by Helen Grant
‘So . . .’ When he spoke his voice was feeble, as though he had aged thirty years in an instant. ‘You came here to get my permission?’
Kris shook his head. ‘Maybe I hoped you’d talk us out of it. But nothing you’ve told us changes anything. There’s no proof Hommel sent those keys – in fact if she didn’t, it pretty much proves that someone else inside the group knows what happened to her.’
‘It will destroy all of us, you realize that?’ said Fred, his voice trembling. ‘And for what? You know most of this is your . . . your imagination. That, and a coincidence. Vlinder and Horzel. You could put all of us in prison for a coincidence.’
There was a long silence.
He’s right, thought Veerle. There’s no proof. Maybe it was just a coincidence, a horrible one, but all the same . . . Maybe there’s no connection between what happened to Vlinder and what happened to Egbert. Maybe Hommel’s just moved on. Maybe Clare . . . But she couldn’t go on with that line of thinking. Maybe Clare just happened to be lying inert on the floor of a house we visited, and it has nothing to do with us . . . There wasn’t any pattern to it, there was no logic, and yet she still felt that slow welling of dread inside her.
‘I will tell you what I will do,’ said Fred suddenly, and there was a new tone in his voice; he sounded almost defiant. ‘I will go to Gregory, since he set up the website for us in the first place, and tell him to take it down. It is of little use to me anyway since Egbert is no longer with us. I will remove it, and that will be the end of the Koekoeken, and the end of these dangerous ideas.’
The end of the Koekoeken?
Veerle was shocked. She shot a glance at Kris and saw that his reaction was much the same as hers. This was unexpected; there was no time to think it through.
Kris opened his mouth but he had barely had time to say, ‘But—’ before Fred interrupted him.
‘If there is any basis for this theory of yours, we will put an end to it.’ He raised a finger as though he were a school teacher about to lecture the pair of them, and Veerle saw Kris’s jaw tighten. ‘The Koekoeken will be gone, as though they never existed.’
I doubt that, thought Veerle. You can’t wipe out all traces of yourself on the Internet as easily as that.
‘That’s not the answer,’ said Kris shortly.
‘It solves the problem.’
‘It doesn’t solve anything. If you take down the site there’s no way of finding out who’s doing this.’
‘You’re assuming there’s something going on in the first place.’ Fred had recovered his confidence. ‘There is no proof of that. This is the best solution. We take down the website, the group ceases to exist, and if there is anything going on, it ends there, without us having to involve the police. No trouble for anyone.’
‘And what about Vlinder? And Horzel?’ demanded Kris.
Fred looked at him levelly. ‘We cannot do anything for them now.’
Veerle was unable to contain herself any longer. ‘What about justice?’ she said angrily.
‘Justice?’ Fred repeated the word almost thoughtfully, as though he were savouring an entirely new taste in his mouth. He turned to look at Veerle. ‘And if we go to the police with this story, where is the justice for the forty people who suddenly find themselves under investigation? You said so yourselves: they would be dead meat.’ He shook his head. ‘No. This is really the best solution.’
‘You’re going to take the site down? Immediately?’ asked Kris.
‘As soon as possible,’ Fred told him. ‘Gregory is away. Another week, ten days, then he will be back and I will tell him to take it down.’
‘If someone’s stalking the group, they’re going to get away with it,’ said Veerle.
‘They are also going to stop,’ Fred told her coolly. The gaze of his grey eyes rested on her for a moment. ‘If someone is doing that, and it is not all a figment of your imagination.’
This time it was Veerle who got to her feet, the legs of her chair uttering a screech of protest as they scraped the floor.
‘Let’s go, Kris,’ she said, but her eyes were on Fred and the expression in them was fierce. As Kris stood up she touched his arm, wanting them to get moving before she lost her temper altogether and took a swing at Fred.
I won’t give him the satisfaction, she thought, looking at that cool, complacent face, the expensive shirt and the even more costly watch under the purple cuff.
