Twenty minutes later, the three of us stood on the doorstep of the old house. The street was quiet. An older couple strolled past, arm in arm, but there was no one else around. A fine drizzle shrouded the streetlights in yellow mist.
“Hurry up, Sam,” I said. “I’m getting wet.”
We dashed in as soon as he had the door unlocked, and Karen led the way to the lift. When we reached the apartment, we turned on all the lights, which made me feel better about what we were doing. We’d been working here late the last couple of evenings, I reasoned. This wasn’t so different.
“Where shall we start?” I asked.
“Let’s take a look at the room that used to be Tomas’s office,” Karen said, moving off along the corridor. Sam and I followed.
When she opened the last door on the right and turned on the light, we found a sparsely furnished room: a black desk under a window that looked out over the street and a bookcase decorated with a few leather-bound books, a marble bust that may have been of Beethoven, and a small gilded globe.
“It looks as though it’s been completely cleaned out,” I said.
Karen went to the desk and pulled open each of the drawers. “Empty. I was hoping we’d find something.”
“Let’s go through Eline’s room,” I said. “She had piles of papers and stuff in there.”
When we walked into Eline’s room, my throat flushed warm as I thought of my earlier search in here. I was my father’s daughter. I usually played by the rules and didn’t even jaywalk, but when there were lives at stake, I’d been known to step out of bounds, sometimes in fairly dramatic fashion.
Karen gazed around the room and then pointed to the mounds of paper on the dressing table. “Let’s look at those.”
Sam and I stood by as Karen rifled through the first stack. “Mostly bills,” she said, turning her attention to another pile.
“Pieter’s already been through those papers,” I said. “Maybe he took what you’re looking for.”
“I hope not,” she muttered, moving papers around.
I picked up a few envelopes that were lying on a chair but none of the words made sense to me. We weren’t going to be of much help, I realized.
“I’ll go make some tea,” I said.
Sam must have felt the same way. “I’ll come with you. If that’s all right with you, Karen?”
When she muttered in response, we wandered towards the kitchen and I put the kettle on.
“I have a feeling this will be a waste of time,” Sam said.
“But if it makes Karen feel that she’s doing something that might help, it’s worth it. Pass me the teapot, please.”
We poured tea and sat at the kitchen table. Vincent padded in moments later. He jumped up on the counter and glared at his empty bowl.
“You’ll get fat,” Sam told him, but he stood up to open another tin of food.
“Did you text Alex to let her know we won’t be at the hotel after dinner?” I asked.
Sam frowned and took his phone out of his pocket. “I did it before we left. But I haven’t heard anything back yet.”
“Well, she’s probably still eating.”
Karen came in just then, breathless and flushed. “I found something. Before Eline’s mother died a year ago, she wrote to Eline every week. Eline kept all her letters in an old chocolate box. I found this in it, deliberately hidden, I think.”
She sat down and spread a piece of paper on the tabletop. “This is a photocopy of a letter addressed to someone called Martin Eyghels. Tomas signed it.”
“Martin Eyghels is the previous owner of the house,” Sam said. “His name is on the deed.”
“Well, he and Tomas must have had some kind of agreement about the house, because this letter says that Tomas is asking to be released from it.”
“What?”
“It says here that Tomas understands he had agreed to sell the house back to Eyghels if and when the occasion arose. But, Tomas says here, he has decided he needs to provide a permanent home for Eline, that she loves the apartment and would be heartbroken if she had to leave it.” Karen looked up at us. “Huh, didn’t I tell you that Tomas never really understood Eline? She did love the apartment but only because she was in it with him. When he died, she could hardly wait to move out. The place is vast and, quite frankly, unsettling. It has a malevolent feeling to it.”
I thought about the falling chandelier and the broken picture chain and the empty spaces upstairs. Not to mention all the auras over people connected with the house. Karen was right about it being sinister.
“What else does the letter say?” Sam prodded.
Karen skimmed the words again. “Tomas says he has rewritten his will, leaving the house to Eline and to his nephew, having already agreed with Pieter that he will allow Eline to continue living in it for as long as she desires. But…” She frowned. “Really?” Screwing her eyes up, she read the typed text again. “But Tomas goes on to say that he is wiring eight million euros to Eyghels as a penalty for reneging on the agreement.”
“Eight million?” Sam asked.
“How much did he pay for it in the first place?” I asked.
Sam thought for a second. “I can’t remember the exact figure, but it was about two million, I think.”
“That sounds about right,” Karen said. “It needed a huge amount of work. It was only barely habitable when Tomas and Eline moved in.”
“But I don’t get it,” I said. “Why would anyone have an agreement to sell a house back to its original owner?”
“Perhaps it was a complicated leaseback situation,” Sam mused. “Maybe Eyghels provided the financing for Tomas to buy it and renovate it at some preferential rate because he knew he’d get a good deal on repurchasing it once all the renovation work was done. But, in order to buy his way out of their agreement, Tomas pays Eyghels the eight million in lieu of returning the house to him. I’ll do some digging around. I’d like to find out more about Martin Eyghels. When was this letter dated?”
