by Helen Grant
‘No,’ said Veerle eventually. She glanced at Kris. ‘It’s weird.’
She had the sense of something escaping her, something twisting away into darkness.
Why is it so important? Joren Sterckx has been dead for maybe nine years.
She stared down at the apartment block.
It’s just so strange. That day – what happened – it could be the thing that set Mum off, that made her so scared of everything. In which case it’s huge to her – and I can’t remember it at all, seeing Joren Sterckx.
After a while she felt Kris’s hand on her shoulder. ‘Veerle? It’s great up here, but . . .’
‘It’s full of bird shit.’
He smiled. ‘Look, I’ve got Jeroen’s car for the weekend. We could go somewhere. There’s a place I’ve been once before, about half an hour’s drive from here. A little chateau. It’s empty, has been for a while, but the inside is amazing. There are paintings on the ceiling . . . and the security’s crap. You won’t even need to climb anything.’ He looked at her expectantly. ‘Want to come?’
She took one last look out of the window.
‘Course I do.’
42
VEERLE HAD ONLY been in the house for thirteen minutes when Claudine arrived home from Namur. Veerle saw the headlights of her little car sweeping round the corner into Kerkstraat. Normally at this time of day the roller shutters would already be down, sealing the house against the outside world; Veerle had deliberately left them up, savouring the feeling of openness and freedom. She suspected that Claudine would shut them all the minute she got inside.
She saw the lights slow, pause, and then begin to retreat as her mother backed into a space outside the house. Veerle went into the sitting room and sat down on the couch. She judged that it would be advisable to be found lounging safely in front of the television; if Claudine found her restlessly wandering the house it would simply make her nervous and suspicious.
As she heard the sound of Claudine’s key in the front door lock she picked up a newspaper that was lying on the coffee table. Claudine always took a French language newspaper – Le Soir or La Libre Belgique – and so Veerle rarely read them, preferring to pick up the news from one of the Flemish TV stations. Even then, she didn’t watch every day; there was only so much you could take of features about how long Belgium had been without a government.
The newspaper – she saw it was Le Soir – was only window-dressing, an attempt to make it look as though she had been on the couch for ages, and it wasn’t even a convincing cover, since she saw now that it was Wednesday’s edition.
All the same, when Claudine opened the door of the sitting room and stood there in her camel-coloured jacket with an expectant expression on her face, as though disapproval was waiting to sweep across it in a tidal wave, she seemed surprised to see Veerle so deeply engrossed in the paper that she didn’t even look up.
‘I’m back,’ she said, and saw her daughter give a slight start. Veerle looked a little pale, she thought, although she was barely aware of the slight thrill of satisfaction the thought gave her. Evidently the girl had spent the day lounging about the house. She probably hadn’t had a proper lunch, Claudine decided; she was blissfully unable to conceive of her daughter eating service-station sandwiches under a peeling rococo ceiling.
‘Hi,’ said Veerle, but she gave the impression of only half realizing that her mother had returned. Her gaze kept creeping back to the newspaper lying open on her lap.
Claudine advanced into the room. The first thing she did was go to the window and let down the shutters, hiding the mellow evening street outside.
‘Have you eaten?’ she asked Veerle. Her gaze darted around the room, sharp and swift as a pullet pecking seed. She was only half listening to Veerle say that she had had some soup, nothing more, as she moved behind the couch to get a clear view of what her daughter was reading.
BODY FOUND IN WOOD.
That was enough to put anyone off eating. Claudine remembered reading the article; she found such headlines both compulsive and repelling. These things only fed the terrible feeling of dread that constantly churned in the pit of her stomach, and yet she felt driven to read all of it, every detail, as though she were searching for something, some hidden meaning – perhaps the single fact that proved to her that the victim was not like herself, had done something that she would never do, never in a million years; that they had asked for it in some way.
