A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1) (9 page)

‘Mr Lantinga? I’m afraid he’s in New York this week. Did you have an appointment?’ The dark-haired, latte-skinned girl checked her screen and typed something. ‘Yes, he’s back on Wednesday.’

‘What about Karin Petersen?’

‘I don’t think we have someone of that name . . . Ah, you mean Karin Lantinga, of course.’

Stefanie and I exchanged a glance. So Karin had married Anton. How soon after Otto’s death?

The receptionist dialled a number and looked at us. ‘What may I say is it regarding?’

‘I’ll have to tell her that in person,’ Stefanie said.

The young woman shrugged. ‘Mrs Lantinga,’ she said to the phone, ‘I’ve got two police officers here for you . . . I don’t know, they wouldn’t say . . . OK . . . OK, I’ll ask them to wait.’ She put the phone down. ‘She’s in a meeting right now and will see you as soon as she’s free. Please take a seat.’

I turned and sat down gingerly on a vulnerable-looking green and white striped settee. I didn’t dare rest against it. Stefanie stayed standing, admired the ship and then went back to the receptionist.

‘Do you have any brochures on Omega? For investors,’ she said.

The receptionist moved a sheath of straightened black hair from her shoulder to her back with an imperious gesture. ‘Omega is closed for new investors,’ she said, ‘and even before that there was a ten-million euro minimum investment. I can take your name and have our Investor Relations department contact you if and when we do accept new investors.’

‘Any material on fund performance?’

‘Karin Lantinga will give you everything you need. She’ll be with you shortly. Please take a seat.’

Stefanie didn’t. She walked up and down, picked up a copy of
Het Financieele Dagblad
and looked at the front page, then turned to page two at a speed that made it clear that she’d read no more than the headlines. How long would Karin Petersen, now Lantinga, make us wait?

Just then, a door opened and two men, both in suits, probably in their late forties, walked through accompanied by a slim woman who looked of similar age. She shook their hands, and I heard her say, ‘Thank you so much for your time. Sonja will get your coats.’ Sonja the receptionist opened a hidden panel to a closet and handed the men their overcoats. Throughout, we were ignored.

The woman opened the front door, shook their hands again and closed it before turning to us. ‘You’re the police, I suppose.’ Her smile had disappeared and she looked older, but still younger than the fifty-three I knew her to be.

Stefanie introduced herself and showed her badge. Karin was a little taller than Stefanie but needed ten-centimetre heels to help her. Her hair was golden-blonde with streaks of silver grey. It was tied in a bun at the nape of her neck, the weight of it tipping her head slightly back, removing any slackness under the chin and giving her a Grace Kelly-like poise and elegance. She faced me and said, ‘And you are . . .’

I got up from the sofa and said my name.

Karin threw one look at the receptionist and led us through the door. ‘We won’t go to my office,’ she said, walking down the corridor lined with Dutch Golden Age oil paintings on either side. I didn’t recognise the artists – we were moving too quickly to have a good look – but they seemed to be originals. I was reminded of Wouter Vos’s apartment, where modern works decorated the hallway. ‘We’ll use the boardroom instead.’ Karin opened a door and over her shoulder I got my first glimpse of true opulence. The ceiling was painted to show a sea battle in which large ships, one identical to the model downstairs, sailed at full mast in the kind of sea that got surfers excited. Grey thunder clouds looked even darker in contrast with the red, white and blue of the triumphant Dutch flag.

‘Admiral Michiel de Ruyter,’ Karin said. ‘The ceiling shows his famous victory over the English at Medway. We based the decorating scheme for the entire office on this room.’ She sat down at the head of the cherrywood table, looking regal, powerful and in absolute control.

Stefanie pulled out a chair to the right of Karin. I would have liked to remain standing, preferably in a corner where I’d have a perfect view, but Stefanie pointed at the chair next to hers and gestured for me to sit down. At least I didn’t have to sit between the two of them; I could watch both women at the same time. I stroked my fingers over the wood, which was glossed like a new conker. Between the painted ceiling and the green and white striped wallpaper, there were signs of the modern era in the room as well: the star phone in the middle for conference calls, microphones sunk in the table and a projector at the far end. A small stand in the corner carried a tray with bottles of Spa water and a teapot as well as a selection of chocolate biscuits. We, however, were not offered anything.