Karen checked. “Four months ago. It’s odd. Eline never mentioned any of this to me, about this agreement to sell back to Eyghels.”
“This must be the deal Tomas was worrying about,” Sam said. “Maybe Eyghels turned down Tomas’s offer of the eight million euros. Perhaps he wanted more. Or he didn’t want the money at all. He just wanted the house back.” He ran his hands through his hair. “You know, it’s possible Pieter discovered that Tomas had originally agreed to sell the house back to Martin Eyghels? He might feel he has to honor that agreement and offer Eyghels right of first refusal, at least.”
“Even if that’s true, he should still have the decency to let us know what he’s doing and to let Bleeker know too,” I said. Pieter’s behavior was getting under my skin. Didn’t he realize that we needed to hear from him?
“That agreement would be void if Eyghels accepted Tomas’s payment of eight million euros, wouldn’t it?” Karen asked.
“It would.” Sam frowned.
“Well, in order to work it out,” I said. “We need to find out if that money was sent.”
Karen nodded. “I’ll go look through the rest of the paperwork. Can you give me just half an hour? And then we can go home.”
Sam looked at me. “What do you want to do?”
“Let’s go downstairs and check out that flashing green light and closed-off door.”
“I don’t think we should leave Karen here alone.”
She put one hand on her hip and glared at Sam. “Oh please. I’m a big girl.”
Karen didn’t have an aura, which meant she’d be all right. “We’ll be back in ten minutes,” I promised.
16
Downstairs, I pushed the door open to the original kitchen. The odor of old smoke and grease hit us as we walked in. Sam fumbled around until he found a switch. Old-fashioned fixtures came on, casting a dim light, barely enough to see by.
“The location of the bricked-up door should at the end of this hallway.” I led the way pa
st the ancient tiled counters and the soot-covered fireplace into a long corridor. Something moved in the darkness and I froze.
“Mice,” Sam said, taking my hand. I saw one then, scampering along the grimy floor in front of us. I wasn’t keen on mice. “Come on.” He tugged gently on my arm.
We walked to a door at the far end of the hall. Sam pushed it open, and we found ourselves in what must have been an old scullery. The walls were lined with shelves, empty for the most part, except for a broken pot here and there. Spider webs glistened in the corners.
I focused on what we were doing, trying to ignore the mice and spiders. “It should be on this back wall somewhere, although it might be covered up by this shelving,” I said.
Sam took a few steps forward and tripped over a metal bucket. The noise was deafening. “Who’d leave a bucket in the way like that?” he grumbled.
“There is a door.” I pointed to white-painted wood barely visible behind a run of shelves. “Do you think that’s the inside of the closed-off entry?”
“Give me a hand moving this.” Sam started pulling a section of the shelving unit away, and we dragged the rest of the greasy shelves off their supports until we had access to the door. Sam tried to open it, but found it was either stuck or locked.
I held my phone light up close. “This door appears to be fairly new,” I said. “It’s not from the nineteenth century like the rest of the kitchen, that’s for sure.”
“This wasn’t on any of your sketches or plans?” Sam asked.
“No. Alex and I assumed this rabbit warren of rooms and pantries was just going to be torn out, so we didn’t draw in the details, just the basic measurements.”
Sam rattled the knob again. “Any good at picking locks?” he asked.
“I skipped that class.” I looked around for something we could use to break the door open, retraced my steps, and found an old copper skillet.
“Give it a bash with this.” I handed it to him. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” I added when he looked unsure. “We’re almost certainly breaking a half-dozen laws already. May as well add trespassing and vandalism to the list.”
“But what if…”
“Go on. No one ever comes down here.”
Sam whanged the pan against the lock. It took three tries, but finally the knob fell away. He pulled the door open.
“Are you seeing this?” he asked, holding up his phone to shed light on the dark room. We were staring into what seemed to be a wiring closet. Hefty bunches of cables of different colors were neatly tied along the walls, some of them disappearing up through the ceiling, while others led to a large white metal cabinet in the corner.
“This is modern.” I ran my hand along a loop of wires. “And there isn’t a speck of dust in here. What do you think? Perhaps the whole thing is a huge alarm system. But still, the flashing light outside is in an odd place.”
“So is that.” Sam pointed to the dark corner of the closet. “There are stairs going down.”
We moved towards it. When I stared down into inky darkness, my heart raced, and my palms started to sweat.
“Let’s take a peek,” he said, one foot already outstretched to take the first step down.
“No, let’s head back. Come on, Sam.”
“Wait for me here then.” Sam went down two steps.
“Absolutely not.”
The steps were metal and curved in a gentle spiral. I gripped the handrail and followed him. After descending ten or twelve steps, we found ourselves in an unlit tunnel about four feet wide.
“There was no basement marked on the plans,” I said. “So, this is really weird.”
Sam wasn’t really listening. He’d moved forward to examine a shiny steel door set in a brick wall. “It’s locked with a keypad,” he said. He punched a few keys. Nothing happened. “Let’s see where the tunnel goes.”
He took a step towards it, but I pulled him back. “Wait. It could be dangerous.”
