A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1) (13 page)

‘So why not make him pay alimony? Child support? If he didn’t want to pay, you could have forced him.’

‘You won’t understand.’

‘Try me.’

‘It was pride, OK? My silly pride. It was probably wrong of me to leave him – we had you together.’ She went to one end of the table and signalled to me to go to the other. ‘My parents were very angry and upset. They wanted me to stay with him. Marriage was supposed to be forever, through thick and thin, through sickness and health, sanctified by God, but I just couldn’t stay, not after I’d found out . . . OK, one – two –
lift
.’

We picked up the table and shuffled it back to its pre-Christmas place, the legs fitting into the original holes in the carpet. ‘Right, that’ll do.’ She rested against a chair. ‘And when I left, my guilt for leaving told me that if I had wanted his money, I should have stayed with him and shared my life with him. Give him something back in return. That probably doesn’t make any sense to you.’

‘As a matter of fact it does.’ Avoiding her eyes, I pushed the other chairs back around the table. Each slotted in where it used to be.

‘I couldn’t take any of his money,’ she said quietly. ‘Not even when there was plenty.’

‘Did you leave him because of the money?’

‘Because of where it came from.’ She visibly braced herself. ‘What he got paid
for
.’

As my mother confirmed what Stefanie had thought and what I’d already suspected last night, a mixture of feelings invaded me. It was hard to unravel and make sense of them all. Part of it was shock, the jump of my stomach, similar to when Ronald had told me about my father’s heart attack. But it was mainly anger. My heart raced and I would have loved to kick something. Why hadn’t my father told me this when I saw him? Why had he asked me to reopen the Otto Petersen case? Why had he wanted me to talk to Ronald? It didn’t make sense. Did he want to be found out? In my abdomen, the nerve endings tied themselves in knots as if somebody was knitting my intestines together. Did he want me to expose him? I wasn’t sure that I could. I would be exposing myself too. No way would I jeopardise my job just to help his absolution! I gripped the back of the last chair I was putting in its pre-Christmas spot and shoved it under the table. Why did he have to make things difficult for me yet again?

‘What did he get paid for?’ I asked tersely.

‘I can’t talk about that. It’s too . . .’

I waited, but she didn’t complete her sentence. ‘Too what?’

‘I can’t tell you, Lotte. Please don’t force me. I don’t want to tell you these things about your father.’

I gave my mother a quick hug, grateful that she had tried to protect me from this.

‘You’re going now? I told you what you needed to hear, now you’re off?’

‘Yes, Mum, I’m going back to work.’ I said it loudly.

She nodded. ‘On a Saturday? Right. I’ll see you Wednesday.’ She kissed me on my cheek.

‘If I have time.’

‘If you have time? I’ve got nothing left of importance to tell you, so now you might not even come on Wednesday?’

I gave her arm a rub. ‘That’s not what I said.’

‘That’s what it sounded like to me.’

‘Mum, I’m sorry, that’s
not
how I meant it. You know what it’s like when I’m in the middle of a case.’

‘That’s what
he
used to say.’ She sat back at the table and started reading the paper again.

‘Thanks for your help, Mum. I know this is hard for you.’

She didn’t reply but kept reading. I got up, touched her head with a light caress, freed my coat and left, almost running down the concrete steps.

My feet pushed against the pedals of my bicycle and I moved back in time from the new-build area where my mother lived to my home in the belt of old canal houses. My back felt as if boiling water was running down my spinal cord. It was from being pulled in so many different directions, by a kaleidoscope of feelings from sadness to anger.

Snow was falling again. Without the wind, the snowflakes brushed softly against my cheeks and eyelashes. I took one hand off the handlebar and put it in my pocket for an extra layer of cover. The snow was getting heavier as I arrived at the first canal ring. A car overtook me on the narrow stretch of road and I was pushed to the outside, close to the small metal bollards with the three Xs in relief that were Amsterdam’s symbol.

