A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1) (24 page)

I realised I’d missed something and that the man we had been referring to as ‘that other one’ was actually important.

‘Could you tell us your version of what happened to Carl Beerd?’ Hans phrased the question carefully. I was grateful to him as I was too annoyed with myself to ask it.

‘I don’t know what Ben has told you, but Carl died in an accident – a car accident. I was driving. It was 1987 – another harsh winter just like this one.’ He exchanged a glance with his lawyer. She nodded and he continued. ‘We’d come back late from some lectures and I was driving us back in Carl’s new car. There were four of us in the car – we rented a house together.’

‘Who else was in the car?’

‘Anton Lantinga. And Ellis.’

‘You were in the car?’ I felt foolish for having thought Ellis was Ferdinand’s lawyer, even if she did look like one.

‘I sat directly behind Ferdi, Anton sat next to me on the back seat and Carl was in the front, next to Ferdi,’ Ellis said.

‘When I lost control of the car, it spun, swerved and the front right crashed into a lamp post. Nobody was wearing their seatbelts and Carl took most of the impact. We were all taken to hospital with various injuries but only Carl never came out. He never woke from his coma.’ Ferdinand fell silent and Ellis took his hand.

‘Would you like some water?’ I asked.

‘No, I’m fine. I’d like to get this over with.’

‘Of course.’

‘We hadn’t been drinking; we were breathalysed and the tests were clean. The ice on the road and the marks were clear to see, and the verdict was accidental death.’

That’s why I hadn’t been able to find it when I looked for Ferdinand’s criminal record.

‘Ben somehow heard about this story some years ago and always thought there had to be more to it than that. His imagination is far too active. When I saw the photo in your bag yesterday, I realised he must have told you this story too.’

‘What made you think that?’

He sighed. ‘Ben has been trying to get money out of me for the last six months. He, of course, has a good allowance but unfortunately all the money seems to have disappeared up his nose.’

Ellis gave him a sharp look.

‘Just a manner of speaking, of course. I didn’t want to imply . . .’ He coughed, waited for a second to gather his thoughts, then said, ‘He wanted more money. He said he’d tell everybody about this man I’d killed. I refused to give him anything and he started to threaten me. Last week, his father – my brother – called me about the hold-up of the petrol station. Of course, now part of me wished I’d given him the cash, so that he hadn’t set up this charade with his university pal that went so badly wrong. But part of me knows that if he’s capable of shooting a police officer, I was right to stop funding him.’

‘Why do you say “charade”?’

Ellis answered for him. ‘We know the boy who mans the petrol station at night. He goes to university with Ben. That’s all.’

‘So you think . . .’

‘I don’t think anything. It was just stupid, ridiculous, that’s all. A disaster.’

‘Where were you last night?’ Hans asked.

‘At what time?’

‘Between six and eight.’

‘We were home, having dinner.’ He exchanged a look with Ellis. ‘Weren’t we?’

‘I got home from the office just after six, six fifteen probably. You were already there. We spent the whole evening at home.’

‘I see. Was anybody else at home with you?’ I asked next.

‘Well, our daughter came to pick up the grandkids,’ Ferdinand said.

That at least explained who the young children were. ‘What time did she arrive?’

‘She collected the children just after seven.’

Nobody questioned why we wanted to know. ‘Who told you about Anton?’ asked Hans.

‘Geert-Jan phoned us this morning, right after he got the call from Karin.’ Ferdinand and Ellis exchanged a glance. ‘It’s why we’re here,’ he said, ‘to make sure you don’t look in our direction, but concentrate on finding whoever killed Anton.’

The phrase sounded rehearsed. The couple must have weighed up the consequences of coming here after Geert-Jan’s phone call and discussed what it was that Ben could possibly have told us about Carl Beerd and the car crash. It was a smart move, to come forward and set the record straight. I believed what they’d told us and also thought that the insight into Ben’s habits was interesting.

‘If that’s all,’ Ferdinand said, ‘we’d like to leave now. Please feel free to call us at any time.’

Hans explained about needing a statement about Ben’s threats of blackmail and said that this would help our investigation into the spate of petrol-station robberies. Ferdinand nodded his agreement. ‘My wife and I are happy to help, aren’t we, Ellis?’

