Demons of Ghent

by Helen Grant

  They followed the gully to its end and found themselves on another flat section of roof. Perhaps it had originally been intended for a roof garden, although the only signs of occupancy were the droppings of birds. There was a small structure like a hut with a door in it, and the door was ajar. When they looked inside, the sunlight behind them showed steps leading down into the dimness below.

  Bram looked at Veerle and raised a finger to his lips. She knew what he was thinking: there could be anyone in there. She was past caring, though; all she knew was that she was not going to walk along that parapet again, the one with the drop. No way.

  They descended the stairs and realized that they were in an apartment block. How did Marnix get in here? Veerle wondered. She supposed they would never know.

  They moved cautiously, making as little noise as possible, but all it would take was for someone to open their door and challenge them, and they would be in trouble. Especially when the police found out what was on the roof . . .

  In the event, though, they got to the ground floor without incident. The front door had a simple pin tumbler lock, opened from the inside by turning a little knob. There was no need for a key. A minute later they were back on the street, walking away from the door without looking back.

  Their bags and Bram’s sweat top were still inside the other building, the one they had broken into, so they went round the block to see whether it was safe to go in and retrieve them. Incredibly, the broken window seemed to have gone unnoticed. Veerle kept watch while Bram retrieved their belongings. Nobody came down the street while she waited. She saw one person pass the end of it, but they didn’t look her way. Then Bram was back, and they were hurrying away, putting as much space as they could between themselves and the empty house.

  They walked for a long time, until the Gravensteen was no longer visible behind the buildings that surrounded them and the nature of the streets had changed – they were no longer passing groups of tourists and little boutiques; instead the streets were quiet and cool and they could glimpse the green surface of a canal.

  Bram stopped and took Marnix’s mobile phone out of his pocket. He and Veerle looked at each other.

  Do it, telegraphed Veerle with her eyes.

  Bram turned away, the phone to his ear, concentrating on the call. He spoke rapidly and urgently, and Veerle was surprised how quickly he had finished.

  ‘They wanted me to stay on the line,’ he told Veerle grimly. ‘They must be joking.’

  Already he was prising off the back of the phone, levering out the battery with his fingernails. He took out the SIM card too, and put both of them in his pocket.

  They walked on for a while, each lost in their own thoughts.

  Salt, Veerle was thinking, remembering the stuff that had been sprinkled over the body. But had it been salt? There was no way to be sure. It could have been sugar, or some kind of cleaning product, anything white and powdery. It made no sense at all. Why scatter something like that on someone you had just killed? Even if it had been something poisonous or corrosive, it couldn’t hurt Marnix now. It couldn’t make him any more dead.

  And the nail? She wondered whether that was simply incidental, a piece of random debris. But she couldn’t think where it had come from. It wasn’t as though Marnix had been climbing something studded with them.

  They came to a building site, temporarily deserted, and Bram ducked under fluttering tape to pick up a large chunk of stone. He put Marnix’s mobile phone on the ground and struck it several times, smashing it until it was nothing but a heap of plastic shards. He swept them into his hand and pocketed them. Later, they came to a drain and he dropped the pieces down through the grille into the obscurity beyond. The battery went into a rubbish bin on another street, and the SIM card into a drain somewhere else. Marnix’s phone had ceased to exist.

  They walked on, but any sense of purpose had evaporated now that the call had been made.

  We got away with it, thought Veerle, but the knowledge gave her no pleasure. She kept thinking about that stiff and silent figure on the rooftop. The dark hair, thick as fur. The skin that was bloodless and almost grey. Those open eyes. Veerle thought she would never forget those.

  She wished she could go home and climb into bed and pull the covers over her head, but of course that was impossible. The school trip to Amsterdam was not due to return until the middle of the evening. The rest of the day stretched out ahead of her, featureless and dismal.

  They walked on.

  34

  Death looked for the blonde girl, the one he had seen that time outside the cathedral. Since then, he had seen her again in the streets of the old city, and he had known her immediately: the fine-featured, angular face, the arched eyebrows, the smooth light hair. The slender, small-breasted body, clad soberly in black. He knew her, and he knew that she must die. While she lived there could be no rest for him.

  He would have killed her already but she was too quick for him. He was stronger than she was, and driven by a conviction that was so aberrant and all-consuming that it was like the rising of a huge and blazing sun in the discoloured sky of an alien planet. She must die. They must all die.

  The girl, however, was very fleet and as skittish as a young deer, bolting at the slightest thing, the most trivial cause for alarm. She flew like an insect before the storm of his obsession, always just ahead of it.

