Death on the Canal

by Anja de Jager

  The chandelier in the communal hallway was comfortingly familiar, shining as if nothing had happened tonight. I slowly took the stairs up to my floor. My mobile rang when I was nearly at the top. I read his name, hesitated then answered it. ‘Hi, Mark.’With my other hand I unlocked my front door. Pippi greeted me with a loud meow. I bent down to scratch the little black-and-white cat behind her ear.

  ‘Lotte, hi. I’m sorry I didn’t stay.’ Mark’s voice was low, with an odd echo to it. ‘I know I should have but I saw you covered in blood and it all got too much. I’m really sorry.’

  I shook my head. It was just like talking to Ingrid. ‘It’s okay, I understand.’

  ‘Did the man survive?’

  ‘No, he died.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  I waited to hear if he was going to say anything else, but he was quiet. ‘I need to get your statement at some point,’ I said.

  ‘Sure. Okay. But I didn’t really see anything.’ His voice was abrupt.

  Only a few hours ago there had been rapport between us. Even if we wouldn’t be lovers again, I’d thought that we could at least be friends. ‘It will be brief.’

  ‘I prefer not to come to the police station. I’m sure you understand.’

  ‘Yes.’ He didn’t want to come there because it would bring back too many bad memories. I preferred not to go to his house because it would bring back too many good ones. ‘We can go somewhere else. I’ll be in touch.’

  ‘Sure. Let me know.’ He ended the call.

  I went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. I folded up my clothes and put the bloodstained jeans and T-shirt carefully in a bin bag. Maybe they’d want them for evidence of my proximity at some later point. If Forensics found any fabric fibres on the body, they would want to check them against what I’d worn to rule out that they’d come from me. My DNA would be all over the victim’s body.

  All this time I avoided looking in the mirror. In the shower, the warm water embraced me as I shampooed my hair three times, as if massaging soap into my skull would also wash away the memories of the dead man. Make me forget how his blood had flowed over my hands. How we hadn’t managed to save him. At the thought, I grabbed the shampoo again and washed my hair for a fourth time. I bent my head back and let the water stream over my face like a flood of tears.

  I put my fingers on the circular scar on my right shoulder where I’d been shot seven months ago. Now a man had bled out right under my hands. With loofah and soap, I scrubbed every centimetre of my body until my skin felt alive again. I still didn’t feel clean, because I couldn’t feel clean. I gave my hands one last scour before turning the water off.

  When I opened the shower curtain, Pippi was sitting on the bathmat, looking at me as if she understood the insanity of her owner. As I dried myself, her green eyes followed me. She started a meow that was no more than a rumbling in her throat, as if to ask whether Mrs Owner was okay.

  ‘Did I forget to feed you, sweetie? I’m sorry. Would you like some food?’

  At the word food, Pippi dashed into the kitchen. I followed her. She stared longingly at the cupboard that held the Felix. The Felix cat looked just like Pippi but without my cat’s cute black nose. I tore open a packet and emptied it in her food bowl.

  Cat fed, I sat in my front room but didn’t turn on the lights. In the dark, I stared out over the expanse of the canal, wider than the roads on either side. The houses at the opposite side, with their gabled roofs, were all slightly different, some with curls, others with steps, as if someone could use the gable to climb up the roof. All an illusion, of course, to make the houses seem taller. I liked to imagine that someone on the other side of the canal was looking back at me.

  Pippi-puss jumped on my lap. ‘You won’t believe what happened this evening,’ I told her. She meowed softly, as if she wanted to encourage her owner to tell her the whole story. I rubbed her behind her ear. My reward for stroking exactly the right spot was that she gazed at me with a look of undying devotion in her big green eyes.

  A sightseeing boat came past, cutting through the water. Earlier in the evening, they would have served dinner and drinks. I’d been on one of those, many years ago. You had to eat quickly or they would dock before you’d finished.

  I went to bed, even though there was no chance of sleep with this much going on in my head. The thought of the stabbing kept me afloat in consciousness rather than letting me sink into slumber. I wondered who the child in the photo was. I wondered what had happened to the woman whom Piotr Mazur had been in the bar with. Had she killed him? Had she seen everything? Was she the reason he’d been attacked?

