A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1) (3 page)

Stefanie stood too close to me. She tipped my chair by resting her weight on the back of it. ‘Coffee?’ she asked.

‘I’m rather busy.’ I gestured with my hand at the papers.

She looked over my shoulder. ‘Wendy Leeuwenhoek. I see.’

I shuffled the papers together in a single pile and started reading the top one, pencil in hand, to check for any spelling mistakes, typos or inconsistencies.

Stefanie threw a pink folder on my desk. ‘Here’s one that’s possibly linked to Van Ravensberger.’

The folder landed against my papers and knocked them sideways, causing my pencil to make a long scratch. I gave the folder back to her and used my eraser to remove the line. Taking her file, she planted herself opposite me at the empty desk belonging to the third member of our team, Thomas Jansen, who was still on his Christmas break.

She started talking but I turned the page over and the rustling drowned out the sound of her voice. As soon as I read about Wendy that voice was no competition anyway. I tuned it out until it was no more than the whining drone of a mosquito, annoying but unimportant. I went through three more pages of my report.

Then she said the word ‘Alkmaar’ and I looked up from my papers.

‘Ah,’ she said, ‘I knew
that
would interest you – Moerdijk’s old murder case, before his promotion, before he became your boss.’

I didn’t correct her.

‘Don’t look at his stuff,’ Hans Kraai put in. ‘That’s a minefield. Do you want to be the one to prove him wrong? Career-ending move.’

‘But you get to work closely together with him,’ Stefanie turned to Hans and lectured him with a pointing finger, ‘so he notices how good you really are.’

Hans shook his large head. ‘No way. Not worth the risk.’

‘A murder in Alkmaar? When was this?’ I asked.

‘More than ten years ago.’ She riffled through the pages. ‘Twelve years – 2002.’

I held out a hand for the thin pink folder on Otto Petersen’s death and quickly flipped through it. ‘He was shot?’ I asked.

Stefanie pulled her hair behind her head with both hands. ‘Yes. Just one hour after he was released from prison.’

‘Where? Outside the prison?’

‘No. Outside his house.’

I grinned at Hans. ‘Must have been the wife then, nothing to do with your Ferdinand.’

‘She had a perfect alibi,’ Stefanie said, unsmiling.

I was reading and talking at the same time, trying to see what would get me the information I needed first. ‘What was he in for?’

She lifted her eyebrows. ‘You don’t remember him?’

‘Should I?’

‘He was the head of Petersen Capital. We busted them for fraud.’

I shrugged; finance never was my area of interest.

‘They were the darlings of the financial industry for years, a high-flying investment fund putting up all these wonderful returns, but it turned out it was all bogus. Millions of euros disappeared. They never found the money . . .’

‘And Van Ravensberger?’

‘One of the investors Petersen embezzled.’

I nodded. ‘Get me the rest of the files on this.’

‘They’re in my office. You can fetch them yourself.’

‘You want this done, right? So bring me what you’ve got. I’m going to talk to the boss.’

Chief Inspector Moerdijk was writing with his head bent low over his desk. I stood in the doorway for a second before knocking on the doorframe to get his attention.

‘Hi, Lotte,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Not too annoyed about having to work with our friends from the Financial Fraud department, I hope.’

I took a seat. I wouldn’t describe Stefanie Dekkers as a friend. ‘It’s fine.’

CI Moerdijk was an efficient man. Even his body didn’t have a gram of redundant fat, not one extra layer where none was needed. His white hair and thin frame gave him the look of a zealot, the type who would, centuries ago, have been a firebrand preacher, but who in today’s society worshipped at the temple of athletics. He was a serious marathon runner and triathlete. He claimed running gave him time to think, but I suspected that running allowed him to forget.

‘You’re done with the Wendy Leeuwenhoek files? You haven’t forgotten you’re taking the evidence to the prosecution office tomorrow, I hope.’

I imagined giving my files and report to the prosecutor, chatting about the murder and talking about the upcoming trial – and it made me feel as if a rat was gnawing at my stomach. I knew then that I wouldn’t be able to talk about it, not even about the parts I’d put in the report. I couldn’t go through with it – couldn’t face going to the prosecution office tomorrow. I was too tired; it would be too hard. I was in no fit state to lie.

