Death on the Canal

by Anja de Jager

  Of course I didn’t go to the beach on Saturday. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Pippi, I might not have got out of bed. Maybe that would have been better.

  Chapter Seven

  The single sheet was as hot as a winter duvet. The open window brought very little freshness. I moved my upper leg so that my thighs weren’t touching and it made me feel marginally cooler. My head was heavy and lifting it from the pillow would be too much effort.

  Pippi meowed.

  Gunk glued my eyelashes together and that slight obstruction made opening my eyes impossible.

  I wasn’t going to get up. As long as I lay here, silently, motionlessly, I wouldn’t have to deal with anything in the outside world. Not address, accept, confront or acknowledge. As long as I kept my eyes closed, yesterday hadn’t happened.

  I fell asleep again but woke up with the thought that yesterday wasn’t the problem. I had to turn time back one more day, to Thursday, and then all would be fine.

  I could have got Nathan Derez to push the yellow T-shirt against Piotr’s stomach whilst I held the phone and spoke to the ambulance. If I hadn’t been covered in blood, I wouldn’t have reminded Mark of what I’d done and then I wouldn’t have scared him.

  I could have waited and not rushed to Piotr Mazur’s side. I could have stood aside and not got involved. Yeah, right, when did that ever happen? When did I last not get involved?

  Maybe now was a good time to start. I could stay in bed and Adam Bauer could sort out the murder. All I was going to do today was move my feet to search for the cool places in the bed and go back to sleep. It would make things go away.

  I woke again with a pounding headache. Pippi meowed, louder this time, but I didn’t open my eyes. She tapped my nose with a paw. Her nails scratched against my skin.

  ‘Go away, puss.’ My voice was croaky.

  She tapped my right eye.

  I flung out an arm. When it connected with her fur, I didn’t swipe her off the bed, as I’d first planned, but scratched her head. I felt her ear, her soft spot. She bumped her head into my hand. When I stopped fussing with her, she tapped my face again. I knew from experience that petting her wasn’t enough. This wasn’t about love and attention; she needed food. I turned over, towards the wall, and pulled the sheet over my face.

  She bumped her body into the back of my head. Against my will, it made me smile. My cat was nothing if not insistent.

  I knew she wouldn’t stop until I got up, so I gave in.

  Was Saturday the most boring day of the week? What was there to do when you were by yourself and had nobody to talk to and no case to work on? It wasn’t even 8 a.m. yet, but already it was too hot in my flat. After I’d fed a now contentedly purring Pippi, I sat in my front room wearing shorts and a T-shirt. I was sweating. Even with all the windows open, only a warm breeze entered. If only the wind direction would change and we’d get a fresh westerly that would bring us some sea air.

  I opened my laptop. It automatically logged me into Skype and I saw Mark’s name with the green dot next to it. So he was awake as well. Was he watching my name too?

  I moved the cursor onto his name and clicked. The message box opened up. Hello, how are you? I wrote. My heart raced as my hand paused above the enter key. What was I going to achieve by sending it?

  I deleted the message.

  I’m really sorry about everything, I typed instead.

  I didn’t send that message either. The last thing I needed to do was to get in touch with him. I closed the Skype window. Better to take a step away from temptation.

  I left the house. I’d got up earlier than the street cleaners and the road along the canal was covered with leftover junk; empty cigarette packages and plastic cups littered the area outside the bar on the corner. I got on my bike, followed the canal and turned right. That was already an improvement on turning left to watch Mark Visser’s house.

  I hadn’t meant to go to the department store, of course; I had nothing to do with that investigation any more, but I arrived there as on autopilot. I chained up my bike and walked around the glass-fronted building until I got to the entrance where Ronald had stood the other day. It was still shut and wouldn’t open up for another half an hour or so. The reflective windows made it hard to see inside. I rested my head against the glass and put my hand above my eyes to shield me from the sun’s glare. Ronald was on the other side of the perfume counter, close to the escalator up. His back was ramrod straight and he was wearing his uniform of dark suit and tie. It fitted him well. He didn’t look out of place in the upmarket store at all.

