Daniel rushed around the car and opened the driver’s door.
‘You should have told me,’ Julia said. ‘If you had found out something about my brother, you should have told me, not the press.’ She stared out of the window. ‘You found something in his flat, didn’t you?’ She said the words to the world outside.
The feeling in my stomach was the weight of guilt being stacked on top of guilt.
Daniel threw me a glance in the rear-view mirror but didn’t object to me being here. Instead he started the car and drove us away.
If I’d been worried last night that I’d helped Andre make everyone’s life worse, here was evidence that I had definitely made things worse for all the people I’d spoken to in the last week.
Even if it wasn’t my doing directly, because I hadn’t personally made the calls to the press, it was clear that I’d assisted the commissaris in protecting the reputation of the police force at Julia’s expense.
I told myself that nobody had done anything wrong. The commissaris was just following up with the press on the Andre Nieuwkerk case. I had done the right thing by keeping him informed. Andre could well have been a murderer. He had definitely taken Theo Brand’s identity. He wasn’t the innocent victim we’d thought he was. That Julia had always believed he was.
So why did I feel that I hadn’t learned anything from what had happened when I’d ignored Andre to help Ingrid?
It hit me that I’d made the same choice I’d made that morning: I’d put the police force over a member of the public. I wondered why that felt like the wrong choice again.
Daniel parked the car. We crossed under the railway bridge and over the main road and walked in silence along the Amstel to the café by the river. It was located in a beautiful eighteenth-century house that was slowly getting swamped by the new-built glass towers around it. The past was once again being crowded out by the present.
The living rooms of the original house had been converted into sitting areas with wooden tables and chairs. I chose a table where we had a bit of privacy. A bookshelf behind me seemed to indicate that at one point this had been the library. It could all be pretence, of course, but it made for a good space to have a private conversation but with all the security of being in public. It was best to be careful, even though Daniel didn’t seem angry. He went to order our coffees.
I couldn’t help thinking that this case was very much like the area around us, with past and present fighting for control and precedence. Because what was more important: the mistakes the police had made twenty-five years ago when they misidentified the Body in the Dunes as Andre Nieuwkerk; or the mistake I’d made last week when I’d ignored him?
If I blocked out part of the view from the window, modern times felt far away. Large barges floated over the wide water of the Amstel at a pleasantly bucolic speed, as if nothing had changed over the last two hundred years. But if I turned my head slightly, it became impossible to avoid the tall glass towers of the office park by the Amstel station. They were shouting that obviously the present took priority over the past.
Both mistakes had caused a suicide. The suicide of a child abuser and the suicide of the victim of his abuse. Even though I didn’t want to, it was hard not to agree with what my surroundings were telling me: that the present mistake had been worse. I shook my head. This wasn’t helping.
Daniel came back from the bar. ‘The waitress will bring our coffees.’ He sat down next to Julia. ‘I knew I had to get you out of there. I saw the papers and I knew the press would be at your doorstep.’
It was weird to be here with Daniel and Julia. To sit here with two people who had once been friends and who had ended up hating each other. Or had they? Julia said she’d always been willing to talk to Daniel.
He’d had the same thought as I had, and the same reaction. She hadn’t opened the door for me, but she’d opened it to him. You wouldn’t do that for someone you hated.
‘I know exactly what it’s like to be accused of being the family of a murderer,’ Daniel said. His voice was calm. I could tell he wasn’t saying it to be confrontational; he was telling Julia that she wasn’t the only one this had happened to. Again I wondered what it must have been like for him after his father was named as Andre Nieuwkerk’s murderer. Had he seen the photos in the papers when the family were banned from church? The headlines screaming about the abuse? Had he struggled with reporters outside their house? Had he known they’d taken his picture at his father’s funeral? I couldn’t imagine he’d been able to avoid all of that. As he’d said, he’d been the son of a murderer.
‘They asked me if I knew,’ Julia glared at me, ‘and I didn’t know what they were talking about. But you knew, didn’t you?’
