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

by Anja de Jager

  ‘I will.’ He looked me in the eye, to make himself seem more sincere. Or to check my reaction. ‘At least we got Yilmaz. Did you hear?’

  My reaction was the only sensible one: I said ‘Yes, I heard,’ and walked out of his office. This had been pointless. He would do exactly the same thing next time. My boots made pleasing stomping noises in the carpeted corridor.

  I left the police station to get some fresh air. I walked along the canal behind the building and didn’t go back in even when it started to rain. I had forgotten my umbrella, but I kept walking. I stood at the back of the police station and looked at the statue of the woman with the sword, seemingly ready to take on the world in the name of justice. The rain in my face forced me to think. It dared me to consider my options. Wasn’t I supposed to uphold justice? Wasn’t that at least part of my job?

  I could no longer do anything about what my superiors had leaked to the press. I couldn’t undo any of the mistakes I’d made, the one that might have cost someone his life. The only thing I could do now was to make sure that an innocent man didn’t end up in prison because of the pressure of public opinion.

  This wasn’t revenge on the commissaris; I didn’t want to ruin his victory in being able to go on TV and tell everybody we had the perpetrator of those violent muggings. No, this was about what I’d seen. This was about telling people about my ‘inconvenient truth’, and if that meant Ingrid was going to tell everybody how I’d ignored Andre Nieuwkerk that morning, then so be it.

  I raised my face to the rain. It had helped me to make up my mind and I was grateful to it, even as it came down harder and harder.

  Chapter 31

  The police station was solid and immovable in the driving rain. The statues depicting the various tasks that the police had to perform were as dark as the sky. ‘Protect the public’ was one of them. As if I needed reminding of that.

  Just because I knew I was doing the right thing didn’t mean I had to feel good about it.

  I swiped my card through the reader and watched the entry light flash up green. The traffic police were three floors up, and I took the stairs two at a time. Water dripped from the hem of my raincoat onto the bottom of my trousers and my shoes. My shoes squished in complaint at every step I took. They told me I was going to betray a friend in order to rescue someone I didn’t like. They seemed to question my choices with a wet squishing sound.

  I didn’t need their reminder.

  I hoped that Mehmet wouldn’t be at his desk, but he was. I paused in the doorway to the traffic police’s office and gestured at him to follow me. I could see two of his colleagues looking at each other with raised eyebrows, but I didn’t care. He didn’t ask what I wanted but walked behind me through the corridor and back down the stairs to Interrogation Room One. I sat at the seat where the suspect would normally sit, facing the mirror.

  ‘Go and switch it on,’ I said.

  ‘Switch what on?’

  ‘Don’t you want to record this?’

  ‘What …’ he started, but then left the room again. The red light came on on the camera in the corner. The microphone in the centre of the table was ready to record my every word.

  Mehmet came back in. He sat down on what would normally be my chair.

  I saw myself in the one-way mirror, my wet raincoat, my hair glued to my face by the rain. I felt ancient. I looked ancient. The first morning I’d met Erol Yilmaz, I’d thought he’d looked like someone who was guilty. Today, I looked like someone who was going to step into an abyss with a gritty determination. This was what it must feel like to go bungee jumping.

  ‘What do you want me to ask you?’ Mehmet said. He shook his head as if he wasn’t sure what was going on. As if he thought I was playing games with him, leading him towards a trap that he didn’t see coming. ‘What are you going to say?’

  I sat back on my chair and undid my raincoat. ‘Why don’t you just assume,’ I said, ‘that I’m going to tell you the truth.’

  ‘Should I get Erol’s lawyer here?’

  ‘You’re a police officer.’ I gestured towards the camera in the corner. ‘You’re recording this.’ I peeled my raincoat off and dropped it on the floor. There was something about sitting here, about to be questioned, that clearly brought out the worst in me. ‘You can do this.’

  I probably should have asked him to switch on the recording equipment after we’d had this chat, then I could have pretended that he’d called me in. Though nobody would have believed that anyway.

  ‘You saw Erol on the morning of the assault,’ Mehmet said.

  Not the right place to start, but I wasn’t going to correct him. ‘That’s right.’ The same part of me that dropped my wet coat on the floor was now not going to volunteer any information.

  ‘Did you notice anything weird about him?’

  I raised my eyebrows and tipped my head sideways. ‘Weird?’

  Mehmet shook his head as if he needed to clear his brain. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Can we start again?’ He sat up straight on his chair and made eye contact. ‘You saw Peter de Waal after he’d been assaulted.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You interviewed him in hospital.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He stated he’d recognise his assailant.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He told you how the assault happened.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you think the attack happened the way he said?’

  ‘I knew it didn’t.’

  ‘Why are you saying that?’

  ‘He said he’d been hit once, but his face and body clearly showed marks of more than one blow.’

  ‘More than one person?’

  ‘Possibly. Not necessarily.’

  ‘Did that rule out that the assailant was the man he mentioned?’

  ‘No, of course it didn’t. He could have been unconscious after the first punch and that was all he remembered.’

  ‘Did he get a good look at the man?’

  ‘He said the man called his name; he turned around, saw him and was immediately punched.’

