‘Good,’ I said. ‘That’s good.’
Harry went downstairs and I kept going through the pile. I was at it for more than an hour and must have looked at about two hundred photos. There was nobody of interest in any of them.
I got up from the floor with aching knees. I had pins and needles in my right leg and gave it a good rub, then sat down on the chair. The desk had two drawers on either side. I pulled open the top left-hand one and revealed a fascinating collection of pens and pencils. The one beneath it mainly held computer stuff, printer cartridges and so on. The top one on the right had bits of paper in it. It was a mess, like Andre’s flat in miniature. I took the stack out and went through them. Old receipts, a menu for a Chinese restaurant.
I was reminded of being in Andre’s office, moving the keyboard and finding that vital slip of paper. I opened the top left-hand drawer again, the one that contained the pens and pencils, and lifted the velour-covered insert.
Beneath it was a leaflet. It looked as if it could have been here for thirty years, kept out of sight by the green insert.
On the front was printed: If things are getting too much, come and talk to us. We can help you.
Underneath were the words: Side Step.
Chapter 33
The offices of Side Step were behind Centraal station, in an area that was now up and coming. I’d called Charlie to meet me behind the station and we had taken the little shuttle ferry across the IJ. It was as if we were on a mini cruise, the two-minute highlight reel of the Amsterdam water tour.
We were met by Servaas Laan, the head of Side Step.
‘Our location is convenient,’ he said. ‘A lot of runaways end up at Centraal station at some point, so we’re close, but the water forms a firm separation from the other possibilities these boys have. Drugs, crime; we like to say we’re the ones who can ferry them away from that.’ He laughed. ‘It’s a bad pun, I know.’
‘We met with one of the kids you helped. He spoke very highly of the organisation.’
A broad smile broke out on Laan’s face. ‘That’s great to hear. We know it doesn’t work out for everybody, but we try to keep the kids in school, if at all possible, provide them with a roof over their heads, do all the paperwork.’
‘What about the parents?’ Charlie asked.
‘It’s not always the right thing to get those kids to go back home,’ Laan said. ‘If they want to, great, if they can be reunited with their parents, great, but only if that’s what they want. We’ve got a team of people who help mediate between the kids and their parents. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t.’
‘And you purely help boys.’
‘Yes, boys between thirteen and eighteen are welcome here.’
‘We’re looking for information about two boys who might have come through here in the late eighties. We know this might be tricky.’
‘No, we’ve kept records of everything from 1985 onwards.’
‘Why is that?’ Charlie said.
‘There were problems before. We had some people working here in the early eighties who were preying on those kids. As soon as we found out, we kept records.’
‘You … kept records?’ My voice was more sarcastic than I’d meant it to be. ‘You didn’t try to do anything about the abuse?’
‘Oh don’t get me wrong,’ Laan said. ‘We keep a very close eye on all the people who work here. Also on all the boys who turn up. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether a kid is really seventeen or maybe a few years older. But in case something does go wrong, at least we’ve got all the details. At least we’ll be able to help the police bring the culprit to justice. Isn’t that much better than what a lot of other charities do? Stick their heads in the sand, assume that all their staff are good people and try to keep matters quiet at all costs because it might harm their reputation? We try to be open, transparent, but we also understand that even the best safeguards might not always work. What is it they say? Drunks like to work in bars.’
And people who were sexually attracted to children tried to work with them. Like Verbaan. I nodded. I completely understood Laan’s attitude and found that I agreed with him.
‘You might have information for us then,’ I said. ‘We’re looking for Andre Nieuwkerk.’
‘The Body in the Dunes guy? I’ve been following that story, of course. You think he came through here?’
‘We don’t know for sure, but we know that his abuser gave the name of your organisation to another kid.’
Servaas Laan grimaced. ‘You don’t think we had anything to do with the abuse, do you?’
‘The other kid is the one who spoke highly of you, so there’s no suggestion that he was passed on to another abuser.’
