He walked over to a pair of spindly-looking bushes that were growing on the rocky plateau. They stood side by side like two people desperately holding onto each other for comfort after a disaster. He kept his eye on Peter, although there seemed to be little chance of Peter posing any kind of threat to him now.
‘Excellent,’ Tony said, like a teacher about to hand back an A+ essay to his top pupil.
One by one, he crumpled the pages of Coen’s notes into balls and poked them into the thorny branches. When he was finished, he took a cigarette lighter out of his pocket.
Like a priest about to make an offering, playing on the emotions of the devotees who are watching him with bated breath, Tony sparked up a flame. He held his arm outstretched as Peter observed him from a few metres away.
I’ve got to get away from here.
Never in his life had Peter been in so much pain. He felt nauseous. He tried to get back on his feet but abandoned the attempt almost as soon as he had started.
Everything makes sense now: the Bible stories that Coen wrote down, the murders, Coen and Yona, the living books. And not just that: everything I’ve ever read about the Old Testament too …
Tony crouched down next to the bushes and lit the paper on the lowest branch. It ignited almost instantly and, seconds later, the bone-dry thorn bushes went up in flames. Peter could feel the heat from where he was sitting.
‘I really ought to take my shoes off,’ Tony said, ‘since this is holy ground. But let’s not make the situation any more dramatic than it already is.’
A dark cloud of smoke rose up from the burning bushes, but the flames didn’t last long. Once the paper had been reduced to black flakes of ash, the fire burned out.
A few glowing embers dropped onto the stony ground and were quickly extinguished.
‘Voilà,’ Tony said, pronouncing the French word with a strong American accent. ‘That’s that.’
He approached Peter again now, looming over him with the stick raised menacingly in the air.
At first, Peter didn’t realise that Tony was there. He had closed his eyes in the hope that the darkness would reduce his splitting headache.
But then he heard a whoosh nearby warning him that Tony had swung the stick back ready to take another slug at him. Peter lunged for Tony’s legs and wrapped his arms around them like a rugby player in a scrum. An excruciating bolt of pain shot through his arm.
Peter’s unexpected tackle caught Tony by surprise. He lost his balance and fell backwards. He lay motionless for a fraction of a second as clouds of dust from the dry ground scudded up around him.
Peter scrambled to his feet, clutching his injured wrist with his hand.
But now Tony was on his feet again too.
Peter reached for the stick that lay between them, but before he could grab it, Tony kicked it away. Peter was still bent over when Tony took a hard swipe at his neck with the side of his hand. He fell flat on the ground.
Peter’s already parched mouth filled with sand, drying it out even more and scouring his tongue. He tried to spit it out and saw that the sand was a pinkish red colour. He blinked. His eyes were blurred with blood and sweat, making it hard to focus. He slowly raised his head.
Tony picked up the stick again and leaned on it like a weary traveller. He paced back and forth across the plateau. He seemed unsure about what his next move should be.
Just as Peter was wiping the blood and muck from his eyes, he heard the sound of moving air again. A fraction of a second later, the stick landed with a loud crack on his back, and once again, he collapsed to the ground. He couldn’t believe that this was how his life was going to end. He closed his eyes and listened as the dull, sand-dampened thud of Tony’s footsteps moved away from him.
Judith, he thought.
And then: Sorry, Fay.
Moments later, he felt hands grabbing hold of his feet. He tried to kick himself free, but he could make no more than a feeble attempt.
He was dragged roughly away, like a dead bull after a bullfight in a Spanish arena. The heel of his left foot slipped out of his shoe, but the shoe stayed on.
Still holding his broken wrist, he pressed his face into his arm to protect it from the hard rocks and coarse sand.
A light gust of wind rushed up, cooling him off despite its warmth. His feet were dropped to the floor. With a great deal of effort, he managed to raise his head a couple of centimetres to see where he was.
To his horror, he found himself staring into an abyss.
