A Death at the Hotel Mondrian

Book 5: Lotte Meerman

by Anja de Jager

Genres: International Crime & Mystery

Synopsis

'A novel brilliantly evoking the isolation of a woman with an unbearable weight on her conscience' SUNDAY TIMES 'Succeeds as a portrait of both a city and, in its heroine, a delightfully dysfunctional personality' SUNDAY EXPRESS __________ When Lotte Meerman is faced with the choice of interviewing the latest victim in a string of assaults or talking to a man who claims he really isn't dead, she picks the interview. After all, the man cannot possibly be who he claims he is: Andre Nieuwkamp was murdered as a teenager over thirty years ago, and it had been a police success story nationwide when the skeletal remains found in the dunes outside Amsterdam had been identified, and the murderer subsequently arrested. Yet concerned about this encounter, Lotte goes to the Hotel Mondrian the next day to talk to the man, but what she finds is his corpse. And his passport shows that he wasn't Andre Nieuwkamp as he said, but Theo Brand, a British citizen. Subsequent DNA tests reveal that the man was Andre Nieuwkamp so now Lotte has a double mystery on her hands and needs to figure out not only why Andre waited so long to tell anyone he was still alive, but also who was the teenager murdered in the dunes all those decades ago. ___________ Praise for Anja de Jager 'An impressive debut. . . 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 in the vicious grip of a bitter winter is the other star here, beautiful and deadly ' Cath Staincliffe 'A tightly written, cleverly plotted whodunit that keeps the reader guessing almost to the last page' Irish Examiner' 'de Jager manages to circumvent the overfamiliar. The evocation of a bitterly cold Amsterdam is worthy of Nicholas Freeling's Van der Valk books' The Independent

Release date: November 7, 2019

Publisher: Constable

Print pages: 352

Sample

The only reason that I was in the Lange Niezel on the edge of Amsterdam’s red-light district at 5.52 a.m. was because I was doing Detective Ingrid Ries a favour. She’d sounded in a panic when she called. You had to love a job where helping out a friend led to standing at a crime scene at this ungodly hour of the morning. It was neither raining nor below zero, but I was glad I’d grabbed my woollen hat on the way out. It was late November, and winter didn’t feel that far away. The lingering darkness made it seem as if the night had hit snooze on the alarm clock and had settled in for at least the next hour and a half, wrapped in a duvet of thick grey clouds.

Two seagulls were strolling down the silent alley as if they owned it, picking up thrown-away fries on their morning patrol. Twenty minutes ago, when I’d first got here, there had been the noise and bustle of an ambulance crew and some of my uniformed colleagues. Now the assault victim had been taken to hospital and the others had gone. I shivered in my thick coat and hopped from one foot to the other to reduce the time that my boots made contact with the ground. The flapping of a shop awning dominated the otherwise silent street. A street cleaner and I were the only people here. I checked my watch: what was keeping Ingrid? Sure, I lived closer to the crime scene than she did, but if she’d called me out of bed to fill in for her boyfriend, the least she could do was not leave me here by myself.

The street cleaner was still waiting patiently, because nobody had told him to leave. He was one of those anonymous people who kept the city tidy. He was African; I would guess Somalian. His head was too small compared to his body, which was bulked out by an enormous thick coat. He glanced around him. I showed him my badge, but that did nothing to reassure him. A gust of wind pushed a McDonald’s wrapper down the road and lifted it in the air as if to taunt the man. His eyes followed it regretfully. His back was bent over the bin on wheels that he pushed all day. Clearly he would much prefer to chase the wrapper than talk to me. I didn’t take it personally.

‘When did you first see him?’ I asked. I shivered and wrapped my coat around me. The autumn air was thick with moisture.

‘First? Maybe four thirty?’The man’s Dutch was basic and heavily accented.

‘Four thirty? You called us at …’ I looked at my phone, ‘five minutes past five.’ I thought about switching to English, but he seemed to understand me as long as I spoke slowly and articulated carefully. The victim, still unconscious and unidentified but at least now in the hospital, had been found slumped in the doorway of a coffee shop with his face turned towards the wall and half hidden by the facade. I had seen him as he was being loaded into the back of the ambulance. People must have noticed him but assumed he was drunk or drugged up, and sleeping it off, and would have hurried past.

‘He hadn’t moved.’ The African’s voice was halting and soft and I had to concentrate to hear him over the sound of the wind.

