by Helen Grant
‘Kris—’ she began.
‘I’ll go round the back and look,’ he said, pre-empting her.
‘I’m coming too.’
‘You go round the other way.’
Silently they split up. Kris headed back the way they had come; Veerle kept to the shadows under the tree until she was able to slip round the other side of the house. Her heart was thumping as she picked her way through the darkness. She could tell by the feel of the ground under her feet that there were paving stones on this side of the house, which was good, in that she was not leaving footprints in earth or mud, but which made it essential to tread softly. She had been outdoors for a while now, and in spite of the excitement she could feel the cold beginning to bite; she had to avoid audibly shivering too.
After a minute or two her outstretched hands met the bars of a gate; she pushed gently, and to her surprise it swung open. The hinge was well-oiled but even so there was a faint scraping sound which made her freeze for a few moments, listening.
Nothing. She had no idea where Kris had got to now. The house remained dark and silent. She passed a window, the shutters tightly closed, no chink of light visible.
Up ahead she could faintly discern the end of the wall. It took her a moment to realize that there must be a light source at the back of the house, since she could see a lighter patch contrasting with the dark bulk of the wall. She paused. It wasn’t bright enough to be a security light, she could tell that.
Maybe they did just leave an inside light on a timer.
She took another couple of steps.
Or maybe someone’s in there.
She stared at that point where the blackness of the shadowed wall met the light patch beyond, a perfect vertical horizon.
The owners are in Burma right now. She shook her head. They’re supposed to be in Burma. So Kris says.
Was this another test? She knew the consequences if they were caught trespassing on a property like this one. It was light years away from fooling about in a dilapidated castle that nobody seemed to own, with nothing inside it worth stealing and no one keeping an eye on it. This house probably had an alarm that went straight through to the local police station, and an owner with enough influential connections to make sure that Kris and Veerle had the book thrown at them.
Stop thinking like that. You’ll psych yourself out.
Veerle made herself keep going, padding along the side of the house as quietly as she could. When she got to the corner, she waited for a few moments before peering round it.
The back garden was clearly enormous, even though much of it was swallowed in shadow. The dim light that came from the back of the house showed a broad paved area, edged with a glittering black rectangle – an ornamental pond. Beyond the paved area there was an expanse of lawn stretching away until it was lost in darkness. There were enormous shrubs too, some of them taller than Veerle, the sort you could only afford to have if your garden was the size of a football pitch.
The light was coming from a circular window in the centre of the wall – the only one small enough not to require shutters, Veerle guessed. It was barred anyway, so nobody could have climbed in that way. She didn’t think the light was on in the room behind the round window; it wasn’t strong enough for that. It was coming from somewhere deeper inside the house. This gave her the confidence to approach the window.
When she was within a few paces of it she ducked to the side and peered obliquely through the glass. She was gazing into a large and well-equipped kitchen; she could make out the shapes of fitted cupboards and a tiled central island, and the silhouette of the mixer taps over the sink. The light was coming from a doorway on the other side of the kitchen, so that everything was backlit. It looked cold, she thought; uninhabited. There was nothing on any of surfaces, not even a single mug or glass waiting to be washed, not a lone fork or a food carton sitting there. No lights winking on any of the expensive chromed gadgets. The bottles on the shelf above the sink were lined up with obsessive neatness. In the half-light the room had the lonely look of a mortuary. The light never changed, never flickered as it would if someone had passed between the lamp and the kitchen door. Nobody home, Veerle thought.
Carefully she moved across the window, to try to get a view of the other side of the kitchen, perhaps a peep through the open door at the lit area beyond. Now she could see the end of the central island, and the bulk of an enormous American-style refrigerator. She could also see a strip, perhaps thirty centimetres wide, of the room beyond the door, although afterwards she could not have described it in any detail. Instead her gaze was irresistibly drawn to something on the tiled floor; something protruding from behind the bulk of the island and clearly visible in the light from the doorway.
A hand.
Without thinking, Veerle ducked away from the window. She pressed herself against the wall, her heart thudding.
Did I really see that?
A hand, palm up, fingers half bent, the wrist disappearing behind the island. That one glimpse she had had of it was so deeply imprinted on her mind’s eye that it had to be real. And if it was . . . there was someone inside the house, all right. But whoever it was was lying on the kitchen floor, completely motionless. As still as death.
Maybe I mistook what I saw. Maybe it was something else altogether. But she couldn’t think what else it could have been. Too big to be a doll’s hand. A glove? No. She couldn’t have confused that half-curled, solidly three-dimensional object with the flaccidity of an empty glove.
Unwillingly she crept back to the window to look again. It’ll turn out to be something stupid, like a mop-head. Or there won’t be anything at all, because you imagined it.
But when she peered in, there it was, still motionless on the floor tiles, as ominous as a spider. Quite clearly a human hand; she could see the silvery gleam of a ring on one of the fingers.
She slid her hand into her jacket pocket, searching for the smooth shape of her mobile phone. Even as her fingers closed around it, she was moving further to the side of the window, straining to see just a little more of the owner of the hand.
