by Helen Grant
A dampening silence fell between them.
Think, Veerle said to herself.
After a moment a thought came to her, chill and unwelcome. She said slowly, ‘Maybe it’s not the houses. Maybe it’s the Koekoeken themselves.’ She looked at Kris, her expression grim. ‘Maybe someone’s working their way down the list. Picking people off. Hunting them.’
Kris stared back, and she could see the horror on his face as the idea sank in.
Hommel, she thought.
‘Who has a list of everyone?’ she asked him.
She could see him consciously shaking off the images that were passing through his brain.
‘Fred,’ he said. ‘Although’ – he thought quickly – ‘in theory anyone could make one by looking at who’s posting on the website.’
‘That’s just user names. You couldn’t track anyone down from those.’
‘Fred doesn’t have much more information. I mean, he knows names and he must have their email addresses, but not everyone’s actual street addresses. Nobody has those.’ Kris shrugged. ‘Some people have some other people’s addresses, if they’ve sent keys through the post. But nobody has everyone’s. There’s no point. It would be needlessly risky.’
‘Well, if it’s not the houses,’ said Veerle slowly, ‘and it’s not the website . . .’ Her voice trailed off. An idea was burgeoning in her mind, pushing its way up through the topsoil of her consciousness like a strange and toxic weed, opening up into ugly glory.
She heard the words running through her head two or three times before they found their way onto her tongue.
‘Maybe it’s both,’ she said.
Her mouth was dry and the words came out more quietly than she had intended.
‘What?’ said Kris, his brows drawing together in a frown.
‘Maybe it’s both.’
They stared at each other, her hazel eyes searching his darker ones. ‘You mean . . .’
‘Maybe someone’s using the houses and the website. Checking who’s going where and when . . . and turning up there themselves.’ There was a silence.
‘They’d have to have access to the website,’ said Kris slowly. ‘Unless someone could hack it.’
‘Why would anyone bother?’ asked Veerle. ‘It looks like a bird-watching forum.’
‘Well, either someone hacked it, or . . .’
‘Or it’s one of us,’ finished Veerle. ‘One of the Koekoeken.’
‘No.’ Kris was shaking his head. ‘This is crazy.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ said Veerle grimly.
‘How would they get into the house if they did that? There’s only ever one set of keys going round.’
‘Maybe they’ve been to that one before and made copies. Or maybe they can lock-pick, like Egbert can.’
‘Could.’
Veerle shivered. She said, ‘It’s pretty horrible to think of. You turn up at some place and there’s someone already in there.’
‘Like that place near Oudergem Woud,’ Kris pointed out.
Veerle stared at him open-mouthed. ‘Oh God. No,’ she said.
Kris looked alarmed. ‘Veerle, I was just thinking out loud. We still don’t know what we saw there. Maybe it was nothing. Just someone messing about.’
‘But the house was empty and it said so on the website. If there was someone monitoring the posts . . .’
‘Then what?’ Kris sounded almost fierce. ‘Supposing you did see a dead body. Supposing it was the girl who vanished . . .’
‘Clare,’ supplied Veerle.
‘Suppose it was Clare, then. She wasn’t one of the Koekoeken, was she?’
‘How do you know?’
‘She was British.’
‘Well, Egbert was Dutch,’ Veerle pointed out.
‘That’s different. Egbert was here pretty much permanently. Anyway, he was up to his neck in it, picking locks for Fred and stuff. You couldn’t invite some spoiled little expat girl to join. She’d be there for maybe two years and then she’d be off somewhere else, boasting about what she got up to in Brussels, and sooner or later there’d be trouble. Anyway,’ added Kris, ‘how many of them do you actually know?’
‘British people?’
‘Any of them. Them and the Americans.’
Veerle shrugged.
‘And how many of them are at your school?’
Veerle thought about that. ‘There’s one.’
‘One. One out of hundreds, maybe thousands. They don’t mix, Veerle. There’s no way Clare was one of us.’
