A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1) (2 page)

I dumped my clean clothes on the bed, ready to strip off one set, shower and get as quickly as possible into the other. I didn’t care what I was going to wear – it didn’t matter what I looked like. Thick trousers, I thought – yesterday’s brown tweed ones – with an almost matching brown jacket over a cream woollen jumper. And that was just for indoors.

In the bathroom, cold air blasted through a small gap around the window that I never managed to shut completely. A thick layer of ice had flowered on the glass. I wished it was on the mirror, so I couldn’t see myself. Lack of sleep was taking its toll. I scraped my hair back in a pony tail and plaited it. It made me look worse as it hid nothing. I made no attempt to put any make-up on: I deserved to look this bad.

I was forty-two but didn’t look a day under fifty.

Showered and dressed, I went downstairs, opened the front door and entered the snowstorm in the dark. My feet sank into the soft powder – there had to be ten centimetres at least. The pavement was deserted, so my footprints appeared in virgin snow. It made a whispering sound, as if I was crushing something fragile underfoot with every step. I wanted to close my eyes against the wind – to close my eyes against the world. Instead I moved along mechanically, too tired to worry about slipping.

The snowflakes whirled around my face, floated in front of my eyes and danced this way and that, in time with the thoughts inside my head. I couldn’t stop thinking about my dream. I had seen Wendy Leeuwenhoek’s face as I knew it from her photo, seen it decay slowly, frame by frame, into the white skull I’d found. I saw the flies laying their eggs. I saw the grubs eating her flesh. I could see them now in the falling flakes.

I trudged past the bakery on the corner, the small bar where I never drank, the church that was shared by Syrian Orthodox Jews and Roman Catholics, an emblem of Amsterdam’s multiculturalism, and an endless row of seventeenth-century canal houses that were now home to banks and businesses. I walked slowly until I crossed the final canal to the police station on the Marnixstraat. Stopping for a while on the bridge, I let my eyes follow the fall of snowflakes down to where they were visible in the ring of streetlights. They moved in and out of sight before they drifted to the street and had their short life reduced even further by darkness. One landed on my eyelashes and turned the world white until it melted into a tear; others floated onto the cling film of ice that had been stretched over the water in the night and was barely thick enough to carry the weight of the flakes.

Resting my hands, lukewarm inside their gloves, on the iron railing, I leaned over and stared down into the blackness. It was early, I thought, and there weren’t many people around. It was cold. They’d never get me out in time. I’d only have to step off the bridge and . . .

A hand landed on my back. ‘Morning, Lotte. Lost something?’

I pulled back from the edge. ‘Hi, Hans. Just watching the ice.’ My colleague would have placed his large hand on my arm if I hadn’t moved away. Hans Kraai was descended from many generations of strong farming stock and his hefty body, made for withstanding the eternal wind of the north, was out of place in the office, where he had to duck whenever he walked through a door and had to force himself in to his chair like a spade in to the clay soil of his parents’ farm. Even his dirty-blond hair was the colour of potato peelings.

We walked through the entrance to the police station together, but I stayed out of step with him so that my footsteps kept their own individual sound.

It was around lunchtime when I got the call that Ben van Ravensberger was being questioned. I immediately made my way down the stairs to the interview rooms and went inside the observation booth. A previous occupant had left a brown plastic cup behind them, as well as the faint smell of sweat. I sat down in front of the one-way mirror, clutching my mug of coffee, the fifth of the day, and thinking that I’d rather be anywhere else than here, in the dark, watching the kid I’d shot – but I felt an obligation towards him. I’d made his situation so much worse and I should at least hear the story of what his uncle had supposedly done.

In the dimness of the observation booth, I watched the interrogation room where André Kamp was interviewing the kid. The detective’s dark hair was streaked through with grey, the same colour as his suit. We used to work together before I moved to another team.

‘Tell me what you heard,’ the detective said. The microphone on the table made his voice tinny and electronic.

