St Paul's Labyrinth

by Jeroen Windmeijer

  ‘What are you looking for, Janna?’ Daniël asked.

  ‘Didn’t Peter say Arnold had wounded his head? So that means there must be blood somewhere, right?’

  ‘I don’t think it was a gaping wound. He just bumped his head. Most of the blood ended up on Peter’s shirt.’

  Janna ignored him and started slowly walking backwards.

  The others followed along behind her, scanning the ground inch by inch.

  ‘Here!’ Janna shouted triumphantly, after she had shuffled another ten or so metres. She put down the lamp with a thud, then got down on her knees and held her nose to the ground.

  The others squatted near the area where Janna thought she had seen something.

  She circled a spot in the sand with the index finger of her right hand. It was slightly darker than the area around it, like something damp and red had mixed with the sand.

  The younger police officer wiped her little finger over the stain and sniffed her fingertip. ‘Hmm,’ she said, ‘that’s blood, without a doubt. That metallic smell …’

  ‘But it doesn’t look like it’s dripped here,’ her colleague said, ‘otherwise it would look like more like a splashed raindrop. It looks like someone fell here.’

  ‘Arnold,’ Janna concluded.

  ‘We can’t say that for certain, although I can see why you think that …’ the older officer said, a little too gravely. ‘But all we can say is that someone was here recently, that they were wounded and very probably fell, but other than that—’

  ‘We need to go back,’ the other officer said urgently. ‘We can leave one of the lamps here. We need to close this place off for forensics and we need a kit to collect the blood …’

  Daniël didn’t move.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Janna asked him.

  ‘Not really …’ he replied. ‘This wasn’t what we …’

  Janna put a hand on his shoulder. ‘No, this isn’t what we were expecting this afternoon. It was supposed to be a celebration.’

  Daniël nodded.

  ‘Come on, let’s go.’ She gave him a gentle push.

  The four of them walked back, leaving a lamp behind them in the middle of the tunnel, like a beacon out at sea.

  When they reached the tunnel entrance, the younger officer walked a few metres ahead of them.

  ‘Does it continue along here?’ she asked, shining the lamp down the passage. But the light fell on a wall about ten metres away. ‘Looks like another dead end.’

  ‘Peter and I walked a little way down there earlier today,’ Daniël confirmed.

  ‘Go and have a look,’ the older officer grunted, with a note of cynicism in his voice. ‘Maybe you’ll find another secret passage.’

  They helped each other climb back up to the surface. Stones came loose as they went and tumbled to the ground in a scud of gravel.

  ‘We’ll bring a ladder next time,’ the older officer wheezed.

  Only one police officer was waiting for them on the street. The other sat in the front of the police car with his feet hanging out of the door and a radio in his hands.

  ‘A report’s just come in,’ the officer said, holding out a hand to help them up.

  The man in the car barked short sentences into the microphone, but from this distance, all they could hear was beeping and static.

  He eventually put the radio back in the cradle and sat for a while, with his hands on his knees and palms facing upwards. Then he stood up and walked towards them. ‘It looks like there won’t be any need to continue the search down there,’ he said hesitantly.

  ‘Whatdoyoumean?’ Daniël asked, the four words coming out as one.

  ‘I’ve just been told that they’ve found a body floating in the Nieuw Rijn, under the bridge next to Annie’s Verjaardag.’

  Daniël covered his face with his hands.

  The officer continued in an official tone: ‘There’s every indication that it’s Mr Van Tiegem.’

  10

  Friday 20 March, 8:58pm

  Peter rushed outside, slamming Judith’s front door behind him. He bounded across the courtyard to Mark’s house and pounded on the windows, shouting his name. He realised immediately that it was useless.

  Feeling helpless, he stretched out his hands, then curled his tensed fingers as though he was kneading a stress ball. His lips were tightly pressed together.

  He had to go to the police of course, as he had originally intended. He would be able to explain the whole Arnold business, including why he’d foolishly run away earlier in the evening. He would be completely open and honest … up to the point where he’d met Raven in the park.

  He pivoted around on one leg, like a soldier at the changing of the guard. At that exact moment, another message arrived.

  Do not seek help. The same message as before. But now it was followed by something more sinister. If you ever want to see her alive again.

  He looked up in panic. The timing of the messages was worryingly precise, as though someone was aware of every step he took. He searched the sky. Was there a drone up there, with a camera watching him?

  Do not seek help …

  He opened Google and typed in ‘black raven Leiden’, but it didn’t bring up anything useful. The first hit was a barber in Groningen of all things. So he tried ‘raven Leiden’. A student dorm, entries in a telephone book for people called Raven, a seaside holiday park, the puppet from a children’s TV show … they all led nowhere.

  Peter was desperate to do something, but he didn’t know where to focus his energy. He felt like the substitute in a football match who has just spent half an hour warming up on the sidelines before being told he won’t be sent on.

  Of course! The phone’s location services. He slapped his forehead, almost as though it would wake up the grey matter inside.

  He opened the settings and deactivated them. It was the obvious thing to do, but it still felt devious.