All the same, she didn’t trust herself to stay in the room with him a minute longer. The atmosphere was suddenly stifling. She thought she could smell the stale aroma of old coffee from the machine in the corner and it reminded her of ashes. Veerle wanted to run downstairs and into the street, where she would have the open sky over her head, but even that would not be enough because the streets were full of people and cars and trams, crowded with them, and right now she wanted space. Space, and loneliness to run off her anger. She chafed under every moment spent in the gallery.
Fred rose too; it seemed he would not trust them alone in the building, even just as far as the entrance. He followed them down the stairs and unlocked the door for them. As he held it open, he said, ‘Don’t come back here. Ever. You understand?’
Kris passed very close to him, and as he did so he turned and looked directly into Fred’s eyes. Their faces were a handspan apart. Kris said nothing; he didn’t need to. Fred fell back against the wall, but as soon as Kris and Veerle were outside he was locking the door behind them with trembling hands.
After she had gone a few paces, Veerle turned once and glanced back at the gallery, but Fred had already vanished into the dark interior, fading away like a ghost into its shadowy recesses. There was nothing to see but the useless white and gold bowl and the ugly chunk of carved sandstone, inert under their spotlights, and the dead eye of the security camera glaring at them.
Kris put an arm around her shoulder, pulling her away. ‘Come on,’ he said in her ear. ‘Let’s go to the Warandepark. We can talk there.’
45
THERE WAS A bench free beside the pond but Veerle found herself unable to sit down. She was too restless even to stand in one place. Instead she and Kris walked up and down together under the trees, giving other strollers a wide berth. It was not possible to walk comfortably at that pace with their arms around each other, but after a while Kris took Veerle’s hand. It was a strangely comforting feeling, his long fingers entwined with hers. She could feel the warmth of his skin, the roughness on the pads of his fingers from working outdoors. Veerle imagined that if she looked closely at those fingertips she would see that the whorls of the skin were finely marked with the dark soil, a faint tattoo that even scrubbing would not remove. She didn’t want to stop and look though; she wanted to carry on walking beside Kris, with the warmth of his hand in hers, not speaking, just being together. Putting off the moment when they would have to talk about it – about what they were going to do.
The trouble was, she didn’t have a clear idea about it herself.
It’s too much, she thought. Vlinder in the frozen lake, and Egbert lying in a forest in Wallonia, and whether we did see Clare – and if so what was happening to her – and whether it was Hommel who returned the keys or not.
All of it was swirling around inside her brain and she felt as though she had been woken late at night in pitch darkness by flood water pouring into the house, and she was fighting her way through a maelstrom of unrecognizable objects that struck her and each other before whirling away into the freezing blackness; she was unable to grasp a single one of them before it was torn away from her.
Veerle had no idea where they were walking; she could have continued making a circuit of the park for hours. At last Kris stopped before the pedestal of one of the park’s statues, seemingly a hunter with some unidentifiable beast, man and animal gazing vacantly out of blind, blank eyes. Neither Kris nor Veerle gave the statue more than a cursory glance.
Kris pulled Veerle into an embrace. From a distance, if one of the well
-dressed ladies walking a lapdog or the homebound commuters taking a short cut through the park had happened to glance their way, they looked like any other young couple stealing a kiss under cover of the drooping tree branches. There was no joy though; Veerle felt a cold burden of dread coalescing inside her, as though ice were forming around her heart. What are we going to do?
When Kris spoke she almost jumped.
‘I’m not letting it go,’ he said in her ear.
She put back her head and looked up into his dark eyes. ‘Me neither,’ she said.
‘So Fred’s shutting down the group,’ said Kris. ‘He’s probably right. But what about the people who vanished? What about—’
‘Hommel,’ said Veerle.
They looked at each other and Veerle thought she could read what he was thinking in his eyes.
This doesn’t have to be your fight.
It’s my fight now, she telegraphed back.
‘And Clare,’ she said aloud. ‘I’m not letting that go either. If she died in that house and I saw it . . .’
Then I’ve already walked away once. I’m not doing it again.