Surely he’s not going to …
Very carefully, Peter moved away from the edge of the ravine.
Where’s Tony? Why hasn’t he already …
He managed to sit up. Blood, sweat and tears muddied his vision, but it looked like Tony was already getting rid of the evidence. He was sweeping the sand with a rough besom that was barely more than a bunch of twigs tied to a stick. He swept the broom wildly back and forth, erasing the drag marks that Peter’s body had made.
Why is he doing that now? Does he just want to torture me? Make me watch him so I know that he’s going to get away with this? That no one will ever find out what happened here?
Peter tried to get up but failed miserably. He was already feeling dizzy, and a throbbing headache was making it worse. His ears rang with a pulsating thrum that faded in and out as if he was driving past parked cars with the window down.
Tony was just a few metres away from him now. He raised the broom in the air like a javelin and hurled it towards the guardhouse. Then he rubbed his hands together. Peter wasn’t sure whether this was to remove the dust or in satisfaction at a job well done.
‘So, Peter,’ he said in the same warm, friendly tone he had used when they’d first met. ‘We have to get through this together, old boy.’ He picked Peter up by his armpits and dragged him back to the edge of the abyss.
Peter tried to resist, but his feet found no purchase on the rocky, sandy ground beneath them. He thought he might black out from the pain in his wrist. His mouth was as dry as cork, and his head felt like it was about to explode.
‘We’re both in the same boat here,’ Tony said, panting from the effort of carrying Peter. ‘I know everything, and you know too much, so if we disappear together, the knowledge disappears with us.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Come on,’ he said.
No.
Gathering every last ounce of strength he had left, Peter turned his head until his mouth made contact with Tony’s upper arm. With all the force he could muster, he sank his teeth into the soft flesh. He felt Tony’s muscles contract as he bit through the fabric of his shirt and then broke through his skin.
For a moment, the deafening sound of blood rushing in his ears gave Peter the sensation that he was standing next to an enormous waterfall.
Now it was Tony’s turn to scream in pain. He yanked at Peter’s hair with his right hand, but when Peter’s teeth stayed clamped onto his arm – like a dog refusing to give up a tennis ball – he began to punch Peter’s head.
Peter let go.
When he felt Tony’s grip weaken for a moment, he launched himself backwards with all the force he could muster, throwing Tony to the ground.
I can do this …
He lay on his back on top of Tony, who was gasping for breath now from exertion and pain.
‘You son of a …’
Peter pushed off with one foot and managed to propel himself over Tony, landing just behind him. Holding his injured wrist, he tried to shove Tony over towards the ravine with his shoulder. Tony leapt up, which sent Peter flying forward. He ended up with his head close to the cliff edge.
No, no, no … Dear God, please, no.
Tony started to push Peter towards the edge.
And war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back.
The solid ground beneath him disappeared. As Peter fell, his loose shoe slipped clean off his foot and stayed behind on the plateau.
But they were def
eated, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven.
For a fraction of a second, time stood still. Adrenaline surged through Peter’s body. He imagined that this was what bungee jumpers felt just after they stepped off the platform.
But bungee jumpers have ropes.
Peter and Tony plummeted into the depths of the ravine.
The great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world.
A brief burst of warm wind blew through their clothes.
He was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.
But then, much sooner than Peter had been expecting, they crashed onto a hard surface, a small ledge protruding less than a metre and a half out from the cliff face, just two metres below the plateau.
Peter landed on his back and Tony came down on top of him with his lower body dangling over the ledge.
He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you, and on their hands they will bear you up so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.
‘Damn it!’ Peter heard Tony shout.
Tony scrabbled around behind him with his right hand, trying to get hold of Peter’s shirt. When he eventually managed to grab it, he pushed himself away from the cliff face with his feet. Peter felt both of their bodies shift over the edge. His backside was already halfway over it. Tony had already almost completely disappeared now, but his grip on Peter didn’t weaken. Centimetre by centimetre, they moved closer to the fathomless depths below them. Peter was paralysed by the pain in his wrist. He was afraid that he might pass out at any moment. He watched the knuckles of Tony’s hand turn white from the strain of holding onto him.
