by Helen Grant
After the tide had turned and they were beginning to see Veerle as an almost-victim rather than a potential killer, the direction of the questions changed too. Why? That was the thing they wanted to know.
She did her best to answer that.
‘He said life had become a burden. He said he was at Gavere, and soldiers came and killed a load of people. I guessed it must have been during the war. He was talking about blood soaking into the ground and people screaming.’
‘He was where? Gavere?’
Veerle nodded.
‘OK, we can check that. Maybe someone there knows who he is.’
They didn’t, though. Later on – they’d let Geert take her home by then – the police wanted to speak to her again.
‘We’ve checked, and there was no massacre in Gavere during the Second World War, nothing like that at all. Nothing during the First World War, either. Are you sure it was Gavere he mentioned?’
‘Yes, I’m sure.’
‘It wasn’t Vinkt? That’s about twenty kilometres from Gavere. There was a massacre there in 1940. German troops killed over eighty people, including civilians. If our man was a boy then, he’d be in his eighties now, which fits, from the look of him.’
‘It was definitely Gavere,’ Veerle told him.
‘Take a little time to think about it. I know the names aren’t alike but maybe something else put Gavere in your head. Are you sure it wasn’t Vinkt?’
‘I’m sure.’
Veerle knew they didn’t believe her. She couldn’t explain it herself. It wasn’t as though she knew every little village within a fifty-mile radius of Ghent; she couldn’t suggest any other place with a similar name. But she knew the old man hadn’t mentioned Vinkt.
59
Questions, questions. They hung over her in a cloud wherever she was. It wasn’t just the police wanting to know whether she’d thought about it any more, whether it couldn’t have been Vinkt the old man had mentioned and not Gavere. It was the school, wanting to know whether Veerle was going back or not: not just because of the coursework she was behind on, but also the regrettable fact that although the directeur had banned discussion on school premises of what she had been through, it was impossible to stamp it out completely. Speculation was rife; it might be more comfortable for Veerle elsewhere.
Bram was going to have questions too, she knew that, and she owed him some answers. At first she couldn’t face going through it all again with anyone, not even kind, amiable Bram, but she knew she couldn’t avoid talking to him for ever. She hoped he wasn’t going to be upset or even angry with her for failing to wait for him that day at the cathedral. She didn’t think that, however annoyed or disappointed he was, he could regret that as much as she did.
And then there was that other question, the one that had been answered. She had wanted to know that answer so badly, but now she couldn’t let herself think about it at all. Someone had lost her life because of that answer; she couldn’t get past that. And Hommel had known, that was the worst thing about it. It didn’t matter whether Veerle was asleep or awake, whether she had her eyes tight shut or wide, wide open: she kept seeing it again, that moment just before Hommel had been swept away like driftwood on the tide, when they had stared into each other’s eyes. A split-second later the old man had cannoned into her and they had gone over the edge, and Veerle had been staring into thin air, staring and staring, as though if she looked long enough the thing would be undone. Hommel knew that she had not been chosen; she had died knowing it.
It was useless for Veerle to tell herself that it had all happened too quickly, that Kris had not had time to make a conscious decision, that he would have shielded them both if he could have – that if he had known what was going to happen, he would have gone on the attack himself. All of it was undeniably true, but Veerle was discovering that however much Geert might insist upon it, Truth was a poor inadequate thing. It couldn’t put Hommel back on the rooftop; it didn’t even make Veerle feel better; it made nothing better.
So she tried not to think about Kris at all, or what the answer to the question meant. It couldn’t mean anything now.
The only person who didn’t have dozens of questions was Geert. That Anneke had plenty, Veerle had no doubt, all of them pent up and waiting to descend on her in a shrill rush, but Geert only asked her one.
He said, ‘Are you all right?’
