Eine Frau verschwindet (2012)

Thirteen-year-old Kevin van Leer has been murdered. His body is found in a thicket in Amsterdam’s Vondelpark, with his skull bashed in, a gaping hole in his palate, and his brain removed. Detective Bruno van Leeuwen is assigned to investigate the case. But he has other problems: his 50-year-old wife, Simone, has Alzheimer’s disease and needs constant care. Bruno stubbornly refuses to put her in a nursing home, even though he knows Ellen, her caregiver, is right. He cannot bring himself to leave the love of his life—not even when he finds several old love letters revealing that Simone once cheated on him with another man. She remembers less and less, however. While Bruno can barely sleep at night because he has too much on his mind, he has to solve the case by day. Tic, Kevin’s girlfriend, contacts van Leeuwen and tells him that Kevin sounded terrified during a phone call shortly before his death. A bamboo splinter whose origin can be traced back to Melanesia points the investigation in the right direction. Everything suggests a ritual murder. Van Leeuwen asks anthropologist Josef Pieters for help. Pieters has made a name for himself through research, including work on Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and Alzheimer’s disease. Van Leeuwen’s attempt to pursue this line of inquiry comes to nothing; Pieters says he is sorry, but he cannot offer him any hope. Van Leeuwen’s suspicions of Pieters are raised not only by contradictory statements from the virologist. There is no connection between Pieters and Kevin, however. Pieters does work at the same hospital as Kevin’s mother, a surgeon. Van Leeuwen’s team discovers that Pieters once attracted controversy over his foundation. From Silvia Fahrendong, Pieters’s former assistant, the detective learns that Pieters’s most striking quality is that he is afraid of nothing. Eventually, Van Leeuwen breaks into Pieters’s house, hoping to find out more. He takes two different hair samples. When the detective later asks him directly whether he knew Kevin, Pieters denies it, but bluntly tells him that he or one of his people broke into his house without permission. The hair sample van Leeuwen cannot use indicates that a second man must have been in Pieters’s house; there are also traces of blood belonging to the murdered Kevin inside. The detective confronts Pieters with his suspicion that Kevin saw something he was not supposed to see: Pieters with his young lover, a boy from Papua New Guinea whom he had brought to the Netherlands through his foundation. He wants to know what Pieters’s connection is to a white mask. Pieters replies that the young man is not his lover but his son. Van Leeuwen discovers that Pieters had applied to adopt Keo Winter, the boy from Papua New Guinea, and that the application was close to being finalized. It was just one moment that decided Kevin’s fate. Shortly beforehand, the boy had argued with Pieters at the hospital, and when Kevin saw Pieters exchanging intimate caresses with Keo in the car, Pieters knew the adoption was in danger. That fear was written all over his face, and Keo noticed it. He then followed Kevin and killed him. After painting his face white, he returned to his victim to remove his brain, as was customary in his homeland when someone died. When Van Leeuwen and his people board the ship owned by Pieters, they find Keo there, his face painted white, sitting beside Pieters, whom he has killed. Pieters had wanted to protect him from prosecution and send him back to his homeland, but Keo could neither understand nor accept this. Bruno Van Leeuwen finally brings himself to place his wife in a suitable nursing home after all. He watches wistfully as Simone disappears through the doorway without turning back.