The Pilgrim Conspiracy

by Jeroen Windmeijer

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Fay said quickly. ‘Right, so, thinking, acting and feeling. The killer bludgeoned the Worshipful Master’s head to stop his thoughts. Or at least, that’s my theory. They impaled his hands with the compasses so that he wouldn’t be able to act; his hands are literally tied. And they destroyed his heart, the source of his emotions, so that he would never be able to feel again.’

  While Rijsbergen was writing down Fay’s words, Van de Kooij stared intently at his notebook if he wanted to make sure that they were being recorded accurately.

  ‘That probably explains why the killer put so much effort into mutilating the victim,’ Rijsbergen said after he had written everything down. ‘But it doesn’t necessarily mean that the perpetrator was deeply familiar with the symbolism. It’s quite possible that the chairman had talked about those things in his presentation that evening. Or that they found out about them on the internet. It’s not secret knowledge, is it?’

  Rijsbergen had been unable to resist sounding slightly caustic when he said the word ‘secret’, but if Fay had noticed it, she wasn’t letting it show.

  ‘Not at all,’ Fay answered calmly. ‘That’s basically open knowledge. I wouldn’t be surprised if you could find that information just by clicking on the top link in a Google search. But you’re right: the way the murder was committed only shows that the killer had some knowledge of the symbolism of the three pillars. It doesn’t say anything about how long they’d had that knowledge or how they came by it.’

  ‘Right, well, that seems to have cleared up the mystery of the bizarre staging,’ Rijsbergen said. ‘Let’s hope it also brings us closer to solving the case.’

  After exchanging a few pleasantries, the detectives left.

  Alena and Agapé came home not long afterwards. Fay quickly tipped her wine into the sink and held her face under the kitchen tap to freshen up. Agapé was allowed to stay up for a while before Alena and Fay took her upstairs and put her to bed together, as they did every night.

  Alena always told Agapé a bedtime story, never from a book, but always from memory, drawing on an incredible wealth of Greek myths and sagas, Czech folktales and European fairy tales and fables – often chosen according to the season or what was happening in the girl’s own life. Alena had been a much-loved teacher once; even the rowdiest pupils would hang on her every word as soon as she began to tell one of her stories.

  Peter often listened in on Alena’s stories. She had the voice of an expert narrator, and in just a few words, she could conjure entire worlds filled with fairies, elves, abandoned orphan children, gods and heroes, and all of the exciting adventures they had. If she was telling the story for the second or third time, she invented new details or gave it a twist so that her audience was always enthralled.

  Peter opened Fay’s laptop to check his emails. She had left her Outlook mail client open. Just as he was about to close it, he noticed the name Fay had given to one of the many folders that she’d made.

  Fay was a very well-organised person. She always dealt with emails promptly, and her inbox never contained more than a couple of messages. She answered them immediately and either deleted the original email or filed it somewhere in one of many folders.

  One of them was labelled ‘Coen Zoutman’.

  There was a (1) next to his name, which meant that it contained an unopened email. It looked like Fay had set up a filter so that his emails would be sent directly to this folder.

  That’s strange, Peter thought. She never told me she’d been emailing him at all.

  He glanced at the stairwell to see if anyone was coming, but he couldn’t hear anything. He opened the folder and saw that Fay and Coen had emailed each other frequently over the last few days.

  Peter debated whether to open one of the emails. He decided against it, but the first line of each message was shown on the screen anyway.

  Coen Zoutman

  I hope we’ll find a moment to talk face to face …

  Coen Zoutman

  You’re right, Fay, as always … ☺ It’s a delicate …

  Coen Zoutman

  Don’t tell anyone what we have discussed Fay. It is …

  Coen Zoutman

  I understand that you’re eager to find out exactly what I want you to …

  Coen Zoutman

  Don’t be alarmed when you read this, but I have a strange feeling …

  Peter sat frozen, frustrated by his own sense of integrity. He didn’t want to betray Fay’s trust. But when he moved the mouse to close the folder, he accidentally clicked on one of the unopened messages.