  ‘Raven, raven …’ he mumbled. Follow the black raven. It had to be symbolic. They couldn’t possibly have meant a real raven. Could they?

  He opened Google again and typed in ‘raven symbol’. Less than half a second later the search term had produced tens of thousands of hits. On the first page, there was a reference to the raven that Noah had released, but Peter’s eye was drawn to the words below the blue, underlined title of one of the links. ‘The raven is featured as a messenger in mythological tales from all over the world …’

  Peter had a feeling this would lead him to something useful, so he clicked on the link. It was part of a website about mythology through the ages, a subpage with an almost endless list of animals in mythological stories. He clicked on the word ‘raven’ and skimmed through the text.

  The story about Noah again, Greek mythology, Egypt, Chinese literature … the raven as harbinger of death … Edgar Allan Poe … And closer to home, the Norse myths and sagas. ‘The god Odin had two ravens,’ he read. ‘Munin and Hugin, who flew around the world during the day, and returned to Odin at night to tell him everything they had seen the people do.’

  Just like Raven in the park, Peter thought.

  He impatiently clicked everything away, and shoved the phone in his pocket. Then he left the courtyard via the large door. He had no idea where he was going to go; he simply wanted to keep moving so that he would feel like he was doing something. He walked past the Kijkhuis cinema, and the gothic remains of the Vrouwenkerk.

  The shops on the Harlemmerstaat had closed an hour ago, but the street still sounded busy. Friday nights in Leiden were as in many Dutch towns for going out.

  A group of people walked by, two female students in identical red student association jackets together with two men and two women, all having an animated conversation.

  ‘After hearing all those stories,’ Peter heard one of the women say, ‘it’s so nice to be able to finally see where you’ve been spending all this time.’

  Many student associations held an annual ‘parents’ evening’ and invited parents to com
e and look around. It went without saying that everything was much quieter than normal on those evenings. There was no rowdiness, no beer was thrown around, and the music was kept at a volume that allowed proper conversation.

  When the group passed him, Peter noticed the word DIONYSUS on the backs of their jackets. It was the god of wine, but also a fraternity of the Quintus student association. One of his colleagues had been a member and had told him about it. Peter himself had never joined a fraternity.

  A thought began to take shape somewhere in the back of his mind. He stood still, closed his eyes and concentrated. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was. Something he had seen.

  Peter walked aimlessly on, but he was careful to avoid the Haarlemmerstraat. He crossed the Lange Mare, a street that had been a canal until the early 1950s when it had been filled in. So they were true after all, the stories about the tunnels that ran beneath the city’s many former canals. It was almost impossible to imagine.

  He thought back to 1978, the first time he’d gone abroad without his parents. With the ink barely dry on his exam certificates, he’d travelled through Italy, ready to conquer the world.

  He’d spent a long time in Rome, staying in a seedy youth hostel where men slept twenty to a room on bunk beds with filthy mattresses. He did everything he could to make his money last as long as possible, not even travelling low budget but no budget.

  He had visited the catacombs, the city’s complex system of tunnels and underground burial chambers, some of which had only been discovered in the second half of the twentieth century. Many of the tunnels had been built in secret by the persecuted early Christians. It was easy to carve out tunnels and chambers in the soft, volcanic tufo that formed the bedrock of Rome. After it had been exposed to the air, the rock would eventually harden, and the result was a sturdy structure, a city beneath the city, up to four layers deep. They placed their dead in elongated niches that had been carved into the walls. The graves were sealed with slabs of terracotta or marble, although these were unlikely to have prevented the smell of death and decay from permeating this underworld.

  He’d taken hundreds of photographs, carrying the rolls of film around in their little canisters for weeks so that he could have them developed in the Netherlands. When he got home, he had been disappointed to discover that the many photographs he’d taken of the frescoes were washed out because he’d had to use the flash.

  But who on earth had built this tunnel in Leiden? And how had it remained undiscovered for centuries? The depth of the tunnel had probably played a role, deep below the canals that had once run above it, or ran above it still.

  Could there really be an entire system of tunnels under the city? It was difficult to believe. Rome had tufo, but here in Leiden, there was soft earth, groundwater and subsidence. How had they done it?

  Peter slowed his pace. He walked a few metres into the broad alley of the Mirakelsteeg and leaned against a wall.

  There was something … something he couldn’t quite remember. What was it?

  He pictured in his mind’s eye the one photograph he’d taken of a fresco that had come out well. It had hung on the cork board in his dorm room for years. The flash hadn’t gone off, so the only illumination had come from the faint light of the catacomb’s lamps. Despite being almost two thousand years old, the fresco was amazingly clear and bright. It depicted ravens flying above lily-like flowers, and a reference to the Gospel of Luke. In this well-known scripture, Jesus encourages his followers not to worry about their lives, about what they should eat, about their bodies or what they should wear. ‘Consider the ravens,’ he told them, ‘they do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn, yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds! Consider the lilies. They neither toil nor spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendour was dressed like one of these flowers … But seek his kingdom, and these things will be given to you also.’

  Follow the black raven.

  All of a sudden, it came to him. He knew where he had to go.

