by Helen Grant
‘I . . .’ He paused. ‘I alphabetized the CD collection.’
‘You what?’ Veerle couldn’t help herself; she began to laugh. ‘You alphabetized the CD collection?’
‘Yes.’ Kris was laughing too.
‘That’s idiotic.’
‘There was nothing else to do. The place was a palace.’
‘Someone will have noticed.’
‘So what? They’ll think the maid did it.’
‘You’re insane,’ said Veerle, but she was smiling. Smiling, and thinking. ‘And what if I want to do that too?’ she said.
‘What, alphabetize CDs?’ He was smiling back at her.
‘No. You know. Enjoy houses. Ones with plasma-screen TVs.’ She looked at Kris. ‘What would I have to do?’
‘Nothing. Hommel just has to agree.’ He looked at her idly, summing her up. ‘There have to be two of us who agree, that’s one of the rules. But don’t worry, Hommel won’t say no. She won’t like it, but she won’t refuse.’
Veerle looked down into her glass of wine, seeing a dim liquid shadow of herself in the depths. The wine was almost black in the low light.
‘Why did you ask me?’ she said.
‘Seemed like you already had a thing for creeping around empty buildings in the dark. Anyway, it’s more interesting with two. Some people like to go into places on their own – like Vlinder, for example. I like company.’
‘Who do you normally take with you?’
‘That depends.’
‘Hommel?’
‘Sometimes. Not any more.’
Ah, thought Veerle. She kept her gaze turned down into the glossy red-black depths of the wine. In the silence she heard something. A door closing. She thought it came from the direction of the kitchen.
Hommel, she thought. Suddenly she was tense again; her body was effervescent with nerves.
She heard the door between the kitchen and hallway open and close. She glanced at Kris, but he was looking at his watch, his dark brows drawn together in a frown.
‘Way too early,’ he said under his breath.
Footsteps were approaching down the hallway.
‘Hommel,’ said Kris.
Veerle’s first thought was, She’s nothing like her name. Hommel, Bumblebee – it had made her think of someone rotund, fuzzy-haired. Hommel was nothing like that. She was slender and pale and angular like a statue of a saint; even through the padded jacket and thick jeans she was wearing you could see how thin she was. She had very light blonde hair that was scraped back into a ponytail: practical but severe. The hair was very sleek; the end of the ponytail hung in a point like the tip of a paintbrush. She had high cheekbones and pale unfriendly eyes. The gaze of those pale eyes moved up and down Veerle’s body but Hommel didn’t bother to greet her.
‘Hello, Kris,’ she said coldly.
‘You’re early,’ he said mildly.
‘Nine wasn’t suitable.’ She didn’t say why. ‘We can’t all just jump whenever you call us.’
‘Do you want some wine?’ He held up the glass.
‘No,’ said Hommel shortly.
‘Why not? It’s a good one.’
‘You’re full of shit, Kris.’ Hommel glanced at Veerle. ‘So this is why you dragged me out here to this dump, is it? Is she the new one?’
‘Hommel . . .’ Kris assumed a conciliatory expression.
‘Don’t bother trying to be nice,’ Hommel told him. ‘The charm offensive won’t work on me.’ To Veerle she said, ‘I hope you know what you’re getting yourself into.’
Veerle said nothing. She was beginning to dislike Hommel acutely. The name Hommel suits you after all, she thought. You’ve got a sting in your tail all right. She was determined not to rise to the bait, though. She contented herself with giving Hommel a stony look.
‘What’s her name?’ Hommel asked Kris, as though Veerle couldn’t speak for herself.
‘Veerle,’ said Kris. He didn’t react to Hommel’s angry tone. ‘De Keyser.’
Hommel made a sceptical grunt of dismissal, as though she had never heard such a ludicrous name in her life. ‘Fine,’ she snapped. She pulled the collar of her jacket close around her neck, thrusting her chin out. ‘I’m not hanging around here, Kris. I’ve got better things to do.’
‘You agree, then?’
‘Whatever. Yes.’
