Demons of Ghent

by Helen Grant

  She found Hommel right behind the altar, sitting on the black-and-white tiles with her back to the wall and her legs sprawled out in front of her. Veerle judged that the church warden was unaware of her presence, that she had slipped in here unseen: if he had seen her, he would certainly have reacted; he would not be standing in the aisle complacently admiring the church fittings.

  Veerle was shocked at the sight of her. Hommel looked terrible, so drawn that her skin appeared almost grey, her eyes red-rimmed, her normally sleek pale hair hanging in damp clumps over her angular face. She was cradling her injured hand protectively against her body; Veerle could see blood on the knuckles. If the church warden, or anyone else, stumbled on her, Veerle doubted that she would get a sympathetic reception: they would think Hommel was a drug addict, or that she had been in a fight. At the sound of footsteps on the tiles Hommel looked up. The moment she saw Veerle she began to cry.

  Shock gave way to pity. Veerle had wondered whether she was a fool to come, to risk a titanic row to help out her exboyfriend and his attention-seeking other girl. But Hommel looked so pitiful that Veerle was moved in spite of everything.

  She went over and squatted down on the tiles next to Hommel.

  As she did so, Veerle was acutely aware of the church warden; if he decided to investigate they would both be in trouble. She saw that the situation was not going to be easily resolved; it would take more than a pep talk and a visit to a pharmacy for sticking plaster. It would most likely take more than the couple of hours that she had free before Anneke expected her at the flat too – even assuming the school didn’t notice her absence.

  There was a horrible inevitability to the whole thing. Veerle didn’t seem to be able to avoid trouble; it stalked her as relentlessly as the person who had pursued Hommel. Still, she knew she was going to see the situation through, trouble or not.

  The strange thing was, she looked at Hommel and found herself thinking of Claudine – or not thinking exactly, but feeling. They were nothing like each other in appearance, her mother and Hommel, and yet when Veerle looked at Hommel’s bowed head and beaten expression she experienced emotions that were painfully familiar: a wave of protectiveness mixed with a dragging sense of responsibility. For a moment she was so overwhelmed with conflicting feelings that she was unable to say anything to Hommel at all. It was the other girl who broke the silence between them.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ choked out Hommel, looking at Veerle’s grave face and interpreting its grim solemnity as a reproach.

  Veerle sighed. ‘It’s OK.’ She held out her hand. ‘Let me look at those fingers.’

  She could tell immediately from the stiff wincing manner in which Hommel unfolded her arm that the damage was pretty bad. There weren’t any actual bones protruding anywhere, thank God, but the hand was turning black and puffy with bruising; just the sight of it sent a cold tingling feeling through the base of Veerle’s spine.

  ‘Shit,’ she said.

  On the other side of the altar she heard the church warden clear his throat and wondered whether he had heard her utter the expletive.

  ‘Look,’ she said to Hommel, ‘we can’t stay here. We have to go.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Veerle told her truthfully. She cocked her head to one side, silently indicating the listener on the other side of the altar. ‘But we have to go. We’ll go to a café and then . . . we’ll think of something. OK?’

  She helped Hommel to her feet. Veerle continued to hold onto Hommel as they began to walk down the side aisle; there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with Hommel’s legs but her face was so shocked and drawn that Veerle didn’t trust her not to collapse there on the black-and-white tiled floor. As they made their way towards the door the church warden stepped out in front of them, his face grim, but when Veerle met his eyes with a flat challenging stare he elected to say nothing; he simply stood there watching, waiting for them to leave.

  Outside, it was raining steadily, and the cobbles were slick and shiny. Veerle debated briefly where they should go, then led Hommel towards a burger bar a little way up the street. Brightly lit and anonymous, it was as safe as anywhere. She thought that if she could coax Hommel up the stairs, out of sight of anyone passing by in the street, they could stay there as long as they liked, quite unnoticed, while they waited for Kris.

