by Helen Grant
Why can’t I do what she wants?
She let the shutters down slowly and the darkening street outside was reduced to a square and then a flattening rectangle, and then it was gone altogether and she was faced with the blank slats. They were sealed in together, she and Claudine. Already Veerle felt as though she were suffocating.
47
THE OLD LADY looks her age, thought Veerle as she picked her way through the overgrown grass to the castle, shielding her eyes against the spring sunshine. In the winter dark, the old building had had a certain sinister grandeur; now the bright light showed the effects of the passing years and the damp Flemish climate all too clearly. The pointing between the castle’s red bricks was wearing away, leaving the spaces between them as deeply graven as wrinkles on an ancient face, and there were slate tiles missing here and there, as though the ridged roof were the back of some sleeping dragon, millennia old, moulting scales as it slumbered its way towards the sleep that never ends.
Veerle kept glancing back towards the road as she approached the castle door with its stone canopy. There was a good deal more foliage at the border of the grounds than there had been in winter, but she was acutely aware that without the cover of darkness she could easily be spotted. Her school bag swung against her shoulder as she walked. There were no books inside it; instead she had packed her torch and screwdriver and also her rock shoes. After that Art Deco place, I’m never going anywhere without my rock shoes.
Even before she got to the castle she was eyeing the windowframes and the stone bosses and the ornamental ridge that ran along the top of the ground floor. It was a habit; she couldn’t stop herself doing it. In her imagination she was already scaling it, curling her fingers around the stone ridges, fitting the toe of her rock shoe into a crumbling hole in the brickwork and launching herself upwards in defiance of gravity, as though she wanted to take flight. She looked at the tower with a critical eye and thought that even that might be climbed; the walls sloped slightly.
Veerle supposed that the owners of the castle – if it even had owners – might one day decide to improve the security of the site, fix new locks on the door. If that ever happened she probably would have to climb the walls to get inside. That was not necessary today, however; the door opened easily. She slipped inside, inhaling the familiar scent of brick dust and ancient wood. Shafts of sunlight pierced the hallway with its panelled walls and tiled floor; Veerle could see dust motes floating in them, as though the very fabric of the building were dissolving away into the air.
‘Kris?’ Her voice sounded strangely dead in the stillness of the castle’s interior.
‘Here,’ he said, and stepped out of the shadows.
Veerle had expected him to be in his work clothes but he was dressed as he always was for their excursions to the Koekoeken places, all in black – black jeans, leather jacket, boots – so that when he appeared it was as though part of the deep shadow had detached itself, budded off like an amoeba. Veerle looked at him and felt that familiar feeling, as though something inside her jumped.
She went over to him, and when he kissed her she closed her eyes, thinking, I wish it could be like this for ever. I wish I didn’t ever have to go back.
When she opened her eyes the castle sprang back into being around her, and with it the knowledge that they had work to do; this wasn’t just about having fun any more.
They went upstairs, the wooden treads, polished with age, creaking beneath their feet. It was safer up there; if anyone happened to approach the castle they could be spotted from the front windows, and if anyone looked inside the front door they would see only empty hallway. Veerle followed Kris into a large wood-panelled room dominated by a reddish marble fireplace, the stone shot through with lighter veins. Above the panelling was a greenish wallpaper, so faded in places that the pattern could barely be picked out any more; it could have been ripples in stagnant water. A sudden flash of reflected sunlight amongst the muted colours caught Veerle’s eye and she crossed the room to investigate. Standing on the marble mantelpiece was a single empty brown beer bottle.
‘Someone’s been here,’ she said. She looked at the bottle but didn’t like to touch it.
‘A tramp,’ said Kris, with a shrug. ‘We can take it with us when we go.’
‘How do you know?’
‘It wasn’t one of us. We’re supposed to improve the places we visit, not leave rubbish. It’s not the first time, anyway.’
Kris’s attention had shifted already; he was examining the mantelpiece itself, running a finger along the worn carving. He didn’t seem bothered by the bottle’s presence.
Veerle looked at it again. I wish that wasn’t there. The bottle was a reminder that others visited the castle, that it was not just hers and Kris’s. It was faintly disturbing, as though they had found strange footprints on territory that belonged to them alone. As though we’re sharing the jungle with animals we never see.
‘Let’s go somewhere else,’ she said impulsively. ‘Let’s go and look at the tower. I’ve never been in there.’
She turned her back on the mantelpiece and the bottle winking in the sunlight, and went back into the corridor. The tower was at the very end, she thought, and began to walk along it. The floorboards creaked gently under her feet, as though the old castle were sighing.
Like a mummy, she thought. Ancient and dry. She remembered the night she and Kris had met here, how he had lit a candle at the top of the stairs. You’d have to be careful doing that; the interior was so desiccated that it could easily go up, as though committing suttee for its long-dead owners. There was a window at the end of the corridor, and as she watched, the sun came out and turned it into a dazzling rectangle of white light, as bright as an acetylene torch, as though the old castle really had caught fire.