Sam rolled his eyes. “Life is dangerous. I don’t skydive, you use hand sanitizer. We each do what we can to reduce our risk. But death can come from anywhere or from nowhere. A distracted driver. A falling tree. My feeling is that the more we uncover about what’s going on here, the closer we’ll be to understanding why Eline died and who or what is threatening me.”
I blinked at him, amazed by this turnaround. Earlier in the day, he’d been so resistant to digging around for more information.
He threw his hands up in the air when he saw the expression on my face. “Look, I’m trying to say I’m sorry. I should have trusted you completely and followed your lead. It’s taken me longer than it should. Shall we do this?”
“Definitely.”
I followed as he led the way along the tunnel. The lights from our phones bounced off brick walls and a ceiling that curved gently over our heads, reminding me of the wine cellar in my dad’s Italian farmhouse. When a puff of fresh air briefly cooled my skin, I glanced up to see the vent we’d found earlier. The tunnel, I realized, ran under the house and along the edge of the garden, presumably all the way to the back fence.
We’d only been walking for a minute when Sam slowed down and held his hand up, warning me to be quiet. Not that I’d been making much noise. I was tiptoeing along and not speaking, trying not to even breathe too hard. We’d reached the end of the tunnel. Ahead, a set of metal stairs ran up to a steel door like the one we’d just passed. My chest was ready to burst with pent-up tension as Sam eased his way up the steps.
“Please come back now,” I whispered.
He kept going however, and I hurried to catch up. My boot caught the edge of a metal tread and I fell forward, my hand slamming onto the step above with a noisy thud.
“This one has a keypad too,” Sam said from the top.
“Ok. There’s nothing we can do then. Let’s go.”
As I turned to descend the steps, lights came on, illuminating the staircase and the tunnel. I yelled at Sam to run, certain someone would burst through the steel door. We slid down the steps and dashed along the tunnel. It was easier to move fast now that we could see where we were going. We raced up the spiral staircase at the other end, through the wiring closet, and into the old scullery. There we paused for breath, and I leaned over with my hands on my knees.
“What the hell was that all about?” I asked while Sam pushed the door closed and hauled one of the heavier bits of shelving in front of it.
“We don’t want anyone getting into the house from the tunnel,” he said, as he positioned another unit in front of the first one. “And it would be best if no one realizes we know about this place.”
“That’s a cheery thought.” I took a deep breath. “What do we do now?”
“There’s something I want to check out. Follow me.”
We walked back through the lobby to the back door, which he’d secured earlier. He unlocked it, stepped outside and led the way along the back wall to where the light blinked.
“Oh God, the light isn’t green any longer. It’s red.” I grabbed Sam’s arm.
“And it’s right outside the wiring closet.”
I closed my eyes, mentally reviewing the layout. Sam was right. “So, at some point, an old door was closed off and the wall sealed to create a closed-in space.”
“Come on, I have an idea.”
“No, wait. We probably triggered some sort of alarm when we broke into that wiring closet, or when we entered the tunnel, or both. I think we should go back in the house and lock the doors.”
Ignoring me, he set off towards the iron fence at the back of the property. My eyes were more used to the darkness this time, and I managed to avoid any painful confrontation with the spiny shrubs that overhung the flagstone paths.
The windows of the three-story office block on the other side of the fence were unlit and there were no signs indicating what kind of business it contained. From where we stood, it was just a dull and innocuous-looking modern structure. But it seemed that the steel staircase at
the end of the tunnel led into that building somewhere.
Sam turned around and leaned against the fence, facing towards the house. He moved a few feet further along and then turned again. “There,” he said, pointing.
When I caught up with him I saw that the red flashing light was clearly visible.“What does that mean?” I asked.
“I’m not sure. Maybe some kind of visual warning system?”
He turned and pointed to the car park on the other side of the fence. It was no more than a square of asphalt with a few marked parking spaces right behind the building. “It would be seen easily from the car park there.”
The roar of a car engine drowned out his last words, and white light filled the street beyond the building. When I heard the squeal of brakes, I grabbed Sam’s arm. “Let’s go. We can easily be seen from over there too.”
We dashed away from the fence along a winding flagstone path that led back to the house. When the vehicle turned into the car park next to the modern building behind us, Sam stopped and pulled me down to the ground, where we crouched in the shelter of an overgrown shrub. For a few seconds, the car’s bright white high beams shone like searchlights on the wall of the house before they snapped off.
Peering through the tangle of branches, I saw a man get out of the vehicle, a BMW, I thought. He walked to the fence and stared into the garden. It was too dark to see his features, but his build made me think it could be the goatee man. Although there was no way he could get through that fence, my palms grew damp and my skin crawled.
We waited in the shadows until he turned away from the fence and went into the commercial building through a side door. As soon as he was out of view, we jumped up and ran to the house, leapt across the step and slammed the door closed.
Without pausing, we ran across the lobby, up the stairs to Eline’s bedroom. Karen was still there, reading papers. She flung them on the bed when she saw us.
“Thank God! Are you all right? You seemed to be gone forever.”
Assignment in Amsterdam Page 14