by Mark Hobson
Bart nodded, wishing he could go to the toilet.
“Right then Dalton, set him loose.”
Dalton used a knife to cut through the ropes binding the man’s ankles and wrists, untied the gag and pushed him out of the bed of the truck.
The poor wretch stood there, shaking like a leaf, his teeth chattering with fear.
“Well go on then, don’t just stand there. Off you go!” He stepped forward into the man’s face, who needed no second warning and turned and fled, his skinny body bolting across the rolling grassland, Johan’s parting laugh crackling like a gunshot.
They watched him go, away from the sloping hillside where they were parked, making for a narrow stream at the bottom.
Johan tutted to himself and shook his head, his eyes narrowed as they followed the diminishing figure running for his life.
“They are always the fucking same. They always follow the bloody stream, thinking the shortest route is the best course to take. Big mistake that, Bart. What he should be doing is cutting out across country away from us, in that direction.” He pointed off, to the north Bart thought. “Then he could lose us amongst the rocks at the base of that big hill there, the one with the flat top, and then swing around to pick up the line of the fence. Follow that for a mile or so, and then the land dips down into a series of gullies, and we’d never find him in there. After that, he would have a clear run all the way to the finish line. Bloody fool.”
They sat in the shade of a large jackalberry tree to wait. Swarms of flies hovered in their faces and Bart watched a line of ants walking from the base of the trunk across the hard-packed earth, and he crushed one of them with his thumb, squishing it flat into the ground.
The half-hour went by too quickly, and when the time to set off arrived he dragged himself reluctantly to his feet and shuffled over to the pickup.
Johan told him they would drive to a spot several miles away where the dirt road bisected the stream. There they would wait for the fleeing man to come running right into their gunsights. To be on the safe side, Dalton was to take the truck over the stream and find a place to wait in the folds of land, and should their quarry make an attempt to head off away from them in that direction, he was to drive him back this way.
Bart and his uncle lay down side by side in the shelter of some rocks and boulders overlooking the narrow stream, and waited in silence. There was a stillness to the air. The sun beat down on them, flat and heavy. The mist had burned away, to be replaced by a cloudless blue sky, the intensity of the heat sapping Bart’s strength. He found himself longing for the cold and ice of Amsterdam in the winter, and he wiped the sweat from his eyes.
After several minutes he felt his uncle tap him on the arm gently, and then nod his head down at the stream, and he followed the pointing finger.
At first he could see nothing. Then there was a sudden flurry as a pair of Sakabula birds took to the wing, and seconds later the fleeing man came into view, running and weaving as he followed the watercourse, glancing back over his shoulder.
“He’s all your’s boy,” Uncle Johan whispered.
Bart brought his hunting rifle up and sighted along the barrel, which seemed to vibrate in his shaking hands.
“Breathe slowly. Try to relax.”
Bart wished his uncle would just shut up. He wanted the whole thing to go away, he dearly hoped this was all just a bad dream and any moment now he would wake up in his bed back home, and everything would be as before. He hated it here in Africa, he hated his family for bringing him here, and most of all he hated himself!
His finger twitched, and the gun bucked in his hands, the loud report bringing a girlish scream from his lips, and in the heat haze caused by the firing rifle there was a bright scarlet eruption of blood from where the running man was passing below them. The figure stumbled and nearly fell – he’d hit him! – but then he regained his momentum and raced on and out of sight around a bend in the stream.
“Shit!” his uncle exclaimed under his breath.
Bart glanced across at him in confusion, and then he felt himself being dragged to his feet and pushed down the rocky slope towards the streambed. Together they trotted down to where the fleeing man had disappeared.
They found him a hundred yards or so further along. He was laying in the shallow water, twitching and breathing spasmodically and staring up at the sky.
As they approached he must have heard their feet splashing through the water, and in a sudden panic he tried to squirm away, gibbering to himself.
His Uncle Johan pushed him along, and then Bart was looking down at the man, who was coughing up blood, turning the stream red. Somewhere, they heard the engine of the pickup truck start up. Moments later, a car door slammed and Dalton joined them.
“A fucking gut shot,” Uncle Johan told them. “Great!” He turned his eyes on Bart, who felt himself cringe away from their intensity.
Reaching for his belt, he withdrew the hunting knife from its sheaf and held it out towards Bart.
“You need to finish him off, put him out of his misery. A wound like that, it could take him hours, maybe days to bleed out.”
Bart looked from the knife, to the wounded man lying gasping at his feet, and back to the knife again. He shook his head and stepped back, shivering and hugging himself even though the day was scorching hot.
A cold look crept into his uncle’s eyes. It was like looking at two icy pits, right into his soul.
“Take the knife and do it, boy. If not, then so help me God I will tie you to that tree over there and leave you out here all night, so you can watch him slowly bleed to death. And in the morning, when the vultures and hyenas come for his body, stripping the flesh away, they’ll come for you too. Those Strandwolves are a nasty breed, they won’t be too choosy, especially when they see a fat boy like you. You’ll be fucking carrion too. If the ants don’t get you first.”
