A Death in Rembrandt Square Read online

  Also by Anja de Jager

  A Cold Death in Amsterdam

  A Cold Case in Amsterdam Central

  Death on the Canal

  A Death in Rembrandt Square

  Anja de Jager

  Constable • London

  CONSTABLE

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Constable

  Copyright © Anja de Jager, 2018

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-47212-629-0

  Constable

  An imprint of

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.hachette.co.uk

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  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 u
nderstood 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.