She remembered the body-in-the-wood story very clearly because, horrifically, it had been a child who had found the corpse. Admittedly it had been a boy, but a boy Scout: in the mental Venn diagram that Claudine drew of young people, this one existed in the very small intersection between Boys and Well-behaved Children. He had been taking part in a game in the forest (and that made it all the more appalling, since who goes hunting for their playmates and finds the decomposing remains of a murder victim?) and had stumbled over the body, almost literally. He’ll be scarred for life, thought Claudine, imagining nightmares and therapy and an obsession with death, and further down the line an inability to form relationships.
‘That’s a terrible story,’ she said aloud, nodding at the open newspaper.
‘Yes,’ said Veerle automatically.
She really did look pale, Claudine decided; perhaps she was a little anaemic. A trip to the GP might be in order. Veerle would probably have to take iron tablets, and spend a lot of time resting.
Claudine felt her spirits rise. ‘I’ll make us a cup of coffee, shall I?’ she said.
Half an hour later, Veerle escaped to her room. She had listened to Claudine’s description of her trip to Namur, which sounded terrifying; as far as she could tell, all the female members of the family (and they were nearly all female, the men having mostly died, perhaps in self-defence) had spent the day sitting around the chokingly formal parlour of Claudine’s older sister’s house, drinking coffee and gossiping. Veerle could imagine the scent of furniture polish and the ticking of the ormolu clock on the marble mantel. The scene it conjured up in her head was reminiscent of an afternoon spent in the Museum of Africa in Tervuren, amongst the cases of stuffed animals – all glassy eyes and moth-eaten fur and frozen in attitudes that were almost but not quite lifelike. Her aged relatives always seemed a little like that, as though they had stopped properly living some time ago. Now they lived vicariously on other people’s lives, like a group of elderly vampires. More than about twenty minutes of their polite prying questions and Veerle always wanted to run screaming from the room, or else say something outrageous.
She listened anyway, to some long rambling anecdote about what one of her older cousins had said and done, but all the time her thoughts kept sliding back to the article she had read in the newspaper.
BODY FOUND IN WOOD.
There was no special reason to think that it was anyone she knew of, much less a specific person, namely Egbert . . . or Hommel. All the same she was itching to get at her laptop and check the news sites.
The paper’s three days old, she thought. Perhaps by now they’ve published a name. So she listened to Claudine’s tales until she judged that she had made herself attentive enough that she could reasonably escape, and then she said she felt exhausted and wanted to lie down.
Claudine did not demur at this; physical ailments had an almost sacred quality as far as she was concerned. She began to offer fruit tea and soup and aspirin, but Veerle turned them all down and escaped.
In her room, she booted up the laptop and began to search. As her fingers flew over the keys she was aware that her heart was thumping.
Don’t be stupid, she told herself. There are, what, eleven million people in the country. What are the chances of it being one of them?
And then there was the fact that she might not recognize Egbert even if it were him; she didn’t know his surname, didn’t even know if Egbert was his real name. He used that other name too, Horzel, but that didn’t mean that Egbert was a genuine name, the one on his ID card. Pe
ople in the Koekoeken group had every reason to keep their personal details to themselves. She only knew Hommel’s name – Els – because Kris knew her.
She told herself all that, but the minute she saw the photograph she knew with heart-sickening conviction that it was him.
It wasn’t a very good photograph; it had been taken for the security pass at the company where he worked, so it had that kind of police-mugshot quality to it. The background was beige and institutional-looking. Egbert himself looked geeky and rebellious. He had a pale, rather angular face and very untidy brown hair that stuck up in clumps, and was wearing some kind of leather thong around his neck. You could see his shoulders and the top of his chest, and although you couldn’t see much of the T-shirt he was wearing, Veerle was pretty sure she could work out what it said.
HORZEL.
You could only see the tops of the letters, but if you knew what the word was to begin with, it was obvious.
He put his Koekoeken name on his T-shirt?
Veerle stared at the photograph in disbelief. She couldn’t take in the sheer audacity of it. The whole point of the user names was to bury your own identity under an additional layer of subterfuge, as though you were painting over it on a sign; and here was Egbert advertising his alter ego on his chest.