‘I already did that twice.’ The bright light flirted with the kid’s high cheekbones and flawless skin. He would look good on the tapes. He was a little older than I’d originally thought in the petrol station – in his early twenties, maybe, and those tight blond curls circled his head like bouncing question marks. He also had a heavily bandaged arm that I tried not to look at. I took another sip of coffee. Ben had told the truth about one thing: his uncle was famous. Ferdinand van Ravensberger was often on TV, famous for being rich and for mixing with movie stars and other celebrities – and now it seemed he might be guilty of murder. I hadn’t thought we would take Ben’s accusations seriously, but my colleagues clearly thought otherwise: that it was important enough to keep Ben here to be interviewed.

‘They were shouting,’ the kid said. ‘She was having an affair. She said: “You’re never here, you’re always at work.”’

‘Your aunt and uncle?’ The detective steepled his fingers and rested them against his bottom lip.

‘Right. And then he said: “Don’t blame me for this. You’re the one doing it.” This went on for a bit. But then he said: “If you don’t stop seeing him, I’ll kill him. You know I’ve killed someone before.”’

My eyelids felt heavy. I wrote down:
Ferdinand van Ravensberger said he killed someone
, to keep myself awake. With a blue pen I drew concentric circles on my notepad then squares around them with a pencil. My watch said I’d been in the observation area for five minutes. I’d stay another five, I decided. I’d heard the main line; I could report back on the information we got from Ben and let that be it. I needed to get through the paperwork on the Wendy Leeuwenhoek case and make sure everything was in order before it went to the prosecution.

‘Ferdinand van Ravensberger said that?’ André Kamp tapped his fingers against his bottom lip.

‘Right.’

‘How long ago was this?’

‘Six years.’

The detective pushed his chair back and got up. He stayed to the right, to keep my line of sight clear. ‘Where were you?’

‘In the hallway. I’d been to the loo.’

My colleague stepped close to the glass and looked over my head at himself. He adjusted his already straight tie and winked. I couldn’t tell if it was at me or at the kid via the mirror. ‘Did you flush?’

The kid screwed up his forehead in puzzlement, leaned back and folded his arms. ‘Does that matter?’

‘Let me put it like this: did they notice you were there?’ My colleague kept looking at the kid indirectly. Without the wall between us, he would stand in my personal space. I got a close-up of his tie with a red-brown stain of spilled meatballs, today’s special in the canteen, surrounded by small water-damage creases, signs of futile scrubbing in the men’s toilets.

The kid’s face relaxed and he raked a hand through his curls, fitting them around his fingers like rings. His other arm stayed motionless by his side, strapped in large bandages. ‘I don’t think they did. Well, I flushed, I’m sure, but at first they didn’t know I was there . . .’

The door behind me opened with the soft click of a light switch. I pretended to be concentrating on what was going on in front of me and didn’t look round. Someone pulled up the chair beside mine – someone who smelled of cigarettes.

‘Hi Lotte, can I join you?’ Stefanie Dekkers asked.

I nodded because I didn’t know how to refuse. I wasn’t surprised that someone from the Financial Fraud department was interested in Ben’s uncle. She sat down and moved her chair forward. Her high-heeled shoe kicked my foot. ‘Sorry.’

My sturdy boot, fit for the weather, came off better than her black leather shoe, the type you wore if you didn’t walk anywhere. I was sure her husband drove her to work. I glanced at her sideways but didn’t meet her eyes. She kept her knees together and to one side to accommodate her tight pencil skirt. The waistband vanished between rolls of flesh and the swell of her hip was cut in two by the line of underwear digging in.

‘Congratulations on closing the Wendy Leeuwenhoek case.’ Her voice was like a mobile phone going off in the theatre. We hadn’t exchanged more than a hello in the last ten years. I shifted my coffee mug out of her way.

Stefanie moved her chair closer to mine and confided, ‘I knew you’d be great at looking at some of these old cases. Even at university you had that eye for detail, getting stuck into the nitty-gritty . . .’

I kept staring at the window. I didn’t move, didn’t give her a centimetre of space. ‘You used to call me anal.’ I locked the grooves of my molars together.

She made a gesture with a manicured hand, her wedding ring locked safely in place by protruding flesh. ‘I want my photo on the front page. Like the Wendy Leeuwenhoek case did for you.’

Why on earth would she want that? For me, that photo and that front page stood for all the mistakes I’d made. I shook my head and switched my eyes from the interview room to my notepad. I filled in another circle. My long plait dangled like a length of dead rope over my shoulder. I pushed it back with my pencil and then rubbed my hands clean and dry on my tweed trousers.

