A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1) (23 page)

A car’s headlights threw a ghostly glow over my shoulder before it overtook me, forcing me sideways, off the cleared and salted part of the road. I made new tracks in a layer of mushy grey snow that had been shovelled to the side and all thoughts of Anton momentarily disappeared from my mind. The frost and wind made my eyes tear up and I pulled the furry collar of my coat high up my face to protect my skin. The scarf that covered my mouth was dotted with white where the condensation of my breath had frozen into tiny ice particles. At least no new snow had fallen overnight. I cycled past the flower stall where they’d sell their frozen-looking tulips later today and stared at the relief that adorns the police station’s wall. The figures symbolise the role of the police force to help and protect. We certainly hadn’t managed to protect Anton Lantinga. I would find his murderer, I vowed, even if his wife didn’t want me to. I locked my bicycle and entered the police station.

I was at my desk, my first mug of coffee in my hand, when Hans came in.

He sat down and turned on his computer. ‘I asked for a list of everybody who worked for Petersen Capital in 1995. I’m pretty sure those people’, he gestured at the Photofits on the wall, ‘worked there. The list should get here today or tomorrow.’

‘Did you hear about Anton?’ I said.

‘What happened?’

‘What happened?’ I put my mug down and started writing on my notepad, writing and saying the same words simultaneously. ‘Anton was shot dead before we got there. He couldn’t tell us anything.’

‘Any clues? Did his wife see anything?’

I knew she had seen my father. I should tell Hans about that. Instead I shook my head. I saw Karin’s face in front of me. Her fear, the look in her eyes that wouldn’t leave the door, the hand scrolling the BlackBerry. ‘Or at least, I think she saw something but she won’t tell us.’

‘And what did the lawyer say?’

‘What lawyer?’ I said.

‘There wasn’t one?’

I frowned.

‘Last night, Anton didn’t have a lawyer there?’

‘I didn’t see one. But there were so many people milling about: police, forensics, the ambulance crew. So there could have been.’

‘Did you search Anton’s house for the files?’

I shook my head again. ‘No, the Alkmaar police were taking care of all of that.’

‘Shame. Oh well. Apart from getting that list, I’ve gone through your notes from yesterday’s interview with Ferdinand van Ravensberger again. Especially the great returns he got on his money with Goosens – that is very interesting. We’ve got: two employees from Petersen Capital – yes,’ he said when I raised a finger, ‘I know that’s not certain, but it’s likely if Stefanie’s met them. They intercepted the files from Alkmaar. DI Huizen knew how long beforehand?’

‘He said two hours.’ Why had my father put me in this position, where I had to lie to Hans? I felt bad that I couldn’t make him aware of the possibility that my father had destroyed the files in return for money, and that I hadn’t even bothered to look for them.

Hans sucked some air in between his teeth. ‘That’s not long. Not long to contact somebody, I mean.’

‘Somebody knew before he did?’

‘Maybe . . . I don’t know. Anyway, they could have been protecting either Anton Lantinga or Goosens.’

‘Or Karin.’

‘I checked her alibi yesterday, met with that prison warden. He’s still there, still at the same place, and he remembered things very clearly. He said she was there until about half past five, then drove off to Alkmaar.’ Hans chuckled. ‘He said he remembered her because she was so pissed off. She was swearing at her husband for making her sit out in the rain, and now she had to drive all the way back. He even remembers that the traffic had been horrendous. He listened to the radio and had a laugh with his colleague because Karin would now be even more pissed off. But her alibi stands: there was no way she could have been back in Alkmaar in time to kill Otto Petersen.’

I was disappointed and pleased at the same time.

‘Could she have killed Anton?’ Hans asked.

‘I don’t know.’ Clear in my memory was that thumb scrolling her BlackBerry. Had she just been scared of being found out? ‘If he had been shot in the house then maybe. But I can’t imagine she got him to go outside, followed and shot him there.’

‘Then we have missing money, or maybe not, and stellar returns, as Ferdinand van Ravensberger said, for any of the investors who put cash in Goosens’s new fund,’ Hans said.

‘Stefanie seemed quite convinced that there was no missing money,’ I responded. ‘But you think that maybe Goosens paid previous investors out of the funds Petersen embezzled?’ He was thinking along the same lines as I had been, last night.

