A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1) (8 page)

He watched me over the edge of his reading glasses. It was a long, deep stare – as if the pale blue eyes under the white hair were attempting to look through my eyeballs and straight into my mind. Then he pushed his glasses higher up his nose and said, ‘I’m sure you noticed that I took the files to the prosecution yesterday.’ He opened a drawer and rummaged through some papers. His head was still bent over the open drawer as he went on: ‘I gave them all the files on Wendy Leeuwenhoek, just to be on the safe side, and all the tapes.’

‘Yes, the office has lost half its contents.’ Someone else was looking at those photos. It made my eyes sting. I rubbed the palm of my hand over the far corner of my eye but hid the gesture by smoothing my hair. I ran my hand all the way over my head, then reached for my plait.

‘The prosecutor should see everything before the trial,’ he said. ‘They still haven’t set a date.’ He got a new diary out of the drawer, and when he flipped the thin pages, it sounded like someone thumbing through a Bible or a hymn book. ‘Probably next month.’

I nodded.

‘You have to testify,’ he told me. ‘Your statement will make all the difference. It’s a shame the last meeting isn’t on the tapes. A recorded confession would have made it watertight—’

The faintness I had felt in the office came crawling back from my toes, via my legs, to my stomach. Its content, mainly black coffee, rushed to my mouth. I kept my teeth locked together, waited, then took a few more deeps breaths until the blackness subsided. As I reached for my water, my hand trembled but didn’t visibly shake. I lifted the plastic cup.

A picture of Wendy as I had found her jumped into my mind. The ground around her showed marks where my hands had been digging. The earth had given way easily under my fingers as if it had been ready to return her. At first my fingers had only found earthworms and woodlice amongst the soil as the earth buried itself under my nails. Then I touched the smooth bone of her skull. That’s when I stopped and called in the rest of the team. That’s when I knew what I’d found. This was the first time I had allowed myself to realise the truth.

I waited by her side, crouched down but not touching her until the technical team and the police photographer turned up. I wanted to scrub my hands free of the feeling of her corpse but instead I’d waited and watched and stood guard as the photographer took shots of her skeleton partially liberated from the dark soil. Her skull looked like a delicate egg tapped open with a teaspoon. It must have taken more force to fracture her bones. By the time the team turned up, I’d stopped crying and managed to wipe the tears off my face.

I remembered how my skin had been streaked with mud from my hands. But I had been holding up; I had been keeping it together.

‘You’re not worried about your statement, I hope,’ the boss said. ‘They will question your methods.’

I wasn’t sure I could keep it together for much longer. The thought of being on the stand and answering the questions of the judge and the lawyers filled me with dread.

‘And I don’t understand why you went to the Alkmaar police in the first place,’ he continued. ‘They were completely incompetent in the original investigation. It was a good thing I took over.’

‘They had a witness,’ I said. As soon as the words left my mouth I wished I could take them back.

CI Moerdijk tore his glasses off his nose. ‘A witness? Who? In the Leeuwenhoek case?’ He smacked the glasses on top of the diary. The pages flipped over and hid what was underneath, not used enough in this first week of the year to stay open.

‘No, in Alkmaar. The police there had a witness who saw the suspected killer arrive at Petersen’s house just before he was shot.’

The CI pushed back on his chair and stood up. He turned towards the window so that the creases in the back of his jacket faced me. ‘For a second I thought . . . Never mind.’ He looked at me over his shoulder. ‘Are you sure?’

‘They told me so themselves.’

He turned away again. It had started to snow, a white background for the CI’s lean frame in its charcoal-grey suit. ‘Who did this witness see?’

‘Anton Lantinga. Or at least his car.’

‘I never heard of this witness.’ He placed his hands in the small of his back and massaged his spine, then swayed his hips from right to left to give a further stretch. ‘Reliable?’

‘The Alkmaar detective seemed to know him very well,’ I said. ‘But personally, not from police business.’

He went back to his desk and sat down. ‘You met him?’

‘Yes, the Alkmaar police took me.’

‘It was strange how little paperwork came from them.’ He pinched the bridge of his small nose.

‘They told me they had boxes full of information – stacks of files.’