‘Knew what?’
‘That Theo Brand was a real person. And that Andre took his identity.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That I knew.’ And I’d made the decision not to tell her. It had been my fault that she’d woken up to that bank of journalists without knowing what was going on. With no idea of what they were going to throw at her. ‘But I didn’t know it had gone out to the press. I’m really sorry you had to hear it this way.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
Why hadn’t I? Because I wanted to spare her the thought that her brother might have been a murderer. ‘You had enough to deal with.’
‘That’s rubbish,’ Julia said. ‘You could have told me yesterday, when we were going to Kars’s. We were in the car together for half an hour; you could have said something then.’
‘He probably didn’t do it,’ Daniel said. ‘Just believe that.’
‘Like you believed your father didn’t do it,’ she said, and nodded to herself as if she only now realised that this was a perfectly reasonable reaction.
It felt really weird to me that the two of them could have this conversation, say these words without throwing them in each other’s faces. In the circumstances, I would have thought it was going to descend into a shouting match, but in fact it just felt as though they were having a sensible conversation about how to deal with a member of your family being accused of murder.
It was a surreal experience and it made my head spin.
‘I knew my dad hadn’t murdered your brother,’ Daniel said. ‘I said so to the police at the time, but nobody listened to me. They all said I’d been too young to notice or that I’d misremembered. They ignored me.’
I hadn’t found any statement from Daniel when I’d gone through the files of the previous team. He’d been twelve when Andre went missing, eighteen when the bones had been found and identified. I could understand why the police hadn’t taken his testimony too seriously, but I was surprised that they hadn’t even made a record of it. ‘You thought your father didn’t do it, or you knew?’ I stressed the last word.
‘He came to our door,’ Daniel said. He looked over at Julia. ‘He came to us, Juul.’
She smiled. ‘Nobody has called me Juul in a long time.’
Daniel leaned forward and rested his arms on the table. ‘Your brother came to see my father.’
The smile dropped from her face. ‘When?’
‘I think it was probably the night he went missing. I saw him talking to my father.’
‘Did you hear what he said?’ I asked.
‘He said your parents had kicked him out.’ He spoke directly to Julia, as if I wasn’t there. ‘He asked my father for money. I was surprised when Dad gave him some, because I didn’t know why he would do that, I didn’t know about what had happened between them. He gave Andre money and then he wrote something down. An address to go to, I’m pretty sure of that.’
‘Do you know where?’
‘No, he wrote it down. I couldn’t see it.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me this at the time?’ Julia said. ‘You knew I’d reported him missing. If you’d told me then, I could have tried to find him and none of this would have happened.’
‘My mother told me not to. She said your parents knew where your
brother had gone; that they didn’t want to talk to him and I shouldn’t stir things up.’
The waitress came over with our coffees. Julia gripped the saucer as soon as the woman put it down, dragged it across the table until it stood in front of her and lifted the cup to hide her mouth.
I didn’t think it was the need for caffeine that made her do that.
Eventually she put the cup down and wiped her mouth. She rubbed her hands over her face, then sat back on her chair. ‘My parents knew where he was? Your mother said that my parents knew? That can’t be right. They can’t have known.’
I took a sip of my cappuccino, enjoying the bitterness. I looked out of the window at a barge floating on the Amstel. The past moved slowly compared to the present, but it couldn’t be avoided.
‘I don’t know,’ Daniel said. ‘Maybe she lied about that, I know she wanted to keep me silent about Andre.’
I could tell he’d said it to make Julia feel better, not because it was what he actually thought.
‘I didn’t know about the abuse until all those years later,’ he continued, ‘but I knew that your brother was still alive when he left our house that evening. My father didn’t threaten him, he didn’t hit him, he didn’t follow him.’ He looked my way. ‘The police weren’t interested. Especially not after my father had killed himself. They had their story, they were done. Instead the papers printed that photo of me at the funeral. The son of a murderer. The son of an abuser. That was who I was, so who was going to listen to me, a kid with an inconvenient truth to tell?’
