‘I was really into art,’ Kars said. ‘I loved drawing, painting, that kind of thing. I didn’t like sports, I didn’t really like school, I just liked other things and Verbaan noticed that. He knew my parents were upset that I wasn’t studying harder, that I wanted to focus on what they thought was just a little hobby. He’d talked to them at parents’ evening. That was when he started to single me out. Take me aside, talk to me, tell me that it was possible what I wanted to do, that I was talented, that I was special.’ He stopped talking.
Frida put her hand on his arm and squeezed it softly.
‘Nobody had told me that before. I wanted him to keep saying it, so I … I did what he wanted me to do. I didn’t like it, but I liked the attention. No, let’s be honest. I was desperate for attention. I was desperate for anybody to think I was worth talking to. That I deserved someone’s time. I was fourteen, I had no friends, no mates in school. I had nobody to talk to …’ His voice trailed off.
‘I’m sorry,’ Julia said.
‘I’m not saying it to have a go at you. I’m just telling you that this was what Verbaan did. This was what he was like. First your brother, then me. Two other kids came after me. I was angry. Not because of what he did, but because it turned out I wasn’t special after all. Can you imagine? I think that’s why I talked to the police. They say abuse victims often only speak out to protect others but I wasn’t like that. I spoke out because I was jealous. It was a messed-up time.’
‘It ended when you were no longer in his class?’ I asked.
‘No longer in his class, no longer fourteen, no longer young enough. Any or all of those reasons. You can pick. Part of me hates him, but there’s a tiny piece of me that is grateful to him, because he did say that my art was important, that painting was important and that I should pursue it. That’s what disgusts me about my art sometimes: that it was an abuser who made me take it seriously. That he was grooming me.’
‘It’s very common,’ Julia said, ‘to feel conflicted about abuse. But remember, he was right to encourage you. That was his job. He was right to give you time. You were not complicit in the abuse. You were fourteen. You were a kid.’
I was impressed with Julia. She’d gone into supportive-social-worker mode to help her ex-classmate. Even though this must be tearing her apart, she still said the right thing.
‘I know that,’ Kars said. ‘Intellectually, I know. Emotionally, it’s harder. Frida and I met at art school. I’d moved out of my parents’ house. We argued too much. Verbaan gave me the name of a place that could help, can you believe it? That place helped me get into art school.’
He grabbed his cup, downed the last of his coffee and pushed himself up from his seat. ‘Come out to the back. You might want to wear a pair of these. What size are you?’
I tried a few pairs of the most unflattering footwear known to man, then followed Kars outside.
He showed us a field where bulbs were planted and covered by a layer of hay. The next field was empty apart from high grass and impressive weeds. ‘For the subsidies,’ he said. ‘I get paid more to leave it empty than I get for growing food. Who’d have thought it, with food prices where they are?’
‘How long has it been empty?’
‘Three years now. I’m not even allowed to keep cattle on it. Good for the bees, they say. It’s good for my pocket.’ He laughed. ‘But it seems insane: prime land and we’re not even farming it. Here’s my studio.’ He walked up to a large shed. ‘I paint; Frida does mainly pottery.’ He opened the double doors and I could see a sea of canvases: wild flowers, the coast, fields with animals. I liked them. I could tell what they were.
‘Do you get any government subsidies for your art?’ I asked. Maybe we could hang some of them at the police station.
Chapter 25
I went to have lunch in the canteen. I had a cheese sandwich, an apple and a glass of milk and stared out over the water. It was turning out to be another nice sunny day and I watched a few tourists sitting outside on a bench with their own lunch. It was as if we were eating together.
As soon as I got back into the office, I could almost feel the crackling of tension in the air. Charlie gave me the accusing look of a dog who’d been left alone for too long. Thomas only stared. I didn’t want to think about what had happened while I’d been out. I wasn’t going to ask.
After Thomas left to have his lunch, Charlie checked his watch and suggested we have a coffee. To round off my meal, he said. He’d like my advice on something. I wasn’t sure what he wanted to talk about. Maybe Thomas had said something that told Charlie more about the opinion he had of him.