The PC beeped again. The CI narrowed his eyes to slits and moved his face closer to the screen. He felt with his hand over the surface of his desk. ‘Why didn’t that get to me?’

‘I don’t know.’

He searched through the contents of his desk. ‘And yet I asked for more information. Three times, I think.’ He patted the sides of his jacket and checked inside his pockets. ‘No reply.’

I pointed. ‘Under the diary.’

He lifted it and retrieved his glasses. ‘Anton Lantinga – that’s a surprise. We talked to him, but found nothing. I’m sure I’ve met him at some charity event since. Well, finding a witness after all this time – it’s a reason to officially reopen the case.’ He read what was on the screen and started typing again. ‘You, Hans and Stefanie can work on it, see where it goes.’ His fingers tap-tap-tapped on the keyboard. This was the time to mention that DI Piet Huizen was my father, to say that I wouldn’t – couldn’t – be impartial, that there was a clear conflict of interest and that my involvement would be against all the regulations. Instead I drew circles on my notepad.

‘Financial Fraud will be pleased with that one, another big fish,’ he went on. ‘I remember Lantinga set up his own firm after Petersen Capital went belly-up. Very successful they’ve been too. Let me know if I can help.’ Tap-tap-tap and Enter. ‘Always thought it was Geert-Jan Goosens, Petersen’s other business partner. Not that he killed him, but that he hired someone. The money was never found, you know – the money they embezzled from their investors.’

‘How much was it?’

‘Ninety million guilders . . . just over forty million euros. No need to write it down, it’s all in the notes. Check out Lantinga, and Petersen’s widow. She had a watertight alibi if I remember correctly. Bit too watertight if you ask me.’

I nodded and got up out of my chair. Only last night I’d decided that I’d keep my father out of trouble, and now I’d put him directly in the firing line. And for what? To defend him against the boss’s remarks? I felt like a traitor because deep down I knew I’d done it to distract the boss from the missing recorded confession and my use of violence.

I had to protect my father. I had to keep working the case to keep him in the clear. Oh my God, what if they found out? My job was all I had. My legs wobbled and I held on to the armrests. I pushed to get myself upright.

The CI was too engrossed in what was on his screen to notice. ‘Talk to me on Monday,’ he said.

In the canteen I had the third of my morning coffees. I held my mug tight and thought of the coffee cups in my father’s house, the white flame cold on the porcelain. Was this some deep-seated revenge, getting even for being abandoned as a child? I took a gulp of coffee. The bitterness in my mouth and the scalding of my tongue was what I sought, the surge of caffeine in my blood only of secondary importance.

The canteen felt different without people. The chairs waited for lunchtime; only a few clumps of policemen in uniform were talking in hushed voices about something that couldn’t be discussed at their desks. The room was poised before the rush like a church on Sunday morning before the service started. My scalp hurt as if my hair was tied back too tightly. I undid my plait and watched the different groups of people scattered around the tables. I didn’t want to see the snowy world outside the window. It was too white, too pure for me to look at. My eyes hurt, as if someone was pushing a screwdriver into my brain through one of my eye-sockets. I closed them in an attempt to make it go away. I put my mug down on the table and rested my head in my hands. My hair fell forwards and covered my face.

‘When are we arresting him?’ Stefanie’s voice shredded my thoughts like an alarm clock destroyed sleep. She pulled up the chair opposite mine, scraping it along the ground.

‘We can’t arrest him—’ I hid my hands under the table to hide their trembling.

‘But there’s a witness, right? Moerdijk told me there was a witness.’

I slumped against the chair, its hard-edged back digging uncomfortably into my spine. ‘When did you talk to him? I only left the boss five minutes ago.’

‘He called me.’

‘I’ve got to go.’ I stood up. I needed to be alone.

‘Fine – I’ll come with you.’ She walked beside me as we left the canteen.

I tried to shake her off. There was only just enough space to walk two abreast down the hall. On my right, the drop to the atrium beckoned as we followed the walkway that connected the old part of the building to the new. I stared down over the wooden banister and trailed my hand over the smooth iron verticals that held it up.

