The ambulance had stopped next to Sebastiaan. A man and a woman jumped out. One of them attended to Sebastiaan, while the other opened the back doors and took out the stretcher.
‘So what happened here?’ one of the policemen asked Peter, without looking at him. He stared agog at the pavement where Sebastiaan lay groaning.
‘Aren’t you …’ the other officer began.
‘Peter de Haan, yes,’ Peter finished the sentence for him.
‘We’ve been looking for you all night, you arsehole,’ the man said, bringing his face close up to Peter’s. He nodded at his colleague who twisted Peter’s arm behind his back.
Knowing that there was no use trying to resist, Peter voluntarily held his other arm out behind him.
The first officer removed a pair of handcuffs from his belt.
Peter felt the cold metal of the cuffs wrap around one wrist, then the other.
The other officer went over to talk to the paramedics who were tending to Sebastiaan.
‘I haven’t … I didn’t have anything to do with this. I really don’t have time for this,’ Peter protested weakly. ‘The man who shot him with the arrow is inside,’ he added. ‘I’d come to see Sebastiaan, the boy lying over there. Some idiot or other broke in and starting shooting arrows at us. I don’t know why. I knocked him out. He’s lying at the bottom of the stairs.’
The police officer immediately took out his radio and contacted the control room to ask for backup.
‘And in the Hortus …’ Peter said. ‘He shot two more people with arrows in the Hortus. But I think they’re dead.’
The officer looked at him aghast, then spoke into his radio again.
Sebastiaan cried out in pain as the ambulance crew gently manoeuvred him onto the stretcher and fastened him in with two wide straps. The collapsible frame and wheels unfolded below him as they lifted the stretcher up. They wheeled him over to the ambulance. The male paramedic stayed in the back with Sebastiaan. His female colleague shut the door behind them and raised her hand before getting into the driver’s seat. Only now did she turn off the flashing blue lights. Then she turned the van around in the road and drove away.
The police officer walked back over to Peter and his colleague. ‘Why don’t you put him in the car,’ he said, ‘and I’ll wait here.’
His colleague nodded. ‘Right then, Mr De Haan,’ he said, ‘I’m arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Professor Van—’
‘Murder?’ Peter exclaimed. He tried to turn around, but the police officer roughly pushed him back.
‘Professor Van Tiegem,’ he continued. ‘You have the right to remain silent.’
‘Murder? What do you mean? Arnold disapp—’
‘They’ve found him now, floating in the canal. Dead.’
‘But …’ Peter bowed his head. Murdered, he thought, horrified. What’s happening? Judith! Panic got the better of him. Surely they won’t … not her too …
‘So, you can come with me and explain what happened in that tunnel,’ the officer said as he manhandled him towards the car. ‘And why that poor man had to die.’
‘It was nothing to do with me. And I don’t know what happened down there.’
The policeman didn’t react.
‘My friend, Judith Cherev, she’s gone missing …’ Peter decided to tell the police everything. ‘I don’t have much time left to find her. You have to help me!’
The police officer seemed unmoved. ‘You can tell me all about it down at the station,’ he said in the same calm, professional tone that he usually used to respond to the weak alibis that suspects came up with to prove their innocence.
‘For God’s sake!’ Peter exploded. ‘You don’t understand!’ He made a half-hearted attempt to wrestle free, knowing it was useless when his hands were behind his back.
The officer opened the back door of the police car and pushed him in, putting a hand over his head so that he wouldn’t bump it.
He loosened one of the handcuffs. Surprised, Peter put both of his hands on his lap and felt a brief glimmer of hope, but then the policeman fastened the open handcuff to the grille that separated the back of the car from the seats in the front.
Peter stared dejectedly ahead, his arm held out in front of him, fingers laced through the wire mesh, like a monkey in a zoo.
The policeman slammed the door shut. Almost instinctively, Peter launched himself at the other door, but of course, it didn’t open. And even if he had been able to open it, there was nowhere for him to go. The officer got in and started the engine. He drove slowly back to the other police officer who was still waiting where they’d left him. He got out of the car and joined his colleague.
Not long afterwards, another police car arrived and two more officers got out of it. Almost simultaneously, a Volkswagen van with a local security firm’s logo on its side drove into the street. Two young men in uniform jumped out.
Peter watched as the policemen conferred with each other then, as if on command, drew their guns from their holsters and started moving towards the Observatory.
The officer who had arrested Peter came back to the car, got in, and started the engine again. He looked at Peter in the rear-view mirror. ‘I’m going to take you to the station first. Then you can make a statement.’
‘Listen, someone’s playing games with me. I don’t know who, but my friend, Judith Cherev, has been kidnapped. They gave me twenty-four hours to find her. I only have eight left.’
The officer turned on the radio.
They drove along the Witte Singel, passing the LAK building and the faculty. A short while later, they reached the Beestenmarkt and then drove past the De Valk windmill. The car slowed down and turned right for the entrance to the police station. They stopped and waited as the car park’s automatic gate slowly slid open.
As the driver parked the car, two other police officers came out of the station.