  ‘What time was this?’

  ‘Between three and three thirty a.m.’

  ‘It was dark?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was it near a streetlight?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It would have happened quickly.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘The man was sober?’

  ‘No, one of his colleagues told us he’d been drinking heavily.’

  ‘But you followed up on the victim’s witness statement.’

  ‘That’s right. Detective Ingrid Ries and I went to visit Erol Yilmaz.’

  ‘How soon after the assault was this?’

  ‘We saw him around ten a.m., so at most seven hours after the assault.’

  ‘You didn’t immediately arrest him.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘There was no physical evidence on him to suggest he’d hit someone.’

  ‘Please explain that.’

  ‘There should have been marks on his hands, bruising or cuts, if he had been the one to cause the damage I’d seen on Peter de Waal’s face and torso.’

  ‘What conclusion did you draw?’

  ‘That Erol Yilmaz was not the person who’d assaulted Peter de Waal. Or at least not in the way that de Waal described.’

  ‘So either de Waal’s statement was incorrect about the method the attacker used, or Yilmaz wasn’t the man who assaulted him.’

  I nodded. ‘That’s exactly it.’

  ‘That makes the witness statement groundless.’

  ‘Given that de Waal was drunk when it happened, that it was dark, that the attack happened very quickly, I would find it difficult to arrest Yilmaz based on the witness statement alone.’

  ‘Just to make sure: you checked Yilmaz’s hands.’

  ‘It was one of the first things I looked at.’

  ‘Seven hours after he was supposed to
have hit de Waal, there was no physical evidence whatsoever to corroborate the victim’s story.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘So why would the team still try to pursue him for it?’

  I didn’t answer; just shook my head with a tiny gesture and threw a glance at the camera. Mehmet got the hint. I wasn’t going to go there. I was willing to go on record with what I’d seen that morning, but I wasn’t willing to say anything else.

  He got up, left the room again and switched the equipment off.

  ‘Make a copy,’ I said when he came back. ‘Because I might not do that again.’ I picked up my wet raincoat from the floor.

  ‘Thanks, Lotte,’ Mehmet said.

  I didn’t respond. It wasn’t that I disliked him for having put me in this position – it wasn’t his fault – but I didn’t feel particularly good about myself for having torpedoed Ingrid’s case.

  I could only hope she wouldn’t put her threat into action.

  Chapter 32

  Even though Robbert Brand hadn’t known anything about where Theo had gone after he stopped sleeping on his friend’s sofa, I couldn’t help thinking that the missing information might give us important clues about his murder. Theo had left home in February 1988 and his father had last talked to him in May of that year. Andre had been kicked out of his parents’ house in February 1989. If the two had met, which seemed likely, where had Theo been in the ten months between May and February? I called Harry to ask him if he knew anything. He said he didn’t, but that I was welcome to go through Theo’s stuff. It had been kept exactly as it had been. Also, his father had been doing research into Theo’s movements and there might be something there that would help. I said I’d come over and look through the papers.

  His father was at a weekly meeting with some friends and Harry let me into the house. The low daylight crept through the net curtains. ‘It’s in the attic,’ he said. ‘Right under the eaves. It used to be Theo’s bedroom.’

  I followed him up the stairs. ‘How long did they keep it like that?’

  ‘They didn’t move his things until years after I left,’ Harry said. ‘They redecorated the whole house. Got rid of my bedroom and turned it into a spare room, and made Theo’s into a study. About ten years after he’d gone missing.’

  ‘Did they think he wouldn’t come back?’

  ‘No, Dad always thought he would. That’s why they never moved. This house is clearly too big for him, but he always hoped that Theo would come home one day.’ He paused on the landing and opened a door to a bedroom on the left. ‘This is the spare room. Half the things in here are still mine.’

  A bed with a bedspread with blue stripes; a large table. I could see the bare bones of a teenage boy’s room there.

  ‘Did you mind?’ I said. ‘Your parents’ long search for Theo, I mean.’

  ‘Mind?’ He turned away and went up the second flight of stairs. ‘What was there to mind? I wanted my brother back just as much as my parents wanted their son back. If anything, I felt sorry for them. My father never moved on. His life was stuck at the point that Theo went missing. He’s spent the last thirty years looking for him. I don’t know what he would have done in his retirement otherwise.’

  He opened the door to the attic room and displayed what thirty years of research had gained Robbert Brand.

  ‘I don’t mind this.’ He indicated the walls lined with ring binders. ‘I minded all the people who were trying to take advantage of my father. People like that man who said he was my brother. People like the psychics who told him where Theo was. Only clearly he wasn’t there.’

  ‘And you thought Andre was one of those people?’ I picked up a sheet of paper from the desk but didn’t look at it. I looked at Harry’s face instead.

  ‘Poor Andre. Yes, I did think he was one of those people at first, but then I realised he wasn’t. He didn’t ask for money. I’ve ended up wondering,’ he said, ‘if he wasn’t worse than the others. He hinted that he had answers but he never gave them to us. Did he do that on purpose?’

  ‘You didn’t meet with him after that first time, did you?’

  ‘No, I tried to reach him but I couldn’t. Because he’d already died.’

