Chapter 4 - part 2

Chapter 4 – part 2

After a copious meal, and too much Chardonnay and brandy-to-go-with-the- coffee, Bobby and Suzan dragged their mother to the old standing piano. She protested, not having played in months, but in the end banged out a couple of carols, which they all sang to with gusto.

Dirk sang well, his eyes shining and his cheeks glowing with food, drink and good company. Then, when Isa collapsed and said she needed her bed, he reluctantly stood up.

 “Well, I’ll be going then”, he said.

Isa smiled. “Absolutely not,” she answered. “First, I’ve had too much alcohol to drive you to the Vesting, and second, I don’t want you to walk there, and third, I cannot afford to put you in a taxi. So there’s nothing to it, you’ll have to stay the night. You can sleep here, on the sofa, if you can bear to have Tom nap on your feet.”

The next morning they had a leisurely breakfast, which turned into lunch, and then, in desperate need of fresh air, all piled into the old Twingo to drive Dirk back to his bicycle. On the way there, Suzan suggested they needed a walk to clear their heads a bit. So they turned into the car park near the lighthouse and walked along the Zeedijk towards the 1953 Flood monument. It was typical December weather: damp, windy, just cold enough to make them push their

hands into their pockets and to make their eyes water. (Copyright Renée Koopman – If you steal this, you are a very bad person!) When they reached a breakwater just before the meadows turned to reed beds, Isa wanted to turn back. But Dirk saw some waterfowl a little way out onto the Haringvliet, and wanted to take a closer look. He climbed the low concrete wall and slithered down to the waterline. Isa, Bobby and Suzan watched him in silence. They saw him reach the breakwater and carefully walk along, until he reached a willow clinging there precariously, almost horizontally. He made as if to climb over the tree, but then stopped and stooped down towards something in the water.

“What is he doing,” mumbled Bobby. She watched him curiously, something in his body language alerting her.

Dirk suddenly stumbled backwards, almost falling into the water. He called out to the women, but the wind garbled his words. “What?” they called back, as he raced towards them, up on the dyke. When he had reached them, he crashed into the low wall. His face was as white as a sheet and his eyes were wild.

He swiped his hand across his mouth with a desperate movement. “There’s a dead...a dead...” 

“What?” they said again, disbelieving their ears. 

He gulped. “There’s a plastic garbage bag with something dead inside it.” 

“Something dead,” echoed Isa. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, it smells to high heaven, awful, disgusting,” he cried. “The bag is ripped, and...And I believe I saw a hand.” 

In Suzan’s highly organised world there was no place for dead hands. 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, and climbed over the wall herself.

She marched down to the thing in the water, closely followed by both her sister and a little way behind by her mother. Dirk, having seen enough, stayed up on the dyke. Bobby hung back when they came to the willow. 

“Dirk’s right, it smells terribly,’ she warned.

Suzan, ever practical, snapped off a brittle willow branch and poked at the bag, widening the rip. She strained to see inside. Then she turned to her family and nodded business-like. “Dirk’s correct. It’s a hand. I can see a ring on the middle finger. We have to call the police,’ and then she fainted.
© Renée Koopman

Chapter 3 - Part 2

This is where Isa's adventure is set. The sea arm connects to the North Sea on the left hand side (not in the map).

Chapter 3 – part 2

Not much later they skidded to a halt at the car park. Isa got down stiffly, wobbling a bit on her broken shoe. Remembering Dirk didn’t do hand shakes, she gave him a grateful smile and a nod. 

“Thanks ever so much. I don’t know what I would have done without your kind help.” 

His deep-sea blue eyes twinkled. 

“Screamed some more at the waves, probably,” he muttered. 

This time he didn’t catch her out quite as much. 

“Are you always this blunt?”

 “I didn’t mean to offend,” he said quickly. 

He looked as if he meant it, too. His gaze was direct and frank, the twinkle replaced by an innocent honesty. Isa felt herself drawn.

 “I mustn’t keep you,” she said with regret. “You will be expected at home, no doubt, Christmas dinner?”

 But Dirk gave a swift shake of the head. 

“I have no plans.”

 “No plans? Won’t you be having dinner with your parents?” 

“Nope.” 

“Who with then? You will not eat alone, will you? At Christmas?” 

“Yep.” (Copyright Renée Koopman – If you steal this, you are a very bad person!) 

She watched his eyes. Either he was telling the truth, or he was a bloody good liar. Seventeen, and then home alone? This shouldn’t be allowed, she decided. 

“Come home with me,” she suddenly blurted. “My girls will be there, it will be fun.”

 “Girls?” 

Dirk looked scared again. His sudden mood swings amazed Isa. 

“Nothing to worry about, they’re coming over for dinner, you’ll like them. Bobby is a student, she’s 19, and Suzan is 22, she’s a teacher in Belgium but over for the holidays. Older than you, but not that much older. Come on, Dirk, it will be good fun,” she repeated breathlessly. 

