A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1) (33 page)

‘The loss of his firm probably hit him harder than the loss of his wife.’

Now she gave a short laugh. ‘That much is true,’ she said under her breath. Her lawyer reached out his hand and put it on her arm, ruffling the material of her peacock-blue jacket.

But I’d been given a response, a reaction, so I kept talking. ‘Anton saw Wouter when he left your house.’

She shook her head.

‘He drives off. Wouter stays behind to wait for Otto. Something happens, and Wouter shoots Otto. Wouter knows Anton saw him so he comes up with the idea of being a witness. As long as we don’t know he was the whistle-blower, and his name isn’t on any of our records, Wouter has no motive – but Anton does. Wouter probably figured it out together with his schoolfriend Ronald de Boer.’

Something changed in her face; her mouth twitched at the sound of his name. She lifted her head, and now that she was not at the other side of a pane of glass, I could see that the wrinkles around her eyes were still red and inflamed. I recognised the signs of long periods of crying.

‘Maybe Ronald even suggested it,’ I went on. ‘Ronald stalls the case: as long as he’s working on it, it will never go to court. But then it is taken over by Amsterdam. And Ronald contacts you. In order to remove both Anton and Wouter’s names, the files need to disappear. Ronald won’t respond to Amsterdam’s requests and it will all go away. Is that what happened?’

Our eyes seemed glued together.

‘Karin, this time it won’t go away. Right now, you might think it will, because nothing happened for twelve years after Otto’s murder. But this is different. A second person has died. You’re a key witness. How safe do you think you are?’

Her eyes slid from mine to something unimportant on the wall behind me. Her hand disappeared up her sleeve again. As she scratched, the cloth rode up over her arm and uncovered the raw-red marks of eczema.

I gazed up at the painted ceiling and the Dutch ships in full sail, and said, ‘After Otto’s death, there was a balance, don’t you see? You and Anton wanted Otto dead just as much as Wouter did.’

Her expression contradicted me.

‘OK, maybe you didn’t
want
him dead, but it was convenient, wasn’t it?’

She rested her hand on her forehead. ‘It was,’ she whispered. I didn’t ask her to repeat it; the tape might pick it up anyway and it was not important.

‘Wouter knows Anton won’t rock the boat, you won’t either, and you’re both implicated in the theft of the files. It’s a perfect equilibrium. This is different.’ I pulled the chair back and sat down. ‘Karin, you know this is different, don’t you?’ I glanced down at my watch: five minutes left. I wished Stefanie was here to give me a financial analogy that would make Karin understand. ‘You worked so hard to build this firm, to go from being a secretary to Dutch Business Woman of the Year. That will all vanish. Both your husbands have been murdered. Unless we make an arrest, that suspicion will always hang over you. Your reputation will be in tatters, your investors will run away, your firm will collapse.’

Karin exchanged a glance with her lawyer and that’s when I knew she’d talk. I’d finally got through to her. I let a silence fall and allowed it to last. In my head I counted – nine, ten, eleven . . . and didn’t fill the gap.

‘He came,’ she said. Her lawyer put his hand on her arm again. She turned her face to him. ‘I’ve got no choice. Let me talk. Anton would have wanted me to talk.’ She looked back to me. ‘Twenty minutes after that old man Huizen left.’

‘Wouter Vos?’ I said.

She nodded. This time I did point to the recorder and she repeated, ‘It was Wouter Vos. I hadn’t seen him in years, but he hadn’t changed a bit. Smarter, better dressed, but otherwise still the same spiteful little creep. Because of Otto’s losses we had to lay off a group of people. We thought that if we scaled the firm down, we might weather the storm.’

She closed her eyes and rubbed a finger under her lower lashes. ‘Anyway, Wouter Vos was one of the people we chose to let go. He didn’t wait long to send that file to the police. We knew there must have been a whistle-blower but I didn’t know who it was until after Otto’s death. There were plenty of people who wanted to see our downfall, but I never thought it was Wouter. He seemed too . . .’ she sighed, ‘too nice. Can you believe it?’

She let the weight of her chignon tip her head back and looked at the ceiling. ‘So there he was, back on our doorstep. Anton walked out with him and didn’t come back. I heard the shot. I was scared – I stayed indoors. I was such a coward.’

