Death at the Orange Locks

by Anja de Jager

  ‘Does he know you’re seeing someone else?’

  ‘Arjen? Why would he care about that?’

  ‘He doesn’t have to be so worried that you’re going to beat him up.’

  ‘How does that follow?’ I couldn’t immediately understand his train of thought. ‘Are you saying that what someone has done to you matters less once you’ve moved on?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘So if someone steals your car, you should forgive him because you’ve now got a nicer car anyway? A much better, more comfortable car?’

  ‘Are you implying that men are like cars?’

  ‘I think that if it’s about something more important than that, you’re even less likely to forgive.’

  ‘You’re not so angry these days,’ Thomas said. ‘You’re calmer.’

  I stretched out and reached with the palms of my hands towards the ceiling to release the tension from my shoulders. ‘Life isn’t bad at all.’ I sounded smug even to myself and I had to stop smiling.

  ‘New love’s happiness. So cute.’

  ‘It’s nice. It’s good.’ It was great really. It was great to sleep in the arms of someone who loved you. Someone you liked and who made you laugh. I didn’t think I could want anything else from a relationship other than to be with someone who made me a better, happier person.

  ‘If it’s all good,’ Thomas said, ‘then work on this with me. Stop asking the chief inspector to take you off the case.’

  ‘He told you, then?’

  ‘It wasn’t anything I couldn’t have figured out by myself. I know you well enough to guess that you were going to see him first thing this morning.’

  I dropped my hands back down by my sides. ‘We’ll see how this goes,’ I said. It would all depend on how much my current happiness protected me against past pain. ‘I met with Margreet earlier. She thinks I’m her daughter’s friend.’ I thought about her mismatched socks and her inside-out top. ‘It was very sad. She told me she used to go swimming but can’t any more because the husband she loved drowned in that water.’

  I knew it was easier for her to talk to me than to my colleagues. I wanted to help her, and that meant working on her husband’s murder case, if at all possible.

  The house was twice the size of Margreet’s flat. If I’d felt at all guilty for taking too much of my ex-husband’s money after the divorce, which had paid for my very nice apartment along the canal, those feelings vanished as soon as I saw where he now lived. That money had been mine by rights; I’d put a lot of cash into his company when he first started it up. When it had become hugely successful, I’d deserved my chunk of the investment back. He’d obviously done well since then. He’d sold the firm not that long ago. Not that I’d kept tabs on what he’d been doing, of course, but it had made the front page of the business papers and it had been impossible to avoid.

  Nadia opened the door to us. Her eyes opened wider when she saw me. What had she expected? That Thomas would be alone? That she and Arjen could appeal to me to look into her father’s case when he was missing, but that I would drop it as soon as he’d been found dead? Or maybe she did not want me involved now that this might turn out to be a murder case.

  ‘My mother just called me,’ she said. ‘Apparently she talked to you earlier.’

  I grimaced. ‘She thinks you approached me after your father had gone missing because I’m your friend. She had some questions for me. It was fine.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Nadia said. ‘Come through. Arjen is here too.’

  We followed her to the living room. I had once read somewhere that when women get together, they automatically rank themselves in terms of looks and attractiveness. That was probably a piece of research written by a man. It wasn’t something I did all the time, but I did do it now, and there was no denying it: Nadia was prettier than me. She was younger than me. Plenty of women get plastic surgery after they divorce to show their ex that they’re just as beautiful as the new girlfriend or the new wife. In my case, there would be no point. Nadia would always win hands-down. No amount of effort on my part, if I even wanted to make an effort, would change that fact. But I knew it wasn’t really about that.

  Pain stabbed my chest so deep that I had trouble breathing. Pain, or maybe grief.

  What really hurt wasn’t the fact that Nadia had taken Arjen away from me; it was the existence of the child. To tell the truth, it had always been about the child.

  I couldn’t help but think that if she hadn’t died, my Poppy would have been two years older than the little girl playing on the floor of my ex-husband’s house.

  If she hadn’t died, there would have been a point when Poppy would have been this big, with golden curls, a wide smile and blue eyes.

  I swallowed. My legs felt weak and I was grateful for the sofa behind me. Even as I sat down, I realised that it would be far better to stand up again and walk out of here. Anything would be better than having to watch the little girl playing with her pony.

  Arjen was looking at me and I couldn’t decipher the look on his face. It could have been pity. Nadia’s shock at seeing me could also have been the sudden realisation that their daughter was here. She might have felt sorry for me too.

  ‘You saw Patrick on the night of the eleventh?’ Thomas asked.

  ‘Yes, I saw him the evening before he went missing,’ Arjen said.

  I took a deep breath and opened my notebook. Pity was good. Because I hated to be pitied, and hate was preferable to sadness in situations like this.

  ‘There was a dinner to welcome me,’ Arjen continued.

  ‘You?’ I said. ‘Why?’

  ‘I was going to help Patrick at the firm for a bit. He wanted to change strategy and I had time on my hands.’

  ‘He got bored of being a house husband,’ Nadia joked. She put her hand on Arjen’s knee, then looked at me and took it away again.

