A Cold Death in Amsterdam

Book 1: Lotte Meerman

by Anja de Jager

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

The first Lotte Meerman mystery Amsterdam-based Lotte Meerman is a cold case detective recovering from the emotional devastation of her previous investigation. She is angry and mentally scarred - but being a police officer is the only thing she wants to do. A tip-off leads Lotte to an unresolved ten-year-old murder case in which her father was the lead detective. ANd when she discovers irregularities surrounding the original investigation that make him a suspect, she decides to cover for him. Now she has to find the real murderer before she's discovered, otherwise her father will be arrested and she will lose her job, the one thing in life that is keeping her focused and sane . . . Praise for Anja de Jager ' An absorbing read with the smack of reality ' Daily Mail 'The book succeeds as a portrait of both a city and, in its heroine, a delightfully dysfunctional personality' Sunday Express 'Impressive . . . De Jager is as good on dodgy family relations as she is on police procedure' The Times 'Detective Lotte Meerman is damaged by her past and tortured by the dreadful mistake she's made at work . . . Amsterdam is the other star here, beautiful and deadly' Cath Staincliffe

Release date: November 5, 2015

Publisher: Constable

Print pages: 352

Sample

They were strange, those minutes that ticked by slowly as I waited for the ambulance to turn up. My concentration never wandered; my focus was purely on stemming the bleeding.

I’d had no real reason to pull into the petrol station, but the streaming lights had drawn my eye from more than a kilometre away, promising company and warmth on this deadly cold night. Although I was only ten minutes away from home, I had glanced down at the petrol gauge, and the half-empty tank had given me enough of an excuse to pull in. I put my indicator light on. It was 2 a.m. and there was nobody else on the road, but it was a reflex – an action that came from muscle memory not from thought, as was grabbing my handbag when I got out, and holstering my gun.

Outside the car it was icy cold; fog flowed from my mouth with each breath. A shiver ran down my arm when my hand touched the metal cap on the petrol tank. If I had kept it there for much longer, my skin would have frozen tight to the car. I put the petrol pump in with my free hand tucked under my arm.

I didn’t often get out of the car on these nightly drives that took me from one end of the country to the other. In the Netherlands that didn’t take much, of course: a two-hour drive east from my home in Amsterdam got me to the German border; one hour south would make me cross into Belgium, and forty-five minutes north would land me in the sea. I tried to limit myself to one hour, with just the hum of the car’s engine to keep me company along the dark roads. It was normally enough to help me get to sleep when I got back home. When it was one of those nights, I couldn’t stay in my flat; I needed to get out. I’d been offered counselling, but so far I’d refused it. Counselling would mean talking about it. Telling somebody would mean reliving it. Why would I want to do that, when I was trying so hard to forget?

As I watched the counter on the petrol pump tick up, I realised I was finally feeling calm. I could face myself in the mirror without wanting to attack my own skin. Tonight had been a bad one.

Just then, another car pulled up on to the forecourt and stopped in front of the shop. A man got out but I couldn’t see him properly as some of the steel construction holding the roof up blocked my view. He’d probably just run out of cigarettes, or maybe he too was just looking for someone to talk to. I turned back to watch the numbers on the display race up.

The jolt on the pump came when the meter wasn’t even on 20 euros. I dribbled in a few more drops to get it to the round figure then walked over to pay. The path of lights deepened the winter darkness even further and made the ice crystals on the ground sparkle like diamonds. Now that I’d been outside for a few minutes, my toes were cold inside my boots. The weather forecasters had been predicting snow for a few days now, but none had fallen. The only thing that was falling was the temperature: with the clear skies, it was getting down to minus ten. It would grow colder still before dawn, in that lonely time before the sun came up and created a new day.

I bunched my fingers into fists inside the pockets of my jacket to keep my hands as warm as I could, grateful when the door to the shop opened automatically and I was greeted by a blast of heat and some modern rendition of ‘Silent Night’.

The man behind the counter – young, a student maybe – turned to me and the warning look in his eyes made me come to a halt. I saw the other man, one hand in his pocket. He was wearing a balaclava so I could only see his eyes. I wished I could have had a better look at him when he’d arrived.

‘Stop right there,’ the man warned me.

I stood still. The automatic door behind me opened and closed again with a whoosh, followed by a short stream of cold air on my neck. I didn’t move. It opened and closed again and I took a step forward.

