by Mal Peet
“Are you going to kill me?”
“Yeah, I think so. Later, when you’ve taken me where I want to go.”
He hobbled back a step and twitched the gun towards the stairs. “Let’s go. Lead the way.”
Dart sidled past Koop and forced his legs to take him towards the stairs. He’d gone ten paces before the unbearable injustice of it all made him unravel like a severed rope. He turned and faced Koop even though the Luger’s muzzle was close to his throat. His outburst was like that of a child denied a long-promised treat. His hands beat against the sides of his thighs and ridiculous tears filled his eyes.
“No, no! I can’t. I won’t. This isn’t right. It doesn’t go like this! It’s not —”
Koop clubbed him on the side of the face with the Luger, and he went down. His head was full of wet stars, and he scrabbled backwards on his hands and heels until his back hit a timber upright.
Koop swayed above him in a halo of brilliant light. The gun came up, aiming at Dart’s gaping mouth.
“Damn you, then,” Koop hissed. “Rot in hell.”
Dart lifted his hands to ward off the bullet, and in that halted instant Koop turned away from him, staring wide-eyed to his right. The arm and the hand with the gun in it swung away. A massive rapid hammering filled the barn. Koop had a fit of grotesque movements like a jerked puppet. Soft explosions tracked across his chest and left shoulder and sent a fine spray of red matter into the bright dusty air. Above Dart’s head splinters erupted from the woodwork. Koop toppled backwards; when he hit the floor, he made a gargling noise and then lay still.
Dart raised his head and looked towards the stairs. He could see only the upper part of Marijke’s body. Her face was a white mask painted with huge eyes. She lowered the Sten and placed it on the floor before climbing the final steps. Dart got to his knees and held his arms out to her. She ignored both him and the man she had killed, and walked, entranced, towards the body at the foot of the ladder.
Dart said, “Marijke. My love, don’t.”
But by then she had got there and thrown her head back and begun to howl like an animal.
Dad said, “Trixie told me the first thing that puzzled her, when she got to the farm, was that the ambulance wasn’t there. She knew it had been there, because there were fresh tyre prints on the muddy parts of the track. But it wasn’t now, and Ernst Lubbers couldn’t have driven back towards Mendlo, because she’d have met him on the road. She started to get seriously worried when she found the door to the farmhouse wide open, even though it was a cold day. She went inside and called Marijke’s name several times. The kitchen stove was warm, and there were two used cups and plates on the table. The bedrooms were empty. She went out into the garden, then the big barn. No sign of anyone. She was very nervous by then. She said that the silence was not like ordinary silence. When she went into the little barn, the one with the radio room in the roof, there was a funny smell, a bad smell, like scheet, fart. She said she somehow knew that something awful was in there, and she didn’t want to climb the stairs but forced herself to. There was a Sten gun lying on the floor at the top. The trapdoor up to the loft was open. The ladder was lowered, and there was a body lying next to it. It was Christiaan Boogart.”
Yoyo had been silent and as still as stone for a long time, but now he inhaled loudly and his fingers tightened on mine. Dad’s hands were clasped together. I noticed for the first time how coarse and marked they were and that the first two fingers of his right hand were yellowed by nicotine. They were not the hands from my childhood. They belonged to a stranger. His head was lowered, and I saw how thin his hair was.
“Trixie couldn’t move for quite a long time. Her blood was ice, she said. She was sure, you see, that if Christiaan Boogart was dead, Marijke would be as well. She was convinced she would find her friend’s body somewhere in the barn. Then it occurred to her that Christiaan might not be dead, so she made herself climb the last couple of steps and walk towards him. That’s when she saw the feet. They were sticking out of one of the stalls on the right-hand side. When she drew level with them, she saw that the body was a man’s. She described him as looking like a tramp. She didn’t know who he was. She’d never seen him before. He had terrible wounds across the front of his body, and his mouth and eyes were gaping open. He had a German pistol in his hand. The wooden partition behind him was splattered with blood. Trixie edged past him, and when she got close to Christiaan’s body, she knew at once that he was beyond help.”
