A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1) Read Online Free Page B

in my hand and took the five of hearts. It went at the end of a run, leaving me with just three to get rid of. We sat at our usual places at the table, my mother at the head and me to her left, and played our Wednesday evening game of cards.
    I sat back in my chair and almost brushed against the Christmas tree in the corner. With the addition of the tree, all the furniture was in intimate contact, the leg of an oak chair touching the arm of the sofa, and there was hardly room to move around. Two strings of Christmas cards dangled down either side of the door, most of them from people who went to my mother’s church.
    ‘Lotte, you don’t look at all well,’ my mother said as she added a six to my five. She reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.
    I pulled back. ‘I’m fine.’ Through the gaps in the tablecloth, I could see the large dent in the wood. In an old gesture I rubbed my thumb over the mark in the table, where I had once tried to carve my initials with my knife. It hadn’t been sharp enough to let me succeed but a thick line in the light oak showed the start of a capital L. I was eight or nine. I couldn’t remember why I did it, but I could clearly remember my mother’s anger and the punishment that followed.
    ‘I’m worried about you,’ she went. ‘I saw the photos – you looked so tired.’
    ‘Which ones?’ Cards in one hand, I wrapped the other around my mug of tea for warmth. My mother kept her small flat a couple of degrees colder than was comfortable, saving money on the heating. The mug with the smiling clown was the same one I’d had when I was five. My mug, my plate, the cutlery with my initials on it – they all came out as soon as I was here. Even the smell of boiled kale, which my mother had had for her early dinner, mashed together with some potatoes and probably with a sausage or some diced bacon, reminded me of childhood.
    ‘The ones in the paper,’ she said, and picked up her mug in a gesture mirroring mine, her other hand shielding her cards close to her chest. I hoped the heat warmed up her ringless fingers with their swollen knuckles. ‘In the
Telegraaf
. I threw it away. You looked just awful.’
    ‘Thanks, Mum.’ I rearranged the run and slid my four of hearts in between. Two to go. I knew the one she meant. I’d cut it out of the paper and put it in the black ring-binder with my press cuttings, a history of all the cases I’d worked on in my eighteen-year career. They had taken the photo just after the team had carried off Wendy’s skeleton. My head was bowed low, and you could only see one side of me, but the streaks of tears down my cheeks were clear; my plait had come partially undone and strands of hair streamed down. I remembered the flash of the photographer, the annoyance of being caught and eternalised like this.
    ‘You have to look after yourself. You’re getting too thin.’
    I laughed. Who was she to talk? You could see every bone in her skull. Her cheekbones looked so sharp, they might cut through the wrinkled skin that hung off them. At seventy-three she should carry a bit more weight or the first bout of flu would take her away. Her hair, short and curly, was as white as the home-knitted jumper she was wearing. She looked as if she’d melt away against the snow outside.
    ‘You didn’t like having your picture taken, did you?’ She picked up a new card from the stack, grimaced and slid the card with its red back between two blue ones. The backs of both packs were equally faded, the red cards now the colour of my mother’s cracked lips, the others the shade of her eyes, bleached by age from sky to duck-egg blue. We always used this double set; not a single card had been lost in over twenty years of playing.
    ‘No, I hated every second of it. All those photographers looking at me, clicking away, lights going off in my face.’
    ‘Even as a child.’ She smiled at the memory. ‘You’d scream as soon as I got the camera out.’
    ‘I