A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1) (17 page)

When my friend needed to leave, Paul walked out with us.

When I said goodbye he put his hand on my arm. ‘Will I see you tomorrow?’ he said. ‘I like talking to you.’ He smiled and I could feel the intensity of his eyes in mine all the way through to my stomach. All the people milling around on the Leidseplein, going from bar to bar, the tram coming past, the awful band playing on the pavement . . . all disappeared. ‘I enjoy being interviewed by you,’ he said, ‘your attention on every word I say.’ The wind had picked up and blew my hair into my eyes. He tucked it behind my ear. His fingers felt electric where they touched the skin of my neck.

When I got home I took a photo of Paul, Monique, his ex-wife, and their little girl Wendy and looked at it for a long time. I wanted to insert myself into that photograph, take the place in that family that Monique had given up when she divorced Paul. I could picture myself in her position with Paul’s arm protectively around my shoulder. I lay in bed, open-eyed, and knew it was impossible. I didn’t tell anybody I’d seen him.

The second time I’d met Paul without the recorder, a large number of properly taped interviews later, it had felt surprisingly private. The knowledge that the things we said would not be listened to by Thomas and the rest of the team afterwards had given that meeting an intimacy that had made me happy at the time and later sickened me.

But now, in the bright light of the police station, what worried me was that first time: would my friend remember? She had called me the next day to ask if I’d thought he liked her. I hadn’t answered her. Surely by now she must know who he was; there was no way she could have missed all the newspaper coverage. Maybe she had even put two and two together. Would she be a witness for the defence? What could she say? Should I call her to . . . to do what? To warn her or to plead with her to keep quiet? That would surely make things worse. I couldn’t do it.

What was the gap on the tapes that Thomas had found? I assumed that Paul had referred to something we’d talked about on the night out. I would have to listen to all the tapes myself, to all the conversations, to find out when and where we had slipped up –
I
had slipped up. But I really didn’t want to listen to all those tapes again, listen to hours of his voice. I reminded myself that this was what Thomas was good at. This was what Thomas had done all the way through the investigation: listen to the tapes, take note of nuances and of any gaps. There was no way he would say anything to the defence, since he would do nothing to jeopardise this trial – but he might go to the prosecutor’s office. I would just have to sit tight and wait for the call.

That night, my dreams and thoughts got the better of me again and I had to go for another drive across the country. But I didn’t stop at a petrol station.

The files had told me that Otto Petersen’s mother was in her eighties, but her eyes looked into mine without a sign of confusion. Her long white hair was tied on the top of her head in a series of loose, intertwined knots. No thin-looking perm. She wore a night-black roll-neck pullover and trousers that hugged her tall thin body around the hips then flared out.

‘Good morning, Mrs Petersen,’ I said. ‘I’m Detective Lotte Meerman from Amsterdam CID. We’re re-investigating the murder of your son. Could I have a word?’ I waited for her response. Maybe I should have started with some introductory chit-chat.

‘Can we go for a walk?’ she said. Her smile pulled the champagne-coloured crepe-de-chine of her cheeks into a series of pleats.

‘Sorry?’

‘If you have the time, it would be nice to go for a walk.’ She looked at my boots. ‘They’re thick enough for the snow.’

It was better to go outside than be indoors in an old lady’s small sitting room with, inevitably, the heating turned up too high. ‘Fine,’ I said. It was a good thing Stefanie was still in Amsterdam, as she would never have agreed to a walk, but she had other work to get on with and we’d arranged to meet at Wouter Vos’s place later.

I kept my coat on and waited in the little hallway until she was ready. Large pieces of furniture, the remnants of a previous life, cluttered the small flat. This was sheltered accommodation, under the protective shadow of a nursing home, on the edge of a park.

‘Have you been here long?’ I asked when she came back, wearing a warm black coat, a bright pink scarf and sturdy boots.

‘I’m too good for this place,’ she whispered. She gestured at the nursing home with a knotted hand before securing the front door. The swollen knuckles of her fingers locked a double wedding ring in place. ‘My son bought the flat for me when my husband died. A lot of my friends are here, so I thought: why not.’ She set out at a brisk pace along the lane through the park. The bare branches of trees touched each other high above our heads like the vaulted beams of an outdoor cathedral in which we’d worship winter. The sun slipped its rays through the gaps, so weak the light needed the help of the pull of gravity to reach the path.

