by Helen Grant
‘Here,’ said Kris, indicating that she should follow. There was no choice, anyway; he had the only light. They passed through a wide doorway with a carved wooden frame. Veerle guessed the room was at the back of the castle since Kris went in boldly, right up to the window, with the candle held in his left hand. Outside there would be nothing but trees, although even those were invisible in the dark. Veerle imagined how it would look from outside: the flickering light at the upstairs window, the two faces peering out into the darkness, their features given a yellow cast by the candle flame. Was that how the castle had gained its reputation for being haunted?
‘Give me the screwdriver,’ said Kris. He did not say that he had seen Veerle pocket it, nor did he express surprise that she had it in her possession. He simply held out his hand, while still apparently examining the window.
Veerle thought about it for a moment, and then she handed him the screwdriver.
She watched him put the candle down on the windowsill and begin to work on the window catch. She watched, and the longer she did so, the more puzzled she became.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked eventually.
‘Mending the catch,’ came the laconic reply.
‘Why?’
Kris continued working on the catch for a few moments without replying. He opened the window a little way, closed it again, and checked that the catch was working. Then he turned back to Veerle.
‘It’s part of the deal. Like paying for being here.’
‘Paying who?’
He shrugged. ‘Nobody. The castle, I guess.’ He pocketed the screwdriver. Now he came closer to Veerle, until they were only an arm’s length away from each other. Half of his face was illuminated by the candle’s soft light, the other was in darkness.
‘It’s a game,’ he said.
‘A game?’
‘Empty buildings. You spend time there, and you do something in exchange. Mend something. Clean something up. Whatever. It’s like . . .’ He thought about it. ‘Guerrilla gardening, only inside. Guerrilla DIY, maybe.’
Veerle stared at him. ‘You break into places and do maintenance?’
Something doesn’t add up. She looked at Kris’s face, at the sardonic twist of his lips, the unkempt hair falling over his forehead, the dark eyes with their watchful expression. She looked at the leather jacket, the jeans and boots. Kris didn’t look like an eco-warrior or a rogue furniture restorer. He looked . . .
Dangerous. That was what her mother had called him. Fragments of memory were coming back to her now. Her mother had told her not to play with Kris Verstraeten any more, not even to speak to him, because he was a bad influence. That didn’t mean much; Claudine thought half the world was dangerous, though she hadn’t always been as bad as she was now.
But what was he supposed to have done? She had a vague remembrance of exploring with him; he had known every interesting corner in the village. They had climbed the bell tower of the church once too; she remembered following the curve of the stone staircase, how it had reminded her of climbing into a gigantic seashell. And then they had got to the top, and something had frightened her, frightened her terribly. Had Kris done something to upset her? Was that why her mother had warned her off? Veerle couldn’t think what it might have been. He had surely been no more than eight or nine himself at the time. He couldn’t have done anything that bad.
All the same, looking at him now she couldn’t imagine that he would be content with creeping into ruined buildings to repair broken window catches. There has to be more to it than that.
‘So what about you – do you make a habit of breaking into places?’ asked Kris, interrupting the silence.
‘I didn’t,’ Veerle pointed out. ‘You’d already done that. The door was open – so was the gate.’
‘It’s still trespassing.’
Veerle folded her arms and looked at him. She didn’t bother to point out the obvious, which was that he had been trespassing too.
Kris leaned towards her. ‘Do you want to do it again?’ He grinned at her startled expression. ‘Joke,’ he added.
He’s playing with you, thought Veerle, aware that if he had waited another moment before telling her he was joking she would have said yes.
‘Look, I should go,’ she said, a little stiffly.
‘Meeting someone?’
‘No.’ She wondered if he was asking her whether she was seeing anyone. ‘Just home.’
‘You want me to walk you to the gate?’
She shook her head. ‘To the door would be good.’
Kris picked up the candle again and she followed him downstairs in silence. She still had the uncomfortable feeling that she was missing something. But what could she ask?
She found her phone lying on the tiled floor and pocketed it. When they got to the door, Kris offered her the torch. ‘It’s risky, but if someone sees you, you could always say you were trying to take a short cut.’
‘It’s OK, I can manage.’
Veerle put her head down and began to pick her way towards the road. Before she had gone a dozen steps she regretted not saying goodbye, not parting in some more meaningful way. We used to know each other, after all. She turned to look back, but Kris had gone. He must have blown out the candle, since the castle was entirely shrouded in darkness.
On the way back to the road she put her foot right through the thin crust of ice on a puddle. Dirty water splashed up and ran down inside her boot.
6
DARKNESS COVERS A multitude of sins, some great and some small.
In daylight hours, a crow perched upon the gilded weathervane of the castle, had it taken it into its mind to do so, could have flown south-east for about eleven minutes, over fields and rooftops and woodland, and landed on the shabby roof of a certain nondescript house on a quiet village street. Now it was late at night, and the crows were roosting in the trees; the darkness was for hunters, the medium in which they swam as easily as sharks gliding through the ocean. Owls claimed the chill air, and foxes the tangled undergrowth, and in the house in the village someone else was stirring.
