‘Absolutely,’ Peter said reasonably.
So the police in Leiden know too! But how did they find out?
‘They’ve been looking into Mr Vanderhoop’s recent movements,’ the trooper said. ‘Our colleagues in the Netherlands heard that he was visiting Plymouth with a foreign guest. To cut a long story short, your name was in the museum guestbook. The museum staff confirmed that Mr Vanderhoop arranged a taxi for you and that you both went your separate ways.’
Peter nodded.
‘Have the Dutch police contacted you?’ the officer asked.
‘Yes,’ Peter said. ‘I got an email, but that was about something else. The police didn’t know that I was on a day trip with Tony, uh … with Mr Vanderhoop.’
‘And you’ve told them that now?’
‘No, to be honest, I haven’t. I wasn’t aware that they wanted to talk to him.’
Now the two troopers nodded.
‘I was quite disappointed yesterday, I must admit,’ Peter said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘We had arranged to spend the day together, and I thought we would travel back to Boston together too. But then, in the museum entrance hall, he told me he had to go and deal with some business, and suddenly, he was gone.’
‘And you really have no idea what that business was?’
‘No … But it must have been something urgent, something that couldn’t wait.’
‘Yes, it must have.’
The officer typed a few short words or commands on the keyboard and then clicked the mouse a couple of times. The expression on his face was much friendlier now than when he had been asking Peter questions.
Peter got the impression that he was off the hook.
‘You’re free to go, sir,’ the trooper said. He held out Peter’s passport, but he kept hold of it when Peter tried to take it from him.
Peter smiled, but the man didn’t smile back.
‘If we look at the video from the security camera on the bus from Plymouth to Boston, we’re going to see you on there, right?’ he asked.
‘Yes, of course,’ Peter replied. He was amazed at the ease with which he told this lie. ‘People were getting on and off, and the driver was getting bags out of the compartment under the bus. He was behind schedule, so he told me just to get on.’
‘Did you get on in front or in back?’
Don’t hesitate.
‘At the back. The doors were open, and I saw two empty seats.’
There’s probably only a camera at the front of the bus.
The trooper smiled – a little apologetically, Peter thought – and let go of the passport. ‘You’re going to Egypt?’ he asked as he stood up.
‘Yes, I am,’ Peter replied.
‘Why Egypt? You have a ticket for Amsterdam, right?’
‘That’s right, I do,’ Peter said. ‘But I’m a lecturer at Leiden University. I teach History and Archaeology. I have a few weeks off. And I bought this book yesterday.’
He took The Bible Unearthed out of his bag. The till receipt that he had been using as a bookmark was sticking out of the top. ‘I was reading it, and I thought: what the heck, why not? I’m going to go to Egypt. I’ve dreamed of going there my entire life, but I’ve never been …’
The man nodded in a way that said he knew everything about unfulfilled dreams.
‘You’re free to go, sir,’ he said. ‘Enjoy your flight. Whatever your destination might be.’
His colleague opened the door.
‘And if Mr Vanderhoop contacts you, we’d like to know about it.’
‘You’ll be the first to know,’ Peter promised.
Back at the EgyptAir desk, he had to listen to Faarouz’s profuse apology before he could buy a ticket. She’d had a legal obligation to call the police and so on.
Peter forgave her graciously and received a beaming smile in return.
She checked in his suitcase, gave him his boarding passes and pointed him towards the gates.
Just as Faarouz had said, the lines at the border control desks were short, and it didn’t take long for him to reach the front.
The man in the kiosk scanned his passport and stared at the screen just long enough for Peter to start feeling uneasy again. But, eventually, he flipped to the right page in his passport, picked up a stamp and brought it down with a loud thud.
Peter almost cried with relief.
What a stroke of luck it was that they didn’t ask me what time my bus left Plymouth.
He reached the gate before the flight had started boarding.
