But the urge was too strong. He turned around. Of course there was no one there, and as soon as he looked back, those feelings of warmth and affection were gone, like a duvet being yanked away on a cold winter morning.
He stood there for a while, staring into the darkness. He felt a cold draught whip past his legs, a phantom gliding past him.
He was about to turn back around and go up the stairs when he heard a sudden noise come from somewhere nearby.
More footsteps.
Slowly but surely, the contours of a body came into view, like a corpse rising from the bottom of a lake and breaking the water’s surface.
46
Saturday 21 March, 1:00pm
Clouds of ancient dust filled the tunnel where two workmen had succeeded in creating the first hole in the wall. The two men, the three police officers and Janna Frederiks wore protective masks so that they wouldn’t breathe in the grit and dust.
Despite the strangeness of the situation, Janna found herself being carried away by the excitement of it all. The rumours that they’d always dismissed as urban legends had suddenly become fact. A labyrinth of tunnels under the city could be turned into a huge tourist attraction. Just imagine, she thought, they would be able to give guided tours of this hidden world, just like the ones in Rome, Paris and London. And what sort of archaeological treasures might they find? What if there were people buried down here too, from centuries ago? The catacombs of Leiden … What an amazing story that would be!
Her excitement at the possibilities made her disappointment all the greater when she saw the amount of force that was being used to break open the first wall. She understood why this investigation, a murder investigation in fact, was the police team’s main priority, but the destruction of these ancient walls was like a dagger in her archaeologist’s heart. There was bound to be a clever mechanism built into the wall that would make it open, but they had probably destroyed it forever now.
How far did this system of tunnels go? Did the passages stretch all the way beyond the boundary of city’s canals? Were the Pieterskerk, the Hooglandse Kerk and who knows which other churches all connected below the ground? How old were these tunnels? Had they been built during the Spanish Siege of Leiden?
She was already mapping out a walking tour in her head, with fun activities for children – you couldn’t avoid those these days – and she would have a role in the spotlight of course, as one of the people who had discovered the tunnels. But an interactive treasure hunt with an app would be tricky when there was no network coverage down here …
Janna was jarred out of her daydreams by the unexpected thud of a large chunk of stone. The hole had been made big enough to walk through.
She was overcome by a hot feeling of shame for having allowed herself to be carried away by fantasies about the tourism opportunities in the tunnels, as though nobody had died because of them.
The dust began to settle, like sand sinking to the bottom of shallow water after a storm, and the workmen stepped back from the hole. They all took off their masks. In contrast to their grey hair and dusty clothes, their faces looked freshly washed.
‘Right then, you can go in if you like,’ one of them said with a heavy Leiden accent.
Janna and the police officers switched on their flashlights. They had the honour of being the first to see what was behind the wall. Like an Egyptologist entering a burial chamber that had been sealed for twenty centuries, Janna gingerly stepped over the threshold of rubble and through the hole. To her surprise, she found herself in another passage, just as well-constructed as the one behind her.
The three police officers followed her, going on tiptoe, just as she had done, as though they expected to fall through a booby trap and be skewered on rows of long, sharp spikes. No one had really believed that this system of passageways was likely to exist. So how far-fetched was it to imagine that its makers had created a security system or set traps, like a gigantic ball of rock that would come rolling towards intruders when they passed a certain point?
The passage stretched out in front of them, but they stopped at a large alcove. There was a set of steps that led upwards and then appeared to stop after about five metres.
One of the police officers took a few tentative steps up the stairs. Moments later, he triumphantly reported that he had a weak signal on his mobile phone.
‘I’ll see if my satnav works,’ he said, ‘then we can get a rough idea of where we are.’
It took a few moments for the navigation app to start up, but then a little blue dot appeared on the screen that showed them which part of the city was above them.
‘We’re at the back of the Hooglandse Kerk now, somewhere near the Hooglandsekerkgracht …’
The others looked up in suspense, waiting for a more precise location.
‘Here, I’ve got it,’ the officer said, enlarging the map with his fingertips.
‘We’re under the Mierennesthofje,’ he said, pointing at the mobile phone in his hand. ‘If two of you go up there now, we can see if you can locate us. I’ll stand at the top of the steps and bang on the ceiling or we can shout. You might be able to hear us. There’s something here that looks like it might open.’
‘I suppose we can give it a go,’ one of his colleagues said, ‘but I don’t know if the sound will carry that far. The stones above us look quite thick to me.’
‘You two stay here,’ the oldest officer said. ‘I’ll go. You can come with me, Miss Frederiks.’
It was an order, not an invitation.
Janna and the police officer walked back to the entrance.
‘Did you know Mr Van Tiegem well?’ he asked.
‘We bumped into each other quite regularly. Professionally, not socially,’ Janna replied, not sure if he was asking out of interest, or if it was a clever interrogation tactic.
The officer shook his head.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘It’s …’ he said hesitantly, and looked behind him to make sure they were alone. ‘He turned out to have a blood alcohol content of nearly 0.8 percent. A normal person would be pretty much dead at that level.’