Mrs Petersen’s steps were sure and her arms swung by her side with the energy of a child kept inside for too long and finally allowed out to play. ‘I don’t regret it. In the beginning I travelled a lot.’

I had to make an effort to keep up as we moved deeper into the park. ‘Are your friends still here?’ I asked, slightly out of breath.

‘Yes, there’s five of us. We used to go to school together. Ada isn’t too well any more, but the rest of us, we go on holidays, walks, to lectures, exhibitions. It’s quite a good little set-up. But they’re afraid of a tiny bit of snow. Worried they’ll fall and break a hip.’

‘You’re not?’

‘I’ve been inside for a week now. I could do with some fresh air. I’m grateful for your company, for whatever reason you’re here.’ She looked me in the eye.

‘As I said, we’re reopening your son’s case.’

‘I’m not sure I can help you. I don’t know much,’ Mrs Petersen said.

‘Not much, but something?’

She shrugged. ‘Probably nothing, but which mother wants to admit that?’

‘What was he like?’

‘As a child?’

‘Or a grown-up.’

‘It’s dangerous to ask an old lady to reminisce.’ She laughed with the sound of the little bell I’d taken from my mother’s Christmas tree. ‘He was a good child. Always fitted in.’

The sound of our boots on the snow formed the rhythm section accompanying a bird singing in a tree. I looked up to see what it was, but couldn’t find it. I could only see two structures, which were partially hidden by the trees on our right. A corner of black wire mesh, the edge of a man-height cage, extruded from between the snow-covered branches. It must be an empty aviary or a monkey house, its inhabitants kept somewhere warm during the winter.

‘He fitted in too well,’ she added unexpectedly. ‘Otto seemed a different person from year to year.’

A sign in front of the aviary would have told us what was normally kept there, if it hadn’t rusted to the point where all lettering was illegible. There was a cemented area where children could stand and poke their fingers through the mesh.

We were both silent and just walked. The frost chewed at my cheeks until they felt stiff, as if all the water in my skin had frozen to crystals. I didn’t mind. Here, in the cold, in the park with only an old woman for company, time grew elastic. I didn’t know how long we’d been walking. By the falling temperature in my upper legs, just at the point where they were no longer covered by my jacket, I guessed fifteen minutes.

‘I saw changes in him all the time,’ she went on. ‘It showed in his clothes, his face.’

‘With different fashions?’

‘No, it wasn’t that.’ Another silence fell. Then she said, ‘He was what people expected him to be. “Our changeling”, we called him.’ She laughed again. ‘Makes him sound like something out of a fairy tale, doesn’t it? But that’s how he was.’ She looked at me. Her loosely tied knot was coming undone and wisps of hair were flowing around her face where they’d escaped their clips. ‘My husband was just a factory worker, you see, just a simple man. And my own parents were small farmers. I was clever enough, I suppose – nothing special. But then Otto – he was different. Highly intelligent, they called him at school, always the top of his class.’ A combination of pride and sadness radiated from her eyes. They showed me where her son had got his intelligence from. I wouldn’t call her ‘nothing special’. She was just from a class and generation where ability had been less noticed and appreciated in a woman.

‘The government paid for his education – he was the first in our family to go to university. We couldn’t tell him how to behave, how to act, what to do.’ She wrapped her scarf tighter around her neck with her bare hands, gnarled and bent like the twigs on the trees by the path. ‘He had to fit in from an early age. Going to school with the children of doctors and lawyers, he wanted to be like them, sound like them. And he was so ambitious. He had this hunger for success and money. It burned inside him. It drove him.’

‘Did he ever bring any friends home?’

‘No, never.’ What must it have been like for her to lose her gifted son? Or had she lost him years before, when he went to university and did all he could to remove all traces of his parents from his speech, his appearance and his entire life? Was that when she’d lost him?

‘And Karin?’

‘That was much, much later. When he married her, she was his secretary; he thought that was what he should do.’

‘I didn’t know she used to be his secretary.’

‘She’s different now.’