  He’d better come soon, she thought. Now that she had actually seen Hommel, she knew she couldn’t just walk off and leave her. She’d have to stay until Kris arrived. Briefly she considered calling Anneke, making some excuse. She rejected the idea; if Kris managed to get there quickly, if no one at the school noticed she had gone, she could make it home without being very late and nobody need know she had bunked off at all. If it was just a matter of being a few minutes late maybe Anneke wouldn’t even call Geert. No; there was no point in stirring up trouble if she could avoid it.

  But if he’s really late, if he gets held up . . .

  Well, then she was going to be in trouble so very deep that it would make her eardrums hurt. Geert wasn’t bluffing about confiscating her laptop and her mobile phone, she was quite sure of that, and she’d be under a tighter curfew than ever. There’d be no getting away for anything ever again, emergency or not.

  She helped Hommel up the stairs and into a seat away from the plate-glass windows, and then she went downstairs again to buy hot drinks. The burger bar didn’t have hot chocolate, it only had coffee, so she bought two and loaded Hommel’s with sugar. She carried them upstairs, slid into the seat opposite Hommel and pushed the sweetened coffee towards her.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Hommel listlessly, putting out her good hand to take it.

  Veerle felt in her pocket. She usually carried a few painkillers, the sort you could buy over the counter, a residue of the time when they were the only thing that could douse the fire in her battered limbs.

  ‘Here,’ she said, sliding the little strip of tablets towards Hommel.

  She picked up her own coffee, eyeing Hommel as she did so. That hand was going to be a problem, she judged. Briefly she considered asking Hommel whether she was registered with a doctor in Ghent, but then she didn’t bother. She already knew the answer to that. Still, it would soon be Kris’s problem, she supposed.

  ‘So what happened?’ she said eventually, after Hommel had washed two of the tablets down with coffee. ‘Kris said someone tried to push you under a tram.’

  Hommel looked up, into Veerle’s eyes, and now her lips were trembling, as though she might burst into tears again at any moment. She nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘It couldn’t have been an accident? Someone shoving to get to the front of the queue?’

  ‘No,’ said Hommel. ‘I felt two hands – in my back. Pushing. It wasn’t an accident.’

  ‘Shit.’ Veerle stared. ‘So did you see him, the person who did it?’

  Hommel shook her head. ‘No, I . . .’ She put her good hand up to her face and Veerle saw that it was shaking. ‘I wasn’t thinking. Normally I look out for him when I’m walking through the city – you know, the one who’s been following me. But I was going to the station, to get out of Ghent. I was thinking about that, and I didn’t look.’ She put her fingers to her lips, biting at them. ‘It must have been him, though. Who else could it be?’

  ‘I suppose some random . . .’ Veerle’s voice trailed off.

  Some random act of madness. She’d thought for a while that this was what the attack on Bram had been, the night they had tried to climb down the service ladder into the yard. If it had stopped there, with that one isolated incident, then perhaps she might have believed that. But she thought that Bram’s assailant was also the person who had cut down Marnix, had butchered him on a rooftop and left him bizarrely scattered with salt, dyed red with his own blood. And there was the fact that dead Daan De Moor had been found with salt around him. Veerle was rapidly disbelieving the whole idea of randomness.

  All the same, there was nothing to connect what had happened on the
rooftop with what had happened to Hommel. There are reasons why someone might be following Hommel, Veerle reminded herself. Well, one reason, and it’s called Jappe. That fat poisonous klootzak.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I know you don’t want to go to the police . . .’

  She saw Hommel start at that word, police, and sighed inwardly.

  ‘But look, supposing we did – just supposing – is there anything at all that would help identify the guy? Hommel? You could describe him, right?’

  Hommel was shaking her head. ‘Not his face – I haven’t seen it clearly. He’s clean shaven, I think. He has a wide mouth or maybe there are just lines here.’ She touched the corner of her mouth with a fingertip. ‘I think he’s taller than me. He wears some kind of dark coat with a hood. That’s all, really.’ Hommel shrugged hopelessly. ‘I’ve never seen him really close up.’

  ‘A hood?’

  No, thought Veerle. Get a grip. He doesn’t want his face to be seen so he wears a hood. The guy who went for Bram, he probably didn’t want his seen, either, so he wore one too. It doesn’t mean anything.

