8:05
Judith was a member of Een Ander Joods Geluid, ‘A Different Jewish Voice’. It was a Jewish organisation that focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the situation in Israel. Its members wanted Israel to cease its occupation and end its human rights violations, a stance that was unpopular with Jews both inside and outside Israel’s borders.
Judith
Ugh. It’s so annoying.
8:05
Peter
I know … But the police must be aware of any groups in Leiden that might do this sort of thing. Leiden really isn’t big enough for there to be all sorts of political cells operating under the police’s radar.
8:05
Judith
I’m sure you’re right. But anyway, I’m just going to assume it was a one-off. Mark was rattled. He’s such a sweetie. He thought it was specifically aimed at me.
8:05
An icon appeared in the top left corner of his screen to tell him that he had another message.
That can wait, he thought, and he carried on typing.
Peter
That was my first thought too, you know.
8:06
Judith
And you’re a sweetie too. xxx
8:06
He felt a stab of something between pain and pleasure in his abdomen.
Judith
I’m going to get up. Mark is already downstairs, and I can smell coffee … Maybe see you later today? Lunch? Much love.
8:06
Peter
Sure. I’m going to have a quick coffee and get going. 1 pm?
8:06
No reply came to his last message, no matter how many times he looked at his phone.
The other message was from Fay. She hadn’t added any emoticons, but she hadn’t needed to. Her anger was almost bursting out of the little screen.
Fay
Have you been reading my email?
8:05
Trouble in paradise … Peter thought.
He started to type a reply, but then he stopped. He knew he really ought to call her to clear the whole matter up, although he didn’t understand why there was a matter that needed clearing up in the first place. Whenever he used her laptop to check his mail or read the news, Outlook had almost always been left open. Suddenly, he felt enormously irritated by her message and annoyed by the lack of trust it implied.
For goodness sake, she’s the one who’s been hiding things, he thought. So who should be pointing fingers here?
Now that she knew he had been looking at her emails, he actually regretted not reading them all.
Fay would know from the little blue ticks that he had read her WhatsApp message. She would also have seen that he had started to type a reply and then stopped.
You’re angry, are you? Well, now I’m angry, Peter thought. He decided not to reply just yet. It might be childish but let her stew for now.
There were no more messages from her after that.
She’d be justified in seeing it as an admission of guilt if I don’t reply, Peter realised. But how does she even know that I was looking at her emails?
A series of messages from Piet van Vliet arrived in quick succession. Piet was a linguistics specialist who worked for the heritage organisation Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken whose premises were on the Boisotkade.
Peter waited until Piet had finished typing.
Piet
A very good morning to you, dear Peter! Can I pop by to see you today? I have something fantastic to show you!!!
8:06
Piet
As an expert on the history of Leiden, I’m sure you’ll find it interesting. I thought of you straight away.
8:06
Piet
I’ve chanced upon a previously undiscovered manuscript written by one of the Pilgrims. A rare glimpse into the Pilgrims’ world through the eyes of an insider.
8:08
Piet
It sheds new light on the time the Pilgrims spent in Leiden, but it raises lots of new questions too!
8:08
Piet
It’s too much to write in a text. I’ll drop by this morning. See you later, Piet.
8:10
Peter
I’ll be at my office within the next hour. No appointments for the rest of the day except lunch with Judith. Come in any time, and I’ll see you when you get there.
8:12
Piet
Great. Then I’ll see you soon. I have to go to the library anyway. Give my fondest regards to the delightful Mevrouw Cherev!!
8:12
The delightful Mevrouw Cherev …
Judith was a regular visitor to the city archive. Piet had told Peter on more than one occasion that he enjoyed her visits enormously.
We’re such old letches, Peter thought irritably.
He decided to completely turn off his phone.
I’ll leave Fay hanging for a while, he thought. What a strange state of affairs this all is … Tensions among the Masons because of an election? Fay having long email conversations with Coen that she never told me about?
He took a shower and then drank a cup of tea in his tiny kitchen. He’d lived in his flat in the low-rise, three-storey apartment block that belonged to the University of Leiden for twenty-five years now. It was part of a large complex that took up a sizable part of the Boerhavenlaan and stretched around the corner onto the Van Swietenstraat. It was home to many of the academics from other countries who had temporary contracts with the university, and doctoral candidates and visiting professors, but also people like Peter who had carried on living there after finishing his PhD.
The flat was actually too big for him: a spacious living room, a bedroom, a study and even a guest room, although he couldn’t remember the last time he had hosted a guest. Instead, it hosted a clothes airer permanently covered in drying laundry, and an ironing board where he ironed exactly one item of clothing at a time – whatever he was going to put on that day. Leaning against the guest bed was a racing bike that he’d bought on impulse because he’d thought he should get more exercise, but so far, he’d hardly used it at all.
His phone was still switched off when he walked down the long Boerhavenlaan towards the Rijnsburgerweg. As he strolled under the enormous rustling poplars that lined the whole street, he looked enviously at the huge townhouses at the end of the Boerhavenlaan, imagining what it would be like to live in one of them. But he would never be able to afford anything like that on his salary, and anyway, what would he do with three, or maybe even four times as much space?
