Death at the Orange Locks

Book 6: 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 __________________ Keeping it in the family... After her painful divorce four years ago, Lotte Meerman has kept well away from Arjen, her ex-husband, and his new wife Nadia. So when they both visit her at central Amsterdam's police station to report Nadia's father missing, Lotte is shocked - but hides it well. Then two days later a dog walker reports the discovery of a body near the Orange Locks, built to keep the sea out of Amsterdam, and the missing man is identified as Nadia's father. Lotte wants to stay away from the investigation but his widow, Margreet, keeps searching her out as she has no idea it was her daughter who was pivotal in the marriage break-up. She wrongly identifies Lotte as a friend and tells her that Patrick had been a great husband and father, and a successful businessman. But when Lotte digs into Patrick's past, she discovers instead a failing company and a man with a history of making unwanted sexual advances to his female employees. Margreet is unaware of any of this. And the more Lotte investigates the dead man's past, the more she finds to suggest that her ex-husband is somehow involved in his death... ______________________ Praise for Anja de Jager: 'Succeeds as a portrait of both a city and, in its heroine, a delightfully dysfunctional personality' Sunday Express 'Impressive' The Times

Release date: October 15, 2020

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 336

Sample

There was a noticeable chill in the air as Thomas Jansen and I stood on the northern bank of the IJ, close to the Orange Locks. He wore his thick jacket done up to under his chin and had his hands stuffed deep in his pockets. Earlier, when the sun had been out, there had been a hint of warmth in the air, but now the wind blew over the water and took the temperature down a couple of degrees.

This water was the source of Amsterdam’s wealth. It was now a river but it still carried memories of when it had been part of the South Sea, many centuries ago. To my eyes, even today it still seemed like a sea, with massive cruise ships docking at the inland harbour and ships carrying freight. Across the wide expanse, the buildings of the port were clearly visible, shaped like massive whales, as if the captains needed that visible reminder to help them figure out exactly where they were supposed to dock. It would take a ferry more than five minutes to cross from the south bank to the north.

The Orange Locks were the border of where Amsterdam ended and the villages began. To the east, the IJ became the IJssel and then the IJsselmeer, a lake so large that early last century a small section of it was poldered to build a city, which now had over a hundred thousand inhabitants. Before the enormous Orange Locks had been built in the 1870s, that lake had been part of the sea.

The Dutch obsession with controlling our waterways had no limits. When we saw water, we could never just leave it be. There was always the question of what we could do with it: polder it and build a city on it, swim in it, dam it, build bridges over it, send boats across it.

Or, in the case of the man I was looking at, die in it.

The body lay on top of a plastic tarpaulin, and yellow tape cordoned off part of the road. Even though it was hard to judge someone’s age after they’d been in the water for a long time, I was quite sure he was middle-aged. He was the right age to have been on one of the river cruise ships. I could only hope that wasn’t the case, because it would be problematic. We could do without a boat holding thousands of people being stuck in Amsterdam’s inland harbour, or having to track down someone who’d been on a ship that had already departed days ago.

‘I’ve got to ask,’ the female police officer in uniform said. ‘You’re Lotte Meerman, aren’t you?’ Her trousers were wet up to her knees. The fluorescent yellow of her jacket stood out against the dark grey of the water.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s right.’

She grinned from ear to ear. ‘I thought I recognised you.’ Her smile was nearly as bright as her jacket. She didn’t look old enough to be a police officer. Her partner didn’t look much older. That was clearly a sign of my own ageing.

‘Why didn’t you leave him in the water?’ Thomas cut through the chat.

‘I’m sorry.’ Her smile rapidly disappeared. ‘I know we’re supposed to do that.’

That was standard procedure. For floaters, careful recovery was important. The water cooled the body down quickly but then kept it at that temperature. Especially at this time of year. It made it easier for forensics.

‘If you knew that, why didn’t you do it?’ Thomas asked.

‘We thought that maybe he was still alive,’ her partner said.