Stefanie picked up my pen from my notepad and turned it over and over between her fingers. ‘I want you to get Ferdinand van Ravensberger for me,’ she said. ‘I don’t care what on.’

I used my pencil to draw a square around the circle. I wanted to get out of the observation area but I couldn’t leave as Stefanie’s chair blocked the exit.

She pointed at the observation window with my pen. ‘He was holding up a petrol station and got unlucky when a police officer walked in. But then you know that,’ she laughed, ‘because you shot him.’

The coffee did somersaults in my stomach.

Behind the window, the interrogation continued. ‘So your uncle said he’d killed someone. You remember this exactly?’ André Kamp pulled back the chair. ‘You were pretty young at the time.’ He sat down.

The kid’s eyes followed the detective. He didn’t break eye-contact. ‘It was a traumatic experience for me. Especially when my aunt noticed me over my uncle’s shoulder. He turned round and looked this pale green colour, as if he was about to be sick or something.’

I tried to ignore Stefanie’s close proximity by picturing Ferdinand van Ravensberger with a face the colour of the interrogation-room walls. It was hard. I’d only seen him tanned on TV or in the serious black-and-white of the financial pages.

‘So I didn’t say anything. I just walked away,’ the kid said.

‘Did he ever mention it again?’

‘My aunt did, the next day at breakfast. My uncle wasn’t there, probably sleeping through his hangover, and she said: “You know he was just joking, don’t you?” And I said: “Didn’t look like a joke to me.” So she said: “Maybe joke is the wrong word. It was just a threat. He’ll never kill me and he’s never killed anyone else.”’

Stefanie rested her left elbow on the shelf and pivoted her body towards me. ‘We’ve been trying to get Ferdinand van Ravensberger on tax evasion and money laundering for ages. When we found out the kid was his nephew we put the screws on a bit. After all, he took a shot at you.’ She tapped with my pen on the edge of my notepad. The smell of stale tobacco was oppressive. ‘You get all the excitement. I’m surprised you’re here, watching your handiwork.’

I wanted to snatch my pen back but instead I extracted my paper and pretended to take notes, writing random words with my pencil. The tip snapped. ‘So why didn’t you ask the kid about Van Ravensberger’s financial setup? Much more your thing,’ I said.

‘That’s what we wanted. But he kept talking about this murder.’

I had to stretch to peer over Stefanie’s shoulder in order to keep watching the interview.

In the room, André Kamp was saying, ‘Your aunt tells you he’s kidding, but you don’t believe her.’

‘He’s killed someone,’ the youth insisted.

The detective tipped his head back and looked at the ceiling. Then he faced Ferdinand van Ravensberger’s nephew again and scratched his greying head. ‘Problem is, you don’t believe your aunt and I don’t believe you.’

I positioned the pointless pencil on the notepad, parallel to the lines, and muttered, ‘The kid already told me that in the hospital. It’s nothing.’

‘Ferdinand van Ravensberger killed someone, for Christ’s sake.’ Stefanie threw my pen down. It collided with the pencil and dropped onto the floor.

Now I removed my eyes from the window and turned to her. ‘His nephew
says
he killed someone. Different thing.’

Stefanie pushed her chair back. ‘He shot at you. You’re angry – I understand that. But we’re working on this for the next two weeks. Didn’t your boss tell you?’ I watched her get up. At the door she turned and added, ‘Oh, and Happy New Year,’ before snapping it closed. I tore off the page of circles and squares and threw it in the bin.

The office was still empty when I got back upstairs to my desk. I picked up a file from the stack on the floor, my fingers caressing the dark green cardboard before I flipped it open. When I heard Hans Kraai’s heavy footsteps come down the corridor, I took a long last look at my favourite photo and said goodbye to the little girl before I closed my file and put it back on the floor. I then logged on to the police computer to see if Ben’s Uncle Ferdinand had any prior form.

Two hours later, having drawn a blank with Van Ravensberger, I was working on the Wendy Leeuwenhoek report.

‘I’ve got you one,’ Stefanie said from right behind me.

I jumped in shock. I hated having my back towards the door. People could sneak up on you. Hans Kraai, who was lucky enough to have the window seat, sniggered.