‘What can I help you with?’ Karin said. As she spoke, she took her BlackBerry out of her bag. Its red light flashed and she scrolled through the emails with a French-manicured finger, her eyes glued to the little screen.

I couldn’t place her accent. It sounded flat, studied, as if she’d had a regional accent that she’d worked hard to get rid of. I tried to imagine her speaking in the softer tones of a southern accent or the farm-like cadences of the north – but neither suited her. A delicate perfume, with notes of apple and jasmine, floated over the table.

‘We’re re-investigating the murder of your husband, Otto Petersen,’ Stefanie said, unsmiling and professional.

Karin put the BlackBerry on the table, sat back and folded her hands. The right was only adorned with a plain golden wedding band, but on the left the entire bottom segment of her ring finger was covered by a square-cut blue stone in a golden setting. ‘Has any . . . new evidence come to light?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ Stefanie said. ‘We’ve had some new information. It’s too early to disclose what it is.’

Karin’s face turned itself into a mask. Nothing moved, not a muscle around her lips, not a blink of an eye. Even the lines on her forehead smoothed themselves out. She looked at me. Her eyes, deep blue as the sapphire on her finger, narrowed between the crow’s feet. ‘Sorry, but I thought you were from the Financial Fraud department.’

‘I am,’ Stefanie said. ‘Detective Meerman is from CID.’

‘I see.’ Her eyes slid from me to Stefanie.

‘Could you please tell us your version of events on the evening your husband died,’ Stefanie said.

‘Anything in particular? Or would you like me to tell you all the minutiae?’ Karin raised an eyebrow.

‘Your movements in the afternoon.’

‘I can’t remember all of them.’ She tipped her head sideways a little at the end of the sentence.

‘You drove to the prison . . .’ Stefanie prompted. She moved forward and I had to stretch my upper body to its full length to keep Karin in view.

‘Otto had asked me to pick him up at five o’clock in front of the prison.’

‘He called you?’

‘As soon as his release date was decided.’ She scrolled the trackball on the front of her BlackBerry again, clicked on an email and read it.

‘You expected that?’

‘Yes. I always thought he’d want me to drive him home.’ Her eyes hadn’t left the device.

‘OK. So you drove to the prison,’ Stefanie said.

Karin was silent. She let it last.

Stefanie was the first to fill the gap. ‘What time did you get there?’

Karin smiled at her BlackBerry and put it back on the table. ‘I got there before five – a quarter to, ten to, something like that – and waited for him. I sat there for half an hour and still he wasn’t out. So I went up to the prison, to talk to the warden. Still no sign of Otto. Then the warden spoke to one of his colleagues, who told us my husband had been released just after four. He had apparently got in a cab and left.’

‘Were you angry? Annoyed?’

Karin unfolded her hands and used the right one to tuck some strands of blonde hair behind her ear. ‘No, I wasn’t angry.’ She looked Stefanie straight in the eye. ‘I thought something had come up and he hadn’t been able to contact me.’

Stefanie nodded. ‘A change of plan.’

‘Exactly.’

‘He could have called?’

‘I assumed he’d phoned the house.’

‘And had he?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Was there a message on your answerphone when you got home?’

‘Otto was dead when I got home.’ Her voice purely stated the facts. She might as well have told us it was raining. She caressed the double string of pearls that fitted closely around her neck, probably to hide some slackness in the skin.

‘But was there a message on the answerphone?’

I watched this game between Stefanie and Karin. What was truth after all this time? Could anybody still remember exactly what they’d done, felt or seen after ten years?

‘No, there was no message.’

Had she been angry then? Unless she had changed a lot in the ten years since his death, this wasn’t a woman to keep waiting. Had she been glad of the delay, perhaps? Glad for the extra time it gave her, to consider how she was going to tell him she was leaving him? Postponing the moment she had to tell him of her affair? In my mind I pictured her inside that car, waiting outside the prison. Nervous but controlled. He’d asked her to be there, so she was there, doing her duty. It rained – drops like tears falling on the car and streaming down the windows. She didn’t want to be there: surely she was wishing she was somewhere else, anywhere else.

‘So now, knowing there wasn’t a message, why do you think Otto asked you to pick him up?’