  I tossed and turned until even Pippi got off the bed. I checked my alarm clock; it was just after 3 a.m. I was too warm and covered in sweat, even though all my windows were open. I got up and took the duvet out of the cover. I lay on my back, covered only by the sheet, unmoving like the dead.

  I could see us in sharp outline as if we were in high definition. I stood with Ingrid and a masked man in a field, the three of us forming a triangle of people in long black coats with guns pointed at each other. The knee-high grass swayed slowly and made an incongruously pastoral setting for the cinematic armed stand-off. The wind made my coat flap against my boots. It was louder than my breathing. Louder than my heartbeat. Even though the man’s face was concealed, I knew who he was. He wasn’t looking at me. He was facing Ingrid. His gun was pointed at her.

  But she and I both had the man in our sights. Two against one. I could feel the extreme weight of my gun in my hand. My finger was glued to the trigger and I had to battle not to pull it. Ingrid, please shoot, I thought, please shoot so that I don’t have to.

  Instead Ingrid lowered her gun and just stared at the man. Did she know something that I didn’t? Was she confident that she wasn’t going to be harmed? I was sure the man was going to kill her. It was now entirely up to me to save her life. I had to neutralise him. The word seemed right. I looked along the extended barrel of my gun. Only if I killed him would Ingrid live. That was the trade-off. I exhaled and allowed the movement of my finger on the trigger.

  It didn’t fully register that the masked man had lowered his gun. I didn’t even really notice Ingrid’s face, relieved that it was over. Instead I was so in the moment that I continued to pull the trigger. The bang was deafeningly loud, like a close thunderclap. The recoil jarred my shoulder. Part of me realised that my gun didn’t normally make that sound. That it wasn’t normally this heavy. That there was something very wrong. Through a cloud of smoke I saw the masked man slump to the ground.

  Ingrid kneeled by his body. I turned away from him and looked into Mark’s eyes, staring at me in judgement. Like he had stared at me when I’d held a T-shirt to Piotr Mazur’s stomach. I looked down at my body and saw that I was covered in blood splatter.

  I woke up with a start. My heart was racing. ‘That wasn’t what happened,’ I said out loud into the dark room to scare the dream away. ‘He didn’t lower his gun. He was going to kill her. I had no choice.’ I tried to laugh at my dream for turning a traumatic work situation into a Tarantino movie. It sounded more like a sob.

  At the sound, the cat meowed at me from the bottom of the bed as if she agreed with me.

  Ingrid had said that seeing me covered in blood had brought it all back to her. The incident had been declared legal by the official review committee, but it had damaged us both.

  I was afraid to go back to sleep and I was relieved when the morning light started to peek over the top of the curtains.

  My hair this morning was sticking out in all directions, as if last night had turned me into a hedgehog. If I hadn’t had it cut yesterday, I could just have tied it back. Now I had to splash water on my head and dry my hair straight. My eyes were small compared to the dark circles underneath. I had a thumping headache and looked every day of my forty-three years this morning. Every wrinkle was etched deeply into my face. I made some coffee, took a couple of paracetamol tablets and sat at
the kitchen table. I should have eaten more than just snacks last night. Or had less to drink. I sipped from my coffee in the hope that it would make the painkillers kick in and chase the hangover away.

  I finally got dressed and put on some make-up to brighten my face. I had to remember to pick up my bike at some point. Now I had to walk to work. Tiredness stung my eyes like grit and I put my sunglasses on. I was probably the only one who didn’t welcome the morning sunshine. My route along the canal was a slalom course of early-morning tourists. I skirted past a large group of Italian people following a woman carrying a red umbrella, on their way to the Rijksmuseum. I narrowly avoided a man who stepped in front of me to take a photo of a picturesque furniture shop.

  The police station came into view, solid and unmovable. I swiped my card through the reader and watched the entry light flash green. Our office was two floors up and I took the steps two at a time. When I came past Chief Inspector Moerdijk’s office, his voice sounded out from behind the half-closed door. ‘Lotte, have you got a minute?’

