled – but it was mortifying to feel that I was an old person compared to the rest of the people here. The ceiling of the bar was low, as if the four storeys of flats above were pressing it down. Thomas and I exchanged a glance, agreeing wordlessly that the only thing more embarrassing than being in a bar filled with kids two decades younger than us would be to head straight out again. I walked up to the bar and ordered our beers. I wondered how many of these kids would actually be underage if we carded them. I also wondered what it was about this place that attracted them. There must be a university department somewhere close by.
The good thing about being old in the company of young people was that they all thought we were very uninteresting. When you’re embarrassed, it’s probably for the best that you’re ignored. I was even more embarrassed when one of the kids by the bar got up from his stool and offered it to me. Not embarrassed enough to refuse the seat, of course. I was grateful for it. Even though I’d been sitting down for most of the day, on planes and trains, I was shattered.
Thomas stood behind me for a few seconds, until the kid on the next stool got up too. Thomas must have given him the kind of stare that could make people confess. And give up their seats.
He sat down on the vacated stool. ‘How was your day?’ he asked, as if we were two mates catching up instead of two detectives trying to make sense of what was going on. ‘I’m guessing you weren’t in London to go Christmas shopping.’
‘No, but that reminds me: what are you giving your wife for Sinterklaas?’
‘Nothing big, just the usual stuff.’
‘What is she getting you?’
‘I don’t know, Lotte, it would spoil the surprise if I knew beforehand, wouldn’t it?’
I paused as the barman put the two beers in front of us. ‘What would you want her to get you?’ I lifted the glass to my mouth.
‘What’s this about? You want to know what to get Mark?’
‘No, not at all.’
‘You’re so obvious.’ He laughed. ‘What are you? Twelve? You were married before.’
‘I know. It’s been a few years, though. I want to get it right.’
‘Okay, a chocolate letter, a book and something small and personal.’
‘Like what?’
‘Something he’d like.’
What would he like? Something to do with cooking, maybe. I’d seen a restaurant somewhere that did a knife-skills class, but that sounded like the kind of course that criminals would take. Maybe I should have got the teddy bear with the Union Jack waistcoat at the airport. I was beginning to understand why people bought tat like that.
‘Just don’t go overboard,’ Thomas said. ‘No big presents.’
‘Okay. Got it. Something small that he’ll like.’ This was impossible. If only I had no time to think about it, I would probably do a better job.
‘You didn’t get him anything in London, then?’
‘No, I went to Andre’s flat with Julia.’
‘Wait. What?’
‘She asked me.’
Thomas shook his head. ‘Only you would think it was a good idea to do that.’
‘I’m not sure it was a good idea.’
‘No kidding.’
‘I thought I was helping this woman out, because it’s been really rough on her. She was the one who reported her brother missing initially, not her parents, and in a way, she feels responsible for what’s happened. I think that’s why she’s been feeling so conflicted.’
‘And now?’
‘And now I think …’ I took a gulp of my beer to try to get my thoughts in order. ‘Wait. Let me tell you what I thought before going to London. I thought Andre Nieuwkerk had left the Netherlands, and changed his name and his nationality so that he could never be found. That he’d been upset with his parents, that he was happy for his abuser to be questioned for his murder. Maybe he was letting it happen, and then when Verbaan killed himself, he couldn’t go back on the lie he’d told. He certainly didn’t make any effort to correct the mistake the police had made.’
‘Yes,’Thomas said, ‘I knew that’s where your thinking was headed.’
‘But now I feel that I’ve made quite a fundamental mistake. Now I know that Theo Brand wasn’t a new name that Andre Nieuwkerk took.’ I remembered what I’d thought when I’d first heard that Andre was using Theo Brand. I’d thought that it had been to indicate a Brand Nieuw, Brand new, identity. That’s why I’d gone to the hotel with Charlie when the manager had called me.
‘Now we know that Theo Brand is an existing person,’ Thomas said. ‘Or maybe he was an existing person to be more precise.’
