The House with Nine Locks, page 32
‘For a new teaching certificate,’ Meunier said, dropping them onto his desk. ‘Our last job on the premises. The Ministry of Education wasn’t after anything elaborate, of course – not too worried about forgery. It would have been nice to go out with something more illustrious.’
De Smet unrolled the design. The paper was waxy and stiff. There were two layers, although one was almost blank except for the state emblem. ‘A thief could use these designs to make his own plates, couldn’t he?’
Meunier seemed convinced that the major was wasting his time. He took the opportunity to count the contents of the cash box. ‘If he had the necessary skills, and the right materials, and if he could somehow make his plates before anyone noticed the designs were missing – and all that without being observed, then yes, I suppose he could.’
Meunier closed the cash box and looked over his shoulder with a smirk on his face.
‘Which means he worked at night,’ de Smet said.
Meunier’s smirk vanished. ‘At night? Where would he do that?’
‘I’m guessing here, right where you’re sitting. That’s where I’d do it. Less danger of being disturbed. I don’t think the lock on your office would be much of an impediment for a craftsman who works in metal. And if he had the safe combination …’
Meunier eased himself back from the desk, a look on his face between disquiet and distaste. ‘It’s impossible. It takes weeks to make a plate – months sometimes. How would they come and go without being seen? It’s absurd.’
De Smet handed back the designs. ‘He only had to manage it once: once in, once out. He broke out the night of the fire. That was the point of it: to cover the noise of a window being demolished. And sometime before that, a few weeks in fact, someone got him in – through the door.’
‘People don’t just walk in here, Major,’ Meunier said. ‘They need identification. Even tradesmen, even plumbers.’
‘I remember a press event here, a month before the fire, when the new designs were announced,’ de Smet said. ‘The place was full of photographers and journalists.’
‘All of them with the appropriate accreditation, which would have been checked.’
De Smet saw no need to answer this point. Judging from the sweat on Monsieur Meunier’s brow, even he could see that if a man could forge banknotes well enough to fool most of the tellers in Belgium, forging a press pass was not going to present a challenge.
Somewhere in the bureau there had been a hiding place, big enough to conceal a man and whatever he needed to survive. De Smet went through the building, carrying a torch, Monsieur Meunier walking ahead, pointing out the irrelevant and the obvious as they went, like a reluctant tour guide.
An attic space under the roof showed promise. There was enough room, even a small circular window in the end wall. But it was a long drop to the landing below, and manoeuvring the ladder would have been noisy and difficult, especially in the dark. De Smet lifted the floorboards in what had been a meeting room, though the furniture and the pictures were now gone. He found enough space underneath for a man to conceal himself, provided he didn’t move an inch. A few days there would have left him crippled.
The cellars were bare and well lit. De Smet went around the walls, checking for anything untoward, but found nothing: the brickwork was solid and in decent repair. The biggest room housed some of the old brewing equipment: copper piping, grimy vessels made of wood and steel, a stack of quarter-barrels playing host to a family of mice.
‘Well, that’s everywhere,’ Meunier said. ‘If it’s all the same, I really must get back to—’
As if to prove his point a telephone started ringing above them.
Partly hidden behind the stack of barrels was an old mash tun. De Smet remembered seeing it before, though he had hardly given it a second glance. In the top of the rusted steel cylinder there was a hatch, through which the ingredients would once have been added. It was just big enough for a man to slip through, provided he was slender.
‘You go ahead, monsieur,’ he said. ‘Answer the telephone. It might be important. I’ll only be a minute.’
Meunier grunted and made his way back up the stairs. When he was gone, de Smet went to the mash tun and shone his torch through the hatch: he saw a blanket, scraps of paper, what looked like a bundle of rags. Something shiny reflected the beam of the torch. De Smet fished it out with a handkerchief. It was a glazed earthenware bottle. The label advertised a brand of genever.
There might still be fingerprints on the glaze, physical evidence tying Lennart de Wolf to the scene, perhaps his brother-in-law as well. In a court of law it might be vital to establish how the de Wolf family business got started: with murder. All that remained to be found were de Wolf’s plates. No doubt his daughter could help with that.
