Death on the Canal

by Anja de Jager

  I took it from his hands. ‘Give that back.’ I hated that he’d probably paged through half my self-help books. But he was right: they didn’t help at all. ‘So what happened with your daughter and this guy?’

  ‘He didn’t like her that way, but he was nice about it. For a teenager. She stopped following him everywhere and her school grades improved massively.’

  ‘Okay, so you say I should go and see Mark and tell him I like him and—’

  ‘No,’ Ronald interrupted. ‘Go and apologise to him. Properly. Have a grown-up conversation about what happened.’ He shrugged. ‘Then he’ll tell you he doesn’t fancy you and you can concentrate on work again instead of sitting here moping like a middle-aged teenager.’

  ‘I’m not moping.’ I couldn’t possibly be, because I smiled. Even though it didn’t change what I’d done, it was better to think that I’d behaved like a teenager rather than a stalker.

  My friend Alex lived in a houseboat along the Prinsengracht. I’d arranged to see the parade from her roof. The best view in town. I’d texted her to check that she had room for one more – she did – and dragged Ronald with me. Hundreds of thousands of people lined the canals to cheer on a flotilla of partying drag queens and party boys. Pink was a very happy colour. When we got to the boat, the crowd was already five deep. I had to skirt my way past a group of tourists with wheelie bags, and a grandmother with a hearing aid, dressed in fluorescent pink, who was lighting a cigarette with a lighter adorned with a kitten. Alex and her husband were dressed in matching outfits, she in a white shirt with pink trousers and he in a pink shirt with white trousers. I refused the glass of champagne that was offered and asked for a soft drink instead. Expecting trouble wouldn’t damage my enjoyment of the parade. It was pretty close to my default state of mind anyway.

  On the canal bank opposite, a young man was sitting on a pink towel, his legs dangling over the edge. His friend, a chubby woman wearing pink bunny ears, had taken off her shoes and showed pink toenails. On the boat next to us, a man dressed in pink hot pants and a pink singlet and a black gimp harness was twerking. He was bald and overweight and probably my age. I bet he dressed really conservatively during his nine-to-five and that the pink socks tucked into combat boots didn’t come out too often. Unless this was his normal weekend gear.

  All over, the rainbow flags were dangling proudly. A boat with policemen came past. The people watching from the canal cheered loudly. They were bored with waiting for the parade to start, so anything was better than nothing. My colleagues gamely waved at their adoring fans, which drew loud applause. Today everybody loved each other.

  Which was why the text from Piotr’s friend bothered me so much. Ronald was staring at his phone and typing something with extreme concentration.

  ‘Who are you texting?’ I said.

  ‘I’m letting Khalil know where we are. In case he wants to meet up.’

  ‘You what? Why did you do that?’

  ‘Because he asked. He’s fine. There won’t be any problems.’

  I wished I could believe him. I heard loud disco music in the distance, the first notes of ‘YMCA’. An even louder cheer went up. The parade was arriving. On the first boat, a group of men in very tight sailor outfits were dancing to the Village People, and half the people on the canal joined in. So did I. Who cared? It was a Saturday and the sun was shining. And I had a good reason to see Mark later. ‘Come on, Ronald, where’s your party spirit?’

  ‘I might have forgotten to bring it.’

  Yes, this really was my favourite day of the year. Pink seemed to be our new national colour. It was much more flattering than orange. The next boat brought a huge inflatable version of the Amsterdam bollards, striped in rainbow colours. It had to be lowered to clear the bridge and then rose again in its full glory. A bollard had never looked more phallic.

  ‘That’s crazy,’ Ronald said.

  It was glorious. Ridiculously, gloriously camp. The boat celebrated the gay people working for the Amsterdam council. I recognised one of the councillors. I’d had dealings with him in the past. Then he’d worn much more than he did now, his bare torso spray-painted in gold, with matching gold trousers.

  The next boat brought three semi-naked dancers. Their tight white hot pants left very little to the imagination, and that was all they wore apart from rainbow-coloured angel wings. They danced in synchronised abandon to ‘Relight My Fire’.