‘I said stop.’

I pointed behind me. ‘The doors.’

He nodded, one hand still in his pocket, and addressed the guy behind the counter. ‘Give me the cash now and nobody gets hurt.’

When he said the clichéd words, I wanted to smile but kept a straight face. ‘I’m a police officer,’ I told him. ‘You’re under arrest.’ I felt completely calm even when the man pulled a gun out of his pocket and pointed it at me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the shop assistant duck behind the counter, his head now hidden by a small plastic Christmas tree.

‘You don’t want to do this,’ I said. ‘You want to put the gun away now and come with me quietly.’

The gun in his hand wobbled all over the place. He should be using his other hand to keep it steady.

‘Because right now, your options are either to put the gun away or to shoot me,’ I said. All the textbooks would tell me to keep talking. Instead, my hand went to my own gun and I undid the button on the holster without my eyes ever leaving his. The palm of my hand fitted around the grip of the weapon. Against my cold fingers it felt warm, heated up from sitting on my hip. I pulled it out slowly.

The CD of Christmas songs finished and the night was silent at last. I anticipated the impact of the bullet in my body, the pain that would take away all other pains, and bring the final end to everything. The events of the past six months, which had led to the discovery of Wendy Leeuwenhoek’s body, ran through my mind – each incident and each mistake as clear and urgent to me as what was happening right now, in the petrol station shop. I made the movement slow, raising the gun centimetre by centimetre, inviting him to shoot and giving him time to make up his mind. Maybe I should have gone fast and drawn an automatic reaction. His eyes were locked into mine. We stood like that for a few seconds, which my total concentration turned into an eternity.

Everything I’d noticed before became insignificant: the half-price Christmas cards and reduced boxes of candles in a bin to the side, the rows of chocolate bars in front of the counter and the packs of cigarettes behind it. All I was aware of were his eyes, which seemed incredibly blue, staring at me from the black balaclava. Every thump of my heart against my ribcage felt slow even though I knew my pulse must be racing. I took a deep breath.

When the shot finally came, the sound was harsh in the silence. My ears rang with the bang. I could smell the smoke, but I couldn’t feel anything. For a second I thought it was just the adrenaline that kept the pain at bay and I waited for the agony to kick in. Then I looked down and realised he’d missed. He was only a few metres away and he’d missed.

I increased the pressure on the trigger and shot his arm. It was a textbook manoeuvre: left hand under right wrist to stabilise the gun, and it wasn’t hard from this distance. He dropped his gun with what seemed like relief and sagged to his knees. I took three steps towards him, bent over, put my left hand to his arm to stop the bleeding and asked the youth behind the counter to call 112. After I’d holstered my gun, one hand still applying pressure to his arm, I pulled off his balaclava and saw his blond curls. He was young, maybe a teenager. I felt sick. Why hadn’t I let him have another go? Had the guy behind the counter ever really been in danger?

The kid wanted to talk and I read him his rights. He told me his name: Ben van Ravensberger. I told him he should have a lawyer. I tried to keep him silent because I didn’t want to hear what he had to say. But he kept repeating: ‘Don’t you know who I am? My uncle is famous.’

I waited for what seemed a long time, but would turn out to have been less than ten minutes, until my legs started to cramp from crouching by his side and my voice was hoarse from talking to him continuously. I’d put a tourniquet on his arm to stop the bleeding. Apart from calling the emergency services, the guy manning the shop was useless. He looked in a state of shock: his face white, his hands shaking too much to help me with Ben.

Now I heard the siren of an ambulance and the sound had never been more welcome: I could finally take my eyes from the kid. The paramedics took over, bandaged him up and took him out on a stretcher that was only a precaution. One of the paramedics told me it was just a flesh wound and that the kid should be fine. My colleagues would meet me at the hospital. It wouldn’t be a problem for me: the kid had shot first, his bullet still wedged in the wall of the petrol station, and I had followed the correct procedure.

I drove behind the ambulance to Amsterdam’s Slotervaart Hospital, walked beside the stretcher through the corridors and waited with Ben until the doctors could see him. It was warmer here indoors, but I didn’t take my coat off: I was only wearing my pyjama top underneath.

Ben was telling me again about his famous uncle.

I didn’t want to listen any more.

‘I’m a law student,’ he said. ‘This is just a mistake.’

