by Graham Brack
‘How can I ever know happiness again?’ she cried, but I noted that she took the bread at Johannes’ urging, and ate a little.
‘How is your own house?’ I asked him.
‘Some windows broken, a loose tile or two on the roof, but little damage, God be praised. The wind seems to have followed a very narrow track through the city. Of course, the taller buildings have suffered more.’
‘Is it awful?’ I enquired.
‘Bad enough. The trees by the Janskerk are all gone. There are many barges lifted bodily out of the water and dashed on the banks. Barely a church still has a steeple or tower, though the Dom’s tower has fared a little better. The towers of the Pieterskerk are now inside the church and it will need a new roof.’
I moved a little closer. ‘Are there many dead?’
‘I don’t know,’ Johannes replied. ‘Too many, at any event, for one would be too many. And the dead may be the lucky ones, for some who yet live have fearful injuries. Some have lost arms or legs, or had their backs crushed by falling stones. I cannot imagine that they will live long. Grandfather wants to tend to them but he is too weak to walk. I will take him to see the Dom later, if he is strong enough. But now, you have not slept; I will stay with the ladies a while so you can refresh yourself.’
‘I cannot leave them,’ I said. ‘While Janneke wants to pray, so must I.’
He could see that I was not to be dissuaded, but he turned his attention to the women and gently persuaded them to take a rest and try to sleep. We undertook to return later, and in a while we were outside in the warm daylight.
‘Let’s go to grandfather’s and you can take some food. You must be exhausted.’
‘My brain is dull,’ I answered. ‘I am not used to night vigils.’
‘It is hard to concentrate for so long,’ he agreed.
‘I didn’t,’ I said. ‘I found my mind wandering. And one of the things that it wandered to is nagging at me. What was Van Leusden doing at the south-west corner of the nave?’
Johannes stopped walking and stared at me, open-mouthed. ‘Come!’ he snapped, and ran towards the Dom.
He had locked the vestry door as we left it the night before and now fumbled for the keys to open it again. As he flung the door open, it presented a scene less orderly than I had remembered.
In the turmoil of the previous evening I had failed to notice anything except that Van Leusden was not there, but it took very little time in daylight to see that the register for which he had come, and which had not been in his grasp when he was found, was lying in front of the small window.
‘I’m a fool!’ announced Johannes, which summed up my own feelings very well. Not that he was a fool, you understand, but that I was.
‘Don’t worry,’ I replied, ‘I feel just as stupid. We sent Van Leusden to get a book, noted that he had taken it, but completely failed to remark on the fact that he didn’t have it when we found him.’
‘He must have taken it to the light to check he had the right one,’ Johannes suggested. ‘All the volumes in the coffer are very similar.’
‘So the fact that he did not take it implies that he did not leave here voluntarily,’ I said. I looked around the area where the book was sitting, and then I saw it: a splash of blood on the window ledge to the right, and a further smudge on the floor. ‘Do you see it?’ I asked excitedly.
‘I do, Master. But what does it tell us?’
‘This room is to the north-east of the church, so there would be very little light with heavy rain falling outside. Let us suppose Van Leusden had to come right up to the window to see the lettering on the spine. He is concentrating intently, and in his hurry he has left the door open behind him. An assailant sneaks in and swings a club or stick, using his right hand, and thus hits Van Leusden around the right temple. That causes him to slump sideways, his head bouncing on the ledge and then coming to rest just here on the floor.’
‘That seems plausible.’
‘I have no idea what motive the killer had, but let that pass a moment. The killer, for whatever reason, does not want to leave the body here. But the storm is now at its height, and he is safer here than he would be outside. So he shelters here until the storm begins to die down.’
‘But he would have heard the mighty crash of the nave collapsing. Wouldn’t that make him flee?’
‘It has already happened when he hears the noise, and yet this small room is safe. Why risk leaving when you can see the havoc being wrought through the open door? Then, when the storm abates and he can hear the screams of the injured people, he realises that if he can just leave the body somewhere outside it will be assumed that Van Leusden died in the storm.’
‘But why take it all the way to the opposite corner of the church?’
‘I can only suppose that he wanted it as far from here as he could manage. After all, he does not know that it will arouse our suspicion because only we know where Van Leusden planned to go next, so he had no reason to be in the south-west corner.’
Johannes stood for a few moments in thought. ‘I accept your conjecture,’ he said, ‘but we must search this room thoroughly for any other clue that helps us fix on the murderer.’
We knelt and searched the floor, then worked our way upwards. I could see nothing particularly helpful, except that it was likely that the attacker had brought his own weapon, there being no suitable object to hand there.
‘We know its maximum length,’ Johannes told me, ‘because anything that comes higher than your hip would have been impossible to swing in this space.’
‘Only if he grasped it at the end,’ I replied. ‘He might, perhaps, have held it partway up. But it does tell us where he must have been standing.’
We experimented with a brass candlestick that Johannes borrowed from the Dom. It is as well that I am a trusting soul, because I played the part of the victim while Johannes stood behind me and slowly clubbed me with the candlestick from various positions.
‘Is there anything of value missing?’ I asked.