‘Shall we go to the little café around the corner?’ he said.
‘Sure,’ I said. I knew the one he meant; they did good coffee there. I didn’t know what had happened, but things must be pretty rough if he wanted to talk to me away from the police station.
I followed him across the bridge. The lights were on in the large houseboat moored in the water behind the police station. Some days you could see the couple who lived there eating their lunch together. Today I didn’t see them. If the lights had been off, I would have assumed they were out, or still asleep, but now I wondered where they were.
Did they know we watched them most mornings as we came into work?
If I’d been by myself, I might have waited on the bridge until either one of them showed themselves, but now I just kept walking and entered the café with Charlie.
He ordered our cappuccinos from the guy behind the bar. I offered to pay but he refused. I was about to joke that I was impressed that he knew what coffee I liked when I noticed him nodding to a guy sitting at a table by the window. The man was handsome, with black hair and darkish skin. He wore the uniform of a traffic officer, and his thick fluorescent jacket was hanging over the back of his chair.
‘One of your former colleagues?’ I asked Charlie. He’d been a traffic cop before he joined us in CID.
‘Yeah, let’s sit with him,’ Charlie said, and he carried our coffees over before I could point out that I thought he’d wanted to talk to me about something.
‘What’s this about, Charlie?’ I said.
‘He wants to ask you a favour.’
I narrowed my eyes. I could tell I was being set up for something. I pulled the chair out and sat down.
‘It’s about the man who beat up Peter de Waal,’ Charlie’s mate said.
Now why would a policeman of Turkish descent want to talk to me about Peter de Waal’s assault? ‘You know him?’ I asked.
The man had the good grace to look sheepish. ‘His father and my father are cousins.’
At least he didn’t lie. I stirred my cappuccino even though it had no sugar in it and it would only mess up the foam. ‘I’m sorry, what’s your name.’
‘Mehmet. Mehmet Yilmaz.’
‘Mehmet Yilmaz.’ I got my notebook out of my handbag and slowly wrote it down. ‘I wonder if I should tell anybody about this little chat we’re having. You want to convince me that he’s innocent?’
Mehmet blushed, and shuffled on his chair. ‘He said you talked to him the other day, and I didn’t know what to make of that. You’ve got a reputation for …’
‘For what?’
‘For investigating things properly. Maybe he beat this guy up. Maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. But I know some other people are completely convinced he did it without looking into it.’
‘And you said you didn’t think he did,’ Charlie said. ‘That’s what I told Mehmet.’
‘Seriously?’ I turned to face him. Maybe Thomas was right. Maybe Charlie was very stupid, or just too naïve for words. Either way, he really was rubbish at the political shenanigans.
‘That was what you said, wasn’t it?’ The tone of his voice was that of a small boy disappointed in his mum. But what mattered here wasn’t whether I thought Erol was guilty or not; it was that Charlie had set up this meeting away from the police station. I wasn’t sure whose idea that had been, but they
could have come and talked to me in our office.
I held my coffee cup between both hands, leant back and had a good look at Mehmet Yilmaz. I could see the family resemblance: he was built in the same way as his cousin. Like I’d thought about Erol, I also wouldn’t be surprised if Mehmet could floor a man with a single punch. Maybe that was more useful for a police officer than for someone who had been harassing his ex-wife.
Mehmet squirmed under my scrutiny. He seemed embarrassed.
Erol would have looked angry.
‘Do you know your cousin well?’ I asked.
‘He’s not my cousin. My father—’
‘Whatever.’ I cut short the family explanation. ‘Do you know him well?’
‘Not that well. I’ve met him a number of times, of course, but we’re not friends.’
‘He wasn’t really forthcoming with answers,’ I said.
Mehmet nodded. ‘I know. He can be like that.’
‘He’s older than you?’
‘A couple of years.’
‘You know this isn’t our case, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’ Mehmet shot Charlie a glance. ‘I know.’
‘And it’s a bit of an insult,’ I folded my arms, ‘to assume the team wouldn’t do the right thing.’