  Chapter Three

  The boss’s words weren’t a question but a summons. I pushed the door open and stepped inside. He’d torn a ligament in his left knee a few weeks ago and his doctor had prescribed two months without exercise. Not running had put five kilos on him. Now he actually looked healthy. His face had filled out and it suited him. I knew he was counting the days until he could return to his passion.

  ‘You heard what happened last night?’ I remained standing, hesitant to take the chair that wasn’t offered.

  ‘Yes. A terrible end to a summer evening.’

  The muscles around my jaw tightened. I took my sunglasses from my head, where I had been using them to keep my hair out of my face, and shoved them in my handbag.

  ‘Ingrid told me you got a good look at the main suspect?’

  ‘I saw the victim in the bar with a woman and I saw them leave together.’

  The boss frowned at my choice of words. ‘You don’t think she killed him?’

  ‘She could have done. But I don’t know where she would have kept the murder weapon. In the pocket of her jacket? And when they were in the bar, they were just talking.’ I shrugged. ‘Still, we don’t have anything to go on apart from this woman. We need to talk to her. I guess we haven’t managed to find her?’

  ‘No, no sign of her.’The boss stretched his arms above his head and groaned as if even this little movement was now an effort. ‘We got a very good description of her from the barman.’ He leaned forward and placed his elbows on his desk. There was a slight smile on his lips and I could almost see the question on his face; he wanted to know why I’d been in that bar, but it wouldn’t be appropriate to ask. Luckily whatever was on his computer screen became more interesting than my private life and he turned to his keyboard and started typing.

  It was the perfect time to get permission to escape. I knew he would have practically forgotten that I was still there. Ingrid had once said that she was sure the CI spent most of his time on Facebook. He was probably just addicted to email and had to read anything new that turned up in his inbox, regardless of who was nervously waiting in his office. I’d read somewhere that the ping of new email gave people a little boost of endorphins. The boss needed that, now that he didn’t get it from running any more.

  ‘Anything else?’ I said.

  ‘No, that’s it.’ His eyes didn’t leave the screen. It was amazing to think that my father had retired from the police force before the majority of the work involved computers. Apart from accessing the central database, I wasn’t sure what he would have used a computer for. Even now he would send me emails that read like long letters. Only recently had he realised that you were supposed to type above the message you were replying to rather than underneath.

  ‘Thanks, boss.’ I took a step back towards the door.

  ‘Oh, just one thing: make sure you take it easy. It’s tough to see what you witnessed last night.’

  ‘Sure.’The man died. I hadn’t managed to keep him alive. Now all I could do was make sure I caught whoever had done it.

  I walked the rest of the blue-carpeted corridor to get to our office.

  Ingrid and Thomas were already at their desks. As soon as Ingrid saw me, she got up as if to give me a hug, but then stopped herself. ‘Are you okay?’ she said.

  ‘I’m fine. Thanks, Ingrid.’ I put my handbag on my desk. ‘No sign of that woman?’

  Thomas shook his head. ‘No, none.’ With his dark hair slicked back from his pretty-boy face, he looked like a boy-band singer who hadn’t aged too badly. He wore a sky-blue shirt. He always wore a blue shirt, as his wife had once told him it brought out the colour of his eyes. He pushed a picture across to me. ‘Is that her?’

  It was a shot from a security camera. It was grainy but recognisably the woman in the floral dress. ‘Yes, that’s her,’ I said. ‘Is this from the bar?’

  ‘Yes. From last night.’ Thomas stuck the picture on the whiteboard at the far end of our office. A photo of Piotr Mazur was already on there. It was a copy of the picture on his security pass.

  ‘What did the pathologist say?’

  ‘Three stab wounds. Two in his stomach and one through the left lung,’ Ingrid said.

  I nodded. That was what the doctor had said last night as well.

  ‘What time did he leave the bar?’ Thomas asked.

  ‘It was twenty past ten when I heard Nathan Derez shout for help. That wasn’t long after Piotr and the woman left the bar.’

  ‘Okay. Did you see where they went?’

