A Cold Case in Amsterdam Central

Book 2: Lotte Meerman

by Anja de Jager

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Having been shot in the shoulder in the line of duty, Dutch police detective Lotte Meerman returns to work after four months of painful recovery - yet not all her colleagues are happy to see her. But department politics take a backseat when Lotte is called to investigate a worker's fall from the roof on a building site in the centre of Amsterdam. Frank Stapel's tragic accident becomes suspicious when Tessa, his widow, discovers human bones in her husband's left-luggage locker at Amsterdam Central. To Lotte, this changes the course of her investigation from fatal accident to potential murder. When forensics discover the skeleton dates back to the Second World War, the rest of the team are convinced that Lotte is wasting everybody's time by insisting this somehow ties in with the Frank's death, but then it is discovered that some of the bones are less than a decade old . . . and although vindicated for pursuing the cold case, Lotte finds that the investigation takes a dark and sinister turn, linking an old war crime to events in the much more recent past. Praise for Anja de Jager '. . . a novel brilliantly evoking the isolation of a woman with an unbearable weight on her conscience' Sunday Times 'The book succeeds as a portrait of both a city and, in its heroine, a delightfully dysfunctional personality' Sunday Express

Release date: November 3, 2016

Publisher: Constable

Print pages: 352

Sample

The street lights made the deadly spikes of glass shine and sparkle. It was almost nine p.m. and darkness had invaded what had been a bright spring day. I tried to walk along the edge of the lake of shards but misjudged it, crushing splinters underfoot. I was lucky they didn’t pierce the soles of my shoes. High up, seven floors above to be precise, two man-sized glass panels were missing from the balcony. It was probably referred to as a roof terrace in the marketing material for the almost-completed office block. Those two missing panels were here, in a million pieces at my feet. The fragments covered everything in a ten-metre radius: the pavement, the square wooden flower planters and the body.

The dead man lay on his back amidst the sea of glass. I grabbed a large piece of cardboard that was propped against the building and created a bridge so I could get near him. His hair was rusty red. He was young. Early twenties was my guess. He was like a young, snub-nosed version of Boris Becker. Apart from the blood on his face, he looked like someone asleep after having fallen into bed drunk. Too young to be dead. I looked up towards the seventh floor. How long did it take to plunge from that height? For how many seconds had he known he was going to die? The thought of how frightened he must have been as he was falling made me wrap my arms around my waist.

Paint splatters on his shirt and arms shouted out his profession, along with his thick Timberland boots. His face was bruised and cut in several places. There was glass all over him. If it weren’t for those shards, I would have pulled up his trouser leg to check for impact wounds. In the majority of falls from this height, the legs carry the brunt. The impact can break the tibia and fibula and often cause compound fractures that pierce the skin. I had seen them before, especially with suicides. If you jump, you’re likely to land on your feet and the energy from the fall will shatter your legs.

This didn’t look like a suicide but a workplace accident. Especially with those missing glass panels. Maybe the man had been installing them.

We couldn’t get on to the building site as the door was locked. The building manager was on his way with a pass. There were many offices here, as this part of Amsterdam was close to both a tram line and a mainline station, Zuid WTC, and only two stops from Schiphol airport. When I’d gone to university, on the other side of the tracks, the station had only just been built and none of these towering blocks had been here. The one we stood next to had an unusual shape: two seven-storey sections placed on top of each other, with a four-metre sideways offset that created a corridor on the ground floor and a terrace on the seventh.

My colleague Thomas Jansen was talking to a witness on the opposite shore of the glass lake. We had driven here in an uncomfortable silence that had become harder to break with every second that passed and every street we crossed. A pale centimetre of skin showed where the dark hair on the back of his neck had been shaved away. He had a tan he hadn’t had yesterday. This morning he’d been filmed for our recruitment video. Everybody else had been from a minority. The next Matt Damon, he’d called himself. Should have had the haircut before the tan.

What did he see when he looked at me? A woman who wasn’t getting any younger, back at work after four months off. When I said hello yesterday morning, it was clear that he wasn’t happy I’d returned. I even wondered if he had testified against me in the internal investigation. It must have been a tough decision to balance his desire to disclose what he suspected with the need to not make a murder case collapse. A case that had largely depended on my witness statement to imprison the man I’d been so desperately in love with. Discredit me and you discredited my testimony that he’d confessed.