As Hans left with the couple to deal with the formalities, I stayed behind in the interview room and wondered if I was completely losing my touch. Or my mind. When had I last had a decent meal, a proper night’s sleep? Was that why I was finding it so hard to think?

My hands were shaking. My mind was what I’d always relied on. I’d always thought that my ability to think and observe was what made me good at my job. Now I didn’t seem capable of doing either: I had initially misinterpreted the looks exchanged between Ferdinand and Ellis as those of businessman and lawyer whereas they were those between husband and wife. I was seeing what I was expecting to see rather than what was actually there.

On my notepad I wrote down all the things I now knew I’d missed. I had thought all along that Ben’s story that his uncle had once killed someone was a complete lie, but it turned out to have been a lie like so many of mine: based on a grain of truth. I should have recognised it. Secondly, I’d had the photo for a while but had focused solely on the fact that it showed that Ferdinand van Ravensberger had known Otto Petersen as well as Anton Lantinga. I had never bothered to check who ‘the one that we don’t know’ actually was. And I had automatically assumed that Ferdinand would bring a lawyer – but he hadn’t; he was here with his wife as she had been in the car during the car crash and formed his alibi for yesterday. Or maybe she was here to provide him with emotional support.

Was I still capable of doing this job? Should I take some time off? I was clearly in no state to work: too absorbed in my previous mistakes to do a proper job. In fact, I had been so absorbed in my previous mistakes that I kept making new ones, layering faults on top of errors.

Where did that leave all my other conclusions? That my father had been taking bribes, that he or Anton Lantinga had destroyed those stupid files, that Anton had been killed because he’d wanted to come clean about something. Which of those were lies, maybe based on grains of truth, and which ones were actual truths, maybe with a veneer of lies?

I stared at my notepad of mistakes and saw only one route out of the mess: tell the boss that Piet Huizen was my father, accept the suspension and let Hans take over the case. It was the only possible route and one that I couldn’t possibly take without putting my father in danger. If only Stefanie wasn’t so keen to nail something on him to protect the boss’s reputation.

My mind was still in a whirl when I left the interview room to inform my colleagues of what Ferdinand van Ravensberger had told us about his nephew. Hans would give them the official statements later, but I just wanted to fill them in.

The team working on the robberies at the petrol stations seemed busy and I paused on the threshold of their shared office. Thomas and André Kamp were looking through piles of photos. I hadn’t seen André since I watched him interview the kid I’d shot and I still hadn’t heard if Thomas was joining this team permanently.

‘Hi, guys. Sorry to interrupt,’ I said.

‘Hi, Lotte. What’s up?’ André said.

‘I’ve just come out of an interview with Ferdinand van Ravensberger. He told us that Ben had tried to blackmail him. Ben had spent all his money on cocaine, and probably staged the hold-up at the petrol station with a friend from university.’

Thomas’s eyes blazed. ‘Well, thank you, Lotte! What do you think we have been doing here?’ His voice was getting louder. ‘Do you think we’re doing sod all, just waiting for
you
to tell us what happened? That we need your brilliant input to figure out the one hold-up that didn’t match the pattern?’

‘I was only trying to—’

‘Trying to interfere and take all the glory. We know what you’re trying to do. Get your photo in the paper, talk about how you “solved the case”. And it’s all lies, isn’t it, Lotte?’

‘What are you talking about?’ André interrupted him, but I knew full well what he meant.

‘Sorry, Thomas.’

‘And now you prance in here, telling us about this kid you shot. Well, maybe you could have asked André over the last few days what he’d found out, but we haven’t seen you here, Lotte.’ He got up from his chair and walked over to me, stopped just a metre in front of me. ‘We haven’t seen hide nor hair of you until now, when you think you’ve got some information to get one up on us. We’ve had the other kid, the one manning the petrol station, in custody since yesterday. We did blood tests when Ben was arrested, of course, so we knew he was a coke fiend. His friend was pretty pissed off: said that Ben took a shot at you because he was off his face. We already knew all this precious information you lowered yourself to share with us. Thank you very much, Lotte. Much appreciated.’

He stared in my eyes for two breaths, then turned round and walked back to his desk. ‘So, where were we?’ he said deliberately calmly to André and turned over another page in the book with photos. Even André wouldn’t meet my eyes. I left.