‘It’s a possibility, isn’t it?’

‘Are you sure there were good returns for all the investors in Goosens’s fund?’ I dug the photo out of my bag. ‘Maybe it was just money for Goosens, Lantinga and Van Ravensberger. And what about that whistle-blower?’

‘But surely Van Ravensberger wouldn’t have told you about the great returns if there was something dodgy going on.’

‘I don’t know. He was a bit too happy to talk to us. If Goosens dripped the money back into Van Ravensberger’s account, he might not even have realised. CI Moerdijk always thought it was Geert-Jan Goosens, or at least that he had kept the money. What if’, I tipped my chair back and speculated towards the ceiling, ‘Goosens takes the cash, stitches up Petersen for the fraud, promising him a share when he comes out, but then shoots him instead. Anton knows and is worried that Goosens is trying to stitch him up as well, so he wants to talk to us.’

‘But there was Alkmaar’s witness . . .’

‘OK, so Goosens and Anton split the money. Anton was still at Karin’s house, is seen by Wouter Vos, kills Petersen . . . Then what? He wants to confess?’

‘Doesn’t seem right.’

The phone rang and disrupted our speculation. ‘Will they never leave us alone?’ I grumbled to Hans. I enjoyed bouncing ideas off him, throwing them across the office to see which ones stuck, even if this time my ideas were ones that I knew were wrong. I picked up the phone. ‘Lotte Meerman.’

‘Hey, Lotte, it’s Ronald de Boer.’

As if I hadn’t recognised his voice. I leaned back on my chair and looked up at the ceiling. A spider had found refuge against the cold outside and now lived in the corner. ‘Hey, Ronald. Any news?’

‘It was a different weapon.’

I was close to swearing but stopped myself. A man had died, after all. ‘Interesting,’ I said instead.

‘Yes. It was from a further distance this time. No traces of gunpowder on Anton’s head.’

‘But it could still be the same perp. There are twelve years between both murders . . .’

‘I don’t think so. Leave it to us.’

‘Sure – your patch. You didn’t find your lost files at Anton’s house, by chance?’

‘Lotte, leave it to me, OK? I’ll take care of this.’

‘But we’re actually getting somewhere—’

‘Don’t drag your father any further into this than he needs to be.’ He sighed.

The sounds of the exhalation in my ear reminded me of last night. It reminded me of what he’d said about covering for my father. ‘DI Huizen was here on Wednesday.’

‘DI Huizen? Right, you’ve got some other people in your office with you. I understand. Well, he’s been busy then.’ He laughed.

‘He was here,’ I repeated, ‘and we did a Photofit of the people who picked up the files.’

‘Lotte, think about it. He got rid of—’

‘Stefanie recognised them. Did she tell you?’

‘She told me she doesn’t trust him.’

‘Yes, well, she’s got other motives for that. She recognised them. I think that’s important.’

‘Lotte, leave it. Your father . . . well, I think he might be more deeply involved in this than we thought.’

There was no way my father would have killed anybody. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘You don’t
want
to think so.’ His voice sounded louder and more determined.

‘No, Ronald, I seriously think—’

‘For the last time, leave it, Lotte. Honestly, you don’t want to drag him any deeper into this.’

‘You’ve said that already. I heard you first time round.’ I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t dragging my father into this but that I was dragging him
out
. I understood that my father had got rid of those files and that he’d taken bribes, but there was no way I would believe he’d done anything else. However, I had to be careful what I said with Hans around.

‘I know him better than you do – I worked with him,’ Ronald said harshly. ‘Trust me, I know what he’s . . . well, capable of, I suppose. Sorry, Lotte, I’ve got to go. I’ll call you when I’ve got news.’ The line went dead.

* * *

I sat at my favourite table in the canteen with my usual lunch of a cheese sandwich, an apple and a glass of milk. My lack of progress was, I decided, because I’d let my emotions rule me. I had to let my brain take over and do the work. Like I used to. Forget that DI Huizen was my father, lose my preconceptions of him, negative or positive, and look at the facts.

From my handbag I took out the photo Mrs Petersen had given me, the Photofit of the two police impersonators who met with my father and took the files, and my notepad. I glanced at the leftmost Photofit then took a glug of milk and stared out over the canal.