Now Thomas came over.

I stayed on my cardboard life raft by the body. I hadn’t seen a dead person in the last four months. Nor had I seen any criminals or victims. Or maybe I had seen them but hadn’t recognized them as such. I’d been a normal civilian, or as normal as you can be whilst recovering from a gunshot wound.

‘Who called it in?’ My words were rusty but at least I’d said something.

‘A guy in the office opposite.’ Thomas’s voice sounded final.

Out of a childish desire to needle him, I kept going. ‘What’s the witness’s name?’

‘Maarten Schuur.’

‘Victim’s name?’

‘Frank Stapel.’

‘Next of kin?’

‘Wife.’

Even before it all happened, Thomas and I hadn’t been the best of friends, but standing here with him now felt like being at a dinner party with a partner you’d cheated on. Both of us wished there was somebody else, anybody else, who could have gone instead. Like an old married couple, maybe we’d get to a point where we could put the deceit behind us.

Five of our uniformed colleagues, the fluorescent-yellow stripes on their dark jackets clear from a distance, made sure that anybody sick enough to want to look at the dead man wouldn’t get a chance.

‘It was an accident,’ Thomas said.

Most of the buildings around us were only half lit, with dark windows showing that nine-to-fivers had left hours ago to have dinner with their families. Not many people lived here.

I looked up towards the roof terrace. ‘What did the witness see?’

‘I saw him fall.’ The man who spoke stood to my left, where the glass stopped. He wore pale trousers and a blue blazer. From my crouching position there was no missing his orange boat shoes. ‘I looked up from my screen and he was . . . you know . . . already in the air.’

‘What time was this?’

‘Not sure. After eight o’clock.’

We would get the exact time he’d called from Dispatch.

He folded his arms and kept his eyes to my right, deliberately looking away from the body. ‘Those glass panels came down right after him.’

‘You don’t know what made him fall?’

‘No, I couldn’t see that. I’m working over there.’ He pointed to the building opposite. ‘We’ve seen this one go up. I’ve been watching it for months. But the glass panels are reflective. On purpose, I guess, to give people some privacy.’

‘Which floor are you on?’

‘I’m on six.’

Someone from a higher floor might have been able to see on to the roof terrace, but all those floors were dark.

A young police officer came up to us, confident in his dark-blue bomber jacket with yellow stripes even though acne still clung to his skin. The gun on his hip added a swagger to his walk. His boots dealt with the glass much better than my shoes had.

I stood up.

He started to ask my name but stopped himself. ‘Detective Meerman,’ he said. ‘Sorry, I didn’t recognize you.’ He held his pen and notepad as if he was going to ask me for my autograph. ‘I’ve followed all your cases,’ he said, ‘especially—’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘So you’re back?’

‘Second day.’

He nodded, kept his face serious. ‘We’ve got the man in charge of the building site just here.’

‘Great,’ I said. ‘I’ll—’

‘I’ve got this,’ Thomas interrupted. He walked towards a bulldozer of a man who had his hands in his pockets but needed to keep his arms away from his body to give his biceps room. His neck was like a chimney going straight down from his ears.

‘His name is Kars van Wiel,’ the young officer in uniform said as he followed Thomas.

I stayed behind with the body.

Sometimes the dead were easier to deal with than the living, I thought an hour later as I pressed the doorbell that had the label Frank and Tessa Stapel next to it.

‘Have you forgotten your keys again?’ I heard the smile in the young female voice.

‘Police,’ I said. ‘Can we come in?’

‘What’s it about?’ Any hint of levity had gone.

‘Can we just come in?’

The flat was in one of a line of pale-yellow three-storey blocks that had been placed at angles to pretend that they had been playfully dropped there rather than carefully planned. Outside the centre of Amsterdam, half an hour’s drive from where Frank had died, these rent-controlled apartments were all owned by the same pension fund and provided it with a steady and predictable income stream. They were around the corner from where my mother lived in a similar block.

The buzzer sounded and I pulled open the communal door to a long hallway. Thomas stepped past me as if I was the doorman. I hoisted my handbag higher up my shoulder and followed him along the stretch of matching red doors.