  ‘Oh my God,’ I heard Ronald breathe beside me.

  ‘What?’ I immediately scanned the boats and the crowd along the canal front to see what had concerned him.

  ‘He clearly doesn’t do things by half.’

  ‘Who?’

  The dancer in the middle, a man with sculpted muscles and dark skin, looked across at Alex’s houseboat. A big grin split his face and he stretched both arms to the sky in a gesture of pure abandon.

  ‘Fucking hell!’ Ronald laughed. ‘Khalil, you idiot!’ he shouted jokingly at the boat.

  ‘Friend of yours?’ asked Alex in an impressed tone of voice. ‘Great dancer.’

  ‘When I told him he shouldn’t live in fear, I didn’t mean he should out himself in just hot pants and a pair of angel wings in the middle of Gay Pride.’

  ‘Isn’t that what the parade is all about?’ Alex said.

  But Ronald shook his head. I sang along to the song. The sun was shining over the city and Ronald’s friend had only texted him to make sure someone he knew saw him dancing. The incongruity of it made me laugh out loud. Nothing could spoil this day. I gave Ronald a prod to make him dance with me. He didn’t respond, and I looked at him. His expression was too serious for the party atmosphere. ‘What’s up?’ I said.

  ‘Couldn’t you see the desperation in his face? Even today hasn’t made the hurt go away.’

  The words surprised me. I stopped moving. ‘What hurt?’

  ‘We buried his long-term partner a couple of days ago.’

  It took me a moment to work out what he was saying. ‘Oh my God. He and Piotr, they were together? Did Natalie know?’

  ‘They were neighbours. Of course she knew.’

  That was why she had said that Katja had killed an innocent man. If she’d killed him because she’d thought he had been Sylvie’s boyfriend, she had been very wrong.

  ‘We should talk to him,’ Ronald said.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Ronald and I caught up with Khalil immediately after the Pride parade had finished its cruise through the canals. By the time we found him, he was in the middle of getting changed, standing apart from the colleagues who had been on the boat with him. He had replaced his white hot pants with black jeans but was still wearing his feather wings. The gold highlights on his torso and face brought out his muscles and features. He made quite a beautiful angel.

  ‘Can you help me with these?’ he asked Ronald.

  ‘Of course,’ Ronald said, but he sounded reluctant.

  Khalil turned to give him access to the buckles on the harness that connected the rainbow-coloured wings to his body.

  ‘You need to give us a statement,’ I said.

  ‘What difference does it make?’ he said as Ronald undid the straps. ‘Piotr is dead and you’ve got his killer. Nothing else matters.’

  I got the impression that it was only because I was here with Ronald that Khalil was willing to talk to me. ‘I’m not sure we do have his killer,’ I said.

  Khalil threw a glance at Ronald. ‘I thought you had? Wasn’t this about drugs? Some deal gone wrong?’ He shrugged out of the wings as if he was taking off a jacket. ‘That’s why I got up the courage to do what I did today.’

  This was clearly something that the two of them had discussed at some point in the past. Then I remembered Ronald telling Khalil at Piotr’s funeral that he shouldn’t live in fear. Was this what he meant? That Khalil shouldn’t be afraid to come out?

  ‘My parents, my cousins,’ the Moroccan man continued, ‘they’re very traditional. I was worried that they’d h
ad a hand in Piotr’s death. It’s horrible to think that about your own family, but because he’d been stabbed to death, I couldn’t help but wonder. When I heard it was about drugs, that it had been a white woman who’d killed him, it actually made me feel better. That he didn’t die because of me. That it wasn’t about me.’ He scrubbed his hands and arms as diligently as a surgeon, to remove any trace of gold. ‘Piotr had come to Amsterdam, only to end up with me and be more afraid than he’d ever been back at home.’

  ‘We don’t think Piotr was killed because he was gay,’ I said. After all the years of tolerance, it made me sad to think that people were still scared to come out. In recent years, violence against gay people had increased, and in certain areas men didn’t even dare to walk hand in hand any more. Whatever had made Khalil come out today, if his family were that strict, it might have been sensible for him to have stayed in the closet. ‘Someone said it was about a child,’ I said gently. ‘Because Piotr was asking questions.’