‘No, no, it’s not that. It’s that … Peter de Waal’s wife, you know who she is, right?’
‘She’s Erol’s ex-wife.’
‘Exactly.’ He paused for a second. ‘So here’s a Turkish guy whose Dutch ex-wife shacked up with her high-school boyfriend. Then the new husband gets beaten up. What do you think everybody is going to think?’
‘He had a restraining order. It’s got nothing to do with his background.’ But I understood his concern.
‘You actually believe that? I know what people think. I’m just asking you to not see the Turkish guy with the restraining order.’
‘Okay, instead I’ll see the guy whose cousin was desperate to talk to me.’ I smiled to pretend I was joking. I didn’t think Erol was guilty, but I knew the pressure those TV interviews were putting on the team, and suddenly I wasn’t so sure any more that this was all going to work out fine without my interference. ‘Check if he’s taken a photo of his hands as I told him to. If he hasn’t, get him to do it straight away. With a witness if possible. And make sure he can prove which day it was taken.’
‘Why?’ Mehmet said. ‘Are you trying to stitch him up?’
I shook my head. ‘Didn’t you want to talk to me because I was impartial? Then just get him to do it.’
‘He should take photos of himself?’ Charlie asked me.
I wasn’t going to fill in the details. Let them figure it out. I stared out of the window, pretending this had nothing to do with me, and let the two guys discuss it amongst themselves. The less I said, the better. I didn’t think I’d done anything here that could be seen as actively damaging Ingrid’s case. If I made the new member of our team do some thinking, surely that was a good thing.
‘If he’d beaten up that guy, there would have been cuts and bruises on his hands,’ Charlie said.
Good boy, I wanted to say, but I kept quiet. I was pretty sure I hadn’t told Charlie why I believed Erol Yilmaz was innocent.
Mehmet thanked me and headed out. He obviously understood the significance of this. Through the window, I could see him getting his phone out. I hoped he was calling his cousin to have those photos taken. They might need proof of his innocence. Or at least proof that the assault hadn’t happened the way Peter de Waal stated.
I took a gulp of my coffee. ‘Don’t do that again,’ I said to Charlie.
Because I knew that even though we hadn’t really done anything we shouldn’t have, it wouldn’t give a good impression if anyone found out about this meeting.
Chapter 26
I went to talk to the chief inspector. As soon as I told him what we’d discovered about Andre using Theo Brand’s identity, and Theo going missing right around the time that the Body in the Dunes was murdered, he insisted on calling the commissaris to join us. It didn’t surprise me at all.
It was probably a sign of how seriously Commissaris Smits was taking this that he came down to the CI’s office rather than making us go up to his. Or maybe he felt he hadn’t been commissaris for long enough yet to summon us upstairs.
‘Tell me what happened,’ he said before he’d even sat down.
‘I went with Julia to London, to Andre Nieuwkerk’s flat, and I found a note of the people he’d been planning to see on his visit. One of the names was Robbert Brand, and that made me think that maybe Andre hadn’t just changed his name but had taken someone else’s identity.’
The commissaris took a pen out of the inside pocket of his jacket. ‘Can I use this?’ he asked the CI, pointing at a notepad that was lying on his desk. At the CI’s nod, he tore a page out, folded it in four and started writing on it balanced on his knee.
It would have been easier to just use the notepad itself.
‘So there really was a Theo Brand?’ the commissaris said.
‘Yes.’
‘Please tell me he’s still alive.’
I shook my head. ‘His family haven’t heard from him in over thirty years.’
‘And Nieuwkerk was using his identity?’
‘Yes. We think Theo Brand left home some time before Andre Nieuwkerk did. I’m assuming the two of them met at some point.’
‘Give me some dates here. What facts have you got?’
‘Theo Brand’s parents last spoke to him in early May 1988. Andre Nieuwkerk went missing in February 1989. Theo Brand’s passport was renewed in London in October 1991, and his family thought he had moved to the UK. I now think it was Andre who did this.’
‘Any evidence for that?’