‘She’s still disappeared, just like Vlinder did.’
‘Well, maybe that’s just—’
Coincidence. Veerle waited for him to say it.
But Kris was putting a hand to his forehead, tugging at his dark hair as though trying to uproot some unwelcome idea that was sprouting inside his head.
‘Kris?’
‘She wasn’t meant to be there,’ said Kris, and Veerle had the feeling he wasn’t talking to her at all, but to himself, following some script she couldn’t see. ‘And he came to scope out the house and she was already inside, or maybe he was inside when she came in.’ He exhaled slowly, a long sigh. ‘Wrong place, wrong time. She wasn’t one of us, but maybe he thought she was. It all fits.’
Veerle stared at him and she had a cold feeling in the pit of her stomach. It all fits. Kris was right. And now she was realizing that she didn’t want any of it to fit, she had been relying on him to be the sceptic, to prove that none of it was connected, anything that seemed connected was a coincidence. A coincidence, rare as a Spix’s macaw but undeniably still in existence. Because if it’s all true, if it really all fits together the way Kris say it does . . .
‘We can’t walk away from this,’ said Kris grimly. His hand was on her arm, the fingers digging into her flesh. ‘We have to do something now.’
Veerle found her tongue. ‘Supposing we’re wrong?’ She looked into his eyes, and although she was afraid of hardly anything she could feel the fear seeping into her now, like freezing rain soaking through her clothes. Veerle thought she would rather have solo-climbed the sheerest rock face in the world, the most featureless façade – she would rather have climbed the gleaming surfaces of the Atomium, for God’s sake, and risked falling off and landing on the tarmacked surface of the Eeuwfeestlaan, splattering passing tourists with her blood and brains – anything rather than this. The consequences of making the wrong decision at this point were so enormous that her imagination could hardly map them.
If Kris is right, and one of the Koekoeken is behind what happened to Vlinder and Egbert and even that British girl, Clare, we can’t let it go, we have to do something. To ignore what was happening was to walk heedlessly through a darkened catacomb, deaf to the silent reproaches of the massed dead. But acting . . .
That means involving the police, it means exposing dozens of other people. It means placing ourselves at a crime scene. It means confessing before everyone that we – possibly – saw a murder and didn’t report it. We’ll probably top the list of suspects, Veerle realized sickly. As for the people who owned the houses we visited – those great big palaces with their pools and jacuzzis and home cinemas – every single one of them is rich and powerful and well-connected. They aren’t going to write off those clandestine visits to their houses as the result of youthful exuberance. They’re going to want blood. Mine and Kris’s.
Kris said, ‘I don’t think we’re wrong.’
Veerle looked at him and saw it in his eyes.
He’s going to act, whether we’re wrong or not, because the consequences of not doing anything if we’re right are too terrible. Blood on our hands, she thought.
She looked at him, taking in every detail of him with a painful intensity, as though she were seeing him for the last time. The dark hair falling over one side of his forehead, the dark eyes, the nose that was a little too big and the mouth that was a little too wide for perfect good looks but which somehow combined to make her heart leap whenever
she saw him. She had the sense of something immense and terrible thundering towards them, like a dam bursting, tonnes of brown and stinking water bearing everything before it, shattering trees and buildings like matchwood, scouring clean the face of the earth, sweeping them both away. Crushing them.
She said nothing. Anything she could have said would have sounded like a farewell.
‘Veerle?’ said Kris at last. ‘Are you sure Mevrouw Coppens didn’t say anything about where Hommel might have gone – to a friend, or a relative or something? Anything at all?’
Reluctantly Veerle shook her head. ‘No. She asked me if her daughter was all right, and when I talked to her in the street she just kept saying that Jappe had said this or that, and that she was old enough to move out.’