A primal, animal instinct to survive welled up in Peter, just has it had done in the water in Plymouth. Tony’s fingers were next to Peter’s mouth.
If Tony fell now, he would drag Peter with him.
Peter lifted his head once more and bit into one of Tony’s fingers as hard as he could. Tony let out a bloodcurdling scream.
There was a barely audible but nauseating ripping sound, and then … Tony let go.
Peter tasted blood. He spat out the chunk of raw flesh in his mouth. He had bitten off most of Tony’s finger, just above the middle joint.
He quickly swept the bloody stump into the ravine.
Then he closed his eyes and sank into a deep, black oblivion.
Epilogue
The ice cube that Rijsbergen had added to his whisky had completely vanished. He had been staring at the glass without taking a sip, wondering if he would see the ice melt. But its slow disappearance had been imperceptible.
The Zoutman–Falaina investigation had finally been closed that afternoon. Although he knew with certainty who had murdered the two men, in many respects, the resolution of this case had brought him no satisfaction.
Those little grey cells had failed him after all.
In the end, it hadn’t been old-fashioned detective work that had led to the solution but a series of dramatic events, events that had almost claimed an eighth innocent victim in the form of Peter de Haan.
Six ‘living books’, as Rijsbergen had learned, and an elderly monk in Saint Catherine’s Monastery had been unable to escape the murderous hands of Tony Vanderhoop.
Only Peter had managed to narrowly avoid being killed by the madman who had eventually taken his own life.
But is Peter a victim? Is there such a thing as a ‘guilty victim’?
At last, he took a sip of whisky.
That afternoon, he and Van de Kooij had sat silently in Rijsbergen’s small office where, over the last few weeks, they had spent far more time together than was good for their professional relationship. Their little plastic beakers of coffee – or what passed for coffee – had gone stone cold.
How I would love, just once, to be able to bring a case to a close by giving a speech, Rijsbergen thought. Knowing that the killer was in my audience, I would lay everything out in exquisite detail, explaining how the murderer had initially managed to throw me off the scent. What an idiot I had been – I, Rijsbergen! – to allow him to deceive me. The murderer would nervously shuffle his feet and try to keep a straight face. I would name a few other suspects first, and he would relax a little, thinking he had got away with it. Until! ‘Until …’ I would say. ‘Until that one clue that had seemed so insignificant at first, that no one, including myself – because even a great mind such as my own can be mistaken, can it not? – had paid any attention to, turned out to be of enormous significance.’
‘In that one clue,’ he would tell his spellbound audience, ‘we found the key that unlocked the case.’ And then, in the triumphant culmination of all his meticulous detective work, he would point his finger at the murderer.
One must seek the truth within – not without.
In reality, Rijsbergen and Van de Kooij had been playing a constant game of catch-up. The moment they had established that Tony Vanderhoop was involved in all three cases, the man had vanished into thin air. Their American counterparts had been unable to catch him. Only after his death had they discovered that he had left the United States travelling under a false name, and that he had been on the same flight to Sharm el-Sheikh as Peter de Haan. A man had been spotted on CCTV at Logan airport with the same unmistakable build as Tony Vanderhoop.
The authorities in Egypt had not picked up the alert that had been put out for Peter de Haan’s arrest. Even now, Rijsbergen had received no response from the Egyptian police.
Vanderhoop had indeed failed to board the flight to Boston with the rest of the American delegation, inventing an excuse and parting ways with them at Schiphol.
This did not let Van der Lede off the hook, however, since his long silence had obstructed the case.
A few days after De Haan had arrived back home in the Netherlands, Rijsbergen and Van de Kooij had spoken to him in Fay Spežamor’s little almshouse. His left wrist had been in a cast, and the wound above his eye was a deep, purplish blue, almost black. He had looked like a boxer after an epic fight.