Kris followed her out into the darkened hallway, leaving Veerle alone. She could hear the two of them arguing in low voices as they moved towards the kitchen door. She sipped wine, put her head back and stared up at the ceiling, doing her best not to listen to what they were saying. It seemed to her that on the whole she didn’t want to hear what Hommel might be saying to Kris, especially if it was about her; and more than that, she didn’t want to hear what Kris was saying back. There was nothing he could say to Hommel about the situation that would gratify both of them. Instead she gazed up at the ugly and moribund light fittings and the map of damp patches that disfigured the ceiling.
After a while she heard the door slam and Kris came back on his own. He was still holding his glass of wine, but something that had been building up in the atmosphere had evaporated.
The new one. It was obvious what Hommel had been implying – that Veerle was just the latest in a string of gullible girls. Hommel could be the one with the problem, she reminded herself. Maybe she wasn’t an ex at all; maybe she was someone Kris had rejected, trying to get her own back.
Which of them is more plausible? she thought, rubbing her fingers against the stem of the wine glass. Aloud, she said, ‘So she’s OK with it?’
‘Not really. But she has agreed.’
‘Mmm.’
‘She’ll get over it. It had to be her, anyway. She’s the nearest.’
Veerle thought about that. ‘So this isn’t just a local thing, then?’
‘Nope.’
‘How far does it go?’
Kris shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Nobody knows everybody, that’s the point.’
‘Who started it?’
‘Fred started the circle here. But even he doesn’t know everyone, just the ones in this group, in this area. Fred made up most of the rules.’
‘Who’s Fred?’
‘He does something in Brussels – runs a gallery or something. He got into it because he loves old buildings. Says he’s a purist. He doesn’t do the expat houses.’
‘You’ve met him?’
Kris shook his head. ‘Hearsay.’
‘But why do you need the group anyway?’ persisted Veerle. ‘Isn’t it risky, involving other people?’ She thought of Hommel, who clearly held a grudge. ‘Why don’t you just do it yourself?’
‘Exchange of information,’ said Kris. ‘It’s safer that way. If you know the family next door to you are going to be away for three weeks, it’s risky to go in there yourself. You’re more likely to be recognized by the other neighbours. If the breakin is detected you’ll get questions. Better to let one of the others do that one.’
Veerle looked him in the eye. ‘What if someone decides to tell? What if I walk out of here and go to the police? It’s trespassing, after all.’
‘I’m not going to track you down and kill you, if that’s what you think.’ Kris’s voice was ironic. ‘I can’t stop you, if you want to do that.’ He took a mouthful of wine. ‘In practice, nobody ever does. You’re trespassing too – you’d have to explain that. And we don’t steal anything or smash anything up.’ He eyed her. ‘Are you going to the police?’
‘No.’
They stared at each other. Unspoken messages were travelling between them, but Hommel’s hostile mood still hung in the air like a poisonous gas. If Kris had moved closer to her, she would have stepped back.
‘What happens next?’ she asked, breaking the silence.
‘Fred sends you the contact details. You’d better give me your email address.’
He watched her write it on the back of a till receipt, looked at the proffered piece of paper briefly and pocketed
it. Then he raised his glass to her.
‘Congratulations,’ he said drily. ‘You’re in.’
9
TOWARDS THE END of January the temperature rose; the snow gave way to sleet and then to rain. The ice on the lake in the park began to melt. It was still unpleasant to walk in the park – wet and dirty underfoot and cheerless overhead, with the bare and wet black branches of the trees jutting into dreary grey skies. It required a certain hardiness to root oneself out of bed on a Sunday morning to walk the dog.
That was probably the only reason the discovery didn’t make more of a stir at the time; it was early and there was hardly anyone in the park. In the south-west corner near the Sint-Hubertuskapel there was only a local man, Johan Bogaerts, who was walking a dog – or, more specifically, his wife’s dog. Johan was in a filthy mood because the weather was wet and cold and he hated the dog anyway; it was a stupid thing, small and yappy and wilful. The only thing that prevented him from planting a stout shoe on the dog’s backside and punting it into the lake was the fear of what his wife would say and do. All the same, he entertained pleasant thoughts of doing just that as he trudged after the loathed animal. He could see that the white hair of its belly and legs was already brown with mud; that meant brushing the car out after he’d taken the dog home, and bathing the bloody thing, while resisting the temptation to hold it underwater until bubbles and life itself burst forth from it.