I couldn’t understand why they’d thought he could possibly have been alive. The body was bloated. This guy had been in the water for days. It was much more likely that they hadn’t thought at all but had acted before their brains had kicked into gear.

‘Right,’ Thomas said. ‘He was floating face down, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes, and as soon as we turned him over, we saw he was dead,’ the female officer said.

We had been called in because there were cuts and bruising on the man’s face. That didn’t necessarily mean that he had been assaulted before he drowned. He had been floating in a body of water used by a number of large vessels and could have been hit by any of them postmortem. The forensics team would examine the body more closely to see what had happened. Death had not been that recent. If I’d had to guess, I would have said that he had died less than a week ago. Luckily, we didn’t have to rely on my guesswork.

‘Leave a floater in the water next time.’ Thomas was right to pull them up on it. I would have let it go because it was chilly enough today that it didn’t matter a great deal. Had it been the height of summer, it would have been a different story.

I wondered how long these two had been police officers. They’d carefully taped off the area around the body. Sure, we would want people to stay away from the corpse, but this wasn’t the crime scene. Who knew where he’d actually entered the water. I wasn’t sure it was even a crime. As the body was fully dressed, he could have just fallen in somewhere. It wouldn’t be the first time that someone, possibly drunk, had toppled into a canal and died. The postmortem would tell us an awful lot more.

‘We thought it would take a while before we’d get help out here,’ the male officer said. ‘That everybody would be at Centraal station.’

There had been a suspected terror alert at Amsterdam’s main station this morning. Apparently a reliable source had given a warning of a large-scale impending attack and it had sparked a major operation. The station had been closed and the capital was on high alert. While most of our colleagues were involved with that, Thomas and I had to stand here at the water’s edge and deal with a body. It was the icing on the cake that the first officers on the scene had already messed up. With a bit of luck it would turn out to be an accidental death.

‘But at least we got to meet you,’ the female officer said to me. ‘I’m sorry we messed up.’ She handed me a wallet. ‘This was in his inside pocket. The other pockets were empty.’ She paused for a second. ‘I checked as soon as we’d pulled him ashore. That will help you identify him, won’t it?’ She was desperately keen to have done something right, bless her.

‘He still had his wallet?’

‘Yes, his coat was zipped up, so it hadn’t fallen out.’

I opened the wallet. There were credit cards and a driving licence. They were heavily water-damaged but the plastic had done its job and the details were still readable. The dead man’s name was Patrick van der Linde. His address placed him on the south side of the water, on the KNSM Island. He was a local, then.

‘Have you notified his next of kin?’ I asked.

‘No, we waited for you.’

Thomas grimaced, but I would have waited too. Nobody liked having to tell someone that their husband, son or father had died.

The face of the male cop was starting to look as grey as the cloudy sky. ‘Go and dry off,’ I said. ‘We’ll take it from here.’

After they’d walked off, I went over to speak to the woman who’d first spotted the body. ‘At what time did you see him?’ I asked her.

‘I called you as soon as I noticed him,’ she said. ‘It was just after nine, I think. I was out walking my dog.’

‘You always walk your dog here?’ Thomas asked.

‘Yes, I always take the same route.’ She smiled at him and ignored me. I guess he was attractive in the way of a man who had been cute when young and hadn’t aged too badly. I bet he used more skin treatment products than I did. I didn’t hold that against him. ‘Twice a day: morning and evening.’

‘The body wasn’t here last night?’ I asked.

The woman shrugged. ‘I’m not sure. I don’t think I would have seen it in the dark.’ She was definitely less interested in answering my questions. She wasn’t excited to meet me.

It did surprise me that nobody had spotted the body before that. There were always a lot of joggers and dog walkers using the path along the water’s edge. Maybe someone had seen him but not called us, or maybe they’d thought it was only a mannequin or something. It was possible that he had floated closer to the middle of the shipping lane, less easy to see from the road. Over a hundred thousand boats a year went through the locks, and if it had been the height of summer, I would have expected one of them to have spotted him. How quickly drowned people were found all depended on where they’d entered the water and what the current was like, and of course whether we were searching for a body or not. If we were lucky, they would wash up at one of the banks quickly. With this man, it had taken days.