  I tapped on the window. He didn’t look round. I banged a bit harder and got his attention. I gestured that he should come my way.

  He unlocked the door with a metal key and opened it a fraction. His face was as pale as it had been yesterday. He must be the only person in the country who didn’t have a tan yet.

  ‘We need to talk,’ I said.

  ‘Now there’s a threat,’ he said.

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘Okay, come in. I need to do one final loop before we open up.’

  ‘You have all the excitement.’ I’d hoped it would be cool inside, but either the air con wasn’t on yet or it wasn’t coping well with the unusually high temperatures we were having. It didn’t get above 30°C very often in Amsterdam, and a high of 33°C had been forecast for today.

  ‘You can join me on my rounds. You met my boss yesterday, didn’t you?’ Ronald looked up at one of the security cameras that hung from the ceiling.

  ‘Is he watching us? Want me to hold up my badge?’

  ‘No, we’re good. He’ll recognise you.’ He set off towards the other end of the shop at the speed of a uniformed cop on a leisurely stroll down the high street. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘You said Natalie Schuurman wasn’t Piotr’s girlfriend.’

  He didn’t break his stride but turned left and opened the fire door, which led to stairs down. ‘She wasn’t.’ He didn’t make eye contact.

  This was another part of the store that I normally didn’t see. The concrete steps bounced a damp coolness. I took the bottom edge of my T-shirt and flapped it to treat my skin to some of the colder air.

  ‘She admitted to us that she was sleeping with him,’ I said. ‘You didn’t think to mention that?’

  He didn’t reply; kept taking the stairs down at a calm speed and only shook his head.

  ‘And your friend was a dealer. A drug dealer.’

  ‘Did Natalie tell you that as well?’ There was a hint of sarcasm in his voice. He took out a swipe card from the inside pocket of his jacket.

  ‘No, we have a witness who saw him deal to her friend. That man OD’d yesterday.’ I followed him down and stood next to him, waiting for him to open the door.

  Instead he paused. ‘Your witness is mistaken. Or lying. Piotr wasn’t a drug dealer.’ His voice was calm, as if he was stating such a well-known fact that he didn’t even need to try to persuade me.

  With the door still shut, I was standing too close to him. I considered taking one step back up the stairs to increase the distance between us, but that would be a defeat in whatever his game was. Why was a security guard also a drug dealer? Did he have to supplement his income? Maybe his colleagues hadn’t known about his other activities. I didn’t know what Ingrid got up to after work. So why did I doubt Ronald? The dark circles under his eyes were almost as grey as his eyes.

  ‘You look like shit,’ I said. My voice had a hard edge. I felt a trickle of sweat run down between my shoulder blades.

  He leaned against the wall and created more space between us. ‘It’s not easy to sleep in this heat.’

  I put my hand on the wall furthest away from him. The concrete was surprisingly cool and I rested my back against it. ‘True. I didn’t sleep well last night either.’ The hard coldness was pleasant under my spine.

  ‘Try sleeping during the day.’

  ‘You work nights?’

  ‘An hour or so to go befo
re it’s the end of my day.’ He looked at his watch. ‘And I’ll have worked for sixteen hours. You just caught me at the end of my shift yesterday morning.’

  ‘You must be exhausted.’ No wonder he looked terrible. ‘Do you want to have a sit-down?’ I pointed towards one of the steps.

  ‘That would probably make me fall asleep.’ He held his swipe card against the reader and opened the door to the car park.

  He set off towards one of the corners. I followed him. My eyes slowly adapted to the low light levels. Two cars were parked on the far side. Yellow lamps sunk into the walls threw a sickly glow over the white lines that divided the large space into neat rectangles between concrete pillars. The emptiness made it hard to tell what time of day it was. It could have been the middle of the night.

  ‘According to you, Piotr Mazur wasn’t a drug dealer, he wasn’t sleeping with Natalie and he didn’t have a child.’ My voice echoed against the bare walls.

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘What’s going on here, Ronald?’

  He approached the leftmost car of the two, a small red vehicle. I wondered why he was going that way and then I noticed the exhaust fumes coming from the back of it. The engine was running.

