Death at the Orange Locks Page 3

  She shrugged. ‘I wanted to show someone and you were the only ones here. I was surprised that you’re not involved in the operation at Centraal.’

  ‘It’s not that we’re outcasts,’ Thomas said. ‘We had a floater to look at.’

  ‘I guess not everybody can be involved in the terror attack. Someone has to do the normal everyday crime too.’

  ‘If this turns out to be natural causes, we might well get assigned to help them out,’ he said. ‘If they need it.’ He looked at the article for no longer than I had and handed it back to her.

  Now that she had achieved what she’d come for, Stefanie got up and headed for the door, carrying the magazine proudly, ready to show the article to anybody kind enough to ask about it.

  Charlie Schippers came back in just as she was leaving. ‘It was Patrick van der Linde,’ he said, giving me a look like a spaniel trying to be angry at its owner for not taking it out for a walk. Having to do a formal identification with the family was nobody’s favourite part of the job. ‘The daughter and her husband recognised him immediately,’ he added. ‘Not a shadow of doubt.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I said. I didn’t mean that it was good that Patrick van der Linde was dead, of course, but at least we had a name to put to the body.

  Charlie had joined our team not that long ago and already seemed to regret it. The traffic police, his previous department, would be right in the middle of today’s events at Centraal. He must have been wishing he was still with them.

  Thomas dropped a folder on my desk. He’d been meeting with the pathologist and knew I always started with the photos. I would normally have gone with him, but I’d stayed at my desk. It seemed important to make the point that I wasn’t working on this case.

  ‘The pathologist pretty much ruled out accidental death,’ he said.

  Well, that was one hope dashed. ‘He was beaten up?’ I said.

  ‘The majority of the wounds were postmortem, according to the pathologist. Probably happened over the four or five days that he’d been dead. Floating in a busy shipping lane will do that.’

  ‘Five days?’

  ‘Or thereabouts.’

  ‘It’s astonishing that nobody saw him before,’ Charlie said.

  I thought about how the body had looked when we’d first seen it at the edge of the water. ‘He was fully dressed. Thick coat, woollen jumper, shoes. Everything would have been soaked through. It might have been some time before he surfaced.’

  Thomas took a photograph out of the folder. ‘The pathologist said that only this one,’ he pointed at a large wound on the back of the victim’s head, ‘was done when he was still alive. Something heavy with a straight sharp edge. She suggested that potentially a standard-size builder’s brick would have done it.’

  ‘A brick? Someone hit him over the head with a brick?’ Charlie said. ‘So he was dead before he hit the water?’

  ‘No, there was water in his lungs. He drowned.’

  ‘He fell into the water when he was hit?’ Charlie frowned.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Or they pushed him in on purpose after they’d bashed him on the head.’

  ‘Wouldn’t he have come round once he was in the water? It’s not that deep along the edges.’

  ‘We don’t know where he went in,’ Thomas said. ‘For all we know, he was dumped in the middle of the IJ, where it’s deep. He might as well have been dropped at sea if it was there.’

  ‘Then he would have had to have been on a boat,’ I said. It seemed overelaborate to smash someone on the head and then take him out into the middle of the lake. No, the assault must have happened on a boat. Maybe on one of the ferries – but then surely someone would have seen it happen. ‘Do you think it was significant that we found him right by the Orange Locks? Anybody leaving Amsterdam by water would have to go through there to get to the North Sea Canal or the IJsselmeer.’

  ‘Either way, it wasn’t robbery,’ Charlie said. ‘He still had his wallet in his inside pocket.’

  ‘Could it have been an accident?’ I really wanted it to be an accident. ‘What if he fell and hit his head on a sharp edge?’

  ‘And rolled himself into the water afterwards? I don’t think so. Also, looking at the shape of the wound, the lower edge is deeper than the top edge. The pathologist said that an object was brought down on his head with force. That’s why she ruled out an accident. He was hit with a downward motion.’