He walked through the railway tunnel, negotiating the chaotic tangle of badly parked bikes, and headed towards Schuttersveld. The sundial at the De Valk windmill had sadly been removed to make way for the redevelopment of the square and the addition of the deepest car park in Europe – a seven-storey underground lot that had been under construction for years.
This walk had become part of his morning routine over the last twenty-five years. He walked past the small dock on the Prinsessekade and onto the Rapenburg, the city’s most beautiful canal, known as Leiden’s ‘Goudkust’ or ‘Gold Coast’. At one time, he’d been in the habit of taking a photo here on the same spot at the same time each day. But after he’d forgotten a couple of times and cheated by taking a photograph on the way home or even the next day, he had eventually abandoned the project. He had planned to turn it into a time-lapse video showing the passing of time, the changing of the seasons …
Since he’d not eaten breakfast, he turned right onto the Groenhazengracht canal to buy bread rolls at the Frisian bakery. He had a mini fridge in his office that he kept stocked with things he could have for breakfast. There had been times in the past when he’d spent the night on the large sofa in the office, but that had stopped when he’d met Fay.
Maybe those times will return sooner than I ever could have imagined, he thought as he strolled onto the Doelengracht with the bag of warm bread rolls.
He passed the o
rnate arch of the Doelenpoort gate and glanced up at its statue of Saint George on horseback inflicting a fatal blow to the dragon that lay on its back under his horse’s feet. The dragon symbolised the base desires that man had to overcome or ‘kill’ to prevent his soul from being dragged down into the quagmire of all that was worldly or even hellish.
He managed to work through a few emails as he ate his breakfast at the computer, but his mind was elsewhere, brooding over the situation with Fay.
He was, however, curious about the manuscript that Piet van Vliet had found. Piet had started out as a linguist, but his research had increasingly led him into the field of history. He was often asked to help decipher manuscripts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, his area of particular expertise.
Peter got up from his chair, frustrated by his inability to concentrate on his work.
What is Fay hiding, he wondered. If you had any information at all that could help solve something as serious as a murder case, why wouldn’t you share it? Why on earth would she keep it to herself that she and Coen had been having a long email conversation shortly before he was killed? Should I confront her about it? I haven’t actually read the emails – I didn’t lie about that – but I couldn’t help reading the first lines.
He needed a cigar. He took out his cigar case, removed one of the slim cigars and put it in his mouth before going outside to sit on a low wall next to the bike rack.
He felt himself grow calmer with each drag on the cigar.
When he looked up, he saw Piet van Vliet walking towards him. It was easy to recognise him from the characteristic spring in his step, the gait of a man who strode cheerfully through life. Piet started waving at him when he was still quite far away, something that Peter always found difficult to deal with. He could never decide whether to keep looking at the person walking towards him – and what sort of expression should you adopt during those fifteen or twenty seconds? – or to casually look away like something else had caught his eye until the person was closer.
He decided to concentrate on finishing his cigar. He threw the stub at the base of a nearby tree.
Piet stopped at arm’s length from him.
‘Peter,’ he said, shaking his hand wildly. ‘Long time no see. Good of you to find time for me. How are things?’
Peter stood up. ‘Good, good. Thanks, Piet. I’m curious about what you want to tell me.’
‘Yes, I think you’re going to like it. I …’ Piet looked around skittishly. ‘Shall we go to your office? We can talk more easily there.’
‘Yes, uh … yes, of course,’ said Peter, suddenly realising that Piet was being far more secretive about his discovery than he had been in his messages earlier that morning. ‘Is it a secret then? Something we can’t talk about out here?’
‘No, no,’ Piet said and laughed. ‘It’s more … Well, perhaps a bit of a secret, but there are fewer distractions indoors. It just makes conversation a bit easier. And it means I can show you something on your computer.’
Once they were in Peter’s office, Piet sat straight down at the computer without asking permission. Their relationship was a friendly one, but Peter felt himself bristle at his presumptuousness.
Piet opened his own email client, scrolled through a few messages and double-clicked on the one he had been looking for. He whirled the chair around with a flourish to face Peter, who had ended up sitting on the sofa as if he was the visitor in the room.
‘So as I told you earlier, I’ve found a manuscript from the time of the Pilgrims,’ Piet said. ‘It’s a tremendous document, quite unique. Someone who was there right from the start during their flight from England to Amsterdam, the move to Leiden, and eventually on the crossing to America. An ordinary man, well-educated, but not a prominent member of the Separatist community. It’s someone who’s writing an account of the everyday events, the quarrels … But it’s not a diary. There are gaps between entries that last for years … Some parts of the manuscript might have been lost. We don’t know. And there are some cryptic references that we’re not sure about, but those might become clearer at some point. We’re translating it into Dutch now. And that’s no easy task because the handwriting is almost illegible. On top of that, it’s seventeenth-century English peppered with seventeenth-century Dutch words. We’re attacking it sentence by sentence, line by line. Sometimes a single phrase takes hours to decipher. It isn’t easy, but I have someone who’s a specialist in this area helping me, so we’re making steady progress.’