‘How many times did you come past?’

‘Four times. Four circles.’

Circuits, I corrected automatically in my head, but I knew what he meant. ‘He was already here when you started work?’

The cleaner nodded.

‘Did you see anything? Did you see someone punch him?’ The victim’s face had been severely battered. I’d had a chance to swap a few words with the paramedics before they carted him off. They suspected a broken cheekbone and nose, in addition to a number of broken ribs, judging by the severe bruising around his torso. ‘Did anybody kick him?’

The man shook his head. ‘No, no fights tonight. Just the man.’

The fight must have taken place before the cleaner got here.

‘Can I take your name, please?’

‘I have a passport. I have a job.’

I smiled to allay his fears. ‘I know. But just in case we have any further questions.’ Depending on where this man originated from, it was quite possible that he’d had a bad experience with police en route to the Netherlands. To be honest, he could have had a bad experience with the police here. ‘And I’m sure the victim will be grateful to you for calling an ambulance.’ I spoke very clearly. ‘Thank you for that.’ Especially since you’re scared of the police and just want to keep your head down and the street clean. He’d been the Good Samaritan who’d done what plenty of tourists and people out drinking in the early hours of the morning hadn’t.

The man shivered. He had two scarves tied around his neck. One looked like a football scarf, but I couldn’t identify the team. The other was dark blue, the same colour as his coat. Maybe it had been provided by the council.

‘Can I buy you a coffee?’ I said.

‘Can I go? Please?’

I asked for his name and telephone number again. This time he gave me the details without arguing. After I’d written them down, I wished him a pleasant rest of the day and let him go. He seemed more grateful for being allowed to leave than for my thanks or my offer of a coffee.

The glow from a streetlight exposed the early-morning aftermath of a night filled with too much fun, empties and cigarette butts littering the places the cleaner hadn’t yet got to. A deadly silence hung around the area. In the evening it would be swarming with punters, tourists and people out drinking, but now there were just the two of us: a police detective and a street cleaner. He reached the McDonald’s wrapper and speared it with a pointed stick, then shivered again. It wasn’t even real winter yet. On an impulse, I pulled the hat from my head, rushed after him and gave it to him. He pulled it on, stretching it far enough to fit him, and thanked me four times before moving on. I watched him as he made his way carefully down the street, sweeping up cigarette butts and crisp packets.

When he turned the corner, I started to focus on the walls of the buildings along the street, looking for CCTV cameras.

I hadn’t found any by the time Ingrid finally joined me. As she walked over to me, she was stuffing the last of a croissant into her mouth. Flakes of pastry fell on the front of her coat. I was always surprised how she managed to stay so skinny. The bumps of her wrists were visible where the sleeves of her jacket didn’t cover them perfectly. She’d once told me that it was hard to find clothes that fitted because her arms and legs were so long. Her short blonde hair was brushed up into spikes.

‘Thanks for helping me out, Lotte,’ she said. ‘I should have called Bauer or someone else from the team, but I wasn’t thinking straight.’

Bauer was her boss. I understood why she hadn’t called him. ‘It’s not a problem,’ I said. ‘How’s Tim now?’ Tim was her boyfriend. They worked together in the serious crime squad. Ingrid had been on my team before moving to join him a month ago.

‘He’s better now that we know what it is. He has to have his appendix out.’ She rubbed her eyes. ‘We were at the hospital for most of the night. They’re keeping him in until the surgery.’ She walked towards the coffee shop where the victim had been found. ‘Was there any ID on the guy?’

‘No, nothing. His pockets had been cleared out. No wallet, no phone, no car keys, not even a public transport card.’

‘It’s the fifth violent mugging around here in two weeks,’ she said.

‘Weren’t the others a bit closer to Centraal station?’

‘True, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that they were all done by the same lot. They probably just spread their net a bit wider.’ She bent down to examine a scuff mark on the door that could have been there for weeks. There would be little forensic evidence available to us. If he’d been punched and kicked, there wouldn’t even be a weapon.

‘Our only hope is CCTV footage,’ I said. ‘There’s got to be a security camera around here somewhere.’

But most of the shops along the Lange Niezel still had their shutters down. Early morning was the red-light district’s equivalent of the middle of the night. It would be worth coming back once they’d opened again. One of them might have caught something on their internal security cameras.