  That made sense. If he’d fallen onto something, it would have been the other way around. ‘Okay. Someone bashed his head in and he ended up in the water. What about the timing?’

  ‘The pathologist said that it would be very hard to establish an exact time of death. The water was cold, so that would have slowed decomposition down, but there’s a temperature difference between the deep water in the centre and the shallow sides. We don’t know how long he’d been floating there for, so she was reluctant to give us anything more precise than that he was killed between Friday evening and Saturday morning. If we need a tighter timescale, she can do some flotation tests.’

  Some of the stream patterns of the river were carefully documented to help the ships navigate the shipping lane into Amsterdam’s inland harbours. If we needed more certainty, we would have to first find out exactly where Patrick had hit the water, then track the pattern to where we had found him. The only way to get exact timings would be to follow a pig’s carcass across the water, and the cruise ships didn’t like it when we did things like that. Our forensics scientists might find it a fun experiment, but we would only do it if it was absolutely crucial to our investigation.

  There were easier ways to make the window smaller. ‘He was at a company dinner on Friday evening and didn’t come home after that. It was close to his place of work,’ I said, remembering what Arjen and Nadia had told me. ‘It’s in the missing persons report.’ I still had it open on my screen. ‘According to this, the do finished around ten p.m. We could check out any CCTV in the area, see what we can find. Maybe one of the cameras picked him up, though there aren’t that many of them around there. It’s going to be tricky to find out where it actually happened.’

  ‘You hate it, don’t you,’ Thomas said, ‘that this is now a murder case.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ I said, ‘but with everybody so busy, we could do without a tricky murder with no obvious crime scene.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘Oh, Lotte doesn’t want to work on this case.’

  ‘Why? Did you know him?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘Of course not,’ I said. It was true. I didn’t know Patrick; I’d never met him. But it would have been horrible if I’d had to do the identification with Nadia and Arjen. A shiver ran down my spine at the thought of it.

  At that moment, my phone rang. It was my mother. She had a real knack for calling me at inconvenient times. ‘Hi, Mum,’ I said. ‘I’m a bit busy right now.’ It felt as though I was always saying that to her.

  ‘Don’t forget you’re coming to mine for dinner tonight.’

  ‘Of course. I know that.’ We always met on Wednesday nights, so I didn’t understand why she felt the need to confirm.

  ‘Don’t be late.’

  I looked at my watch. ‘I’ll be here for a bit longer. A couple of hours maybe?’ I should round things off neatly.

  ‘Can’t you come earlier?’

  ‘Earlier?’ I looked at Thomas. ‘Hold on.’

  ‘You can head off home if you want to,’ he said. ‘Charlie and I can take it from here.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  He nodded.

  ‘I’ll make it up to you tomorrow,’ I said.

  But that was a lie. He’d be annoyed with me tomorrow, because I was going to ask the chief inspector to take us off this case.

  Chapter 5

  My mother was busy in the kitchen, and all her bustling about made me nervous. She wasn’t a great cook and I wished she’d just ordered a Chinese takeaway instead of trying to make pas
ta for us. I wasn’t all that good at cooking either, but I was trying to fix that with Mark’s help. My boyfriend was fantastic at preparing wonderful meals without it taking any effort whatsoever. Even the kitchen would remain clean. My mum and I both just about managed to make something that was barely edible whilst making it look as hard as cooking a seven-course gourmet dinner.

  Some things obviously ran in the family.

  She put the dried pasta in the pan, set the timer going and added the water from the kettle.

  ‘You should start timing it when the water is actually boiling,’ I said.

  ‘Look here.’ She showed me the back of the package. ‘Add boiling water and cook for ten minutes. That’s what I’ve done.’

  I peered into the pan. The water wasn’t boiling any more after having hit the cold metal. ‘Mark always says you have to wait until the bubbles come back.’

  ‘Mark says, Mark says. As if that guy is the only one who knows anything about cooking.’