Still he hesitated.

“I have more than enough food! I always buy far too much, and then I’ll only feed it to Tom, and he’s too fat as it is.”

 “Is Tom your husband?” 

“What? No, he’s my cat.”

Isa suddenly felt deflated. Inviting Dirk wasn’t such a good idea, perhaps. But Dirk did an about-turn once again. 

“Okay, I’ll come. I can go get my bike later, I’ll lock it to the lamppost over there.”

The ride to the suburb of Nieuwenhoorn was uneventful. Isa didn’t like to talk when she was concentrating on the road, and thankfully Dirk seemed to sense her mood and kept his mouth shut. In no time at all she turned into her own street.

“Here we are.” 

She locked the car door and bent down to give Tom, who had materialised from under the box hedge, a quick stroke under his chin. 

“Come into my parlour, said the spider to the fly,” she tossed over her shoulder to Dirk, only to see him start at the threshold as if she had tossed him a dead rat. Isa, you stupid twit! she admonished herself. 

“It’s a joke! Honestly, come in, come in, make yourself at home.” 

She made herself turn around and marched into her house, hoping he would follow her as he had done at the harbour months ago. He did. Isa busied herself with putting the kettle on, guessing he would like tea better than her usual chilled tipple from the fridge. When she came back into the living area, she saw him standing in front of her bookshelves, intently reading the titles on the spines. 

“You like detectives,” he stated a fact. “And Art.”

 “Yes. I’ve made you Earl Grey, it’s the closest to ‘just tea’ I have, is that all right? What kind of books do you like?”

 “I don’t read,” Dirk said.
© Renée Koopman

Chapter 3 - Part 1

Chapter 3 - part 1

November slowly but surely slid into December. Isa kept herself busy. She had landed a nice assignment for a new women’s magazine, having pitched furiously to get it, and the glow of having got the job lasted her almost until Christmas. Then, as she had feared, the warm feeling of achievement faded, and she found herself on the slippery slope once more. 

Ellen invited her over for Christmas dinner, but the thought of having to sit through an evening with Ben and Ellen’s overbearing Mum-in-Law (“Have I told you about Ben’s chance to become a partner in his firm, I always thought he had it in him, he does take after me, you know, I would have been a great professional, had I ever looked for a job, blah-blah-blah”) gave her a case of instant tummy-ache. So she made up an excuse and stayed at home, overfeeding Tom on expensive smoked Gravad Lax and drinking an entire bottle of Chardonnay and then being violently sick.

The next morning found her on the Zeedijk along the Haringvliet, trying to walk off her hangover before her girls would arrive for dinner. She might be turning into a lush, but she’d be damned before she would let it show to her daughters.

 The wind blew her hair straight into her eyes, almost blinding her to her surroundings. Gulls shrieked at her, and a couple of moorhens called from the water’s edge. Last night’s rain had made the path slippery, especially at the patches where sheep’s droppings littered it. The sheep themselves had been moved to meadows closer to their pen. It gave the dyke an empty feeling, desolate and grim. Isa allowed the wind to push her along, hardly watching where she put her feet. So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when her heel got caught in the cattle grid and broke off, but it did. She almost fell, and only just managed to keep her balance by gripping the barbed wire on top of the sheep wire. (Copyright Renée Koopman – If you steal this, you are a very bad person!)

“Ouch!”

Pain and frustration made her lose it, and she howled wordlessly into the wind. 

“Can I give you a lift?”

 Isa screamed again at the unexpected sound of the voice behind her. She whipped her head around, and apparently looked frightening enough to make Dirk take a bewildered step backwards. He kept his bicycle between them as he gave her a tentative smile. 

“We’ve met, you bought me a tea,” he said. 

“What? Tea? Oh...yes. I did, didn’t I?”

Taking a deep breath, Isa realised he looked positively scared. Mustn’t upset the locals, Isa, she admonished herself. 

“Dirk! Hi! How are you?” she asked brightly, at the same time hiding her bloody hand behind her coat. 

“Fancy meeting you here. Were you cycling to Hellevoetsluis?”

He nodded, giving her another smile, but kept his bike firmly in position. 

“I was just on my way to...I was walking...I lost my heel. I keep losing things when we meet, don’t I?” 

This time his smile flashed broadly. 

“Yep. First your hat, now your heel, and soon your mind,” he grinned. 

Isa felt herself agreeing before his last word had fully sunk in. 

“Yeah, I...What?” 

But he had gotten hold of his bike, and offered his carrier with an old fashioned gallantry. 

“Hop on. I’ll give you a lift back to town.” 

