Death on the Canal

by Anja de Jager

  ‘Mom, please.’ I drained my glass of water, only now realising how thirsty I had been.

  ‘Just saying. There’s hope for you, just not with him.’

  ‘I was hoping we could be friends.’ I went into the kitchen to fill the glass up again. I drank it all with the tap still running.

  ‘Your father said you witnessed a stabbing?’ She hadn’t moved from her seat at the table, but that was no reason not to keep the conversation going.

  ‘Yeah, well, that comes with the job.’ I said it softly, so it was probably camouflaged by the sound of the running tap.

  Two empty wineglasses stood on the work surface. ‘Mark was with me,’ I said. Why hadn’t she washed those up yet? She was normally so diligent that it was a surprise to see any dirty crockery out at all. I picked up one of the glasses and turned it round. My mother never wore make-up, but her friend might have done. No lipstick markings. Not on the other glass either.

  ‘And did you do something sensible, like ask for his help?’

  ‘Mum, I’m a police officer, remember?’ And I’m now investigating this evidence of you entertaining someone. Who was it? I looked in the recycling bin. There was an empty wine bottle. I checked the label. It was a nasty sweet white. Not my kind of thing at all.

  ‘Men want to be useful sometimes.’

  I put the bottle back in the recycling, softly so that it didn’t make a noise. ‘You’re so last century.’ My mother kept herbs in tins on the windowsill of her kitchen. They looked a bit droopy. I felt the soil and they were bone-dry. I watered them from my glass.

  ‘You’re doing everything by yourself. So independent, so self-sufficient. No wonder he didn’t feel needed.’

  ‘So that’s what I should have done? Asked him for help with something that is my job?’

  ‘I despair of you sometimes. You think you’re so smart but you’re acting all stupid.’

  I filled my glass one more time and sat back down at the table. ‘And you’re what? Sensible?’

  ‘No,’ my mother said, ‘but I’ve met someone.’

  ‘Was he here tonight?’The two wineglasses. The red scarf. It was so incongruous that I hadn’t been able to piece the evidence together. I realised that I must have just missed him. When I’d rung the doorbell, she’d probably thought he’d come back. No wonder she’d been surprised to see me.

  ‘We met at church,’ she said with a small smile that could only be described as smug.

  I hadn’t known this was a competition. ‘That’s nice,’ was all I could come out with. And I knew that in an hour or so, I really would think it was nice that she wasn’t alone at seventy-four. She hadn’t introduced me to anybody in the last forty years. She must have had flings and just not told me about it. Or maybe she’d been so bitter about the divorce from my father that she hadn’t been able to move on. It was only now that she was talking to my father again that she’d met someone new. One of the self-help books on my shelves at home would say that this situation was proof of the need for closure before you could move on. I knew all the theory; it just didn’t help me much in real life.

  ‘I asked him to carry my shopping when I’d broken my wrist.’

  ‘I did your shopping!’ And I’d picked her up from the hospital and let her stay in my flat for five very long weeks. I scratched my arm. A bite was already showing red on the skin. Lotte 2, Mosquitoes 1.

  ‘Well, so did he. So you see, I needed him and wasn’t afraid to tell him that.’

  ‘So I should just show Mark that I need him and he’ll come running?’ Another bite started to itch on my back where a little bit of bare skin showed between the waistband of my trousers and the bottom of my T-shirt. It was going to be a draw after all.

  ‘No,’ my mother said with finality in her voice. ‘It’s too late for that. I just meant that asking for help is fine sometimes. It’s not a failing. You don’t have to do everything by yourself. You don’t have to be superwoman.’

  Superwoman. It made me laugh. All I managed to do was keep my head above water.

  When I opened the front door, my cat didn’t meow to greet me.

  ‘Puss, puss,’ I called down the empty corridor, ‘where are you?’ My skin itched like crazy. I had four bites on my arm and three on my back. Lotte 2, Mosquitoes 7. You never beat the mozzies.