‘There is nothing of value here in the first place,’ Johannes retorted. ‘Although we call it the vestry, it was too small for the French priests when they took over the cathedral, so they kept their vestments and the Mass vessels elsewhere, and we use it only for storage.’
‘Is that widely known, or might an opportunistic thief have supposed the valuables were here?’
‘I’d have thought everyone in Utrecht would know. And surely an opportunist would first try inside the Dom, where there are plenty of things of value?’
‘That leads me to suppose that Van Leusden himself was the target; and since he came straight here from your grandfather’s house and was seemingly attacked very soon thereafter, it implies that someone was watching us and followed him here.’
Johannes was visibly shocked. ‘I saw no-one!’
‘Neither did I — no, wait! I had the idea that I was being followed as I left the banquet the other night. I didn’t see anyone, but I thought I heard steps behind me.’
‘But even if that is so, he was following you then, not Van Leusden; unless, of course, we are all being followed.’
It was a horrible thought. ‘If so, then “all” now means you and me, Johannes.’
‘That thought had not escaped me, Mercurius. We must take care. Do you have a weapon?’
‘I’m a clergyman,’ I answered. ‘Of course I don’t carry a weapon.’
‘I’m sure God would understand if you carried a knife for a day or two.’
I dug deep into the pouch round my hips. ‘I have a penknife!’ I exclaimed. ‘You never know when you might need to sharpen a quill.’
Johannes inspected it. ‘You’d better get one for a bigger quill,’ he smiled. ‘To get close enough to use this on him, you’d need to be in his arms.’
‘Let’s keep together if we can, then we can each protect the other.’
I would do rather better out of such an arrangement than Johannes, since he was a tall man unenc
umbered by being a man of God, and I had no doubt he would fight ferociously to save me, whereas if our roles were reversed my best response would probably be to write the assailant a very stiff note.
‘I think we should tell Grandfather what we have discovered.’
‘I agree. You go first.’
Gijsbert Voet was put out of countenance by our news, but soon regained his composure. ‘Master, you told me that a man was killed at Leiden. Could the murderer be the same man?’
This had not occurred to me. ‘Well, both victims were apparently clubbed from behind on the right side of the head,’ I mused. ‘But one was in Leiden and the other in Utrecht. What could possibly connect them?’
‘You could,’ he replied.
‘Me?’
‘I don’t mean that you attacked them. How could you? You were in our sight all last night.’
Somehow this grudging exoneration did not seem to me to do full justice to my complete innocence.
‘What I mean,’ the old man continued, ‘is that two people loyal to the House of Orange have been killed in similar fashion. Perhaps someone knows of your mission here and is following you to see who is working against his cause.’
‘Van Looy was killed because he was close to discovering the traitors in Leiden,’ I said. ‘Does this mean that they thought Van Leusden was likely to do the same here?’
‘It must at least be possible. And we have no other explanation, do we?’
‘That suggests that someone was in Leiden and is now in Utrecht. But who could that be?’
We sat in silence for a while, my tired brain looking for any hint.
Then it came to me. There was someone. A man with a lute.
Having marched around the city with Johannes, questioning all the innkeepers who might have employed an itinerant lutenist, all I can say is that the people of Utrecht must be thirsty folk, because it is hard to see how so many inns can remain in business otherwise. Sadly, some innkeepers could not be questioned because either they or their inns (or both) had perished in the storm, but nobody to whom we spoke could tell us anything about a lutenist answering Beniamino’s description. Yet he must have been staying somewhere, and he needed to earn his keep.
‘Could a man sleep in the fields?’ I pondered.
‘It’s warm enough,’ Johannes answered, ‘but why come to Utrecht in the first place if not to play in the inns?’
‘To kill loyal people.’
‘Yes, but he has gone to some lengths to create a believable narrative. You said that in Leiden he could be seen playing his lute.’
‘If we use the word “playing” in its loosest sense, that’s true.’
‘So if a man is seen around town with a lute that he never plays, wouldn’t that just draw unwanted attention to him? Surely he would want to blend in and render himself forgettable?’
‘If you’d ever heard him play, you wouldn’t forget him in a hurry,’ I said. I will now admit, with the passage of time, that I may have been unduly severe on his artistry. I have heard many worse lute players, but also many more melodious tomcats.
‘We must check the casualties in case he was killed in the storm,’ Johannes proposed.
‘But if our theory is right, he moved the body after the storm abated,’ I argued. ‘And with his mission here accomplished, surely he would leave at the first opportunity?’
Johannes went off to check whether any barge-master had left with a lutenist on board, though it seemed unlikely given the debris still littering the canals, while I toured the city gates.
There was one gate each to the west, south and east of the city, and two to the north. At the time of the storm these had all been open because it was not yet dark, but they should have been manned; and by order of the city council all the gates had been closed after the storm so that an accurate count of those in the city could be completed and any looting prevented.
The guards were all sure that they had not seen a man with a lute leave the city since the storm. The only doubt was at the southern gate, because there were six windmills on the city wall in that area which had all been seriously damaged, and the guards had left their posts to help look for casualties there; but they assured me that the gate had never been out of their sight and that when the storm had passed, at least one of them had resumed his position. Since it would have taken Beniamino at least ten minutes to walk from the Dom square to the southern gate, it seemed unlikely that he could have escaped by that route.