  ‘Yes, they turned left into the Korte de Wittekade.’

  ‘Where he was killed.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You didn’t hear anything?’

  ‘To be honest, Thomas, I wasn’t really paying attention. But Nathan, the guy who found the victim, said he hadn’t heard a thing. No argument, no commotion.’ I noticed that one thing was missing from the board. ‘Where’s the photo of the child?’

  ‘Forensics are testing it,’ Ingrid said. ‘Because you thought the woman might have given it to him. They’re looking for fingerprints. We spoke to his parents last night. They are still in Poland. They told me he doesn’t have any children. But then they also said he didn’t have a girlfriend and we found this.’ She held up Piotr’s phone. ‘With a whole bunch of texts on it. Look here.’

  I read them as she scrolled through them.

  I need u now. U want it 2.

  Where are u? I’ll give u what u want.

  ‘The caller is stored as a Natalie,’ Thomas said. ‘But without any other contact details. We’re tracing the number. We rang it but it went straight to voicemail.’

  ‘You think this Natalie is the woman in the floral dress?’

  Ingrid nodded. ‘It could well be, couldn’t it? Thomas and I are going to search Piotr Mazur’s flat.’

  ‘Fine. Then I’ll go to the department store.’

  ‘No, don’t worry,’ Ingrid said. ‘Why don’t you stay here, try calling this number again. You need to take it easy,’ she clarified.

  ‘I’m not an invalid,’ I said. ‘I’ll go to the department store and talk to some of his colleagues. If I find out anything about this Natalie or if anybody recognises the woman, I’ll call you guys straight away.’

  As soon as I stepped out of the police station to get my bike, the bright light hit my eyes. It wasn’t even ten o’clock yet but it was already warm, and I was extremely grateful for my sunglasses. The sky was Delft blue, only broken by the vapour trail of a plane overhead. I got on the tram to go back to the bar. Two stops later, a middle-aged couple got on. The woman held the man’s hand and pulled him through the door. She put first her card against the scanner and then his. The man’s grey hair rose up from his forehead. She had a worried expression that seemed prematurely superglued to her face. She pushed the man ahead of her onto an empty seat. I realised that they were not that much older than me. Seeing them made me feel ancient.

&n
bsp; During the rest of the twenty-minute tram ride, it seemed I only saw smiling people all around me. In a country where it rained so often, a sunny summer day was like a public holiday. My bike was miraculously still where I’d left it. I unchained it and walked along the canal to where Piotr had been killed last night. I stood by the crime-scene tape, at exactly the same spot as where Mark had been when I’d last seen him. When he’d stared at me. A white line showed where Piotr’s body had been. Why hadn’t he shouted out when he’d been stabbed? The terrace was far enough away that the sound might not have carried over our conversation or that of the table next to us, but surely Nathan should have heard something. It was such a warm night that everybody had their windows open. Had Piotr not put up a fight? There had only been the three stab wounds, and I couldn’t remember any cuts on his hands indicating defence wounds. I would have to check that in the pathologist’s report. The killer must have taken him completely unawares and that might point towards the woman in the floral dress. Maybe Piotr hadn’t thought she was the type to do this. Or were we looking in the wrong direction?

  I got on my bike and cycled to the department store. I had called ahead to Piotr’s boss to let him know that I wanted to talk to him.

  The building had been newly refurbished and the outside was as glossy as the products they sold. Tourists would come in to buy something small and almost affordable, to get one of the easily recognisable green plastic bags. In the shop windows, between the mirrored glass panels, mannequins wore outfits that would cost me a month’s net salary. The glass walls of the large building bounced rays of sun back into the street. The extra light added definition to the tram that rattled past. The pavement in front of the store thronged with people. It was surely too nice a day to go shopping. If I hadn’t had to work, I might have gone to the beach.

  Piotr Mazur’s boss had told me to use the lift at the back of the shop and take it up to the sixth floor. It was clear from its tucked-away position that the store preferred shoppers to use the central escalators instead. That way they would be tempted by the items sold on each of the floors that they passed. The escalators only went as far as the fifth floor.