The driver got out of the car and opened the back door. He leaned over with his knee on the back seat, removed the handcuff from the grille, and clicked it onto his own wrist.
‘Is that really necessary?’ Peter asked with a tired sigh.
The two other officers stood watching in silence.
‘Hey, Mani,’ one of them said. ‘I thought you weren’t working tonight?’
‘I wasn’t,’ his colleague said, smiling, ‘but I couldn’t sleep, so I was listening to the scanner. I heard so much weird stuff going on that I had to come and see it for myself. Looks like it was a good job I did. We’ve got a lot of cars out tonight.’
Mani had a distinctly Middle Eastern appearance, jet black hair and light brown skin. Despite the early hour, he appeared to be friendly and upbeat, like a man who had found a source of inner peace.
They went into the station through the back door. When they got to the desk, Peter’s handcuffs were removed at last. A female police officer took his details and cheerfully typed them into the computer.
‘You’ll be interviewed shortly,’ she said to Peter, in a tone so animated she sounded like she was doing him a favour.
‘I haven’t got any bloody time for this!’ Peter shouted, angry now. ‘Judith is gone …’ He slammed his fists down on the counter.
Before he knew it, two police officers had grabbed him by his arms and pushed him away.
I have to get out of here, Peter thought. He struggled to break free, but the two policemen carried on down the corridor, unfazed, until they reached the door to what looked like a cell.
‘I can take it from here, I think,’ Mani said. ‘Isn’t that right, Mr De Haan?’
Peter nodded dejectedly.
The other officer nodded and walked back along the corridor.
‘You can take your belt off. And give me your shoelaces.’
Peter handed his belt over; there were no laces on his loafers. ‘How long before I can talk to someone?’
Mani looked at his watch. Peter looked at it too and noticed the unusual numbers on its face.
&nb
sp; The officer gave Peter an amused look. This clearly wasn’t the first time someone had been surprised by his watch.
‘Those are Arabic numbers,’ he volunteered. ‘I’m from Iran, originally. This was my dad’s watch.’
Peter stepped into the tiny cell. ‘Iran?’ he asked.
‘Yes, Iran. Although we prefer to use the old name for Iran, Persia.’ Mani said, smiling at the puzzled look on Peter’s face.
He began to close the cell door, but before it closed completely, he said, ‘I am a Persian.’
28
Saturday 21 March, 6:25am
Peter sat on the bed in his cell. It was more of a hard, plastic bench than a bed. Other than the bench, the room was completely empty. Totally scrote-proof, they called it.
There was a small, blue book next to him on the bench. He instantly recognised it as the Gideon bible that was often found in hotel room nightstands. He was surprised that the Gideons left bibles in police stations too. Or maybe it had been put there by a pious policeman. Someone locked in here for hours wouldn’t just have plenty of time to think, they would probably have reached a point in their lives where they were susceptible to a bit of evangelism.
Next to the bible was a Mars bar. That was … a bit of a coincidence, Peter thought. Just then, he remembered what he’d read earlier about the Persian. ‘No longer the child of his father and mother, no longer belonging to this village or that … The Persian is protected by the planet Mars.’
He picked up the Mars bar and examined it thoroughly, but there didn’t seem to be anything unusual about it. So he ripped off the wrapper and took two big, hungry bites.
He picked up the bible and opened it. The famous words from the sixteenth verse of the third chapter of The Book of John were printed on the first page:
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.’
He quickly leafed through it. Then, holding the little book in his left hand, he thumbed the rest of the pages with his right hand. He didn’t see any notes, or underlined scriptures. He put the bible down again, disappointed. Then he saw a thin ribbon marker tucked between two pages at the back of the book.
Nothing that had happened so far today had been a coincidence. This had to mean something.
He opened the bible at the page marked by the ribbon. It was Paul’s second letter to the Christian community in the Greek city of Corinth, the last part of chapter 7 and the start of chapter 8.
He scanned chapter 7, in which Paul wrote about joy after sorrow. He had spoken to the community reproachfully in an earlier letter, but it seemed that they had now taken heed of his words and improved their lives.
No, no … This doesn’t mean anything, Peter thought gloomily. Maybe I’m reading too much into everything, like what the policeman said when he closed the cell door: I am a Persian.
This was almost impossible, wasn’t it? How far did this go? Who else was involved? The policeman, Mani, wasn’t supposed to be working tonight. Was that allowed? Might someone higher up have told Mani to come to work to keep an eye on Peter? Or maybe he wasn’t involved at all and his words had only seemed significant because Peter’s brain was desperately trying to connect all the dots?
Who was behind this? What was the point of it all? And Judith … Oh God, Judith …
Peter got up and banged madly on the cell door with the flat of his hand. ‘Hey!’ he shouted. His voice echoed in the small space. ‘Hey! I need to speak to someone. I’ll tell you everything. We have to find Judith.’
There was no response.
High on the wall in the corner of his cell, he saw a tiny camera. He stood in front of it and jumped up and down, waving his arms around as though he was a desert island castaway waving at a ship in the distance.
The hatch in the door opened and Mani’s face appeared.
