A Death in Rembrandt Square

Book 4: Lotte Meerman

by Anja de Jager

Genres: International Crime & Mystery

Synopsis

Guilty until proven innocent . . . It's hard for anyone to have their work scrutinised in public. For Amsterdam-based detective Lotte Meerman, listening to the Right to Justice podcast as they dissect one of her old cases is made even more harrowing as every episode makes fresh accusations of a bungled operation. As the podcast reveals hidden facts about the arrest of Ruud Klaver, the one thing Lotte is still convinced of is that it was Ruud who was guilty of the murder of a student near Rembrandt Square ten years earlier. However, when Ruud Klaver then dies in suspicious circumstances, only hours after the final podcast proving his innocence is broadcast, Lotte has to accept that maybe she was wrong. With the dead man's family passionately against her inclusion in the investigation into his death, the only way for Lotte to discover who killed him is by finding out where she went wrong all those years ago - if indeed she did go wrong. As Lotte digs deeper and involves colleagues from her past, it starts to look like the murder in Rembrandt Square was part of an even bigger deception . . . Praise for Anja de Jager 'Captures the feel of Amsterdam . . . entirely convincing' Daily Mail '. . . 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 '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

Release date: November 1, 2018

Publisher: Constable

Print pages: 320

Sample

It was 13.35 on an autumnal Wednesday, and the woman standing at the desk in the police station on the Elandsgracht was making the indoors almost as stormy as the outdoors.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ she shouted, as if the loudness of her voice would make up for her lack of stature. Her Asian heritage made her look minuscule in this country where almost everybody was tall. ‘When are you going to get off your lazy arses and do something?’ she swore in flawless Dutch. She was so petite it looked like a schoolgirl had dressed up in her big brother’s corduroy jacket. Her black hair was tied back in a topknot and shaved at the sides as if to showcase her ears, which had a row of small rings running all along the rim. Her eyes were protected by black-framed glasses.

Her entire appearance demanded the attention that her height wasn’t going to get her.

Every police station in Amsterdam had its fair share of angry people, crazy people, drug-fuelled people and drunk people, or any combination of those four, and normally I would just have thrown a quick glance at the duty officer to see if he needed a hand, and then ignored it if everything was under control.

But now I paused, because I could see the woman’s face properly, and even though it was red and contorted, I recognised her. Of course I did. Most police officers here would.

‘Please calm down,’ my colleague said. He leaned on the desk as if he needed to have a closer look, and loomed over her. ‘We’ve said that someone will come to see you.’

She continued to rant. ‘I was burgled yesterday and nobody’s been round. I’ve called and called.’

The public entrance was separated from the rest of the police station by glass walls. It was for security reasons, but it made it seem as if the woman was by herself in a glass cage, cordoned off or locked away like an animal in the zoo. It was this that tempted me to take a quick photo, until I realised how inappropriate that would be and put my phone back in my pocket.

‘Someone went through my papers,’ she said. ‘Yesterday afternoon. And still nobody’s talked to me.’

‘I understand,’ the duty officer said with a small smirk around his lips, as though he was enjoying the woman’s powerless rage. ‘But in your statement you said that nothing was missing, nobody was injured and nothing had been damaged.’

She took the elastic band from her topknot, shook her hair loose and tied it back again. The redness slowly receded from her face. ‘Was it you guys? Did you do this?’

‘Please stop making these groundless accusations.’ My colleague sounded like a disappointed schoolteacher talking to a misbehaving pupil.

Sandra Ngo having a complete meltdown in the police station on the Elandsgracht was something that a lot of police officers would appreciate. Even though she was no longer on TV, her true-crime podcast still had a huge following. Trying to prove that we were doing a lousy job made for interesting listening for the general public, but it obviously didn’t endear her to anybody here. She might have to wait for a long time before anybody came to take the details of the burglary in which nothing had been stolen.

Suddenly she looked up and saw me. ‘Detective Meerman, would you care to give a comment for our podcast?’ She spoke more loudly, but I could hear her clearly through the glass anyway.

I shook my head, as I’d done the dozens of times that she’d asked me the same question before. ‘He did it.’ The window didn’t seem like strong enough protection any more.

Sandra gave me a rueful smile, as if she’d been hoping for something else. I walked away.

‘You’re not going to help me?’ she called out after me. ‘I’m keeping your name out of it.’

I stopped and turned back towards the window. ‘Is that a threat?’

‘No, of course not. I’m just saying: one good deed and all that. I only try to get to the truth. I give a voice to the vulnerable party.’ She sounded as if she almost believed it herself. ‘Haven’t you listened to yesterday’s episode? He’s innocent.’

At least she hadn’t said his name, because for me, that would have to come with a trigger warning.

I didn’t respond, but escaped and made for the stairs: it was already late for lunch.