I kept my head down as much as possible whilst still looking ahead, and soon passed the Westerkerk. The garish blue paint on the adornments of the steeple and Amsterdam’s symbol in vibrant red and black stood out against the demure grey of the rest of the church. Three skulls above each of the side doors reminded every churchgoer of the brevity of their lives. The postcard shops, currently closed for the winter, would open to hordes of tourists in a few months. People from all over the world would come with their cameras out, eternalising Amsterdam’s picturesque historic heart of canals and bridges, as well as its seedier side closer to the station. They would record the slight tilt of the tower of the Westerkerk or the Homo monument to the gay community, situated just behind the seventeenth-century church, and talk about how interestingly mixed the city was.

Now, in January, cleansed of visitors, the city felt empty. I hadn’t seen a living soul since the car went past. On this stretch there were only tall houses on one side and frozen water on the other. The signs of life were all indoors, where lights were on to drive away the dark of the snow clouds, even though it was still morning.

Should I call my father? Demand an explanation? Tell him that I knew anyway? Explain that I had to protect myself so that I would have to cover for him, even if that wasn’t what he wanted? He still hadn’t called me back. He obviously didn’t care. Didn’t want to talk to me. I could still see him – old, shrunken, standing in front of his house, waving, saying it had been nice to see me. If it had been nice, why hadn’t he contacted me?

I rammed my bicycle in an open slot, chained the front wheel to the metal stand and stumped up the stairs to my flat. My cheeks were wet, numb from the snow’s embrace. I took my coat, gloves and shoes off, put my slippers on, lay down on the sofa and stared at the light coming through the window. My whole body was heavy; even my fingers resting on top of each other felt as if strings attached to the earth’s core were pulling them down. The amber pot of pills called to me from the bedroom. The thoughts from earlier came back.

Ronald had said I looked like my father. I dragged my body upright and looked at my parents’ wedding photo, which I kept on the sideboard. They both looked so young. Not all of my features were like his but I recognised his long nose with the flattened end on my face. So I was mentally like him as well: I too could not tell wrong from right. I straightened the photo, my mind made up. I couldn’t tell CI Moerdijk about him or about the bribes. I wouldn’t get him into trouble. More importantly, I wouldn’t get myself in more trouble than I already was. If he wanted to unload the weight on his conscience, someone else could be his confessor.

In my study I took a pen and coloured thickly over my foolishly optimistic faint pencil lines. He’d been on the take, my mother had said, so it was likely he had been bought by Anton Lantinga to destroy the files.

I was reading through files on Otto Petersen at the shelter of my desk, when Hans came in. I hadn’t seen my colleague since Friday morning. ‘Hans, I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t have shouted at you.’ This must be what it was like to have a younger brother: you fought, then you apologised.

‘It’s OK, Lotte. I’ve been shouted at before. I can cope.’ He hung his coat beside mine on the hooks on the inside of the door.

‘Still, I was wrong—’

‘Let’s not talk about it.’ He rested his hand on my shoulder as he moved past me to reach his own desk. I tried not to flinch. ‘I know how stressed you’ve been,’ he said.

‘It’s no excuse. Anyway, I spoke to the boss on Friday. Did he talk to you afterwards?’

‘Yeah, he told me that you’ve dug up a new witness . . .’

So the die was cast. There was no turning back now. ‘Well, not new exactly,’ I said.

‘New to him, right?’

I nodded.

‘So we’re officially reopening it, you and I. And that Stefanie Dekkers—’

‘She came round Friday night.’ I bent closer to Hans. ‘Can you believe it? Made me pour her a drink . . .’

‘What I can’t believe is that you let her in.’

I smiled and covered my mouth with my hand to cup and hold the unexpected feeling. ‘I bet she just wanted to see where I live. How was your weekend?’

‘I saw my parents.’ Hans pulled his large hands through his potato-peel hair and readjusted his body in the seat, which contained him tightly. ‘They’re still talking about selling up. They say they’re getting too old for farming and have no reason to keep going without any of us wanting to take it over.’ He scratched the back of his head. ‘I have been thinking about it . . .’

‘You wouldn’t.’

‘If I thought I’d be any good at it, I might.’

‘But Irene wouldn’t want to give up her job, surely.’ Hans and his fiancée were going to get married in April and I couldn’t see her as a farmer’s wife. I had met her three weeks after I joined the team. We had just started working on the Wendy Leeuwenhoek case and Hans had invited me for dinner at their house. He’d told me that Irene wanted to meet me and I assumed that she wanted to check me out. She had nothing to fear from me because, even though I’m the latest addition to the team, I am a good ten years older than either her or Hans. But I was wrong – that wasn’t what she was after at all. She was obsessed with Wendy Leeuwenhoek and wanted to hear from me what the parents were like. I didn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know from the newspapers’ endless speculation and the annual interviews the parents gave to keep their daughter in the public eye.

