by Helen Grant
Her head turns; she looks at the old man, willing him to keep his distance. She shouts, ‘Move, Kris.’
His reply is too faint to be clearly heard, nearly lost in the vast empty expanse of air that surrounds him on almost every side like a vast throat waiting to swallow him, but she knows what he is saying anyway.
‘I can’t.’
‘You have to!’ she screams.
In the second that her attention is focused on Kris the old man makes his move.
‘Silence,’ he tells her. He brings up his arm, and the light that flashes on the blade curves through the air like electricity arcing between two points.
Veerle puts out a hand defensively and the blade whispers past her palm, so lightly that she is not sure for a moment whether it has touched her at all.
Next to her is the mould-speckled carcass of a garden chair; she kicks it over so that it is between them. Then she looks at her left hand and there is a long slash across the palm; big drops of crimson blood are welling up all along it as though she is holding a necklace of cabochon rubies in her hand. The cut is so clean that for a few seconds she does not even feel any pain, in spite of what she sees with her eyes. Then it begins to sting intensely, the pain increasing with the sharpness of a musical note climbing the scale until it is a glass-shattering shriek.
It would be easy to collapse then, to fold herself around the wounded hand, but if she does that she is dead. Instead she uses her good hand to grab the nearest projectile, a chunk of masonry that has fallen out of the neglected wall and is nestling in a desiccated planter, and she throws it at him. As he ducks she begins to scramble up the wall to the gutter.
With adrenalin fizzing through her veins like a lit fuse, Veerle might be able to ignore the pain from her left hand, but what she is not prepared for is the loss of strength. He has cut something important and now she struggles to get a good grip, relying too much on her right hand. He closes in again with the blade. Veerle kicks out savagely and it glances off her boot.
She lunges upwards and almost falls into the guttering on her stomach, her head over the tiny parapet. Veerle is better with heights than most people, but the shock of it, the way her shoulder hits the stonework, and wham! she is suddenly looking into the abyss, is too violent; for a second she thinks she is falling, that the pavement six storeys below is coming up to meet her, the façade of the apartment building with its vanishing perspective whizzing past underneath her like train tracks. She opens her mouth and a terrible strangled sound comes out. She shuts her eyes, opens them, wants to shut them again but daren’t.
Death is coming up after her, climbing slowly but inexorably. Veerle realizes with horror that the traverse along the narrow gutter with its appalling drop to the street below is not going to stop him at all.
She forces herself onto her hands and knees. The gutter is just wide enough. She looks at Kris and he hasn’t moved.
‘Kris!’ she screams at him.
He doesn’t respond; there is no sign that he has even heard her. Veerle knows that look; she has seen it before, at the climbing wall when there is a group of novices. Kris is paralysed by the height. His limbs will be trembling and that will make it worse: the feeling that his body is betraying him, that it can’t and won’t keep still when his life depends on it, will boost the fear to stellar levels. The longer he stays there the harder it will be to make him move.
Veerle begins to crawl towards him. Some of her own nerve has gone; it fell away from her when she looked into that terrible emptiness, six storeys to the street. She does not want to stand up, so she goes along on her hands and knees, leaving spots of blood like garnets on the metal gutter. She shouts at Kris, screaming his name and then using terrible words, words as blunt as the blows of an axe – she doesn’t care how terrible they are, as long as they goad him into moving. Veerle can see past him now, and Hommel has done what she is doing – she is crawling along the gutter; it is slow progress but it is better than standing there as Kris is doing, waiting for nemesis to overtake you.
‘Get down, Kris!’ she shrieks at him. ‘Just crawl. Move!’
At last Kris seems to understand and he does move, although so stiffly and haltingly that you would think he is older than the man who is pursuing them. Veerle’s relief is tempered by the fear that Kris will actually go over the parapet because his fear has made him clumsy. At last, however, he manages to get down and begins to creep slowly along the gutter.
