Death at the Orange Locks

by Anja de Jager

  Anja de Jager is a London-based native Dutch speaker who writes in English. She draws inspiration from cases that her father, a retired police detective, worked on in the Netherlands. Anja worked in the City for twenty years but is now a full-time writer.

  Also by Anja de Jager

  A Cold Death in Amsterdam

  A Cold Case in Amsterdam Central

  Death on the Canal

  A Death in Rembrandt Square

  A Death at the Hotel Mondrian

  Copyright

  Published by Constable

  ISBN: 978-1-47213-045-7

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © Anja de Jager, 2020

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Constable

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Anja de Jager

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  There was a noticeable chill in the air as Thomas Jansen and I stood on the northern bank of the IJ, close to the Orange Locks. He wore his thick jacket done up to under his chin and had his hands stuffed deep in his pockets. Earlier, when the sun had been out, there had been a hint of warmth in the air, but now the wind blew over the water and took the temperature down a couple of degrees.

  This water was the source of Amsterdam’s wealth. It was now a river but it still carried memories of when it had been part of the South Sea, many centuries ago. To my eyes, even today it still seemed like a sea, with massive cruise ships docking at the inland harbour and ships carrying freight. Across the wide expanse, the buildings of the port were clearly visible, shaped like massive whales, as if the captains needed that visible reminder to help them figure out exactly where they were supposed to dock. It would take a ferry more than five minutes to cross from the south bank to the north.

  The Orange Locks were the border of where Amsterdam ended and the villages began. To the east, the IJ became the IJssel and then the IJsselmeer, a lake so large that early last century a small section of it was poldered to build a city, which now had over a hundred thousand inhabitants. Before the enormous Orange Locks had been built in the 1870s, that lake had been part of the sea.

  The Dutch obsession with controlling our waterways had no limits. When we saw water, we could never just leave it be. There was always the question of what we could do with it: polder it and build a city on it, swim in it, dam it, build bridges over it, send boats across it.

  Or, in the case of the man I was looking at, die in it.

  The body lay on top of a plastic tarpaulin, and yellow tape cordoned off part of the road. Even though it was hard to judge someone’s age after they’d been in the water for a long time, I was quite sure he was middle-aged. He was the right age to have been on one of the river cruise ships. I could only hope that wasn’t the case, because it would be problematic. We could do without a boat holding thousands of people being stuck in Amsterdam’s inland harbour, or having to track down someone who’d been on a ship that had already departed days ago.

  ‘I’ve got to ask,’ the female police officer in uniform said. ‘You’re Lotte Meerman, aren’t you?’ Her trousers were wet up to her knees. The fluorescent yellow of her jacket stood out against the dark grey of the water.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s right.’

  She grinned from ear to ear. ‘I thought I recognised you.’ Her smile was nearly as bright as her jacket. She didn’t look old enough to be a police officer. Her partner didn’t look much older. That was clearly a sign of my own ageing.

  ‘Why didn’t you leave him in the water?’ Thomas cut through the chat.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Her smile rapidly disappeared. ‘I know we’re supposed to do that.’

  That was standard procedure. For floaters, careful recovery was important. The water cooled the body down quickly but then kept it at that temperature. Especially at this time of year. It made it easier for forensics.

  ‘If you knew that, why didn’t you do it?’ Thomas asked.

  ‘We thought that maybe he was still alive,’ her partner said.

  I couldn’t understand why they’d thought he could possibly have been alive. The body was bloated. This guy had been in the water for days. It was much more likely that they hadn’t thought at all but had acted before their brains had kicked into gear.

  ‘Right,’ Thomas said. ‘He was floating face down, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, and as soon as we turned him over, we saw he was dead,’ the female officer said.

  We had been called in because there were cuts and bruising on the man’s face. That didn’t necessarily mean that he had been assaulted before he drowned. He had been floating in a body of water used by a number of large vessels and could have been hit by any of them postmortem. The forensics team would examine the body more closely to see what had happened. Death had not been that recent. If I’d had to guess, I would have said that he had died less than a week ago. Luckily, we didn’t have to rely on my guesswork.

  ‘Leave a floater in the water next time.’ Thomas was right to pull them up on it. I would have let it go because it was chilly enough today that it didn’t matter a great deal. Had it been the height of summer, it would have been a different story.

  I wondered how long these two had been police officers. They’d carefully taped off the area around the body. Sure, we would want people to stay away from the corpse, but this wasn’t the crime scene. Who knew where he’d actually entered the water. I wasn’t sure it was even a crime. As the body was fully dressed, he could have just fallen in somewhere. It wouldn’t be the first time that someone, possibly drunk, had toppled into a canal and died. The postmortem would tell us an awful lot more.