  ‘Were there any issues at work?’ Thomas said.

  ‘Not really sure,’ Arjen said. ‘I hadn’t started there as such. But now I wonder what he did after the company do. Where he went and who he met.’

  I glanced at the little girl. It wasn’t a My Little Pony she was playing with, but one that was more anatomically accurate. It was delicate in her chubby fingers. She made it dance up and down, ready to clear the obstacles made out of other toys. She wore a red and blue striped top, thick dark blue tights and a corduroy skirt. Her golden hair bounced. It was the same colour as the pony’s mane. Her smile was as bright as her hair. She was a happy child, looked after by two caring parents, with a father who spent time with her because he’d sold his company.

  She looked like Arjen.

  Poppy had looked like him too, whatever my mother had said to the contrary.

  ‘Was that the last time anybody saw him?’Thomas asked.

  ‘I don’t know that, but I do know he didn’t come home that night. Margreet called us at three or four in the morning. I was fast asleep. She asked if I was still with Patrick, but I’d been home for hours.’

  Her grandparents must dote on her. I didn’t think Arjen’s parents had ever really liked me. They hadn’t stayed in touch with me after the divorce. Why would they? I knew it could be hard on parents when their kids split up and they had less access to their grandchildren. In our case, that wasn’t an issue. There had just been Arjen and me, and it had been easy enough to cut ties with me.

  ‘You didn’t all leave at the same time?’ Thomas asked.

  ‘I had to get back to Haarlem. Patrick lived a block away from where we had dinner. He wanted to stay behind to pay the bill too, without anybody seeing. He was always like that.’

  I hadn’t contacted Arjen’s parents either. His mother had had a go at me after I’d miscarried the first time. I should never have told them about the pregnancy before the three-month point. She’d shouted at me that it had been reckless of me to keep working. She told me that I was insane to carry on doing this dangerous job.

  It was probably the only t
hing that my mother-in-law and my own mother had ever agreed on.

  ‘You’re telling me you were the last one to see him?’

  ‘No, someone at the restaurant must have seen him afterwards. The waiter, for example.’

  Even though I was off work on maternity leave when Poppy died in an unexplained, unexplainable cot death, she’d blamed me for that too. She was the kind of woman who needed to apportion blame; she couldn’t accept that some things just happened for no reason. I could see her point. I was sometimes like that too, but I’d never been able to talk to her calmly again after that. Whatever sympathy there had been between us was irrevocably destroyed when she’d piled guilt on top of whatever I was going through at the time. There was no word for my feelings. Calling it grief was putting it too lightly.

  ‘Did anything happen at the dinner? What was the mood like?’

  ‘I thought it was fine. I hadn’t met any of them before, of course, so it might be harder to judge, but it all seemed amicable.’ Arjen glanced at me again, even though Thomas was the one asking all the questions.

  I could only imagine that his mother had done a little victory dance when Arjen had brought home his pregnant lover and dumped the careless wife who let her babies die. She’d once sent me a letter to say that I was a greedy bitch to take my share of the money after the divorce. She didn’t say that I was wrong; she acknowledged that I had a legal right to it but wrote that I should have walked away with nothing.

  As if I was worth nothing.

  As if my behaviour deserved nothing.

  I dragged my gaze away from the playing child and looked down at the empty page of my notebook. I hadn’t thought about any of this in over a year. Now it was all coming back.

  What the hell was I doing here?

  Suddenly I knew I had to get out.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘Where’s your bathroom?’ I sounded ridiculously polite, even to myself.

  ‘You’re really pale, Lotte, are you okay?’ Thomas said.

  ‘On the left, in the hallway.’ Arjen answered my question.

  I got there just in time to turn on the tap of the little basin to cover the sound of my sobs. I put my hands over my face so that I wouldn’t have to see my ugly crying face in the mirror.

  Self-pity was even more hateful than someone else’s pity, I told myself sternly.

  When I’d finally regained some control, I splashed water on my face. My efforts to keep my tears inside had given me hiccups.

  This was just great.

  I sat down on the toilet. How long could I hide in here? I heard the murmur of voices in the other room. I flushed the toilet I hadn’t used, washed my hands, and dried my face with a soft blue hand towel that smelt of washing powder. Then I pushed my hair behind my ears and pulled my shoulders back, ready to face them all again.

  I was happy. My life was great.

  So why get pathetically upset over something that happened years ago? Why drag all of that up again?

  I took a deep breath and opened the bathroom door. When I stepped back into the room, Thomas immediately got up. ‘Thank you,’ he said to Arjen and Nadia. ‘I think that’s all we need at the moment. If we have any further questions, we’ll call you.’

  ‘Sure,’ Arjen said.

  I noticed his eyes on me, but I turned away, opening the front door and leaving the house without saying anything. It must have seemed strange, but I didn’t think I could get any sounds out, and I wasn’t even going to try.

  Thomas beeped open the car doors. I got in, grateful for the metal protection of the vehicle. He sat beside me.

  ‘I’m sorry about that, Lotte,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have asked you to come.’