  Mrs Cat didn’t turn up. Having someone else in the flat had probably scared her. She’d come and say hello later. I dropped my bag on the sofa and went into my study. I’d bought the flat from an interior designer and I kept everything exactly as she’d had it. I hadn’t thought the big architect’s table in the study would be useful, but I’ve come to love drawing my thoughts on whatever case I’m working on. I hadn’t made any drawings on Piotr Mazur’s murder. Had I not taken his death seriously enough? Had I been too busy thinking about how I’d messed up with Mark?

  Bauer wasn’t interested in Piotr Mazur’s death, but I had moved teams because I’d wanted to catch whoever had killed him. Bauer had only allowed me in to make sure his previous case didn’t get damaged. I’d probably already known that in the back of my mind, but his outburst today had brought it out in the open. That actually made things easier, because once you knew what the issues were, you could deal with them.

  I ran the palm of my hand over the sheet of paper pinned to the architect’s table. I took out a blue marker pen. I wrote ‘Piotr Mazur’ in the centre of the sheet. I drew a square box around his name. At the top I wrote down the names of the two people whom Piotr had definitely supplied with drugs: Karl the Beard and Natalie Schuurman. I drew red arrows between Piotr’s name and the two boxes. ‘Dealer’ I wrote by the arrows. At the bottom of the page I wrote the names of the two sisters: Katja and Sylvie Bruyneel. By Sylvie’s name I wrote: ‘OD’. I also wrote that by Karl’s name. I drew an arrow from Katja to Piotr and wrote ‘together in bar’. I drew a dashed line between Sylvie and Natalie and wrote ‘worked together’. When had Piotr Mazur started working at the department store? Sylvie had been caught stealing from there two years ago. Had he already been a security guard then? Ronald had mentioned to me that Natalie had got Piotr his job.

  I pulled up Piotr’s employment records. He’d started work at the department store eighteen months ago. That was after Sylvie had been convicted of theft. So who had her dealer been? Natalie had said that it was always the security guards dealing drugs.

  Only the manager, Kevin Haanen, had already been there when Sylvie was arrested. I should talk to him tomorrow. Tim had scheduled the meeting with Katja and Sylvie’s adoptive parents for 9 a.m. I could go back to the department store after that.

  I stared at my drawing a bit longer. I took a step back. It was already a mess, a spider’s web of tenuous connections that could be coincidences. I remembered hearing the argument between Natalie and her handsome fiancé Koen Westerfaalt. At the time I’d thought it was about her affair with Piotr, but now I knew there hadn’t been one. So what had they been arguing about? Her drug use? Or was it only a normal row like every couple has every now and then?

  I took another step back.

  There was only one thing missing. I wrote: ‘Who’s the little boy?’ and surrounded the words with question marks.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The parents arrived at 9 a.m. on the dot. I took them to Interrogation Room 1. I opened the door and was hit by how warm it was inside. The air conditioning in the police station seemed to have given up its attempt to cool things down. It was like stepping into a sauna.

  Tim was already in his seat. A few drops of sweat showed on his forehead. I took my place next to him and indicated the chairs opposite us. Harald was wearing a suit and tie, as if that was the right attire for a visit to the police station regardless of the heat. Mabel wore a summer dress, and a golden cross showed in the small V of the demure neckline. She carried a thick leather folder. They pulled back their metal chairs in tandem. I looked at my phone; the temperature gauge indicated that it was 25°C in the room. It was be
st to keep this brief.

  If they had helped Katja out of the country, or if they were hiding her, they were in serious trouble. I was reminded of their house, the lounge without any photos of either daughter. Was that because they’d been trying to conceal Katja’s identity? At the time I’d thought it was a sign that they’d cut off all ties with her, but what if it had been the opposite?

  I pressed the button on the recording equipment and stated our names and the time.

  The parents hadn’t brought a lawyer.

  ‘Where’s Katja?’ Tim asked. ‘We need to speak to her in connection to a murder.’

  ‘A murder?’ Mabel said. ‘You said you were looking for her but you didn’t mention a murder.’

  ‘We think she may have been involved in the murder of a drug dealer,’ Tim said. ‘Was she using drugs?’

