by Helen Grant
The girl was missing, and she had been missing for weeks; the earnest television report, the pleas for information, were simply the flowering of an affair whose roots ran backwards in time, back into the chill and darkness of February. She hadn’t gone missing from Brussels, though, and that was the complicating factor, the Zandmannetje sprinkling his psychotropic dust in the investigators’ eyes. Although the family lived in Belgium, they were British, and the girl had been studying at a university in England since the previous autumn. There was some problem though; she had decided she didn’t like the course any more or had been slipping behind with her studies, and after a heavily loaded meeting with her tutor she had simply dropped out of sight, failing to show up for her lectures and tutorials. After a time the lumbering machinery of the university had realized that she had actually gone, left, and was not simply curled up in her room in an almighty snit. Attempts had been made to contact her family, but her parents were on a two-week holiday in Burma and it had taken a while to track them down and for them to fly home.
Even then, the initial search had tended to concentrate on Great Britain. The house in Belgium was closed up during the family’s absence and there was no reason for anyone to think that Clare – that was the girl’s name, Veerle learned – had gone there. Someone was employed to water the house plants in the family’s absence and he or she had seen nothing untoward at all, no sign that anyone else had been inside the house.
One of us, Veerle realized with a sense of shock. The person who waters the plants is one of the Koekoeken.
That wasn’t the worst of it, though. It was bad enough, yes, because if the police decided to lean on the plant-waterer hard enough, he or she could blurt out everything, drop every single one of the Koekoeken in it up to their neck. But what was a million times worse, the thing that was making Veerle feel suddenly sick with foreboding, as though her entire body were clenched in a spasm of cold horror, was the thought that the girl, Clare, had been inside that opulent villa; that it was Clare’s motionless hand she had seen outstretched on the kitchen tiles.
She didn’t want to believe it, because apart from anything else, if it was Clare she had seen, lying so terribly still on the kitchen floor, then she and Kris and the rest of them were standing at the rim of something appalling – an abyss, a black hole whose gravitational pull would suck all of them in.
Veerle sat with her plate of pasta cooling on her lap, her gaze fixed on the television screen, and tried to reason it out, but she kept coming back to the same horrific conclusions. The house was supposed to be empty when we visited it; the owners were in Burma. Only a handful of people had access to it, and one of them has vanished. Someone was lying on the floor when I looked in through the window that night, someone who wasn’t moving . . . If it wasn’t Clare, who else could it be?
She couldn’t think of a single satisfactory alternative. She remembered Kris suggesting that perhaps what she had seen was one half of a couple. Maybe they like fooling around on the kitchen floor. That was possible, of course, but everything still pointed to Clare; Clare who was missing. Kris had the key to the house that night, which meant none of the other Koekoeken had it, not unless one of the others had made a secret duplicate, and when you looked at that possibility against the likelihood that Clare herself had come back to the family home and let herself in with her own key, well, it was a no-brainer.
So what was she doing lying on the kitchen floor? And who was the man? That was the crux of it. She had tried to see that scene in the kitchen in another way. Perhaps Kris had been right: perhaps it was the man’s hand she had seen.
I don’t think so, though.
At the time, she had almost come to doubt the evidence of her own eyes, and it had been easier, safer, to think that she had seen something with an innocent explanation. Still, she could remember the horror that had welled up inside her when she saw that motionless hand; the way she had instinctively reached for her phone to call for an ambulance – would actually have done so regardless of the consequences if Kris hadn’t stopped her. She had started entering the number, she remembered that, so at the time, what she had seen had convinced her of its urgency, no matter how muddy the memory had become afterwards.
Whatever I saw happening, it wasn’t good. If the hand belonged to Clare, well, Clare had vanished, but apart from that undeniably sinister fact there was that feeling she had had that night, something ill-defined and just out of her grasp.
The echo of a memory.
Wrongness, she thought now. The horror she had felt when the man had risen into view from behind the kitchen unit was more than the simple shock of seeing someone where there should have been no one. She had felt the wrongness of the situation.
