A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1) (31 page)

‘The murder of your husband,’ Stefanie said. I could see only the back of her head, the reddish-blonde hair a blunt straight line across her grey suit. She must have thought it looked more professional, this subdued colour, than her usual bright ones. I wished I had something to eat, but it wasn’t worth the risk to go to the canteen. Instead I sank down on my chair, as low as I could get, picked up my pen and doodled on my notepad.

‘Which one?’ Karin looked like the woman we had met for the first time at Omega. The scared, defensive creature huddled in the corner of a room had gone and Grace Kelly was back. Her hands rested on the table. She wore a black suit with a round collar and a white blouse with the top two buttons undone. She was with her lawyer, a man about ten years younger than she was.

‘That of your first husband. Otto Petersen. Your second husband, Anton, was a suspect in that case.’

‘Incorrectly so.’

‘So it now seems. There was evidence in that case – paperwork, reports – that went missing.’

Karin sneered, ‘That was careless of you.’

‘And those files were seen in your shed, the night before Anton was killed.’

‘So you must have them back then.’ Her hand went up to a triple string of pearls. I moved forward, my nose nearly touching the glass, to get a closer look at them. The necklace was the same one she had been touching compulsively after her husband’s death. The deep lines around her eyes were no longer as deep as they were on that night, but still red.

‘They weren’t there any more.’

‘You searched the place afterwards. Every centimetre of it, it seemed. If they were there, you must have found them.’ She sighed pointedly. ‘Are you saying you lost them again?’

Stefanie ignored her needling. ‘Do you know what happened to them, after Anton died?’ I fidgeted on my chair. Yes, those files were important, but could we get to the more crucial part? I wanted to scream through the glass:
‘Please, Karin, tell the truth. Tell Stefanie and Hans that Anton was still alive and well after my father left and that somebody else came to the house later.’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘We believe you or Anton were involved in taking those files from the Alkmaar police station under false pretences.’

‘I don’t know anything about that.’

Stefanie leaned back on her chair. ‘Two people, well known to you, went to the Alkmaar police station, impersonating police officers.’

The door clicked open behind me and the sound made me jump. I kept the back of my head turned, hoping they wouldn’t recognise me. After three heartbeats the door closed again. I waited for the sound of footsteps. None came. Whoever had come in must be waiting just outside. They must be staring at me. The skin on my neck crawled with goosebumps. I drew some circles on my notepad.

‘I don’t know anything about that,’ Karin repeated. Her voice sounded the same as it did before, full of defiance. She turned the large ring on her left hand around and around with her thumb. Her nails were short, last week’s French manicure bitten away. She scratched her skin under the sleeve of the jacket.

‘Mrs Lantinga, we need to know what happened to those files. We’re not going to prosecute you if you organised it, we just want to know. It’s crucial with regard to finding the murderer’, Hans paused and gestured with his large hand, ‘of both your husbands.’ He moved to the right and his bulk blocked my view. I turned round carefully, but there was no one there. The corridor behind the observation rooms was empty. Somebody must have changed their mind, or turned up at the wrong room.

Karin’s face went a little paler as if dusted with a lighter colour powder, but she didn’t say anything, just blinked three times.

‘Mrs Lantinga,’ Hans said, ‘could you please tell us if you recognise these people.’ He pushed the two Photofits across the table. At one stage this had been important, these two bits of paper with strange faces on them. Now they were a delay. I ripped the first page with circles off my notepad and made a tear in the corner.

Karin looked at the photos and her face turned into a mask. The muscles around her jaw tightened. She slowly shook her head. ‘No, I don’t.’

‘Please, have another look. We think they might have worked for you at Omega, or even at Petersen Capital.’

She pretended to look. I couldn’t tell exactly where her eyes went, but it seemed slightly above the photos. She sat back and shook her head again.

‘It’s no use.’ Stefanie leaned forward, her arms folded on the table. ‘We will go through everybody who worked at either firm, every friend of yours, every relative of you or Anton, and we’ll find who those people are. It will just take us longer and that is time we could use in tracking Anton’s murderer.’

‘But the police from Alkmaar are working on that, aren’t they? DI de Boer came to see me yesterday and the day before.’

