Silent Saturday

by Helen Grant

  It was a warm evening, unseasonably warm even for May, and there was no wind, so that the air had an unnatural feeling to it, as though it were exactly the same temperature as his skin. It didn’t feel like being outdoors; he had no sense of the air moving against his face and hands as he walked. He kept his eyes on the castle; he was pretty well shielded from the road by the thick spring foliage, and anyway, there was nothing more he could do to hide himself. He had learned long ago that if you worried about the tiny risks, about the freak occurrences, you couldn’t do what he and Veerle and Hommel and the rest of them did. You had to trust that things were going to go your way.

  He was getting closer to the castle now, he was perhaps twenty-five or thirty metres away, and he could see no cause for alarm. The evening sunshine was reflected in the windows, the flash and wink of sunlight on the glass the only movement. The great wooden door was shadowed by the stone canopy above it, but even from this distance he could see that it was closed. The castle looked as though it had lain undisturbed for a hundred years, and would probably remain so for another hundred.

  Kris strode towards the door, and as his boots whispered through the grass he thought about Hommel, wondering whether the answer to the question of her disappearance would come strolling through it at nine-thirty with the dying rays of the sun, or whether she was destined to remain no more than an unsolved absence, a Hommel-shaped rent in the fabric of life. He didn’t want to consider that possibility. If the road she had taken ran one way only, he wanted to know who was responsible. He wanted to settle it with them. Unconsciously he clenched his fists.

  Ten metres from the castle, and he could make out the details of the door, the panels, the drift of old leaves and litter blown into the stone porch by the wind. Five metres, and the old building was looming above him, the dormer windows of the attics like heavily lidded eyes frowning down upon the interloper.

  Kris slowed his pace, not wanting to burst precipitately through the door. He had gravel under his feet now, and even though it was heavily choked with weeds it was difficult to move silently. He approached the stone canopy overhanging the door.

  Everything was silent and still. There was no movement anywhere, not so much as a sparrow hopping about the porch. Kris had to step through leaves to reach the door. He grasped the iron handle, feeling the metal cold under his skin in spite of the evening sunshine, and very cautiously turned it, wary of the telltale squeal or creak of hinges that would give away his presence. Then he pushed gently and the door began to open.

  Kris’s nostrils flared at the familiar scent of ancient wood and accumulated dust, decay and mould spores. A thin sliver of interior wall became visible – battered panelling and some worn wall covering so faded that its pattern was indecipherable. The sliver became a long rectangle, and now Kris could see the edge of the nearest windowframe and the evening sunlight casting a golden tint on the worn floor tiles.

  He stopped pushing and listened. Silence. Outside he could hear a car passing and the chirping of birds in the trees; inside the castle there was nothing. All the same he remained there, motionless, for perhaps half a minute before resuming his stealthy pressure on the door. Now he had a clear view of the shabby entrance hall and the wooden staircase, the banister worn smooth and gleaming by years of hands running up and down it. He scanned it and saw nothing moving. Even the festoons of grey cobwebs suspended from the ceiling hung limply with not so much as a breeze to make them tremble.

  Kris relaxed. His shoulders went down. He was not aware of it, but his heart rate began to slow. He let out a pent-up breath. He took a step further forward into the castle. The sound of his boots on the tiled floor almost obscured the tiny rustle from above.

  Kris looked up and saw a flicker of movement in the shadows at the top of the staircase. He stepped back at the same moment as he heard a hard brittle snap.

  For a moment Kris thought he had been punched. He staggered on his feet and his mind was flailing too, trying to make sense of an assault by an invisible assailant. He looked down at the front of his jacket and there was something sticking out of the leather, so close to his face that he could barely focus on it. Red and yellow. It looked like the feather fletching of an arrow, if the arrow-maker had been able to find a bird with red-and-yellow plastic plumage.