As I stepped out of the police station, I shivered and shrunk in my large coat, pulling the thick collar as high around my face as I could to keep the wind from peeling the skin off my nose and cheeks. The canals were deserted. Parked cars and blocks of stalled bicycles with their dimmed red back lights and white fenders close together were the only signs of life. People who didn’t have to be out were staying indoors by the fire. They said that if you laid down in the snow, you’d get the most wonderful dreams and visions as you slowly froze to death. It sounded good. Not that I wanted to touch the grey heaps at the side of the road where the snow had mixed with the dirt of the street. The stress of today was catching up on me, as were the many nights when I hadn’t slept. I kept walking.

In the dark the houses on both sides started to look unfamiliar. I took this route every day, but now I didn’t know if I should go left or right. I stood still. Looked left and right, but both sides appeared identical. There was nothing to choose between them. So how did I choose? That seemed funny to me somehow. I turned. And turned again. And again and again until I wasn’t sure what direction I’d come from. Had the canal been on my right or my left? My brain refused to function. My knees were trying to give way. There was a bench overlooking the canal. I wiped the snow off with my gloved hand and sat down. Just a little rest for my exhausted body and my tired brain that was playing tricks on me. The cold of the seat crept up through the back of my legs. I was so close to the edge of the canal that I could rest my feet on the cloth-covered roof of a moored boat if I’d been half a metre taller. My eyes closed; I couldn’t keep them open any more. I heard a car pass behind me, then all was silence and I was embraced by the generous darkness . . .

Something was pulling my arm, someone was talking in my ear: ‘Wake up, wake up,’ and my body obeyed the voice. I wanted to go back to sleep now that I’d finally got some rest without dreams, but the hand on my arm wouldn’t let me. ‘No, no, stay with me. Open your eyes.’ My head fell forward and the jolt jerked me fully awake. A uniformed policeman stood next to me. His colleague, a woman, was talking on her radio. ‘It’s OK,’ he said to her, ‘she’s conscious. She’s awake.’ He helped me to my feet. ‘Can you stand? Are you OK?’ Yes and no. I took a step forward but my legs were numb and hesitant to obey my brain’s commands.

‘It’s dangerous to fall asleep in this cold,’ he said.

‘Sorry, I was . . .’ My lips had difficulty forming the w and I slurred the word into a hiss of breath.

‘What did you take? Are you on drugs?’

‘No, no.’ I wanted to laugh. If I had been taking my pills I wouldn’t have been so tired. Feeling was coming back to my legs and I stamped my feet to the ground.

‘You’re lucky we found you,’ he said. ‘Where do you live?’

I took my glove off and put my bare hand against my lips to get some warmth into them. When I could talk again, I gave him my address. The policewoman, off the radio, looked at me. ‘I know you,’ she said.

I nodded. She looked familiar to me too. ‘Lotte Meerman.’ My fingers felt twice their size and I had problems getting my ID card out.

‘Don’t bother,’ she said, putting her hand on mine. ‘I know who you are.’

‘I’m exhausted,’ I said.

She smiled a fleeting smile that sparked her eyes before being hidden again. ‘We’ve all been following it,’ she said.

Her colleague looked at me again. ‘Sorry I didn’t recognise you. The hair . . .’

I gestured that it wasn’t important. He took me by the arm and we started to walk towards my flat. ‘Let’s get you home and we’ll get you warm.’ Their kindness made my eyes sting.

My fingers fumbled the front door open and as we went up to my flat I was followed by sound, first the soft whistle of one of my companions when I opened the main door to the marble-floored hallway with the chandelier, then the surprising clamour of multiple sets of boots on the wooden stairs. On the first-floor landing I unlocked the right-hand door. The wood on my personal flight of stairs was darker; fewer feet had walked and scuffed it over the centuries, and it had a certain smell, that of carpentry and sawmills, that the lower stairs lacked.

The policewoman introduced herself as Ingrid and sat with me, while her colleague, Erik, put the kettle on to make me a cup of tea. ‘We’ll get you all warmed up,’ she said. And so it was that I had one more person in my apartment than ever before. It felt so empty, after they left.