Stefanie nodded. ‘Yes, we’re working closely together with them. Now please answer our questions.’

Karin stared at a point over Stefanie’s shoulder. Our eyes almost met; she seemed to be looking at my left ear. I was surprised she’d come into work today, her husband only dead five days, but when it was your business, you didn’t have much choice. And, as my father had said, work helped you forget. Or took your mind off it at least.

‘And DI de Boer is coming to the office again this afternoon, isn’t he?’ She looked at her lawyer.

‘Yes, at two o’clock,’ the lawyer said. ‘So I would very much like to know why you have my client here now.’

The door clicked open again. This time there were footsteps too. I sank down in my chair, hoping it was an observer for another room.

Hans ignored the lawyer and kept questioning Karin. ‘Your husband, Anton, admitted he took those files.’

‘Did he?’

‘To DI Huizen.’

She rested her chin on her hand, the large square-cut stone of her ring on display, and smiled.

The steps came towards me. I didn’t look up but kept staring at the window, hoping whoever it was wouldn’t know I’d been suspended.

Her lawyer said, ‘I believe she has answered this question a few times now.’

‘She hasn’t answered it,’ Stefanie replied sharply.

‘What the hell are
you
doing here?’ whispered a soft voice behind me, straight into my ear. I nearly jumped up off my chair. It was CI Moerdijk.

‘How did you get in?’ he asked.

I showed him my pass. Without a word he took it out of my hand and put it in his pocket. I expected him to throw me out, any minute now. I waited for his hand on my arm, dragging me out of this observation area. I could almost feel it around my elbow. ‘Please don’t make me leave before I’ve saved my father,’ I breathed, but I didn’t say the words out loud.

‘Can you tell me about your working relationship with Wouter Vos?’ Hans was saying.

The lawyer in the room sat forward. ‘My client isn’t answering that,’ he said.

‘Surely she can tell us if she knows him.’

Karin turned the large ring round and around her finger with her thumb before folding her hands in front of her.

‘We’ve got him here as head of IT at Petersen Capital in 1995. He’s on the list of the tax office,’ Hans went on.

I didn’t look away from her defiant face. ‘Vos was Alkmaar’s witness,’ I said aloud. ‘He worked for Petersen Capital. Was their head of IT.’

‘So I heard. Did your father know that?’ The CI spat out the words. It was an accusation.

‘They arrested my father last night,’ I said. I shouldn’t have been asleep.

In the shadowy light of the observation area I turned to look at the CI. His thin preacher’s face didn’t smile at me. He got a small notepad from his jacket pocket and put it on the ledge in front of us. I moved mine further along, then looked back to the window.

‘You’ve got to leave, Lotte.’ Moerdijk’s voice sounded weary. ‘You can’t be in here.’

I couldn’t respond.

‘Lotte, did you hear me?’ Here was the anticipated hand on my arm, the pressure I had been expecting. I nodded and got up, tears in my eyes because I hadn’t achieved anything, hadn’t heard anything that made a difference. I had failed. Failed my father.

‘Yes, he worked for us.’ In the room, Karin said it so softly that I only just caught the words over the sound of my chair scraping the floor as I pushed it back. I didn’t know why it was different to hear her say it. I’d seen his name on that list, I knew he’d worked there, but to hear it coming from Karin’s mouth made it more real. Wouter Vos with a motive to kill Otto Petersen. Ronald’s schoolfriend. Concern about my father made my breakfast of biscuits stomp around in my stomach.

The hand on my arm propelled me towards the door, away from the window where all the important things were happening. I had to count on Hans and Stefanie to finish what I’d started.

On the other side of the door, the hand let go of my upper arm. The CI closed the door and removed any view of the observation area from my field of vision. Everything was lost and over, and I felt sick as I walked towards the exit with my boss. I was lost for words until we got to the garden. This was my last chance to ask something before I was evicted through the white gates.

‘Who went to collect them?’ I asked.

He frowned. ‘Collect what?’

‘The files on the Otto Petersen case.’