Ambulance, she was thinking. I should call an ambulance.
Now she could see something else, if she craned so hard to the side of the window that her temple was pressing against the frame. A curl of hair. The top of someone’s head.
Even as she pressed the button to turn the phone on, she had visions of what would happen when she called 112, her mobile phone number appearing on a screen in an emergency call centre somewhere. She’d be traceable, instantly, and here she was standing in a stranger’s back garden, with no good reason to be staring in through their kitchen window in the middle of the night.
Supposing it’s just a drunk sleeping it off? I could get myself in more trouble than I’ve ever been in my whole life. Her fingers hovered over the screen. But if someone’s collapsed, I need to call the ambulance now. They could die if I don’t. She bit her lip, focusing on the tiny screen. She touched 1, hesitated, looked up, and there was Kris moving swiftly and noiselessly across the paving stones towards her. His appearance was so sudden that she jumped.
When he was within a metre of where she stood, he put out a hand and plucked the mobile phone right out of her fingers.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he whispered fiercely. ‘You can’t call anyone.’
‘There’s someone in there,’ she hissed back.
Kris glanced at the window but didn’t really look inside. ‘Then we have to leave. Now.’
‘I mean, on the floor. I think she’s hurt.’
‘Verdomme. Are you sure?’ Kris’s body language had been tense, straining to make a getaway. Now, suddenly, he was still. He didn’t move to go, nor did he hand her phone back.
‘Yes, I’m sure,’ whispered Veerle. They stared at each other in the dark. ‘We have to call someone,’ she added. ‘I can’t just pretend I didn’t see her.’
‘You shouldn’t have seen her,’ Kris pointed out. ‘We’r
e not supposed to be here.’ Still he didn’t move.
‘We could call from a phone box,’ suggested Veerle.
‘Do you know where there is one?’ said Kris in a low voice.
‘No.’
‘Well, neither do I.’
Veerle bit her lip. ‘We can’t just leave her.’
Kris shook his head. ‘Look . . . maybe you were mistaken. There’s probably nobody in there at all.’
‘There is—’ Veerle’s voice was rising.
‘Keep your voice down,’ whispered Kris urgently. ‘We’ll look, OK?’
Cautiously they approached the circular window, moving slowly and silently as though tiptoeing through a tiger’s den while the fanged and clawed occupant lay sleeping. Veerle went to the right, Kris to the left, both of them hugging the wall.
From her side, Veerle could not see the patch of floor where the hand lay at all. She leaned her head against the wall, watching Kris’s face outlined in the dim light from the window, and waited for him to say that he had seen it.
Kris stared through the window for several seconds, pressing himself against the frame as Veerle had done, in an attempt to get a clear view. He seemed dissatisfied with whatever he could see; after a few moments he risked moving to the centre of the window and gazing boldly in. Then he turned towards Veerle and she saw him shake his head.
He must have seen it. He must. Veerle was beginning to feel reckless herself. She moved closer, up against him, trying to see what he could see, although she knew that the pair of them must be visible from inside, their pale faces pressed almost against the bars.
Now she could pick out the central island again, and if she pushed Kris aside she could glimpse the edge of the open doorway. As she craned to the side, the floor by the island came into view.
There was nothing there. No hand. No curl of hair.
It’s not possible. Veerle felt as though she were going mad. There was a hand there. There was someone lying there, on the floor tiles. I know there was. I saw that hand.
She stared and stared at those empty tiles, as though the hand would suddenly materialize there again, motionless, the fingers slightly curled, the silver ring gleaming in the light from the doorway.
‘Come on,’ said Kris in her ear.
She turned a baffled face to him. I did see it.
‘We’d better forget it for tonight,’ he said in a low voice, and her heart sank.
He thinks I imagined it.
She looked away, back into the half-lit kitchen, willing the hand to be there again, proving that she hadn’t gone mad, wasn’t seeing things. And saw a movement.
Behind the central island something appeared for a split second, then vanished with the lightning speed of a gecko disappearing into a crack in a wall.
Veerle ducked away from the window, pulling Kris with her, and leaned against the wall, her heart thudding.
What the hell was that? she was thinking. She had had no time to take in anything other than a dark, indistinct shape, visible for a mere instant before it disappeared behind the unit.
‘Did you see that?’ she hissed, but she knew the answer even before he shook his head. Kris had been looking at her, not at the window. Wondering whether she had entirely taken leave of her senses, whether she was always seeing things that weren’t there. Now he was probably convinced of it.
I have to take another look, risky or not. She stepped back to the window and peered through.
The glass was thick and the window well-sealed so there was not a single sound from inside, nothing to warn Veerle of the presence of the person behind the expensive bulk of the kitchen island – a person who now rose from what had surely been a stooped or kneeling posture with ominous slowness, like the thick muscular uncurling of a python. First the head came into view, blunt and close-cropped, and then the shoulders, broad and powerful, silhouetted against the light from the open doorway.