He pushed the knife closer.
Bart looked around in panic. He glanced over towards Dalton, but he was looking down at the ground.
He wondered briefly if he could make a run for it. But where would he go? How far would he get, before he too found himself being hunted down?
Finally he turned his eyes back towards the man lying in the stream, slowly bleeding and moaning in agony.
Bart shouted, and his voice rolled across the countryside. He yelled again, a loud and guttural sound, like he was trying to expel something deep inside, and he was breathing hard, snorting down his nostrils, and he felt his features contort and twist.
Snatching the knife he ran headlong at the man and plunged the blade deep into his chest, who jerked in surprise. Bart stabbed again, their eyes locked together. He stabbed him over and over, in his neck, in his torso, in his face, in his stomach, he lost count of how many times he stabbed, so lost was he in his bloodlust.
Vaguely he heard his uncle whispering encouragement.
“That’s right, boy, that’s right.”
. . .
They slung the carcass into the back of the truck and drove back to the farm. Sometime tomorrow they would shove the body into the cesspit behind the stables, but first Bart deserved a beer and a hearty meal, his uncle told him. He’d made the family proud.
Later that night, as he and Lotte lay in their beds side by side, he told her what had happened during the hunt, explaining the day’s events in vivid detail. He felt a feeling of pride swell inside him, and he also sensed that something else had shifted within. Something that he couldn’t explain or put into words. Just a notion that he had crossed an imaginary line, a boundary that up to now had been holding him back. He concluded that this was how it must feel to pass from childhood into manhood.
Things would never be the same for him again.
He heard the bedsprings on Lotte’s bed squeak then he felt her take a hold of his hand, and draw him to his feet.
“There’s something we have to do,” she said to him in the dark, and she led him outside.
Everyth
ing was still except for the quiet lowing of the cattle in their pens and overhead the Milky Way and the Southern Cross lay serenely over the heavens.
Lotte guided him across the yard to where the pickup truck was parked, using a flashlight to light their way. The corpse lay in the back, covered over with a tarpaulin. With his help they pulled the sheet aside, Bart asking: “What are we doing? If we get caught…”
“It’s something that Dalton told me, something that they do in Africa. Something important. Here, hold this.” She handed him the flashlight.
There was the glint of a sharp blade in his sister’s hand.
“We need to… remove… some parts of the body.”
“What?! Why?!”
“It’s for what they call umuthi medicine. The Zulu inyanga, their witchdoctors, do it. It will make us very powerful Bart, and give us supernatural control over our enemies forever.”
“We have enemies?”
“Of course, silly,” Lotte told him, sounding much older than her eleven years. “It’s me and you against the rest of the world.”
Bart watched in fascination as she started to cut a strip of skin from the corpse’s forehead, and then from one of its arms. “So that he cannot strike us even in death,” she explained.
Next she carved deeply into the chest and cut and twisted until a piece of cartilage came loose from the bottom of the breastbone. “Our shield.”
Then she turned the corpse over and removed tissue from the soles of its feet “To give us strength and speed.”
When she was done Lotte tore off a strip of the man’s shirt and wrapped the pieces inside.
Bart waited while she stepped back and looked at her handiwork, her eyes moving over the dead body, and then she turned to look directly at him and sighed.
“This next part you must do yourself.”
She passed him the knife and he looked at her in confusion, not liking where this was going.
“You must open up the body, slash him from top to bottom. To release his spirit. If not, then he will haunt you for the rest of your life.”
Doing as his sister said, Bart set to work.
PART 2
THE UNSHRIVEN
Chapter 17
Marc Dutroux
The following morning, a Tuesday, Kaatje was taken for her surgery. Pieter was there when they wheeled her into the elevator and down to one of the theatres, and although he knew the prognosis for the outcome of the operation was poor, he nevertheless tried to maintain a positive attitude, for Kaatje’s sake. She smiled back and even cracked a couple of jokes, but there was a tenseness there, a forced joviality.
There were a few comfy seats in the corridor just outside the surgical suite and Pieter chose one next to a coffee machine. It gurgled and rumbled away, and now and then it spat out brown dregs from one of the little spouts.
While he waited for news, he cast his mind back over yesterday’s events, reliving the horrifying moment when their prime suspect, Tobias Vinke, had been shot in the head by a long-range sniper round.
Following the fatal shot, there had been a split-second of silence from the passengers on the ferry as they spun and watched him fall, a small fountain of blood pumping from the large hole at the top of his head. Then, when the realization of what had just happened sank in, there was complete pandemonium, with people screaming and pushing, shouting at each other as they wondered who amongst them had a gun, thinking the killer was on the boat with them.
Pieter had immediately known otherwise. In the build-up to the murder, there had been nothing to indicate what was about to happen, with no sound of the gunshot, telling him instantly that the round had been fired from some distance away. He had called out to those around him, pleading with them to stay calm; he was seriously concerned that the boat might capsize, or that somebody might get crushed or trampled, or even fall overboard, but it was only when he brought out his police warrant card and held it aloft – “I’m a police officer, please do not panic!” – that some kind of order was restored.