‘He was face down,’ the woman said. ‘Otherwise I would have jumped in to try to save him, but he was floating, his arms stretched out. He wasn’t moving.’

‘He’s been dead for days,’ Thomas said.

‘That’s what I told them,’ she pointed at the two cops in the distance, ‘but they insisted on dragging him out. I don’t think they really listened to me.’

I wondered if their minds had been on the attack at Centraal station that they had been excluded from rather than on the task at hand. Alternatively, maybe this was the first dead body they’d dealt with and adrenaline had kicked in and they’d acted instinctively.

I took the woman’s details and told her to go home. We might have more questions for her later, but I doubted it. Forensics arrived. They bagged up the body and took it to the lab.

I held up the driving licence to Thomas. ‘Better do this, hadn’t we?’ It would be unpleasant and we should get it out of the way.

The KNSM Island had been created at the beginning of the twentieth century. The word ‘island’ always made me think of naturally shaped pieces of land, like Texel in the north of the Netherlands. This island wasn’t like that at all. It displayed the Dutch liking for straight lines. The perfect edges screamed that this land was artificially made, but since that was the case with so much of the Netherlands anyway, it didn’t stand out. A large part of the country had been reclaimed from the sea, and this island in the IJ was no different.

The KNSM – the Royal Dutch Shipping Company – had constructed the island to accommodate their factories and warehouses. Naming it after themselves was probably the ultimate in advertising; or perhaps the ultimate in hubris, because not long afterwards, they went bankrupt. After that, the land hadn’t been used for decades, and squatters had moved in and made the place theirs. But twenty years ago, Amsterdam’s relentless expansion had created a need to use every centimetre of land that could be found, and the island had been redeveloped. Right at Amsterdam’s eastern edge, it was now a trendy and buzzing part of town.

The address on the driving licence was at the far end. Flats had been built in a large ring around a communal open space dotted with concrete benches and plants. Patrick’s flat was on the twelfth floor. I pushed the button for the lift. Not many places in Amsterdam had lifts. If there was anything that identified the city – apart from the amount of water – it was the steepness and height of its stairs. In my place along the canal, I had to go up three vertiginous flights of steps before I reached my front door. I liked to think that they kept me fit, though if you had problems with your knees, there were better places to live. Here, we went up twelve floors without having to do any work at all.

I rang the doorbell. A woman with blonde highlights opened the door. From Patrick’s driving licence, we knew he’d been in his late fifties. This woman looked about the same age. People would probably describe her as well preserved. She wore a string of pearls, and fake diamonds adorned the front of her black loafers. Her pink lipstick was perfectly applied.

‘Yes?’ she said. ‘How can I help you?’ She didn’t seem distressed. This struck me as odd. The man we’d found had been dead for days. Surely she must have been worried about him, unless he was in the habit of leaving home for a week without contacting his wife.

‘I’m Detective Lotte Meerman,’ I said as I showed her my badge.

‘Of course, I’ve heard of you,’ she said, smiling widely. ‘Come on in. I’m Margreet. Margreet van der Linde.’

I hadn’t been surprised when my uniformed colleague had recognised my name, but the fact that members of the public were now doing the same was disconcerting. Margreet’s smile indicated that she was pleased I was here. That she’d been expecting me, almost.

It made me feel even worse about the news we had to give her.

It was always in moments like these that the professional defence, the ability to keep an emotional distance, melted away. I had no problems looking at a body, but death became reality in the face of the people who were left behind.

We followed her down a narrow corridor, past a glass door to the kitchen and into a living room with a circular table at one end and a sofa at the other. The windows gave an uninterrupted view over the water of the harbour and the houses on the other side. Margreet sat down on a large leather chair.

