A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1) (21 page)

He crossed his arms and sat forward. ‘Is this where you are going to ask me where I was on this-and-this day in 1973?’

‘Not quite that long ago,’ Stefanie said coolly. ‘We’re re-investigating the murder of Otto Petersen and we’re pretty sure it’s linked to the Petersen Capital fraud.’

He nodded. ‘Petersen – of course. How long ago was that?’ He seemed to relax, scratched the back of his head and smiled a rueful smile. ‘I lost a lot of money in that fund.’

‘It was twelve years ago that he was shot, nineteen years since the fraud. We’re currently talking to investors to find out how the fund worked. What can you tell us about Otto Petersen, Geert-Jan Goosens and Anton Lantinga?’ Stefanie asked.

‘I didn’t know Petersen well. I mainly dealt with Geert-Jan.’

I didn’t interrupt him even though I knew from the photo that Otto Petersen’s mother had given me that he was lying. I wanted to hear where he was going with this, give him just enough rope to hang himself with.

‘Did you talk to him after the fraud?’

‘The next day, after it became public, he called to apologise.’

The shrill sound of my mobile suddenly interrupted Ferdinand with its old-fashioned ring. I had tried a number of ringtones, but experience had taught me that if my mobile didn’t sound like a normal telephone, I didn’t pick it up. Stefanie turned to me, looking annoyed. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, and opened my handbag. The first thing my hand connected with as I rummaged for my mobile was the frame of the photo Mrs Petersen had given me. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t got round to putting it on the whiteboard. I’d gone to Alkmaar especially to get this photo and then had forgotten all about it. Come to think of it, I hadn’t even told Stefanie I had it. I had been going to when my father turned up yesterday afternoon. Another mistake caused by my father. The curly edge of the ornate silver frame felt like cold waves under my fingers. My mobile kept ringing and I opened the bag further.

‘Do you remember how he sounded?’ Stefanie continued the interview.

‘Embarrassed, I think. As if he couldn’t believe this had happened . . .’ Ferdinand’s eyes moved down towards my bag. He stopped talking and frowned. I wasn’t sure if it was at the interruption or if he’d seen the photo. I took my phone out of its pocket.

The display told me it was Hans. I gestured an apology to Stefanie and Ferdinand, mimed ‘sorry’, then got up and answered the call. ‘Hi Hans. What’s up?’ I walked past shelves laden with a large number of DVDs and turned to keep Stefanie and Van Ravensberger in my sight as they continued the interview.

‘Hi, Lotte. Sorry, but I had a call from Anton Lantinga and thought I should let you know.’ I took a DVD from the shelf. It was in a white cover. In square handwriting in black ink it said:
Nova interview, 23 Dec 2012
.

‘What did he want?’ I talked softly. I read the spines of the other DVDs.
NOS Journaal
interview, 15 June 2012, CNN interview, 3 March 2013. Ferdinand van Ravensberger had a long row of these, all recordings of his own television appearances. What kind of a man would keep such a collection of his own image?

Hans said, ‘He wants to talk to you.’

‘What about?’ I put the DVD back and looked out through the window, where two small children dressed in thick skisuits and identical red wellington boots were building a snowman on a large lawn in front of a rhododendron. They had two balls of snow stuck on top of each other. The girl took her scarf off and tied it around the snowman to indicate where its neck was supposed to be. They looked too young to be Ferdinand van Ravensberger’s children – unless there was a younger wife, of course. But his nephew had said he was still married to his first wife.

‘Don’t know, wouldn’t say. Just wants you to go to his house tonight at eight,’ Hans said.

‘Thanks, Hans. Look, I’ve got to go. We’re in the middle of an interview. Thanks for the call.’ I clicked the mobile closed and rejoined the others.

‘. . . Geert-Jan looked up to Petersen’, Ferdinand was saying, ‘and found him wanting. It was the making of him really.’

‘In what way?’ Stefanie asked.

‘He moved out of Petersen’s shadow, set up his own firm,’ Ferdinand explained.

‘Only you didn’t invest with him any more.’ Stefanie smiled.

‘Oh, but I did. I gave him five million euros to run and he quadrupled it by the time Petersen came out of jail. Made me all my money back and more.’ He waved at the office around him as if to indicate what that money had bought. ‘And he has kept on going. He has done well by me. The best revenge I could have had.’