He was there when she woke up from the anaesthetic after they fixed her hand. He was sitting by the bed, and when Veerle saw him she was reminded of waking up in hospital after the fire at the old castle the summer before, and seeing him and Anneke at her bedside. Only now he was here on his own; Anneke wasn’t with him.
It was not until much later that it occurred to her that Geert had done it on purpose, that he had made Anneke stay away, not just because Anneke would fill the air with her reproaches but because this was not between the three of them, it was between Geert and Veerle alone. At the time she was exhausted and numb, and the only emotion she could summon up was gratitude that he was there and that he didn’t seem to be furious with her.
Geert sat with her for a long time, and that one question was almost the only thing he said. When he saw that Veerle was awake he leaned forward and covered her curled fingers with his own large hand. His touch was warm and reassuring.
Geert had a slightly baffled look on his face, as though he were a zoo keeper who had suddenly found himself in charge of an alien species. Perhaps he did not ask questions because he did not know where to start; perhaps he was afraid of upsetting Veerle. Instead he was just there, as sturdy as a milestone sunk into the earth, the one solid thing on her journey from a past she would gladly have forgotten into a daunting future.
Geert was also there at the police station, and he was there when she came home again. Anneke was at the flat too, of course; there was no avoiding her for ever. In the event she said very little to Veerle. The hailstorm of questions, the reproaches about the trials she was putting Geert through, never came.
Veerle began to see that her father had told Anneke to stay out of it. Veerle had no illusions. She had made a promise to Anneke, and she was going to have to keep it. She saw the way the older woman glanced from her to Geert, her eyes narrowing and her lips pursed, and she knew that Anneke was remembering that promise too. Besides, the cold hard truth was that Geert belonged to Anneke and Adam more than he belonged to Veerle.
Still, Geert had done this thing for her, and no doubt he was suffering for it when he was alone with Anneke. Veerle remembered the day Anneke had confronted her, the venom with which she had spoken, the cold urgency to extract Veerle’s promise to leave. She thought Geert was suffering all right; Anneke had enough bile to keep haranguing him about this for years. He had stuck his neck out for the daughter whose disobedience he couldn’t begin to understand.
They had one conversation about the future, and one only; Geert wasn’t the sort to keep returning to a subject to worry at it.
Geert asked her, ‘What do you want to do about the school? Do you want to change?’
Veerle looked at him steadfastly and said, ‘No. I want to do the diploma there. I just want to get it out of the way.’
She didn’t say what she thought, which was that she was not going to pass. That would mean opening a whole area of discussion that was pointless anyway since she had promised to leave. Instead she was silent for a while, and then she said, ‘Dad, I’m sorry.’
Geert didn’t ask her what she was sorry for; he didn’t tell her not be sorry, either. At last he put out his arms, and Veerle went into them. Veerle leaned in to her father and heard the strong beat of his heart, and in spite of everything she was comforted for a little while.
60
There came a day when Geert knocked on the door of the bedroom that Veerle still didn’t really consider her own – never would consider her own, now – and told her that Bram was here to see her.
Veerle didn’t know whether she was ready to see Bra
m, but she owed it to him, so she said yes. She stood up, too full of nervous tension to stay seated. A few moments later Geert ushered him in, then left, closing the door noiselessly.
Veerle and Bram stared at each other. Bram looked a little self-conscious. For a moment there was silence.
‘Hi,’ he said awkwardly.
‘Bram, I’m so sorry,’ burst out Veerle. She felt like crying, except Veerle hated crying; she forced the tears back, biting her lip. She said, ‘I went to the cathedral to meet you – I didn’t stand you up.’
Bram came a little closer, but he didn’t try to touch her. He stood an arm’s length away and said, ‘What happened?’ When she didn’t reply immediately he said, ‘I’ve heard all this stuff – I don’t know what’s true and what isn’t.’
‘It’s probably all true,’ said Veerle, trying to smile at him, and found that she was crying after all. ‘Hommel’s dead,’ she said, rubbing uselessly at her traitorous eyes. ‘The guy who was following her – he did it. He’s dead too.’