Now he saw with annoyance that the dog had started down the bank that led to the pond. It was barking – or rather, it was making the shrill and irritating noise that passed for barking – and forcing its way under the green remains of fallen branches to the water. With the thaw, the wet earth had turned to mud; the dog would be even more filthy than usual. Johan called and whistled, but with a certain sense of futility; the dog did whatever it wanted, regardless of the admonitions of its owners.
‘Klootzak,’ said Johan disgustedly to the dog. Then he went to follow it.
The bank was, he saw to his dismay, steeper and muddier than he had expected. If he went down it himself he would end up just as filthy as the dog, even assuming he managed to keep his footing. He called the dog again. ‘Mirko. Mirko.’
Johan raised his voice but the dog still didn’t respond, even when he shouted ‘Klootzak!’ at it.
It was at the water’s edge, barking its hairy little head off and ignoring him completely. Johan opened his mouth to curse it again, and then he saw what the dog was barking at. For a moment he tried to tell himself that it was something innocent – a carrier bag that had blown into the water, a discarded piece of clothing. But even as he struggled down the bank, slipping and sliding, mud coating his trousers, he knew that it wasn’t. As he went down, he tried to fumble his mobile phone out of his pocket, intending to call the police, an ambulance, his wife. But he stumbled over a mossy branch and the phone flew out of his hand and landed in the pond with a faint splash.
The bottom of the bank was so slippery that he was unable to avoid putting one foot in the water. It was freezing, and in his mind’s eye it was contaminated too, the solution in which a dead thing was suspended like an exhibit in a medical museum. He made a strangled sound and launched himself back onto the bank.
He looked for his phone but it had vanished in the leaden water. Then he looked at the body and he knew that it was down to him, he had to do something. He was as sure of that as he was of anything, as sure as he was that his marriage and his life since had been a complete mistake, that he was going to tell Céline it was the dog or him when he finally got home. I’m going to have to turn the body over. I have to be one hundred per cent certain that whoever it is is really dead. He didn’t think there was the remotest chance of life in that motionless and submerged form, but he had a duty to find out before he went off for another fifteen minutes to fetch the police in person. He couldn’t leave someone to drown if there was the faintest hope of resuscitation. So he took his courage in both hands and grasped the sodden clothing, which moved in the water around the silent form like the gently waving seaweed on a reef. He pulled, feeling the weight of the water trying to suck the body back down out of his grasp, and then he braced himself and heaved, and the body turned over.
Johan looked at the dead grey face and screamed.
10
VEERLE HEARD NOTHING for six days. She travelled to and from the high school, the bus passing shops where the newspaper headlines outside screamed BODY FOUND IN LAKE. She didn’t read up on the details; it seemed prurient somehow, like taking pleasure in someone else’s tragedy. All the same, it was not possible to avoid it. Students and teachers alike were talking about it at school, and Claudine sucked up every minor piece of information with an obsessive zeal: suspicious death and bloody mysteries simply served to confirm her view that the world was an impossibly dangerous place to live in. She went after the smallest snippets of news with the morbid compulsion of someone unable to stop picking a scab.
Meanwhile, Veerle kept checking her email account. It was not easy. She couldn’t trust her mother not to pry, to look over Veerle’s shoulder while she was online, or peep at the screen when Veerle had gone to make herself a coffee. Claudine hated to be excluded; it made her even more suspicious.
Being stalked by Claudine made Veerle feel desperate to make contact with Kris and his group. It was as though she had been wandering for years in some grim labyrinth and suddenly he had opened a door in the wall and said, Look, here’s the way out.