She stopped and took a couple of breaths. ‘Then Ronald de Boer turned up, with the rest of the police circus. He said I should under no circumstances reveal to anybody that Wouter Vos had been there. He frightened me.’ She stared back at me. ‘What was I going to do? He was police. He’d set it up from the start. Even after Otto’s death it was Ronald de Boer who made it clear that nobody would take Anton’s word over Wouter’s, not as long as he was on the case, not while nobody knew Wouter was the whistle-blower. Wouter had shot Otto in self-defence, he said. We had an hour to pick up those files and everything would be over. Without those files, there’d be no witness statement and Ronald promised us he’d keep it that way. So Anton got two of his friends, ex-colleagues, to do it, using names of the police-officers who’d pissed him off.’

Her voice sounded harsh over the sibilance of the swearword. ‘It was fine until you turned up. You and your digging and your bloody colleague. I recognised her but she didn’t recognise me. What did you call it? An equilibrium. And that was fine.’

‘Karin,’ the lawyer said. I could kick him for interrupting her, but I supposed that was his job.

‘Anton was fed up with it. We talked it through and decided that giving back those files was the best thing to do. But how did Wouter know that?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said – and then I remembered my father saying that he had told Ronald, who had warned him not to go. I rubbed my forehead with my hand when I realised that of course it had been my father who’d told Ronald de Boer.

The door behind me opened. Karin stared over my shoulder, her expression both frightened and angry. I saw who it was and had only just enough time to take the tape recorder and stuff it in my bag before Ronald grabbed my arm.

‘What the hell are
you
doing here?’

‘How could you, Ronald?’ I wrenched my arm free and spat the words in his face. ‘You arrested my father. You arrested him to save your friend! You worked with my father for years. He trusted you. But you gave him up for Wouter. Was friendship more important than doing your job?’

‘Your father shot Anton Lantinga. You’re the one who can’t see straight.’

I tipped my head sideways, surprised that he was continuing to lie and was keeping up this story.

‘Wouter left just before six and your father arrived just as he got into his car and drove away. I’m sorry, Lotte.’ He reached out a hand.

I jumped out of the way.

He smiled a small smile at me. ‘This is why I had to get you suspended. How did you say it? Is family more important than doing your job?’

I pointed at the bag and said clearly: ‘You’re wrong. It’s all on the tape. It was the other way round: Wouter came to the house after my father had long gone.’

From behind me, Karin’s lawyer confirmed this.

Ronald paled. He didn’t say anything for a few seconds. The silence hung in the room like a poisonous cloud.

Then: ‘She’s lying.’ He swung his grey eyes back to me. ‘Your father
was
at Anton’s house after Wouter left. And you’re suspended.’

Karin made a movement with her hand and started to say something. I interrupted her. ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s all on tape – I have the recording.’ I smiled at Ronald. ‘Oh, and I spoke to your wife – she was very helpful too. Anyway, as Karin will tell you, Wouter was there last. He came twenty minutes after my father left.’ I waved the tape recorder at him. ‘It’s all on here.’

His mouth contorted as if he’d bitten into an unripe Granny Smith apple. I put my hand on the rough material of his sleeve. ‘Thanks, Ronald. I really appreciate the way you tried to protect us.’ The taste of sarcasm on my tongue was as addictive as caffeine. ‘I—’ My mobile rang. I expected him to bar my way but he just stood and stared as I left the boardroom. Out in the hallway, I kept the tape in my handbag, securely pressed against my body by my elbow.

The display on my phone told me it was Hans. ‘What’s up?’ I asked.

‘Where the fuck are you?’

‘Amsterdam. With Karin Lantinga. We’re done. Make sure you keep Wouter Vos there.’

‘We could have kept him here if only we had a car – if you hadn’t taken our car. He went out of a back window almost an hour ago. We couldn’t follow him.’

‘Why didn’t you let me know?’ I checked my phone and saw the six missed calls that I’d ignored on purpose. ‘Sorry, I didn’t hear my phone,’ I lied. An hour ago? I knew where he was headed. ‘Could you call the boss? Get him to release my father. He’s innocent – I’ve got proof. Karin confirmed that Wouter Vos came to their house
after
my father had left. And please ask my father to call me as soon as he’s free.’

In the downstairs reception, I rested my hand on the door handle and took a few moments to collect myself. My stomach fluttered at the thought of stepping outside without a weapon to protect myself. My hesitation only lasted for a couple of seconds, for then I thought of my father in prison and opened the door.