  He had seen her for the second time on a street west of the canal, not far from the Sint-Michielskerk. Knowing her at once, he had followed her as discreetly as he could, cloaking his intentions in stealth, but there had been few other people on the streets at the time, no crowds in which to lose himself. He had followed her for perhaps a kilometre, his hand thrust deep into the pocket of his coat, fingering the knife, while she became more and more disturbed, quickening her pace, turning to glance back at him with a white and anxious face. Finally she had abruptly turned a corner, and then she must have taken to her heels and run from him full tilt down the narrow street, because when he reached the corner there was no sign of her. He had walked up the street a little way, and there was a puddle of dirty water which had collected in a dip in the square grey cobbles, and all around it the dry cobble-stones had been splashed with dark and wet, a ragged radius like arterial spray. He saw it in his mind’s eye: her boot hitting the puddle and the filthy water spraying across the cobbles. She had run. She knew he was coming for her, coming to end her, and she had run.

  Why? he had asked himself as he stood there scanning the empty street. She was as unreasoning as the animal that flees from the hunter. She had had more than her time, she must know that. And she could not run for ever.

  His withered lips tightened. Sooner or later he would catch her, and then the thin edge of the blade he had in his pocket would pass like a caress across that pale throat and let the life out of it in a drenching red rain.

  Since that day, he had seen her twice more in the streets of Ghent. Death was closing in on her; he was narrowing down the possible number of places in which she could have gone to earth. He thought now that her appearance on the west side of the canal was a fluke; wherever she went back to was on the east side, somewhere in the old city. She knew that he was looking for her and was taking pains to avoid him, that was clear. Once he had seen her wandering along Voldersstraat, and although he had stayed well back, mingling with the strolling shoppers, his dark hood pulled down low over his face, she had become uneasy. She had begun to walk more briskly and then she had gone into a shop. He had waited for a long time, hanging around at the corner of the street, but she had not re-emerged. The other time she had turned and seemed to notice him, but she had not run. She had very deliberately crossed the road and walked back the way she had come, but with the width of the street between him and her, and when she was level with him she had darted a glance at him, at once fearful and challenging, showing him that she knew who he was.

  She could have met Death there and then, known him intimately, bloodily, but the stre
et was crowded. Inevitably someone would intervene, someone would call the police. The chances of getting away would be close to zero. He would have taken a single step towards the achievement of his goal, but unless he had his liberty to pursue and exterminate the others, that single step would be worse than useless. He could not risk that; in spite of the almost overwhelming need to act now, it was unthinkable that anything should prevent him from completing what he had come to see as a holy quest.

  The Demons of Ghent themselves shall not stop me.

  So instead he had simply lifted his head far enough that she could see his yellowed teeth bared in a savage parody of a smile under the dark hood, and then he had dropped his head again and walked on, listening for the sound of pattering feet as her nerve broke and she ran. He was confident now that he would see her again, and that he would find her hiding place. To run into her three times, that was more than chance. She was not visiting Ghent; she was living here. She was living east of the canal, in the old city. Sooner or later, Death would find her hiding place. He would follow her home, and when they were there, when he was closeted with her in her private space, he would watch the life run out of her in pulsing crimson waves.

  35

  On the Saturday Veerle arranged to meet Bram again.

  He’s going to think we’re together, she thought uneasily. Then: Perhaps we are. Before she looked down from the Gravensteen and saw that terrible assault upon Marnix, she had kissed Bram willingly; there had been no doubts in her mind at all. But now, looking back past that horrific time as though peering through a window filmed with filth, she wondered whether she had simply been caught up in the thrill of the moment. Or was the nagging doubt she now felt a product of the horror they had experienced together, a taint in the atmosphere between them?

  She had to see Bram, though. The death of Marnix was with her every second of the day and night. It was a toxic reaction inflaming her whole body; it was the hot angry buzz of insects swarming inside a hollow tree. She wanted to talk about it, to try to work out the meaning of the things she and Bram had seen: the salt – if it was salt – on the body, the iron nail. Whether the salt had anything to do with the salt they had seen on the rooftops, sprinkled as neatly as a boundary fence. Whether it had anything to do with Daan De Moor. Even if Bram didn’t want to talk about it, at least she would be with someone who had seen the same things. She would have to be on her guard when she was with Geert and Anneke, afraid that she would betray herself by some inadvertent remark. Afraid that the horror she felt would somehow seep into her expression and attract her father’s attention. All the time she was with him and Anneke she kept her face carefully neutral, but the memory of what she had seen was like some angry demon screeching into her ear.

  Bram, she thought. I’ll feel better if I can talk to him.

  Veerle arranged to meet him at Sint-Baafsplein. She had some vague idea of going into the cathedral again, of letting the confused tangle of feelings inside her diffuse into the vast empty stillness of its ancient interior.

  When she got to the square, however, it did not look as though going into the cathedral would be peaceful at all. Before Veerle had got halfway across she could hear the altercation.

  A group of tourists were milling about outside the main door but nobody was going in or out, and Veerle could hear someone shouting. She stood where she was for a moment, looking towards the cathedral door. There were two people standing in front of it, and a third standing in front of them with his back to Veerle. The two blocking the doorway had a certain grim immovability in their stance. As Veerle watched, one of them shifted his position slightly and the bleak autumn sunshine glinted off a security pass pinned to the breast of his jacket. Cathedral guides . . . or security, she guessed.