It was as well for Veerle that the man had his back to her; for a few seconds she was unable to move, simply standing with her knuckles pressed to her mouth, swallowing the scream that had threatened to burst out of her. If he had been looking her way, he would have had a perfect view of her white face, the dark eyes huge and horrified, staring through the glass. As it was, she stood there paralysed, watching him begin to turn towards her, until Kris took her by the shoulders and dragged her to the side of the window, out of sight.
She might have made a run for it then, made for the side of the house, but Kris pulled her close. Motionless, they clung to each other, trying not to make a sound. Veerle could no longer see anything inside the kitchen, but the window threw a long faint oval of light on the ground, and as the pair of them watched, they saw it flicker. Someone was approaching the window.
They pressed themselves back against the wall, until the person in the kitchen would have had to lean right out of the window to see them, and watched as the shadow of whoever it was grew in size until it had almost eclipsed the light. He must be standing right up against the glass, Veerle thought. Close enough to press his face against it. She felt almost sick with tension. If Kris had not had his arms around her she thought her legs might have given way beneath her, she might have collapsed.
She imagined the man gazing out into the night, scrutinizing the darkness, trying to pick out the tiniest movement. More than anything she wanted to run, to put a good long distance between herself and the lit window, yet she made herself stay still. A single flicker of movement, a single faint shadow was all it would take to alert the man to their presence.
The man remained at the window for some time, and then abruptly he moved away.
‘We should go,’ said Kris in Veerle’s ear.
He took her hand and they ran.
19
WHEN THEY EMERGED from the path behind the houses onto Tervurenlaan, Kris and Veerle slowed to a walk. There were no other pedestrians in sight, but there were still occasional cars passing and there was no point in drawing attention to themselves by running full pelt along the street. Veerle was grateful for an opportunity to assess the damage done by running across a huge and unknown garden in the dark. By some miracle the pair of them had avoided the chill black waters of the ornamental pond, but Veerle had run into a low stone wall with an impact that had left her hip throbbing, and there was a rip in the sleeve of her jacket. She was panting, her breath visible on the frigid air under the streetlights.
‘Are you OK?’ asked Kris.
Veerle nodded. She had to resist the temptation to look over her shoulder, to check that nobody was coming after them.
You’re supposed to be just passing by, she reminded herself. Try to look innocent.
For a moment they paused and stood there in silence, listening. Veerle could hear a car moving along a street somewhere out of sight, and the dry rattle of wind through the skeletal branches of a tree. Other than that there was only her own breathing and Kris’s. No sound of anyone crashing along the path after them. No shutters opening or doors slamming.
Veerle didn’t dare comment on the silence from the house they had just fled, feeling as though it might somehow jinx them. She could not shake the feeling of being watched, of being under the scrutiny of unseen eyes.
Kris shook his head. ‘Nothing.’
They began to walk again, heading back towards the tram stop. Kris slipped Veerle’s mobile phone out of his pocket and handed it back to her.
‘That’s the first time that’s ever happened,’ he said. ‘Someone in the house.’
Veerle looked down, turning the mobile over in her hands. She pressed the button, and when the screen illuminated, there was the 1 she had punched in, intending to call 112.
‘Kris . . .’
When he glanced at her, she didn’t know what to say. She was thinking about what she had seen through the kitchen window, the hand lying motionless on the floor, the lock of hair curling across the tiles.
The person who stood up behind the kitchen island had close-croppe
d hair, I’m sure he did. And even though I didn’t get a good look at his hands, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t be slim, with rings on.
She bit her lip.
What did I see?
Was it possible that there had been two people there all along, the owner of the hand (who she was convinced was female), and the man who had stood up and come to gaze out of the window?
Or am I imagining things? She wondered whether she could absolutely swear to it that the hand she had seen was a girl’s or woman’s. That the curl of hair was really hair and not the tail of a shirt or a shoelace or some other thing that she hadn’t properly identified.
‘Who were you going to call?’ asked Kris. ‘Police?’
‘An ambulance,’ said Veerle.
‘Well, the guy wasn’t hurt,’ said Kris.
‘I know.’ Veerle was silent for a moment. ‘But I’m not sure it was him I saw on the floor.’
Kris shrugged. ‘Who else could it have been?’
‘I thought it was a girl.’
‘Thought it was, or sure it was?’ When Veerle didn’t reply, Kris put out a hand and touched her shoulder. ‘Look, maybe there was a girl. Maybe it was his girlfriend or his wife or whatever. Maybe they like fooling around on the kitchen floor.’
But the hand was dead still, thought Veerle.
‘Or maybe it was his hand you saw,’ finished Kris. ‘Who knows?’
I don’t know, thought Veerle. I really don’t know any more.
She cleared the 1 from the display. Then she switched off the phone and slipped it into her jeans pocket.
Forget it, she told herself. It’s the only thing you can do. You don’t know what it was you saw, and you shouldn’t have been there seeing it in the first place. All the same, there was something about the scene that was bothering her, something more than the fear of being discovered and reported to the police.
It was nothing more than the echo of a memory, faded and indistinct, a recording from the ancient past lost in hiss and crackle.