Oh God, what did we witness?
It was no use, she couldn’t sit here any longer. I have to contact Kris.
She knew that it would upset Claudine, but she still had to do it.
Veerle had chosen to spend the evening with her mother, watching television in the stiflingly dull atmosphere of the living room. She had thought that it might pacify Claudine, that it would paper over the cracks, work as a kind of tradeoff. Hey, I go out alone sometimes, but we still have our safe little evenings at home, same as ever, just the two of us. OK?
Neither she nor Claudine had broached the subject of Veerle having been locked in her bedroom. Her mother was still a little stiff with her, but Veerle now suspected that she was ashamed of herself, rather than angry, and as the evening had progressed in its reassuringly uneventful way, Claudine had gradually unbent. She had cooked something she knew Veerle liked, and had gone so far as to ask her questions about school and her friends.
Veerle had fed her mother some tame titbits of information in much the way that she might have offered scraps to a timid animal – an outline of the last Dutch assignment, a description of a friend’s mother’s new car. Nothing alarming. She had felt Claudine relaxing, felt that things had returned more nearly to normal than they had for some time.
Now I’m going to ruin it by going off upstairs and shutting myself in my room. If she chooses to listen outside she’ll know that I’m calling someone. Even if she doesn’t, she isn’t going to like it.
I can’t help it. I have to call him.
She put the unfinished plate of pasta on the floor and got to her feet.
31
‘KRIS? IT’S ME, Veerle.’
Veerle was standing by the window in her bedroom, looking down at the street below. She had chosen the spot because it was the furthest point from the door, which was firmly closed. She didn’t think her mother was listening in – in fact Claudine had gone into the kitchen in a state of dudgeon and started washing up with a staccato energy that was perilous to the crockery – but she didn’t want to take any chances.
‘Have you seen the news?’ she asked.
‘Yeah. Have you seen the message from Fred?’
‘What message?’
‘He’s told everyone that the house is off limits. Extinct. He’s crapping himself.’
Veerle sagged against the windowframe, putting her free hand to her forehead.
‘Are you still there?’ asked Kris after a moment.
‘Yes.’ She exhaled slowly. ‘I was just kind of hoping that I’d made a mistake – that maybe it wasn’t the same place or something.’
‘It’s the same place, all right.’ Kris sounded grim.
‘Fred recognized it?’
‘No, he only does the old ones, remember? He has this thing about restoring them. Someone else tipped him off, and now he’s panicking, scared as a weasel.’ Kris paused. ‘He’s not the one who has to worry, though. He’s never been near the place.’
‘Shit.’ Veerle closed her eyes. ‘Look, we didn’t go in. It’s not like we’ve been all through the house leaving fingerprints on the doorknobs or anything.’
‘You haven’t,’ said Kris succinctly. ‘Me, I’d better hope the maid polishes everything properly.’
&nb
sp; ‘But . . .’ Veerle was fighting to think of some way of warding off the horrifying possibilities that were suggesting themselves. ‘Even if you’d left stuff all over the place, they wouldn’t come looking for us, would they? If you’re not on their records already, then prints and stuff don’t tell them anything.’ She said they because she didn’t want to say the police.
‘As long as the girl who waters the plants keeps her mouth shut,’ Kris pointed out. He sighed. ‘She probably will. If she tells anyone about the extra key and all the rest of it she’ll drop herself in it, not just us. I’m guessing she won’t tell the police anything.’
We hope. Veerle was silent for a moment. She was gripping her mobile phone very tightly; her palm was slick against the plastic casing.
‘But should we?’ she said finally.
‘Should we what?’ said Kris, and then he realized. ‘Talk to the police, you mean? No. No way.’
‘Kris . . .’ Veerle massaged her brow with her fingers, as though trying to work away a headache. ‘There was that hand.’
‘The hand on the floor? But you didn’t see whose hand it was. It could’ve been anyone’s.’