‘He could take his drink, yes … But should you be telling me this sort of thing?’ Janna asked.
‘Yes … you’re right. I … Forget I said anything.’
They climbed back up to street level via the rope ladder.
Another police officer helped them out of the pit. ‘What’s the situation down there?’ he asked.
‘We’ve knocked one of the walls through,’ his colleague said. ‘The tunnel continues behind it. The others are waiting near a staircase now. We’re going to walk round to the Mierennesthofje, behind the Hooglandse Kerk. It looks like that staircase leads up to the courtyard, or to a house in the courtyard.’
‘Excellent. I’ll pass that on.’
Janna and the police officer walked past the Hooglandse Kerk onto the Hooglandsekerkgracht, a street that had once been a canal. They crossed the street towards the Mierennesthofje’s courtyard.
‘Forget what I just told you,’ the officer said.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Janna reassured him.
By now they had reached the door that led into the hofje, where five doorbells were arranged one on top of the other. Janna pressed them all.
They heard a voice through the intercom. It was difficult to understand, as though the person speaking was deliberately crumpling an empty crisp packet next to the microphone.
The officer gently pushed her aside and shouted, ‘POLICE!’ at the intercom.
Janna couldn’t help laughing at his behaviour. It was so unexpectedly bossy that she was sure he was trying to demonstrate that he was assertive and professional after all.
They heard a buzzer as the door unlocked, then they pushed it open. The door at the other end of the narrow passageway opened before they reached it. An elderly lady appeared in the doorframe, then stepped back to let Janna and the police officer into the courtyard.
&n
bsp; Janna noticed how calm and peaceful it was here, away from the busy streets. It was like stepping out of a concert hall during a performance and closing the soundproofed doors behind her.
‘You gave me a fright,’ the lady said, timidly.
The officer introduced himself with his surname. Janna used her first name.
A plaque on the wall bore the name of the housing association: DIOGENES. Janna smiled at the irony of a housing association being named after a philosopher who, according to legend, slept in a barrel.
‘It’s a bit of a strange story, madam, but …’ the officer began. ‘Did you hear about the incident in town yesterday? The mayor was trapped inside a digger. It fell into a pit when they were installing an underground waste container.’
‘Yes, I read about that, yes.’
‘Well now it turns out that there’s a tunnel, right under where he fell in. We came across a stone staircase in that tunnel just now, and we have reason to believe that it leads to somewhere here in the Mierennesthhofje.’
The three of them looked around as though they half expected to see a sign saying TUNNEL ENTRANCE somewhere, but all they could see was a rather untidy garden with a large lawn, dominated by an enormous oak tree.
‘And now you want to look round my house?’ the lady said in a voice that sounded faintly upper-class and a little amused. She had recovered from her initial shock remarkably quickly, but she also didn’t seem at all surprised by the news that a tunnel ran under her house. Maybe she was too old to be surprised by anything any more, Janna thought.
‘That’s right,’ the man said. ‘Our colleagues are somewhere under here right now and we’d like to know exactly where. If we can find out which house the tunnel entrance is in, then we might find someone who knew about it already.’
‘Come in then,’ she said invitingly. ‘But surely I’d know if there was a door to a secret tunnel in my kitchen, wouldn’t I?’
They went inside. The house had looked tiny from the outside, but inside it was surprisingly spacious.
‘The basement is down there on the left,’ the woman said. ‘I don’t use it much. It’s too cold and damp. It’s more of a larder and storage area really. Mind your head.’
They went down a small flight of stairs, but realised straight away that this wasn’t the place they were looking for. The floor was made of smooth, evenly poured cement, with no irregularities that stood out as being unusual.
‘Who else lives in the hofje?’ the officer called up to the woman in the kitchen.
They both walked back upstairs to the kitchen.
‘There’s an older lady next door. She’s been here for thirty-five, forty years. Nobody really lives in the house next to hers. It’s a local priest’s retreat house. He goes there to study. Opposite here …’
The lady babbled on, as though they were tenants who had just moved in and she was telling them all about their new neighbours. Janna interrupted her before she could ask if they wanted to stay for a cup of coffee. ‘I don’t suppose you have keys to the other houses?’ she asked.
‘No, sorry,’ she answered. ‘But the housing association will have them. They need to be able to get into all the houses in case there’s an emergency, if there’s a gas leak, or something like that, or a problem with the water … But there won’t be anyone there today of course.’
‘Do you have much contact with the other residents?’ the officer wanted to know.
‘I wouldn’t say we were in and out of each other’s houses, but we say hello. The priest, Tiny Strauss, I don’t speak to him much. He’s an extraordinarily friendly man, he really is, I must admit, and that’s speaking as a Protestant.’
Janna and the officer laughed along politely with her.
‘Unusual name for a man, Tiny,’ the officer remarked.