She began to scan the text underneath the photograph.
Egbert Visser. So his name really was Egbert.
Egbert Visser, aged twenty-six, software engineer. Older than Veerle, and Kris too, older by a long way, but he hadn’t outgrown his taste for adventure, she guessed. Or perhaps it was his taste for anarchy that he had been indulging.
It was thanks to Egbert’s taste for anarchy that he was in the picture at all. It wasn’t his family who had reported him missing – he was a Dutch citizen and no close family had been traced at all – but his employer. Some weeks before, Egbert had failed to turn up at the office where he worked; since this followed an incident in which his boss had disciplined him for playing online games during office hours, nobody was that surprised at first when he didn’t appear. After a few days, however, questions began to be asked, and after ten days someone else was having to cover his work. Scenting an opportunity to rid himself of a difficult employee, Egbert’s boss, Paul De Bock, had made redoubled attempts to contact him. It swiftly became apparent that Egbert had vanished altogether, not simply from the company where he worked, but from the unkempt studio flat he called home. The downstairs mailbox was stuffed full and the flat stank of mouldering food cartons and the contents of the overflowing kitchen waste bin.
By the time Alexandre Lambert came sprinting through the early spring forest, with his eyes wide and the back of his blue Scout shirt coming adrift from his jeans, Egbert was already considered a Missing Person.
The article said nothing about how Egbert had died, or why. Clearly it was not an accident, or natural causes; Egbert had hardly dragged himself dying into the depths of the woods and pulled the dark soil over himself like a blanket, turning his weary face to the bosom of Mother Earth before falling asleep for ever. Someone had carried or dragged him there, just as someone had carried Vlinder down to the overgrown pond in the park and let her lifeless body sink into the dark scummy water.
There was no indication that anyone had made a connection between Vlinder’s death and Egbert’s. Vlinder had been found in Flemish Tervuren; Egbert’s body had been discovered in the depths of the Wallonian Ardennes. Egbert had been a software engineer; Vlinder, so far as Veerle knew, had still been studying. They hadn’t known each other in ‘real’ life, only on the Koekoeken site, where each of them hid behind an insectoid user name, one a butterfly, the other a hornet.
The only connection between them was the Koekoeken, she thought sickly.
Veerle stared at Egbert’s photograph with a cold hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach.
And the only people who know that are the Koekoeken.
She wondered how many of them would even connect the two deaths. She and Kris, and certainly Fred – but perhaps no one else, unless Fred posted something on the website.
Like what? Supposing he posts something warning the group but doesn’t tell the police? If they ever do find out about the Koekoeken, we’ll have been concealing evidence.
Useless to conjecture what Fred would do; she’d never met him. But the fact remained that none of the Koekoeken, Fred included, could involve the police without dropping every single member in it, up to their neck.
And if we do nothing?
She bit her lip.
Then who’s next?
43
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Easter Sunday morning, Claudine went to mass. As usual she went to the French-speaking church in a neighbouring district, rather than the Sint-Pauluskerk opposite the house. She asked Veerle whether she would like to go with her rather than staying alone at home, but when Veerle said no she didn’t press it. Clearly Veerle was not going to go anywhere (Claudine reasoned to herself) or get into trouble of any kind, since there were still no buses running. She went into the sitting room to say goodbye to her daughter, buttoning up her good coat as she did so, and found Veerle still lying indolently on the couch in her dressing gown, with a mug in her hand.
‘Won’t you be bored here?’ she asked, but Veerle simply shrugged.
‘I’m fine,’ she said.
‘I’ll be gone two hours,’ Claudine warned her.
‘That’s OK.’ Veerle stifled a yawn. She lay back and listened as the front door closed. A minute later she heard the engine of Claudine’s little car firing up, and then the sound of it pulling away from the kerb outside the house. Veerle looked at the ceiling, holding her breath.
Gone, she thought.