Veerle felt an insane desire to laugh at that. She said, ‘It was a woman’s hand – or a girl’s. I’m sure of it. Anyway, who else would be in the house if it wasn’t that Clare girl? They said everyone else was away.’
‘I don’t know. Anyone. If the house had been empty, we could have been in it.’
‘We had the keys,’ Veerle pointed out. ‘So it can’t be any of the other Koekoeken, not unless someone has a second key.’
Kris thought. ‘Look, supposing it was Clare’s hand you saw. So what? They already know she’s missing, and they’re already investigating whether she came back to Belgium or not. If she did, they’ll find out. Telling them we saw a hand won’t do anything, if we can’t confirm it was her.’
‘There was the man.’
‘Whose face we didn’t see,’ Kris pointed out. ‘We can’t identify him either.’
There was a long pause.
‘I suppose not,’ said Veerle reluctantly. She stared out of the window. The streetlamps were just coming on. A man was passing the end of Kerkstraat walking a little dog. Everything looked normal. Reassuringly normal.
‘Veerle?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I just feel as though we ought to help them find that girl, if we could. But you’re right, we couldn’t tell them anything useful.’
So why do I feel so bad about keeping quiet?
32
EGBERT MADE A journey, his first ever visit to Wallonia, the French-speaking part of Belgium. Egbert had never shown an interest in this region of his adoptive country, nor was he likely to do so now. He travelled in the boot of a car, his darkened and tainted features concealed under a tarpaulin shroud. He travelled until he had passed out of Flemish Brabant and into the province of Namur; indeed his journey took him past the birthplace of Veerle’s mother, Claudine. He continued onwards, into the Ardennes, travelling along ever smaller and narrower roads, until he was passing through forest.
There were places in this region that thronged with tourists, stretches of river patrolled by plastic kayaks, picturesque hiking trails. The haunts of the living. Egbert had done with those for ever. His destination was a lonelier one, a stretch of unkempt forest pierced by a single winding road. The leaves of the trees and bushes lining the road were grey with the dust of traffic that simply passed through on the way to somewhere more interesting: the next boathouse, the next town where the weary walker or mountain biker could quench his thirst with a cold beer and turn his face to the sun.
There was a track leading off the road and into the woods, so little used that it was almost concealed by the overhanging foliage. It was deeply rutted; as the tyres bounced over the gouges in the earth, Egbert’s dead limbs jumped and jerked as though an electric current had passed through them. His head lolled.
When the car stopped and the engine died, there was a second or two of absolute silence. Then there was the sound of the car door opening and closing, the muffled crunch of footsteps on the mulchy ground, and shortly after that, the grunt and strain and thick hacking sounds of someone turning the earth. A gouge, a furrow, and finally a shallow grave.
The boot of the car was opened, the tarpaulin drawn back, and the sunlight that filtered down greenly through the clustering leaves illuminated the skin of Egbert’s face for the last time. The marks of passing time were clearly visible; soon Egbert’s own mother would not have recognized him.
Presently he lay in the makeshift grave, nestled in the earth like some strange unhealthy tuber. The weary spadework began again. At last the rich dark soil closed over Egbert’s sunken features as though he were slipping slowly down into black water, overwhelmed, drowning.
After the soil came some mossy branches and leaf mulch. Now a casual passer-by, if such a person ever ventured into this part of the woods, would be unlikely to notice anything at all.
In life, Egbert had prided himself on his ability to enter forbidden places unseen, to come and go undetected. Now at last he had achieved the ultimate: he had vanished altogether.
33
KRIS AND VEERLE met at a house in Everberg, an upmarket village which required two bus journeys to reach from Veerle’s home. The house was large and very modern and ill-defended; the alarm was not working at all. It had a pool, although it was smaller than the one in the house to which Kris had first taken Veerle, and a sauna; but better than that, it had a large basement with a home cinema. It even had padded chairs like the ones you found in real cinemas, upholstered in deep blue plush fabric.