‘And Anton?’ Stefanie asked.

‘Never spoke to him,’ Ferdinand said.

‘You never spoke to him?’ I said and sat back in the Le Corbusier chair.

Ferdinand went slightly pale underneath what must be a fake winter tan.

‘You don’t think Geert-Jan Goosens had anything to do with the fraud?’ Stefanie tried to come back to the original line of questioning.

He moved his eyes from me to Stefanie and forced his shoulders down and back in a more relaxed posture. ‘I wouldn’t have invested with him again if I had. I wanted to make that gesture, so that other investors would follow. Actions speak louder than words.’

Of course. Ferdinand van Ravensberger voted with his money – the only thing that mattered in these circles. He’d given a vote of confidence in Goosens. I was sure other investors had watched that and followed his lead. What had he got in return? Was all his current wealth based on the money that Goosens had made him?

‘In your opinion, what happened? How did Petersen Capital lose that money?’

‘It was all Petersen’s doing. He never thought he could be wrong . . . In his eyes, he was always right. It was the market that was wrong. The market would recognise the error of its ways and come over to his views.’ His eyes stayed on me and Stefanie. Not once did he glance over our shoulders at the playing children outside. The windows must be well insulated as I couldn’t hear them at all.

‘So why hide the losses?’

Ferdinand van Ravensberger shrugged. ‘I’m not sure he did. I think he didn’t feel he had to tell us. We were only the investors, you see. He was the brain. He made the decisions without any need to justify himself.’

And Ferdinand van Ravensberger wouldn’t have liked that. The collection of DVDs of his interviews showed how important Ferdinand thought he was. For someone with such an amount of self-worth to be seen as not being worthy of information would have been a real insult. But being insulted was not a reason for killing someone seven years later. Also, the money that Goosens had made him would have taken the edge off any bad feelings. It was clear like never before that Ferdinand van Ravensberger didn’t have anything to do with Petersen’s murder, at least not with money or insults as a reason. I was still intrigued by the early connection between the men that the photo revealed – a connection to which Ferdinand so far had not referred.

‘Was he already like that at university?’ I asked.

‘Sorry?’

‘You said that Otto saw himself as the brain, not telling you anything. You knew him from university, didn’t you?’

‘I didn’t know him well.’

‘Not as well as Geert-Jan Goosens and Anton Lantinga, you mean?’

‘Yes, I knew them much better.’

‘But you said you never spoke to Anton.’

‘Not about the fraud, not at Petersen Capital, I meant.’

‘But you talked to him about other things.’

‘Yes, but much more social, not work-related.’

‘And Otto wasn’t a friend.’

‘No.’

‘Because he thought he was better than you?’

‘It wasn’t that.’ Ferdinand waited for a bit and looked at the ceiling, seemingly for inspiration. ‘He hung around us all the time. Didn’t really join in, didn’t do anything, just followed us around like a kid brother. He watched us all the time and then did whatever it was we were doing. Always imitating us, never with any ideas of his own.’

‘Annoying?’

‘Yes, sometimes.’ The phone on Ferdinand’s desk rang. He let it ring for a few seconds, looking to see who it was, then said, ‘Sorry, I have to take this.’ He seemed happy to be interrupted. Ferdinand van Ravensberger turned away and talked in such a low voice that I couldn’t make out any of the words although I was trying hard. Apart from his obvious lies, he was too open with us, too willing to answer our questions. But the obvious lies made me doubt every answer he gave.

‘What did Hans want?’ Stefanie whispered.

‘He had a call from Anton Lantinga. Anton wants to talk to us.’

‘Did he say why?’

‘No.’

‘So we’ll go after this?’

‘No. Anton said to be at his house at eight o’clock tonight.’

‘I’m not on lates, but I can come along,’ Stefanie said.

I nodded. I shouldn’t go by myself anyway and there was no way she’d let me leave her behind.

Her large face glowed a deep pink. ‘He’s going to confess,’ she hissed. ‘This is it.’

I disagreed but didn’t contradict her. I didn’t have an alternative suggestion, but confession seemed unlikely.