‘Fred said Gregory would have to shut down the website, and he’s away,’ said Kris. ‘So that means it’s going to be active for at least another week. Long enough to do something.’
‘But what?’ Veerle could have screamed with frustration. ‘Supposing we tell the police and then it turns out Fred was right, and what happened to Vlinder and Horzel had nothing to do with the Koekoeken? We’ll be in so much trouble we’ll never get out of it again, and so will everyone else.’
Kris was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘But if we knew for certain someone was monitoring the group we’d have a readymade list of forty suspects. And Fred must have their email addresses. If we knew it for sure, I’d tell the police.’
‘But how can we be sure?’ Veerle said, and before the words were out of her mouth she knew. ‘We could leave a message on the forum. One that he would understand but nobody else would.’
‘And if he responds,’ said Kris, ‘the list of forty is narrowed down to one. We could get the email address and maybe even the name from Fred – I don’t care what he says about not going back to the gallery, he’ll co-operate if it’s that or drop everyone in it. And then the information could be passed on to the police anonymously, without involving anyone else at all.’
‘Unless the stalker tells them,’ Veerle pointed out.
‘Then we have to hope that Gregory knows his stuff and buries the website deep.’ Kris shrugged. ‘It’s a risk. They say once stuff is out there on the web it’s never really gone, even if you delete it. But I’d say it’s a risk worth taking.’
‘We’ll have to do it soon, before Gregory gets back,’ Veerle pointed out.
‘Yeah.’
‘What are we going to say? In the message?’
They stared at each other.
‘You know,’ said Veerle, ‘we can’t say, Whoever murdered Horzel, please identify yourself.’
‘I realize that.’ Kris looked away, gazing into the distance, thinking. Then he said, ‘We have to offer him something. An incentive to show himself.’
‘If he exists.’
‘Yes, if he exists. And it has to be something that only he will want. We don’t want anyone else replying and messing things up.’
‘Information?’ Veerle felt her spirits flag. She couldn’t think of anything a person capable of hunting others down in the way they suspected could possibly learn from her or Kris.
‘No,’ said Kris slowly. ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll offer him. Bait.’
46
EVEN FROM THE end of Kerkstraat Veerle could see that something was wrong.
Lights, she thought. Why can I see lights?
She was back later than she had planned, and although it was not yet properly dark the daylight was fading and the street was slowly sinking into shadow. Normally Claudine put down the roller shutters before nightfall, sealing the house so that not one chink of light escaped.
Now, however, yellow light was pouring out of the front windows, and as Veerle approached the house she could see that the front door was ajar and it was pouring out of that too, as though the house were haemorrhaging light. She picked up her pace a little, and then she slowed again, feeling the first stirrings of apprehension, as fleet and subtle as mice scurrying under straw. When she came to the stretch of pavement in front of the house, she paused altogether for a moment and stood there looking at the open front door.
Something’s wrong.
She pushed the door wide open and went inside.
‘Maman?’
For one long moment there was silence, and unpleasant ideas flickered at the edges of her mind. Then she heard someone stirring in the sitting room and she thought, I’ve spent too much time thinking about Vlinder and Egbert.
Veerle went to open the sitting-room door, but before she could do so, it was opened from the inside and she found herself face to face, not with Claudine, but with someone else entirely. The expectation of seeing her mother was so strong in her mind that for several seconds she stared quite blankly at the person in front of her. Then she recognized the woman: it was a friend of Claudine’s, a French-speaking woman who lived in the next village.
What’s she doing here?
Veerle couldn’t recall the woman’s name. She was about Claudine’s age, but that was the only thing the two women had in common. Claudine had a worn and faded look, as though life were wearing her thin; Madame Whatever-her-name-was had a considerably more solid appearance, with a large-featured face, big hands and a bosom that jutted alarmingly. She did not look pleased to see Veerle.
‘So there you are, miss,’ she said in French.
Veerle tried to look past her but there was no peeping around that meaty shoulder. ‘Has something happened?’ she asked. ‘Is my mother all right?’
‘Now she asks.’