‘You need to be patient for a while,’ he said affably but firmly. ‘There’s a bit of a commotion going on in town, as I’m sure you know.’
Peter rushed over to the hatch. Mani took a step backwards, even though Peter couldn’t do much to him with the heavy cell door between them.
‘What do you know about this, Mani? Why did you say you were a Persian?’
The officer looked at him bemusedly. Either he was a brilliant actor, or he really didn’t know what Peter was hinting at.
‘Because I am a Persian of course. Or Iranian. You were looking at my watch, so I explained it.’
‘No, no,’ Peter whispered. ‘You know perfectly well what I mean. The Persian is the fifth grade of initiation … Mithras? Come on! There’s a reason you told me you’re from Iran, from Persia.’
‘Should I have told you I come from Morocco?’ Mani asked derisively. ‘I told you because it’s the land of my cradle days, as you Dutch say.’
‘That Mars bar, did you put it there? And why is there a bible in here? Do you know where Judith is?’ Peter narrowed his eyes and watched Mani’s face closely, but he gave nothing away.
‘I can go and get you some water,’ Mani said.
Peter gave up and nodded. ‘Yes, okay,’ he said. The Mars bar had made him thirsty.
Mani shut the hatch, then quickly came back with a little plastic beaker of water. Peter reached for the beaker, but Mani held onto it. Peter thought he was taunting him, but then the man’s face transformed, as though a cloud had come over it.
‘We left one at the Observatory for you, but you missed it. So we had to improvise …’
‘What do you mean “left one at the Observatory”?’
‘The next person who buys a Mars bar from the machine there is in for a surprise.’
‘But—’
Mani let go of the beaker so unexpectedly that it almost fell on the floor. Instinctively, Peter grabbed it with his other hand. As he did, Mani slammed the hatch closed.
Peter gulped the water then went back to the bench. He sat down and opened the little bible again, this time at chapters 8 and 9. His eyes flew over the text, then stopped at a sentence that he recognised as one of the hits from his web search at the Observatory. 2 Corinthians, chapter 9, verse 6: ‘Remember this: whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously.’ The Persian was the reaper; he gathered the harvest of the seeds that had been sown and grown with so much care.
Both chapters were about the collection Paul had promised to organise at the famous meeting of the Apostles in Jerusalem. In these verses, the Apostles were agreeing that Peter and his associates would focus their ministry on the ‘circumcised ones’, the Jews, and Paul and Barnabas would concentrate on the ‘uncircumcised ones’, the Gentiles. Paul pledged to collect money for the Jerusalem Christians.
Peter recalled that this supposed fundraising was a conundrum that bible scholars had been scratching their heads over for centuries. Why was Paul collecting money from Christians in the Roman Empire for Christians in Jerusalem when he didn’t want to go to Jerusalem himself? And hadn’t Paul said again and again that people should be responsible for their own upkeep? He emphasised repeatedly that he worked to earn his own daily bread. If people were unwilling to work, then they should suffer the consequences. Yet we were to believe that after many, many years, he returned to Jerusalem with this money? Had he wanted to buy the goodwill of the Christians in Jerusalem? Had he wanted to show that he was trustworthy, that he was committed to their cause? Whatever his intentions, he hadn’t been welcomed back with open arms like a prodigal son. In fact, before he knew it, he’d found himself in conflict with everything and everyone. An angry mob of Jews dragged him from the temple and he only escaped being killed by surrendering to the Romans, who then arrested him. He was detained at a Roman base in Caesarea for two years, and in that time, no one came to help him, not even his Christian brothers, nor anyone from the church in Jerusalem. And the money he had collected was never seen again.
Most of chapter 10 was about Paul’s opini
on of himself and his own selflessness. An odd thing to pat yourself on the back for, Peter thought. Paul was using the language of a soldier again.
For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds.
But chapters 8 and 9, Peter concluded, were nothing more than begging letters playing on the Corinthians’ sense of guilt. ‘Hadn’t the Christians in Macedonia, who are much poorer than you,’ he urged them, ‘given beyond their means? And they gave entirely of their own accord, but you I have to ask! Jesus became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich. How can you refuse to follow the example of our Lord? By doing so, you will not only disappoint me, but also God …’ And so he went on, on the one hand telling them ‘this is not a command’ and ‘you should only do it if you want to’ but on the other hand …
It was all about collecting donations, which of course, was also like reaping in a way. But what did it have to do with his next step? Clearly, they wanted him to go to a place where money was donated, but that happened in every church.
Peter closed the bible and put it down again. He regretted eating the Mars bar now. It had made him thirsty and he had no water left.
He lay down on his side, keeping his feet on the floor. Despite being utterly exhausted, he wanted to make sure he stayed awake.
But less than a minute later, he was fast asleep.
THE FOURTH VISION
And behold, I saw a man with hair like the mane of a lion. The Father anoints his hands with honey to keep them pure from every evil, from every crime and contamination. He anoints his tongue with honey to keep it pure from every sin. A burning torch is passed over his naked body. The flames lick at his skin, the smell of singed hair fills the temple. And so they make him clean, and so he becomes a new man.
St Paul's Labyrinth Page 20