She put the mug down on the floor and jumped up. With Claudine’s departure a deadening atmosphere seemed to have lifted. The very air felt cleaner, colder, sharper. Energizing.
Veerle ran upstairs to her room. In between dressing at lightning speed and brushing her teeth with savage briskness she phoned Kris on her mobile, as arranged. Three minutes later, as she was fastening her dark hair in a loose knot at the back of her head, she heard the doorbell. She pulled on her jacket as she ran down to answer it.
She had thought that she would instantly feel calmer when she saw Kris, but she didn’t. The burden of knowledge about Egbert was too much; it was like a tumour in the heart of her, hot and heavy and toxic. She didn’t invite him in, even though she knew Claudine was long gone. Instead she pushed past him, out of the front door.
‘Where did you park the car?’
‘A couple of streets down, like you said.’
They began to walk quickly. It was a cool morning but Veerle felt too warm, as though she were running a fever. She was desperate to reach the car, to get away, somewhere well out of earshot of any other living person.
‘Where do you want to go?’ asked Kris. ‘We could go to the castle, if we’re careful.’
‘Anywhere.’
They passed an older man walking a couple of little dogs. Veerle returned his friendly greeting but inside she was seething with an impatience so intense that it was like rage. As soon as they were inside the car with the doors closed, and Kris was sliding the key into the ignition, she said, ‘What are we going to do?’
Kris paused, his fingers still curled around the key. ‘We’re going to think carefully before we do anything.’
‘Did you see the photograph?’
‘Yes.’
‘He had his name on his T-shirt. Horzel, I mean. He had his Koekoeken name on his T-shirt.’
Kris said nothing. He started the car, and pulled away from the kerb.
‘We have to do something,’ said Veerle. She put her hand to her forehead, as though checking for a temperature. She was looking out through the windscreen but not really seeing the street as it slid past. Houses, a single shop, the yellow-painted façade of a bar, more houses, then at last an open expanse of grass. All of it as distant as a dream. It was Egbert who
kept intruding into her consciousness: Egbert with his rumpled-looking hair and rebellious expression. Seeing his photograph for the first time had been like meeting him; she had to remind herself that he didn’t exist any more, at least not like that. What does someone look like after a month in the ground? She shuddered.
Anywhere, she’d said, but the castle was too far, the conversation wouldn’t wait. Kris drove until the last house was half a kilometre behind them and they were passing fields, and then he pulled over. When he turned off the engine the silence was startling.
‘Let’s think about this,’ said Kris seriously.
‘It can’t be a coincidence,’ said Veerle immediately. ‘Two of them; three if—’ She was going to say, if you count Hommel, but she stopped herself just in time. ‘Two of them,’ she repeated more firmly. ‘And the only thing they had in common was the Koekoeken.’
‘The only thing we know they had in common,’ said Kris.
‘It’s a pretty big thing,’ Veerle pointed out.
‘Yeah.’ Kris slumped back in his seat, thinking. ‘I just don’t see how the deaths are connected. I mean, Vlinder went missing ages before Egbert did, and nobody seems to know exactly when or where she died. She might have gone to one of the houses, or she might have run into the wrong person on the street somewhere. There’s no way of knowing.’
‘Maybe she broke into somewhere when there was somebody there, like that time we went to that place near Oudergem Woud.’
‘What, she ran into the owner and they thought she was a burglar and whacked her, but a bit too hard?’ Kris shook his head. ‘It’s possible, but it doesn’t feel right. OK, so maybe that was what happened, and then the person who whacked her panicked and dumped the body. But I can’t believe the exact same thing happened to Egbert. That really is too much of a coincidence.’
‘Supposing it was the same house?’
Kris shot her a glance, eyebrows raised.
‘No,’ said Veerle, relenting. ‘That’s too far-fetched.’
‘Vlinder normally did the old places,’ said Kris. ‘And Egbert – the last place he did was one over in Sint-Genesius-Rode. I checked through his posts last night. It’s a big house, really modern. Not Vlinder’s thing.’