‘That sounds amazing, Piet,’ said Peter, genuinely glad for him, but also glad for the distraction this news brought from the strange tide of recent events. ‘But why hadn’t anyone found this manuscript before now?’
‘That’s the best part of this story. Really, you could turn it into a movie. Imagine the opening scene: it’s just another day at the office for the dashingly handsome linguist-slash-historian, examining manuscripts, making notes about what he finds. In the gloom of the archives, ancient dust dances in the shafts of sunlight that fall through the high windows.’
‘But there aren’t any windows in the archives, are there? And you have all those fluorescent lights.’
‘Yes, yes, of course, but it’s a film, isn’t it? I’m not dashingly handsome either,’ he said, chuckling.
Get on with it, Peter thought. ‘Go on.’
‘And then, suddenly …’ Piet continued, ‘the background music stops, and the viewer knows something is about to happen. The researcher reaches for an old book, but he fumbles.’
Piet was on his feet now, totally absorbed in his role.
‘The book falls – I’m seeing it in slow motion – and the researcher desperately tries to catch the valuable tome before it hits the ground and suffers irreparable damage. Such a terrible black mark on his professional reputation! But the book tumbles to the floor. He can’t stop it. It falls open, its ancient pages exposed to the cruel sunlight. And then … We zoom in on the text. The camera glides slowly over the book and stops at the corner of the page. We notice that the paper curls at the edges, just slightly, and then we see it! This is no ordinary page, but two pages cunningly stuck together. What secret has been hidden here for hundreds of years? Why did someone go to the trouble of hiding it so ingeniously?’
‘Is that really how it happened?’ Peter asked, impressed by Piet’s storytelling.
‘That’s exactly how it happened, Peter,’ Piet said, sitting down again. ‘I picked the book up and realised that some of the pages had been stuck together. It’s been done so cleverly that you can’t actually see it, so it’s quite possible that anyone who handled the book before now just never noticed. But to make a long story even longer … We examined the book thoroughly, and it turned out that there were other pages just like it. We separated them under lab conditions using tiny surgical scalpels. The book was damaged, of course, but only very lightly. We found almost twenty of these small pages, all densely covered in writing. It’s amazing.’
‘Wow, Piet, that really is fantastic. Congratulations.’
‘Thanks,’ Piet said, trying to compose his face in a humble expression and failing completely. ‘But, naturally, I thought of you straight away, our city historian … You’re interested in the Pilgrims too, right?’
‘Yes, I am,’ Peter said. ‘It’s not the main focus of my research, but if you’re a historian with a particular interest in Leiden, you can’t really avoid it.’
‘And you volunteer in Jeffrey’s museum?’
‘That’s right. You’ve done your homework.’
‘That’s why I wanted to let you know about it. If you like, I could send you updates about the translation as we go along.’
‘Yes, I would like that!’ Peter replied eagerly. ‘That would be great. What sort of impression have you got from it so far?’
‘We’ve translated six of the fragments. I’ve got them as attachments in my email. I’ll forward them to you now. As I said, no secrecy. I’m a firm believer in sharing sourc
es and information. That’s how science should be, in my opinion.’ He turned around, asked Peter for his email address and then forwarded the attachments.
The message arrived with a ping.
‘Well then,’ Piet said, standing up to give Peter his chair back. ‘I won’t keep you any longer. I was on my way to the library to pick up some books I’d ordered. The translation is proving to be a devil of a job. As I said, the handwriting is often illegible, and there are a lot of words we don’t recognise. We don’t just want to translate it. We want it to be a modern text that’s easy to read so that when you read it, you’ll think: hey, this could almost have been written by someone today.’
‘Yes, that’s always a wonderful thing,’ Peter agreed. ‘When people from the distant past speak to us in a way that we can understand, we can see that they’re just ordinary people like us.’
‘Precisely,’ said Piet. ‘What’s extraordinary here is that we have an original text from the time, an eyewitness account that was never read by anyone else after it was written. It’s quite exceptional. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about the text itself. Most of it was already known from other sources, but there is something strange about it. The author frequently mentions a boy under the care of a Josh Nunn, someone we’ve not come across before. The boy appears to be Nunn’s protégé, a pupil with special status. It doesn’t seem to have been clear to the other people around him at the time exactly what the boy’s role was, either. He went to America in the end, and this Josh stayed behind.’
Piet paused for a moment, like he was deciding whether to tell Peter more.
‘And in the sixth fragment … Well, actually, you know, I’m sure you’ll see it for yourself. We’re hoping that more information will emerge as we go along. We’ve translated more than eighty per cent of what we’ve found.’
‘That all sounds fascinating,’ Peter said. He couldn’t wait to start reading.
When Piet was gone, Peter sat at his desk and clicked on the first attachment in the email Piet had just sent him.
He started to read.
The Pilgrim Conspiracy Page 15