Once he was installed in his seat on the plane, Peter took The Bible Unearthed out of his bag again and thumbed to the map of the route that the Israelites were supposed to have taken from Egypt to the promised land.
Then he opened the images app on his phone and scrolled through his photos. The last three weeks flashed before his eyes, just as they say images of your whole life do at the moment of your death.
Like when you’re drowning, for example …
Eventually, he found the image that Rijsbergen had shown to him and Mark: the tattoo that Coen Zoutman and Tony Vanderhoop had both had.
He pressed ‘edit’.
Rotate.
Ninety degrees to the right …
The top of the triangle was now pointing to the right.
He rotated it again.
Ninety degrees to the right …
Now the top of the triangle pointed downwards, like a wafer in an ice cream sundae.
He held his phone next to the map in the book. The similarity was blindingly obvious. They matched so perfectly that he was amazed that he hadn’t seen it before.
How could even Tony have missed this? … But you wouldn’t see it unless you were actually looking for it.
The tornado in his head had stopped completely now, and the puzzle pieces had tumbled gently to the ground, each piece landing in exactly the right place, all the parts of the puzzle combining to form a complete picture.
Each individual piece was almost insignificant on its own. It was only when it was put together with the other pieces that it became meaningful.
Tony would have liked that metaphor.
The image that had now emerged was astounding.
The tattoo wasn’t the all All-Seeing Eye or two pyramids or the sun over a mountain.
It was simply a map of Sinai that showed the route of the Exodus.
The outer edge represented the borders of Sinai itself, with the inner line showing the path that the Israelites were thought to have taken through the desert. Peter was on his way to the little circle, Mount Horeb, where God had given Moses the stone tablets.
At the foot of the mountain was a monastery that had been built on the site where God had spoken to Moses from the Burning Bush, commanding him to lead his people out of Egypt and take them to a new land, a land overflowing with milk and honey …
This was where the whole story had begun.
In Saint Catherine’s Monastery.
PART THREE
THE PROMISED LAND
SINAI
Chapter 33
Rijsbergen’s eyes hadn’t deceived him.
He had recognised Tony Vanderhoop on the CCTV footage on Unsolved Murder Mysteries: the same build, the same curls poking out from under a baseball cap. Once the image had been cleaned up and enlarged by a whiz kid from digital forensics, there had been no doubt that it was him.
However, in reality, the Leiden Police Department still had nothing concrete. There was no evidence against Tony Vanderhoop other than that he had been in Jerusalem at the time of the murders. But when it was added to the fact that Tony had said nothing about it when Rijsbergen had spoken to him, it made him a very likely suspect. And even more suspiciously, he had turned up four years later in Leiden at the scene of another murder.
What are the odds, Rijsbergen wondered. Admittedly, it would be a hell of a coincidence, but we can’t assume that this makes him a murderer.
And
there was still nothing to link Tony Vanderhoop to Yona Falaina’s death because he had already left the country when the young man had been killed.
Rijsbergen’s investigation unit had immediately been reinstated and fully staffed so that new leads could be followed up. They had found out which flight Tony and his delegation had been booked onto and looked into whether he had actually flown back to Boston that day.
Rijsbergen questioned himself constantly. Was it my fault?
Although he was always the first to critically examine his own performance and the mistakes he might have made, he felt that in this case, he could hold his head high. When all was said and done, there were no clues that he had overlooked. Tony Vanderhoop hadn’t been in the picture at all until now, so nobody had thought to check whether he had been on the flight with the rest of his group.
And we already had someone in custody: Herman van der Lede. The evidence against him is weak, but he knew that a square and compasses had been used in Coen Zoutman’s murder and his refusal to reveal how he knew about them made him a prime suspect.
They had informed the police in Boston, and now Rijsbergen was in direct contact with them.
Just today, they had found out that Vanderhoop had been to Plimouth Plantation with a foreign guest the previous day. He’d had no mobile phone with him, so they had been unable to trace his location that way. They had found out about his movements indirectly, by asking around in Vanderhoop’s network.