They rattled over the cattle grids and slithered along the path, pushed by an ever stronger growing wind. Isa had to hold on to his coat with both hands, leaving a few specks of her blood on the denim. Dirk didn’t attempt to speak, but simply concentrated on not crashing the bicycle. They passed the monument to the Great Flood of 1953 on their left, its rusty styles a reminder of the spot where the sea dyke was breached. After the last bend they reached the fork in the path where you can choose between continuing along the Zeedijk, or going towards the tennis club. 

“Where do you want to go?” shouted Dirk. 

“Oh, anywhere is fine. You can let me off now,” Isa replied.

“I’m going to the Vesting, myself. But I can take you anywhere you like.” 

“I live in Nieuwenhoorn. But my car is at the car park just outside the Haaven. So you can drop me off there, if that’s not inconvenient.”

 “Sure, no problem”.
© Renée Koopman

Chapter 2 - Part 1

Ducks (photograph © Wibe Koopman)

Isa’s Sundays used to be filled with people. A husband, her two daughters, her Mum, friends. She used to rush around her kitchen from two in the afternoon; preparing dinner, chilling wine, making sure everything was just so for when everyone would sit around her huge teak dining table at six.

When did all this change? The rot started with her Mum dying of the cancer that had sneaked up on her five times previously. The sixth time the cutting and medicating couldn’t save her. Isa mourned her in silence. She wasn’t given to loud and public mourning. But she missed her mother terribly. 

Then, out of the blue, her husband of twenty-five years dropped a bombshell into their tidy lives. He had fallen in love with a woman fifteen years younger than Isa. And this woman loved him. Love! So he moved out. And moved in with his new love. Isa mourned the demise of her marriage as she had mourned her mother. Quietly, secretly, but not bitterly. Thus was life. Husbands left for greener pastures and greener leaves, one only had to look around the supermarket to see the evidence. 

But when in the course of one year both her darling daughters left as well, one to study International Business Law in Maastricht and one to teach abroad, Isa had to face down a huge urge to get seriously depressed. The wine hardly got the time to chill properly. (Copyright Renée Koopman – If you steal this you are a very bad person!) 

Her few true friends rallied round. But all of her not-so-true ones disappeared along with the Sunday dinners as soon as they got the message that Isa wasn’t her normal cheerful welcoming self. 

Isa got through it by working hard. How ever late it had got the night before, how ever many glasses of wine she had guzzled down in the evening, she was there in time for her first appointment of the day. Slowly, very, very slowly, she found she could smile, and then laugh again at the antics of het cat. 

She managed to shoulder the burden of her daughters’ shock over the phone at their father’s midlife crisis, with carefully contrived humour, and clichés straight out of women’s magazines. “But don’t you hate him, don’t you hate her,” they would ask, and she would give a little chuckle (mentally patting herself on the

shoulder in the meantime; oh, how good you are at acting grown up!), and reply “No, no, how can I hate them for something as natural as falling in love? Don’t forget we had you, and you are worth it, all of it.” (Pat, pat, pat, and a quick trip to the off-license after work)

Anyway, Isa counted herself lucky in a way. Robert, perhaps feeling guilty, had agreed to a quick, harmonious divorce. Not for her the screaming rows, the spitting fits, the tug of war. She had, a whole bottle of Chardonnay gone, for a few minutes considered cutting up all his suits (weren’t you supposed to do that sort of thing?), but couldn’t find the scissors and then nearly fell down the stairs, so she gave up on that idea. Another cliché.

After a while things calmed down even more, and she found she could see Robert around town without wanting to throw her arms around his knees and beg him to reconsider. He couldn’t be more gallant about it all. Came round to fiddle with her dishwasher when it broke down. Offered to mow the lawn. Looked radiantly happy. Life with his young lithe wife certainly agreed with him. Isa swallowed her tears and ran to the CD player to put on Adele when he’d left for his new home.
© Renée Koopman

Chapter 1 - part 1

Hi again,
As there's been no-one telling me to immediately stop writing, I've uploaded the next part of the story for you.
Enjoy!

Chapter one.

Grey rolling waves raced towards Hellevoetsluis harbour, making the mallards bob up and down like ever so many corks. Isa held on to her new felt hat with one hand.

“Whose silly idea was it to go to the harbour?”, she muttered to herself, knowing perfectly well that it had been her own idea, born from the boredom of a lonely Autumn Sunday afternoon. She turned her back on the water and squinted up at the round white lighthouse with its jaunty red roof. The wind immediately saw its chance and spun her hat straight into the choppy harbour waves.

“Shit! Shit, shit, shit!“

Dismayed, she tried to work out where, if anywhere, her hat would float near enough to the harbour wall for her to reach. More mallards making their way to the jetty below the lighthouse gave her an idea. Perhaps she could borrow a boat? Many of the yachts in the harbour had their private dinghies. Isa hurried to the nearest vessel, a beautiful wooden Waarschip.