  ‘We’re concerned that she witnessed something,’ I said to soften the edges of Tim’s blunt words. ‘She was in the bar with the victim.’

  Mabel’s head started to nod a little with a tremor like one of those toy dogs that people have in the back of their car. ‘Why would she have been in a bar with a drug dealer?’ I could see that Harald was taking her hand under the table.

  ‘That’s what we would like to find out.’Tim looked down at his notes.

  ‘We’re no longer in touch with Katja,’ Harald said in his slow and precise voice. ‘We don’t know where she is.’

  ‘When was this man killed?’ Mabel clasped the golden cross around her throat.

  ‘A week ago,’ I said. Sweat was trickling down the back of my neck. I rubbed it away and then wiped my hand on my trousers. ‘She hasn’t been seen since. We’re extremely concerned about her well-being.’

  ‘We thought …’ Mabel looked at the leather folder. ‘We thought you had more questions about Sylvie.’

  ‘Do you know where Katja is?’ Tim said.

  ‘No,’ Harald said. ‘As I told you, we’re not in touch with her any more.’

  ‘And you?’ I looked at Mabel. ‘Are you not in touch with her either? If she’s scared and in hiding, we can help.’

  ‘I haven’t seen her,’ Mabel said.

  ‘Have you spoken to her?’

  ‘I talked to her four months ago and haven’t heard from her since.’ Mabel started to cry softly. ‘I tried to call her but she isn’t answering her phone.’

  ‘Did you help her leave the country? You know we’ll find out,’ Tim said.

  Harald and Mabel shared a bewildered look. ‘We really haven’t seen her,’ Mabel said. Her head was shaking violently. Harald enclosed her hand firmly with both of his.

  ‘Did you know what she’d done? Is that why you have no photos of her in your front room?’ Tim said. ‘So that we wouldn’t find out her identity?’ It was the same thought I’d had.

  ‘No,’ Mabel said. ‘No, it’s not that at all.’

  The couple looked shocked by the bombardment of questions. Surely they would have been better prepared for this if they’d helped Katja.

  ‘Let’s take a step back,’ I said, to calm things down. Tim shot me an annoyed glance, but I ignored him. ‘You mentioned something last time we spoke,’ I said, ‘about your daughter being just like her mother and not being careful. Were you talking about Katja or Sylvie?’

  ‘Katja.’ Mabel put her hand on the leather folder. ‘We’re so angry with her.’

  Harald wrapped his arm around his wife’s shoulder. His suit jacket rode up from his waist. He should undo the button. ‘You did your best,’ he said to her. ‘You tried.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘She’s refusing all treatment. Just like her mother.’

  ‘Treatment for what? Drug addiction?’

  Mabel shook her head.

  ‘Take your time,’ I said. ‘What’s in the folder?’

  ‘The adoption papers.’

  I gestured that I wanted to see them. It would be quicker for me to read what had happened to the mother than to wait for Mabel to tell me this in a muddle. The papers mentioned two girls: Karin and Sonja. Mother: Tanja Aak.

  ‘You changed their names?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. But we kept the initials.’

  It really was as if they had got two dogs out of a rescue centre. What would that have been like if you were five years old?

  ‘I was surprised when Katja called us out of the blue,’ Mabel said. ‘We hadn’t been talking for a while. When she told me about the cancer, I said it was stupid of her. Sylvie overdosing was one thing, but this was unnecessary. Katja got angry with us. That’s when she said it about the divorce for children.’

  I scanned the documents. Mother’s cause of death: cancer. Father’s cause of death: suicide. ‘Their mother died of cancer at age twenty-nine?’ I realised that all my assumptions had been wrong.

  ‘Yes. Breast cancer. Katja was always very likely to have inherited that gene. We asked her to get tested for it, but she said she didn’t want to know, and that if she was going to die young that was okay.’

  ‘That’s why you said she wasn’t careful.’

  ‘When she called us four months ago,’ Mabel’s voice was suddenly full of anger, ‘it had already spread all over her body and to her lymph nodes and she’d decided not to have chemo.’

  ‘This wasn’t long after her sister died.’