That was how they knew that he had been to the Pilgrim Hall Museum, where a foreign name had been found in the visitors’ book.
Peter de Haan.
And yet again, Peter de Haan’s name comes up, Rijsbergen noted with amazement. Had he and Tony Vanderhoop really not known each other before the open evening in Leiden? Were Peter de Haan and his girlfriend involved in some way after all?
Now, a completely different hypothesis was forming in Rijsbergen’s mind. Vanderhoop, De Haan and Spežamor murder Zoutman. Afterwards, De Haan and Spežamor give Vanderhoop an opportunity to escape. And finally, Peter calls 112 to report that he and Fay have found the body.
If De Haan and Spežamor were involved, Vanderhoop could indeed have been back in the USA by the time Falaina was killed. Peter could have killed him – with or without Fay.
We can’t rule anything out, Rijsbergen thought, but it’s not a particularly plausible hypothesis. The Jerusalem murders were four years ago, and Judith wasn’t even a member of Loge Ishtar then. Her lodge didn’t exist.
On Saturday, at 10 a.m. local time, the police had paid a visit to the Pilgrim Hall Museum, where the ladies at the reception desk had confirmed that Vanderhoop and his guest had left the museum separately after saying goodbye in the entrance hall. It had been clearly visible on the CCTV video that they had shown to the police. Afterwards, a car had pulled up, presumably to take the Dutchman to the terminus on Pilgrims Road so he could take the bus back to Boston.
Their immediate priority was to arrest Tony Vanderhoop, but he appeared to have vanished from the face of the earth. The Boston Police also wanted to speak to Peter de Haan since he had been the last person seen with Vanderhoop. They hoped that he would be able to tell them where Vanderhoop might have gone.
De Haan hadn’t answered his phone when he’d been called. The Boston Police had visited Judith Cherev’s apartment where De Haan had been staying for the last few weeks. The officers had eventually found Cherev in the library, but De Haan, it turned out, had already been on his way to Boston Logan airport.
De Haan’s name had been put on a watchlist. As soon as he checked in at the airport, the agent at the desk would have received an alert with instructions to call the police so that he could be questioned.
Rijsbergen knew that there was nothing he could do right now to expedite the situation in America.
As soon as De Haan set foot on Dutch soil, he would be apprehended and taken to the police station in Leiden. Rijsbergen wanted another chance to interview him, more rigorously this time, about the events of that fatal evening. And about the exact nature of his connection to Tony Vanderhoop.
Fay Spežamor would also be picked up for further questioning the next day.
But first, Rijsbergen and Van de Kooij were going to go to the Haaglanden Penitentiary in Zoetermeer, the prison where Herman van der Lede had been in pre-trial detention for the last six weeks.
Herman the Silent, Rijsbergen thought.
It was a short drive to the prison, less than half an hour usually, but this time it felt like it was taking much longer.
We’re so close to solving this case now, I can feel it …
They had already visited Herman several times, and each visit had been just as pointless as the last. The man had only sat and stared at the wall, looking right through Rijsbergen and Van de Kooij as if they were invisible.
He had remained silent during his preliminary hearing as well – at one point, the magistrate had asked, quite earnestly, if Van der Lede was perhaps hard of hearing.
Herman’s determination not to speak even extended to his wife Jenny who had visited him every week; he had never said so much as a ‘hello’ to her.
The visiting room in the prison was bare except for a table and the four chairs around it. Van de Kooij sat down, but Rijsbergen was too agitated to sit still.
Rijsbergen got straight to the point. ‘Today is your last day here,’ he said as soon as Van der Lede was brought into the room.
It was hard to tell who looked at Rijsbergen with the most surprise, Van de Kooij or Van der Lede.
‘What does that mean?’ Van der Lede said, ending six weeks of self-imposed silence.
‘Take a seat,’ Rijsbergen instructed him, although he didn’t sit down himself.
