The Statement That Stood

The police station waiting area was almost empty the next morning. Lena chose a different chair from the day before. Opposite her was the same coffee-stained magazine, closed now. She had brought her own account of the afternoon, written before bed. Anouk took it and laid it beside her notepad.

‘We’ll start with what you saw and heard yourself,’ she said.

They went through the movements in the workshop. Lena drew the table and the two ways out on a blank sheet. She hesitated over the distance between the chair and the passage by the shelves. Instead of adding a measurement, she wrote that she hadn’t measured it. When she described Niels holding Cor, Anouk asked which hand she had seen. Lena closed her eyes briefly. She had been behind him. She was no longer sure whether it was left or right.

‘Put that down,’ she said. ‘I saw him holding Cor. I don’t remember which hand.’

Anouk nodded and went on. Had Niels taken the folder before Nora came in? Lena remembered the loose sheet on the floor. He had been holding the folder then. She couldn’t say what happened inside after she left. Cor and Nora had their own statements to give.

Towards the end, Henk’s name appeared on the paper again. Lena found she could be calmer about facts she couldn’t confirm herself. She hadn’t seen the push. She understood the seriousness of what had been concealed, but Sofie was the witness who had seen it and handed over her messages. The truth didn’t need to come through Lena to be useful.

‘I didn’t speak to Sofie yesterday,’ she said.

‘You don’t need to have done for this statement.’

‘I wanted to know if she knew.’

‘She’s been contacted. What else she chooses to share is up to her.’

Lena read the written account, corrected a house number that had been reversed and signed. She felt no relief as the sheet passed back across the table. It was a job done.

Outside she rang Mieke. Her own afternoon appointment was still in the diary. Sofie would be coming later too; Lena knew because Sofie had told her herself in a message. Mieke asked whether she would prefer a shorter appointment. Lena was willing to try as planned. If she grew tired, she would say so.

She arrived ten minutes early and waited in reception. Mieke had asked her to keep the roles separate: Lena could explain the corrections to the building report, but wouldn’t negotiate between Sofie and the housing association. A magazine about walking routes lay on the chair by the door. Had she been in a single building that week without a magazine nobody read?

Sofie came with Yara. Despite the dry weather, she wore a yellow raincoat. Yara went to the water jug on the cabinet, first asking whether she could use it. Mieke came out of her room and said she was ready.

Sofie stopped beside Lena. ‘You went out through the back door?’

‘Yes.’

‘Cor had shown you.’

‘Before. When I was just there for work.’

Sofie nodded, smoothing the sleeve of her coat. ‘Yesterday, when they rang about him, I found it hard not having to come. I thought they’d want me to go somewhere and identify him again.’

‘There were other people with him.’

‘Yes. I know. For so long I thought it only counted if I still had something else to do.’

Yara brought them water and kept a glass for herself. Mieke asked whether Sofie minded Lena staying a little longer before their own appointment began. Sofie had something to ask her. They sat at the small reception table. Mieke left her office door open and stayed within reach without taking over.

‘That report of yours,’ Sofie said. ‘Could he have used it to say I wasn’t allowed to live there any more?’

‘Not on its own. It didn’t end your tenancy.’

‘But they kept bringing it up. They’d say an expert had been. That you’d said I couldn’t stay.’

‘I didn’t say that. I recorded the leak and the small damp patch. And that you lived there. That’s the report I sent.’

Sofie held her glass in both hands. Had Lena said the electricity must be cut off too? No. She hadn’t found any reason to cut power to the whole house. What happened on 11 May had to be checked against the instructions and records for that work. A stopped clock wasn’t enough to point to one person.

‘Eleven seventeen,’ Sofie said. ‘That was just where it stopped. I kept looking at it. My phone showed later. I had to charge that at work.’

She shook her head. ‘There was always something I couldn’t sort out. Keeping food cold. Doing a wash. Getting an answer. Ruben said I’d be better off taking the money. Said I’d find a flat. He never named one I could actually have.’

Lena looked at the rim of her own glass. She knew sums on job letters and lines in a file. Now she was hearing what a single line of instructions did to someone’s day, what spoiled in a fridge before anyone ever signed a paper about leaving.

‘My report should never have been made to describe an empty house,’ she said. ‘I should have read the final version.’

‘You’re not the one who pushed him.’

‘No.’

‘But I want your other mistake to stay yours. Otherwise I have to pretend one person did everything and everyone else just stood there.’

Lena nodded. ‘It will.’