Dad stopped talking. He reached forward and picked up the stained identity booklet from the table, where I’d laid out the contents of the box. He opened it and stared at the photograph again.
“I didn’t even know what he looked like,” he said. “Never saw his face until today. It’s so . . . strange.”
His voice had thickened. I wanted to go over to him and hold him then, but I knew I couldn’t. It was as though he had a sort of barrier around him, a barrier that he needed until he’d told us everything. So I just blinked my tears away and waited.
He took a long breath. “Trixie went up to the radio room. She said it was a dreadful thing to step over the body onto the ladder. There was blood on the rungs, and it was awful, putting her feet on it. The loft was empty. The radio thing, the transceiver, was still set up. He must have been using it when it happened. So she went down again and walked the length of the barn, looking in all the stalls, dreading finding Marijke in one of them. She said that when she dreams about that afternoon that’s what she’s doing: searching shadowy rooms along an endless corridor, expecting to find some horrible thing. When she didn’t find Marijke or anything that might have explained what had happened, she rode away. She couldn’t think what else to do.”
Yoyo said, “Where did she go, Jan?”
“To the asylum. She was still hoping that Marijke and Lubbers might have gone back there, perhaps by some roundabout route. If they hadn’t, she would have to tell Veening what she’d found. She must have been in a bad state when she got there. But she discovered who the dead tramp in the barn was. His name was de Vries. A resistance guy, but sort of an outlaw. A psycho, according to Trixie’s aunt, Agatha, although I don’t suppose that’s the word she used. He’d shown up at the asylum with a German bullet in him, and he’d been holed up there for a few days. Veening and Agatha had been very keen to get rid of him. So Lubbers had arranged to drive de Vries to a safe house somewhere. Not the farm; Trixie said Albert Veening was sure of that. Veening thought de Vries must have put a gun to Lubbers’s head and made him go there. But that’s not what happened, as I now know.”
Dad rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and then lit another cigarette. The flame of his lighter trembled.
“Anyway. Telling me all this had pretty much worn Trixie out. The poor old love looked drained. Rosa looked pretty haggard too. It had been rough on her, translating the story for me. Once or twice I’d thought she was going to refuse to continue. But I think she realized that there was a huge unburdening going on and had decided not to interfere. When Trixie stopped talking, she sat back in the chair with her eyes closed, maybe because she was exhausted. Or maybe because she didn’t want to look at me.
“I was completely baffled. I think I was still trying to believe that some sort of mad mistake had been made, that Trixie’d got the names wrong. Something was very wrong, because I knew my father wasn’t dead; I’d been with him less than a week ago. Eventually I managed to stand up and go to the window. I watched a crow wander across the lawn as if it owned it. Then Rosa started to say something, I don’t remember what, but stopped when Trixie sort of gasped. We both turned to her, thinking that she was in pain. But it wasn’t that.
“All the time she’d been talking, Trixie had kept the photo I’d given her on her lap. Now she’d picked it up again and was staring at it. She spoke to Rosa in a low voice. Rosa didn’t seem to understand. Trixie said it all again, very agitated, and her face did look as though she was hurting. She jabbed at t
he photo with her fingers. Rosa went quite pale and said ‘Nee nee’ several times. No, no. Then, in English, ‘Jesus Christ, are you sure?’ And then Trixie tore the picture in half. The two halves fell onto the floor on either side of her, and she clenched her fists on the arms of her chair.”
“None of us spoke for what seemed an age. I had absolutely no idea what was going on. Rosa wouldn’t look at me. Then she said, ‘My mother needs a rest, Jan. And in a little while the nurses will be coming with her medication. Let’s you and I get some fresh air.’
“It was an order, not an invitation. She walked so quickly that I had trouble keeping up. It was as if she was trying to leave me behind. We didn’t speak until we reached a little park called the Prince’s Garden.
“‘My mother likes to come here,’ Rosa said. ‘I have to bring her in a wheelchair these days.’