  I was taken aback. She liked Mark. She normally kept going on and on at me about not messing up this relationship. She’d snapped at me out of nerves, I was sure. What was she nervous about, though? Just about what the food was going to taste like?

  She added two minutes to the oven clock. It would probably take a couple of minutes before the water would come back to the boil, so that sorted out that problem. I decided not to say anything else.

  ‘I bought some wine,’ she said. ‘Can you open it?’

  ‘Wine? What’s the occasion?’

  ‘Why should there be an occasion? Can’t we just have a glass of wine with dinner?’

  This might not have been a matter of concern for other people, but as we usually had our weekly Chinese takeaway with glasses of tap water, I eyed up the bottle with the kind of suspicion I normally kept for the suspect in a murder case. As I opened it, I scanned the kitchen for any sign of what might be going on. The bottle had a screw top. I was disappointed, because I liked easing the cork out. There was something satisfying about the sound of the pop as it was released from the neck of the bottle. Mark once told me that natural cork shrinks when pressure is applied to it. Perfect for hammering into the tops of bottles, and the pop is the sound it makes when it expands again after being released from its prison. I wondered who the first person had been to figure that out. I pictured a man hitting all kinds of material with a hammer until he found the one that contracted.

  My inspection of the kitchen didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. My mother had laid the table with two plates and two sets of cutlery, so this wine wasn’t about finally introducing me to the mysterious other person in her life.

  I told myself off for overthinking things. Just because she was acting differently from normal didn’t mean something was up. Sometimes I thought that being a police detective made me too suspicious of everything. There were cases where people did something new for no reason whatsoever. Maybe Mum had been on a cooking course, or watched a cooking programme on TV and thought it would be fun to try something like that herself. Or – much more likely – maybe she’d got into an argument with the owner of the takeaway place and no longer wanted to go there.

  See, there were lots of innocent explanations for what she was doing.

  Still, it put me on edge. I felt that I was waiting for something to happen; that there was a bomb in the corner of the room that I couldn’t see but that could explode at any minute. Time was ticking away slowly, like the timer on that oven clock.

  I poured the wine into the two glasses my mother had put out, then took a large gulp. Better to be partially sedated for what was coming. You didn’t make it to this age without knowing when something was up with your parents. It was no different from Pippi knowing that a trip to the vet was coming up whenever I got the cat carrier out.

  I felt as antsy as Pippi and couldn’t take it any longer. ‘Just tell me,’ I said.

  ‘Tell you what?’

  ‘Whatever it is you’re going to say. Whatever this is.’ I gestured at the food and the wine.

  My mother sighed. ‘Lotte, there isn’t always a conspiracy. It’s your job that makes you distrustful.’

  Just because I’d thought the same thing a few minutes ago didn’t mean I was going to agree with her. ‘It’s the fact that you’re cooking for us and that there’s wine that makes me worried. It’s got nothing to do with my job.’

  The oven clock beeped. There was no way the pasta had been cooking for ten minutes yet.

  ‘How much time did you put on the clock?’ I asked.

  ‘Ten minutes. Plus whatever you wanted me to add.’

  I looked into the pan. ‘That doesn’t look cooked yet.’

  ‘It’s cooked.’ She switched off the gas. ‘The clock beeped, so it’s cooked.’

  I grabbed a fork and stuck it into a piece of pasta. It was still half raw. I turned the gas back on. ‘Give it five more minutes.’

  ‘Then it will be totally ruined.’

  ‘It will definitely be disgusting if we eat it now.’

  My mother looked at the back of the packet again. I could see that she thought the instructions must be wrong. I wondered if she’d deducted time when she altered the clock, instead of adding it. I was getting better at cooking, I thought, if I could actually judge how much longer something needed before it was edible. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man was king. I might be a lousy cook, but I wasn’t as bad as her.

  If it was possible to stir food with an annoyed attitude, that was what my mother was doing. Why listen to your daughter if you knew so much better yourself how to do something? There was clearly no reason to thank me for my intervention.