  The students he had seen earlier with their parents. That was it. At the time, he hadn’t been able to make the connection. Like when you know you know the name of an actor in a film, but just can’t quite recall it.

  And then, just like that, you remember it again.

  Peter retraced his steps.

  He needed to go to the student association.

  He needed to go to Quintus.

  11

  Friday 20 March, 9:35pm

  Two police officers stood on the quayside, trying to pull the floating body towards them with a hook on the end of a long pole. It was harder than it looked. The body seemed to be stuck, caught, perhaps on one of the hundreds of bicycles that were dumped in the canals each year.

  An ambulance waited behind them, with two police cars parked diagonally across the street behind it. Two paramedics leaned against their vehicle and watched.

  When the body didn’t budge, the policemen abandoned their attempt.

  ‘What do we do now?’ one of them asked as he took photographs of the body’s position in the water.

  They looked around them. Small groups of people stood watching from behind the red and white tape that the police had used to cordon off the scene. A few of them held their phones in the air to take photos or record videos. The dots of light on their telephones looked like a constellation of bright little stars.

  Curtains twitched behind windows here and there and people peered outside.

  A rowing boat in the distance paddled towards them. Two policemen had had the presence of mind to unhitch a boat that was moored further up the canal. When they reached the body, they manoeuvred the boat alongside it. One of them took off his coat and rolled up his shirt sleeve so that he could stick his arm in the water and free the body from whatever it had snagged on.

  It proved to be the handlebars of a bike.

  The men in the boat took the pole from their colleagues and hooked it onto the victim’s collar. They rowed the boat further down the canal, to the pier opposite the town hall that was normally used as a dock for canal tour boats. They towed the body behind them, like fishermen with a catch too big to bring on board.

  They moored at the stone steps and managed between them to haul the body onto the pavement. The paramedics brought out a stretcher.

  ‘That’s the missing professor all right,’ a policeman said. ‘This is Van Tiegem.’

  He took out his radio to report the news to the control room.

  ‘What a sad way to go,’ someone said.

  Van Tiegem lay on his back, with his head rolled to the side and his eyes wide open, like someone in fright.

  An officer knelt down and closed Van Tiegem’s eyes, mumbling something the others couldn’t hear while his colleague took photographs to document the scene.

  Van Tiegem’s socks had slipped down his ankles, revealing white legs with blond hairs. He had lost a shoe.

  ‘By the look of his skin, he’s not been in the water very long,’ one of the officers said. ‘Two hours, at most, definitely not longer.’

  Two policemen rowed the little boat back to its mooring. When they came back, the four officers carried the surprisingly heavy corpse away from the water and heaved it onto the stretcher. Water streamed from the body onto the ground until the ambulance crew had wrapped it in a sheet of plastic and secured it with two straps.

  The heaving and shoving had twisted Van Tiegem’s jacket upwards. To their bewilderment, it revealed an empty wine bottle sticking out of the waistband of his trousers.

  ‘Have you got some gloves for me?’ one of the officers asked a paramedic.

  He walked back to the ambulance and returned with a pair of latex gloves. The officer struggled them over his wet hands.

  He used his thumb and forefinger like a small pair of tongs to carefully remove the bottle. The label was hanging off, but it was still legible: a Beaujolais Nouveau from the Dionysuswine estate.

  ‘Mitra
,’ his colleague said. ‘This bottle comes from the Mitra off-licence. There’s one in the town centre, isn’t there?’

  ‘If you say so …’ he replied, smoothly sliding the bottle into a clear plastic bag that the other paramedic had had the foresight to go and find in the meantime.

  ‘Then we should drop by there later today. Maybe they know who bought this bottle. They might have CCTV footage.’

  They rolled the stretcher awkwardly over the uneven cobbles and lifted it into the ambulance.

  ‘Let’s start by doing a house-to-house in this area, from the Koornbrug to Annie’s,’ one of the police team said. ‘Someone might have seen something.’

  He took out his notebook. They watched the paramedics put Van Tiegem’s body into the ambulance.

  One of them climbed into the back of the ambulance and the other shut the doors behind him, gently, as though he didn’t want to wake Van Tiegem. He walked round to the front and got into the driver’s seat, but before he’d even put the key in the ignition, the doors at the back flew open, and his colleague, who had been sitting almost in vigil next to Van Tiegem, leapt out. He banged loudly on the side of the ambulance and gestured wildly to the police officers.

  ‘What the …’ said the officer who was holding the notebook.

  The two of them ran over to the paramedic who had been joined by his colleague. ‘What’s wrong?’ the officer asked when they reached them.

  ‘There’s something …’ the man said. ‘I think you’d better come and see it yourself.’

  He got back into the ambulance, closely followed by the police officer.

  Van Tiegem’s body was wrapped in plastic up to his neck. His exposed head was turned to the side and a puddle of water had formed underneath it.

  When the two police officers had squeezed themselves into the cramped space next to the stretcher, they no longer needed the paramedic to explain why he had been so alarmed.

  They could see it clearly.

  There was something in Van Tiegem’s mouth.