I did not want to think about Sandra Ngo. I only wanted to think about food. My stomach rumbled as if in agreement with my brain. Having a late lunch put me in a slightly cranky mood, and the fact that it was caused by an excruciatingly long internal briefing only made it worse. It was mitigated by being greeted by a sea of empty tables, including the one by the window that was my favourite.

But as I was carrying my lunch over to my usual spot, five minutes after the encounter with Sandra and lulled into a false sense of security, I heard someone else say the name. Instead of continuing to where I was going to sit, I had to drop my tray on the table closest to the two men who were talking. The words had caught me like a fish hooked through the lip, the stab of the memories as sharp as ever.

‘I couldn’t believe it was him at first,’ the man nearer to me said. The oversized fluorescent yellow jackets hanging over the backs of the chairs and the motorcycle helmets on the table made it pretty clear that they were traffic cops. Maybe the guy had given him a speeding ticket. If I’d sat by the window, I could have looked out and pretended I wasn’t listening to them. Now I just had to hope they were too deep in conversation to notice my odd seat choice.

‘I’d just listened to the latest episode,’ the guy continued, ‘so it was weird to see Ruud Klaver in person.’

I couldn’t breathe for a second. I took a gulp of milk and it washed some of the lump from my throat to my stomach. I had hoped the memory’s jagged edges would have been smoothed, because over the past six weeks I’d heard more people talk about him than I had in the entire ten years before. Maybe if I heard his name dozens more times, I would slowly become immune to it.

That would be the only upside of this trial by public opinion, even if the public never knew who I was. Sandra Ngo’s Right to Justice podcast was careful to talk about ‘the police’ instead of using individual officers’ names. Maybe the two men having their lunch didn’t know that I’d been one of the investigating officers on the case, or maybe they hadn’t noticed that I was sitting here at the table next to them.

It was also possible that they knew both these things and simply didn’t understand how terrible it was to have this particular case discussed over and over again.

‘It’s ironic, isn’t it?’ the guy said. ‘That this happened just now.’

‘I don’t know if it’s ironic.’ The man facing me rubbed his eyes. He was the one more likely to spot that I was surreptitiously eavesdropping. He was dressed more for a holiday in France than police work in Amsterdam, in a long-sleeved white top with horizontal blue stripes. He was in his mid thirties and had light brown hair that he wore with a side parting. My mother would describe him as a ‘nice guy’. ‘I think it’s sad,’ he said.

Sad? So they weren’t talking about a speeding ticket.

I hadn’t really kept tabs on him since he’d come out of prison, but I’d looked in the database as soon as the Right to Justice podcasts had started airing. He’d been clean. Had something changed? What had he done?

‘What did Forensics say?’ the man with his back towards me said.

‘Still waiting. Checking the car’s trajectory. Not sure it will help us much.’

I gave up any pretence of eating. He’d been in an accident?

‘I’ll go to the Slotervaart hospital later,’ Stripy Top continued. ‘It’s not looking good. As a pedestrian, you don’t stand a chance against a car.’

He’d hit someone with a car? Before I could muster up the courage to ask what was going on, Stripy Top tapped his helmet, pushed his chair back and got up. He looked at me, and I got the impression that he’d known I’d been listening all along.

I took a couple of bites from my sandwich, then went back up to the office that I normally shared with two of my colleagues. At the moment, it was empty. It was the autumn school break, and Thomas Jansen was on holiday with his family, while Ingrid Ries was having lunch with her boyfriend.

Since I was alone, I woke my PC and pulled up a file from the archives. It was the same one I’d been furtively looking at every day since the current series of Right to Justice had started to air. At least I’d stopped reading the comments on their website.

I opened the transcript of the interview with the murderer. The interrogation during which he’d admitted killing Carlo Sondervelt. In the back of my mind a little voice whispered that just because a man had confessed, it didn’t mean he was definitely guilty. Other innocent people had confessed to crimes they hadn’t committed. A woman had walked into the police station and announced she’d murdered her husband and her son. They had both, luckily, turned out to be completely unharmed. The woman had ended up in psychiatric care. A man had confessed to a rape until forensic evidence exonerated him. So yes, my experience told me that it was possible this man was innocent.

Only he wasn’t. He’d done it.

As I read, the afternoon slipped away unnoticed until the darkness came. That was earlier each day anyway, and I switched on my desk light with a click that resonated in the space. Ingrid had come back and gone home at some point. I think she knew what I was doing but had left me to it.

When I was by myself, I didn’t like sitting with my back to the door, and I thought about using Thomas’s desk instead of my own. Our office contained four L-shaped desks, pushed together to form a plus sign. Ingrid’s was to my left, by the window. Thomas had the ideal spot: facing the door and also by the window. My old case being discussed made my desire to see who was coming up behind me even stronger. It was ridiculous, of course, because not many people knew that I’d been one of the investigating officers. Plus nothing was going to happen inside the police station.