‘I didn’t know this. Well, let’s go down to the archives in the basement. Someone suggested the other day that we should clear it out – we could house another six boys if we do – but I really don’t want to get rid of any of the paper.’
‘You could computerise it,’ Charlie said.
‘And then have someone wipe it? I don’t think so.’
The basement was a large room with pillars at regular intervals. It smelled of old paper and a hint of damp. Row upon row of pink folders lined the walls.
‘What year are we looking at?’
‘Andre left home in February of 1989.’
We followed Laan along the shelves.
‘Here we are, 1989. It’s all in alphabetical order.’ He trailed a finger over the dusty spines. ‘No, I’m afraid not. He isn’t here.’
‘What about Theo Brand?’ I asked. ‘Have you got him?’
‘Let me check.’ Laan studied the files again. He didn’t point out that it would have been easier if I’d given him both names at the same time. ‘No, nothing in 1989,’ he said.
This was going to be a pointless visit.
‘Maybe 1988?’ Charlie said. He was an eternal optimist.
I took a step back and watched Laan check the spines of a whole new row of files.
‘Here he is!’ The man’s voice was triumphant. He took out a thin folder and opened it up. ‘Okay, he arrived in February 1988 and left in May.’ He looked at me. ‘He wasn’t here long.’
I should have come here as soon as Kars Borst gave us the name of the charity, rather than going to the Brands’ house. It would have saved us half a day.
‘Can you give me all the details you have? Where he went to school, where he went from here.’
‘Oh, wait. There’s this,’ Laan said. He studied a piece of paper. ‘He accused a member of staff of touching him up. Those were his words.’
I pulled my hair away from my face and held it together at the back of my neck for a second. So much for perfect safeguards. I’d thought it when I’d seen his photos: here was a kid who wouldn’t keep quiet. ‘What happened?’
‘He withdrew the accusation a day later. Said he’d just been pissed off with the man. Again, his words. He left a couple of months later. This place clearly wasn’t working for him.’
Much more likely that he never left; that he was killed in May 1988 and his body buried in the dunes nearby. I took my notebook out. ‘What’s the name of the member of staff he accused?’
‘I’m …’ Servaas Laan hesitated. ‘I probably shouldn’t tell you that.’
I raised my eyebrows. ‘Didn’t you say you kept records so that you could help the police?’
‘The man was cleared.’
‘The kid was murdered, Servaas.’ I used his first name on purpose. ‘He was murdered and he accused one of your staff of sexual abuse.’
‘Of touching him.’
I held out my hand. ‘Give me the file. Or do you want me to come back with a warrant? The result will be the same, only an hour later.’ Or two hours, depending on how busy the prosecutor was.
Laan rubbed a hand over his face. He looked down at the sheet he was holding. ‘Werda,’ he said. ‘Laurens Werda.’
Charlie made a loud noise next to me, an involuntary
gasp of surprise.
I just felt sick, but I needed to get all the facts so I knew I had to keep my emotions under control. ‘Laurens Werda? What exactly happened between him and Theo?’
‘I’ll get Werda’s file too. Hold on a second.’ He scuttled along the shelves and pulled out a green folder. He opened it. ‘They had a tribunal.’
I was intrigued by how ‘we’ had suddenly become ‘they’.
‘Werda said nothing happened. He was closely monitored for the rest of his time here, but there were no more complaints. Not from Theo Brand or any other kid.’
‘You didn’t fire him?’ Charlie said.
‘Well, no, not after the kid withdrew his statement. You have to understand: the people who work here have rights too. Some of these boys are really troubled.’
He’d withdrawn his statement, like Kars had done against Verbaan all those years ago.
‘Oh, here,’ Laan said. ‘Theo had been expelled from his previous school for falsely accusing a teacher of touching him up. A female teacher.’
