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

by Anja de Jager

  I heard him take a sharp intake of breath.

  ‘Katja?’ My voice was tight with the effort it took to keep calm.

  ‘Harry’s ex-wife.’

  Of course. It came back to me. I’d spoken to Katja when I’d called the number in Andre’s diary. She’d told me she didn’t know a Harry; that I’d dialled the wrong number.

  And now here she was, at Theo Brand’s mother’s funeral, chatting to Andre Nieuwkerk.

  I called Katja and spoke to her for the second time in a week. At least this time she didn’t say I must have the wrong number. I’d confirmed that the address Andre had written down in his diary was actually the right one, and Charlie and I drove out to her house.

  ‘I can’t believe it.’ Charlie kept his eyes on the road in front of him while he talked. ‘Andre Nieuwkerk came to Theo’s mother’s funeral. Why would he have done that?’

  ‘To be honest, I’ve got no idea. Let’s wait to talk to Katja.’

  ‘Can I lead the questioning?’

  ‘Of course you can.’ This latest turn of events made me think I’d been asking all the wrong questions anyway. Charlie couldn’t make more of a mess of things than I had. ‘What do you think we should find out?’

  ‘What she talked to Andre about at the funeral.’

  ‘And what else?’ I asked. We were coming up to a large roundabout and Charlie stopped to let a stream of cyclists pass. I thought of Andre cycling in London and getting into an accident that ultimately caused him to lose his job, giving him time to google himself and find out about Theo Brand’s mother. The accident had also got him hooked on prescription painkillers. In Amsterdam, cyclists and cars were kept separated as much as possible precisely to stop these kinds of accidents. When they did happen, they were often racing bikes, deciding to cycle on the main road instead of staying in the designated lanes full of cyclists in no particular rush. When I’d gone to London with Julia, traffic had seemed confusing enough already without trying to get through it on a bike.

  ‘Is there anything else?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘He came to her house last week,’ I said. ‘Harry told me that she said there’d been another nutter.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ Charlie said.

  I became aware that I probably hadn’t kept him informed as much as I should have done. ‘He told us that when Thomas and I interviewed him and his father the first time.’

  ‘Last Saturday.’

  ‘That’s right. He didn’t mention that his ex-wife had talked to the man a month before that.’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t know.’

  ‘Worth a question,’ I said.

  Charlie nodded, his eyes on the road. ‘Lotte, I spoke to Mehmet. Did you know that Erol has been arrested?’

  I’d expected that question. If anything, I was surprised that he’d waited this long to bring it up. ‘Ingrid told me it was going to happen.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Do? Nothing.’

  ‘Don’t you think you should?’ He looked at me. ‘You don’t believe he did it.’

  ‘I’m not going to mess with Ingrid’s case any more than I already have.’

  ‘Don’t you think you have a duty?’

  ‘I have a duty to a fellow police officer.’

  Charlie was shaking his head. ‘You also have a duty to the truth.’

  The truth. I’d talked to Ingrid last night and she was convinced that Yilmaz was guilty. It was also the truth that I’d talked to Andre Nieuwkerk. Did that make me guilty of his death? Did it make me culpable, and did I want Ingrid to tell other people about that?

  I didn’t want to think that this was the reason why I wasn’t more willing to help Erol Yilmaz. Surely I could trust Ingrid? She wouldn’t have arrested someone unless they had some evidence.

  We pulled in to Katja’s street. The house looked like a typical family home, with a pair of garden gnomes in the front guarding two recycling bins, and a patch of pebbled ground only a little bigger than a car. It was that time of year when gardens looked their worst, and Katja’s was no exception. I was glad I didn’t have a garden at my place. I couldn’t even keep potted plants alive.

