A Cold Case in Amsterdam Central Read online

  ‘Darling, if I wasn’t listening, how could I repeat what you said?’

  ‘You’re watching TV.’ He was silent for a few seconds. ‘I can hear what it is. You’re watching that again. Have you recorded it? Do you have it on a permanent loop?’

  ‘It’s the news. It’s on the news.’

  The hooligan was hauled from the ground by the stewards, dragged off with his hands behind his back. They were supposed to have stopped him coming on to the pitch but had been too cowardly to do anything to get in his way. Now that he was down, they were there in force, supporting each other; a gang of them against one man. Francine turned the TV off.

  ‘Stop watching it,’ her husband said.

  Francine put the remote control back on the table. ‘It’s gone.’ She knew that if she hadn’t switched it off, she would have kept staring at it, unable to draw her eyes away from the screen. It was easy for Christiaan. He was far away, not in the front room. He would have watched it too if he’d been sitting on the sofa next to her.

  ‘It was finished, wasn’t it? The footage. It had finished anyway.’

  ‘Darling, I’m listening to you. Tell me more about Qatar.’

  ‘I’m sorry if I’m not as interesting as the TV.’

  ‘It’s not the TV. It’s—’

  ‘That particular clip. I know. Anyway, I’ll be home in time for the trial.’

  ‘We’re not going.’ As she said the words, her eyes hurt. They’d been to all the previous ones. But no longer. She didn’t want to go, and Sam definitely didn’t want them there.

  ‘We’re not?’ Christiaan said.

  Her dark-blue work shoes lay on their sides in front of the sofa. The leather of the left was stretched out of shape by her bunion. Her misshapen foot had worked on the shoe until that was equally warped. She picked it up. Turned it over. The edge of the heel had been walked off. She placed it back under the table. She’d get it fixed tomorrow.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he said. ‘We can talk about it when I get home.’

  ‘I don’t want to go any more,’ Francine said. How many men had she seen come through the court? All so similar to her brother, all with that feeling of intense boredom, that nothing was ever exciting enough, that normality was dull, that fitting in was for losers. A job was for those who conformed. Not for them. They wanted the excitement of drinking, fighting, setting up times to meet with the other groups before the games.

  ‘Does Sam know?’

  Sam. Sam D. they called him in the press, not being allowed to use his full name. Her husband kept telling her she should go under his name and drop the surname that had gained notoriety. If Francine hadn’t seen so many of the others, she might have thought it was her parents’ fault. Or maybe her fault: that she’d mothered her little brother too much, that having two mothers had made her brother rebel. But she had seen the other parents, and apart from the few who were always used as stereotypes, most were decent, law-abiding people like herself. Sometimes you couldn’t help what your children were like.

  ‘Sam doesn’t care if we’re going or not,’ she said.

  ‘And your father?’

  ‘I don’t want him to go either.’

  ‘It’ll be nice to spend some time together,’ her husband said. ‘Or do you have to be in court all day?’

  ‘I’ve taken the time off. I’ll pick you up from the airport.’

  ‘Don’t, I’ll take the train.’

  ‘No, I want to. You’re landing at eleven, right?’

  ‘Eleven oh five. But really, Francine, don’t bother. It’s easier by train.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. I’ll meet you there.’

  ‘Last time—’

  ‘I’ll be there.’

  ‘Okay. And Francine . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s good we’re not going.’

  She knew that her husband thought they weren’t going to the trial because she’d finally come to her senses and given up on Sam. In reality, it was because Francine couldn’t stand to be in court and meet all her colleagues. They would smile sympathetically, say that they were all supporting her, that having Sam D. as a brother shouldn’t make a difference to a prosecutor. But Francine knew they didn’t believe it. She also knew they were right. Every time she asked for a sentence for someone like Sam, she looked at the defendant and pictured her own brother in their situation.

  And asked for a longer sentence.

  Chapter Three

  Amsterdam Centraal station’s newly restored main hall formed the high-ceilinged nave of this nineteenth-century cathedral for public transport. I crossed the blue-and-white-patterned tiled floor and skirted past mobile chicanes of students and tourists. Before the station improvements, a departure board would rattle its turning metal strips whenever a train left. I missed the sound.