  Parents and ex-husbands were put on this world to try us.

  We waited in silence until the clocked beeped again. My mother drained the water from the pan and put the pasta on a plate. She dolloped red sauce on top.

  I carried both glasses of wine through to the table, which was too large for the front room, and put them on the coasters my mother always used.

  ‘How’s work?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s fine.’ I took a sip of wine. ‘Arjen and his new wife came to see me the other day.’ My mother was still in touch with them, so she would want to know about that.

  ‘Nadia? You shouldn’t call her the new wife. They’ve been married for years.’

  ‘You still call Dad’s wife his new wife and they’ve been married for decades.’

  ‘That’s different.’ It was what she always said. She forked up some pasta but didn’t raise it to her mouth. Instead she said, ‘Is she nice?’

  ‘Who? Nadia?’

  ‘No, your father’s wife. Do you like her?’

  I shrugged. ‘Maaike’s okay. She and Dad get on well. That’s all that matters.’

  ‘That’s good to hear.’

  If I hadn’t been suspicious before, I definitely was now. ‘What’s brought this on? Why do you want to hear about Maaike?’

  ‘What is it like when a parent remarries?’

  I put my fork down. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Richard asked me to marry him.’

  ‘What?’ Luckily I had no food in my mouth, or I would probably have spluttered it all over the table.

  ‘And I said yes.’

  This was insane. ‘You’ve known this guy how long?’

  ‘We’ve been going out for longer than you and Mark.’

  Going out. If this wasn’t my mother, it might have been cute. If I’d known and liked this Richard, I might have been happy for them. ‘Mum, you haven’t even introduced him to me.’

  ‘I didn’t want to.’ She looked down at her food. ‘I was worried.’

  ‘In case I didn’t like him?’

  ‘And in case he didn’t like you. I didn’t want you to dislike each other at first sight.’

  ‘Why get married? You’re both in your seventies.’

  ‘We want to live together. There are legal reasons why it makes more sense. If something h
appened to either one of us, the other wouldn’t be able to make any decisions unless we were married or had signed a civil partnership document.’

  ‘If something happens to you, you want him to make the decisions, not me?’

  ‘And it’s the same for him.’

  ‘He has kids?’

  ‘Two. A son and a daughter. We thought the first step should be that we all meet.’

  ‘I … I don’t know what to say. We should have done the meeting first.’

  ‘I wanted to tell you as soon as we decided. I want to be able to wear my engagement ring without you being all eagle-eyed and weird about it.’ She got up and walked to the cupboard. She got a little red box out and opened it to reveal a plain gold band that she slipped onto the ring finger of her left hand.

  It wasn’t that I hadn’t known she was seeing someone. When she’d told me she’d met Richard’s family last December, I had known how serious it was. That would have been the perfect time to ask her to introduce Richard to me. She had probably wanted me to ask her.

  ‘Are you going to wear a white dress?’ I asked with a hint of a joke in my voice. Getting angry or upset wasn’t going to do anybody any good.

  ‘Don’t be so silly,’ she said. But she was smiling as she glanced down at her shiny new ring.

  The chandelier in the communal hallway was comfortingly familiar when I got home, shining as if nothing momentous had been announced tonight. I slowly took the stairs up to my floor. When I unlocked my front door, Pippi greeted me with a loud meow. I bent down to scratch my little black and white cat behind her ear.

  ‘Are you hungry, sweetie? I’m sorry. Would you like some food?’

  Pippi dashed into the kitchen and I followed her. She was staring longingly at the cupboard that held the Felix. The Felix cat looked just like Pippi but without my cat’s cute black nose. I tore open a packet and emptied it into her bowl.

  Cat fed, I sat in my front room and called Mark. ‘Well, my mother landed a total bombshell on me,’ I said. ‘She’s going to get married.’

  ‘But you haven’t even met the guy.’

  ‘She met his kids and grandchildren a few months ago. Do you think she’s ashamed of me?’