  He cursed under his breath.

  Coen Zoutman

  That’s fine, Fay. I’ll see you this evening!

  Regards, Coen

  The mail had been sent the previous day, a few hours before the murder.

  What should I do, Peter brooded, restlessly moving the cursor back and forth over the screen.

  There are some other unopened emails in the inbox, so she mustn’t have looked at her mail at all today. There’s nothing important in this message. And if I leave it, she’ll know that I’ve been reading her emails …

  He heard footsteps at the top of the stairs.

  He hastily clicked on the email to delete it, and then he opened the ‘deleted messages’ folder and deleted it permanently. He closed Outlook and opened his own mail client. Just as he saw Fay’s lower legs appearing on the stairs, the Outlook website disappeared from the screen and was replaced by the Leiden University homepage.

  ‘All work and no play makes Peter a dull boy,’ Fay said with a smile when she got back downstairs.

  Alena was still upstairs.

  ‘What are you up to?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing, I …’ He logged into his work email. ‘Just checking my email. But there’s nothing important.’ He quickly clicked on a random message before looking back up at Fay. ‘How’s Agapé?’ he asked. ‘Did it take her long to fall asleep?’

  ‘No,’ Fay said, smiling warmly at him. ‘She was out almost before Mam had finished her story.’ She sat next to Peter on the sofa, tucked her legs underneath her and leaned against him. He put his arm around her.

  ‘This can all wait until tomorrow,’ he said, closing the laptop and putting it on the coffee table.

  ‘Good.’ Fay kissed his neck and snuggled into him.

  He usually treasured moments like these, but now he felt odd, like it wasn’t his own, familiar Fay sitting next to him, but a stranger.

  What are you hiding from me, he thought.

  ‘I don’t think it’s all sunk in yet, everything that’s happened,’ said Fay. ‘Poor Coen … I hope they find whoever did it soon.’

  This isn’t the time to ask about that long email conversation with Coen, Peter thought. There’ll be another opportunity to ask her about it soon enough.

  ‘Come on,’ Fay said with what sounded like forced cheerfulness. ‘Let’s just watch a film. We could talk all night about what happened, but it won’t do us any good.’ She turned on the television and pressed play on a film they’d recorded a while ago.

  Peter looked down at Fay now and then as they watched the film. She was focused so intently on the television that a little furrow of concentration had appeared between her eyebrows.

  What are you not telling me, Peter wondered. How well do I know you? How well can you ever know someone?

  When the film ended, Fay sat up and peeled herself away from him. She mumbled something that sounded like ‘bed’ and went upstairs.

  Peter stayed behind on the sofa for a while. He pulled the laptop onto his knee and opened it.

  Fay had just one password for all of her programs and accounts, a combination of her name and Agapé’s and the year Agapé had been born.

  I might as well read them, Peter thought. She’s not likely to find out, and I’ve already seen one of them anyway.

  He opened Outlook and clicked on the ‘Coen Zoutman’ folder.

  His index finger h
overed for at least a minute over the left mouse button that would open one of her emails with a single click.

  But I don’t want to be in the kind of relationship where you secretly read each other’s emails. That’s the beginning of the end.

  He clicked everything away.

  I’ll ask her about it tomorrow. Then she’ll be able to tell me about it herself. There’s probably a simple explanation.

  He gently closed the laptop again.

  And why should lovers tell each other everything? Fay doesn’t know everything about me, does she?

  He was tired, and it would have been the easiest thing in the world to crawl into bed next to Fay, but he felt like he really needed to spend the night in his own bed. He wasn’t sure he could bridge the distance he felt between himself and Fay now simply by lying next to her.

  Standing at the kitchen table, he wrote a note telling her that he had an early start the next morning and had gone home because the books he needed were still at his place.

  I’m not being entirely honest, he thought.

  But neither is Fay.