  Of the man with his back to her she could see little other than that he was above average height and rather stooped. The rest of him was hidden beneath a long dark coat and a woolly hat under which he could have had golden curls or dreadlocks or smooth bald skin. Veerle saw him move forward, towards the men blocking the doorway, and now one of them actually planted a hand in the centre of his chest and pushed him back. Arms were waved; faint angry voices drifted across the square like smoke from a distant bonfire.

  ‘Not again,’ grumbled a voice close at Veerle’s elbow. She looked round and saw a short stout woman of perhaps seventy, muffled against the chill air in a grey padded jacket. No answer seemed to be required; the old woman was talking to herself as much as to Veerle, and she wasn’t even looking her way. ‘Always another idiot causing trouble. They should move that painting, or lock it up.’

  Now she did give Veerle a brief glance, loaded with disapproval.

  ‘The painting of the Mystic Lamb?’ said Veerle, feeling that she was being called upon to say something in reply, but the woman was already sweeping on.

  ‘There was that one they caught with a hammer under his coat. They knew him too. He’d tried something similar before.’

  ‘Why would someone do that?’

  The woman eyed Veerle with something close to suspicion. ‘You’re not from here, are you?’

  Am I from Ghent now? wondered Veerle briefly, thinking of Geert and the flat on Bijlokevest.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  The woman gave a little grunt under her breath. ‘Well, if you’re wanting to see the cathedral, you’d better come back later.’ With that, she waddled off.

  Veerle looked at the crowd of people round the door and decided that she didn’t care if she went inside or not after all. She was beginning to think that no amount of contemplative silence was going to help.

  She tried sitting on one of the benches in the square to wait for Bram, but even through the fabric of her jeans she could feel the cold of the slats. She got up again and walked about until she saw him coming towards her across the cobbles, his hair white gold in the autumn sunshine.

  As he came up to her he opened his arms and Veerle went into them. There was nothing else she could do.

  ‘I haven’t slept,’ he said into her hair as she gazed up over his shoulder at the cold and limitless blue of the sky.

  ‘Me neither,’ said Veerle.

  ‘I keep thinking about it. I told him to go up there, to look for us,’ said Bram in her ear. He meant the block opposite the Gravensteen. ‘If I hadn’t done that—’

  ‘You couldn’t have known,’ said Veerle. Even before the words were out of her mouth she felt a small guilty pang. Perhaps we could have known. Perhaps there was a message in the salt we saw on the rooftop the time before, if we had only been able to read it.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘let’s go and talk about this somewhere else.’ Then, on impulse: ‘Do you want to walk down to de ladder?’

  ‘No,’ said Bram immediately. ‘Not up there.’

  ‘We could get a coffee,’ suggested Veerle, although she didn’t feel remotely like drinking anything.

  Bram was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘You could come back to my digs.’

  The suggestion caught Veerle off guard. Before she had had time to think about it, she said, ‘I can’t.’

  ‘OK,’ said Bram after a pause. He pulled back to look down into Veerle’s face, his blue eyes serious, but he didn’t try to persuade her. ‘We’ll go and get a coffee, then.’

  He slipped an arm around her shoulders and they set off across the square, leaving the cathedral behind them. Veerle didn’t look back.

  Walking down the street with Bram she had that feeling she’d had before, as though she were looking at herself from the outside. A girl of eighteen, with a home and family in Ghent. A fortunate girl with a good-looking boyfriend. A girl in her last year at high school, studying for the exams that would take her to university. Except that none of it felt real. The flat didn’t feel like home, and Anneke didn’t feel like family; sometimes Geert didn’t, either. She liked Bram, she wanted to like Bram even more, maybe even love him, but Kris was always between them; Kris, who was at that moment very p
robably in the flat over Muziek City with Hommel. And as for school – when had she last given any serious thought to her coursework? She’d be lucky to scrape through the year even without the unofficial days off.

  Not my life, she thought. It feels like someone else’s.

  She wasn’t surprised that Bram had baulked at her suggestion that they go to de ladder. She had seen the expression that passed across his face when she suggested it, and heard the vehemence in his voice. Veerle thought that Bram was losing his nerve, that he was deciding that the cliffs and mountaintops of Ghent were best abandoned. And perhaps, she thought, they were. She had a very bad feeling about the whole thing.

  Luc and Daan . . . she hadn’t known either of them personally. Maybe they had both thrown themselves off the rooftops. She couldn’t definitively know whether there had been malice at work. But she had seen what happened to Marnix. She had seen murder, and it hadn’t looked like a random attack, either. It had been meant. Planned.

  And then . . . there was the night she and Bram had been about to descend from the rooftops and that guy whose face neither of them had seen had rushed at Bram, arm upraised. There had been something in that clenched fist, something glittering, and she could think of nothing that it could be that was not deadly. The incident had been unnerving enough at the time, when Bram had thought it was just some random nut. Now Veerle was wondering whether it could have been the same person she had seen running at Marnix. There was no way to know. Whether it was or it wasn’t, though, the rooftops were looking like a very dangerous place to be.