‘Yes, it’s done,’ I said. Maybe when my report had left my desk, I would finally stop thinking about that little girl and about the errors of judgement that had brought me such unwanted recognition.

‘Good, good. You’ve made sure it’s watertight?’ the CI asked.

‘It is.’

‘So you can start on Van Ravensberger?’

‘I don’t think there’s much in it, but Stefanie Dekkers has come up with something.’

‘Anything promising?’

‘Otto Petersen . . .’

‘One of my old cases?’ His voice rose in the middle of the sentence, turning it into a surprised half-question. ‘One of my early ones.’ He screwed the top on his fountain pen and put it down. ‘Think it’s got legs?’

‘I’m pretty sure it hasn’t. But if you want me to work with Stefanie for two weeks, I might as well have a look at some of the things she suggests.’

‘Sure. I don’t think I looked at Van Ravensberger for that at all.’ He took his glasses off and dangled them from one hand. ‘I can’t remember all of it, but I would have remembered him.’

‘He was an investor.’

‘In Petersen Capital?’

‘That’s right.’

The chief inspector pursed his lips. ‘OK, why not. We looked at some of the other investors, especially after the Alkmaar police made such a mess of it. You don’t expect these local forces to be up to much, but . . .’

‘Who worked on it?’ I managed to keep my voice neutral as if I wasn’t that interested in finding out the answer.

‘Can’t remember. Anyway, read what’s in there. Petersen has been dead for over ten years. He can wait,’ he pointed at his paperwork. ‘This can’t.’ He unscrewed the top of his fountain pen again. ‘Thanks, Lotte.’ He gave me a quick look. ‘Are you OK with this? Working on this, I mean?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘The shooting—’

‘I had no choice.’

‘I know, I know.’ He looked at his screen again.

‘There won’t be a problem – he shot at me first.’

‘Yes, good for the case review but . . . Anyway. As long as you’re OK with it.’ His eyes went back to his paperwork and I was dismissed. I knew what he was thinking: that I was angry and upset with being shot at. But I knew I’d made the kid do it. I didn’t feel angry or upset. I felt guilty.

Her years in the Financial Fraud department had made Stefanie more efficient than I remembered. She’d left a stack of files by the side of my desk. I started to go through them. She was right: Otto was killed just one hour after he’d been paroled. I flicked through the papers until I found the photos. I liked starting with the photos. The body had been found on the path two metres from his own front door. There was no weapon. The crime scene was clean of footprints or any debris. The CI’s report contained the statement from Karin Petersen, Otto’s wife. She’d claimed to have been waiting outside the prison when her husband was shot. I turned over the pages until I found the text of the interview with the prison guard. He’d remembered Karin and confirmed her story: she was there at Otto’s time of death. I made some notes with my pencil. I wanted to double-check this. Why was she at the prison when her husband had already been released and was on his way home in Alkmaar?

Hans passed by the back of my chair on his way out. He said goodbye and gave the threatening weather as an excuse for leaving early. I nodded, only raising my eyes from the reports to check my watch. It was just after half past four. When he’d gone, I stared out of the window and watched the clouds hang over the canal. They were so heavy they barely floated. Gravity would pull more snow out of them before the day was over.

I searched for the report from Alkmaar. It didn’t seem to be there. I turned page after page in the files. Finally I found it somewhere in the middle: six pages stapled together in the top left-hand corner. An insult to the dead man, this staple. Was this not important enough to warrant a proper cover? I scanned the pages: a technical report, one page describing who called in the murder, some photos – and that was that. This was first-day stuff. The CI must have taken the investigation over quickly. I went back to the CI’s papers and checked the date he made the first notes. Otto Petersen was killed on 17 April 2002. The CI’s first report was dated 3 August 2002. Almost four months. What had happened in between? I found official requests for more information from the CI. No response from Alkmaar. In total there were five attempts by the CI to get additional files from them, but no sign that anybody ever replied.

And then I saw his name on one of the forms in the back of the file:
Original Investigative Officer for the Alkmaar police: DI Piet Huizen
. I weighed the six pages with the staple in my hand, then rolled them up and tapped them on my palm.