‘Okay. Fine,’ I said. There was no point in arguing with a guy who must have joined the organisation long after all this had happened. ‘Give me those two files. Don’t worry, I’ll return them to you.’ I wouldn’t want to mess up his perfect paperwork; paperwork that clearly hadn’t kept these kids safe.
Laurens Werda had worked at Side Step from October 1987 until February 1989. He’d been there for four months before Theo Brand arrived, and resigned from his job two days after Andre Nieuwkerk had been kicked out of his house and Paul Verbaan had given him the address of a place to go.
On the walk back to the ferry, the files seemed to burn in my bag and my fingers twitched with a desire to read through everything. The ferry arrived and we boarded. I got one of the files out of my handbag, but the wind kept pulling at the papers, trying to tear them from my hand and throw them into the water of the IJ. I put it away until I got back to my desk.
At the police station, Charlie and I sat side by side and read through the files. I gave him Theo Brand’s file and took the one covering the tribunal myself.
‘He said he left home because he was scared his parents would find out about the teacher, and that he’d been expelled from school,’ Charlie said.
There was no denying that Side Step had been thorough in their investigation of Theo’s claim against Laurens Werda. They’d interviewed Theo’s previous teacher. I scanned through her statement. ‘She said he demanded money from her; if she didn’t cough up, he’d claim she’d been touching him.’ I flipped a few pages. ‘Laurens said something similar.’ I read from the piece of paper. ‘“Theo approached me for an advance on his allowance, and when I refused, he threatened to report me for abuse.”’
Charlie looked at me. ‘You think he was telling the truth?’
I shrugged. ‘Who knows? Either that, or he had had access to Theo’s file and knew what to say to sound innocent.’ I went back to the teacher’s statement. She’d said she’d given Theo 400 guilders, but that he kept wanting more. She finally stopped paying and he went through with his threat and reported her. The school sided with the teacher and expelled the kid.
Her statement sounded credible, but I couldn’t help but think of Paul Verbaan abusing those boys and getting away with it for so long. I remembered what schools were like in the eighties. They would have sided with the teachers by default. Even in my school there’d been a teacher who’d had a reputation, so that the girls would not want to go to his classroom after lessons had finished.
On the other hand, I remembered the photos of Theo going off on his first foreign holiday. Of Harry telling me he’d been jealous of his brother’s ability to earn money.
‘There’s nothing much else here,’ Charlie said. ‘He didn’t enrol in another school. Nobody seemed to have been worried when he left Side Step in May 1988.’
Chapter 34
The interrogation room was brightly lit to indicate that we wanted to get answers to everything and look into every corner. Laurens Werda sat opposite me. His lawyer was by his side. As soon as we’d called him in for questioning, he’d said he wanted his lawyer. This was his right, of course. I’d filled Thomas in on the way to the interrogation room on what Charlie and I had found out. I knew I needed someone experienced by my side. Charlie had been disappointed, but getting this right was more important than his feelings.
‘You worked for the Side Step charity,’ I began.
‘That’s right,’ Laurens replied. ‘Between 1987 and 1989. It was my first job.’ He grimaced. ‘I don’t think I quite knew what I was getting into.’
‘Tell me about Theo Brand,’ I said.
Laurens looked down at his hands.
‘The real Theo Brand,’ I added. ‘The one you met at Side Step.’
He sighed but met my eyes. ‘He was a really troubled kid. I’d only been at Side Step a few months when I met him. He said he wanted to confide in me about his past, and I didn’t have the experience to deal with him. I remember that five minutes into our chat, he grinned at me and said: I’ve got you now.’
‘He said you touched him up.’
‘I never touched him.’
‘Were you angry with him?’
‘At first. Then he withdrew his statement.’
‘Did you pay him?’
‘No.’
‘Then what? You killed him?’
‘He left one day and we were all relieved. I wasn’t the only one.’
‘He didn’t really leave, though, did he? You killed him, took his possessions, buried his body and then ran away with Andre, who was using Theo’s passport and name.’