‘You can forget all about law now.’

‘But I can tell you something that—’

‘What’s a law student doing holding up a petrol station?’ I interrupted him. He wanted to hold my hand as if I was his mother or something, and tears were rolling down his cheeks.

‘Can’t we make a deal? I can tell you—’

‘Be quiet now. Tell my colleagues later.’

‘My uncle, he’s famous. But he’s killed someone.’ Ben’s eyes drifted close. ‘Or at least he said he did.’ His last words sounded mumbled.

I didn’t say anything but just sat there with his hand in mine until the nurse wheeled him away.

The bells of the Westerkerk rang out over the streets of Amsterdam. It was 7 a.m. and still dark outside. I’d been home for three hours. As I reached out to switch on the light by the side of my bed, my hand bumped against something and I heard the rattle of the pills the doctor had prescribed two weeks ago. He’d said that these would make me sleep deeply and stop the dreams. He said I was suffering from post-traumatic stress and that he’d recently seen a number of other police officers with the same complaint, many of them women. I’d been annoyed with the generalisation. After all, I’d been in CID for over ten years and in uniform before then and I’d never needed pills or anything else. I didn’t take the medication. I deserved my dreams.

I slid my legs from under the duvet. The parquet floor sucked the warmth from my feet and the pale blue walls, which normally reminded me of a washed-out hazy summer sky, seemed the colour of frozen limbs. I peeked around the curtain and saw that the forecasted snow had arrived in the night and most of Amsterdam’s sins and dirt were now hidden beneath it. The snow had come too late for a white Christmas but just in time to swaddle the newborn year in a blanket of innocence. The wasteland of roofs before me were covered with centimetres of white that took away the edges and left everything with a smooth contour.

I dumped my clean clothes on the bed, ready to strip off one set, shower and get as quickly as possible into the other. I didn’t care what I was going to wear – it didn’t matter what I looked like. Thick trousers, I thought – yesterday’s brown tweed ones – with an almost matching brown jacket over a cream woollen jumper. And that was just for indoors.

In the bathroom, cold air blasted through a small gap around the window that I never managed to shut completely. A thick layer of ice had flowered on the glass. I wished it was on the mirror, so I couldn’t see myself. Lack of sleep was taking its toll. I scraped my hair back in a pony tail and plaited it. It made me look worse as it hid nothing. I made no attempt to put any make-up on: I deserved to look this bad.

I was forty-two but didn’t look a day under fifty.

Showered and dressed, I went downstairs, opened the front door and entered the snowstorm in the dark. My feet sank into the soft powder – there had to be ten centimetres at least. The pavement was deserted, so my footprints appeared in virgin snow. It made a whispering sound, as if I was crushing something fragile underfoot with every step. I wanted to close my eyes against the wind – to close my eyes against the world. Instead I moved along mechanically, too tired to worry about slipping.

The snowflakes whirled around my face, floated in front of my eyes and danced this way and that, in time with the thoughts inside my head. I couldn’t stop thinking about my dream. I had seen Wendy Leeuwenhoek’s face as I knew it from her photo, seen it decay slowly, frame by frame, into the white skull I’d found. I saw the flies laying their eggs. I saw the grubs eating her flesh. I could see them now in the falling flakes.

I trudged past the bakery on the corner, the small bar where I never drank, the church that was shared by Syrian Orthodox Jews and Roman Catholics, an emblem of Amsterdam’s multiculturalism, and an endless row of seventeenth-century canal houses that were now home to banks and businesses. I walked slowly until I crossed the final canal to the police station on the Marnixstraat. Stopping for a while on the bridge, I let my eyes follow the fall of snowflakes down to where they were visible in the ring of streetlights. They moved in and out of sight before they drifted to the street and had their short life reduced even further by darkness. One landed on my eyelashes and turned the world white until it melted into a tear; others floated onto the cling film of ice that had been stretched over the water in the night and was barely thick enough to carry the weight of the flakes.

Resting my hands, lukewarm inside their gloves, on the iron railing, I leaned over and stared down into the blackness. It was early, I thought, and there weren’t many people around. It was cold. They’d never get me out in time. I’d only have to step off the bridge and . . .

A hand landed on my back. ‘Morning, Lotte. Lost something?’