I wonder if this is how criminals feel, she said to herself. As though the laws aren’t really there, as though they’re something made up that doesn’t apply to them. There was a kind of reckless freedom in it. Everyday life, the round of bus and school and going home to Claudine at night, seemed like a façade, a crust that she had broken through. It would never look the same again; she could see the cracks now. She kept herself awake with coffee and checked her emails late at night, when Claudine had gone to bed.
On the sixth day she came home, studied for a while in a listless sort of way, ate the supper Claudine had prepared and went without much hope to check her email account. For once she could expect to work undisturbed: Claudine wanted to watch something on television, a doom-laden documentary of some sort. Inevitably this would supply her with more grounds for fretting, more proof of the evil of the world outside the heavily bolted front door, but Veerle was prepared to worry about that later. She booted up her laptop, went online and accessed her email account.
1 new message.
It was from an address she didn’t recognize, and the title read Fwd: Bird-watching.
There was a line of text: Welcome to the world of bird-watching! Underneath it was a link to a website address, http://www.koekoeken.be, and underneath that were a user name and password. The username was Honingbij, Veerle noted wryly. Honeybee. Was someone trying to tell her something, hinting that she was the latest in a long line of successors to the embittered Hommel? She clicked on the link.
When the website came up she thought for a moment that there had been a mistake. KOEKOEKEN! shouted the header – CUCKOOS! The screen was sprouting wild birds – robins, finches and various other species, not all of which Veerle recognized. There was a paragraph of text which began with Welcome to the world of bird-watching! and ended with a list of bird species. The final line read, Our especial interest is of course the cuckoo.
At the very bottom of the page were two fields marked Username and Password.
Someone has a sense of humour, thought Veerle as her fingers hovered over the keys. Cuckoo. The bird that’s in someone else’s nest.
Then she thought about the username, Honingbij, and decided that the wit was not so much to her taste after all. She entered the username and password, and pressed RETURN.
The flocks of birds vanished and Veerle found herself staring at a message board. Most of the message subjects were similar: Sighting, Sterrebeek. Sighting, Tervuren. She opened one at random. Possible cuckoo sighting, Feb 14–28, Eikst
raat 209.
She exited the message and scanned down the list. There were a number of messages with Vlinder in the title. Vlinder, if you’re reading this, please contact . . .
She might have opened one of those out of curiosity, but another message caught her eye. Honingbij, welcome. It had been posted by Schorpioen.
She opened the message.
There was an address, and then: Friday, 21.00. K.
Kris. Veerle looked at the message for a while. She could hear the sudden blare of music from the sitting room. She supposed the documentary was ending; it sounded like the sort of sombre and over-dramatic theme tune that she associated with the harrowing documentaries her mother liked to watch. In a minute or two Claudine would be in the room, peering over Veerle’s shoulder and asking her whether she wanted a hot chocolate or something.
Friday, 21.00. K.
She exited the message, logged out of the Koekoeken site and shut down the laptop. She had just finished when Claudine came in.
‘Do you want some cocoa?’ was the first thing she asked, and the second was, ‘What have you been doing?’
‘Looking at a wildlife website,’ said Veerle promptly.
‘Really?’ said Claudine vaguely, losing interest. ‘It’s amazing what you can do with that thing, isn’t it?’ She meant the laptop.
‘Yes,’ agreed Veerle. ‘It is.’
11
THERE WAS ANOTHER fuss when Veerle announced that she was going out on Friday night.
‘Where are you going?’ demanded Claudine suspiciously.
‘Someone in my class has a birthday, so we’re all meeting up,’ said Veerle. She plucked a name out of the air. ‘Anna.’
‘I didn’t know there was an Anna in your class. You’ve never talked about her.’
‘Her family just moved here last term,’ said Veerle. She didn’t feel guilty about lying to her mother; it was like telling a child something that wasn’t strictly true to reassure it.
If I say I’m meeting someone she’ll go overboard. She’ll want to know who he is and where he comes from and how I know he’s OK, and she’ll probably decide he isn’t OK, whatever I say. Then she’ll try to stop me going.