‘Did you talk to the guy who called it in?’

‘Yeah, the street cleaner. He didn’t see anything; just the guy slumped in the doorway.’

As Ingrid continued to examine the coffee shop doorway, a man approached me.

‘Are you the police?’ He wore a woollen trench coat, a green and white checked scarf wrapped around his neck. He was smartly dressed for this time of the morning. Probably on his way to work.

‘Yes, I’m Detective Lotte Meerman.’

‘Great,’ the man said. He was wearing glasses, and his dark hair and beard were shot through with grey.

I could feel a smile growing on my face. It was possible that he’d witnessed the assault. He looked like the kind of person who would come forward if he had. The kind of person who thought it was his duty to society to report what he’d seen.

‘I thought it was important,’ he said, ‘to let you know that I’m not dead.’

Ingrid grinned at me. Her mobile rang and she quickly walked away.

I pushed my hair off my face. ‘Of course you’re not.’ I tried to keep the disappointment out of my voice. There was no reason not to be polite. After twenty years in the police force, I’d seen my share of delusional people. Early on in my career, an elderly woman came to the station every week to tell us that her neighbour had killed her cat. When I went to her house after her second or third visit, I found the cat very much alive, but also very overweight. The surprisingly understanding neighbour told me the row had started because he’d told the cat’s owner that she was feeding the animal too often. Since then, she’d got it into her mind that he was trying to kill it.

The man standing opposite me this morning was at least two decades younger than that elderly lady – probably in his late forties. At first glance there was nothing to indicate that he was mentally disturbed. His eyes were focused as he looked at me. But his hands were so tightly folded together in front of him that it looked as if his fingers were strangling each other. There was a bruise on his left cheekbone. It appeared to be recent.

‘When I saw you,’ he said, ‘I felt I should at least tell you that I hadn’t died.’

There was something odd about his speech. His Dutch wasn’t the basic and accented version that the street cleaner had used earlier on, but it was halting. Almost as if he hadn’t spoken for years.

He swallowed. ‘I …’ he started, then fell silent again.

‘Take your time,’ I said, glancing at my watch. ‘Have you been ill?’ Maybe he’d had a stroke. I scrutinised his face, but there were no signs of it.

He shook his head.

‘Is someone saying you’re dead?’A celebrity’s obituary had been mistakenly released the other month. Maybe something like that had happened to this man too.

I shot Ingrid a glance that would hopefully tell her I wouldn’t mind being interrupted, but she was still on the phone. ‘What happened to you?’ I pointed to his bruise.

‘Nothing. That’s nothing.’ He seemed to come to a conclusion. ‘I’m Andre Nieuwkerk,’ he said. ‘Andre Martin Nieuwkerk.’

The name took my breath away, and it was a second before I could answer. He was the right age.

Or at least the age Andre Martin Nieuwkerk would have been if he hadn’t been murdered as a teenager thirty years ago.

‘You can’t be,’ I said.

Colour flared up on the man’s face. ‘I’m at the Hotel Mondrian for another day.’ He rearranged his scarf with deliberate care. ‘People should know,’ he said, ‘that I’m not dead.’

Ingrid ended her call and came over. ‘That was the hospital,’ she said. ‘Our victim has woken up and named his attacker.’

The man in the long coat turned and walked away. I thought about calling him back.

‘We can speak to him now,’ Ingrid said, more urgently this time.

Even though I could see the excitement in her eyes, because this was the first solid lead in this series of assaults, she sounded exhausted and looked frazzled. She hadn’t slept all night because she’d been at the hospital with her boyfriend. Tired people didn’t always ask the right questions.

‘Okay, let’s go,’ I said as I watched the man cross the bridge.

At the hospital, we followed the yellow line on the floor that would lead us to our victim’s room. We now knew he was called Peter de Waal. I knocked on the door and we went in.

De Waal’s face was bruised and swollen and it was hard to guess his age – mid to late thirties probably. His left eye was closed, the socket black and blue. He had an oxygen mask over his mouth. A doctor was by his side, hooking him up to some machines.

‘I’m Detective Lotte Meerman,’ I said. ‘Can you answer a few questions?’

‘Keep it short,’ the doctor said. ‘Five minutes at most.’

A woman was sitting at the bedside, but she stood up as we came in. She had dark shoulder-length hair, and was wearing a tight skirt and knee-high leather boots.