  Kris’s nervous system caught up with his eyes and it was as though a bomb had gone off in his shoulder. The pain was huge, a great red fist that hammered him to his knees. He wanted to cry out but the agony was too intense; all that came out was a wheeze, and now he was on the floor, the patterned tiles so close that he could make out every scratch and chip on their surface, and his mind was too full of the all-encompassing pain even to form the thought Please God let it stop. He slumped onto his left side and there was another explosion of agony through his shoulder. Kris realized that whatever was sticking out of the front of his jacket had gone right through him; the new kick of pain was the other end of it scraping against the floor, pulling at the rim of the wound. Nausea roiled over him in waves. The air seemed to be getting thicker; he was struggling to draw breath, as though the pain itself were some thick poisonous gas filling his lungs. He coughed helplessly, and the agony it produced was seismic.

  He lay on his side, and the world was fading in and out in grey pulses, and he could not work out why he was seeing the staircase and the worn tiles at this angle, as though the soles of his feet were on the wooden panelling and he was trying to walk along the wall in defiance of gravity. He heard a series of thuds, a heavy tread coming down the wooden staircase, but he could not untangle the sounds from the thumping of his own heart.

  Kris closed his eyes, and for a second – or perhaps a minute, or much longer – there was thick velvet blackness, as comforting as a blanket, and then he opened them again and he was staring at a pair of boots. He could not look up at their owner; he was too preoccupied with the mind-blowing pain. He felt as though he had fallen into a lake of fire. Hell, he thought. His mouth opened and closed uselessly.

  He waited for whatever would come next, carried limply on the ebb and flow of agony.

  ‘Schorpioen,’ said a voice, and something wheeled into view like the weight of a pendulum swinging down, a thing the shape of an anchor, taut with ugly probabilities. Kris knew what it was, but even the single word crossbow was unable to coalesce in the seething cauldron of his brain.

  ‘Schorpioen,’ said the voice again, and it was urgent and terrible, the sound of a blacksmith’s hammer striking an iron anvil. ‘I am the hunter. Where is the other one? Where is Honingbij?’

  51

  AT FIVE TO seven Veerle left the house and ran to the bus stop. It was a clear dry evening and the air was very still but she felt as hectic as if she had been running through a tempest, fighting her way through high winds and rain. She had had to leave Claudine alone; there was nothing for it. She had missed the first bus and she had avoided looking at the clock as she put her arms around her mother and tried to comfort her, but all the time a terrible urgency had been building up inside her. She had been horribly aware of the long hand making its stealthy way upwards, moving all too quickly. She looked at the clock once and it was on the seven, and it seemed as though she had barely blinked and now it was on the nine. Veerle thought of the bus barrelling along the road that led to the village, drawing closer and closer; if she were not at the bus stop when it arrived it would simply sweep past, and all it would carry to Kris would be broken promises and empty intentions. At last she had disentangled herself from her mother, gently removing the hands that clung to her arms, shaking her head.

  ‘I have to go, Maman. I promise I’ll be back as soon as I possibly can.’ She felt a pang at that; she wasn’t nipping out on a five-minute errand. Claudine would be alone all evening whatever happened. Impulsively she went back to her mother and kissed her. ‘I love you,’ she said. Then she looked at the clock and she ran.

  The front door banged behind her but she didn’t look back.


  When Veerle got to the bus stop there were theoretically five minutes to spare, but that didn’t make her any less anxious. If the bus arrived early and there was no one at the stop the driver was quite likely to pass it by instead of waiting, she knew that from experience. She leaned out into the road, peering into the distance, looking for the familiar white-and-yellow bulk of a De Lijn bus.

  Calm down, she told herself. We’re meeting two whole hours before the time, remember? It’s not going to matter if you’re five minutes late.

  If the hands of the living-room clock had seemed to hurry before, now the bigger hands of the clock on the tower of the Sint-Pauluskerk seemed to creep along with agonizing slowness. Veerle pulled her mobile phone out of her pocket and checked for messages. Nothing.

  That’s good, isn’t it? But it didn’t feel good. She leaned out into the road again. Still no sign of the bus.

  Five minutes later she was still waiting, and the itch of impatience had turned into a raging fever.