  Katja opened the door and let us in. She was a little younger than Julia and had her hair cut short in stark straight lines that did nothing to soften her angular features. She wore bright blue eyeshadow; the kind we wore as teenagers because we were told it brought out the colour of our eyes. She hadn’t moved on from that look, which hadn’t even been flattering on young girls. The house was filled to the brim with plants, large bunches of flowers stood on every surface, and the air was so full of unseasonal pollen that it made me sneeze. She mainly seemed to favour large lilies that reminded me of nothing so much as a funeral home.

  She led us through to an open kitchen, the only place where there were no flowers.

  ‘You met Andre Nieuwkerk at your mother-in-law’s funeral?’ Charlie said.

  It was good that he wanted to lead the questioning, because Katja gave him her undivided attention. ‘He was looking for Theo,’ she said. ‘Was he at the funeral, was he going to come, when had we spoken to him last, those kinds of things.’

  ‘What did you think?’

  ‘I tried to get rid of him. I thought he was just trying to get information from me. We’d had some other people pretending to be Theo in the past.’

  Harry had told me about people like that.

  ‘I was quite short with him, told him we hadn’t seen Theo in years. That I had never met him. When Harry and I started going out, Theo was already out of touch with the family.’

  ‘You saw him again last week?’

  ‘Yes, he came to my front door, told me he had something to tell me about Theo. I knew it was just rubbish, so I didn’t stop to talk to him.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘A month before, he was asking me if I’d seen Theo, and now he was saying that he had information for us? Of course I didn’t believe him. I told him to leave. Then you called,’ she nodded at me, ‘so I was short with you as well.’

  ‘Did he say anything else?’ Charlie asked. ‘When he came to your place?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like what information he was going to give you?’

  ‘No, I didn’t wait to hear what he had to say.’

  I swallowed down the saliva that had rushed into my mouth. That was what I had done. Did it matter if Ingrid was going to tell everybody about it? It had happened. I’d refused to listen to him. I had made that mistake.

  ‘What did he seem like,’ I asked, ‘when you met him at the funeral?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘How did he react when you told him you hadn’t seen Theo in a while? Was he surprised, upset, angry?’

  Katja paused. ‘I’m not sure.’ She widened her baby-blue eyes as far as they could go. ‘He was sad, maybe? But then it was a funeral, it was normal to be upset. I was upset.’

  ‘Did he tell you why he’d come?’

  ‘I got the impression,’ Katja said, ‘that it was because he hoped Theo would be there. So maybe he was disappointed? Yes, that’s it. Disappointed.’

  I could feel Charlie’s eyes on me. ‘I know what that feels like,’ he said. ‘To be disappointed.’

  Chapter 30

  Charlie and I drove back to the police station in silence. This seemed to be his method of showing disappointment. I filed it away for future reference. Thomas would normally demonstrate annoyance with sarcastic comments. Silence was much preferable, and I tried to convince myself it was good because it allowed me to do some thinking. It disturbed me that Andre had expected Theo to be alive. That he had come to Theo’s mother’s funeral expecting to meet the man whose papers he’d used. It made me think of what his neighbour had told me, about Andre being different after he’d found out about Theo’s mother’s death.

  As soon as I was back at my desk, I put a call in to Carol Reynolds, Andre’s London neighbour.

&
nbsp; ‘I was going to call you,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you about this, but I’ve been really disturbed by all the press interest in Theo. Andre, I mean,’ she corrected herself.

  As she was talking, I googled Andre Nieuwkerk London and was immediately presented with a set of pictures taken outside his place in Putney. I really didn’t want to hear someone else complaining about reporters camping outside their house. I could only imagine what her quiet street was now like. Still, I had a duty to listen to her. After all, this mess was partially my fault. It was largely my fault if I wanted to be honest about it.

  ‘I’m a psychiatrist,’ she said. ‘And even though I wasn’t his psychiatrist per se, he did tell me a lot of things. He felt he could share things with me and that I would understand. Or at least not judge him.’

  ‘What did you want to tell me?’

  ‘He tried to commit suicide before, about six months ago, and I found him just in time.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘He called me and told me what he’d done: taken an overdose of his painkillers. I called 999 and then I went upstairs. I knew where he kept the key – he’d had one hidden downstairs. It was a cry for help.’