  Chapter 14

  The next morning, Rijsbergen and Van de Kooij visited the morgue. There was no doubt about the cause of death in the Zoutman case, but Rijsbergen wanted to speak to the pathologist and get the latest update from the man himself. They were likely to have found items on the victim’s body that would prove useful. Receipts, notes, business cards … in his pockets, in his wallet … No stone would be left unturned at this stage. Everything was potentially an important clue.

  The investigation team had been able to speak to roughly half of the people on their list in a short amount of time. Although everyone on the list had had the opportunity to murder Coen – they had, after all, been in the building when he was killed – the team had been able to eliminate them as suspects with a reasonable amount of confidence. In general, they seemed to be ordinary, good-hearted people in their sixties and seventies. Most of them had gone downstairs to the drinks reception immediately after the Worshipful Master’s talk. Those who had stayed upstairs to ask him questions had joined the others not long afterwards. It was difficult to imagine – although not entirely impossible – that one of these guests might have made some excuse, perhaps that they were going to the toilet, then gone back upstairs after the question and answer session, stove the Worshipful Master’s skull in, bored through his hands and heart, and then calmly gone back downstairs to rejoin the other guests. Moreover, the extreme violence used in the murder would have demanded a physical strength that these older guests were unlikely to possess.

  The whole thing was so chaotic. There were too many people involved. There had been too many people in the building that evening, people who all left behind their shoeprints, fingerprints and hairs.

  Van de Kooij turned the car into the morgue’s car park.

  The reception desk was in a hall that was far too large for the purpose, and empty except for two sofas, a side table and the row of hooks where they hung up their coats. It had a glass roof that looked like it had been added after the morgue was built, perhaps in a desperate attempt to let some light into this realm of the dead.

  Despite his long career, Rijsbergen had rarely dealt with murder cases in Leiden. He could count on one hand the number of times he’d been to the morgue. Like most people – or at least, he had always assumed that most people would share his feelings on this – he found visiting this building intensely unpleasant. It was difficult to understand why anyone would willingly study for so many years just so that they could then spend the rest of their lives cutting up people’s bodies to find out how they had died.

  Van de Kooij, on the other hand, was bouncing along next to Rijsbergen so energetically that he seemed almost thrilled at the prospect of seeing Zoutman’s corpse again.

  Pieter-Nicolaas van Eijk was waiting for them behind the security door. He was a cheerful man in his forties with a badly receding hairline and fashionable, black glasses with chunky frames. He wore bright orange sneakers and tight, new-looking jeans with a spotless white lab coat on top. Before he shook hands with them, he handed Rijsbergen and Van de Kooij identical lab coats.

  ‘Here,’ Van Eijk said. ‘Put these on, and we’ll go downstairs.’

  They descended a wide staircase that led to a small hallway where several corridors met. Each corridor was sealed with a sliding glass door.

  Why are these places always underground, Rijsbergen wondered.

  Van Eijk punched a code into a small keypad next to one of the doors. It slid open with a gentle hum. A long corridor stretched out in front of them. The polished linoleum floor reflected the light from the evenly spaced, oblong florescent lamps on the ceiling. They passed a series of dark red doors, all of which could only be opened by entering a code into a keypad on the wall.

  Framed posters had been hung on the walls at regular intervals. Rijsbergen realised with surprise that they were all Dutch poems on the theme of death. He noted with satisfaction that he was familiar with most of them.

  At the end of the corridor, they went left. Van Eijk stopped so abruptly that Rijsbergen and Van de Kooij bumped into him.

  Van Eijk pressed the buttons on the door lock, keeping it covered with his left hand. ‘I don’t think you’ll be too surprised to hear that I haven’t much to say about the cause of death,’ he said as they entered the room.

  Is it really colder here than it was in the corridor, Rijsbergen thought. Or is it just my imagination?

  Inside, a long wall was neatly divided into ten silver-coloured squares with handles, behind each of which was a drawer containing a body. A tall, narrow metal table stood in the middle of the room laid out with instruments, knives, spatulas and shiny metal bowls in various sizes.