When I’d joined the police, I hadn’t told anybody about my father. It was none of their business. Not talking about him had become a habit.

I didn’t want to meet the prosecutor tomorrow. I didn’t want to meet him at all. I would at least postpone that encounter if I went to Alkmaar to see my father. With a bit of luck, someone from the prosecution office would collect the reports while I was away. Afterwards, I could use the clear conflict of interest as the reason to hand the Petersen case straight back to Stefanie.

I rearranged the cards in my hand and took the five of hearts. It went at the end of a run, leaving me with just three to get rid of. We sat at our usual places at the table, my mother at the head and me to her left, and played our Wednesday evening game of cards.

I sat back in my chair and almost brushed against the Christmas tree in the corner. With the addition of the tree, all the furniture was in intimate contact, the leg of an oak chair touching the arm of the sofa, and there was hardly room to move around. Two strings of Christmas cards dangled down either side of the door, most of them from people who went to my mother’s church.

‘Lotte, you don’t look at all well,’ my mother said as she added a six to my five. She reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.

I pulled back. ‘I’m fine.’ Through the gaps in the tablecloth, I could see the large dent in the wood. In an old gesture I rubbed my thumb over the mark in the table, where I had once tried to carve my initials with my knife. It hadn’t been sharp enough to let me succeed but a thick line in the light oak showed the start of a capital L. I was eight or nine. I couldn’t remember why I did it, but I could clearly remember my mother’s anger and the punishment that followed.

‘I’m worried about you,’ she went. ‘I saw the photos – you looked so tired.’

‘Which ones?’ Cards in one hand, I wrapped the other around my mug of tea for warmth. My mother kept her small flat a couple of degrees colder than was comfortable, saving money on the heating. The mug with the smiling clown was the same one I’d had when I was five. My mug, my plate, the cutlery with my initials on it – they all came out as soon as I was here. Even the smell of boiled kale, which my mother had had for her early dinner, mashed together with some potatoes and probably with a sausage or some diced bacon, reminded me of childhood.

‘The ones in the paper,’ she said, and picked up her mug in a gesture mirroring mine, her other hand shielding her cards close to her chest. I hoped the heat warmed up her ringless fingers with their swollen knuckles. ‘In the
Telegraaf
. I threw it away. You looked just awful.’

‘Thanks, Mum.’ I rearranged the run and slid my four of hearts in between. Two to go. I knew the one she meant. I’d cut it out of the paper and put it in the black ring-binder with my press cuttings, a history of all the cases I’d worked on in my eighteen-year career. They had taken the photo just after the team had carried off Wendy’s skeleton. My head was bowed low, and you could only see one side of me, but the streaks of tears down my cheeks were clear; my plait had come partially undone and strands of hair streamed down. I remembered the flash of the photographer, the annoyance of being caught and eternalised like this.

‘You have to look after yourself. You’re getting too thin.’

I laughed. Who was she to talk? You could see every bone in her skull. Her cheekbones looked so sharp, they might cut through the wrinkled skin that hung off them. At seventy-three she should carry a bit more weight or the first bout of flu would take her away. Her hair, short and curly, was as white as the home-knitted jumper she was wearing. She looked as if she’d melt away against the snow outside.

‘You didn’t like having your picture taken, did you?’ She picked up a new card from the stack, grimaced and slid the card with its red back between two blue ones. The backs of both packs were equally faded, the red cards now the colour of my mother’s cracked lips, the others the shade of her eyes, bleached by age from sky to duck-egg blue. We always used this double set; not a single card had been lost in over twenty years of playing.

‘No, I hated every second of it. All those photographers looking at me, clicking away, lights going off in my face.’

‘Even as a child.’ She smiled at the memory. ‘You’d scream as soon as I got the camera out.’

‘I loathe being the centre of attention.’

‘So much fuss over this one case.’

I couldn’t get rid of either one of my cards and had to pick up a new one – a three of clubs, its corner battered and tattered from over-use. ‘The papers had been writing about it for years. There’d been so much speculation,’ I explained.

‘There’s plenty of other things to write about. Proper news. There’s no need to put
you
on the front page.’