  Khalil rummaged through a bag by his feet. He didn’t clean his chest but just hid the gold paint on his torso with a black T-shirt. ‘You found the child?’ He said the words as if it was definite. There were no doubts in his mind about the child’s existence.

  ‘We think Katja used a photo of a child to lure Piotr to the bar. Isn’t that why he met her there?’

  Khalil nodded. ‘He loved children. He was hoping we could adopt at some point, but I wasn’t ready for that.’ He sighed. ‘I wasn’t even ready to be open about our relationship. And he was worried about this child. The girl’s child.’ In the mirror I could see the gold glitter hugging his face, and it brought out the incredible greenness of his eyes.

  ‘Which girl?’ I said.

  Khalil ignored the question. ‘I thought he was nuts. I told him to let it go.’Tears welled up in his eyes. ‘I hadn’t realised it would be the child that would kill him and not the coke.’ He started to attack the golden sequins on his cheekbones with a nailbrush, as if they now offended him.

  ‘What do you know about this child?’

  ‘Only what Piotr told me. He was at his neighbours’ flat; they all liked to do a line together every now and then. It wasn’t my scene so I never joined them. But this one night, a girl turned up. Piotr had never seen her before. She was pretty, he said. Blonde hair, blue eyes, very Dutch-looking, you know. And she said she had a child. She was the neighbour’s ex-girlfriend.’

  ‘Sylvie Bruyneel,’ I said.

  ‘She was Koen Westerfaalt’s ex?’ Ronald said at exactly the same time.

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘And Natalie was there too?’ I asked. Sylvie used to go out with Natalie’s fiancé?

  ‘Yes. So this girl turns up and claims that the guy is the father of her child. Natalie screams that she’s lying. That she doubts there even is a child.’

  ‘There’s nothing about Sylvie’s child in the birth register.’

  ‘I know. Piotr checked that too. Anyway, Piotr said that Koen got upset. Angry. The three of them disappeared into the bedroom. Why they didn’t just ask Piotr to leave, he couldn’t understand. He would do that a lot, talk about Dutch culture to me, as if I understood all of it.’ He smiled a small smile. ‘That’s what got us together, you know, that we were both outsiders in a way.’ He started to cry and reached for a tissue. ‘Sorry, just give me a moment.’ He worked visibly hard to compose himself before he could continue. ‘There was a lot of shouting, a crash, and when they came out, the girl is crying and her face is red as if she’s been hit.’

  I nodded. That made sense. Petra had told us that Sylvie had had a bruise on her face when she’d gone to Katja’s flat, desperate for money. She must have gone to Katja after she’d been at Natalie and Koen’s flat.

  ‘After she’d left, Natalie told Piotr that the girl had been trying to blackmail Koen but that it was all a lie. Fine. Piotr left to go home, but he talked to Koen in the doorway and told him that if he was a father, he had a responsibility and he should look after his kid.’

  ‘And that was the last time Piotr saw the girl?’

  ‘The last time he saw her, yes, but he heard her again later. He heard the doorbell. She had come back, and he was worried that there would be another argument.’ Khalil rubbed his eyes. ‘But he told me the voices sounded happy and there was laughter. So he went to bed, thinking it was all solved.’

  I remembered that time I’d searched Piotr’s flat. I’d been able to hear every word that was said from the other side of the wall. No wonder Piotr had known exactly what had been going on.

  ‘But the next morning the girl was dead and that’s when Piotr started to get obsessed,’ Khalil said. ‘He had this odd idea that the girl had been telling the truth, however often I told him that maybe she had just been a very good liar. That she was a junkie out to score cash for drugs and she’d clearly managed it because she’d OD’d. But Piotr kept insisting she looked clean.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us this sooner?’ Ronald sounded angry. ‘You made it sound to me as if it was about drugs.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. In a way, that’s what I hoped.’