A couple of kids in their mid-teens were throwing bricks on the ice. On other canals people had started to skate. The temperature had got down to minus ten last night, caused by the snowless clear skies, but I wasn’t sure the ice would hold. The Singelgracht, however, was being kept open by the tour boats that broke through every day, but the boats didn’t start running until midday and the frozen night’s ice must seem an enticing short cut.

I looked back down at the pictures and aligned them with the edge of the canteen table: one photo given to me by a demented old woman; two drawings created by an old man. I smiled ruefully. They didn’t make particularly convincing evidence.

The kids had come back, carrying a large piece of building rubble between them. It looked like the piece that held a park bench tethered to the ground. They swayed it backwards and forwards. I could almost hear them count: ‘and-a-one-and-a-two’ before letting go. I leaned over to the window to get a good view of what happened next. The rubble bounced and slid along the ice. But it didn’t go through.

I drew a circle on my notepad and filled it in. Wouter Vos had seen Anton Lantinga at Otto Petersen’s house, but that didn’t mean Anton killed Otto. With Anton dead it seemed less likely. Karin had a watertight alibi. That pretty much left Geert-Jan Goosens. CI Moerdijk would be pleased that he’d been right all along – and maybe that would be enough to move the searchlight of Stefanie’s investigation to a more rewarding subject and away from my father’s past. However, Ronald thought Anton and Otto had been shot by different people. Anton must have wanted to come clean; that’s why he contacted us. But someone else wanted to stop him from talking. Talking about what? Confessing to a murder – or to a financial fraud?

One of the two kids stepped out on the ice. He took a couple of small slides closer towards the weaker middle. I got my mobile out of my bag and put it on the table. His friend stepped out on the ice as well, but stayed close to the side where the ice would be thicker. The kid in the middle of the canal started jumping up and down. I picked up my mobile. Then he stopped jumping and went across in one easy slide. I put my phone back on the table and took a bite of my sandwich.

Anton could have shot Otto Petersen, and Karin could have shot Anton. It wasn’t the same gun, but a gun could have been in the house. He wanted to confess, she didn’t, they argued, the gun went off. Karin was distraught because she’d killed him. It could have happened but the problem was that Anton was shot outside, not in the house. Anyway, it didn’t seem right.

What had my father been doing at their house last night?

I took one last bite of sandwich, put my apple in my bag and went back to our office.

A couple of hours later I got the call from Ferdinand van Ravensberger saying that he wanted to see me and that he would come to the police station later that afternoon. I didn’t tell Stefanie – the excitement would be just too much for her, but instead checked with Hans that he was available. I was reminded of Ferdinand’s words yesterday morning that if two people knew something, it wasn’t a secret any more, and I was curious to find out what he wanted to make more widely known.

It took Ferdinand and his lawyer just under an hour to arrive at the police station. Hans and I met them in a downstairs room that was not as severe as the interrogation room but still fully hooked up with recording equipment.

Ferdinand looked more businesslike than he’d done before: the charcoal-grey suit, white shirt and blue tie all looked more formal than his casual outfit yesterday. Maybe that was because he had other meetings to got to after our little chat, or maybe he wanted to make a different impression. He also looked tired and jaded, his skin still coloured by the fake tan but ashen underneath. His lawyer shook my hand and introduced herself as Ellis. Her outfit was colour-coordinated with Ferdinand’s but under her short-cropped curly white hair her face was neither as tanned nor as tired. She had that sharp attention that good lawyers have and that allows them to jump in whenever their clients are about to say anything useful.

Ferdinand came straight to the point. ‘I want to tell you something that I think is important,’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s something you already know. Yesterday, I saw you had a photo. This photo.’ He opened his briefcase and took out the same photograph that Otto Petersen’s mother had given me. His version wasn’t in a frame. ‘I don’t know who gave you the photo but I guess my nephew had something to do with it.’

‘I can’t tell you that,’ I said.

‘It doesn’t matter; either way you’ve got it. I want to tell you the truth about what happened to this person in the photo.’ He pointed to the unknown young man standing between Anton Lantinga and Geert-Jan Goosens. ‘His name is Carl Beerd, but I assume you already know this.’