De Smet stood alone in the darkness, picturing the conclusion of the hunt: the pale, handcuffed defendant, the guilty verdict, the sentence. But what then? He shone the torch at the gaping hatch. What then? A few column inches in the newspaper, certainly. A pat on the back from a chastened Colonel Delhaye perhaps. If he was lucky, an offer to stay on at Federal Police Headquarters for another year, in the interests of saving face: a temporary truce between the new brooms and the old guard. A bigger clock when they finally got rid of him. Then nothing.
And the de Wolf girl? Seven to ten years later she would be free, perhaps sooner than that. Forgive and forget. She would recover the money she had hidden in numbered bank accounts or write her story and live well on the proceeds. He could picture her visiting him in his poky flat, in the interests of research, old adversaries reconciled. She would feel sorry for him, living alone with only his memories and his old cases for company. When they were done talking, she would promise to come and visit him again, and fail to keep her word.
De Smet shook his head. It was not going to happen that way.
FORTY-NINE
On Monday evening, Adelais packed the new batch of notes into a shoulder bag, and rode the Vespa north towards the docks. A letter addressed to her had arrived at the hotel that morning. It read simply:
Monday 10pm
‘Safari’
2 Zeilstraat
Muide-Meulestede
C
It had rained in the afternoon. The wind that blew in her face was clinging and raw. Adelais followed a set of tramlines for one kilometre, until they brought her to the water, then crossed over the Muide Bridge. The district on the other side was crammed into a narrow tongue of land between the ship canal and the three biggest docks in the city. At the end of the cross-streets, the dim red lights of cranes and moored vessels hung motionless in the sky. A municipal police car went past on the quayside, but the traffic had already thinned to a trickle. Nothing moved on the narrow pavements.
Safari turned out to be a bar. It stood on the corner of Zeilstraat behind frosted windows, its faded sign painted in zebra stripes. Adelais parked the scooter and went inside, her arrival announced by the clack of a heavy bead curtain strung across the doorway. Inside it was dark and smoky. Around the walls were booths, each equipped with a table and a light with an orange shade. The benches were covered in brown vinyl. A man at the bar looked Adelais up and down and turned away. There was no sign of Uncle Cornelis.
Adelais tightened her grip on her shoulder bag and walked over to an empty booth. Music was coming from a loudspeaker over her head. The guitar rhythms were intricate and strange, and the singer sang in a language she could not understand. There were no other women in the place, and no space to dance. A clock above the bar read five minutes past ten. She wondered why they were meeting here, and how long she was supposed to wait.
A skinny young man appeared, wearing a purple batik shirt. He tamped out a cigarette and wandered over. ‘What’ll it be?’
‘The lady isn’t staying.’ Uncle Cornelis was standing behind him, dressed in the same patched blue coat he had worn last time, but with a black woollen cap pulled down over his forehead. ‘I’ll take a beer.’
‘Two beers,’ Adelais held up two fingers so that the barman could not be in any doubt. He shrugged and went back to the bar.
Uncle Cornelis slid into the booth. ‘I suppose we have a minute or two.’ His gaze fell on the shoulder bag. ‘How did you get on?’
‘It’s done.’
‘All of it?’
Adelais nodded.
‘As if you’d let me down.’ Uncle Cornelis waited for the beers to arrive, then reached across the table.
Adelais took the bag off her shoulder, but hung on to it. ‘You have to tell me something. It’s important.’
Uncle Cornelis frowned and sat back. From somewhere upstairs came a raised voice, a woman shrieking, angry. A door slammed. ‘We need this deal, Adelais, for the future. You trust me, don’t you?’
‘It’s not the deal I want to know about.’
‘Then what is it?’
Adelais looked down at the shoulder bag resting on her lap, at one hundred and fifty thousand francs, expertly forged. ‘Pauwel Verlinden.’
Uncle Cornelis remained silent.