‘Anton Lantinga – who’d have thought it? Let’s pick him up now.’ She needed to take two steps for every one of mine. Even in her high-heeled shoes she was almost a head shorter than me. ‘That would be a front-page story right there.’

‘You’re insane.’ I lengthened my steps further. It had been my tiredness that had made me jump to the wrong conclusion: that she had suggested arresting my father. Now I could breathe again. Still, every centimetre I put between the two of us felt like a blessing.

‘Shall I get him in for questioning?’ Stefanie’s voice was breathless, either from trying to keep up with me or from excitement at the thought of arresting Lantinga.

I didn’t respond. My office was two floors up from the canteen. We passed by the lifts but I ignored them and moved to the stairs.

‘So how come the CI didn’t know about this witness?’ Stefanie had stopped at the lift button and now had to run to catch up with me.

‘I suppose the files got lost.’ I took the stairs two at a time as I always did.

‘They couldn’t have done,’ she puffed. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

‘In transit?’ The sound of my boots echoed through the stairwell, the concrete steps amplifying the noise.

‘Didn’t someone pick them up?’ Somehow she was managing to keep up with my pace.

‘They lost the paperwork then.’ One floor up.

‘But he asked for more information,’ Stefanie said. I wasn’t going fast enough to lose her or even to stop her talking. ‘It’s strange, isn’t it?’

I pushed open the door at the end of the stairwell. ‘No, not really.’

‘Of course it is: a witness after all these years . . .’

We arrived at my office. ‘It isn’t “after all these years”: the guy came forward immediately.’

‘What’s he like?’ She was breathing hard and fanned herself with the front of her fitted jacket.

‘Who?’ I glanced over at my empty desk and the reports from the Petersen file that I’d strewn all over the floor.

‘The witness, of course.’ A flush moved from the top button of her white blouse up the sides of her neck and covered her cheeks, the red blotches clashing with the fuchsia pink of her suit. She wiped a few drops of sweat off her forehead, which was fleshed out and therefore unlined, unlike mine.

‘I don’t know – geek done good, I’d say.’

‘Perfect. They make excellent witnesses. The judge will love that.’

‘Stefanie, there isn’t enough—’

‘Not yet, but we have some time. What about the detective?’

‘What about him?’ I bent to pick the papers up and put them back in their cardboard box.

‘What’s
he
like?’

From my position on the floor I saw the ladder in her tights – she’d be horrified when she noticed. ‘In his fifties, seemed professional enough. Bit over-controlled.’

‘I thought he was older, this – what’s his name . . . Piet Huizen?’

I turned back to the floor and my tidying. ‘Oh, him – yes, he’s retired.’

‘Interesting . . .’

‘Why?’

‘Well, retired guy, missing witnesses, missing records – it’s worth investigating, that’s all. We should look into that.’

I made a show of checking my watch. ‘I thought you wanted to interview Lantinga. We’ve got some time – he’ll still be at work.’

A smile bloomed on Stefanie’s face and I sighed with relief, hoping I’d managed to drive any thoughts that linked my father to missing records from her mind.

The shiny copper plaque by the door read simply:
Omega
. The seventeenth-century houses on the Herengracht did their best to bend themselves around the semi-circle of the canal. Their facades leaned forward and back as the subsidence of Amsterdam’s peat and sand foundations had tipped them centimetres this way and that. Shops, businesses and living accommodation stood in non-uniform individuality side by side along the wide water, each house slightly different from its neighbour: some had three storeys, some four; a different style of gable, a different colour paintwork; some with steps leading up from the lower-ground floor, others with ground-floor entrances. Despite the variations, they still formed a coherent row.

We went up the flight of stone stairs above the basement entry – ten steps that probably took us over the partners’ bicycle storage. The steps had been swept clear of snow. When the receptionist buzzed us in, I pushed open the door, which had been painted the green of old 1,000-guilder notes.

A model of a sailing ship, its white sails stained nicotine-yellow by age, sat in a glass display cabinet to the left of the reception area. The wallpaper was of a pale green fleur-delis pattern. The girl behind Reception and her desk with the computer on it seemed to have landed by mistake in a period drama.

‘Police, Financial Fraud department,’ Stefanie announced, showing her badge. ‘We’re here to see Anton Lantinga.’