‘I’m so sorry to have to give you bad news,’ Thomas said. ‘A man was found drowned this morning and we have reason to believe it’s your husband.’

The smile on her face didn’t disappear. ‘No, no, that can’t be right.’ She waved her hands in front of her energetically, palms facing us, to indicate that we were clearly wrong and to ward off our negative words. ‘Pat’s a really good swimmer. Thanks for coming here, but it must be someone else.’

‘We don’t know exactly what happened yet,’ I said, ‘but we found this on the body.’ I showed her the wallet and its contents. ‘Is that his?’

She kept eye contact with me and didn’t even glance down. ‘I’m sorry you’ve had a wasted trip; it can’t be him.’

‘We would like you to formally identify him,’ Thomas said. ‘And once we know more about the cause of death, we may have more questions.’

She shook her head. ‘I really don’t see the need. It can’t be him, he can’t have drowned.’

‘Is there someone who can go with you?’Thomas carried on as if she hadn’t said anything. Margreet’s unwillingness to even consider that the dead man was her husband was clearly annoying him.

I was equally convinced that the man found in the water had been the man whose photo was on the driving licence, but I also recognised her attitude for the self-preservation exercise it really was. The longer she could convince herself that her husband hadn’t died, the longer she could keep smiling.

‘It’s important that we identify him,’ Thomas said.

I looked out of the window and could see four people swimming in the water of the canal; dark shapes pulling orange buoys behind them. Not only did those floats alert boats to keep their distance, but they were also hollow and kept the swimmers’ belongings dry and safe. I knew this because one of my friends had once persuaded me to go for an open-water swim in the canal with her. Even though it had been refreshing and fascinating to see the streets from down below, I still preferred to be on dry land. If I had to exercise, I would rather be on a bicycle. It was warmer, and less likely to give me a disease. The people I could see in the canal probably weren’t taking in gulps of water. They swam like older ladies in a swimming pool, with their heads high, chatting as they propelled themselves forward.

‘Or we can ask someone else instead,’ Thomas persevered, ‘if you don’t feel up to it.’

‘Well, you know my daughter.’ Margreet looked at me. ‘Should I get her to go? Even if there’s really no point?’

I stopped looking at the swimmers. ‘I know her?’

‘Yes. My daughter and my son-in-law met with you two days ago. To tell you that my husband had gone missing. Surely you remember.’

For a moment I couldn’t think who she was talking about. Then realisation hit like a ton of bricks. ‘You mean Nadia? Nadia’s your daughter?’

Thomas shot me a look that I could easily interpret. It said: is this something we need to talk about?

And yes, he was right, we needed to talk about it, but not here, not now. I’d tell him what had happened once we were outside.

To give myself a moment, I looked at the swimmers again as I remembered the moment the duty officer had contacted me and said there were two people waiting to see me.

I shouldn’t have asked for their names. I should have gone downstairs and been confronted with them out of the blue. It would have been easier. Instead, I’d done the normal thing and asked who they were. As soon as the duty officer told me, my stomach churned as if someone had punched me.

‘We reported my husband missing as soon as twenty-four hours passed and the police were finally willing to look into it,’ Margreet said. ‘They told you that, didn’t they?’

I hadn’t been the one they had reported him missing to. They had only come to see me to ask if I could expedite things. When I hadn’t volunteered to take the case on – because why would I? – they hadn’t told me his name. They hadn’t shown me a photo. Nadia’s surname wasn’t van der Linde.

I hadn’t connected the dots. If I had, I wouldn’t have come here.

Thomas managed to hold back from asking me questions until we were at a café on the south side of the island, overlooking the water where I’d seen the swimmers. They’d gone by the time we got there. Margreet had given him Nadia’s number, and after we’d left the flat, he’d called her and asked her to do the formal identification instead of her mother. This was easier than persuading Margreet. I thought it was the right choice: Nadia was probably better capable of dealing with the traumatic strain the identification would cause. Charlie Schippers, our colleague and third team member, was going to accompany her. I assumed that her husband was going to come with her too. I didn’t want to think about the two of them, but I knew a conversation about them was coming up.