  After the light and spacious main hall, the stored luggage area was a 1970s throwback, with strip lighting and bad air. All oxygen seemed pushed out of the room by the low ceiling, which I could touch if I raised my arms even halfway. The only pattern on the floor here was that made by discarded chewing gum stuck on the dirty linoleum. Tessa sat on a chair in the guard’s office, separated from the luggage lockers by thick yellowed Plexiglas.

  She looked over her shoulder at something I couldn’t see. Her feet dangled ten centimetres off the floor. The last three days had cut themselves into her face. She probably hadn’t eaten or slept since her husband died. Her face was gaunt and drawn; all colour had been sucked from her skin by grief until only the red around her eyes was left.

  ‘She refused to pay,’ the security guard said. He stood close enough to her that he could act if she tried to leave. He towered over her. He could have lowered his chair.

  At least she wasn’t crying any more. She had been when she called me. When I’d seen her previously, she had been a well-dressed young woman, but now, in a large jumper marked with paint stains and ragged gashes, she looked like a runaway teenager. The too-long sleeve, unravelled at the edges, partially disguised the mobile phone she clutched in her left hand. The security guard had probably thought the sleeve was hiding needle tracks.

  I showed my badge to defuse the situation. ‘Her husband died in an accident three days ago,’ I said.

  ‘That’s what she told me. But I thought . . . It’s no excuse for . . .’ His uniform was immaculate. It looked new. He’d probably only been in this job for a few days. I remembered what those early days in new employment were like: you wanted to do your best and apply all the rules to the utmost of your ability. You hadn’t learned to judge yet when bending them made everybody’s life so much easier.

  Tessa looked across at me. ‘He wouldn’t let me get Frank’s stuff. He wouldn’t let me . . .’ Her voice started defiantly but disappeared in a sob.

  ‘Too young to have a husband,’ the guard said. He himself didn’t seem much older than Tessa. He rubbed his wrist. ‘She looked . . .’ He shrugged and didn’t finish his sentence. He didn’t have to. I understood why he’d refuse to let a woman who looked like Tessa get luggage from a locker without paying the fee. It was a scam that many junkies tried: steal bags from stored luggage with old tickets or those that people had dropped on the floor.

  ‘I’m sorry, Detective Meerman,’ Tessa said. She clutched the luggage ticket in her right hand, as if that small piece of paper was the last part of her husband that she could ever touch. Her wedding ring shone brightly. It should have told the guard that she wasn’t lying; had she been a drug addict, it would have been the first thing she’d sold. ‘He says I have to pay. That Frank had only paid for one day.’

  ‘Yes, the machine—’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I interrupted him. I was keen to get Tessa her husband’s possessions. I wanted her to have the answers she was looking for, and I really hoped that the contents of the locker would ease her pain. I wasn’t sure what would make it better; maybe something he’d bought for her that he’d stored at the station so that he could pick it up
on his way home, because he hadn’t wanted to get it dirty on the building site.

  Over the guard’s shoulder I could see a group of young girls, students or tourists, with open luggage. Oblivious to her surroundings, one of them was getting changed, stripping off to her underwear and putting on clean clothes from her suitcase. Her two friends turned to look at me. They must have sensed the tension, seen the shiny new guard, the grey-faced, dishevelled young girl, and me, the woman who was old enough to be the girl’s mother.

  ‘Let’s get that locker open,’ I said. Whatever Frank had stored there, we should find out what it was.

  ‘It’s thirty euros a day,’ the guard said. ‘It’s been three days.’

  ‘Her husband died. Can’t you waive the fee?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry. As I explained to your friend here’ – at the emphasis on the word ‘friend’, Tessa kicked her legs and rotated the chair, to turn her back to the guard and his official stance – ‘I can’t open the locker until the money’s paid. Only my boss can. She’s out for lunch.’

  ‘Give me the ticket,’ I said to Tessa.

