A Death at the Hotel Mondrian (Lotte Meerman Book 5) Read online

  Anja de Jager is a London-based native Dutch speaker who writes in English. She draws inspiration from cases that her father, a retired police detective, worked on in the Netherlands. Anja worked in the City for twenty years but is now a full-time writer. She is currently working on the next Lotte Meerman novel.

  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

  Copyright

  Published by Constable

  ISBN: 978-1-47213-041-9

  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.

  Copyright © Anja de Jager, 2019

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  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.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Constable

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Anja de Jager

  Copyright

  I: The Liar

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  II: The Troublemaker

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  III: The Murderer

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  IV: The Victim

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Acknowledgements

  I

  The Liar

  Chapter 1

  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 p
leasant 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.

  Chapter 2

  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 bedsi
de, 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.’