I stared at my computer screen for a few minutes without reading and then hit the x in the top corner to kill the file, because what I really wanted to know couldn’t be found in this ten-year-old transcript. As I grabbed my coat and shut the door to our office, I wondered what the quickest way to the Slotervaart hospital was. I walked down the corridor and then took the stairs two at a time. That was definitely faster than waiting for the elevator.

I left the police station through the door at the side without looking back, and passed the little courtyard garden where the metal statue was visible now that the plants had been stripped by the wind of most of their leaves. My bicycle was parked just around the corner. I unchained it. The Slotervaart was a twenty-minute cycle ride from here. The blustery northerly wind would be behind me on my way there, so I might even make it in less time.

I set off along the road towards the canal. Details of my old case occupied my mind. Sandra Ngo’s question about whether I’d listened to the latest episode made me wonder if she had discovered new information. Surely there was nothing.

Still, just to be sure, I stopped by the side of the road, put my earphones in and pressed play to listen to the latest instalment of Right to Justice. Sandra’s voice in my ears was mellow, as if talking about past crimes was as soothing as an easy-listening music programme. It was very different from the angry shrieks and shouts at the duty officer earlier.

It was dark, but the street lights were on and their glow accompanied my journey. My front lamp threw a dim circle onto the street ahead of me. The cycle path was empty apart from a scooter that overtook me noisily. I went over the wide bridge that signalled the end of the canal ring and came to the newer part of town. The road dissected a park, with statues on either side that might have been memorials to something, or maybe were just art. One day I really should stop and check. The streets were deserted. No more tourists here, no late-evening shoppers.

In my ears, there was no explosive new material. Sandra didn’t talk about anything I didn’t already know. Whenever she said his name, I blocked it out by imagining her loud shrieks in the police station. She and her team still hadn’t unearthed a single thread of evidence that corroborated the murderer’s story. Nothing to imply that justice hadn’t been done. Of course, she didn’t say so openly. It wouldn’t make for interesting listening to say: yup, the police were right, this man is guilty. Instead she did her best to keep the possibility of innocence alive, but I wasn’t convinced, and I didn’t think many of her audience would be either.

I shouldn’t have followed the podcast series as closely as I had done. The police had initially been portrayed as incompetent fools. That meant that I had been.

The road widened out as it came to the roundabout at the bottom of the park. I glanced to my right, but there were no cars coming. The wind was starting to pick up, as had been forecast, and the tops of the young trees that separated the cycle path from the street were bending under the force.

Back into a built-up area, the cycle path disappeared, but the road was empty anyway. Here it was lined on both sides by ordinary blocks of flats with shops on the ground floor. A nail bar had five treatments for the price of four as a special offer. The Indonesian toko next door flashed red and green lights, as if buying takeaway food needed to come with a warning sign. It understood how I felt.

I sat up straight on my bike, taking one hand from the handlebars and stuffing it deep into my pocket. I exhaled deeply, and tension I hadn’t even been aware of spread from my shoulders through the rest of my body. A sudden blast of wind blew my hair in front of my face, and the material of my jacket flapped around me with the sound of a sail cut loose in a storm.

‘But more of that next time. We’re on the trail of some interesting information that we think proves Ruud Klaver’s innocence,’ Sandra said.

I cycled past cars parked nose to tail that looked more depressing than they had done before I’d started listening. I was certain of this conviction. What was Sandra talking about? In the back of my mind I was worried about what she was going to dig up on the case.

When I reached the hospital, I put my bike in the covered bike racks.

‘Thanks for listening to us,’ Sandra concluded. ‘You can of course continue to post any information on our website.’

I took my iPod out of my pocket to switch off the podcast, and was just locking my bike when three people left the hospital through the revolving doors. The first was the traffic cop from the canteen. The zip of his thick fluorescent jacket was undone and I could see the striped top he was wearing underneath. He paused and exchanged a few words with the two people who followed: a woman maybe ten years older than me and a man in his early twenties. I took a quick step back towards the bike racks so that my colleague wouldn’t notice me. He got on his motorbike and left.

The woman started to cry. It surprised me. She hadn’t cried last time.

It was as if listening to Sandra Ngo’s voice had conjured these two people up. The woman now had grey hair, spiked up, and wore tight trousers and Doc Marten boots. The young man wrapped an arm around her shoulders. He was built like a bear, with a beard and glasses. I didn’t want to acknowledge who he was. He could be a young friend, or the older woman’s neighbour.

The woman’s tears shook me up enough to wake me and make me wonder what the hell I was doing. I shouldn’t be here. Before anybody could see me, I recovered my bike and left.

I hadn’t seen her since I’d given my testimony in the court case. Then, as I’d answered the prosecutor’s questions, I’d had a clear view of her. She’d been sitting motionless in the row behind the murderer, like a gorgon, with hatred blazing out of her eyes.