‘But you—?’
‘I’m OK,’ Veerle told him, and then she couldn’t control it any more. She began to sob, great heaving sobs that couldn’t be disguised. She felt a wave of useless anger at herself, but she couldn’t stop it. ‘I’m OK,’ she said, weeping.
After a moment Bram went up to her and put his arms around her.
Veerle leaned in to him. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she wept.
Bram’s arms tightened around her, but he didn’t say anything for a long time. Finally, when Veerle had cried herself out and was fumbling in her pocket for a tissue to blow her nose on, he said again, ‘What happened?’
‘I went to the cathedral like we arranged, only I was early. And it was dark in there, and there wasn’t anybody around, just me. I was standing there waiting and looking at this painting of a woman when someone came up right behind me and said, Eva. Just that, the name. And the thing is, Hommel heard someone say that right before the guy tried to push her under the tram.’
‘Shit,’ said Bram. He held her away a little so that he could look into her face. ‘No kidding? So it was him – the guy who tried to push her?’
Veerle nodded. ‘Yes. He was old, really old. I didn’t expect that. And he had this look – like there was something boiling up inside him, like a rage. He asked me if I was one of them and I didn’t know what he meant, so I said no. Then he did something weird. He scattered a load of salt on the floor and made me walk over it, like a sort of test.’ She looked at Bram. ‘And Bram, when he scattered it—’
She made the motion with her arm, twice, and she saw that he understood.
‘The guy who ran at me that night when I was coming down the ladder,’ said Bram. ‘But why salt? It’s just . . . it doesn’t make sense.’
‘He was talking about demons,’ said Veerle. ‘He said he barred their way with salt and iron. And then he started talking about the painting of the Mystic Lamb, the one there in the cathedral, and all the people in it, the ones who weren’t supposed to die . . .’
She told Bram about the old man’s wartime story, the one the police still hadn’t got to the bottom of, how he had said that sometimes life was a burden. How he had been thrown out of the cathedral, and Veerle had decided to follow him – now or never.
‘I saw you,’ she told him. ‘I was on the other side of the square, by the Belfort tower, when you went into the cathedral. I wanted to call you but you wouldn’t have heard me, and there wasn’t time to phone you. I’d have lost the old man.’ She put the heel of her hand to her forehead, rubbing as though she could expunge the memory from her brain. ‘Maybe it would be better if I had. It would be better.’
Bram sighed, but he didn’t interrupt; he waited for her to go on.
‘I followed him to this building – it had a shop on the ground floor but pretty much all the other floors were empty. I kept trying to call you but I couldn’t get through.’
‘Verdomme,’ said Bram. Veerle felt his body tense. ‘I was angry because I thought you’d stood me up. I thought you’d decided – you know. And I didn’t want to hear the excuses.’
Veerle heard the self-reproach in his voice but there was nothing she could say to it. She had spent so much time herself going over her own actions, the decisions she had made. If she had agreed to spend the weekend at Bram’s as soon as he asked her, instead of arranging to meet at the cathedral; if she had phoned him before following the old man; if she had called the police instead of Kris. If. If. If. It was true that she wouldn’t have called Kris if Bram had answered the phone, but once you started thinking like that the only thing that lay ahead was madness. You could keep going backwards through every decision that had ever been made, for ever. If Hommel had chosen anywhere other than Ghent to hide herself. If Veerle had never bunked off school, and had never run into Hommel at all. If Veerle had never got into trouble back in Vlaams-Brabant, so that her mother had never been out on the street that afternoon, distracted with worry, not noticing that the lorry was too close to the kerb . . . In a way you could argue that it all came back to that; that De Jager or Joren Sterckx or whoever he was had extended his evil influence as far as this, even if he hadn’t intended it . . .
Bram was asking her to go on. He wanted to know what had happened after she tried and failed to reach him.