Then he had crouched over the recumbent form of Tobias Vinke and searched for signs of life, checking his breathing, his pulse, wondering if it was worth doing CPR or not, but when his eyes had looked more closely at the wound he quickly decided it was pointless. The whole of the top of his head was missing, with pieces of bone and brain splashed across the boat’s wooden deck, and there was a smaller entry wound square in the centre of Vinke’s face, right where the nose was. The bullet had struck him there and then ricocheted upwards, possibly off his jawbone, and out of the top of the cranium. It was an unsurvivable injury.
Standing up, Pieter looked around, his mind already trying to piece together just what had happened.
Where had the shot come from?
Ignoring the contagious fear amongst the passengers, who were now mostly silent with shock apart from one or two people who were crying quietly, he thought back to the exact moment that Vinke was hit.
Pieter had been standing at the rail and trying to blend in, but he clearly remembered sensing Tobias Vinke turn in his direction, as though he’d been rumbled – and then down he had gone.
His posture had been pointing south, towards the riverside. Therefore the round that hit him in the face must have come from that direction.
And if it was from a long-range rifle, then the shooter would need a good vantage point.
Pieter found his eyes going up to the roof of the large rail station.
Raising his walkie-talkie to his mouth, he’d called it in, quickly explaining to the other members of K Team what had happened.
“Check the station. Up on the roof.”
A few moments later and the ferry arrived at the north riverside terminal, and as soon as the ramp lowered the passengers scattered. So much for getting any witness statements, Pieter thought to himself, but he let them go in any case.
Within ten minutes the area was swarming with emergency vehicles and medics, and Pieter had stood to one side on the riverbank to let them do their thing. Word came back that Centraal Station had been placed in lockdown: nobody was allowed in or out. The concourse and platforms, the shops and cafes, and all of the entrances were flooded with police officers, and several teams were sent straight up onto the station roof to look for the sniper.
Pieter waited anxiously, praying for a bit of good luck for once.
Nothing. There was nobody up on the roof, and nothing suspicious was found in the station itself.
Whoever he or she was, the shooter had somehow slipped through the net.
It quickly became clear what the repercussions of the killing of their prime suspect would be.
In one fell swoop, the whole game had changed, for he was sure the shooting of Vinke had been a deliberate act.
From being the search for a missing girl kidnapped and being held captive by some unknown assailant - a man who had brutally murdered her parents and whose sick motives for taking her were unclear - and rescuing her from his vile clutches, it was now a race against time to find wherever she had been locked up in some hidden location, possibly alone and with nobody to hear her cries for help, before she potentially died of starvation or thirst.
Sitting in the hospital waiting area, Pieter was reminded of the notorious child abduction case in Belgium some years ago.
In May and August 1986 two young girls aged twelve and fourteen were grabbed off the street and bundled into the back of a van. They were abducted three months apart but ended up in the same dungeon, tied to a bed with a chain around their necks, to be tortured and abused. Luckily for the two girls, an eyewitness to the second abduction was able to pass on details of the van’s licence plate to the police, who swooped on a ramshackle, white-washed farmhouse on the outskirts of the town of Sars-la-Buissiere and arrested the home-owner, a thirty-nine year-old known sex criminal named Marc Dutroux. Initially, Dutroux refused to talk, but after several days of questioning he showed Belgium police the secret entrance to his dungeon of torture, and the
pair of girls were rescued and reunited with their families.
As if this were not bad enough it soon became clear that Dutroux was also responsible for the abductions and murders the previous year, 1985, of four more girls and young women aged between eight and nineteen, as well as the death of an accomplice and local drug addict, Bernard Weinstein.
The saddest part of the whole tragedy was that police had missed an opportunity to rescue the first pair of missing girls, both just eight years old when they were taken. Having captured and locked them away in his farmhouse, Dutroux subjected them to the most terrible of ordeals for week after week. But then, a month or so later, Dutroux was arrested for an unconnected crime – he was caught stealing a car – and was sent to prison for three months. While locked away the psycho kept the whereabouts of the two young girls a secret, and imprisoned as they were back at his house, they slowly died of thirst and starvation. Even Dutroux’s wife, who knew about her husband’s sordid secret, did nothing to help them.
The case shocked not just the nation of Belgium but the whole world.
Now, going back over the events of the past few days and wondering if there were any clues that he and his colleagues may have missed, Pieter found himself struck with the terrifying possibility that history was about to repeat itself.
They had to find Nina Bakker as soon as they could before this case took on an even more frightful turn.
There was nothing to be gained by sitting here, he told himself.
Kaatje would be in the operating theatre for at least two or three hours. In the meantime, while he was at the hospital, there was something he wanted to check up on.
Pieter headed for the morgue, which was across the car park in a separate building but also connected by an underground passageway to allow the deceased to be moved there from the main wing without upsetting other patients and visitors. He went looking for Prisha Kapoor the Chief Pathologist, and he found her in her office at the end of the corridor, on the phone to her partner, Rowan.