“Hello! Anyone on board?” She hesitated before the gangway. Should she board? “Hi! Can you hear me?”

 Silence. Then a gull screeched like a banshee, taunting her.

Isa decided to try once more.

“Helloooooo! I need your help!”

“There is no one on that ship”, said a voice behind her, making her jump.

Isa looked over her shoulder, flustered, until she saw that the owner of the voice was a young man. More of an older boy than a young man, really. In his hand he was holding a sketchpad, and he looked just as flustered as Isa was feeling.

“Oh! Hi there. I was hoping…I need…,” she stopped. “Oh, what’s the point? My hat’s long gone by now. It blew into the harbour, you know. My new hat. I‘ve only had it since yesterday. I…”

Again Isa ground to a halt. Something in the boy’s reaction, or rather lack of any reaction, made her lose the thread of her thoughts. He was staring at his pad, with a small annoyed frown.

“Oh well. Don’t let me keep you from your drawing. Bye.”

She turned away from him, ready to walk back to the little square on the other side of the harbour. Her bright idea, that a brisk walk along the waterfront would blow the cobwebs away, had utterly vanished from her mind.

“Another fun day,” she muttered darkly.

“It has sunk,” said the boy.

“What?” Isa turned back.

“Your hat. It’s sunk.”

So he had heard her after all.

“Story of my life!” Isa snorted. “My gorgeous new, not to mention very expensive, hat has drowned. I may as well go and drown my sorrows then, don’t you think?”

Again she turned away from him, but something made her hesitate and toss him a quick look.

“You look cold. Would you like to join me?”

“Join you where?”

“You know! Join me for a drink.” She nodded in the direction of the pubs on the square across the water.

“We could go to De Admiraal.”

 Once more it seemed as if the boy hadn’t heard her.

Isa shrugged and started walking to the bridge. Behind her she heard the boy fall in with her rhythm. What an odd boy, she thought. They marched quickly over the cast iron bridge, buffeted by the strong westerly wind, which whistled through the green railings. 

The cobbled square was deserted. Only the statue of Napoleon’s architect Jan Blanken, ledger open on his bronze knees, looked out over the yachts that were moored in the Haaven. Isa peered into the window of De Admiraal. At the back of the restaurant she saw the gas fire lit. Good!

“Come on then, if you’re coming,” she said.

Without waiting for an answer, she stepped over the threshold. She wasn’t quite a regular, but she had been to De Admiraal a couple of times, and liked the quiet modern interior. She tossed her coat onto the coat stand and chose a table near the gas fire. She saw the boy still standing at the door, an unhappy look on his face.

A Menopausal Detective on a Slippery Slope - Prologue

Hi there, Reader.

This is an experiment. You know that I am a writer, right? 

Most writers have their writings on a shelf, or in their computer, or in a little notebook. Until they get it published.

Writing is an ongoing process. You try, you throw away, you try again.

Well, I'm trying. This is a try-out. This is YOUR try-out, too!

Let me know what you think about this?

Prologue

  

The accidental killer looked around him, sweat rolling from his hairline along his brow in rivulets. His hands scrabbling through the sand and sheep droppings, he tried to find enough loose stones to weigh down the heavy-duty garbage bag in front of him. He swore when knife sharp shards of oyster cut his fingers. In the distance he heard the sound of an approaching car. 

To his left, a goose honked sleepily. Ever faster he searched for rocks and stones. Away, he had to get as far away as possible, before he was seen!

 He held his breath when the car passed him, the sheen of headlights seen just above the dyke, and then moving down the narrow road. When he heard an asthmatic cough behind him, he froze. His bowels threatened to loosen and once more he held his breath, pressing his buttocks together. Again the cough, but this time it sounded less human and more animal. His overheated brain provided him with an answer. Sheep droppings – that meant sheep. 

As soon as he couldn’t find any more ballast, he tied a tie-wrap around the stiff plastic of the bag, wrestling with its folds. Scrambling up, he dragged the dead weight towards the waterline. 

Christ, it was heavy going! The blue plastic made a tearing noise, and suddenly all round him there came an alarmed honking and the flapping of wings as the Canadian and Grey Geese woke up and tried to get away from the danger. He doubled his efforts, finally succeeding in getting the bag down the basalt incline to the water and then into it, where it became a little bit easier to drag. He stepped into the shallows, immediately losing his footing on the algae covered basalt and falling piggyback onto the bag. 

A moan escaped him. He couldn’t get off it fast enough. At last! The bag hovered, gently bobbing on the calm waves. He guided it as deep as he could, walking alongside it on the muddy seabed until only his head was above water. Then he gave it one last strong push. It made a slow roll and half-turn, and teasingly slowly drifted away on the current. He sighed. It was supposed to sink, why didn’t it fucking sink?