I pulled back from the edge. ‘Hi, Hans. Just watching the ice.’ My colleague would have placed his large hand on my arm if I hadn’t moved away. Hans Kraai was descended from many generations of strong farming stock and his hefty body, made for withstanding the eternal wind of the north, was out of place in the office, where he had to duck whenever he walked through a door and had to force himself in to his chair like a spade in to the clay soil of his parents’ farm. Even his dirty-blond hair was the colour of potato peelings.

We walked through the entrance to the police station together, but I stayed out of step with him so that my footsteps kept their own individual sound.

It was around lunchtime when I got the call that Ben van Ravensberger was being questioned. I immediately made my way down the stairs to the interview rooms and went inside the observation booth. A previous occupant had left a brown plastic cup behind them, as well as the faint smell of sweat. I sat down in front of the one-way mirror, clutching my mug of coffee, the fifth of the day, and thinking that I’d rather be anywhere else than here, in the dark, watching the kid I’d shot – but I felt an obligation towards him. I’d made his situation so much worse and I should at least hear the story of what his uncle had supposedly done.

In the dimness of the observation booth, I watched the interrogation room where André Kamp was interviewing the kid. The detective’s dark hair was streaked through with grey, the same colour as his suit. We used to work together before I moved to another team.

‘Tell me what you heard,’ the detective said. The microphone on the table made his voice tinny and electronic.

‘I already did that twice.’ The bright light flirted with the kid’s high cheekbones and flawless skin. He would look good on the tapes. He was a little older than I’d originally thought in the petrol station – in his early twenties, maybe, and those tight blond curls circled his head like bouncing question marks. He also had a heavily bandaged arm that I tried not to look at. I took another sip of coffee. Ben had told the truth about one thing: his uncle was famous. Ferdinand van Ravensberger was often on TV, famous for being rich and for mixing with movie stars and other celebrities – and now it seemed he might be guilty of murder. I hadn’t thought we would take Ben’s accusations seriously, but my colleagues clearly thought otherwise: that it was important enough to keep Ben here to be interviewed.

‘They were shouting,’ the kid said. ‘She was having an affair. She said: “You’re never here, you’re always at work.”’

‘Your aunt and uncle?’ The detective steepled his fingers and rested them against his bottom lip.

‘Right. And then he said: “Don’t blame me for this. You’re the one doing it.” This went on for a bit. But then he said: “If you don’t stop seeing him, I’ll kill him. You know I’ve killed someone before.”’

My eyelids felt heavy. I wrote down: Ferdinand van Ravensberger said he killed someone, to keep myself awake. With a blue pen I drew concentric circles on my notepad then squares around them with a pencil. My watch said I’d been in the observation area for five minutes. I’d stay another five, I decided. I’d heard the main line; I could report back on the information we got from Ben and let that be it. I needed to get through the paperwork on the Wendy Leeuwenhoek case and make sure everything was in order before it went to the prosecution.

‘Ferdinand van Ravensberger said that?’ André Kamp tapped his fingers against his bottom lip.

‘Right.’

‘How long ago was this?’

‘Six years.’

The detective pushed his chair back and got up. He stayed to the right, to keep my line of sight clear. ‘Where were you?’

‘In the hallway. I’d been to the loo.’

My colleague stepped close to the glass and looked over my head at himself. He adjusted his already straight tie and winked. I couldn’t tell if it was at me or at the kid via the mirror. ‘Did you flush?’

The kid screwed up his forehead in puzzlement, leaned back and folded his arms. ‘Does that matter?’

‘Let me put it like this: did they notice you were there?’ My colleague kept looking at the kid indirectly. Without the wall between us, he would stand in my personal space. I got a close-up of his tie with a red-brown stain of spilled meatballs, today’s special in the canteen, surrounded by small water-damage creases, signs of futile scrubbing in the men’s toilets.

The kid’s face relaxed and he raked a hand through his curls, fitting them around his fingers like rings. His other arm stayed motionless by his side, strapped in large bandages. ‘I don’t think they did. Well, I flushed, I’m sure, but at first they didn’t know I was there . . .’

The door behind me opened with the soft click of a light switch. I pretended to be concentrating on what was going on in front of me and didn’t look round. Someone pulled up the chair beside mine – someone who smelled of cigarettes.

‘Hi Lotte, can I join you?’ Stefanie Dekkers asked.