  ‘We thought it would take a while before we’d get help out here,’ the male officer said. ‘That everybody would be at Centraal station.’

  There had been a suspected terror alert at Amsterdam’s main station this morning. Apparently a reliable source had given a warning of a large-scale impending attack and it
had sparked a major operation. The station had been closed and the capital was on high alert. While most of our colleagues were involved with that, Thomas and I had to stand here at the water’s edge and deal with a body. It was the icing on the cake that the first officers on the scene had already messed up. With a bit of luck it would turn out to be an accidental death.

  ‘But at least we got to meet you,’ the female officer said to me. ‘I’m sorry we messed up.’ She handed me a wallet. ‘This was in his inside pocket. The other pockets were empty.’ She paused for a second. ‘I checked as soon as we’d pulled him ashore. That will help you identify him, won’t it?’ She was desperately keen to have done something right, bless her.

  ‘He still had his wallet?’

  ‘Yes, his coat was zipped up, so it hadn’t fallen out.’

  I opened the wallet. There were credit cards and a driving licence. They were heavily water-damaged but the plastic had done its job and the details were still readable. The dead man’s name was Patrick van der Linde. His address placed him on the south side of the water, on the KNSM Island. He was a local, then.

  ‘Have you notified his next of kin?’ I asked.

  ‘No, we waited for you.’

  Thomas grimaced, but I would have waited too. Nobody liked having to tell someone that their husband, son or father had died.

  The face of the male cop was starting to look as grey as the cloudy sky. ‘Go and dry off,’ I said. ‘We’ll take it from here.’

  After they’d walked off, I went over to speak to the woman who’d first spotted the body. ‘At what time did you see him?’ I asked her.

  ‘I called you as soon as I noticed him,’ she said. ‘It was just after nine, I think. I was out walking my dog.’

  ‘You always walk your dog here?’ Thomas asked.

  ‘Yes, I always take the same route.’ She smiled at him and ignored me. I guess he was attractive in the way of a man who had been cute when young and hadn’t aged too badly. I bet he used more skin treatment products than I did. I didn’t hold that against him. ‘Twice a day: morning and evening.’

  ‘The body wasn’t here last night?’ I asked.

  The woman shrugged. ‘I’m not sure. I don’t think I would have seen it in the dark.’ She was definitely less interested in answering my questions. She wasn’t excited to meet me.

  It did surprise me that nobody had spotted the body before that. There were always a lot of joggers and dog walkers using the path along the water’s edge. Maybe someone had seen him but not called us, or maybe they’d thought it was only a mannequin or something. It was possible that he had floated closer to the middle of the shipping lane, less easy to see from the road. Over a hundred thousand boats a year went through the locks, and if it had been the height of summer, I would have expected one of them to have spotted him. How quickly drowned people were found all depended on where they’d entered the water and what the current was like, and of course whether we were searching for a body or not. If we were lucky, they would wash up at one of the banks quickly. With this man, it had taken days.

  ‘He was face down,’ the woman said. ‘Otherwise I would have jumped in to try to save him, but he was floating, his arms stretched out. He wasn’t moving.’

  ‘He’s been dead for days,’ Thomas said.

  ‘That’s what I told them,’ she pointed at the two cops in the distance, ‘but they insisted on dragging him out. I don’t think they really listened to me.’

  I wondered if their minds had been on the attack at Centraal station that they had been excluded from rather than on the task at hand. Alternatively, maybe this was the first dead body they’d dealt with and adrenaline had kicked in and they’d acted instinctively.

  I took the woman’s details and told her to go home. We might have more questions for her later, but I doubted it. Forensics arrived. They bagged up the body and took it to the lab.

  I held up the driving licence to Thomas. ‘Better do this, hadn’t we?’ It would be unpleasant and we should get it out of the way.

  Chapter 2

  The KNSM Island had been created at the beginning of the twentieth century. The word ‘island’ always made me think of naturally shaped pieces of land, like Texel in the north of the Netherlands. This island wasn’t like that at all. It displayed the Dutch liking for straight lines. The perfect edges screamed that this land was artificially made, but since that was the case with so much of the Netherlands anyway, it didn’t stand out. A large part of the country had been reclaimed from the sea, and this island in the IJ was no different.

  The KNSM – the Royal Dutch Shipping Company – had constructed the island to accommodate their factories and warehouses. Naming it after themselves was probably the ultimate in advertising; or perhaps the ultimate in hubris, because not long afterwards, they went bankrupt. After that, the land hadn’t been used for decades, and squatters had moved in and made the place theirs. But twenty years ago, Amsterdam’s relentless expansion had created a need to use every centimetre of land that could be found, and the island had been redeveloped. Right at Amsterdam’s eastern edge, it was now a trendy and buzzing part of town.