Ferdinand finished his call and apologised.

Stefanie continued my line of questioning. ‘Otto Petersen might have been annoying, but when he set up his investment firm, you gave him money.’

‘I gave Geert-Jan money. He told me of this company he was starting with Petersen.’

‘You thought it was a good idea?’

‘I never trusted Petersen, but Geert-Jan was my friend. He asked me for the money, had some good ideas and I was willing to invest with them.’

‘So you lost all your money in your friend’s firm.’

‘As I said: he made it up to me. Made me a fortune.’

‘Do you think he knew about the fraud?’

‘I don’t think anybody did.’

‘Otto’s wife might have known . . .’

‘Maybe. But only if he thought she needed to know. He probably decided it was better to keep her in the dark.’

‘So she couldn’t tell the investors?’

‘Or anybody else. When more than two people know something,’ Ferdinand said with a smile, ‘it’s no longer a secret.’

Stefanie drove us back to the office. During the journey, I thought about the things that more than two people knew. I stared out of the window for a long time and watched the landscape go by, past the faint reflection of my own face. I’d thought that Paul had loved my face, had desired my body. I wondered if he’d told his lawyer, and whether the lawyer would try to use it. Did more than two people know what happened between Paul and me? I would never talk about it, of that I was certain. I would never want anybody else to know this about me.

What Ferdinand van Ravensberger had told us about Otto Petersen – that he had watched his fellow students and tried to ape the way they were acting – fitted in with what his mother had said: that he was her changeling. What had he changed into in prison?

The A9 north to Alkmaar was starting to look familiar on my third trip in a week. Music bounced off the inside of the windows and around the car seats. The engine hummed an additional little one-note tune in the dark. Softly, under my breath, I sang along with Massive Attack’s ‘Safe from Harm’, and glanced sideways to check that Stefanie was still asleep. She was leaning with her head against the door, snoring softly; only her seatbelt kept her upright. Under the sound of the radio I also heard the whirr of the heating, which was gallantly fighting the severe frost in an attempt to keep us warm. As in my other nightly drives, I felt that my car protected me from the outside world where the snow-covered fields were eerily luminescent under the glow of the full moon, and villages and houses twinkled at scattered irregular intervals like decaying Christmas lights. On the other side of the road, every now and then, cars enveloped by vague haloes of light hurtled towards me on a collision course until they bent to my left, steered there by the central crash barrier.

The road surface shone for one breath in the headlights of the car, then got run over by the wheels. They consumed the kilometres until the football stadium at Alkmaar’s roundabout outshone the moon. Come match day it would swallow up thousands of supporters, attracted by its light like moths to a flame. They would come on foot or by bicycle, wearing their club’s red and white team colours in scarves and T-shirts, come in the hope of victory, not even considering the possibility of defeat and crushed dreams.

We left the motorway and passed some cyclists, dressed like Michelin men in order to protect themselves against the freezing temperatures. The cry of a siren rose then fell and a blue light tore through the darkness.

‘What’s that?’ Stefanie had woken up.

‘Just a police car. We’re nearly there.’ Ice flowers started brave attempts to establish themselves on the corners of the windscreen, but the car heating destroyed them as quickly as they bloomed.

Nerves marched around in my stomach. When people wanted to talk, it was not always a good thing. Being told the truth could be a painful experience.

Eight o’clock, Anton had said. The green clock on the dashboard showed 19.23. We had plenty of time to get to Bergen. Before she’d fallen asleep, all Stefanie had talked about was how Anton obviously wanted to confess that he’d killed Otto Petersen and would claim it was in self-defence. I bet she’d already picked out what she was going to wear at the press conference. She was wrong. It was probably about those blasted files. Why else would he have written down my father’s name?

I wanted to speed up, get to our destination more quickly, but needed to slow down to make sure we weren’t early.

In the village of Bergen, curtains were closed against the cold and the dark. I imagined a whole multitude of sins hidden behind those pieces of cloth: rowing couples, people eating in a resentful silence, screaming children. Or worse. Somebody hitting somebody, hurting them with fists or with words, a thief coming in through the window at the back. My mother had been right. A side-effect of this job was that you always expected the worst of people. It was because we always saw the worst. It altered your view of the world.