‘Right. Instead of Andre changing his name to Theo, he was using Theo’s passport. He had taken Theo’s identity. The identity of a person who the family has lost touch with over thirty years ago, a person who’d gone to London and changed nationality.’
‘You think it was Andre who did that? Not Theo?’
‘Wouldn’t that have made him harder to trace? Or at least it made the family think that Theo had still been alive twenty-five years ago, when he did that. It was probably why Theo Brand had never been considered to be the Body in the Dunes.’
‘You don’t think Andre met him in London?’
I shook my head. ‘No, I think Theo never left the Netherlands. I think Andre was right, and that Theo was the Body in the Dunes all along.’
‘Two runaways met each other; one ended up dead, the other took his identity.’
I nodded. ‘It makes you think, doesn’t it?’ In the corner, a group of young girls were laughing and shrieking as loudly as the flocks of parakeets that had invaded the Vondelpark.
Thomas narrowed his eyes. ‘He could have killed him. Killed him, buried him, taken his passport and run away to London.’
I didn’t want to think about this, but of course I could see the sense in Thomas’s words. He was voicing what had been in the back of my mind ever since I’d found out that Theo Brand had been a real person.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, he could have done.’
Chapter 22
The next morning, I went to work early even though it was Sunday and my day off. I wanted to check everything we had on Theo Brand.
What I was interested in was whether there was another reason why the police had ruled out Theo as the Body in the Dunes, or whether it was based purely on his passport renewal.
I picked up one of the photos of Theo that his father had given me. The teenager was smiling widely. He shielded his eyes from the sun but was still squinting as he gazed into the light. He was wearing a pair of stone-dyed jeans. I remembered that I’d had a pair just like that when I’d been his age.
There could have been very good reasons why the initial te
am had thought the skeleton wasn’t Theo’s. I just had to find those reasons. The typed-up forensics report highlighted that the skeleton had no signs of previous fractures apart from those in the small bones in the neck that pointed towards strangulation as the cause of death. He was the same height as Andre. He was the right age.
In the files, I could find no good reason why the body couldn’t have been Theo’s.
The original investigation had ruled him out on the passport alone, but there was no way I could do the same.
I went down to the basement lab to talk to Forensics. I wondered what we would do today compared to the tools they had available twenty-five years ago.
Edgar Ling was typing up a report and seemed only too happy to be disturbed and asked about misidentified skulls. His blond hair showed the tracks of a comb.
‘You’re not distracting me. I like bones.’ His face flushed pink. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘That came out wrong.’
‘It’s okay.’ I would sometimes say things like that myself, things to do with my work that in the context of normal conversation would make me sound like a very dangerous individual. I laid the photos down in front of him: the school photo of Andre Nieuwkerk, the photos of Theo Brand and the images of the skull that the initial investigative team had taken all those years ago.
‘This is tricky,’ he said. ‘Do you have any other photos? Maybe from the side rather than full-frontal?’
I rummaged through the folder. Even though there were many photos of the skull and the rest of the skeleton from all angles, I couldn’t find any more of Andre. His parents hadn’t given the police much to go on. Four years after he’d left home, they might not have had any photos left. It was such a sharp contrast to the house of Theo’s father.
‘This is it,’ I said.
He put the photos of the two teenage boys next to each other and studied them closely. ‘To be honest, it could be either one of them.’
‘If this wasn’t an old case, would you feel comfortable opening a murder investigation into it?’
‘That’s a bit of a jump from wondering if it could be either one of these two. It’s much easier to rule someone out than to think it’s actually them. Especially from the photos. Look at this bit.’ He pointed at the fringe on Andre’s photo. ‘With his hair like this, it’s tricky to tell the shape of his forehead.’ He shuffled through the photos of the skull, discarding them like my mother would discard her cards until he found one that had been taken from the same angle as Theo’s photo. He put the two side by side and looked at them closely.
A Death at the Hotel Mondrian (Lotte Meerman Book 5) Page 16