Peter de Waal raised his hand, slowly, as if the movement was a huge effort, and pulled the oxygen mask away from his face. ‘Erol Yilmaz,’ he said. Talking opened up a cut in his lip, and he grimaced against the pain. ‘It was Erol Yilmaz.’ He put the mask back.

‘We told you he was dangerous,’ the woman said.

‘And you are?’

‘Caroline de Waal. Peter’s wife.’ She was still standing. ‘We told you and you didn’t do anything.’ Her voice got louder. ‘A restraining order. As if that made any difference.’

‘So you saw him clearly?’ Ingrid asked.

Peter removed the mask again. ‘I came out of the bar and heard a voice behind me. I turned round and saw Erol. He punched me in the face and that’s all I remember.’

‘And Erol Yilmaz is …’

‘My ex-husband,’ Caroline said.

I nodded. I could see where this was going. Ingrid left the hospital room to make some phone calls. She’d get us Erol’s address so we could go round and ask him some questions. Maybe he was linked to the other assaults, or maybe this was a one-off. If we could close even one GBH case, the boss would be happy. Sometimes police work really was this easy.

‘He’s been harassing us for the last year,’ Caroline continued. ‘There’ve been constant threats. Phone calls, emails.’

‘So you got a restraining order?’

‘Because you refused to do anything else. You didn’t protect us.’

‘What time was the assault?’ I felt bad asking questions, as Peter had to move the mask away from his mouth every time to answer them, but we had to know these things.

‘Around three a.m.’

The cleaner had first seen him at 4.30. If he’d got the time right, Peter had been unconscious in that doorway for an hour and a half without anybody calling it in. He was lucky he hadn’t got pneumonia lying on the pavement in the November cold. ‘Were you by yourself?’

‘With a group of colleagues. They all headed in a different direction.’

‘Can you give me their names?’

Peter lay back against the pillow with his eyes closed. He seemed to find it hard to breathe even with the mask. I looked around for the doctor.

‘What’s the point?’ Caroline said. ‘He told you who did this.’

‘We’ll still have to check the details. If one of your colleagues can confirm the time you left and the bar you were in, that would be a big help.’

‘Just arrest Erol. Before he leaves the country.’

The doctor came back into the room. ‘Please leave for now. The patient needs to rest.’

‘Sure.’ I left and waited in the hallway until the doctor came out. ‘What’s his prognosis?’

‘He’s got a shattered cheekbone and a broken nose. Probably concussion from the fall. Also a couple of broken ribs.’

‘He’s on oxygen?’

‘Yes, bruised lungs.’

‘He says he only remembers a single punch. This wasn’t a single punch, was it?’

‘No, definitely not. From the bruising around his torso, I would guess he was kicked when he was on the ground.’

That was what it had looked like to me as well. Maybe the first blow had knocked him out and he hadn’t been aware of the rest of the assault. The punches and kicks could indicate that there’d been more than one person. Had Erol Yilmaz brought some cousins to rough Peter de Waal up? It wouldn’t be the first time that a group of Turkish men with a grudge had attacked someone.

‘If you have more questions, come back this afternoon,’ the doctor said. Without waiting for an answer, he strode off.

Ingrid joined me. ‘I’ve got the address,’ she said. ‘Let’s have a chat with Erol Yilmaz.’

We were going through the revolving doors of the hospital when the sound of engines destroyed what had been a peaceful lull. I expected ambulances, but over Ingrid’s shoulder I saw a large car pull up, followed by a van, stopping on the edge of the hospital car park. The emblem of the main Dutch TV channel was printed on the side of the van.

‘Ah shit,’ I said. ‘What are they doing here?’

The car doors opened and Commissaris Smits got out. Our new chief of police was the youngest we’d had in a long time. Modern, we’d been told in the initial introduction. He didn’t look our way, but turned towards a woman, who handed him a hat to complete his uniform. She positioned it carefully and straightened it out.

‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ I said. ‘Why’s he here?’ ‘Modern’ clearly meant talking to the press a lot.

‘Isn’t that obvious?’ Ingrid said. ‘He looks good on the screen. It’s that strong jawline.’

I shot her a glance. ‘Please tell me you’re joking.’

She winked. ‘It’s what my mum said when she saw him on TV when he first got the job.’