Thomas had gone to order our coffees and I stared out of the window. He knew me well enough to understand that caffeine would make this upcoming chat a lot easier, but to be honest, I was expecting it to feel like an interrogation.

Nearby, a row of houseboats was moored in what had once been a working harbour. This area, Eastern Docklands, was made up of more man-made islands and harbours. The boat closest to me had washing dangling from a line strung where the sail would have been: three black T-shirts and a bunch of random socks. There was a single red sock, a lone striped one, one with dots and one that was solemn black. What had happened to their partners? Had they been twinned with other odd socks? On another line, some pairs of underpants, a tracksuit top and jogging bottoms flapped manically in the wind. The top was grey, the bottoms were blue. Whoever had done the laundry had washed a load of things that didn’t go together. It was possible that they had hung them out to indicate that the boat was lived in; the equivalent of leaving the lights on when you went out in the evening.

‘Fill me in.’ Thomas’s voice broke through my study of the ship. He put my cappuccino in front of me. ‘How do you know the daughter?’

There was no point pretending, and I couldn’t think of a smart way to escape the question. ‘Nadia, Margreet’s daughter, is my ex-husband’s new wife. They came to the police station two days ago to ask if I could get involved in locating her missing father.’

‘Seriously? Your ex-husband?’ Thomas knew me well enough to have heard all the stories about Arjen and how we’d divorced less than a year after the death of our baby daughter, after he’d cheated on me and got his secretary pregnant. ‘He’s a brave man, coming to see you.’

‘His wife’s father was missing, so he thought he’d ask me for help.’

Thomas laughed. ‘But to talk to you about that, it’s … I don’t even know what to call it. You of all people.’

I shrugged. When I’d heard they’d come to see me on Monday morning, I had thought they were certifiably insane. That thought had been immediately followed by the question of how desperate they must have been.

On my way down to meet them, I’d felt worry sitting in my stomach as heavy as a millstone. I didn’t want to open the door and see the man I’d managed to avoid for four years. Amsterdam wasn’t a big city, and a couple of times I’d thought I’d seen someone who looked like him and had crossed the road or turned into a side street to avoid a situation that was only going to give me pain. But now I was going to walk straight into it.

If you’re a detective, it’s hard to refuse to talk to someone who is visiting a police station. I didn’t go to the ladies’ first to check my hair and make-up, and I was proud of that. Instead, I went straight to the stairs and headed down.

Even as I pushed open the door to the small room, I thought I could still step back. But this was work, I told myself. They wouldn’t have come to the police station if there wasn’t an issue. Also, surely four years must have dulled the pain; this was a chance to find out how much it still hurt.

It’s a surreal experience, seeing people in the wrong place. I couldn’t remember a single time that Arjen had come to the police station before, not even when we were still married. I tried not to scan his face to check how he’d aged, but I couldn’t help but think that behind the extra wrinkles, the receding hairline, I could still see the younger person, the one I remembered, the one I’d first fallen in love with and had ended up hating.

I wondered if he looked at me like that too, if he noticed the now dyed-dark hair, the short-cut bob. I wondered if he remembered our good times, or that the last time we’d met in person, I’d screamed at him.

If he’d come to talk about something serious, I hoped he saw a police detective and not his ex-wife. If I’d been him, I wouldn’t have brought the new wife, not if he wanted to get in my good books. A visual reminder of how we’d ended things, and more importantly of why we’d ended things, was not going to help him.

‘The duty officer told me you asked for me specifically,’ I had said. ‘I assume it’s not a social call.’

‘No, we need to talk to a police officer,’ the woman had said.

Even now, two days later, I thought they would have been better off talking to any other officer than me. I picked up my coffee cup to give my hands something to do.

‘Talking to me was audacious,’ I said.

‘That’s putting it lightly,’ Thomas replied. ‘Still,. . .