  She stared at it for a while without really seeing it, and her fingers crushed the slip of paper as she balled her hand into a fist.

  ‘Tessa, I’ll open the locker for you.’ I could raise the paperwork, or I could pay up myself.

  She straightened the piece of paper out, caressing each of its creases. At one time it had been folded in four. Where had she found it? ‘I’m really sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to cause any trouble, but I got so angry when . . . well, when I had to pay.’ She rubbed the ticket with her thumb, reluctant to let go.

  I held my hand out. When she passed me that slip of paper, the size and shape of a cashpoint receipt, it felt warm to my skin.

  Tessa turned to the guard. ‘It’s so unfair.’ She sounded like a petulant teenager, acting up against her father or a teacher. She was reacting to the station guard because he was there and her husband wasn’t any longer.

  The ticket said ‘C7’. I walked to the left-most bank of lockers, scanned the paper slip in the machine, paid the extra money on my cash card and listened out for the soft whirr of an electronic mechanism unlocking. A medium-sized door to my right swung open. Inside I could see a large bin bag.

  I knew that whatever was inside it, it might not give Tessa the answers she was looking for. Sometimes accidents were just accidents. I had seen it many times before in upset relatives: the stubborn desire to prove that the death of their loved ones had meaning; the refusal to acknowledge that some things just happened for no reason whatsoever. The autopsy report had said there’d been no alcohol or drugs in Frank Stapel’s bloodstream. He’d had multiple fractures of his skull, nose and jawbones. The point of impact hadn’t been his legs but his head. All his injuries were perfectly in line with a fall from a great height, especially after those panels landed on top of him. We’d released his body to the family.

  I stopped thinking about Frank, stepped aside and let Tessa get the bag out. I looked the other way to give her privacy. The three young girls, now all fully dressed, were hoisting their suitcases into one of the larger lockers. From behind me I heard the rustling of plastic. It was a sound of such normality, the once-a-week sound of bin night.

  Then Tessa started to scream.

  Chapter Four

  When Tessa dropped the bag on the floor, whatever was inside rattled. It sounded just like the old departure board in the main hall. The bin bag sat on the floor like a fat bulbous time bomb. The yellow tie-string was a garish addition, like a cheap bow on a particularly nasty present. She stepped away from it. Her hands were shaking.

  I asked her if there was anything dangerous in the bag. She shook her head, then sank to the floor, huddled against the lockers as far away from the sack as she could, and cried, hysterical keening cries, interrupted by a sound like a hiccough every time her breath caught on an inhalation. She covered her head with her arms.

  I took a pen from my handbag and used it to open the bag. I’d been holding my breath, but the smell wasn’t bad, only the faint petrol odour of the bin bag itself.

  Inside the sack, bones were piled up with a skull on top. It had tipped on its side and the empty eye sockets were staring the other way. I could see the back, which was smooth, apart from a circular hole, just above the base. I imagined there would be a matching hole on the other side. Even though I had no idea whose remains these were, or why they were in a bin bag in a locker at Amsterdam Centraal, that hole at the back of the skull clearly showed how this person had died.

  ‘I thought . . .’Tessa whispereds, ‘for a second I thought . . . that it was Frank.’

  ‘It isn’t. It’s old,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ she said and buried her head in her arms again.

  I got my mobile out and called Thomas. ‘There may be more to the death of Frank Stapel than we originally thought,’ I said.

  ‘That builder? There isn’t,’ Thomas said. ‘He just fell off the roof terrace. An accident. Nothing suspicious.’

  ‘There’s a human skeleton in a locker he hired at Centraal. That suspicious enough for you?’

  ‘Is it real?’

  ‘Looks real to me. Better come over. Bring Forensics.’ I didn’t wait for his reply but cut the call off. I turned round to talk to Tessa, as I thought she might need comforting, but I saw that the security guard had done what I’d done three days ago: he’d put his arm around her shoulder and held her. He was talking to her softly, and I could just make out that he was murmuring that soothing lie that everything was going to be okay.