‘No evidence.’ But before the commissaris could ask another question, I added, ‘It wasn’t Theo who renewed the passport because he’d already been killed. He could have been the Body in the Dunes.’
The commissaris looked at me. ‘Why do you think that?’
‘Nieuwkerk met with Theo Brand’s family and suggested it. Then I showed photos to Forensics – of Theo Brand and of the skull – and they said they couldn’t rule it out.’
‘Nieuwkerk met with Brand’s family?’
‘His father and his brother. Andre’s neighbour in London said he had been very upset about a month ago when he found out about his mother’s death. But his mother died three years ago. It was Theo’s mother who died recently.’
‘No,’ the commissaris said. He tapped his pen on the piece of paper. ‘This makes no sense.’
I looked at the CI as if to get some support, but he stayed quiet. ‘What doesn’t?’ I finally said.
‘Why would he be upset when a woman he’d never known died?’
‘Because he felt guilty?’
The commissaris shook his head. ‘I’m not buying it,’ he said. He looked up at me. ‘And I’m not just saying that because you wanted me to do a press conference about a guy who now might have murdered someone.’
I wondered if he was laughing at me.
Well, it was better than being shouted at.
‘I’m not suggesting Nieuwkerk necessarily killed Theo Brand. His actions don’t seem to imply that.’
‘Because why come and see Theo’s family if that was the case.’ The commissaris nodded. ‘I get what you’re saying.’
‘He could just have got the papers from somewhere,’ I said. As soon as the words left my mouth, they suddenly made sense. ‘Maybe he thought he’d acquired a forged passport and was shocked to find out that Theo Brand had been a real person.’
‘Did they look alike?’
I thought of the two photos I’d seen. ‘They had different-coloured hair and Brand was two years older, but they were alike enough for Nieuwkerk to have travelled on Brand’s passport and for Forensics to have misidentified the skull.’
‘That’s good,’ the commissaris said. ‘It’s good that it wasn’t a glaring mis
take by the police.’ He made some more notes on the piece of paper that he’d taken out of the CI’s notebook. ‘Thanks, Detective Meerman,’ he said. ‘I think I can work with this.’ He got up, nodded towards the CI as if that was enough of a goodbye, and left the office.
I sat there confused. ‘What does he mean by that? Work with it?’
‘Damage control,’ the CI said. ‘That man’s all about damage control.’ He pulled the notebook towards him and picked the edges of the page that the commissaris had used out of the spiral in the middle. ‘He should have been a press officer, not a commissaris.’
I understood what the boss was saying, but on the other hand, the commissaris had pushed me to a conclusion that I liked: Nieuwkerk needn’t have killed Theo Brand to have ended up with his papers. I wondered how much the going rate for a passport would have been back then, and where he’d got the money from.
Maybe he’d just stolen it. The money, or the passport.
I left the CI’s office and saw Mehmet Yilmaz in the corridor. He seemed to be waiting for me. This was not a good place to talk.
‘We took the photos.’ His words were cautious.
I realised there must be an urgent reason for him to want to talk to me here, where my boss could see us at any moment. ‘Is there a problem?’
‘We got him a lawyer.’
‘What did he say?’
Mehmet paused. ‘He said the photos were taken too late. It would have been better if we’d done it the morning after the assault.’
‘I saw his hands the morning after the assault. They didn’t have a single mark on them. No cuts, no bruises.’
Mehmet gave me the same look that my cat gave me when she thought I was doing something strange but there was a possibility that my actions could lead to her getting fed. ‘Are you willing to testify to that?’ he said.
‘I can’t. Seriously, I can’t.’
‘Then what was the point in telling me?’ he said, and walked off.
It was really annoying when people just walked away like that.
Chapter 27
I went home. Pippi seemed delighted to have me back. She weaved through my legs to show affection with the entirety of her body and purred loudly when I finally did what she wanted me to do and sat down on the sofa. She jumped up onto my lap and stared at me with total adoration in her green eyes.
A Death at the Hotel Mondrian (Lotte Meerman Book 5) Page 18