Halfway down, I stopped. The wall of the corridor was newly painted in a magnolia colour that nobody could object to. The weight of my gun, hidden under the jacket of my suit, reminded me that I’d had far worse encounters than the one coming up. Still, the thought of the pain that we were going to inflict caused a sensation like goldfish were swimming inside my gut.

Thomas looked round. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take the lead,’ he said over his shoulder.

I swallowed my annoyance at being treated like a rookie. After all, we were equal in rank and he was younger than me.

Provided with the choice between putting away a child killer and ending the career of a colleague, Thomas had chosen the former. The more time off I had to take, the more he must have thought he was going to have it both ways. I took a grim satisfaction in having spoilt that.

He knocked on the door of number 7.

Tessa Stapel opened it. Her grey eyes were so wide with worry that they seemed to take over her whole face. She couldn’t be older than twenty-five. ‘Yes?’ she said.

Thomas showed his badge.

She pulled up her eyebrows until they were safely hidden under the fringe of her long dark hair. Even though it was late in the evening, she was still wearing office clothes – a white shirt tucked into a grey skirt – but had swapped her shoes for pink moccasins. She pushed her hair behind one ear and showed a small pearl earring. A jacket that matched the grey skirt hung over a chair.

‘I’m sorry,’ Thomas said, ‘there’s been an accident.’ His tone was matter-of-fact, like a doctor delivering grave news. Was it only because I’d been away that it sounded callous and uncaring?

Her hand flew to her mouth. ‘Oh God, are you taking me to the hospital? Let me get my coat.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Thomas stopped her with a hand on her arm. ‘He’s dead.’

Tessa’s mouth opened in a silent scream that turned into a snarl, and her hands flew open-palmed against Thomas’s chest. He put an arm out to keep hers at bay and took a step back.

‘It’s not true. It’s not.’ As her arms swung, they pulled the shirt out of the front of her skirt. ‘You’re lying!’

I caught one of Tessa’s wrists in front of her but was annoyed with myself when the momentum allowed the other to slip through my grip. At the second attempt I pinned it against her stomach. I restrained her easily. She howled; a high-pitched sound that was almost loud enough to shatter the glass of the coffee table. I tried not to make my fingers too tight on her wrists, but we couldn’t have her hurt a police officer or try to go for my gun. Her hair flew around with the fierce shaking of her head, as if denial would make her husband’s death less true.

The NOS Journaal on the TV in the corner broadcast the demise of hundreds of Syrians into her front room, all far away and anonymous.

‘Shh, shh,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

She pulled with the intensity of an angry toddler in the grip of a tantrum: fierce, muscles tensed. Thomas stepped further back. His blue eyes were half closed, judging me as if he had to write a report afterwards to dissect how I’d handled the situation. I nodded at him that I had her and gave her enough space to fight out her grief. This was how much it hurt when you were suddenly alone. When my baby died, I’d screamed as well. When my husband left me, I’d only cried. Compared to that, being shot had been easy.

Tessa dropped her head forward and shook with her sobs. My eyes burnt in sympathy but I bit the inside of my cheek to keep the tears inside. Thomas would interpret it as a sign of this incompetent rustiness he kept mentioning.

‘Are you calmer now?’ I said. ‘Ready to listen to us?’

She nodded.

I released her arms. Her face was the same colour as the paper of the cigarette smouldering in the ashtray. ‘He fell from the roof terrace. At the building site,’ I said. I gave her a tissue.

She collapsed on to the leather sofa and wrapped her arms around her stomach as if she’d been punched. ‘He wouldn’t have. He wouldn’t have left me like this.’

I sat down next to her and put my arm around her shoulders. She rested her head against me. Thomas was still standing like a scarecrow in a field. I offered her the glass of water that stood next to the cigarette. She refused.

‘Can I get you anything else?’ Thomas said. ‘Something stronger?’

‘I don’t drink,’ she said.

‘Cup of tea?’

‘No.’

‘Here’s my card,’ I said. ‘If you need anything, call me.’

She accepted it without making eye contact.

Three days later, she took me up on my offer.