  ‘A couple of months after. She’d been stupid. If she’d checked herself regularly, she would have had a chance. Now she said she was only going to the hospital to get her pain meds and to receive palliative care. Nothing else. No chemo, no surgery.’ Mabel’s voice rose. ‘It was too late for that, she said. She wasn’t interested in twelve months of a horrible life if she could have four months of a good one.’

  ‘Mabel was so upset, weren’t you?’ Harald said. ‘We tried to do anything we could to get her to change her mind. We went to her place and wanted to drag her to the hospital, but she flat-out refused. I asked her to do it for her mother’s sake, to give us peace of mind that we’d done all we could for her, but she couldn’t care less about us.’

  ‘So that was the last time you saw her? When you went to her flat?’

  ‘Yes, we tried again a week later, but she wasn’t there. She stopped answering her phone as well.’

  ‘Where is she being treated? Which hospital?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mabel said. ‘She wouldn’t tell me. I’m sure we’ll hear at some point that she’s died.’ She pushed the folder across to me. ‘Keep this. Was that all?’

  ‘So Katja never used drugs.’

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘And do you know anything about a child? This child?’ I showed them the photo of the little boy with the boat.

  ‘I’ve no idea who that is.’

  ‘Okay.’ At least I now understood why Katja had left her flat. It was to escape her parents. That didn’t tell me where she was now, of course.

  ‘If you hear from Katja, please contact us,’ Tim said. He accompanied Harald and Mabel out of the room.

  Unless she was self-medicating with heroin, Katja would have to go to the hospital for her pain meds. She would be keeping those appointments.

  I called the oncology departments of all Amsterdam’s hospitals to ask if they had a Katja Bruyneel on their patient list. It only took half an hour before I had the right one.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Tim’s car with the air con on at full blast was blessedly cool. He had frowned when I suggested we drive to the hospital, but I needed a substantial drop in temperature and it was either this or a bag full of ice cubes on my head.

  ‘You could have asked your questions over the phone,’ he said.

  ‘Didn’t you want to get out of the station? I felt like a tomato in a glasshouse.’

  I remembered when weather like this meant driving with your elbow out of the window. I’d done that when I had my first car and had thought it was the coolest thing ever. Now we kept all the windows shut to create this cool box on wheels.

&nbs
p; ‘I’m not going to complain about the sun. Two whole weeks of summer doesn’t happen too often.’ Still, from the way he was driving, it was clear that he was happy to be inside the car as well. A traffic light went from green to amber and Tim slowed down instead of speeding up. The short delay of a red light was a blessing on the quick drive to the hospital.

  ‘The doctor might let something slip that he’d be reluctant to tell us over the phone,’ I said.

  ‘Do you think Katja will still turn up for her appointments?’

  ‘She’ll need her meds unless she bought heroin from Piotr Mazur to keep the pain at bay.’

  ‘That would make the boss happy.’ He put his indicator light on to pull in to the hospital car park. ‘It would make me happy too.’

  ‘Happier than if we arrested her?’ I was lucky to be secure in my job, but I still had a hard time prioritising Bauer’s opinion over getting some answers. Then I remembered cases that I had worked on where I’d done anything I could to get a conviction. If they had fallen apart in court, I would have been devastated.

  ‘Well, if Mazur was dealing heroin,’ Tim said, ‘maybe he just gave that German the wrong stuff.’

  I reluctantly got out of the car. I wasn’t keen on hospitals. Just the smell of antiseptic and cleaning products brought back too many painful memories. This hospital was in Amsterdam’s outskirts, close to the ring road and therefore easy to get to. I delayed going inside by having a scan around. To my left, next to the car park, was the day-care centre for the children of patients and medical staff. It had a separate entrance so that the kids didn’t have to be subjected to that hospital smell every morning. Through the window I could see healthy children playing with soft balls that were bigger than their heads. A young man showed them how to hold the ball between both hands, put it on the floor and push it over to the child across from them.

  Tim had walked up to the hospital entrance as I lingered outside. I rushed after him. We were told at reception to follow the green stripes on the floor to get to the oncology department.