‘A little unusual, yes, but there are a few of them you know,’ the lady said. ‘Tiny Kox from the Socialist Party, and Tiny Muskens who used to be the Bishop of Breda … Mr Strauss just comes here to get away from it all. It’s a busy life, being a priest, you see. He’s usually on his own, but I have noticed rather a lot more people coming and going over the last day or so. There was a man there just half an hour ago that I’ve never seen before. But he left again after about ten minutes.’
The officer raised an eyebrow.
‘Shall we look at his house first, then?’ Janna suggested.
They walked along the path to the priest’s house and the policeman rang the bell, but it made no sound. He peered through the window, and knocked on it a few times, but there was no answer.
‘Now what?’ Janna asked.
The officer sighed and took out his mobile phone. ‘I’ll call the station, get a search warrant,’ he said, walking away from her.
He came back a minute later. ‘We’ve got permission. It’s an emergency after all. The public prosecutor—’
‘Doesn’t he need to be here for that?’
‘She doesn’t need to be here, no. It’s a woman,’ he said. ‘Sexist,’ he added. Janna couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. He took the baton from his belt. ‘Step back, please.’
He turned his own face to the side, and then used the thick end of the baton to aim a couple of quick, heavy blows on the small window next to the front door. He tapped the remaining shards of glass from the frame and stuck his arm through it. He groped around for the door handle, a bulbous knob that made a dry click when he turned it.
He opened the door excruciatingly slowly, like a father entering the room where his children are sleeping and trying not to wake them up.
‘There’s one question that I’ve always wanted to ask a priest,’ he said.
Janna found it an odd moment to say such a thing.
‘That Jesus of his, why did he only heal someone here and there, raise a couple of people from the dead, or make the odd lame person walk again? Isn’t that all small potatoes for someone like him? Why didn’t he do something on a bigger scale?’ The officer looked at her seriously, as though he expected her to have an answer. ‘Why not just feed everyone who was starving, or give water to everyone who was thirsty? Why not make all the blind people see, and the lame people walk? It’s like Superman having all those superpowers and only ever going after the muggers in Metropolis.’
Inside, there were three tall glasses on the kitchen counter, each with a half-moon of lemon left in the bottom, and two still half-filled with cola.
The old lady had surreptitiously followed them. She took a seat at the kitchen table.
Just as they had done in the first house, Janna and the police officer went down into the basement. Sunlight shone in through the high windows that ran along the length of the wall
They heard muffled knocking somewhere in the distance, like the sound of piles being driven into soft earth.
The two of them stood still, like hunters afraid they might step on a dry twig and frighten off their prey.
The ceiling was slightly too low for Janna and she was forced to stoop over.
They heard the knocking again, but it was difficult to tell exactly where it was coming from. Maybe the others weren’t standing below this house, but in the house next door. Or even under another building next to the hofje.
The officer jumped up and down a few times. The reply came back immediately, one knock for each jump.
There was a large cupboard in the corner of the basement. Underneath it was a plain-looking rug.
Without saying a word, they both began to push the cupboard across the flagstone floor, dragging the rug with it.
When they stood back, they saw a large flagstone in the corner of the stone floor where the cupboard had been. It very clearly had no mortar around its edges.
The officer looked around the room and spotted a crowbar leaning against the wall. The flattened end was rough and worn and grey with dust.
He picked up the crowbar and tapped the stone with it. The reply that came back this time was a muffled cheer.
He sprang
into action, jamming the end of the crowbar into the gap around the stone.
Lifting the stone up was more difficult than it looked, but after some prying and pushing, he succeeded in working it loose. The officers in the tunnel helped to lift it by pushing upwards with their shoulders.
The men standing at the bottom of the staircase in the tunnel screwed their eyes up against the sunlight.
‘There’s no one else in the house,’ the officer said from the top of the stairs, ‘but we know who it belongs to, and that’s a good start. Would you happen to know where Mr Strauss might be right now?’ he asked the old lady.
She thought about it. ‘I think he might be in the church? The Hartebrugkerk is open on Saturdays.’
‘She means the Coelikerk,’ the officer said to his colleagues as they came up the stairs into the basement.
Janna turned around and started to walk to the courtyard door, but before she reached the end of the path, she was stopped in the garden by three police officers.
47
Saturday 21 March, 1:25pm
It was Daniël.
‘If you come just one step closer, I’ll set you alight,’ Peter said, waving the flame at Daniël to show he meant it. In the fast fading light of the torch he could see that Daniël’s clothes were burned and singed from the tussle earlier.
‘I’m here to help you!’ Daniël hissed. ‘I was every bit as surprised as you back there! They weren’t on our side. They aren’t on our side …’
Peter aimed the torch at the ground, but he was still on his guard.
‘You have to trust me … We don’t have much more time and we really need to go back to the surface now.’
Peter was hesitant, but he knew there was very little time left.
‘Come on, Peter, you know me. Let’s go up now, I’m worried …’
St Paul's Labyrinth Page 31