BY NOW IT HAD BEEN A YEAR SINCE WE HAD MADE OUR STATEMENTS to the Justice Department, but nothing had happened. Everything was the same. Meanwhile I’d had to intensify my relationship with Wim, and it felt like a noose was tightening around my neck. I could hardly breathe. All this time, I had told myself that the Justice Department would take action at some point, but I hardly believed it myself anymore.
Sonja, who had to suffer through all the threats, was just as frustrated.
“As, we are being played for fools,” she said. “He must know somebody, somebody in the Justice Department, who protects him. Fuck them. I quit. It’s worse with them than without them. Every day I hope they’ll do something, and every day I’m disappointed. It stresses me out.”
She was totally right. They weren’t doing anything, and they couldn’t explain why it was taking so long. We’d been exposed to danger for more than a year, and they were leading us on. Maybe it was time to back out, focus on controlling the damage.
We talked to Peter about it, and he agreed with us: the Justice Department showed no decisiveness whatsoever, and the risk our statements would leak remained real. He supported us in our decision to annul the statements. We’d rather be alone in this than not taken seriously.
We scheduled a so-called exit talk. Betty said she couldn’t share with us why everything was taking so long, that she wanted us to “stay aboard,” but that she understood that we’d lost faith. She would give the order to annul our preliminary statements.
I immediately doubted our decision. Were we not running a greater risk of our statements leaking the moment we had them annulled? If the Justice Department thought we would still cooperate, the responsibility of a possible leak was clearly still with them.
Besides, these statements also provided me protection by justifying my many meetings with him. I wanted to continue recording what he told me without being seen as his accomplice by the Justice Department.
In the end I felt it was best to hang on to the preliminary statements and the contact with the CIU. That way at least one judicial department would be aware of the true reasons why I kept seeing him. Should I be arrested because of him, at least I would have witnesses on my side.
A couple of days after the exit talk, I called to ask if they had annulled the statements yet.
“No? Good. Don’t do it. Maybe someday they will come in handy,” I told Manon.