It was pitch dark by the time I got back to the police station. I could have gone straight home, but I knew that without the rest of my team in the office, I could get the couple of minutes by myself that I needed. I wanted to know why that woman had been in tears, but I also knew that I’d be better off not looking into it tonight. I sat at my desk, pushed the palms of my hands against my eyes and slowly counted to ten as I conjured up a picture of a cardboard box full of fluffy kittens. Just as I was putting the finishing touches to my mental calming exercise by adding a red bow to an imaginary white ball of cuteness, I heard footsteps coming up behind me and turned quickly.

Standing in the doorway was the one person I didn’t want to speak to.

The fluorescent yellow of the traffic police uniform was extremely bright, and it made me blink after the self-created darkness. The man carried his motorcycle helmet under his arm. He smiled, but seemed uneasy.

‘Can I talk to you for a minute?’ He was solid enough to keep a motorbike upright.

‘You’re traffic police, right?’ I said.

‘Sorry, yes. I’m Charlie,’ he said. ‘Charlie Schippers.’

The parents of my first boyfriend had had a cocker spaniel called Charlie. Apart from giving my boyfriend and me a great excuse to be together by taking the creature for a walk, my main memory of that dog was its endless ability to fetch the same stick from the same place over and over again without ever getting bored.

‘Lotte Meerman,’ I said.

‘I know.’ Charlie did his best to look serious, but a grin kept creeping onto his face. I could tell he was delighted to be here. ‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Sure.’

‘Ruud Klaver’s been in an accident. He’s in a bad way. He got hit by a car.’

I couldn’t say anything for a second. The fluffy kittens were running away really quickly.

‘We’re still treating it as a hit-and-run for now, but there are some doubts. It looks like he was targeted on purpose. Have you kept tabs on him at all since he was released from prison?’

I could understand why he was here, because when a murderer is hit in a traffic accident, you do get curious. ‘I haven’t followed him since his release, but I checked his record earlier today, and he’s been clean. No incidents, no contact with the police. A couple of traffic tickets.’

‘Any threats against him? Anybody saying they wanted to kill him as soon as he came out?’

‘The victim’s parents were pretty upset at the time, of course. They were angry with him, but they didn’t seem the killing type. Still, you never know.’

My phone rang. It was my mother.

‘Where are you?’ she said. ‘You haven’t forgotten, have you?’

‘No, I’m on my way now.’ I looked at my watch. It was later than I’d thought. ‘I’ll be there in five minutes.’ I was grateful to her for giving me an excuse to cut short my conversation with Charlie.

As I reached the canal where my flat was, I could see my mother standing outside my front door. We used to play cards together once a week, but we’d now changed that to having dinner every Wednesday night. I wanted to keep an eye on how much she was eating. She was too skinny for a woman in her mid seventies. Her cheekbones were so sharp that they looked as if they could cut through the loose skin that covered them. Her white hair was so short that even the storm outside hadn’t managed to disturb it.

She’d come bearing food: she was carrying a white plastic bag filled with boxes. It probably came from the toko on the corner. I didn’t hold out much hope that she’d ordered my usual, but at least she’d saved me from having to cook. Luckily it wasn’t raining, because then I would have felt even guiltier.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I got held up.’ I chained up my bike and opened the communal door. My flat was the top floor of a seventeenth-century canal house. When it was built, the tax on houses was decided by the size of the footprint of a building, so like many of the others along the canal, it was high and narrow. The stairs were steep. My mother followed me up the three flights. She looked petite and fragile but I knew she was strong underneath, and she wasn’t even out of breath when she got to the top. It was probably all that cycling she did.

I could hear my cat meowing from the other side of the front door, but as soon as she saw my mother, she froze in silence, then ran away to hide in the study.

‘How are you?’ my mother said.

‘I’m fine. Come in.’ I held out a hand for the food. ‘I was going to cook for you.’

‘I got a set meal for one, but that should be plenty for both of us.’

I wasn’t going to argue. She had a bird-like appetite, and however often I urged her to eat more, she never did. The portions from the toko were always on the generous side, and buying one meal would have saved her money as well.

I tidied up the table and removed the papers that always seemed to congregate at one end of it, then closed the curtains, blocking the view of the canal. I loved my flat. The walls were painted pale blue and soft grey, colours that were picked out again in the curtains. I had bought the place from an interior decorator in financial difficulties. I had been a cash buyer and she had needed the money. The deal, which included most of the furnishings, was done quickly. She’d had great taste and I’d had a lot of sense when I changed as little as possible.

I told my mother to take a seat at the table and went into the kitchen to get plates and cutlery. The rest of the country might eat Indonesian food with a spoon, but my mother liked chopsticks, Chinese style. It was more of a challenge and made a meal last longer.. . .