An inconvenient truth. I knew our circumstances couldn’t be more different, but Daniel’s words reminded me of the situation I was in with Erol Yilmaz. I had seen him the morning after, and nobody wanted to hear it. Daniel had seen Andre visit his father – and walk away alive – and nobody had wanted to hear him either.
Julia’s mobile rang. She checked the display to see who was calling. ‘It’s Kars Borst,’ she said. She looked at Daniel. ‘Remember? He was in our class.’ She answered the call and listened for a few seconds, then said, ‘Kars, I’m going to put you on speaker.’
‘Julia, I saw the papers this morning and I wanted to tell you something. Because maybe you’re feeling guilty over Verbaan’s death. Well don’t. I’m not. Your brother did a good thing. He took revenge for all of us. Verbaan was an abuser. He would never have been convicted. Nobody would ever have talked, I mean. God knows how many boys had gone before Andre.’
I looked at Daniel. He was so pale, it was as if he was going to be sick.
‘Even if a kid had gone to his parents,’ Kars continued, ‘and if the parents had gone to the school, it would all have been brushed under the carpet, you know that. If your brother hadn’t pretended to be dead, if he had come forward immediately, Verbaan would still be alive. He might have gone on to teach for another twenty years.’
Daniel put a hand in front of his face. Julia reached out and patted him on the arm, as you would do with a crying child. As she had probably done often enough with people in her job. She was comforting him, but she was probably the one who needed the support most
‘Don’t feel bad,’ Kars continued. ‘Just remember that once Andre kept quiet, he couldn’t come back. I don’t think he did it because he hated you. He didn’t do it to cut you out.’
I looked at Julia. Tears were streaming down her face. I could see that she was shaking.
‘Don’t feel bad,’ Kars repeated. ‘I know it was tough for you and your family, but I think Andre felt he had to do it. Verbaan died. That was a good outcome. I know it’s been hard on Verbaan’s son – you two were friends, weren’t you?’
‘Yeah,’ Julia said, looking at Daniel. ‘We were friends.’
‘But don’t forget that the guy was a child abuser and would have ruined many more lives.’
Something Daniel had told us earlier jogged my memory. ‘Kars,’ I said, ‘this is Detective Lotte Meerman. Sorry to interrupt. When we came to see you the other day, didn’t you say that Verbaan gave you the name of a place to go? After you had problems with your parents.’
‘Yes, he did, and they were great. They really helped me.’
‘Can you remember what they were called?’
‘Side Step.’
I looked at Daniel, but he shrugged. I needed to know if maybe one of the other runaways had gone there. Someone like Theo Brand.
Julia thanked Kars and disconnected the call. ‘It reminds me of this area,’ she said. ‘Did you know they had to build the apartment blocks around this house because it was so old? The past,’ she said. ‘It always shapes the present, doesn’t it?’
Chapter 29
I’d thought Theo’s father might have information on where his son had gone, and I’d taken Charlie with me to talk to him. Robbert Brand gave us a tired smile when we arrived on his doorstep.
‘I knew you’d come to talk to me again,’ he said. ‘Is it all certain now? Is Theo dead?’
The last time I’d spoken to him, he’d seemed an energetic man. This morning he looked old, as if the hope that his son was still alive was what had kept him charged all this time, and the news of his death had sucked the life from him. With journalists chasing him and speculation about his son’s death in all the papers, he’d aged a decade. A pile of newspapers lay by the side of his chair. The front page of the local paper showed an old picture of his son side by side with one of Andre as a teenager. Luckily it wasn’t one of the photos that Robbert had given me the other day. I would have hated it if the commissaris had passed one of those on to the press.
I’d only thought of the information I wanted when I was on the way over, but now I was hit by the father’s grief. If I’d thought it was bad that Julia had found out through the papers that her brother had used Theo’s identity, Theo’s father finding out that his son was most likely dead was a hundred times worse.