He stayed quiet. A blackbird hopped around the roots of the plants, black against the snow. ‘I went by myself,’ the CI said. ‘I drove to Alkmaar, to the police station, spoke to the receptionist and she gave me one cardboard folder.’

‘Gave it?’

‘Yes. I asked her if there was more, but she told me that was it.’

‘What did the receptionist look like?’

‘Lotte, it was more than ten years ago . . .’

The blackbird flew from the ground and landed in a tree, calling out his displeasure at our presence in beautiful tones.

The CI said, ‘I think she was young, with blonde hair, creamy skin – looked like a farmer’s daughter.’

Ronald’s wife had already been on Reception then? Ronald’s friend the witness had admitted to us that Ronald had been at Petersen’s house just before Petersen was shot. His wife made those files disappear. Two sets of footprints were actually
three
sets of footprints after the investigating police officer had walked to the shed to check on the files. All the important information had been in my boss’s hands, the hands that now shoved me through the gates, the hands that closed it with a bang behind me. From the other side of the white bars the CI looked at me, his angry face cut into segments by the vertical bars, waiting until I walked away.

I didn’t go far, just turned left and left again, until I was at the other side of the canal at the back of the police station. I texted Hans:
CI caught me, call me
, and waited. The statue on the wall of the new part of the station was Lady Justice, but a vengeful one, leaning her weight on the Sword of Power, ready to wield it when necessary, almost inviting enemies to attack her, so that she could strike and get the sword’s edge bloody. She glowered at me for my lack of progress, annoyed by my attitude.
‘Don’t you dare give up,’
her eyes told me.
‘Don’t you dare.’
I smiled grimly at her:
‘Don’t worry, I’ll keep going.’
I waited for a few minutes. I knew where Stefanie and Hans had to go next.

There had been discussions before we’d headed north to Alkmaar: all about procedures and rules and regulations, none about where we were going. Stefanie didn’t want to use the recording equipment without the proper paperwork, but she agreed when I apologised for shouting at her after I’d been suspended. She in turn apologised for trying to pin something on my father. I was about to thank her when she followed up by saying that I couldn’t blame her for thinking as she had. I explained that my father had made all his money from marrying a rich wife, to which she laughed and meanly replied, ‘Like father, like daughter then.’ It washed away any good feelings I had towards her.

Hans and Stefanie got out of the car at Wouter’s apartment block and I moved to the front seat. It looked less suspicious that way. Stefanie’s car smelled of stale cigarette smoke, and sweet wrappers littered the floor.

‘Can you hear us?’ Hans asked.

I raised my thumb to him through the windscreen. It was odd to be without the weight of the gun on my hip. There was an empty packet of cigarettes on the dashboard. I watched Hans and Stefanie as they entered the apartment building. Stefanie reached no higher than his armpit and Hans took small slow steps to make sure she could keep up with him. They went up the stairs Ronald and I had gone up two weeks ago.

What a risk Ronald had taken, I thought now, introducing me to Wouter so early on. If he had played things differently, if he hadn’t tried to get me worried about my father, would I have dropped the case? After that first trip to Alkmaar it had been clear that Otto Petersen’s murder wasn’t committed by Ferdinand van Ravensberger, whatever his nephew might have said. I could imagine a situation where we would have realised early on that Ben van Ravensberger had been using a lot of coke and had tried to blackmail his uncle. We probably would have dropped the case at that point. Otto Petersen’s murder would still remain open and Anton Lantinga would still be alive. But because Ronald had tried to frame my father for the stolen files, to get me to abandon this case, I’d stuck with it and he’d achieved the complete opposite.

However, I also remembered the conversation with the CI where I’d told him about Alkmaar’s witness and I had to admit to myself that if I hadn’t been trying to cover up what had happened in the Wendy Leeuwenhoek investigation, I would probably have done what Ronald had intended. When I’d continued to investigate Otto Petersen’s murder, Ronald had upped the ante, got me suspended and my father arrested.

What a shame that this was all speculation and that I didn’t have a shred of evidence to support my case. There was nothing to say that Wouter Vos had really been the whistle-blower other than that he would have had the opportunity and that he had kept quiet about working for Petersen Capital. But I would obtain the facts because that would get my father out of jail.