On TV, they were showing a man running on to a football pitch during a game. His jeans were low around his hips, showing the top of his underpants. Francine Dutte had lowered the sound when her husband called but could still tell that the commentator was shocked. Even without any volume, she knew exactly what he was saying. She was curled up on the sofa with the phone hugged to her ear. She rubbed her left foot, which always hurt after a long day.

‘They called me back. They want me in Qatar on Sunday,’ her husband said. He sounded upbeat. It was mid-afternoon in New York, evening in Amsterdam.

The pitch invader had come close to the central defender. His face was turned away from the camera and only the short stubble on the back of his head was clearly visible. He lifted his arm to hit the player.

‘Great,’ Francine said. Her husband didn’t sound as if he was a continent away. He seemed deceptively close, as if he was calling from the house next door instead, or maybe just from the Amsterdam ArenA, the Ajax stadium, which was being shown on TV. From their house she could see the floodlights in the evening and faintly hear the roars when the home team scored. No sound today. The footage was months old. Francine took the remote control from the arm of the sofa and turned the volume up.

‘The Qataris are concerned about what’s happening in Bahrain,’ her husband said.

The defender, in the yellow away strip, turned round, saw the man coming and floored him with a swipe of his leg.

‘They want to make sure everybody knows about their attempts at political reform,’ he said.

The man was trying to get up but the football player landed a few kicks in his midriff.

‘Francine, are you even listening to me?’

Francine’s eyes stayed fixed on the TV. ‘Of course I am. Qatar on Sunday.’

‘You’re not listening, you’re watching TV. I can hear it in the background.’ His voice was raised.

‘Darling, if I wasn’t listening, how could I repeat what you said?’

‘You’re watching TV.’ He was silent for a few seconds. ‘I can hear what it is. You’re watching that again. Have you recorded it? Do you have it on a permanent loop?’

‘It’s the news. It’s on the news.’

The hooligan was hauled from the ground by the stewards, dragged off with his hands behind his back. They were supposed to have stopped him coming on to the pitch but had been too cowardly to do anything to get in his way. Now that he was down, they were there in force, supporting each other; a gang of them against one man. Francine turned the TV off.

‘Stop watching it,’ her husband said.

Francine put the remote control back on the table. ‘It’s gone.’ She knew that if she hadn’t switched it off, she would have kept staring at it, unable to draw her eyes away from the screen. It was easy for Christiaan. He was far away, not in the front room. He would have watched it too if he’d been sitting on the sofa next to her.

‘It was finished, wasn’t it? The footage. It had finished anyway.’

‘Darling, I’m listening to you. Tell me more about Qatar.’

‘I’m sorry if I’m not as interesting as the TV.’

‘It’s not the TV. It’s—’

‘That particular clip. I know. Anyway, I’ll be home in time for the trial.’

‘We’re not going.’ As she said the words, her eyes hurt. They’d been to all the previous ones. But no longer. She didn’t want to go, and Sam definitely didn’t want them there.

‘We’re not?’ Christiaan said.

Her dark-blue work shoes lay on their sides in front of the sofa. The leather of the left was stretched out of shape by her bunion. Her misshapen foot had worked on the shoe until that was equally warped. She picked it up. Turned it over. The edge of the heel had been walked off. She placed it back under the table. She’d get it fixed tomorrow.

‘Are you sure?’ he said. ‘We can talk about it when I get home.’

‘I don’t want to go any more,’ Francine said. How many men had she seen come through the court? All so similar to her brother, all with that feeling of intense boredom, that nothing was ever exciting enough, that normality was dull, that fitting in was for losers. A job was for those who conformed. Not for them. They wanted the excitement of drinking, fighting, setting up times to meet with the other groups before the games.

‘Does Sam know?’

Sam. Sam D. they called him in the press, not being allowed to use his full name. Her husband kept telling her she should go under his name and drop the surname that had gained notoriety. If Francine hadn’t seen so many of the others, she might have thought it was her parents’ fault. Or maybe her fault: that she’d mothered her little brother too much, that having two mothers had made her brother rebel. But she had seen the other parents, and apart from the few who were always used as stereotypes, most were decent, law-abiding people like herself. Sometimes you couldn’t help what your children were like.

‘Sam doesn’t care if we’re going or not,’ she said.