She blinked once, twice, and then the effect was gone; clouds had drifted across the face of the sun. The window was simply a bright oblong once more.
Kris appeared at her side. ‘The tower’s through there,’ he said, pointing, and Veerle saw that there was a narrow doorway to the left of the window. The heavy wooden door stood open to its fullest extent, pushed back flat against the wall.
Kris had to duck his head to enter the room. It was immediately apparent that the tower was considerably older than the rest of the castle. There was no carved wood panelling here; the walls were coarse textured and whitewashed and a metre thick; you could see that from the depth of the window openings. The floorboards were rough and unvarnished, the wood grey with dust and age.
Veerle went to the nearest window and pushed at the windowframe; it opened easily and she stuck her head out, looking down at the wall as it sloped away.
You could climb down here, she thought, but it would be difficult. She didn’t like to say dangerous to herself; the very word made her think of Claudine, always seeing hidden hazards in everything. All the same, when she looked down at the wall she could very well imagine how easy it would be to lose your grip with nothing but the slight slope and the gaps between the bricks to support you, and once you started to slide and then to fall there would be nothing large enough to grab as you shot past.
If I ever have to climb in or out of the castle I’ll choose another route, she decided.
She drew her head back in and closed the window.
‘Is there a room under this one?’ she asked Kris.
He nodded. ‘It’s just a storeroom or something. There’s no way down to it from here – you have to go back downstairs.’
‘Strange.’
‘This part is older than the rest. Maybe there was a staircase when it was first built. Not now, though.’ Kris lounged against the wall, studying the room. After a moment he said, ‘So how did you get away?’
‘I just didn’t go to school. I’ll write a note and take it in tomorrow.’ And pray nobody phones my mother.
Veerle hadn’t dared enlist Lisa’s help this time; it would have led to too many questions. She was already aware of a certain
coolness between her and Lisa and her other school friends. She’d never breathed a word, never said anything that might suggest she had anything to hide, but people knew. They could tell when you were shutting them out of something.
Veerle looked at Kris and thought, I don’t care. It would be useless caring about that now anyway; the pair of them were in too deep.
Aloud, she said, ‘What about you? Did you bunk off work?’
‘I took a day off. They didn’t like it, but’ – he shrugged – ‘this is important.’
‘Kris . . . the things Fred said, about Hommel sending the keys, and Clare disappearing being a coincidence . . . he could still be right.’
‘He could. But I don’t think he is. I think there’s someone doing it. Don’t you?’
Veerle sighed. ‘Yes. I do.’ She rubbed her arms as though she felt chilled. ‘If there is, you know he’s probably a crackpot and definitely dangerous.’
‘I know.’
‘If he’s clever enough to get away with killing people it’s not going to be easy to get him to show himself.’
‘I’ve thought about that,’ said Kris. ‘No matter what we say, he’s not going to just post something on the forum. Once he does that, we’ve got his user name and we can get his email address from Fred and then he’s not anonymous any more. We need to get him to show himself, physically. Then we know he exists, we know what he looks like, maybe one of us will even recognize him.’
‘You mean, confront him?’ Veerle asked. ‘Kris, we don’t even know what he did to Vlinder and the others. He might be armed.’
‘No, not confront him,’ said Kris, but he didn’t catch her eye.
He’s going to wait and see, thought Veerle. He’s going to see whether he can take him on or not. It was not a reassuring thought. Kris was lean, hardened by working outdoors, and he was tall, broad-shouldered too. But this other person, this shadowy person whose presence they deduced from a pattern of events, as an archaeologist reads changing hues in the earth when all proof has mouldered away, what about him?
‘We just have to know whether he exists or not,’ Kris was saying. ‘If we contact him through the Koekoeken and he shows himself, he’s one of us. If we know who it is, we tip off the police. If we don’t, we go to the police and tell them everything. There’ll be trouble, but at least we know they’ll get him.’
Veerle stared at him. Kris still wasn’t catching her eye. He was looking out of the window, and his profile was turned to her so that she saw his aquiline nose, one cheekbone, one dark eye gazing out into the castle grounds as though he thought the unknown killer might come strolling across them.
‘OK,’ she said eventually. ‘But how do we do that without confronting him?’
Now Kris did turn and look at her. ‘We hide,’ he said simply. He pushed away from the whitewashed wall and began to move around the room. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘We get him to come here. It’s the obvious choice. We know this place; we have to know it better than he does. Some of the others come here, but not many. It’s too far out of Brussels, too far away from the metro and the tram. He won’t know his way around. We will. That’s the first thing. Second, we know it’s going to be empty. Most of the other places, they’re only empty if the owners happen to be away. We can’t control that; there’s no way of picking one we know well. Thirdly, there are a lot of ways in and out of this place. OK, we normally come in through the front door, but we could leave any of the downstairs windows unlatched, in case we need to get out in a hurry.’
‘That makes sense,’ said Veerle, watching him. ‘So where do we hide?’