Their progress along the rooftop is painfully slow but the expected assault from their pursuer never comes. When they get to the other end and Kris is climbing down, white-faced, onto the safety of a flat roof, Veerle risks a look behind her and the old man is standing at the other end of the gutter, watching them.
Briefly she thinks that perhaps after all he will not dare to follow them – the path is so narrow and the drop so intimidating – but her relief is short lived. He waits for Veerle to climb down after Kris and then he begins to walk along the guttering towards them, careless of the drop.
He knows this way, Veerle realizes, but there is more to it than that: he actually believes he is impregnable. He is taking a risk following them like this; they could try to push him back when he reaches the end of the gutter, or even push him off altogether, into that yawning space below. He has the knife, though, and anyone who tries to touch him with their bare hands risks having them cut to ribbons.
She sees Kris staring at her, his face a mask of shock, and she looks down at her own left hand, which she is holding with her uninjured right one, as though it might come apart if she let it go. Blood is oozing between her fingers; hot red pain splits it from side to side.
No, she thinks.
If there were anything up here that they could use as a weapon – a piece of wood, a length of metal piping, anything – they could try to push him back with that. But there is nothing to hand. The three of them turn their backs and flee across the rooftop.
57
Veerle runs out of space; if the rooftops were a map she’d have reached the edge of it. She had feared this. She doesn’t know this part of Ghent’s upper landscape, but from her conversations with Bram she knows that it is impossible to get right across the city without descending to street level; every block, no matter how extensive, is an island surrounded by the deep canyons that are the streets of Ghent. The problem here, however, is not a street bisecting the block but fire damage. The entire top floor of a building has burned out, leaving a blackened hole too deep and wide to pass. The fire itself is long gone: the charred beams and blackened bricks are cold and damp. All the same, the destructive power of the blaze still shows itself in the seared devastation it has left behind; it looks as though a bomb went off in the building. Somewhere in that wet black pit are the remains of a viola, burned almost to nothingness, but Veerle does not know this, cannot know this. All she knows is that she cannot get across this wreck.
There is no further to go, no way to burrow down into the buildings below their feet, no way to go back that does not involve going through that blade. There is only this flat broad expanse of rooftop with a low stone wall running around it – for ornamental purposes only, not to stop anyone falling off, because there should not be anyone up here.
The three of them look at each other and Veerle sees it in the others’ faces too: they know. They are trapped.
Kris’s face has lost that sickly tinge now that he is no longer teetering on the brink of a drop, but his expression is grim. In the strange livid light of that overcast sky his aquiline features look sharper than ever, almost sculpted. His dark eyes are fierce. He hates heights like a cat hates water but now that he feels his feet on solid ground he wants to fight. He is reckoning his chances against someone who is older and slower but armed, who can slice open an artery with one casual gesture.
Hommel does not look as though she wants to fight. There is a stillness about her, the stillness of death. She has vanished to some secret place deep inside herself. Perhaps
it is the place where she used to go when her stepfather was tormenting her. If there is panic going on, there is no sign of it on the surface; it is like the struggles of someone drowning many fathoms underwater. Her angular face is smooth, beautiful even, but it is a beautiful façade. The great limpid eyes are no more expressive than tourmalines.
Veerle looks from Kris to Hommel, her face a mask of horror. No. Please don’t let this be happening. She feels a terrible, crushing sense of responsibility. She made the call that brought them here. She led them across this unforgiving vista of bricks and metal and glass. My fault, she thinks, but she has no more solutions to offer them, no way out. She means to fight too, she won’t give in without a struggle, but her hands are slippery with her own blood and the pain is gnawing raggedly at her consciousness, making it difficult to think clearly.
The old man climbs down onto the roof with them. He looks lopsided, a cyborg, the way his right arm terminates in that sharp triangular blade that twitches so restlessly. His seamed face is absolutely pitiless.