I left the building and waited at the top of the steps. The man I was expecting appeared, walking along the canal, head bent as if to protect the mobile stuck to his ear. I knew he’d come here to tidy up the last loose end or remove the last witness, but he was too late for that. His eyes met mine when he was twenty metres away and he snapped the phone shut.

‘That was Ronald,’ he said loudly; his voice could carry a much longer distance.

‘What did he say?’

‘That I should hand myself in.’

‘It’s over, Wouter.’ The words came out in a cloud of breath that disappeared long before the reverberations died away. I imagined the sound leaving my mouth and arriving in his ear.

He stood still on the pavement below and gestured with his chin at the door behind me. ‘Did she talk?’ His hands didn’t leave his pockets.

‘She did.’

‘Ronald told her not to, but I knew she would. He thought warning her off was a better solution than the one I had in mind.’ Behind him, a woman on a bicycle passed along the canal, a small child on the luggage-carrier behind her.

I saw his hand move in his pockets. Snow started to fall and cut through the air between us. I was listening out for the door behind me to open, but so far nothing. The seconds stretched. I thought I should say something, but I didn’t know what. Instead I stood there in silence and watched the wind pull at the blond curls at the back of his neck.

‘You’ll want the gun,’ he said.

Actually, I wanted my own gun – so much I could feel the weight of it in my right hand. But it wasn’t here. It was in Chief Inspector Moerdijk’s drawer. So I waited, waited for what was going to happen next. I didn’t say anything. My focus was entirely on his right hand in his pocket. A man on a bicycle pedalled past, followed by a blue car.

He pulled the gun out.

‘Give it to me,’ I said.

‘Ronald told you to drop the case,’ he said.

My hair tickled my jawline, but I didn’t touch it. I stood still, frozen to the spot. I only allowed my lips to move when I said, ‘Otto’s death was unavoidable. Wasn’t it self-defence?’ I remembered the painting on his wall, the vibrant colours of the painter’s dreams. I remembered how Wouter had looked when I’d asked if his dreams were vibrant like this. Instead they must have been as guilt-ridden as mine.

‘That’s what I told Ronald,’ he agreed. ‘In a way, it was. Just longer term.’

He kept the gun pointed to the ground. I forced myself to look him in the eye or to look at his mouth as he was forming the words. Anything but at the metal in his hands.

‘Otto didn’t even know how to use a gun,’ he went on. ‘He stood there in his white clothes like some overweight baker, pulling the trigger without taking the safety off. He looked incredibly surprised when nothing happened, started cursing the guy in prison who got him the weapon. It was so easy to take it off him and use it.’ Wouter shook his head sadly. ‘He was going to keep coming at me, and maybe next time he wouldn’t fail. I had to get to him before he could get to me. That’s the only reason I’d agreed to meet him in the first place: to see what he knew.’

I swallowed the sudden saliva in my mouth. That hadn’t been an act of self-defence: that had been the act of a calculating killer. He’d come here with a gun to get rid of the only person who knew. Now an additional person knew and he wouldn’t hesitate.

My muscles tensed up in a need to act but I was too far away to tackle him. If I’d still had my gun, I’d have stood a chance. Now all possibility of action was taken away by my suspension, and I observed every centimetre of movement as he lifted the gun higher. Some part of me wanted him to do it – the same part that had wanted Ben van Ravensberger to shoot me two weeks ago. The same part that couldn’t scrub away the feeling of Paul’s fingers on my body and in my hair, however much I wanted to. I knew I wouldn’t get my job back, not after today. What did I have to live for?

Unlike Ben, Wouter Vos wouldn’t miss. The range was too close and I wouldn’t have time to react. My feet were frozen to the spot, on the freshly wiped top of the steps. Out of the corners of my eyes I checked the street, making sure that no innocent bystanders would get hurt, no playing children, no cycling mothers. I didn’t look at the weapon in his hand; I kept my eyes on Wouter’s face, watched the wind unravel the slicked-back hair, hoped the cold would steam up his glasses. I held my hands out to the side, palms turned towards him.

‘I’m not armed,’ I told him. ‘Put the gun away.’ My voice didn’t tremble. I kept telling myself that if I kept my eyes on his, he wouldn’t shoot – but I knew it was a lie.

He steadied his right hand with his left.