‘You know who I’m talking about, don’t you?’ Still Uncle Cornelis said nothing. ‘My mother used to visit his grave. She put flowers there. Why did she do that? The grave of a man who died ten years ago?’
Uncle Cornelis shook his head. ‘I didn’t know she’d been doing that.’
‘She tried to keep it a secret. I don’t think even my father knew.’
‘That’s something, at least.’
‘Why? Why did she do it?’
‘There isn’t time now, Adelais.’
‘I know about the fire in Anderlecht. What did my mother have to do with it?’
Uncle Cornelis picked up his glass, and put it down again without drinking. ‘Some things it’s better not to know. And you don’t have to know this. Why should you carry the burden, when it’s not your fault?’
Adelais tightened her grip on the shoulder bag. Uncle Cornelis knew better than to think she was bluffing. He sucked his teeth for a moment, before relenting with a heavy sigh. ‘I blame myself, Adelais. I should never … I should never have let her get involved. We needed another hand and we didn’t trust anyone else. Family, you know?’
Adelais felt the blood begin to drain from her face. ‘Involve her how?’
At last Uncle Cornelis took a drink. Adelais could sense the wheels going round in his head, trying to decide what to tell her, what to hide.
‘All Odilie had to do was smash through a window, once the commotion started.’
‘You mean the fire, don’t you?’
Uncle Cornelis nodded. ‘A diversion, that’s all it was. That was my job, start a fire in an empty warehouse.’
‘What about my father?’
Uncle Cornelis nodded. ‘Lennart was inside. He spent three weeks in there, inside the bureau. It was a feat of endurance, what he went through: working all night, hiding by day, not making a sound. Think of it, every night for the best part of a month, in winter. And the work was good, Adelais. I was afraid it would go to pieces, but it didn’t.’ Uncle Cornelis smiled. ‘You’re a lot like your papa in that way. You get the job done, no matter what. That’s how I know he’d be proud of you.’
Adelais shook her head. The old fear was there. She wanted to tell Uncle Cornelis to stop.
His voice softened. ‘The best engraver in Flanders, Adelais, and they wouldn’t give him work because of the war, because he helped make banknotes during the occupation. They called him a collaborator, but he had to make a living. He had a young family. He had—’
‘Tell me what happened.’
Uncle Cornelis frowned. ‘When the work was done, he had to get out of the building. The window was the only way, but he couldn’t break it from the inside. There’d have been all the wrong kinds of questions.’
‘How did Verlinden die?’
Uncle Cornelis looked at his watch. ‘You should get going now. I don’t want to have to introduce you. There’s no need.’
‘Tell me.’
Uncle Cornelis ran a hand across his mouth. These were things he had never intended to share, but Adelais had him cornered. ‘All right. At first, everything went fine, like clockwork. The other two had already made it to the car, but then I got held up. I had to take a detour to avoid being seen. Your mother came looking for me, thought I might have hurt myself because I’d been up on the roof. Verlinden saw her from a window. He was already inside the warehouse, rescuing a cat or something stupid. Odilie panicked. The fire was on the other side of the building. She thought she was buying us some time, a minute or two. She thought Verlinden would break out. She couldn’t know the man was going to pass out from the fumes. It was just bad luck.’
Adelais’s mouth was dry. For a moment, she thought she was going to faint. ‘She locked him in, didn’t she? She locked him in.’
Uncle Cornelis put a hand on her arm. ‘She didn’t know, Adelais. She couldn’t have known.’
Adelais wasn’t listening. She was imagining Verlinden’s death, the terror as he tried in vain to escape the inferno, the engulfing flames, the singed and charring flesh – as her mother would have imagined them a thousand times since that night: a prelude to the fires of Hell that would one day consume her damned soul.