  Where is it? Where is the verdomde bus?

  She began to pace up and down.

  I should have got the earlier one, I should have just left her.

  Veerle looked up at the church clock and saw the hand move ponderously on a minute. What if it doesn’t come at all?

  She began to calculate when she would arrive if she had to take the next bus. She’d be more than half an hour late, even assuming the next one was punctual to the minute.

  What other option do I have? It was too far to walk – if you went as the crow flies it would be shorter than going by the road, especially by the circuitous bus route, but even at a run it would take far longer than half an hour. Even if she took out her old battered bicycle it would take longer than that, and what if the bus turned up while she was wheeling the bike out of the back gate?

  Veerle rocked forwards onto her toes, poised for flight. Go for the bike – run – wait? Still no bus, but here was a car, and for a second she considered trying to flag it down, beg for a lift. Then it was almost level with her and she saw the driver’s face, unshaven and unsmiling, and thought better of it.

  It was twenty past seven now, and she was definitely going to be very late. She took out her phone again, meaning to text Kris, and then she glanced down the road, and there was the bus, finally. She slid the phone back into her pocket and thrust out her arm.

  A minute later she was swinging herself into a window seat as she watched Kerkstraat and the Sint-Pauluskerk slide away behind the bus. Veerle glimpsed the façade of her own house for a moment before the grey stone bulk of the church obscured it.

  Don’t think about it. You have to concentrate on what’s ahead.

  She sat in her seat and hugged herself and waited for the bus to reach Kasteelstraat.

  52

  DE JAGER STOOD in the hallway of the castle with the crossbow in his hands, looking down without pity. He recognized the expression on Schorpioen’s face; he had seen it a score of times on other faces. Shock. Schorpioen couldn’t believe what had happened to him, how quickly it had all gone bad. He couldn’t believe that he was going to die. The pain, though, that would convince him. Pain was persuasive; it needed no interpreter.

  De Jager felt nothing for Schorpioen, but he felt a certain irritation with himself. His plan had been to take out whoever entered the castle first, and then pick off the second person at his leisure. He had shot to kill, but Schorpioen had moved at the last minute, seeing movement above him, and the bolt had penetrated his shoulder.

  He had reloaded the crossbow – it took time but Schorpioen wasn’t going anywhere – and now he aimed it at the figure on the floor. At this range it would punch through any part of the body with no more resistance than a skewer going through a marshmallow. He didn’t fire, though, because he was thinking, Where is the other one? Where is Honingbij?

  He had asked Schorpioen that and had received no useful reply, but if he put a bolt through Schorpioen’s chest or his eye cavity there would be no information forthcoming ever again, and De Jager still needed to know the answer to the question. It was tempting to shoot him in the leg or the hand to try to force the information out of him, but De Jager could see that Schorpioen wasn’t handling the pain too well already. If he cranked it up any further he thought Schorpioen might pass out or actually die of shock. He lowered the crossbow so that it was within Schorpioen’s range of vision.

  Let him see what he’s getting if he doesn’t talk to me.

  ‘Schorpioen.’

  He wasn’t getting a response to the name, not a flicker, so he leaned over, pulled open Schorpioen’s leather jacket and extracted his wallet from the inner pocket, ignoring the groan of pain this elicited. The ID card was tucked into a clear plastic pocket, Schorpioen’s face, shrunk and reduced to monochrome, staring out as though trapped behind glass.

  Kris Verstraeten, read De Jager. He dropped the wallet on the dusty tiles next to Kris. It would be ashes by morning anyway. He prodded Kris in the hip with his foot.

  ‘Kris. Wake up, Kris.’

  This time he got a reaction. Kris flinched and tried to turn his head. His mouth opened but nothing came out.

  De Jager was terribly tempted to shoot him. Instead he made himself crouch next to the huddled figure. Patience, he told himself.

  Aloud, he said, ‘Kris, where is Honingbij?’

  It took him some time to understand the reply, and even then it wasn’t much use.