De Jager thought it was time. The moon had dwindled to a sliver, a cheese rind; where there were no streetlights the darkness was impenetrable, the blackness of an ocean floor, five kilometres down.
There was nobody to ask him where he was going when he let himself out of the house. It was an ugly building, blank side turned to the road, but it was convenient; impossible to peer into unless you were brazen enough to trespass in the garden, and large enough to keep things in – things with which other people would have hesitated to share their living space. In appearance it was reminiscent of the house in which he had grown up, but that had played no conscious part in his decision to buy it. It was simply another rather dowdy, anonymous village house, the sort of place your gaze just slid past. He had no history with it, and that was fine. He had no immediate family to share it with either, and that was fine too. His parents lay side by side in a cemetery some kilometres away, under a plain memorial that bore only initials, the family name being instantly recognizable in a way that would attract the wrong kind of attention. A headstone with that name on it was liable to be defaced, kicked over, scratched. Nobody wanted that name next to a loved one’s resting place.
He no longer had it on his identity card, either. When he’d come back to the area after his long time away, he’d chosen another name, taken a house in a different village, one where his face was less likely to be recognized. Even after all these years there was a chance that someone, a former neighbour or friend, would see his younger self in his face.
He didn’t care about the new name any more than he cared about the drab new house. It wasn’t him, in any meaningful way. De Jager, that was what he called himself, that was what defined him. The hunter. Anything else was convention, the tiger-stripes that allowed him to move through the shadows, stalking his prey unseen.
Tonight the hunter had work to do.
De Jager had rubber boots
on, keys, gloves, a scarf that covered his mouth and nose. When he came home that afternoon he had parked the car close to the outbuilding at the back of the house, so there was no need to back it up any further. The trees generally provided a screen from nosy neighbours, but at this time of year the branches were bare so he scanned the next house carefully before he went any further. There was only one window facing his property and the roller shutters were down. There were no lights on, no car in the drive. When he was satisfied that there was no one there he took out the keys and unlocked the outbuilding.
The thing was where he’d left it (where would it go?), and although it was time to dispose of it he couldn’t resist unfolding the tarpaulin and taking another look.
It was preserved remarkably well. That was because of the freezing winter temperatures. If this had been July it would have been another matter. He studied the dead face. People sometimes compared death to sleep; they said that a dead person looked as though they were asleep. This one didn’t look as though she was asleep. He remembered the sounds she had made, the stillborn scream that had turned into a cough, a gurgle. He relished the memories, reliving them with the sensual enjoyment of a couturier fingering expensive fabrics – raw silk and cashmere.
After a while he covered the face again, taking care to conceal it completely in case of prying eyes. He went and opened the boot of the car, then came back and fetched the bundle in its tarpaulin. It was large enough to be unwieldy but he was strong, he had the family build. Good farming stock somewhere back in the past.
He put the thing in the boot and shut the lid. Then he went back and closed and locked the outbuilding. He started the car and drove down the drive and onto the road. There was no other traffic. He turned right and headed out of the village, taking a road that snaked through several other villages and into the town of Tervuren.
The spot he was aiming for was in a stretch of parkland normally closed to cars, but roadworks on one of the streets running into Tervuren meant that traffic was being diverted through the woods that fringed the park. A little while later he was turning in at the gateway in the high brick wall that surrounded it.
At this time of night hardly anyone chose to drive through the park. In the hours of full darkness it was a lonely and sinister journey, car headlights turning the overhanging trees into a bleached tunnel through the blackness, and the massive potholes, concealed by the night, could do serious damage to wheels and axles.
All the same, De Jager kept an eye on the road behind him in the rear-view mirror. There was no sign of anyone else in the park, no headlights, no cycle lamps. He drove carefully through the woods and along the side of the lake.
When he was within view of the chapel, the Sint-Hubertuskapel that overlooked the lake, he pulled in and killed the lights. He sat there for a while, waiting. He wanted to let his eyes adjust to the darkness.
There was a pond at the edge of the woods, the black water overhung with beech trees. That was where he planned to put the thing in the boot. It would be easier than trying to put it in the ground, when the earth was frozen, the vegetation too sparse to cover his work. The lake itself was too open and well-maintained to keep a secret for long, but the pond was obscured by tree branches and a tangle of unkempt bushes. Dank and neglected, it was the perfect dumping ground for unwanted items. There was even a fallen tree, and because it wasn’t across the road or in anyone’s way it hadn’t been cleared away yet.
De Jager judged that if he could put the body into the water under cover of the trees, perhaps even wedge it under the fallen one, it would be a while before anyone spotted it. It didn’t really matter if they did; he hadn’t left any traces of himself on it. The water would hold them up a bit, anyway, while they hauled out the body and discovered that she hadn’t drowned, and tried to work out where she had died. No trail leading back to him there, either. If they found any carpet fibres on the body they’d match with fibres in a house that didn’t belong to him, whose owners had been in Mauritius when the girl died.