  The address on the driving licence was at the far end. Flats had been built in a large ring around a communal open space dotted with concrete benches and plants. Patrick’s flat was on the twelfth floor. I pushed the button for the lift. Not many places in Amsterdam had lifts. If there was anything that identified the city – apart from the amount of water – it was the steepness and height of its stairs. In my place along the canal, I had to go up three vertiginous flights of steps before I reached my front door. I liked to think that they kept me fit, though if you had problems with your knees, there were better places to live. Here, we went up twelve floors without having to do any work at all.

  I rang the doorbell. A woman with blonde highlights opened the door. From Patrick’s driving licence, we knew he’d been in his late fifties. This woman looked about the same age. People would probably describe her as well preserved. She wore a string of pearls, and fake diamonds adorned the front of her black loafers. Her pink lipstick was perfectly applied.

  ‘Yes?’ she said. ‘How can I help you?’ She didn’t seem distressed. This struck me as odd. The man we’d found had been dead for days. Surely she must have been worried about him, unless he was in the habit of leaving home for a week without contacting his wife.

  ‘I’m Detective Lotte Meerman,’ I said as I showed her my badge.

  ‘Of course, I’ve heard of you,’ she said, smiling widely. ‘Come on in. I’m Margreet. Margreet van der Linde.’

  I hadn’t been surprised when my uniformed colleague had recognised my name, but the fact that members of the public were now doing the same was disconcerting. Margreet’s smile indicated that she was pleased I was here. That she’d been expecting me, almost.

  It made me feel even worse about the news we had to give her.

  It was always in moments like these that the professional defence, the ability to keep an emotional distance, melted away. I had no problems looking at a body, but death became reality in the face of the people who were left behind.

  We followed her down a narrow corridor, past a glass door to the kitchen and into a living room with a circular table at one end and a sofa at the other. The windows gave an uninterrupted view over the water of the harbour and the houses on the other side. Margreet sat down on a large leather chair.

  ‘I’m so sorry to have to give you bad news,’ Thomas said. ‘A man was found drowned this morning and we have reason to believe it’s your husband.’

  The smile on her face didn’t disappear. ‘No, no, that can’t be right.’ She waved her hands in front of her energetically, palms facing us, to indicate that we were clearly wrong and to ward off our negative words. ‘Pat’s a really good swimmer. Thanks for coming here, but it must be someone else.’

  ‘We don’t know exactly what happened yet,’ I said, ‘but we found this on the body.’ I showed her the wal
let and its contents. ‘Is that his?’

  She kept eye contact with me and didn’t even glance down. ‘I’m sorry you’ve had a wasted trip; it can’t be him.’

  ‘We would like you to formally identify him,’ Thomas said. ‘And once we know more about the cause of death, we may have more questions.’

  She shook her head. ‘I really don’t see the need. It can’t be him, he can’t have drowned.’

  ‘Is there someone who can go with you?’Thomas carried on as if she hadn’t said anything. Margreet’s unwillingness to even consider that the dead man was her husband was clearly annoying him.

  I was equally convinced that the man found in the water had been the man whose photo was on the driving licence, but I also recognised her attitude for the self-preservation exercise it really was. The longer she could convince herself that her husband hadn’t died, the longer she could keep smiling.

  ‘It’s important that we identify him,’ Thomas said.

  I looked out of the window and could see four people swimming in the water of the canal; dark shapes pulling orange buoys behind them. Not only did those floats alert boats to keep their distance, but they were also hollow and kept the swimmers’ belongings dry and safe. I knew this because one of my friends had once persuaded me to go for an open-water swim in the canal with her. Even though it had been refreshing and fascinating to see the streets from down below, I still preferred to be on dry land. If I had to exercise, I would rather be on a bicycle. It was warmer, and less likely to give me a disease. The people I could see in the canal probably weren’t taking in gulps of water. They swam like older ladies in a swimming pool, with their heads high, chatting as they propelled themselves forward.

  ‘Or we can ask someone else instead,’ Thomas persevered, ‘if you don’t feel up to it.’

  ‘Well, you know my daughter.’ Margreet looked at me. ‘Should I get her to go? Even if there’s really no point?’

  I stopped looking at the swimmers. ‘I know her?’

  ‘Yes. My daughter and my son-in-law met with you two days ago. To tell you that my husband had gone missing. Surely you remember.’