  ‘You were a lousy judge of character in the past too,’ I said.

  He suddenly stopped, right in the centre of the car park. ‘I made a mistake. A misjudgement. Are you going to keep throwing that in my face? Why are you really here?’ The expression on his face wasn’t quite anger, but he had a deep frown between his eyebrows.

  I threw up my hands. ‘Because I thought you might want to tell me what was going on with your friend.’

  ‘I tell you the truth and you don’t believe me. So what’s the point?’

  ‘Because if he was a drug dealer, I’ll stop investigating.’

  ‘Why? You still need to find his murderer, don’t you?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘What?’ He raised his voice. ‘So now you suddenly don’t care about his death any more? Are you really that callous?’

  I was so angry that it took a couple of breaths before I could speak again. ‘Are you dealing drugs too? Just like Piotr?’ In the back of my mind, I knew my words were driven by the need to hit out.

  ‘What the fuck? Are you insane? No, of course I’m not. And’ – he looked up towards another security camera fixed like a gleaming eye on the ceiling – ‘this is neither the time nor the place.’ He walked to the stationary red car and knocked on the window. It lowered with a whirr and a gust of cold air came from the car. The woman inside was redfaced. She still had her seat belt on.

  ‘Everything okay here?’ Ronald asked her.

  ‘Yes. I’m waiting for the shop to open and I’m just hot. I’ve got the air conditioning running.’ She seemed mortified and closed the window again.

  ‘What a waste of petrol,’ he muttered as soon as the woman couldn’t hear him any more.

  ‘I’m sorry I came here,’ I said. ‘I should have known you wouldn’t help me.’ As I stomped off towards the elevator to take the official route out of the basement car park, I heard him curse behind me.

  Chapter Eight

  For a Saturday, it was busy on the motorway from Amsterdam to Alkmaar. As I drove north past the Alkmaardermeer, I could see that the water of the lake was covered with white sails. It felt as if the entire country was spending time outdoors. This hot and sunny weekend was tempting many people to the beach and I overtook quite a few cars stuffed to the roof with beach balls and windbreaks. The roads from Alkmaar to the seaside villages of Egmond and Bergen would be jampacked. At least I wasn’t going that far.

  This motorway reminded me of when I’d first met Ronald de Boer. When my father had still been a police detective, Ronald had been his partner. I’d reopened a case that my father had investigated just before he retired and ended up working closely with Ronald. I’d thought that he was helping me but his actions had landed my father temporarily in jail. Some of my anger against him was probably caused by a feeling of guilt, because I had doubted my father as well.

  My thoughts were out of step with the weather. I ought to be thinking how lucky it was that this glorious sunshine was happening at the weekend and that I had two free days. Instead the thoughts tumbling in my head were mainly about death and drugs.

  I hit Alkmaar’s roundabout and then there were only a few turnings before I was at my father’s house. I parked my car behind his BMW. Every time I visited him, I thought that no ex-police detective should live in a house this big. It had at one point made me wonder where he had got his money from, but now I knew it was all my stepmother Maaike’s. I rang the doorbell, which made an old-fashioned ringing sound like a bicycle bell.

  ‘Hi, sweetie, this is a surprise,’ my father said with a wide smile. ‘Didn’t know you were coming.’The white stubble of his hair was in sharp contrast to his holiday tan. Maaike also paid for their long trips away. They’d come back from the Seychelles only three weeks ago. What was the point of being the boss, she’d joked, if you couldn’t take a long vacation?

  ‘Is now a good time?’ I said.

  ‘Every time you’re here is a good time.’ He opened the door wider. ‘Come in, I was just about to have lunch. Maaike’s at work. You can join me. Isn’t this weather wonderful?’

  I pointed at my shoes. ‘Do you want me to take them off?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  I left my shoes on the doormat and followed my father through the corridor on bare feet. The place was immaculately clean. The carpet was as white as my father’s hair. As he had once told me, he had nothing else to do when he was by himself.

  ‘Did you read about that stabbing?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I did. Sit down, sit down.’