  ‘That was why Piotr went to Sylvie’s funeral,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. I told him he was crazy, attending the funeral of a girl he’d only seen once, but he thought the child would be there. He wanted to see him with his own eyes and check that he was being looked after.’

  ‘I guess he asked Koen directly?’

  ‘Yes, he asked both Koen and Natalie. But they both maintained that Sylvie had been telling stories and they denied knowing anything about it.’

  No wonder Piotr had come to the bar when Katja had shown him that photo. She must have known that he had been looking for Sylvie’s son – Koen’s son – and had used that to get him to meet her. I would call Ingrid and ask her to get Katja ready to be interviewed again. We would have to inform her lawyer, of course, but we needn’t tell Bauer. Now that I knew what Piotr had heard, I was only more certain that the little boy existed somewhere.

  Khalil leaned towards the mirror, examining his face, and peeled the last shiny flecks from his skin. All signs of today’s celebration and abandon had been scrubbed away. The beautiful angel had disappeared. ‘I made a huge mistake today, didn’t I?’ In his black T-shirt and jeans, he looked as sombre as he sounded.

  Ronald put an awkward hand on his shoulder. ‘You couldn’t have honoured Piotr better.’

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  We got back on the tram. Half the people around us were wearing something pink. My own fuchsia T-shirt seemed very much out of sync with my thoughts. It was too festive. I pulled on the bottom of the shirt and straightened it. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  Ronald had been looking out of the window, but now he turned back to me. ‘What for?’

  ‘You told me the truth from the beginning about Piotr. That he hadn’t been sleeping with Natalie. That he hadn’t been dealing drugs. I should have believed you.’

  ‘I should have taken you to Khalil sooner, but he wanted to keep his relationship with Piotr secret.’ He put his hands on the headrest of the seat in front of him. ‘I went to their place and had dinner. That was a big deal. They hadn’t told many people but they trusted me to keep their secret. Maybe I shouldn’t have kept quiet. I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  The tram took us closer and closer to Koen and Natalie’s flat. I was reminded of when I was there a week ago and had heard them argue. Had that been about Koen’s child? The tram took us slowly through the post-parade crowd. I wished we could move more quickly, but I knew that this was still faster than if I had driven. But I was worried about what we were going to find.

  We got off at the nearest stop and went up to the fourth floor. It was a massive anticlimax when all we found was a closed door. There was no response when I rang the bell.

  ‘What now?’ Ronald said.

  I didn’t think we had enough to apply for a search warrant. ‘Call Natalie. You
have her number, right?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Find out where she is.’

  Ronald got his mobile out. After a few seconds’ conversation he turned back to me. ‘She’s at work,’ he said.

  We went back into the centre of the city, to the department store. It was nearly closing time when we got there and the store was almost empty of shoppers. I stepped on the escalator to get to the second floor. I stared at my bare toes in my sandals, then further down to the striped metal steps. Each of the steps might think it was going somewhere, but at the top it was being dragged right back to the bottom to start its aimless journey up again.

  When I got to the top of the escalator, I could see Natalie Schuurman wrestling with a mannequin. One naked arm lay discarded on the floor. I tried not to look at it. It reminded me too much of the time when I’d seen a real one severed just like that. That had been a horrible traffic accident. At the time, we’d just dealt with the aftermath and tried to keep the woman alive until the ambulance turned up. We’d managed. She’d lived.

  ‘We have a couple of questions,’ I said.

  The rest of the mannequin seemed to be clinging on to the expensive dress. Natalie wrenched the other arm free from the body. ‘What do you want to know?’ she said.

  ‘Tell us about the night that Sylvie Bruyneel came to your flat. We know that Piotr Mazur was there.’

  Natalie sighed. ‘That was what started it all.’ I thought she meant Piotr’s murder, but she continued, ‘All the trouble between Koen and me.’ She held on to the edge of the sleeve of the dress and stripped it from the loose arm.

  ‘Because of the child?’

  She bent her head and her hair fell forward and covered her face. ‘There is no child. Koen hated the idea. He refused to believe it was true. We were both so happy when it turned out she’d been lying.’

  ‘Where is Koen?’ I said.