She hated to see the way the look in Kris’s eyes darkened. ‘It’s still possible she did just move out, you know,’ she said. ‘We don’t know anything’s happened to her, not for certain.’ The words sounded empty even to her own ears. Still she wished that just by saying them she could somehow breathe life into the possibility. On the single occasion she had actually met the girl the air had practically crackled with the enmity between them, but Veerle thought about Vlinder, suspended face down in frozen pond water, and Egbert mouldering under the forest trees, and she was truly afraid for Hommel.
‘I don’t believe that,’ said Kris.
Veerle looked at him for a long moment and then she sighed.
‘No. Neither do I.’ She looked away, out of the window, as though there might be some comfort to be found in the familiar view of fields and sky and the distant roofs of the village. Then she looked back at him, because it had to be done, the medicine had to be taken.
‘So,’ she said, ‘what are we going to do?’
44
KRIS AND VEERLE sat side by side on the tram as it swayed and rattled through the woods, heading for Brussels. The trees were clothed in the bright light green of springtime. It was a very fine evening, mild and sunny, but Veerle took no pleasure in the beauty of the woodlands. She could not look at that burgeoning foliage without reflecting on the fact that it made the bare winter wood opaque; it created a thick canopy of leaves that could cover all manner of things. Egbert had lain hidden in such a place, and Vlinder had been found just a few kilometres away from the tramline, at the border of forest and park. It was impossible not to speculate about the others – the British girl, Clare, and Hommel. Were the green shoots of spring weaving a concealing carpet over disturbed earth, vacant eyes and pale dead skin? She shivered.
Kris had his arm around her, but she was tense; she wasn’t relaxing against him. He followed her gaze and saw that she was staring fixedly out at the passing trees.
‘Hey,’ he said in her ear. ‘Relax. She was probably just putting it on to stop you going out.’
His words seemed to recall Veerle to herself, but they didn’t lighten her mood.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘She seemed really ill. She sounded sort of . . . weak.’ She bit her lip. ‘I offered to call the doctor but she wouldn’t let me.’
‘Veerle,’ said Kris patiently. ‘Of course she didn’t want you to call the doctor. Look, think about it. She’s tried arguing, she’s tried locking you in. She even tried taking your wallet. This is just the latest ruse.’
At the word ruse he saw Veerle’s eyes widen, and he added, ‘I don’t mean ruse, I mean—’
‘She’s not doing it on purpose,’ Veerle told him. ‘She thinks she’s sick, even if it’s all in her head.’
‘Well, you offered to call the doctor,’ Kris pointed out.
‘I know.’
Veerle lapsed into silence. If I could tell her, she thought. This is important. I’m not leaving her on her own to go off and mess around. This is about people’s lives. She knew the impossibility of it. She couldn’t even tell her school friends.
She glanced up at Kris. It’s him and me.
And Hommel?
That was the question: whether the connection she felt to Kris was a straight line between the two of them or one side of a triangle.
The tram had left the woods behind and was now passing a large park. A few minutes later they passed the tram museum. After the stop known as Chien Vert – the green dog – they left the parkland behind and the streets of Brussels closed in upon them.
There was a tight knot of tension in the pit of Veerle’s stomach at the thought of the meeting ahead.
We have to talk to Fred, Kris had said, and she had seen the determination in his face. It made sense, of course it did; it was either that or go directly to the police, but that was the equivalent of weighing into a war with a nuclear bomb; it might stop the war but it would take everyone with it, yourself included.
We may still have to do that. What if Fred’s no help? That seemed like a frightening probability. Veerle couldn’t imagine that Fred was going to be able to suggest anything they couldn’t have thought of for themselves, the two options being: do nothing, or tell the police. She supposed that in some ideal fantasy world Fred would take the whole horrible problem off their hands and offer to contact the police himself while leaving them out of it altogether. She knew that wasn’t going to happen, though. She had no personal knowledge of Fred but she knew perfectly well that he didn’t owe them anything. He wasn’t her father, he had no obligation to protect her.