  Van Eijk walked to the only drawer that had a label hanging from the handle. He pulled it open, and the bier behind it slid out smoothly, almost silently, revealing a corpse hidden under a white sheet.

  ‘Could you tell us something about what you found, anyway?’ Rijsbergen asked.

  ‘Certainly,’ Van Eijk replied. ‘I’ll give you a copy of the report shortly, but I can briefly summarise the cause of death. Penetrating skull fracture caused by two, perhaps three blows to the back of the head with a hard object. I have absolutely no doubt that he was dead before he hit the floor. It’s obvious that whoever did this was very strong. It would have taken a huge amount of physical strength. Or rage … In any case, he – or she, we can’t rule that out – was at least as large as the victim, possibly slightly larger. Probably someone right-handed otherwise they would have struck the other side of his head. Meneer Zoutman’s blood would probably have spattered onto the killer’s clothing. In my opinion, the initial blow would have been enough to kill him.’

  ‘And the compass stabbed through the hands …’ Van de Kooij began and then trailed off.

  ‘Yes, that was done post-mortem, when the blood had already stopped circulating. Well, it’s all in the report. We can at least be sure that Meneer Zoutman wasn’t tortured before he was dealt the blow that killed him.’

  ‘So they weren’t trying to extract information from him,’ Van de Kooij concluded. He was standing right next to the mortuary cabinet, like he was trying to prove that he was a hardened copper and not afraid of death.

  Rijsbergen kept a few metres’ distance.

  ‘No, not very likely,’ Van Eijk agreed. ‘But that’s your area of expertise, so I’ll leave the interpretation of those injuries to you.’

  Rijsbergen smiled. ‘Unless you are good at guessing, it is not much use being a detective,’ he said in English.

  ‘Uh … I guess so,’ Van Eijk said uncertainly.

  ‘Stabbing the heart and the hands was an overtly symbolic act,’ Rijsbergen said. ‘Or so it’s been explained to me. The Freemasons are concerned with thoughts, feelings and actions. The man who killed Coen Zoutman—’

  ‘Or woman,’ Van de Kooij butted in.

  ‘The man who …
’ Rijsbergen continued irritably, but then thought better of it and paused. ‘Or do you think that a woman would be capable of something like this?’ he asked Van Eijk.

  ‘We can’t rule anything out,’ Van Eijk replied. ‘It would have to have been a damned strong woman, but they do exist.’

  ‘Why did you open the drawer by the way?’ Rijsbergen asked. ‘Was there something you wanted us to see?’

  ‘There is. I want to show you two things, actually. First, there’s something on the body, a tattoo of something that I don’t recognise.’ He picked up a corner of the sheet. ‘I’m going to pull back the cover,’ he warned them, ‘but just enough for you to be able to see the tattoo.’

  ‘Yes, thanks. Much appreciated,’ Rijsbergen said, but Van de Kooij was visibly having trouble hiding his disappointment.

  Van Eijk folded the sheet back, revealing part of the left side of Zoutman’s body. His arm, stretched out straight next to his body, was milky white.

  Rijsbergen was overcome by a feeling of deep sorrow.

  So this is where we all end up … he thought. All our knowledge and experience, all our wisdom … What good does it do us? What do we take with us? What do we leave behind?

  Rijsbergen knew without touching the body that it was stone cold; it had the cool, hard look of carved marble.

  Van Eijk took a thin, retractable rod from his breast pocket and pointed it at Zoutman’s body next to his left breast where his armpit began. There was a tiny tattoo there, no bigger than a five- cent coin.

  He walked away for a few moments then came back with a magnifying glass and gave it to Rijsbergen.

  Holding the magnifying glass in front of his right eye, Rijsbergen leaned forward to examine the tattoo. It felt strange to look at another person’s skin so closely, especially that of a dead person. The wrinkles, the little hairs, the moles and other imperfections were so clearly visible. It was a profoundly intimate act – one that the deceased was unable to object to.