“We walked along a path a short way, and then she stopped. ‘I was born in 1943 on New Year’s Eve,’ she said. ‘I’m illegitimate. My mother has never told me who my father was. She says he was a hero, like your father.’
“‘Your mother thinks she knows what really happened in that barn, doesn’t she?’
“‘Jan,’ Rosa said, ‘my mother is very ill and pumped full of drugs. She is old. All those things took place a very long time ago, when a thousand terrible things happened in Holland every day. She wasn’t at that farm when those men died, she told us that. And she has never told me any of this before. Maybe she is —’
“‘Please. Just tell me what she said. Tell me what she told you about my . . . about the man in the photograph.’
“So she did. I felt sorry for her. It must have been awful, like being forced to put a sick puppy to death or something. And I knew it was the truth, that Trixie was right. Because it made sense of everything, and because, deep down, I already knew. In the end I sat down on a bench and died.”
We sat in silence. When Dad lifted his face, he looked dazed, almost surprised to see us there. Then he sniffed and cleared his throat and refocused. He managed a half-smile.
“Look,” he said, “can I offer you a drink? Are you hungry? There’s not much in the house, but I’m sure we can scrape something together. I’ve got a bottle of wine, if you fancy some. It ought to be champagne, I suppose, but I’m afraid it isn’t.”
So in a stunned and clumsy way we gathered up the things on the table and went inside. Dad made me a cup of coffee and poured wine for Yoyo and himself. The living room was filled with golden light from the lowering sun, which made it more welcoming than it might have been. Dad sat in an armchair, and Yoyo and I sat close to each other on the sofa.
Dad said, “All I remember about the return trip to London is that I thought I’d gone deaf. People were talking all around me, but I couldn’t hear them. The first thing I do remember hearing was someone saying my name. It was the announcer at the airport calling me for my flight. When I got home, I stood outside the house for a long time, looking at the windows, not daring to go in. I couldn’t imagine how I could possibly behave normally. But that’s what I tried to do. I kept it up for a couple of weeks, but then I started to go to pieces.
“It was unbearable, knowing what I knew. But what made it worse, much worse, was that I couldn’t do anything about it without wrecking everyone else’s lives. I couldn’t tell anyone. Tell my mother that the man she thought had rescued her, the man she’d married and lived with for forty years, had murdered my father? My God! How could I tell Sonia? How could I stop you spending time with the bastard and not tell you why? I couldn’t even tell him that I knew, because then what? Carry on the charade of normal family life? Sit at his table and eat Sunday bloody dinner? Besides, I didn’t want to see him, couldn’t bear the thought of it. I wanted to kill him. I seriously wanted to kill him. It was the only option, it seemed to me. I thought about it all the time. Worked out elaborate ways of doing it and getting away with it. It was like having a big black spider crawling around in my brain. And although I couldn’t stop thinking about it, I knew I’d never do it. Because then I’d have to live with that as well.”
Dad drank half his wine in one go and lit another cigarette. “I lost it completely, I’m ashamed to say. Couldn’t do my job. People at the office started talking, looking at me in funny ways. Some days I’d leave home — briefcase, suit, all of that — and not get off the tube. Or just walk and end up God knows where. I started drinking quite heavily. My boss called me in, very nice at first, just ‘concerned.’ Then the verbal warnings, then the written variety. It got impossible to be at home too. So I invented business trips and spent days in hotels doing nothing.
“And then one day I found myself in Paddington Station. I sat and stared at the departures board for a long time, watching the names change. When I saw that the train at platform one was going to Penzance, I bought a ticket and got on it. I don’t know why. Perhaps it was just that Penzance is a nice word, or because it seemed a long way away.