I nodded because I didn’t know how to refuse. I wasn’t surprised that someone from the Financial Fraud department was interested in Ben’s uncle. She sat down and moved her chair forward. Her high-heeled shoe kicked my foot. ‘Sorry.’

My sturdy boot, fit for the weather, came off better than her black leather shoe, the type you wore if you didn’t walk anywhere. I was sure her husband drove her to work. I glanced at her sideways but didn’t meet her eyes. She kept her knees together and to one side to accommodate her tight pencil skirt. The waistband vanished between rolls of flesh and the swell of her hip was cut in two by the line of underwear digging in.

‘Congratulations on closing the Wendy Leeuwenhoek case.’ Her voice was like a mobile phone going off in the theatre. We hadn’t exchanged more than a hello in the last ten years. I shifted my coffee mug out of her way.

Stefanie moved her chair closer to mine and confided, ‘I knew you’d be great at looking at some of these old cases. Even at university you had that eye for detail, getting stuck into the nitty-gritty . . .’

I kept staring at the window. I didn’t move, didn’t give her a centimetre of space. ‘You used to call me anal.’ I locked the grooves of my molars together.

She made a gesture with a manicured hand, her wedding ring locked safely in place by protruding flesh. ‘I want my photo on the front page. Like the Wendy Leeuwenhoek case did for you.’

Why on earth would she want that? For me, that photo and that front page stood for all the mistakes I’d made. I shook my head and switched my eyes from the interview room to my notepad. I filled in another circle. My long plait dangled like a length of dead rope over my shoulder. I pushed it back with my pencil and then rubbed my hands clean and dry on my tweed trousers.

Stefanie picked up my pen from my notepad and turned it over and over between her fingers. ‘I want you to get Ferdinand van Ravensberger for me,’ she said. ‘I don’t care what on.’

I used my pencil to draw a square around the circle. I wanted to get out of the observation area but I couldn’t leave as Stefanie’s chair blocked the exit.

She pointed at the observation window with my pen. ‘He was holding up a petrol station and got unlucky when a police officer walked in. But then you know that,’ she laughed, ‘because you shot him.’

The coffee did somersaults in my stomach.

Behind the window, the interrogation continued. ‘So your uncle said he’d killed someone. You remember this exactly?’ André Kamp pulled back the chair. ‘You were pretty young at the time.’ He sat down.

The kid’s eyes followed the detective. He didn’t break eye-contact. ‘It was a traumatic experience for me. Especially when my aunt noticed me over my uncle’s shoulder. He turned round and looked this pale green colour, as if he was about to be sick or something.’

I tried to ignore Stefanie’s close proximity by picturing Ferdinand van Ravensberger with a face the colour of the interrogation-room walls. It was hard. I’d only seen him tanned on TV or in the serious black-and-white of the financial pages.

‘So I didn’t say anything. I just walked away,’ the kid said.

‘Did he ever mention it again?’

‘My aunt did, the next day at breakfast. My uncle wasn’t there, probably sleeping through his hangover, and she said: “You know he was just joking, don’t you?” And I said: “Didn’t look like a joke to me.” So she said: “Maybe joke is the wrong word. It was just a threat. He’ll never kill me and he’s never killed anyone else.”’

Stefanie rested her left elbow on the shelf and pivoted her body towards me. ‘We’ve been trying to get Ferdinand van Ravensberger on tax evasion and money laundering for ages. When we found out the kid was his nephew we put the screws on a bit. After all, he took a shot at you.’ She tapped with my pen on the edge of my notepad. The smell of stale tobacco was oppressive. ‘You get all the excitement. I’m surprised you’re here, watching your handiwork.’

I wanted to snatch my pen back but instead I extracted my paper and pretended to take notes, writing random words with my pencil. The tip snapped. ‘So why didn’t you ask the kid about Van Ravensberger’s financial setup? Much more your thing,’ I said.

‘That’s what we wanted. But he kept talking about this murder.’

I had to stretch to peer over Stefanie’s shoulder in order to keep watching the interview.

In the room, André Kamp was saying, ‘Your aunt tells you he’s kidding, but you don’t believe her.’

‘He’s killed someone,’ the youth insisted.

The detective tipped his head back and looked at the ceiling. Then he faced Ferdinand van Ravensberger’s nephew again and scratched his greying head. ‘Problem is, you don’t believ. . .