Instinctively the other three begin to spread out; he cannot attack them all at once. There is no time, though; the old man sees what they are trying to do and the rage that has been smouldering within him erupts like a pyroclastic flow. He lunges forward, runs at them full tilt.
No time to think – not one second left. Kris doesn’t hesitate. He steps in front of Veerle. Veerle, her right hand still gripping her left one, crimson leaking between her fingers, turns her head, shocked, her mouth open, and looks at Hommel. For about a second she and Hommel stare into each other’s eyes and Veerle sees a terrible knowledge there. Then the old man slams into Hommel like a human shark, a human avalanche. He doesn’t even need to use the blade. The impetus of the collision carries them both onwards – one, two metres, and clean over the inadequate stone barrier that bounds the edge of the roof.
It all happens so quickly that Veerle cannot really believe her eyes. One moment Hommel is there, the next she has gone, sucked over the edge of the building and into empty space. She does not even give a cry. Veerle thinks perhaps the old man said a single word, Eva, but she is not sure. She does not trust her ears; she does not even trust her eyes. She cannot believe what she has just seen. She stares and stares at the stone wall, at the spot where Hommel vanished over the brink. Her wet knuckles are cold in the wintry air; the blood is cooling. She keeps staring at that same spot, as though time were a film that could be rewound, as though what has just happened could be unmade.
Kris makes a terrible sound, as though the blade that went over the brink with Hommel and the old man were buried in him instead of falling after its owner, end over end through the cold air. He drops to his knees and crawls to the edge of the roof. What he sees lying six storeys below on the damp pavement Veerle never knows. She does not look. She stands on the rooftop with blood on her hands, not moving. After a little while she begins to shiver.
Kris puts his arms on the stone wall and puts his head on his arms. Perhaps he cries. Neither he nor Veerle speak to each other. There is nothing they can say. Veerle knows about Kris now, she knows the truth about whom he loves, but she didn’t want to know it like this. So she says nothing.
She waits. After a while she hears sirens in the street below. She looks up and watches the sky darkening, and waits for them to come up and find her.
58
Will I ever see Kris again?
That was not a question Veerle wanted to ask herself, not for a very long time.
The police came, and for a while there was a difficulty about getting her and Kris down from the roof because nobody wanted to walk along that narrow gutter with its useless parapet, particularly after seeing what had happened to Hommel and the old man.
After that there were a few questions, but not many because someone noticed that Veerle was bleeding. The cut was deeper than she had thought, requiring surgery. While the paramedic was assessing it, someone took Kris away, and that was the last she saw of him. Maybe they treated him for shock. Maybe they took him off for questioning right away. Nobody told Veerle anything.
Some of the tendons in the hand were cut so Veerle underwent a period of welcome unconsciousness while they were stitched up and the hand and forearm were plastered. The surgery went well, apparently: the doctors told her the hand would be as good as new when it had finished healing. Presumably they meant as good as new for someone who wanted to carry out ordinary tasks. They didn’t tell her whether it would be any good for climbing. That was something else she didn’t want to ask.
After that came the questions – clustering, probing, stinging, like a cloud of poisonous insects, sonorous with suspicion. Obviously the police were considering the possibility that Kris and Veerle had pushed Hommel and the old man off the building as some kind of thrill or dare, or that Hommel had been in on it too and the whole thing had gone wrong, leading to her accidental death. Veerle had no idea what Kris was saying. She just told the truth. The dead girl was a friend from Vlaams-Brabant who had been staying in Ghent. She had believed someone was following her; it had made her nervous – that was why she had got in touch with Kris. Yes, he was Veerle’s ex-boyfriend. No, that didn’t mean Veerle had a grudge against her. Veerle had gone to help her when someone attacked her. They’d tried to push her under a tram. No, she hadn’t reported it to the police. Why . . .?