  I pulled out one of the chairs placed around the large beech-wood table. The chair had an embroidered cushion on it adorned with a picture of two kittens picked out in cross-stitch. ‘Sorry, is this Maaike’s chair?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  The cushion made me too tall for the table. Maaike was quite a bit shorter than either my father or I. I pulled the cushion out from underneath me and put it on another chair. ‘So yes, that stabbing. I was there.’

  ‘You were?’ my father said from the kitchen. He came out with a tray full of food. ‘But it’s nowhere near your place.’ The tray contained jam, peanut butter, chocolate sprinkles, cumin cheese, salami and ham. He went back to the kitchen to get some plates, knives and forks and a loaf of bread.

  ‘I was escaping the tourist hordes. The dead man and the woman who probably knifed him, they were at the same bar.’

  ‘What can I get you to drink? Water? Juice? Glass of milk?’

  ‘Milk, please.’

  ‘And some fruit? I have bananas and satsumas.’

  ‘I’m fine. This is plenty.’The large French windows at the back of the house were open and it extended the dining room into the garden. But the air that drifted in was hot and energy-sapping. I had some sympathy for the woman who’d been sitting in her car with the air conditioning on.

  My father put the glass of milk in front of me and sat down beside me. He reached out a hand and rested it on my arm. ‘Are you okay?’

  I grimaced and took a slice of bread to avoid his glance. ‘Everybody asks me that.’

  ‘Because we care about you.’ My father took some bread too and spread it thickly with peanut butter. ‘I’m not allowed to have this, of course. I’ll tell Maaike that you ate it.’

  I laughed. ‘Sure, I’ll cover for you. You should watch that, though; there’s a lot of saturated fat in peanuts.’ My father had had a heart attack and was still on a diet and medication. I buttered my bread and put some chocolate sprinkles on top. I never bought them myself. Having lunch somewhere else, with someone else, was an opportunity to have something different on my bread.

  ‘It’s a shock seeing somebody die. You never get used to it, do you?’ I cut the bread in half and brought it to my mouth without losing
too many of the sprinkles. As soon as I bit down on it, I lost that fight and most of the chocolate fell onto my plate.

  ‘You don’t want to get used to it.’ Somewhere inside the old man was still that young traffic cop whom I’d seen in the photos. My father had been quite dashing in those days, almost fifty years ago now, conducting the traffic and inviting cars to come forward with his white gloves. ‘Once you see so much death that it no longer worries you, you’re not human any more.’

  ‘I guess so.’ I picked up the glass of milk and washed the last of the chocolate sprinkles from between my teeth.

  ‘Did you witness the murder?’ He looked at me over his orange juice.

  ‘No, I heard shouting and ran over to the victim. I didn’t know that the assailant wasn’t there anymore.’

  My father nodded. ‘I get that. You put yourself in potential danger.’

  ‘That’s our job.’ I held my glass between both hands. ‘Right, Dad? That’s what we do.’ My hands were shaking so much that I had to put the milk down.

  My father awkwardly took one of my hands between his wrinkled ones. His calloused strength was calming, even if it was just that he understood. I’d missed him when he’d been away. Not having anybody to talk to about work was hard.

  ‘What are you upset about?’ His face was so close that I could see the patch that he’d missed shaving, right underneath his nose.

  That I’d been there with Mark Visser and that the murder had spoiled everything. That I scared him. ‘They’re taking the case away from me,’ I said instead. ‘Because the victim was a drug dealer and seems to have sold heroin to a guy who overdosed the next morning. One of that guy’s friends came forward and testified that he thought he was buying coke.’

  ‘Isn’t there someone in jail for that already?’ He raised his eyebrows, which he clipped short because they kept growing into tufts.

  ‘And there we have the problem.’ I pulled my hand free. ‘The boss is worried that the other dealer is going to use this as evidence that he wasn’t guilty after all.’ I dipped my index finger in the chocolate sprinkles on my plate and brought the sweetness to my mouth. ‘Well, not guilty of anything other than selling drugs. He’s going to say that it was an honest mistake and that he obviously isn’t the only one who sells the wrong stuff because now Piotr Mazur has too. It’s been his defence all along.’