‘I called Kris,’ said Veerle reluctantly. ‘It wasn’t that I was angry with you for not replying. I just thought someone ought to know where I was. I didn’t know he’d actually turn up, and I definitely didn’t know he’d bring Hommel with him. I’d have told him not to, no matter what.’ She sighed heavily. ‘Anyway, the old guy came out and went off somewhere and I lost him, so I decided to go into the building and see if I could find anything. I reckoned it was safe enough; he’d probably be gone a while.’
‘And did you?’
‘Yes. He had this room on the fifth floor. A squat. And there was this thing on the wall – this terrible thing . . .’
She described the mural the unnamed old man had made, with its sea of silent paper faces, and two remaining spaces that would never be filled. When she told him about the Lamb in the centre, cut from some glossy book, she saw him start.
‘He’d copied the Ghent altarpiece?’
Veerle nodded.
‘With pictures of dead people? For God’s sake – why?’
‘He thought he was Joos Vijdt.’
She didn’t have to explain whom she meant as she’d had to with the policeman; it was Bram who’d told her the story of Joos Vijdt in the first place, after all.
‘That’s insane.’
Veerle didn’t disagree. ‘He had it all worked out, like the legend you told me, the one only people who were born and bred in Ghent know about. He thought once all the people in the painting were dead he could rest, and apart from him only Eva was still alive. And Eva was Hommel.’
‘So he killed her?’
‘Not just her,’ said Veerle. ‘At least some of the people in the mural.’
‘How many?’ asked Bram in a horrified voice.
‘I don’t know. He’d pasted up newspaper reports from ages and ages ago, so far back that it couldn’t possibly have been him.’
‘What, you mean, from the 1950s or something?’
‘A lot further back than that. Try the 1750s.’
Bram gaped at her. ‘You have to be joking.’
She shook her head. ‘No. I think he’d gone through old newspapers, looking for them. Anyway, while I was in the squat Kris turned up with Hommel. He said she was afraid to stay behind at Muziek City on her own. And then . . .’ She took a deep breath. ‘Then the old man came home.’
Veerle didn’t tell Bram about the phone call, the one that had given their presence away. She’d looked, long afterwards, and yes, it had been Bram who had called. But she saw no reason to spread the reproach around; he couldn’t have known, after all. So she said nothing about that.
She went on, ‘It was my idea to go up on the ro
of, but anyway, there wasn’t really anywhere else to go. We couldn’t get down the stairs because he was coming up them, and if we’d gone into any of the other rooms we’d have been trapped. So I took a gamble that we’d be able to hide or find another way down from there.’ Her voice wavered a little. ‘I guess I was wrong about that.’
‘And what . . .? I mean, if you want to tell me—’
‘What about Hommel? We came to the end of where we could go. There wasn’t anywhere else – there was this burnedout building and we couldn’t get past that. We were on this flat roof and he ran at us. It all happened really quickly – we didn’t know what he was going to do. He ran right into Hommel and they went over the edge. It was just . . .’ Veerle looked at Bram helplessly. ‘It was all so fast. One moment she was there and the next . . .’
‘Shit.’
Veerle could feel that hot stinging in her eyes again. She dropped her gaze from Bram’s. ‘I keep seeing it,’ she said.
‘Flashbacks.’
‘I suppose so.’
Bram pulled her close again, and for a while Veerle just let him hold her, feeling the reassuring warmth of his body seeping into her.
At last Bram said, ‘So did he think Marnix was one of the people in the painting, like Hommel?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Veerle. ‘The thing with the salt was supposed to ward off demons. Those little bits of iron were supposed to do it too. He thought that’s what the people on the rooftops were – the Demons of Ghent, trying to stop him going to his rest. I think he killed that boy from my school, Daan De Moor, because he ran into him on the rooftops, doing the same stuff we used to do. And that other guy, Luc. I don’t think he jumped off the cathedral. I think he was pushed.’