  Tessa raised her head. ‘I told you, didn’t I? I told you Frank wouldn’t just have fallen. Now do you believe me?’

  I wanted Tessa out of the way before Forensics got here. It would be best for her to be gone when they started sorting through the bones. We could take her fingerprints later. She’d only touched the outside of the bag and maybe the door of the locker. ‘Is there anybody you want to call? Someone who can pick you up?’

  ‘Eelke,’ she said. ‘Frank’s brother.’ She pulled up the sleeve of her jumper and used it to wipe her eyes. The tears made a dark mark next to a bleached patch where someone had scrubbed the material to get something else off. Maybe spilled paint or plaster. ‘I’ll call him.’

  It was another time of waiting: waiting for Eelke, waiting for my colleagues in uniform to close off this area of Centraal station, waiting for Forensics and waiting for Thomas. I’d become an expert at waiting during the time I’d been off work. I had to wait one hundred and twenty-four days before they’d finally cleared me to go back to my job. The same young policeman I’d talked to at the site of Frank’s accident was the first to arrive. ‘Detective Meerman,’ he acknowledged before cordoning off the stored luggage area.

  There was shouting in the distance. A man in a suit flapped his luggage ticket around as if it was a flag to get the guard’s attention. He barked that someone should get his bags for him, as his train was leaving in ten minutes. The guard looked at Tessa. He made sure the brother-in-law was answering the call before doing the pragmatic thing: he took the ticket and got the man’s bag out of the locker for him. He was clearly a fast learner, as that was not according to the rules.

  Eelke turned out to be a skinny young man with hair the colour of a polished two-cent coin. He carried four balls in a net and the studs of his football boots clicked as loudly as stiletto heels on the station floor. The cut of his seventies-retro Adidas tracksuit only emphasized his lack of bulk. He led Tessa away.

  Then the Forensics team arrived and filled the stored-luggage area. The three girls who’d got changed in there earlier were still hanging around on the other side of the cordon, taking photos on their iPhones.

  Thomas turned up five minutes later. ‘You know he just fell,’ he said. He wore a slightly different blue shirt every day, because his wife had once told him it brought out the colour of his eyes. Today’s shirt was cornflower blue.

/>   ‘He placed these bones in the locker the day he died.’

  ‘What time?’

  I checked the ticket. ‘Thirteen fifteen.’

  Thomas nodded. ‘His boss said Frank was working late because he’d taken the morning off.’

  ‘Where did he get the skeleton from?’

  Thomas stared at the bones again, then tapped the nearest forensic scientist on the shoulder. One of them had started by dusting locker C7. That set of prints should be fairly clear, and then we’d be able to tell if Frank Stapel put the bones in there himself or if he was just the holder of the luggage ticket.

  Edgar Ling, part of the Forensics team, stood up from his crouching position by the bag. He was short and bulky and the Tyvek coveralls weren’t particularly flattering. His eyebrows and eyelashes were so fair they were barely visible, and his eyes were glossy, as if marbles the colour of wet soil had been inserted into his skull.

  ‘What do you think?’ Thomas said.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Age of the bones?’

  ‘They’re old,’ Edgar said.

  ‘How old?’ I asked.

  ‘I can’t be sure until we get them to the lab.’

  ‘But at a guess? Are we talking decades or centuries?’

  ‘Oh, I think decades. They’re old, not ancient.’

  ‘And they’re human, right? They’re real, I mean.’

  ‘It’s a very good fake otherwise. If I had to guess, but it’s just a guess, I’d say Second World War. I’ve got some experience with those.’

  Behind the cordon, from a distance, curious commuters stared at the bones. Many of them, like the young girls, were taking photos. Tomorrow – no, within seconds, these would be posted and seen by people all over the world: photos of the skeleton in the bin bag on the floor of Centraal. I tried to see it with their eyes: the dirty station floor, the white plastic sheeting, the bones of the skeleton, the forensic scientists walking around like Martians in their white Tyvek suits, and that one dark-grey bin bag. At least I’d saved Tessa from being in the photos by sending her home.