Laurens shook his head. ‘No. Theo left some of his things behind and I gave them to Andre.’ He looked at his lawyer and she nodded. They must have agreed beforehand what he was going to admit to. ‘Andre came to Side Step but didn’t want to stay. He told me about his teacher, his parents. I only wanted to help. I went to the storage area and gave him the stuff that Theo had left behind.’
‘You took him to London.’
‘No, I gave him some money and Theo’s passport.’
‘Because he looked like Theo? Because you fancied him too?’
‘He was a kid. He was upset. I helped him.’
‘You helped him leave the country.’
‘I didn’t know he was going to do that.’
‘That wasn’t helping,’Thomas said. ‘You were covering for killing Theo.’
‘I didn’t kill him. But I did realise I couldn’t work at Side Step any more. Too many kids with bad stories. I resigned the next day.’
‘I don’t know why you’ve asked my client to come here,’ the lawyer said. ‘You’re looking into a suicide and an outdated case.’ She gave me a stern glance over her reading glasses.
‘We’re trying to get Theo’s family answers about what happened to their son. You can understand that, can’t you?’ But I knew the lawyer had a point. There was no crime we could arrest Laurens Werda for. No reason to keep him. His version of events could so easily be true.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘You’re free to go. For now.’
Laurens stood up. He threw a glance at his lawyer. He looked relieved.
Thomas escorted the duo out. I stayed behind in the interview room. I realised he thought we had called him in for something else.
Thomas came back in. ‘Did you see how he looked at his lawyer?’ he said. ‘We’ve missed something, haven’t we?’
Talking through the facts to fix the timeline and come up with a probable chain of events was the first thing to do. That might help us understand where we had to poke. Where we had to look to get proof.
‘We’ve got nothing,’ I said. ‘But look at this list I found in Andre’s flat. At first I thought Laurens was separate from the others, but in fact these were four people he wanted to talk to who all had something to do with the Body in the Dunes.’
Thomas shook his head. ‘So what? Are you saying that Laurens kill
ed Theo and then ran off to London with Andre?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s possible that he told us the truth: that he simply gave Andre the passport. But maybe he suggested Andre should go to London to get Theo Brand officially out of the country. To hide his death. After all, when Andre renewed the passport in 1991, everybody assumed Theo was still alive. Giving Andre that passport was a master stroke if Laurens had murdered Theo.’
‘Would Andre have known that at the time?’ Charlie said.
I had to think about that. I’d wondered from the start why Andre had decided to come back to Amsterdam. Now I realised that this might have been the catalyst. It could have been exactly what made him come here. ‘I think he had no idea until a couple of months ago,’ I said. ‘I don’t think he knew that Theo was dead. Laurens probably told him that the guy had done a runner and left his passport behind. Then Andre did a bit of research and realised that Theo had been missing all those years.’
‘He’d been looking him up online,’ Thomas said.
‘Right. He could have found the family tree, or one of the notices that Harry had put up for his brother when his mother was seriously ill. His neighbour told me that Andre had been really shaken up when he found out about his mother’s death. I now think he was shocked because he found out that Theo had been missing for thirty years. He’d realised that Laurens had given him a dead kid’s passport.’
When Laurens moved to London, maybe he had looked Andre up. Found out where he lived, arranged to meet. The runaway kid and the guy who’d helped him all those years ago. It was easy to picture it. Laurens was also the only person who knew Andre’s real name. His real identity. The one person who knew his past and understood him. Maybe his hero. I could only imagine how intoxicating that must have been. Then Andre had found out that Laurens had had his own reason for helping him.
‘He must have come here to find out what happened,’ Charlie said.
‘He must have come here to talk to Laurens about it,’ Thomas said.
‘Laurens told us Andre was his ex. That they’d been living together in London.’
A Death at the Hotel Mondrian (Lotte Meerman Book 5) Page 23