‘And your father?’

‘I don’t want him to go either.’

‘It’ll be nice to spend some time together,’ her husband said. ‘Or do you have to be in court all day?’

‘I’ve taken the time off. I’ll pick you up from the airport.’

‘Don’t, I’ll take the train.’

‘No, I want to. You’re landing at eleven, right?’

‘Eleven oh five. But really, Francine, don’t bother. It’s easier by train.’

‘Don’t be silly. I’ll meet you there.’

‘Last time—’

‘I’ll be there.’

‘Okay. And Francine . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s good we’re not going.’

She knew that her husband thought they weren’t going to the trial because she’d finally come to her senses and given up on Sam. In reality, it was because Francine couldn’t stand to be in court and meet all her colleagues. They would smile sympathetically, say that they were all supporting her, that having Sam D. as a brother shouldn’t make a difference to a prosecutor. But Francine knew they didn’t believe it. She also knew they were right. Every time she asked for a sentence for someone like Sam, she looked at the defendant and pictured her own brother in their situation.

And asked for a longer sentence.

Amsterdam Centraal station’s newly restored main hall formed the high-ceilinged nave of this nineteenth-century cathedral for public transport. I crossed the blue-and-white-patterned tiled floor and skirted past mobile chicanes of students and tourists. Before the station improvements, a departure board would rattle its turning metal strips whenever a train left. I missed the sound.

After the light and spacious main hall, the stored luggage area was a 1970s throwback, with strip lighting and bad air. All oxygen seemed pushed out of the room by the low ceiling, which I could touch if I raised my arms even halfway. The only pattern on the floor here was that made by discarded chewing gum stuck on the dirty linoleum. Tessa sat on a chair in the guard’s office, separated from the luggage lockers by thick yellowed Plexiglas.

She looked over her shoulder at something I couldn’t see. Her feet dangled ten centimetres off the floor. The last three days had cut themselves into her face. She probably hadn’t eaten or slept since her husband died. Her face was gaunt and drawn; all colour had been sucked from her skin by grief until only the red around her eyes was left.

‘She refused to pay,’ the security guard said. He stood close enough to her that he could act if she tried to leave. He towered over her. He could have lowered his chair.

At least she wasn’t crying any more. She had been when she called me. When I’d seen her previously, she had been a well-dressed young woman, but now, in a large jumper marked with paint stains and ragged gashes, she looked like a runaway teenager. The too-long sleeve, unravelled at the edges, partially disguised the mobile phone she clutched in her left hand. The security guard had probably thought the sleeve was hiding needle tracks.

I showed my badge to defuse the situation. ‘Her husband died in an accident three days ago,’ I said.

‘That’s what she told me. But I thought . . . It’s no excuse for . . .’ His uniform was immaculate. It looked new. He’d probably only been in this job for a few days. I remembered what those early days in new employment were like: you wanted to do your best and apply all the rules to the utmost of your ability. You hadn’t learned to judge yet when bending them made everybody’s life so much easier.

Tessa looked across at me. ‘He wouldn’t let me get Frank’s stuff. He wouldn’t let me . . .’ Her voice started defiantly but disappeared in a sob.

‘Too young to have a husband,’ the guard said. He himself didn’t seem much older than Tessa. He rubbed his wrist. ‘She looked . . .’ He shrugged and didn’t finish his sentence. He didn’t have to. I understood why he’d refuse to let a woman who looked like Tessa get luggage from a locker without paying the fee. It was a scam that many junkies tried: steal bags from stored luggage with old tickets or those that people had dropped on the floor.

‘I’m sorry, Detective Meerman,’ Tessa said. She clutched the luggage ticket in her right hand, as if that small piece of paper was the last part of her husband that she could ever touch. Her wedding ring shone brightly. It should have told the guard that she wasn’t lying; had she been a drug addict, it would have been the first thing she’d sold. ‘He says I have to pay. That Frank had only paid for one day.’

‘Yes, the machine—’

‘It’s okay,’ I interrupted him. I was keen to get Tessa her husband’s possessions. I wanted her to have the answers she was looking for, and I really hoped that the contents of the locker would ease her pain. I wasn’t sure what would make it better; maybe somet. . .