A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1) by Anja de Jager Page A

not too big for a woman who took half her ex-husband’s company just because she gave him the start-up capital.’
    I clenched my fists between my knees to make sure I didn’t slap her. I should throw her out; she was poisoning my home. What did she know?
    The evening he told me, I had come home early and opened the door to silence. I had stepped over the threshold, unzipped my coat and hung it up. My shoes echoed over the wooden floor – I wasn’t sure what to do. I sat down and switched on the TV, but as soon as a picture appeared on the screen, I pressed the remote control to go to the next channel and the next and the next, until I’d exhausted my options and switched it off. The room filled with the ticking of the clock his grandparents had given us for our wedding.
    Eventually I heard keys in the door. Footsteps moved from the front door to the kitchen. They went up the stairs. I switched the TV on again. This time I left it on Nederland 1. A talking face, discussing something, hid the sound of the clock. The steps were above my head now.
    I got up and walked around the table, pulled the curtains closed to ensure the neighbours couldn’t look in and sat down again, waiting for the next creak, which would tell me he was ready to talk. I heard him move down the stairs and across the wooden sea of the parquet floor until he stood beside me. He switched off the TV. I watched my mug of tea and listened as the leather sofa announced his weight. The clock measured out each second of our marriage. I waited as I didn’t wish to interrupt the loud ticking. I was not the one who wanted to talk.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
    ‘If you’re sorry, don’t do it.’
    ‘No, sorry. I . . .’ The clock had ticked like a metronome, counting out a requiem. ‘I’ve been stupid,’ he said. ‘I’ve been’,
tick tick tick
, ‘seeing someone.’
    I put my mug on the table with a loud bang, unable to control my hand. The glass coffee table held. ‘Stop seeing her.’
    ‘I can’t.’
    My eyes closed. I leaned back against the sofa. Its leather sighed and cried for me. I shielded my face with my hand and pressed it hard against my eyes. Then I made myself face him. His eyes seemed like little blue pebbles in a stream. I looked around me, at our room, and battled with my tears. I swallowed them with the bitter last dregs of my tea. I watched his face in the glass of the table. It had that strange unfamiliarity that mirrors give. I held my tea mug close to my chest. This wasn’t supposed to happen to me.
    ‘Please,’ I said.
    ‘She’s pregnant.’
    I could no longer hear the clock over the beat of my heart as I stared at him. I was frozen, robbed of ways to react.
    Then I raised my tea mug and smashed it with force into the table’s reflection of his face. The glass cracked. The mug split down the middle and landed on the wooden floor in two halves.
    ‘You bastard, you fucking bastard,’ I whispered. I got up and felt with my hand on the back of my right hip. My husband backed away. ‘Get out of here. Get the fuck out of here.’ It was fortunate my fingers hadn’t found my gun.
    The ticking of the clock reverberated through the room. I took one step over to the mantelpiece, grabbed the bloody clock and hurled it on the floor. When the screws, wheels and glass splinters stopped trying to get away from me, there was finally silence . . .
    Stefanie’s voice dragged me back to the here and now. ‘Is his house too big for a retired policeman?’ she said. She helped herself to another couple of chocolates without taking her eyes off me. ‘He could have taken a backhander.’
    I’d missed what she was talking about.
    ‘I read the files,’ she went on. ‘It was his last case before retirement. His last case, a witness statement disappears, a rich guy gets off the hook.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘Don’t you see? Anton Lantinga is a multi-millionaire. He’d pay a lot to see this go away.’ She took another big gulp of wine and