We returned to the Professor’s house to rest and refresh ourselves. I noticed that several of the missing panes of glass had been replaced with small rectangles of knitted wool, and the Professor’s wife and maid were knitting by the fireplace. This was a better arrangement than hanging blankets over the casements, because it allowed light through the majority of the window. The glaziers and carpenters of Utrecht would be busy for a long time to come in repairing the buildings there, and glass would be in short supply, though the broken glass was carefully collected and melted to provide some additional raw material.
Anna paused in her knitting to prepare a beaker of herbal tea for each of us. It was warming, if rather pungent, and very welcome, as were the fresh bread and butter she set out. Johannes and I were enjoying these when the Professor spoilt my appetite.
‘I have been thinking while you were gone,’ he began. ‘Why would anyone want to kill Van Leusden?’
Judging this to be a rhetorical question, I kept my peace, but Johannes filled the silence.
‘Why, because he was your deputy here.’
‘But nobody except us knew that!’ the Professor exclaimed. ‘And the Stadhouder, of course, who approved the arrangement. To everyone else, he was just a loyal man of the city. And even if someone wanted to kill him, wouldn’t it be so much easier to do so in his workshop, where he was often to be found working alone?’
It could not be denied that there was good sense in the Professor’s argument. Van Leusden was just a builder and coffin maker. Whoever killed Van Looy presumably knew who he really was, or at least the role he fulfilled secretly, but nobody could have known what Van Leusden was up to.
‘Could Van Leusden have blurted it out himself?’ I suggested.
The Professor snorted derisively. ‘He was notoriously close-mouthed. A man could entrust him with any secret and know it would not be shared.’
‘Then how do we explain what has happened?’
‘Simple,’ announced the Professor. ‘The killer thought he was murdering you.’
‘Me?’ I do not know if you can stammer a monosyllable, but I found it difficult to utter it. ‘Who would want to kill me?’
‘Anyone who does not love the Stadhouder, whose man you are known to be.’
This did not seem the right time or place to say that I was lukewarm about politics in general and the Stadhouder’s interests in particular, and that if I were done to death for my support of the House of Orange my soul would be entitled to feel highly aggrieved and would probably return to haunt my killer, if I knew whom to pursue.
‘Grandfather,’ asked Johannes, ‘why do you think Master Mercurius was the intended victim?’
The Professor spread his hands as if the whole matter should be obvious to even the most obtuse mind. ‘Consider what has happened since he came here. He believes himself to be followed. Perhaps he was, in which case that courting couple saved him because he could not be attacked in company. Then he passes an agreeable day visiting public places in the city, so he cannot easily be attacked then either. So the first chance the murderer has to attack him is when he leaves this house to go to the vestry.’
‘But I didn’t,’ I said. ‘Van Leusden went.’
‘Indeed he did. But he was wearing your cloak.’
The ghastly truth hit me with as much force as if someone had buffeted me with their fist. Van Leusden had borrowed my cloak and had turned the collar up to protect his face from the rain. In fact, I had urged him to do so, never suspecting that by conc
ealing his face from the attacker he would seal his fate. The murderer had hit him from behind and so had not seen whom he was belabouring.
‘The murderer must have been discomfited to see that he had killed the wrong man,’ I said.
‘More than that,’ said Johannes. ‘He will know he has unfinished business.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Any man of God knows that there are martyrs who willingly embrace death rather than deny their faith, and we honour them in perpetuity. Their example is placed before our congregations so that they will be stiffened in the face of adversity and remain steadfast in the faith.
I am not cut from that cloth. Faced with an angry Turk who demanded that I adopt the Mohammedan faith or pay with my life, I would at least consider temporary membership. I could always apologise later and throw myself on God’s boundless mercy; and Mohammedans believe in God too, so it would not be as if I had denied Him. True, I am a priest and would have denied Jesus Christ, but then again, St Peter did that — and it did not seem to harm his future career.
You may be sure, therefore, that when the Voets begged me to take care, I needed no such encouragement. Were it not unmanly I should have retreated to my chamber and whimpered on the bed until someone else found the killer, but it was clear that unless I did so, there was nobody else to do it. The Professor could only walk a few paces at a time, and there was no reason for Johannes to put himself at risk on my account, though he was a fine fellow and would do all a man could ask of a friend, and more.
My first step was obvious. I had to put my cloak away and resolve not to wear it again. Johannes had promised to return to visit the Van Leusden women, but I did not feel I could do so now that I knew I was indirectly responsible for Bartholomeus’ death. The incentive to find his killer was increased by that knowledge.
Since I could not remain in the house indefinitely, I accompanied Anna when she went to the market. She was shopping for vegetables and fish, while I had it in mind to buy the biggest knife I could lay my hands on. This ambition had to be tempered somewhat when I found such an instrument, since it could not have been concealed about my person, but I managed to buy a knife with a blade as long as my hand and a sheath in which to keep it. Thus equipped, I felt I stood a better chance against any murderous lutenist who might mean me harm.