  ‘Was there a reason for it? Did he tell you?’

  ‘He’d gone through a really rough time. He’d had the accident, it had taken him a long time to recover, then there was the dependency on the painkillers. But most of all, I think he suddenly had a lot of time on his hands to think. He always used to be busy at his job, but when he couldn’t go to work for two months, they laid him off. That’s what tipped the scales, I think.’

  ‘Were they allowed to do that? Is it legal?’

  ‘British labour laws aren’t that strict. He got a big payout; he said he didn’t mind. But sitting at home all day, I don’t think it was good for him at all.’

  ‘That’s why you told him not to go.’

  ‘Yes, I was very concerned. I told him that if things got too much, he should call me. He should come back.’

  ‘His sister didn’t believe him; Verbaan’s son hit him. Was that what made him do it?’

  ‘I wonder. Surely he would have expected Verbaan’s son to be angry at him. That’s why I thought something had happened with the Brand family.’

  ‘Did he tell you something about them?’

  ‘I think they were important to him. That those were the people he obsessed about, that’s all. I just wished he’d called me. After his previous attempt, we’d agreed that he would.’

  ‘Did he tell you anything about Theo Brand, or about what he was planning to do?’

  ‘No, he didn’t. He never even told me that Theo wasn’t his real name.’

  ‘Did he tell you anything about his early days in London?’

  ‘Not really. He did tell me about the childhood abuse. Not in detail – I never knew it had been his teacher – but he told me about being young and being taken advantage of. That seemed to be the big thing for him: thinking that someone loved him and then realising he’d just been used. He said it was a pattern. He’d got it into his head that he had to go to Amsterdam to break this pattern.’

  ‘A pattern? A pattern implies more than once.’

  ‘Yes,’ Carol said. ‘Yes it does, doesn’t it?’

  I thought about the photos in his study. The photos that seemed like a gallery of people he’d hated. His teacher. His father. ‘You think he’d been abused before Verbaan.’

  ‘Before, after, who knows? Who knows what happened between him and Theo Brand?’

  That pulled me up, because it wasn’t the direction my mind had been going in at all. ‘Theo Brand? Did he say anything about him?’

  ‘No, but I think I knew my upstairs neighbour well enough to know that he wasn’t a murderer. If the two boys were together and one of them ended up dead … Well, I just think that something must have happened.’

  This was completely different from what Katja had been thinking. She thought that Andre had come looking for Theo. Carol thought Andre might have had something to do with his death. ‘Why do you think the two of them had been together?’

  ‘He’d been researching his family tree. Only it wasn’t his family tree, of course, but the real Theo Brand’s. He’d spent hours going over Theo’s family.’

  I remembered what Harry Brand had told me about putting messages on all the family research websites, looking for Theo. If Andre had been researching Theo’s family tree, he would have found those. ‘When was this?’ I asked. ‘Was it before or after he was shocked about his mother’s death?’

  ‘Before,’ Carol said. ‘I think that was how he found out about it.’

  He would have found out that Theo’s family were still looking for him. He’d gone to the mother’s funeral. In Katja’s opinion, he’d hoped that Theo would show up. Was it possible that what he’d been shocked about wasn’t the mother’s death but the fact that Theo was still missing?

  ‘Her death must have been a real wake-up call for him,’ Carol continued. ‘For years he would have seen himself purely as a victim, dealing with the effects of the childhood abuse, accepting that what he’d done had been necessary to survive. If he’d had something to do with Theo’s death, seeing the family must have brought with it a huge amount of guilt.’

  She sounded as if she was giving her professional opinion, and I wrote as much of it down as I could. ‘Guilt that he wouldn’t have felt before, you mean?’

  ‘Yes. I think he would have gone to Amsterdam to make amends and I don’t think it went as he’d hoped. It wouldn’t have taken much for him to tip. To kill himself. It could have been something that the Brand family said to him, for example.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘This has been incredibly useful.’