Play with fire, and you can’t complain if you get burned, she thought grimly. Still, there was nothing to do but see what happened when they actually got to the meeting. She stared out of the windows at the apartment blocks sliding past and tried to distract herself by imagining how she would attempt to climb them. On an iron balcony far above her she saw a middle-aged man come out to water his plants and thought how shocked he would be if he stared over the ornamental railings and saw Veerle moving up the façade of the building towards him.
The tram cornered twice and then began to descend into the earth towards Montgomery station. They had to take the metro from here; Fred’s gallery was in Ixelles. When they got out of the tram Veerle could smell the city in the air; she could almost taste it on her tongue, a slightly gritty, smoky essence of traffic fumes and dust and closely packed bodies. It had been sunny up above but down here it was never daytime, it was always a kind of unhealthy yellowish twilight.
Kris and Veerle stood slightly apart on the platform, both too full of nervous energy to entwine themselves round each other. It was too serious an expedition anyway to embark upon it holding hands like a pair of children skipping through a meadow. When the train arrived it was nowhere near full but neither of them sat down; it would have been impossible to relax. They stood up, holding onto the pole and swaying with the movement of the train, staring sombrely into each other’s eyes like a pair of aristocrats in a tumbril, heading for the guillotine.
They changed at Arts-Loi, travelled a couple of stops, then left the train and took the escalator back up to ground level. The metro station of Porte de Namur was on a major intersection and the constant sound of traffic was like white noise. All the same it was welcome to feel space and air around them after the windowless environment of the metro.
Kris set off at a fast pace, threading his way through the commuters heading for the nearest station or tram stop. His legs were longer than Veerle’s, and although she was not unfit she was soon flushed and breathing hard. She didn’t ask him to slow down, though.
Let’s get this over with.
After a few minutes they turned down a side street; now the incessant sound of traffic was behind them, muffled but still audible, like the sound of water thundering down a distant canyon. Kris had checked the address and the route beforehand and he moved swiftly and confidently.
‘Down here,’ he said, cocking his head to indicate that they should take a right turn down a narrower street.
Half a minute later Veerle saw the gallery. The building was old, perhaps as much as a century old, she thought, with a façade of white stucco and elegant mou
ldings around the upper windows. The ground floor had been modernized; there was a glass front polished to such reflective brilliance that it almost sparkled. It was not possible to see right inside the gallery from the street; behind the glass were single items spot-lit against a black background, so that they appeared almost to glow, like items of gold jewellery offset against ebony velvet. As Veerle approached the gallery she could see that one of them was a gigantic dish made of white and gold glass spun so finely that it looked like candyfloss. It was also perforated like lace; you could not have put a grape inside it without it rolling through one of the holes, or an apple without breaking those delicate glass filaments. It gave Veerle the same faint sense of unreality as the houses she had visited with Kris; it was hard to conceive of anyone being so affluent that they could fill their home with things like this, so rivetingly beautiful and yet ultimately so useless.
On the other side of the window was a cube of what looked like sandstone, the corners smoothed and the different faces pockmarked with carved symbols. Veerle thought that it was quite staggeringly ugly.
Kris tried the door of the gallery but without much conviction: places like this one didn’t allow just anyone to wander in off the street. Sure enough, it was locked. He leaned against the doorframe and pressed the buzzer.
After he had pressed it for the third time, there was a crackle and a male voice said ‘Oui?’ Even in that single syllable the speaker had managed to convey a curt, disapproving tone.
Kris did not react to this. He leaned close to the speaker and said in French, ‘We have come to see Fred.’
There was a pause and then the voice said, ‘We don’t see students.’
Veerle looked around at this; she guessed correctly that the unseen speaker was looking at them on a security camera. She spotted it, high in the upper corner of the doorway, its dead cyclopean eye trained on them.
‘We’re not students,’ said Kris. ‘Can we speak to Fred?’