I should have briefed him. Someone should have told him. ‘We still don’t know for certain,’ I said, ‘but it seems likely.’ I should have rushed over to this house instead of Julia’s this morning. My bad decisions only kept multiplying.
‘Is this true?’ He gestured at the paper. ‘Did the guy who came here the other day murder him?’
‘We know that he used your son’s identity. His name and his passport. We don’t know if he killed him.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me this last time?’ The old man’s voice was soft and small, as if he didn’t even have the strength to be angry any more.
It didn’t make me feel any less guilty. ‘We don’t have evidence for any of it,’ I said. ‘We don’t know where he got your son’s passport from.’ Charlie and I were sitting side by side on the sofa as if we were in this together, even though I was mainly to blame for how upset the old man was.
‘You said the ashes had been scattered.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Do you know where?’
I knew what he was thinking: that those had been his son’s ashes. ‘I’ll ask for you. I’ll ask Julia, Andre Nieuwkerk’s sister. She’ll know.’
Robbert rubbed his eyes. ‘Yes. My son was cremated by the family of the guy who the papers say was his murderer. Why did he come here? If he was going to tell people he’d murdered him, he should have just said. Why didn’t he tell us? If he was going to kill himself anyway, why not tell us what he’d done. What he’d done to Theo.’ He looked at me as if I had all the answers, but unfortunately, I had none. I’d come here only with questions.
‘Can I ask you some things about your son?’
The old man didn’t answer me, but got his iPad out. ‘Here are some photos of my wife’s funeral,’ he said. ‘Barbara’s funeral. There were a lot of people. Everybody loved Barbara. Everybody knew her; she talked to people, made time for them. When we went for walks, we’d always bump into someone who wanted a chat, asked her for advice.’
There used to be a time when old-age pensioners weren’t up to date with the latest technology, but Robbe
rt seemed to like his gadgets even though he still read the newspaper in old-fashioned print.
‘We should have had something like that for Theo,’ he said sadly.
‘Why did he leave home?’ I asked.
‘He was old enough to do that.’ Robbert showed me a photo of a group of people talking, looking solemn, dressed in black, at the edge of a cemetery.
‘You said you spoke to him for the first month or so. Did you know where he was?’
‘He stayed with one of his mates at first, slept on his sofa. Look, this is my cousin Frank,’ Robbert said. ‘I hadn’t seen him in years, but he still came.’ I could see the tears in his eyes. ‘He’s called me a couple of times since. He knows I’m not lonely because Harry lives close, but I think he likes to keep in touch with me. It’s nice of him.’ He swiped and showed the next image. ‘It’s nice of him,’ he said again.
‘He stayed with one of his mates first. Do you know where he went after that? Was he at a place called Side Step?’
‘Side Step? No, that doesn’t ring a bell. He went to London.’ He paused for a second. ‘No, you now think he didn’t go to London, don’t you? I read about that. That it was Andre Nieuwkerk who went to London on Theo’s passport.’
The article had been very in-depth.
‘So I don’t know.’ He swiped a few more times. He held the iPad away from him when he looked at the next group photo, and narrowed his eyes to get the picture in focus.
‘Do you remember the names of any of his mates?’ Charlie asked. ‘The one he stayed with maybe?’
‘It’s all such a long time ago. Harry might know. He tried to find him a few times. Went looking for him when he first moved out, but if someone doesn’t want to be found …’ Robbert turned back to the photos. ‘Ah look, here’s Katja. It was nice that she came.’ He planted a finger in the middle of his iPad. ‘She’s a good girl.’ He enlarged the image for me, so that I could see her more clearly.
It also enlarged the image of the man she was talking to. A man I recognised straight away. I took the iPad from Robbert’s hands and angled it so that Charlie could also see the picture clearly.
A Death at the Hotel Mondrian (Lotte Meerman Book 5) Page 20