  ‘Don’t know,’ Kris choked out. His voice sounded ancient, ravaged, the voice of a seventy-year-old who has smoked thirty a day for decades. He was beyond lying, De Jager judged. He really didn’t know.

  De Jager considered. Then he said, ‘Kris,’ and waited until he was sure he had what little attention Kris had left to give him. ‘Honingbij was supposed to be here, but hasn’t come. Is that correct?’ He waited. ‘Is that correct?’

  After a minute De Jager stood up, still cradling the crossbow thoughtfully. Kris wasn’t telling him anything – he seemed to have floated off into a grey world of his own – but De Jager was pretty sure the answer to his question would have been yes.

  So Honingbij had failed to turn up, which meant that either he or she had had cold feet and wasn’t coming at all, or he or she (and De Jager thought it was a she) had been held up and would be arriving at some unspecified point during the evening. She (if he was right) would know that she was late and would be on her guard. She might even bring reinforcements. Not the police; if she and Schorpioen were going to do that they would have done it already. Maybe a burly friend or two. Either way De Jager had to be ready.

  First of all he closed the castle door. It opened inwards and it was heavy. Kris wasn’t going to be standing up on his own any time soon, and certainly not pulling the door open. It was safe to leave him where he was. It was also tempting to pin him to the floor in another couple of places just to make sure, but De Jager didn’t waste the time. He could do it later, perhaps in front of Honingbij.

  He strode down the long hallway that ran almost the length of the ground floor, to the room at the end. He had entered the castle through the window here, a window deeply overshadowed by the branches of a tree that grew too close to the wall. He had simply broken a single small pane and reached in to turn the latch. Even if Schorpioen had had the common sense to check the building before he entered it, looking for access points, there was a chance he would have overlooked this one.

  The room itself was dingy, the sunlight filtered through the dark green leaves clustering against the windowpanes. It was like being at the bottom of the sea, in the green-black depths where light barely penetrated.

  In a corner stood two metal cans, as ominous as depth charges. De Jager put down the crossbow and went over to them. When he unscrewed the cap of the first one the air took on a poisonous taint, the sharp oily reek of petrol. Honingbij would smell it the moment she opened the front door, but that couldn’t be helped. She’d have to come inside anyway if she wanted to know what had happe
ned to her friend.

  It did not occur to De Jager to speculate on the bond between her and Schorpioen, any more than a hunter considers the feelings of the hare or the vixen. To take a buck and a doe at the same time, that would be an experience. Other than that, he was mainly concerned with tying up loose ends.

  He lifted the can easily, even though it was full, and carried it out into the hallway. He tilted the can and petrol came out in spurts with a sound like vomiting, and splattered onto the tiled floor. De Jager moved methodically down the hallway, the muscles of his arms working as he swung the can back and forth, sowing the seeds of the conflagration to come.

  He hoped that Honingbij would come alone. He would take his time with her, and then he would burn the castle to the ground.

  53

  VEERLE THOUGHT SHE would explode with frustration. Wasn’t it enough that the bus was late? It had stopped moving altogether, midway between stops, because someone up ahead had rammed the back of someone else’s car, and now everyone was out in the road arguing with each other and the traffic wasn’t going anywhere. She swung herself out of her seat and strode down the aisle to the front of the bus. The driver, a stolid grey-haired man in his fifties, didn’t even look at her.

  ‘Can you let me off here, please?’ Veerle made herself be polite.

  ‘At the next stop.’ He didn’t take his eyes off the road.

  ‘We’ve stopped. Can’t you just open the door?’

  ‘No. Not until the next stop.’

  ‘Why not?’

  No reply.

  Veerle took a deep breath.

  It’s not worth it.

  She almost went back to her seat, but then she thought about how late it was.

  It’s nearly eight, and I was supposed to be there at seven-thirty.

  Up ahead there was no sign of the blockage clearing. Now not only was their own lane blocked by the car accident, but someone had stopped in the lane coming the other way, and was leaning out of the window dispensing advice, or perhaps abuse. Horns sounded like angry geese.