  Aloud, she said, ‘Could it possibly be your stepdad?’

  ‘No,’ said Hommel emphatically, no tears now. ‘He’s got the wrong build. Too tall. Jappe’s fatter too.’ Her gaze slid away from Veerle’s and her lip curled in disgust.

  Veerle sighed. ‘What about when he pushed you? Did you notice any of the other people at the tram stop before it happened, anyone you recognized?’

  ‘No.’ Hommel shook her head. ‘There was this guy next to me, a guy with light brown hair and a long black coat on. He was the only one I noticed because he spoke to me. He said something about it being cold.’

  ‘A black coat? Maybe—?’ started Veerle, but Hommel was already shaking her head.

  ‘It wasn’t him. He was the one who pulled me back.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m sure,’ said Hommel grimly. ‘I thought it was him at first. He had my arm and he was calling me a crazy bitch because he thought I’d tried to jump, and I was going mad because I thought he had tried to push me – in fact I said he’d tried to push me.’

  ‘So how do you know he didn’t?’

  ‘Because I felt two hands in the middle of my back. He couldn’t have done that and grabbed my arm. It wasn’t him.’

  ‘So whoever did push you was right behind you?’ said Veerle. ‘But you didn’t see him?’

  ‘No.’ Hommel’s voice was taut with frustration. ‘I think the tram was late and there was a crush at the tram stop. I couldn’t pick anyone out. And after it happened things just went mad. The guy who pulled me back was shouting at me, and the tram driver got out and started shouting as well. Some people were trying to get off the tram and others were trying to get on, and there were people standing there staring and getting in the way of the others. It was chaos. I couldn’t work out who’d done it. I just shook them off and ran.’

  ‘Hommel,’ said Veerle levelly, ‘just think back. Is there anything else, anything at all, that you can remember from before it happened? Did you see anyone odd in the street before you got to the tram stop, anything like that?’

  Veerle saw Hommel close her eyes for a moment, considering, trying to throw her mind back to the moments before it had happened, when she had been standing on the kerb, staring up the street towards the approaching tram, the man beside her making his remark about the weather, the crowd behind her clustering close . . .

  Hommel’s pale eyes opened. ‘He said something.’ She sounded amazed, as though the memory had taken her by surprise. She stared at Veerle. ‘He said . . . Eva.’

  ‘Eva?’

  Hommel was nodding. ‘He said it twice. The first time I glanced back because the way he said it was kind of odd, like it had some sort of meaning. I didn’t see anything and I couldn’t work out who’d said it so I just thought, Oh well, and started looking for the tram again. And then he said it again – just that word. Eva. And then I felt this massive shove.’

  There was a silence for a few moments as they contemplated this: the two syllables spoken behind the turned back, the sudden murderous thrust.

  ‘Are you sure he was speaking to you?’ asked Veerle quietly.

  ‘No,’ Hommel told her truthfully. ‘But I felt that he was. There was something . . .’ She struggled to find the right words. ‘The way he said it, it sounded as though he was trying to get my attention. Like it was meant for me. I can’t explain it.’

  ‘And it was definitely Eva he said? It couldn’t have been part of something else? Even or evenzo?’

  Hommel shook her head. ‘It was Eva. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘It doesn’t make sense. Why would he call you that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know anyone called Eva.’

  ‘Well, what did he sound like? Old, young? Did he have an accent?’

  ‘He sounded – odd. Like there was something wrong with his voice. It was rough. Hoarse. Like – like he’d been smoking forty a day for years and years or something.’

  ‘Well, that’s something,’ said Veerle cautiously. She wasn’t optimistic, though. She was imagining herself telling the police that the person who had tried to push her unregistered friend under a tram was definitely, or at least probably, a smoker. It would be bad enough when they realized that she was the Girl Who Saw A Dead Killer; when she told them there was another one on the loose and the best description she had was Smoker, she’d lose what little credibility she had left. And this was even assuming Hommel agreed to talk to the police in the first place.