Veerle’s patience unravelled. She pushed past and went into the sitting room. She could hear the woman’s indignant remarks behind her but she ignored them.
Claudine was sitting in the armchair, propped up with cushions. There was a blanket over her knees. Her head was thrown back, her eyes closed, but when Veerle came into the room she opened them, blinking as though waking from a deep sleep.
‘Maman? What happened?’ asked Veerle, but it was not Claudine who answered, it was her friend.
‘You know perfectly well what happened,’ she snapped. ‘Your mother is very ill.’
Veerle opened her mouth to say something, to say I didn’t know she was ill, but it occurred to her that she had known; at least, she had known that Claudine was claiming to be ill. She simply hadn’t believed her – or at least, not enough to abandon her expedition with Kris.
Claudine’s friend was sweeping on anyway. ‘You should not have gone out leaving your mother alone. She had to call me! Of course I came at once, but I couldn’t be here immediately because I had to come from home. It’s four kilometres, you know.’
Veerle’s hands closed into fists, so tightly that she felt her nails digging into the palms of her hands, but she did not rise to the bait.
It’s true, she thought. She told me she was ill and I still went out. And I can’t tell either of them why I had to go.
She tried to make herself think of Kris, of the pressure of his hand on hers, the warmth of his fingers entwined with her own. Stay calm. Don’t lose it. You can’t tell them anything.
The creeping fear that perhaps the woman was right, perhaps Claudine really was ill, wasn’t helping.
I wouldn’t have gone if I didn’t have to, she thought.
Aloud, she said, ‘We should call the doctor, Maman.’
‘Call the doctor?’ said her mother’s friend contemptuously. ‘The doctor came and went an hour ago.’
Veerle faced her. ‘What did she say?’
‘It was a male doctor,’ came the reply, swiftly and with an unmistakable note of
satisfaction in it; the woman was enjoying this, Veerle realized. ‘But I cannot tell you what he said,’ continued her mother’s friend. ‘I would not have dreamed of intruding. I went into the kitchen while he was speaking to her.’
‘Fine,’ said Veerle. ‘Well, I can ask her when you’ve gone.’
She had made herself speak levelly, without any audible trace of malice, but she saw the other woman stiffen anyway.
‘Of course, you want me to go now. But I wouldn’t be here at all if you had stayed at home.’
Veerle briefly closed her eyes. Don’t lose your cool. She could feel the weight of the evening’s excursion into Brussels, the frustrating conversation with Fred, the dangerous proposal Kris had made. There was a feeling growing inside her chest, as poisonous and pressurized as an abscess; just a gramme more pressure and she thought something would rupture. Keep your temper, she urged herself.
The woman’s attention had shifted to Claudine now, anyway. She was leaning over her, fussing with the pillows and the blanket, making a show of ensuring that Claudine was as comfortable as possible before abandoning her to the dubious custody of her neglectful daughter. She spoke to Claudine as she did so, reassuring her, but she did not address another word to Veerle until the pair of them were at the front door, Veerle holding the door open, waiting for her to go, and the woman standing on the step, buttoning up her coat against the cool evening air.
‘Don’t leave your mother alone again when she’s sick,’ she told Veerle, then turned abruptly and walked towards her car, without further farewells.
Veerle watched her go for a moment, and then she went back into the house and closed the door. She went to let down the shutters, as she knew her mother would have done, first the ones in the kitchen, and then the ones in the sitting room.
She re-entered the sitting room somewhat unwillingly.
I don’t know what to think. What to feel.
Her feelings about her mother were huge and incomprehensible, a great unscaleable slab carved with hieroglyphics she could never understand. Veerle was indignant and angry, and she was afraid – afraid that all the substance of her own life was going to be used up for the war effort that was her mother’s life, struggling incessantly against unseen enemies, foes that perhaps existed only in her mind. Guilt and resentment were so closely entwined that she could not have unpicked them even if she had wished to, but most of all she felt sorrow. As she crossed the room to the window she glanced at Claudine, lying limp and wan in the chair, and the pain she felt inside was a physical ache.