‘The upstairs gallery? No; if he spotted us we’d be trapped up here. The middle room at the back of the castle, downstairs. It’s got doors through into the rooms on each side and a huge window. If we need to, we can get out of there and run for the trees.’
Simple, thought Veerle. He makes it sound so simple.
Aloud, she said, ‘So what do we put in the message?’
48
DE JAGER SAT at the kitchen table with the laptop open in front of him. The sleek silver machine looked out of place in the kitchen, like an alien artefact uncovered in an archaeological dig. Everything else dated from around 1970: the orange and cream tiles, the brown work surface, the curtains with their yellow and white floral design. De Jager was uninterested in updating the kitchen or any other part of the house. He himself had other things to do, and it would have been impossible to allow workmen into the place; you couldn’t trust them not to poke their noses in where they were not wanted. Besides, the outdated décor gave him a certain sense of time streaming past, a sense of having survived and triumphed. The house he had grown up in had looked something like this, old-fashioned and drearily respectable, and all the family members who had peopled it were dead now, all of them except him. The martyred-looking, defeated mother with her hunched shoulders and grey face, the blustering, bullying father – gone.
De Jager knew that he was not as other people are; he was as different as if he belonged to an entirely new species. He knew too that anyone who tried to analyse his behaviour (had anyone been able to observe it, which was unlikely, since those who saw his real self invariably died shortly afterwards) would search for something in his relationship with his family that had shaped him. The idea made him angry. He was himself, uniquely himself, his own creation, without any contribution from his genetic parents. That was why the rest of his birth family were dead, and he was still alive, free, pursuing his own savage impulses like a shark moving through the dark ocean, following the scent of blood. Because he was different. Better.
He stared at the illuminated screen, re-reading the text carefully to ensure that he had understood the message correctly, that there was no mistake. He’d spotted it the minute he logged on to the Koekoeken website, using his member name of Wolfspin, the wolf spider. The message subject was an address and a date. The address was in Sint-Genesius-Rode. The Koekoeken visited a number of houses in that district but De Jager recognized the address immediately. He didn’t need to check the date either; he knew immediately that it was the night in early March when he had sent Egbert to meet his maker in the wet room. He remembered the event with crystal clarity: the pursuit through darkened rooms, the tracking of the prey to the cellar, the sudden blaze of light and the satisfying sound of the crossbow bolt puncturing flesh. Afterwards he had grasped the bolt and used to it pull Egbert’s lifeless body away from the wall, so that he could check there was no damage to the tiles.
Not so much as a chip. He had removed the body and let the shower run for a long time, until the vivid red on the walls and floor had streaked and turned pink and finally run clear. Next time the owner of the house used his fancy gym and showered afterwards, he would have no idea that the gleaming tiles under his bare feet had run crimson with blood. Someone did though. The poster of the message. Schorpioen.
You left something at the house. If you want to get it back, come to Het Rode Kasteel, Kasteelstraat, on Saturday at 9.30 p.m. Your friend.
De Jager looked at the message. He knew better than to think that Schorpioen was his friend, or indeed that he had left anything at the house in Sint-Genesius-Rode. What the message was really telling him was that his time was up, he would have to move on.
It was not the first time that this had happened to De Jager. He had moved several times before, always evading discovery, always tying up loose ends. There was a drowning in Brugge, apparently accidental, and a house fire in a suburb of Antwerpen, neither of them traceable to him. De Jager thought that Schorpioen would have to be dealt with in the same way.
Fire, he thought. It was clean and final.
He went out of the message and began to look for previous posts by Schorpioen. He had a vague remembrance that Schorpioen went about with someone else; for that reason De Jager had rejected him (or her) as a possible target in the past. He was quite confident of his ability to handle two subjects at once, but less sure that it could be done wit
hout noticeable damage to the hunting environment. The search did not take long.
Honingbij.
De Jager sat back and considered. He judged that they were a couple, male and female, and that Schorpioen was the male, Honingbij striking him as a female name. So Schorpioen’s signing off as ‘your friend’ (singular) was disingenuous; there was a good chance that two of them would be waiting at the castle.
So much the better. Taking down both of them would present a challenge, and require meticulous planning, but De Jager excelled at planning.
And fire will clean it all up.
It was perfect that Schorpioen had selected the castle for the proposed rendezvous. A fire in an old and derelict building would excite far less comment than one in a luxurious villa. When the bodies were found – assuming that the charred remains were even identifiable amongst the blackened beams and bricks and tiles – people would assume it was a prank, an act of vandalism, gone tragically wrong. There would be nothing to connect the fire to a harmless web forum about bird-watching.
There was another option, of course. He could ignore the message altogether and simply move on. Schorpioen had no idea of his identity, that was plain. The post was not addressed to Wolfspin but to the group in general. De Jager could simply withdraw from the Koekoeken, either for ever, or perhaps with a view to resuming his activities at some future point when he deemed it safe to do so. The idea had its merits. The Koekoeken group was an almost perfect hunting ground, after all, the best he had ever had. Also, taking out Schorpioen and Honingbij was not without its risks, especially since they would be on their guard.