But there was more. The truth unspooled in her mind. Adelais could not stop it. Her father would have said no to Uncle Cornelis’s plan. Maybe he resented his treatment, but he wasn’t a criminal, and Adelais’s mother was God-fearing, devout. They would have needed persuading, motivation. So Adelais had been recruited, to break down their resolve. Poor Adelais, who had been dealt a cruel hand in life. Poor little Adelais, who had done nothing to deserve such bad luck, and who had no future without treatments the de Wolfs could not afford. If I had such a daughter, there is nothing I would not do for her, nothing I would not risk.
The plan had cost Pauwel Verlinden his life and guilt had descended on the de Wolfs like a plague. It had taken her mother and her father, leaving Adelais alone. Uncle Cornelis’s plan had destroyed her family, and what had she done? She had gone along with it, completed it, put it at the centre of her life.
Uncle Cornelis had said her father would be proud.
‘Odilie didn’t mean any harm,’ Uncle Cornelis was saying. ‘It was just bad luck, like I told her, one of those things that … happen. An innocent mistake.’
Adelais pulled her arm away. Didn’t he see? That innocent mistake had destroyed her mother’s life. She looked into Uncle Cornelis’s eyes, but saw no trace there of the same anguish, no shame for dragging his sister into a criminal scheme for which she was utterly unprepared. She saw only ruefulness at life’s unpredictability and other people’s inability to accept it. For the first time, Adelais saw into his soul: it was unyielding, cold.
A car pulled up outside. Adelais heard its doors open and close. Uncle Cornelis straightened up. ‘You should go now. You don’t need to meet these people.’ He gave Adelais a smile and lowered his voice. ‘We’ll be all right, you and me. We don’t make mistakes.’
Adelais threw her beer in his face. She dumped the shoulder bag in his lap and walked out of the bar. A couple of men passed her outside the door. She did not look at their faces.
FIFTY
Sebastian Pieters was having a dream in which Marie-Astrid, his one-time fiancée, had locked him in a bathing hut and was laughing with her lovers on the other side of the door. He was woken by the sound of his landlady shouting up the stairs.
‘Mr Pieters? Mr Pieters!’
The alarm clock read seven o’clock and it was dark outside. In his dream, he had been naked. He quickly checked beneath the covers and was grateful to discover he was still wearing his pyjamas.
‘Mr Pieters, the telephone!’
The telephone was in the front hall. For a fee, paying guests were permitted to use it for outgoing calls, but Mrs Goethals made it clear that the number was to be given out sparingly, and on no account to tradesmen. She was a landlady, she said, not a bellboy.
‘I’m coming!’
It entered Sebastian’s head that the call might be from Marie-Astrid. But what could she possibly want with him? If she was hoping they could get back together the answer was going to be no.
The room was cold. He pulled on his dressing gown and hurriedly searched for his slippers. He found one of them under the bed, but the other was nowhere to be seen. He went down the stairs barefoot. Mrs Goethals’s door closed with a bang. The receiver was on the hall table.
‘Hello?’
‘Sebastian? It’s me.’
‘Adelais. Thank God.’
‘I’m sorry, it’s early. I was afraid I’d miss you.’
‘It’s fine. I’m just glad you’re not …’ Sebastian coughed. ‘I’m glad it’s you. Is everything all right?’ There was a pause on the line. Sebastian felt his stomach squirm. ‘Adelais?’
He heard her take a deep breath.
‘Sebastian, if I asked you if we could begin again, if we could wipe away everything that’s happened since you left Ghent, all of it, what would—’
‘I’d say, I wish we could.’
‘And if that meant going away, you and me, somewhere far away, without telling anyone, at least for a while, and going soon – very, very soon – what would you say then?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘What would you say?’
A dustcart went by outside, rattling the windows. Sebastian heard a creak behind Mrs Goethals’s door. She was listening, of course. He lowered his voice. ‘Just tell me what to pack.’
She knew where to go. She had seen it in films: a place where people found themselves, where they made a fresh start. Two thousand years of history put things into perspective. She had checked the flight timetables before she called Sebastian. Now she rode into town and bought the tickets at a travel agent. In one week’s time their plane would take off at eleven o’clock in the morning from the airport at Zaventem. Sebastian would meet her at the check-in desk.