  Eva, she thought. That made absolutely no sense at all.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘are you sure you don’t know anyone called Eva? A distant cousin, or a friend of a friend?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure,’ said Hommel. She sighed. ‘It didn’t sound like he was – I don’t know, mentioning the name or something. It sounded like he was calling me that.’

  ‘Maybe he mistook you for someone,’ suggested Veerle.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Hommel, but her voice was bleak. ‘But if it’s the same guy who’s been following me, he’s seen me quite a few times.’ She looked down into her coffee cup.

  Silence stretched out between them. After a minute Veerle said, ‘I’m going to call Kris and tell him where we are.’

  And pray he’s going to be here more quickly than he thinks, she added silently.

  Kris answered her call on the second ring.

  ‘It’s me,’ said Veerle. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘On the metro.’

  Verdomme. Not even at Brussel-Zuid yet?

  ‘I’ve got Hommel,’ she said. ‘It’s her hand that’s injured.’ She glanced over at the other girl. ‘It’s busted pretty badly. You’ll have to take her to a doctor.’

  She heard Kris sigh. ‘Where are you?’ he asked.

  ‘In a burger bar. You can see it from the Sint-Niklaaskerk.’

  ‘I know the one.’

  Of course you do, thought Veerle. You spend the weekends here with Hommel. Any residual warmth she might have felt drained away.

  ‘Hurry up,’ she told Kris. ‘I’m going to be in trouble anyway. I don’t want to make it any worse.’

  Veerle hung up without waiting for a reply, feeling obscurely restless. She put the phone down on the table with a precise little click, pushed back her hair, took a mouthful of coffee and glanced at Hommel.

  Hommel had a strange look on her face, a blend of expectancy and hesitation, as though there were something she wanted to say but was unsure how to express, or perhaps wondered whether she should express.

  Veerle looked away, gazing through the rain-streaked window, and it was then that Hommel spoke.

  ‘Veerle . . . you know, I’m not with Kris.’

  Veerle’s head jerked up and she stared at Hommel, her face blank with astonishment. ‘What?’

  ‘Kris and I . . . we’re not together.’ Hommel spoke quietly, seeming to shrink under Veerle’s gaze. />
  Eventually Veerle found her tongue. ‘You’ve finished with him?’

  Hommel put her head down, pushing the fingers of her uninjured hand into her draggled hair. She said: ‘It was finished a long time ago. Before you.’

  Veerle looked at the crown of Hommel’s head, at the slender fingers threaded through the hair. She wished Hommel would look up; she hadn’t finished studying her – she wanted to look into those large grey eyes and see that Hommel was speaking the truth. She suspected that Hommel was simply trying to make peace in some misguided way, reasoning that it didn’t matter much anyway since she, Veerle, was presumably now with Bram. Hommel had seen him, after all, the day they had come to the flat over Muziek City.

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’ she said gruffly.

  ‘Because . . . it’s true.’

  Veerle felt a constricting sensation in her chest, a tightening of the painful knot that seemed to be there whenever she thought about Kris. She leaned towards Hommel across the plastic table-top. ‘But he’s been living with you at the weekends,’ she said, making a titanic effort to keep her voice level.

  Now Hommel did look up. ‘Kris is a good person, Veerle. There wasn’t anyone else I could go to when all this started, when that guy started stalking me. That’s why I asked him. I knew he’d come. It doesn’t mean we’re . . . He’s helping me as a friend.’

  Veerle couldn’t help herself; she had to keep probing. ‘A friend who stays over?’

  ‘I know how it looks, but . . . what else can he do? He can’t afford to stay in a hotel every weekend.’

  Well, what else am I going to do? Book into the Grand Hotel? Veerle remembered Kris saying that, the night they had argued in the street beneath her bedroom window. Hommel’s words were consistent with what Kris had said, that was true. All the same . . .

  ‘Look, why are you telling me this now?’ she asked.

  ‘Because you’ve been kind,’ said Hommel simply. ‘You didn’t have to help me.’

  She looked down again; Veerle found herself looking at the top of her blonde head once more.