The trees around us shrank the world to just me and Mrs Petersen. It was a colour-free world, the black of the branches and the white of the snow. We compressed it under our boots and walked for a while without speaking. Deep in the park I could no longer hear the traffic. There were no playing children; they must be back at school now that the Christmas break was over.

‘Do you like her?’ I said after the pause, my breath adding more white to the world around me.

‘She never visits me, but I don’t blame her for that. Yes, I liked her when they got married. I’m not sure I like what she turned into.’

‘What do you mean?’

The old lady led me down a left turn. ‘Like Otto, she changed her voice, her appearance and her manners. They were alike and they wanted the same thing. To fit in.’

My fingers were starting to feel cold inside the gloves and I stuffed them deep in my pockets. ‘He must have taken the collapse of his company very hard.’

She didn’t respond.

‘Mrs Petersen?’ I said.

She looked over to me. ‘Are you his new girlfriend?’

‘Whose?’

‘Otto’s. All these questions.’

‘No, Mrs Petersen, I’m from the police. Remember? Your son’s murder?’ I said it as gently as I could.

‘They stitched him up.’ Her voice sounded louder in the frozen park.

‘They?’

‘Geert-Jan Goosens, Anton Lantinga – they’re all old money. Rich parents, rich children. Clearly, Otto wasn’t.’ She glanced at me and said more quietly, ‘I’m worried it was our fault.’

‘You’ve met them?’

She shook her head from side to side, setting more strands of hair free. ‘I never did, but they all went to university together.’

Goosens hadn’t mentioned that. ‘And then Karin started an affair with Anton.’

Mrs Petersen laughed. ‘Otto probably expected that to happen. Isn’t it in all the movies and books? When you’re in jail, your wife runs off with one of your friends. He would’ve been disappointed if she’d been waiting, pining for him.’ She clasped her arms around her waist, her hands tucked away under her elbows.

‘Are you cold? Would you like my gloves?’ I took mine off. I reached out and she put her hand in my bare one. It was like a shard of glass under my fingers. ‘God, you’re freezing!’ I exclaimed.

‘I’m fine.’ She looked down at her hand. It was white with mottled pink around the edges where I was holding it.

I took my other glove off too and wrapped both her hands inside my warm ones, careful not to rub them, until they weren’t cold to the touch any more. All the time, she stood still and looked over my shoulder at the trees in the park. ‘Here.’ I gave her my gloves.

‘I’m fine,’ she insisted again.

‘No, you’re not. Put them on.’ I pulled them over her hands as you did with a toddler. She held her hands up and wiggled her fingers. The cold bit mine. I pulled my sleeves down so that they covered my hands.

A block of snow fell from a tree branch and landed on the ground with a loud plop. The trees opened out to a pond. Ducks and coots were huddled together in a small area, hemmed in by the ice.

‘We should have brought some bread,’ Mrs Petersen said. ‘Poor creatures.’

‘I read somewhere that bread’s bad for them.’

‘I’m sure they prefer it to nothing, don’t you?’ A large mallard, his green wing-feathers glistening with water, was clambering up the bank of the pond, sure we’d come to feed him. ‘Let’s go. We’ve got nothing to give them. It’s cruel to get their hopes up.’ She turned around and walked away.

I looked at the waddling ducks and remembered feeding them, with my mother, in the Vondelpark, bags of leftover bread disappearing in their flat beaks. It never did them any harm; there had always been more ducks each Sunday than there’d been the week before. I remembered the feeling of my mother’s hand around mine, keeping me secure and safe. I followed Mrs Petersen’s footsteps. The compressed snow under my boots whispered with every step. It gave way for a centimetre or so, then supported and carried me.

If Otto had adapted so well to his varying environments, what would seven years in prison have done to him? Made him violent? Made him feel he had to kill his wife’s lover?

‘Did you visit Otto in prison?’ I asked.

She raised her head, probably as deep in thought as I had been. ‘Yes, I go once a month.’ She took a few more steps then stopped. ‘No, not go – went.’ She took her hands out of her pockets and swung her arms.

‘And he changed.’ It wasn’t even a question.

‘He always changed. This time, he put on weight and his vocabulary got coarser. He started to sound like his father again, back to his regional accent.’