The guard brought the prisoner to the table, then left the room and waited in the hallway.
Well, I’ve managed to get a response out of him, at least.
‘I’m convinced that you’re innocent,’ Rijsbergen said. ‘And I’m going to explain why.’
Van der Lede looked at him expectantly, as though he was watching the conclusion of a thrilling crime series on television.
‘When was the last time you were in Jerusalem?’
‘Jerusalem?’ Herman asked, looking bewildered. It was clear that this wasn’t a question he had been expecting to be asked.
‘I’ve never been to Jerusalem,’ he replied. ‘Jenny and I have wanted to go for a long time, but—’
‘Exactly,’ Rijsbergen said, cutting him off. ‘Listen, there’s a new suspect in the case. We expect him to be arrested very soon. It’s just a matter of time.’
Pure bluff, Rijsbergen thought. But let’s see how he reacts.
‘We can link this person to two murders. We also have strong evidence linking him to Coen Zoutman’s murder and possibly Yona Falaina’s as well. That would completely exonerate you of any involvement in their deaths.’
Van der Lede nodded.
Van de Kooij tried to adopt a solemn expression that would say that he knew precisely what Rijsbergen was talking about. But Rijsbergen could tell from his furrowed brow that he wasn’t entirely sure what was going on.
‘Yes,’ Van der Lede said.
You’re going to have to say a bit more than that.
‘So, now that we’re sure that you’re not guilty … Right, Van de Kooij?’ Rijsbergen looked down at his colleague, who immediately nodded back. ‘… We would just like to know how you knew that a square and compasses had been used in Coen Zoutman’s murder when nobody but the killer could have known about them. And the person who found his body, obviously. If you can explain that convincingly, then there’s probably nothing to stop you leaving this building shortly, as a free man.’
‘It was me,’ Herman said.
‘What do you mean?’ Rijsbergen asked genially.
‘I was the one who found Coen.’
Rijsbergen opened his mouth to speak but found himself unable to say anything.
‘You
what?’ Van de Kooij asked.
‘I found him first.’
‘And why didn’t you tell us that?’ asked Rijsbergen, finding his voice again.
Van der Lede sat up straight and folded his hands together as though he was about to pray. ‘I didn’t think it was …’ he began, but then he stopped.
‘Important?’ Van de Kooij suggested. ‘All that bad? Serious enough? Worth the hassle?’
‘Bad. I didn’t think it was really all that bad,’ Van der Lede replied, as though it had been a multiple-choice question with only one answer. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he went on, suddenly giving the impression that he was about to take control of the conversation. ‘It’s always terrible when someone dies.’
‘Dies!’ Van de Kooij exclaimed.
‘Easy there,’ Rijsbergen urged his colleague. ‘Let’s hear what Meneer Van der Lede has to say.’
Van de Kooij pressed his lips together so tightly that they started to turn white.
‘Let me put it this way,’ Van der Lede said. ‘It’s always sad when someone dies. I …’
Rijsbergen decided to sit down after all. Over his long career, he had interviewed more people than he could count, and he had developed an intuition about the moment when a suspect was about to reveal the truth. It was something in the tone of their voice, their posture, a clarity in their eyes … It was a confession, ultimately, and confession always brought relief. In a way, it was comparable to walking home carrying an increasingly heavy load, and the relief of finally being able to put it down when you got there.
‘The event was nearly finished, and I was about to go home,’ Van der Lede said. ‘But Jenny wanted to stay behind. I went upstairs to get the CDs that we had been using that evening. The temple door was open, and when I went in, I saw Coen lying on the floor. There was a spotlight shining on him. It made him look like a performer on a stage. Really bizarre. I don’t think there was anyone else in the room, but I can’t be certain. Although someone could have been hiding behind the curtains. I went over to him, and I could see that he was already dead, and that’s when I noticed the square and compasses.’ Then, as if he had reached the end of the story, he stopped talking.
The Pilgrim Conspiracy Page 39