Sofie laid her hands flat on the table. She didn’t tell the whole evening again, just the moment she had seen from the back window: Henk by the steps, Niels directly in front of him, the movement towards Henk’s chest. One hard push. Then Henk had dropped out of the space below her window. She hadn’t been able to follow every movement of the fall. She had seen what came before it.

‘I remember thinking I had to go downstairs,’ she said. ‘But I was afraid he’d look up. Perhaps he already had. I was beside the window and I didn’t dare look again. I don’t know whether he saw me then.’

Yara let her finish. Lena didn’t ask for minutes. Sofie’s account was with the police, its limits recorded. So were the messages she had kept and the other information from those days. Henk had had a phone Niels wanted. His ordinary appointments helped establish where people had been; he couldn’t have recorded his own death.

‘I went out along the path,’ Sofie said. ‘I only had my bag. Afterwards it got harder and harder to go back and say what I’d seen. In the end Yara said I wasn’t doing myself any favours by waiting.’

‘I put it a bit less politely,’ Yara said.

Sofie looked at her. ‘You said I could do your washing-up every morning, but I couldn’t tell you every morning that I’d ring tomorrow.’

‘That too.’

Mieke appeared at her office door. She had taken a call and put the phone down again. Sofie said she would be there in a moment, then leaned towards Lena.

‘My brother’s spoken to them. Of his own accord. I want to know that. I don’t know yet whether I want to speak to him.’

‘Those can be separate decisions,’ Lena said.

Sofie picked her coat up from the chair. She didn’t look happy as she stood, though the tension around her mouth had eased. Yara took the empty glasses back to the cabinet. Could Lena come back in half an hour for the final attachments, Mieke asked. They needed Sofie’s permission for what went into her housing file. Lena agreed and went outside.

Ruben was by the bicycle stands. He wasn’t smoking, but held an unopened packet of cigarettes. He put it away when he saw her.

‘Is she in there?’

‘She has an appointment. I’m not speaking for her about who she wants to see.’

He nodded. ‘I rang Mieke. She was going to ask whether Sofie wanted anything from me today. Not me. Just the papers.’

‘What papers?’

‘My own breakdown. What I was paid. Which addresses. I’ve given it to the detectives too.’

Lena sat on the low wall by the bicycle stands. Ruben remained standing. Marten had first hired him to help people move, he explained: arrange boxes, book a removal company, hand over a key. Later, his payments had begun to depend on which homes became vacant. He had got people to sign departure papers when they had no viable new address. He had called it helping because he hadn’t wanted to see himself as someone paid when other people gave in.

‘With Sofie, I thought I could help her afterwards,’ he said. ‘That made it worse. I asked her to trust me without telling her what I earned.’

Lena let him finish his own sentences. Had he been with Henk on the evening of the fall? No. He hadn’t been willing to make something up just to spare his sister more questions. What she had seen wasn’t his to testify to.

‘When you came to see me, I didn’t know where she was. I heard from her later. She said I mustn’t pass that on. For once I just did what she asked.’

‘It doesn’t undo the rest.’

‘No.’

He took an envelope from his bag. Sofie’s name was on the front. Lena didn’t take it. Ruben could wait for Mieke; the papers needn’t pass through yet another pair of hands. He sat on the wall beside her, leaving a good gap. A few minutes later Mieke opened her door and invited him in without Lena.

At home Lena found an email from Eva. Through the advisers now helping her, she had also made the information about replacing the report available for the residents’ file corrections. There was no request for forgiveness. Niels had supplied the altered wording, Eva wrote, and she had knowingly used it. She had accepted the payment. She wasn’t going to keep claiming it had been an error in exporting the file.

Lena read it again. The parts fitted together without becoming the same thing. Marten had financed the approach and pushed it harder. Niels had wanted homes emptied and supplied false information. Eva had changed Lena’s report. Ruben had earned money and reassured his sister with promises he didn’t keep. Niels had delivered the push by the steps. Sofie’s flight hadn’t been a departure on a date in a portal.

She didn’t send Eva a friendly reply to soften the end of the message. She acknowledged receipt and said further coordination of the files should go through the advisers involved. Then she closed the email.

Jip came in an hour later with a bag from the bakery. She had been working and brought reduced-price croissants. Lena took a plate from the cupboard. Was she finished with the police for today, her daughter asked. Yes, Lena said. For today.

‘Then I want to show you something,’ Jip said.

She brought up a picture of a second-hand desk chair on her phone. The armrests were far enough apart for her shoulder, she said. Lena looked at the measurements the seller had listed and asked how much Jip wanted to spend. Her daughter had already worked that out.