We could have walked to the car and driven off. Instead we watched the preparations for the interview. The van spat out the camera crew. I recognised the interviewer: Monique Blom had been on the NOS Journaal last night, asking the Minister for Economic Affairs about rising unemployment numbers. This whole media circus seemed over the top and inconsiderate.

They set up about thirty metres away from where we stood, ignoring us completely. They probably didn’t know we were police detectives; they must have assumed we were visiting sick relatives. The crew finally seemed happy with how the interviewer and the commissaris were positioned and gave them a nod.

‘We’re outside the hospital where the victim is recovering,’ Monique Blom said. ‘I’m here with Commissaris Smits to ask him for his comments. Thanks for your time, Commissaris.’ The wind messed with her perfect hair, but it also blew her words in our direction.

‘My pleasure.’ The commissaris’s dark hair was better protected by the cap that was part of his uniform.

I suddenly realised why they were here. A TV crew was the last thing we needed.

‘This is a disaster,’ I muttered.

‘It’ll help us get witnesses,’ Ingrid said.

I threw her a glance. The publicity would only get her extra headaches, because it would increase the pressure on the team to get results. It wasn’t worth it for the small chance that seeing the coverage on TV would shame someone into coming forward. None of the tourists who had been here last night would watch the Dutch news anyway.

‘But still, doing an interview here? Now?’ I shook my head. ‘That’s quick. Peter de Waal has only just regained consciousness.’ Maybe ‘modern’ meant enjoying the attention. To my eyes, Smits looked more like a youthful politician than a chief of police.

‘He likes doing all these interviews,’ Ingrid said.

The scarf around the commissaris’s neck was the same blue as the band around his cap. The flame, the symbol of the Dutch police force, was clearly visible on the front of the hat. I thought he was brave to wear it, as the wind could easily grab the peak of it and blow it from his head, and the resultant clip would be on the internet in seconds.

‘We’ve increased the number of police officers dealing with this current series of assaults,’ he was telling the interviewer.

I exchanged a look with Ingrid. If only he had increased the size of the team, she wouldn’t have had to call me this morning in a panic to help her out.

‘We’re doing everything we can to stop these gangs from terrorising people in the area,’ he continued. ‘That’s our number one priority at the moment.’

‘Seriously,’ Ingrid muttered, and shook her head.

I didn’t like the emotive language he was using. Words like ‘gangs’ and ‘terrorising’ should be kept for when we actually knew what was going on with these violent muggings. The attack on Peter de Waal sounded as if it had been entirely personal.

‘These are deeply worrying incidents,’ Monique Blom said, seemingly revelling in the sensationalism. ‘What’s your advice for people?’

‘We’re asking everyone to be extremely vigilant and contact us if they witness anything. As I said, we’ve got additional manpower on this case, including one of our most decorated detectives.’ Suddenly the commissaris’s eyes swung my way. I’d had no idea he actually knew who I was. The cameras followed his line of vision. I quickly turned my back on them to stop my face from plastering the screens again. My previous cases had brought me more recognition than I’d ever wanted, and I hated being singled out.

‘Additional manpower’, he’d said, only to make himself look good. I wondered if he even knew who was actually working on the cases. Ingrid must be pissed off about this.

I stood in silence with my back turned until the interview had finished. Then I had a look to see what was going on. Once the cameras had stopped rolling, Commissaris Smits had a pleasant chat with Monique Blom. They seemed to know each other well enough. He shook her hand and went back to his car. As he opened the door, he looked over his shoulder in my direction and gave me a nod.

I was still puzzling over that as Ingrid drove us to Erol Yilmaz’s house.

The man who opened the door was smiling, but as soon as he saw us, the smile disappeared and was replaced by a frown so deep that it made his eyebrows meet in the middle. He had been expecting someone, but it wasn’t us. He started to push the door shut again, but I put out my hand and stopped it. I normally only got that kind of reaction after I’d identified myself. It seemed that for this man, most strangers who came to his front door were bad news.

Or maybe he’d been expecting the police.

‘Are you Erol Yilmaz?’ I asked.

The sides of his head were shaved and the rest of his dark hair was brushed up and gelled in the centre. His skin was darkened by the emergence of a beard. He was tall and muscular. His biceps bulged from under the sleeves of a black T-shirt.

‘What do you want?’ His voice was aggressive and confrontational. I could imagine him taking out Peter de Waal with a single punch.

‘Detective Lotte Meerman,’ I said, showing m. . .