“I must have slept a long time, because when I woke up and looked out of the window, all I could see was water. The train was running along right next to the sea, and the light was dazzling. Then it was Plymouth, then the bridge into Cornwall. And there it was — a big sign with TAMAR on it. I don’t know if it was because it was your name, my real father’s name, but something sort of clicked in my head. The solution to the problem came to me. I couldn’t make William Hyde disappear, but I could make myself disappear. It was a terrifying idea, and cruel, but absolutely logical. It was that or go mad. And I realized I’d started doing it already. The drinking, the hiding — I’d been trying to vanish. So I got off at the next stop and took the next train back to Plymouth, figuring that it would be easier to be invisible in a city.”
I sat there in that unlived-in living room and understood that my dad had been insane. I wondered if he still was. I couldn’t imagine how he could have kept all that stuff dammed up inside him all this time without being at least three parts crazy.
He said, “It turned out to be much harder to disappear than I’d imagined. The practical problems are enormous, actually. After a couple of months, I was living pretty much hand to mouth. Then I had a stroke of luck. I was working in a pub down by the ferry terminal, and I got talking to a man who was waiting to meet some clients off a delayed boat. It turned out to be Colin, the guy who owns this place. One thing led to another, and he offered me a job. I’d been here almost a month before I found out that it was a stone’s throw from the head of the Tamar. It seemed such a beautiful coincidence. Or predestination, if you believe in that sort of thing.”
I didn’t know what I believed. I didn’t know if it was possible to believe in anything anymore.
I said, “I’m sorry, Dad. I can’t get my head round all this. I mean, why didn’t you just get in touch with us? Didn’t you want to? Didn’t you realize we were all off our heads with worry?”
“I couldn’t get in touch. How could I, without explaining why I’d gone? And that was the one thing I couldn’t do.”
“So what were you going to do? Stay here forever?”
“I don’t know. I suppose I was waiting for Hyde, Lubbers, Dart, whoever he is — was — to die.”
Hyde, Lubbers, Dart, whoever he was. Grandad.
“He is dead,” I said, very cold.
The word sat there between us like a toad. Dad didn’t meet my eyes. He poured more wine.
Yoyo said, “Jan, you say he came here. This is something I don’t understand. How did he find you?”
“I didn’t ask. It wasn’t that kind of . . . conversation.”
“What did he say?” I said. “What did he want?”
“Forgiveness.” Dad’s voice was so bitter. “Forgiveness. Can you imagine?”
I could. Very easily. And I thought Dad, of all people, ought to be able to.
Yoyo said, “Sorry, but I am a bit confused. You are saying that he knew you had found out these things about him?”
Dad didn’t answer for a second or two
, and he didn’t look up at us.
“Yeah. I wrote to him. Not what you’d call a letter. A few words, several of them obscene. This was a couple of days after I got off the train in Plymouth. I’d been drinking. I was pretty dark, I suppose. I called him Lubbers, and a few other things besides. So yes, he knew.” He took a long drag on his cigarette. “I suppose that’s how he tracked me down. The Plymouth postmark on the letter. He’d have started from there, and . . . I don’t know. He’s a clever bastard. Was a clever bastard.”
I thought, He came up the river. I must have said it aloud, because Dad looked at me. “What?”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. I want to know what he said. What did he say?”
“He admitted everything. Said he’d spent the rest of his life horrified by what he’d done, said it was like having cancer. I actually think he expected me to feel sorry for him. Christ! Then he started talking about love. How he’d always loved Mum, always loved me, loved you. Love, love, love. I wanted to strangle him. It was . . . appalling. Vile. And just so bloody untrue. You know how cold he was. He wouldn’t know what love was if it hit him in the face.”
I was tearful again and hated myself for it. I wiped my eyes on my sleeve, hard. “You’re wrong, Dad. I know you are. He did love Gran. I know because when she started going . . . getting ill, it broke his heart. I saw it. I was there, and you weren’t. He was so . . .”
“Guilty.”
“What?”
“Guilty. That’s the word you’re looking for. That’s what he meant by love. He’d spent the rest of his miserable life feeling guilty. Why do you think he killed himself?”
“No, Dad. No. It wasn’t like that. I know it wasn’t. And Gran loved him.”
“Did she?” There was a sneer in the question.