Veerle liked the house, and not just because of the home cinema. She was glad that they had selected a property far away from the villa she had seen on the news.
She didn’t want to think about that villa, about the circular window at the back, and the light that had poured out of it that night, making a paler patch on the close-cropped lawn. She had thought about that house almost constantly when the news first broke, but Kris was right: even if she had contacted the police, she could not give them enough information to identify the people she had seen inside, assuming that there really were two of them, and she hesitated to take a step that would implicate so many unknown others.
Fred did the right thing, she told herself, trying to swallow the unease that rose in her like nausea. He had warned everyone off the villa, had declared it permanently off limits, had sealed it off from the Koekoeken network as neatly and finally as a surgeon performing an amputation. It has nothing to do with us any more.
. . . And if that was Clare you saw, and you could have saved her if you’d made that call? Better not to think about that, unless you wanted to stagger around with a burden of guilt, and wake up at night thinking What if . . . It was too late anyway, she realized.
Veerle came out of her reverie and saw that Kris was sorting through the ranks of DVDs. She went over and stood beside him and started looking at the spines of the plastic covers herself. Nearly every one of them was in English, with no Dutch soundtrack or subtitles. She supposed the owner had ordered them all from Great Britain.
They live in a bubble, Veerle thought. It didn’t make her feel any more empathy for the people whose house she was invading. How could you trespass in someone’s space if they weren’t really there?
It’s weird, she mused. These people always either live in the past, hankering for the place they left, or live in the future, yearning for the day when they’ll return. Never in the present. If I had a house like this, I’d enjoy it properly.
She picked out a DVD. ‘What about this?’
It was a horror film, an extravagantly trashy story about a group of teenagers being picked off one by one in improbable and grotesque ways.
‘Nice,’ said Kris, looking over her shoulder. He leaned in almost casually and kissed the side of her neck. Veerle shivered pleasurably, her eyes closing, wanting him to do it again, but
Kris was already taking the DVD out of her hands, opening the plastic box to extract the disc inside. Veerle’s eyes followed him but she went to sit down on one of the blue plush seats.
When he started the film, she almost jumped. The rumble from the speakers was so loud that it was like listening to an aeroplane landing. Kris adjusted the volume and turned down the lights, and then he came and sat next to Veerle, putting his arm around her, pulling her towards him.
On the screen, horrible things were starting to happen, mouths gaping open, eyes wide with terror, screams, fire. Blood. Veerle wasn’t looking at it. Her face was turned to Kris’s and his to hers. They were bathed in the colours pouring out of the screen – white glare alternating with the golden bloom of explosions. Kris put out a hand to touch Veerle’s face and his skin was tinted the colour of flames. The screen went black for an instant and Kris’s face, so close to hers, was lost in brief darkness, as though a great wing were beating between them.
I think I love you, she thought, and on screen someone died.
She gave herself up to the pleasure of being kissed by Kris, but she was not oblivious to the film; she was consciously ignoring it. She hadn’t picked that one at random, either. She had seen an earlier one in the series; she knew what it was about. A string of freak accidents, utterly improbable but theoretically possible events. The plot didn’t just go out on a limb, it tiptoed out to the very end of the branch, to the slimmest twig, until the whole thing was bending under its weight and a single step further would make the whole thing snap.
The thing was, Claudine thought like that. She would knock on Veerle’s bedroom door half an hour after both of them should have been asleep: she had been lying awake wondering whether Veerle had fallen asleep with her laptop on the bed – all because she had read about someone who had done that, leaving the machine plugged in at the wall, so that some part of it had heated up and set the bed linen alight. When she used the dishwasher, which was rarely, she still washed up the cook’s knives by hand because she had heard of a person who had slipped on their kitchen tiles and fallen onto the upturned blades stacked in the cutlery holder. And if she went down with an illness, she never suspected anything as harmless as a cold, she always went directly to fretting about tumours and heart defects and killer viruses.