Karin let her eyes rest on the table in front of her. She took a deep breath and replied, ‘I think he wanted me out of the way. Whatever he had planned, whomever he was meeting, he wanted to make sure I wasn’t at home.’

I wrote
what had he planned? – who was he meeting?
on my notepad.

Karin laughed, a sound like breaking glass. ‘Your colleague clearly likes my explanation,’ she told Stephanie. ‘Hadn’t you figured that out for yourself yet?’

‘You had an affair with Anton Lantinga, whom you’ve now married.’ Stefanie paused for Karin’s confirming nod, then said: ‘Someone saw him at the scene of the crime.’

I kicked Stefanie on her shoe, hard enough to shut her up but soft enough not to make her cry out.

‘Who saw him?’

‘We can’t disclose that.’

‘He wasn’t there. He went home that morning.’

‘But—’ Stefanie began.

‘Where’s Anton now?’ I interrupted her.

‘New York, meeting new investors.’

‘You didn’t keep the Petersen Capital name,’ I said.

‘No, of course not. This is an entirely different firm.’

‘When did you found it?’ Stefanie said.

‘We had to close Petersen Capital after the inquest and Otto’s conviction. We worked with investors to see if they wanted to transfer their money to our new company, Omega.’

‘And did they?’

‘Many of them did. They realised that Otto was the rogue element. The firm was otherwise run on sound principles.’

‘And you didn’t know anything about what he did?’

‘He was the only one of us to go to prison. The court decided we were innocent. Many of our investors agreed with the judge. And we’ve made them enough money to repay their trust.’

‘When is Anton due back?’

‘The middle of next week. I’ll ask him to contact you. If you could give me your card . . .’ Stefanie handed hers over. ‘Is that all?’ It was a graceful dismissal.

‘Yes, thank you.’ We left. Karin didn’t show us out – we were not important investors.

We walked along the next canal over, back to the office. On a map, Amsterdam’s canals looked like the concentric circles I drew on my notepad, like the year rings of a tree but cut in half, with other canals connecting them like the spokes in a bicycle wheel. Ducks slipped and slid over the ice until they found a hole and joined their friends. All skaters would hate them for keeping the gaps open. The ice was white, water mixed with snow. On this canal, where the tour boats didn’t break through it once an hour, it would be thick enough to hold a person’s weight in another day or two, and the frozen water would form a temporary pavement for the two houseboats more permanently moored with the ice as an extra anchor.

‘I bet he was meeting Anton Lantinga,’ Stefanie said, her words accompanied by a white cloud of breath. She walked with her hands deep in her pockets, a scarf wrapped around her neck, and turned to look at her reflection in a shop window. She didn’t wear a hat, probably too afraid it would mess up her perfect shoulder-length cut.

‘Not if it’s about Anton and Karin.’

‘No?’

‘Would he have known about them? Who’d have told him?’

‘Maybe Karin herself did.’

‘And it festered in him while he was locked up, until it boiled over on his first hour out.’ I said the words to check if they felt true coming out of my mouth. I couldn’t tell. I didn’t know Otto Petersen yet – I didn’t know what he was like. I needed to get a better idea of his personality. Had he been a calculated risktaker:
I get forty million euros, that’s worth seven years in jail
, or a megalomaniac:
I’m so clever, they’ll never catch me
, or just someone who got sucked into circumstances, started small and watched it snowball into something huge he couldn’t control, possibly egged on by his wife. ‘You worked on the first Petersen case, didn’t you?’

‘I only helped out, mainly in clearing their office.’

‘Did you meet Otto?’

‘No, he had already been arrested. I only met Anton. I remember he put up quite a fight when we confiscated his PC. Wasn’t having any of it. Quite funny. He gave me all this
who do you think you are
stuff. I told him:
police
, and just took it. He was livid. Hopping up and down. He told me that unplugging that PC had just cost him more money than I’d make in my entire career. He was probably right.’ Karin sighed.

So I needed to find someone else who could tell me. ‘Who else might have met Otto?’

‘Not sure. Wasn’t Freek Veenstra the main guy working on it? He died last year, remember.’

‘Veenstra? God, I keep forgetting the Petersen Capital fraud was that long ago.’ I wondered if my father had known Otto. No reason he should have. He hadn’t called me back after my message.