  She told me that if I had any further questions, I could call her at any time. What she’d said had made so much sense. I could imagine that shift between seeing himself as a victim and seeing himself as someone responsible for a man’s death. Had those photos in his flat been to remind himself what he’d gone through? What Carol had said about the Brand family possibly being the trigger to Andre’s suicide was possible. I thought we should talk to Harry and Robbert again. But before I could go to them, I got a call from the commissaris saying that he wanted to talk to me. I needed to keep my anger hidden just as carefully as he disguised every single emotion. I kept my hands stuffed in the pockets of my coat. That way he wouldn’t be able to see that they were balled into fists.

  The walk up to the floor where the commissaris’s office was located was long enough to make me even more angry. I pictured Robbert Brand’s face as he’d sat in his chair this morning, and I knocked on the door with more force than was necessary.

  ‘This wasn’t what we agreed,’ I said.

  The commissaris looked up. ‘We agreed something?’

  ‘I briefed you but I didn’t know you were going to leak this to the press.’

  ‘What did you want to do instead, Detective Meerman?’ My job title sounded like an insult. ‘I think I’m right in saying that you’re getting nowhere with this case. There will never be any forensic evidence. You’ve got nothing on Andre Nieuwkerk’s death or Theo Brand’s potential murder. What we need are witnesses who might have seen something thirty years ago. We need press coverage.’

  ‘I promised the family—’

  ‘You were in no position to promise them anything,’ he interrupted me pleasantly. ‘What we do is solve crimes with whatever methods are at our disposal. Sure, we are sympathetic towards the families of the victims wherever possible. Here it was no longer possible.’

  ‘I understand your position,’ I said. The way I understood it and what I was going to say were not the same thing, however. ‘Informing the press about Andre Nieuwkerk’s death is entirely the right thing to do. However, I think it’s callous to have made it known that Theo Brand was potentially the Body in the Dunes. That’s the part I have trouble with.’

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘And
I’m the person who told them? Are you sure about that?’

  Frustration narrowed my throat so that the only way I could get the words out was by talking too loudly. ‘Who else? Who else but you?’

  ‘I confirmed to the press that we’d misidentified the Body in the Dunes thirty years ago. I told them that Andre Nieuwkerk had committed suicide last week and that he had been using Theo Brand’s identification papers. That’s it. Maybe you should check your facts before storming in here and making these accusations.’

  The photos on the wall looked at me and judged me. The eyes of one particular criminal who was posing with a politician next to a racehorse told me that I was angry with myself more than with the commissaris. I knew I could have told Robbert Brand all this in person when Thomas and I visited him after I’d got back from London, but that we’d decided not to. I could have told Julia as well. I should have briefed both of them as soon as I’d briefed the commissaris. I’d been too preoccupied with other matters to do the decent thing. ‘There was a mob of journalists outside Julia Nieuwkerk’s flat,’ I said.

  ‘I know. I got my secretary to write her a letter of apology.’

  ‘An apology?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have apologised? Is that how you deal with things in Amsterdam? I’ll make a note of that for next time.’ He actually wrote something down on his pad. I had no idea it was possible to pick up a pen in a sarcastic way.

  It had taken three meetings with the commissaris before I’d finally come to realise that this was what he did. This was how he dealt with tricky questions: he attacked any part of them he possibly could. Keep it short, Lotte, I told myself. One topic in every sentence. Don’t give him the slightest gap to squirm out of. ‘Why didn’t you tell me beforehand?’

  ‘I really don’t see what the problem is here.’

  ‘If you’re going to do something that affects my operation, at least tell me. Don’t keep me in the dark. I felt as ambushed as the victim’s family did.’

  ‘You weren’t ambushed.’

  I relaxed my fists in my pockets. ‘Next time tell me so I know when to expect stories in the press. Give me an hour’s notice or so.’