Hans’s house in one of Amsterdam’s suburbs was nice, and photos of his parents’ farm, the farmhouse, the land and the livestock adorned many of the walls, but I didn’t get the impression farming was Irene’s thing. She was a doctor at the VU Hospital and had slogged to get to where she was. It must be difficult to fit a life around two people on shifts. I’d been with my previous team for more than five years, but I’d never been to any of their houses. When I’d still been married, I would have had to take Arjen and he never had much interest in mingling with my colleagues and listening to police talk. After those early refusals, I wasn’t invited again.

Irene had wanted to cook me another meal last week to thank me for swapping shifts with Hans over Christmas. She’d said I should come over for New Year’s, but I’d said I had other plans. I thought she was going to set me up with one of her friends and I couldn’t face having to make pleasant chit-chat with a stranger who I was supposed to like but inevitably had no intention of seeing again.

‘She says she’d like to give it a go. There’s good money to be made in farming.’

‘Don’t you dare leave me alone with Thomas. If you’re leaving, we’d be a two-person team.’

‘Hi Lotte. Hi Hans.’

I turned round like a naughty schoolchild. ‘Hi, Stefanie. Ready to go?’

‘Geert-Jan Goosens, here we come.’

‘If there’s anything I can do to help.’ Hans said.

‘You could start getting us some pictures,’ I told him and pointed towards the whiteboard. I picked up my gun, fitted the holster around my waist and put on my suit jacket. The problem with suits was that they never fitted properly: the cloth wasn’t cut to accommodate the extra lump on your hip. When I’d first started as a plainclothes officer, I was young and cared what I looked like, and wanted to wear clothes that veiled the weapon. I’d stopped trying after a stupid incident in the fitting room of C&A. I was checking if the weapon showed through the cloth of the jacket I was trying on, undoing the buttons, turning round, readjusting where the gun sat on my hip, when a shop assistant saw me, around the edge of the badly closed fitting-room curtain. My eyes caught hers in the mirror. Only showing her my badge had stopped her from screaming and calling the police. Now I simply bought clothes a size too big.

Geert-Jan Goosens worked in the glass and steel dominated business park around Amsterdam’s World Trade Center, as Director of Research at the Chicago Bank.

‘That must be a step down from running your own firm,’ I said to Stefanie. My ears popped halfway up our ride in the lift to the thirtieth floor.

‘He’s fifty-seven,’ she said. ‘Sold his company to Chicago Bank two years ago.’ She had done my homework for me. ‘This is more an honorary job than anything else. They’ve kept him on at a high level, possibly for his contacts. Old boys’ network and all that.’

We were taken to Geert-Jan Goosens’s large corner office, past row upon row of young men and a few young women, often on the phone but always looking at some screen or other. I felt old walking amongst them. What chance would my father have had of understanding these people? Whatever I might think of her, Stefanie was useful as my guide and interpreter in this financial world.

Geert-Jan Goosens sat behind a large desk, which seemed to have been created this size for intimidation only. There was a pile of papers on one corner, a PC on the other, a blotter in front of him, but otherwise acres of bare wooden surface. He was a large man, almost big enough to do his desk justice. When he stood up, he towered over me, and I estimated that he had to be around 2.10 metres tall. A well-fitting suit made his mass look intentional, as if he was supposed to be this big and had worked hard to achieve it.

I shook his hand, then walked across to the window, looked out and surreptitiously wiped the palm of my hand against my leg. Outside, thirty floors below us, people and cars were so small they seemed made out of Lego. From this distance, their lives looked unreal and unimportant. That was probably why business people liked to be in their high buildings; it made it possible to ignore the normal people, to think they were just toys, whilst they made their decisions. A faint smell of cigars lingered in the fabric of the blinds. I pictured Goosens in the evenings, with the door shut because it was illegal even for a director to enjoy a cigar in his office to celebrate a job well done. Maybe a law to protect those unimportant men and women who worked to clean this office could be broken.