  The normal response would have been to say that it was okay, but I knew it wasn’t. That the fault was as much mine as his – my hubris in thinking I could cope with coming here, seeing them – didn’t make me feel any better.

  I didn’t think Thomas understood why I was so upset. He might have got the wrong idea. He didn’t know that seeing Arjen made me think of those days again, when our beautiful little girl had died, when I’d gone back to work early from my maternity leave, because being at home only made me think of one thing. It was work that had rescued me, work that had allowed me to move on and the company of my colleagues that had restored my sanity. Having death and violence around me allowed me, at least for a few hours, to forget about the death in my own house. A death from natural causes more heartbreaking than any that work served up.

  I understood, of course, that this death had been worse for me because it had been my baby girl. That plenty of people would say that at least she’d gone peacefully in her sleep, which was infinitely better than being brutally murdered. I could never tell anyone that dealing with violence on a daily basis was the perfect displacement activity to stop me thinking about Poppy. My boss would probably have sent me home if he’d known, and with hindsight, I’d been very lucky that nothing bad had happened while I was walking around in a daze.

  I knew I was wired up differently and I could never share those thoughts with anybody. They would make me seem crazy.

  Not talking about stuff came naturally enough to me anyway. For most of my life I had been interested in the kind of things that other people would find morbid or unnatural. What would make them shiver with disgust, I found infinitely fascinating.

  There comes a point when you stop trying to change yourself. I was lucky that my job allowed me to work in the area that interested me; that I had colleagues who were just as warped as I was. My mother would say that it was the job that had damaged me, but I knew that I’d been messed up from the start and that work had been my salvation. At least there was one place where I felt normal.

  Now it seemed that the past I’d tried to think of as little as possible had come crashing into my work life. There was one obvious solution: don’t get involved. Don’t talk to Arjen, his wife, her family.

  There was no official reason why I shouldn’t investigate this case but I could try to fabricate one. Give it some time and I could surely come up with something. How hard could it be? I might have wanted to support Margreet, but it wasn’t worth this much pain.

  Chapter 8

  When we got back to the office, I went straight to Chief Inspector Moerdijk’s office. Thomas trailed me.

  ‘This case is an issue,’ I said to the CI.

  ‘Grab a chair.’ His smile was kind. We’d worked together for years, and now, like an old marriage, we were probably going to be together until one of us dropped dead. Well, until one of us retired. Still, if you had to work for a long time with anybody, CI Moerdijk was as good a boss as you were going to get.

  ‘You need to take me off this case. I’m not working on it.’

  He dropped the smile. ‘You can’t refuse,’ he said. ‘It’s a murder case. It’s important. We’ve been officially assigned.’

  ‘I can take time off. I’ll just go on holiday.’

  ‘Until when? Until the investigation is finished? That could be two weeks, six weeks, never.’

  ‘I’m hoping we’ll close it quicker than never,’ Thomas said.

  ‘I can’t meet with them again.’ I turned to face Thomas. ‘I can’t go back to that house.’

  ‘Then don’t. We’ll divide up the investigation in such a way that you have nothing to do with the family. You can look into his financial situation.’

  ‘Is there anything to suggest the family is involved in the murder?’ the CI said.

  That I had to think about that question showed how little time I’d actually spent on the case so far. I’d been too tied up with the personal side to do any background research. ‘We don’t know that much yet,’ I said, ‘but at first glance, I would say not.’

  ‘I agree,’ Thomas said.

  ‘If it was any other case, any other investigation, would you spend time with the family aside from victim support?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘So why don’t we
add a family support officer to your team and then you’ll never have to talk to them. It should be easy enough.’

  ‘No need to add anybody,’ Thomas said. ‘Charlie and I can do that.’

  I thought about Margreet wearing her clothes inside out and her socks that didn’t match. She’d said she preferred talking to me.

  ‘We can do this, Lotte,’ Thomas said.

  When Nadia had come to the station with Arjen when her father had been missing, I’d been okay. Her mother had been kind, even if she didn’t know who I really was. I didn’t necessarily feel that I owed them, but I could still help.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Sure. I’ll give Thomas support.’

  ‘We can look into adding someone to your team, though. How about someone to work on the company’s financial side? I’m sure Stefanie Dekkers from the financial fraud department could help out. They’ve just rounded off a big case.’

  The one that was mentioned in the article she’d shown me. ‘I don’t need her help.’ I spoke quickly, before Thomas could say that it was a good idea.

  Anybody but her.

  That evening, Mark and I arranged to meet for dinner in the small café we often went to on Thursday nights. He was already waiting at our usual table when I came in. I liked it when it was that way around, I enjoyed those seconds when I could watch him without him knowing. Observe him without being observed myself in return. I tried to see him the way other people did, a lanky man with messy dark hair and glasses, but the sum of him added up to so much more for me than it would for anybody else. It was the way he accepted me that made all the difference. Or maybe it was that we’d known each other since we were kids, even if my mother had been at pains to point out that she’d been with her fiancé for longer than Mark and I had been going out.