  Yes. He’d already died.

  He took off his small black-framed glasses and rubbed the lenses.

  ‘Did your father ever say that he suspected someone of having murdered your brother? Was Theo seeing anybody at the time he went missing?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Harry said. ‘I really don’t. I don’t even know if he ever had a girlfriend. It just wasn’t something we talked about. He was seventeen, he was a good-looking kid, he used to hang out with a group of his classmates.’

  ‘Was there a boyfriend?’

  ‘I don’t think so. He and his mates would go to pubs together, they’d go clubbing together. I can’t imagine that he never met anybody he liked, if you know what I mean, but I have no idea how serious any of it was. I always thought he liked girls. If he was gay, he never told me.’

  ‘Perhaps that was what the argument with your parents was about.’

  ‘I don’t think my parents would have made a big deal out of that. I’m sure they couldn’t have cared less.’

  ‘Then what? What happened?’

  The light was low in this space that had been Theo’s bedroom. I felt closer to the boy who’d disappeared thirty years ago than I had before. I hoped it was the same for Harry. That he would tell me why Theo had left home. That he had knowledge of what had happened, like Julia had had about her brother.

  But he stayed silent.

  I knew I was trying to force the reality into a version of events that would make sense to me, but I couldn’t stop myself from trying to find a link between Andre and Theo. I could picture the two of them together. The key thing was to find out how they’d met. ‘Are there any photos of Theo and his friends?’

  Harry got up and took a photo album down from the shelves. ‘This was in the eighties, when everybody still took photos.’ He handed it to me.

  I sat down at the desk and opened the album. Four photos had been glued down on each page. The first one showed a group of six boys, smiling broadly, waving at the camera. They were getting ready to board a bus.

  Andre had been a quiet boy, his sister had said. Kars had been one of those boys who’d had no friends. Theo was different. Confidence blasted from his eyes and out of every centimetre of his body. Looking at these photos, he wasn’t anything like Andre. If you’d put the photos of the two boys side by side, you’d think their identities could never be confused. Still, Andre had been able to pass for Theo because on the small passport snap you probably couldn’t see what I could see in those photos. It wasn’t about the way they looked; it was about their attitude.

  The thought entered my mind that – unlike Andre and Kars – here was a kid who probably wouldn’t have kept quiet.

  ‘This was Theo’s first trip abroad. They were going to Spain.’ Harry tapped one of the faces. ‘That’s him,’ he said. ‘That’s my brother.’

  I’d already recognised him from the other photos I’d seen, but he seemed so alive here, with an exuberance that bounced off the page. It was in the light in his eyes and the wide smile. A joy, a pleasure in life spoke from every part of him. ‘How long before he left home was this photo taken?’

  ‘Three months. This was the first and last foreign holiday he ever took. I remember my parents were really against him going, but I’m glad he did, otherwise he would never have got to do this.’

  ‘Did you go too?’

  ‘God, no, I didn’t have any money and my parents wouldn’t pay for foreign holidays.’

  ‘Theo had money?’

  ‘He always did little jobs here and there. He was good at making cash. Unlike me.’ Harry smiled ruefully.

  I scanned the faces of the other boys in the photo. I’d hoped to recognise Andre, but he wasn’t one of them. I should have known he wouldn’t be. Theo’s parents would have known if one of h
is friends had gone missing or been killed. Nobody in the photos looked familiar. Snaps of beaches, of girls joining the group of boys on their holiday, all with deeply tanned faces and slightly red noses. Had any of them been girlfriends? Who could tell? More photos of the friends with their arms around each other’s waists. I felt like turning the pages more quickly. Other people’s holiday photos were never very interesting. I made myself slow down. I made sure I looked at every face, every pose, every person who joined them or was in the background. I didn’t see anybody I recognised.

  ‘How many of these albums are there?’ I asked Harry.

  ‘A lot,’ he said. ‘He liked photos. Can I help? What are you looking for?’

  ‘I’m looking for a photo with anybody else in it. A girlfriend, a friend, anybody who could have seen something or who could have killed your brother.’

  Harry looked at me as if he thought I was crazy but it was best to just humour the police detective. He thought right. Of course it crossed my mind that if he’d been involved in his brother’s disappearance or Andre’s death, he might skip certain photos, but there would be photos with him in anyway so that didn’t tell me much. I didn’t think there was a lot of mileage in it for him to not help me out. I sat down on the floor next to him, and for a few minutes all I could hear was the sound of Harry turning pages, every so often pulling back sticky paper and putting photos on a pile.

  I was going through another album myself: it seemed to be the one of Theo’s high-school days. There was a photo of the entire class of seventeen-year-olds. I examined each of the twenty-odd faces, but nobody looked familiar. At Harry’s side, the pile of photos grew steadily.

  ‘I don’t know who half these people are,’ he said.

  ‘Would you have known at the time?’

  ‘It just makes me realise how little I knew about my brother. It’s a bit upsetting.’

  ‘Or maybe how much you’ve forgotten? It has been thirty years.’

  He handed me the pile of photos he’d selected. ‘These are all the ones that have other people in, even if they were just walking past.’