Spežamor’s daughter, who had been sitting on De Haan’s knee when Rijsbergen and Van de Kooij arrived, had been sent upstairs. Her mother had wanted to spare her the gory details of what had almost been De Haan’s final hour.
‘The guards found me,’ De Haan had told them, his face contorting with pain now and then. ‘It turned out that there was someone in the guardhouse. The man was dead to the world. Maybe he was in a drunken stupor. Lord knows, but he heard absolutely nothing. Not a single thing, from my arrival in the night to my fight with Tony the next morning.’
It was only when his colleague had gone into the hut to take over from him the next day that the guard had returned to the land of the living. Outside, the two guards had noticed a single shoe on the edge of the plateau that hadn’t been there earlier. Taking a closer look around, they had found evidence of a struggle and peered over the edge of the ravine where they saw De Haan lying on a ledge, apparently dead.
One of the guards had tied a rope around his middle and fastened it to a rock, then lowered himself onto the ledge. He had discovered that De Haan was still alive but unconscious. With the rope tied under De Haan’s arms, the guards had eventually managed to haul him up onto the plateau and move him into the protective shadow cast by the guardhouse. They had tried to give him water, but most of it had trickled back out of his mouth. De Haan’s broken wrist would have been obvious to any layman. They had splinted it with reeds, then strapped him onto the stretcher that had stood in the corner of the hut since time immemorial but never been used.
The guards had carried him down the mountain together, an impressive feat on the uneven steps and under the harsh sun that had already grown very hot.
At the bottom of the steps, they’d been met by the Bedouins who congregated there every morning hoping to take tourists back to Saint Catherine’s Monastery by camel.
The Bedouins took De Haan to the monas
tery where he’d spent the rest of the day in a cool and spartan cell regaining his strength under the care of a bearded priest.
By the next day, he had been well enough to take a taxi back to Sharm el-Sheikh and had asked the driver to take him to the hospital so that his wrist could be set in plaster.
When he’d returned to his hotel to pick up his suitcase, he’d been surprised to find Melchior and Katja waiting for him. Katja had thrown herself into his arms, so happy to see him alive. They had told him that Vanderhoop had offered them a huge sum of money, an amount that far exceeded the loss they had suffered in Cairo.
Vanderhoop had shown the pair some photographs of De Haan and himself together – presumably taken during Willem Hogendoorn’s Pilgrims tour in Leiden – and convinced them that he and De Haan were old friends. He had spun an elaborate yarn about how they had been playing jokes on each other for years to keep their wits sharp. ‘Never anything that would cause any real danger, obviously,’ he had told them, putting his hand on his heart to show how sincere he was. He’d promised them he would be along in another taxi to rescue De Haan less than five minutes after they had driven off without him. He had even told them convincing stories about some of the tricks they had already played on each other. Supposedly, during a trip to the rainforests of Borneo, De Haan had instructed their guides to break down their camp while Vanderhoop was asleep and move it a hundred metres away. And he had tricked De Haan on a trip to Paris by getting off the train one stop early with all of their luggage and passports while De Haan was in the bathroom. These tests of wits had served to deepen the long-standing bond of friendship between them. Together with the five hundred dollars in cash that Vanderhoop had paid them on the spot, this strange but convincing tale had been enough to persuade Melchior and Katja to go along with the plan to leave De Haan in the desert.
That explained why Katja had smiled and given him two thumbs up as the taxi had sped away. She had been wishing him luck on his latest exciting adventure, one that would give him entertaining anecdote to tell back home.
After his visit to the hospital, De Haan had been taken to the police station in Sharm el-Sheikh to be interviewed. He had told them that Vanderhoop had attacked him but had claimed not to know why the man wanted to kill him. And of course, Vanderhoop was no longer available for questioning.
The Pilgrim Conspiracy Page 49