When he was sure that there really was nobody around, and his eyes had become accustomed to the darkness, he carried the body in its tarpaulin shroud to the pond. It took some effort to get it down the bank under the trees to the water’s edge, but he took his time and eventually he managed it. He unwrapped the tarpaulin; if she went into the water in that he thought there was a risk of air pockets.
He managed to get the body right underwater, beneath a heavy branch of the fallen tree. His legs were wet to the thigh by the time he finished. If there had been more moonlight they would have glistened like sealskin. The water was freezing; he didn’t spend any longer in it than he had to. He had checked the place out pretty thoroughly during daylight, so he was satisfied that the body would not be obvious from the track. Somebody would have to go nosing about to see it. He folded the tarp and stowed it in the boot of the car. He changed the boots too. They were new, but they would have gone by tomorrow night, as would the tarp.
As he drove home he was thinking about the girl again, about the night she died, reliving the hunt. He had hunted many times and still it gave him a sense of icy gratification. The planning. The deciding who it would be and when. The adjustments, the refinements of technique that made him ever more efficient, a killing machine processing its victims.
The first time he had taken a human life he thought he had reached some kind of summit, an apotheosis of killing: it was not a pet he had slaughtered, some trusting dog or cat, but a human being. Now he looked back upon that first adventure with slightly contemptuous eyes. With more experience, with a steadier hand, it need never have led to the consequences it did. He might never have gone away; he might still have an identity card with his real name on it.
He had learned so much since then. The hunting of this last girl, it had been well-nigh perfect.
He wondered how she would look when they eventually found her, whether it would be easy to identify her. If the skin was discoloured, would they still see it? he wondered. The tattoo she had. The one of a butterfly.
That night the temperature dropped again, and in the morning the surface of the pond was covered with a thin layer of ice. The day after that it snowed, this time more heavily, and the wind blew the snow into drifts. It got everywhere, like desert sand, even under the fallen tree, where it covered the ice with a powdery white frosting. Underneath the ice, in the dark water, lay the dead girl, her face pointing downwards, as though at some chill Hades. On the surface, however, there was nothing to be seen at all.
7
THE SNOW KEPT falling, and covered everything with a white pall. After a day or two it stopped snowing, but the temperature remained low. Those who walked in the park looked forward to getting indoors again. Nobody went near the pond or the lake; dog owners kept their pets away from the water, where the covering of ice was treacherously thin.
For Veerle, the next two weeks slid past without incident. It was as though the scene at the climbing wall, her precipitate flight from the bus and the events of that night at the castle had never been, as though some strange encrusted sea creature had broken the surface of the ocean and then sounded, leaving the waters smooth and undisturbed. The only thing that had changed was that she no longer went to the climbing wall after school.
Veerle didn’t tell her mother what had happened; she didn’t tell her that she wasn’t going to the wall any more either. The thought of all the questions, the feverish seeking after all the details, was too much to contemplate. Besides, she suspected that Claudine would actually be pleased. One less hazardous activity for her daughter to indulge in. It made Veerle feel like taking up something even more dangerous, like BASE jumping.
Claudine’s anxious complaints were becoming more and more insistent. Once she followed Veerle to the bathroom and stood outside the door lecturing her about some imagined hazard in a fretful voice, while inside Veerle brushed her teeth and made faces at herself in the mirror. Veerle suspected that Claudine’s anxiety was borde
ring on an illness and wondered whether she should do something about it – try to contact her father or persuade her mother to see a doctor.
‘You don’t know what you put me through,’ said Claudine through the closed door. She spoke in French; she had been born in Namur.
Veerle looked at herself in the mirror. She had toothpaste at the corners of her mouth. I look like a rabid dog, she said to herself. She thought that her mother acted as though the whole world were a pack of mad dogs. As though if Veerle were exposed to it she would be infected, there would be no holding her back, she would go mad too.
How did it get this bad? she wondered. When she looked back at the past, well, everybody had less freedom when they were a little kid, your parents kept a closer eye on you, but it seemed to Veerle that Claudine had got more anxious, more cautious since then, not less. I used to run around all over the village on my own. I used to go over and play in the churchyard or go to the shop for an ice cream and she didn’t have to know where I was every single moment. She’s got worse. She’s still getting worse.
‘Calm down,’ Veerle replied in French. She didn’t open the door. She looked into her reflection’s hazel eyes as though seeking some kind of conspiratorial reassurance. I can’t give in to her. I can’t let it rule my life. I might as well be in prison if I do.
Veerle was not afraid of much, but her mother’s smothering anxiety filled her with dread. Like the irresistible gravitational pull of a massive planet, it would suck her in and ultimately it would crush her. It was not possible to maintain the form of your own will when subjected to those forces. She would as soon have opened the door to a vampire.
What happened? she asked herself silently. Why did she get like this?
She kept to her routine, spinning out the hours of freedom. She hoped that eventually she would be able to go back to the climbing wall, that Bart would forgive or possibly simply forget; in the meantime she filled her spare time by hanging out with people from her class, going window-shopping or eking out a single Coke in the snack bar near the school. If nothing else was in the offing, she went to the public library, which was at least warm.