At some point someone made the connection with the case last summer, at that castle just outside Brussels. The questions intensified. A body had been found there too. Like the one here in Ghent, there was no identification found. That body still hadn’t been identified. The policeman doing the talking described an interesting scenario for Veerle, in which a couple of young people lured down-and-outs into isolated places and killed them for kicks. He invited her to comment on whether this seemed a realistic scenario or not. He speculated on how Hommel had come to be involved, how she had come to meet her death, whether it was intentional or not.
He kept calling Hommel Mevrouw Lievens – except once when he suddenly used her first name, Els, perhaps hoping to startle Veerle into a reaction of some kind.
Veerle noticed that he never called the old man anything. No name was ever mentioned.
She stuck to her story. Hommel had heard someone call her Eva just before the attempt to shove her under the number 1 tram heading for Gent-Sint-Pieters railway station. She, Veerle, had heard someone say the same thing in the cathedral – yes, the Sint-Baafs cathedral, the same one the young man fell from last year – and she had been suspicious enough to follow him home. She had called Kris because she was afraid the old man was dangerous and she wanted someone to know where she was. She hadn’t expected him to bring Hommel with him.
‘The old man . . .’ said the policeman a little wearily. ‘Had you ever seen him before?’
Veerle shook her head. ‘No.’ She’d thought about that question before it was even asked, and there was no way she could say she’d seen him before without saying where and how. I saw him from the top of the Gravensteen one night, murdering a friend of the friend I’d broken in with. No.
Anyway, she hadn’t been able to see his face that night, or the time he attacked Bram on the ladder. Saying she’d seen him would lead to a whole load more trouble and she couldn’t prove anything anyway.
‘Do you have any idea who he is?’ the policeman was saying. ‘Did he tell you his name?’
Veerle sighed. ‘Not exactly.’
‘Well, what, exactly?’
‘He answered to Joos Vijdt.’
‘Joost Vijdt?’
‘Not Joost. Joos.’
Veerle could see from the blank expression on the policeman’s face that the name meant nothing to him. She sighed.
‘Joos Vijdt was the person who paid for the Ghent altarpiece.’
Now she had his attention, not that she wanted it; she wished she could go somewhere where there was nobody else at all, and just sleep. Forget.
Veerle told him her theory. She talked do
ggedly, seeing the incredulous expression on his face. City police deal with lots of things – drug dealers, rapes, knifings – but not killings carried out by someone who believes he is six hundred years old, inspired by an Early Flemish polyptych. It was easier to believe that Veerle was a fantasist as well as a delinquent who killed for kicks.
There was the fact of the wall in that fifth-floor room, though, with its uncanny resemblance to the painting that any resident of Ghent and nearly every visitor would have recognized. After Veerle had told the open-mouthed policeman that she had seen the politician who had died by arson in his mistress’s flat and the priest whose body had been found in his burned-out house amongst the faces pasted carefully to the wall, someone was sent back to examine it again, more carefully. The little wooden statue of the Virgin and Child was recovered, and in due course someone had the idea of sending for the priest’s cleaning lady, who was able to confirm that it had belonged to him.
Eventually it would be proven that the old man had handled the statue but Veerle hadn’t, as was the case with everything in that fetid candle-lit chamber, and the knife that had been found on the pavement near his body. That was some way in the future, but all the same, the talons of justice that had been tightening so ominously about her began to relax. The cathedral guide who had spoken to Veerle was able to confirm that he had seen her with the old man in the church. He also confirmed that the old man had been banned from Sint-Baafs for trying to vandalize its most precious treasure, the Van Eycks’ altarpiece. His obsession with it, and his violent unpredictability, were established.
Then there was the matter of the other, earlier deaths, some of which had occurred when Veerle was too young to grip the handle of a large knife, let alone wield it. The deaths before those, the ones that ran back into past time like the roots of some grotesque plant pushing their way down into deeper and darker soil – those ones the police discounted altogether. Nobody who is killing in the twenty-first century can also have been killing in the eighteenth – or the seventeenth.