It was not difficult to find the flat stretch of rooftop they were looking for with the looming bulk of the Gravensteen to orient them. The traverse along the gutter was the worst of the route; the rest was relatively easy. They slid along the ridge of a tiled roof, riding it like the scaled back of a dragon, climbed down a peeling section of whitewashed wall and found themselves in a cramped and filthy corner behind a stout chimney stack with four pots on top of it.
Veerle knew that chimney stack. The last time she had seen it, she had been staring down from the top of the Gravensteen, straining to catch a glimpse of movement behind it. It had been night, and what light there was had been the sickly amber of streetlamps and the castle illuminations, interleaved with jagged patches of black shadow. Now everything was defined clearly by the bright morning light. All the same, she had no difficulty recognizing the chimney stack: those four pots were distinctive. Marnix’s killer had stood exactly where she and Bram were standing.
The thought appalled Veerle. Mere hours separated her and Bram from a monster. He had occupied the same space they were occupying – breathed the same air. Suddenly she didn’t want to be in that confined space. She stepped over the corner of an adjoining roof and out into the open.
She saw Marnix almost immediately. What had been a person – Bram’s friend – was now a lump, a shapeless black patch like a sack of refuse, huddled on the gritty rooftop near the parapet.
Veerle was conscious of Bram at her shoulder, his breathing an audible series of shudders. As if by mutual consent they began to walk slowly towards that huddled shape, each wanting to know but not really wanting to see, moving forward but delaying the evil moment.
Marnix was lying on his back, his legs drawn up slightly and twisted to the side. He was wearing dark trousers, the kind you’d have worn for climbing or hillwalking in cold weather, and a soft shell jacket in a colour that was nearly but not quite black. Under the jacket was a light-coloured T-shirt with a Rorschach stain of dark reddish brown on the upper part of it. There was more of that red-brown on the pale exposed skin and the surface of the roof.
Veerle saw that Marnix had very dark hair; it was thick and rather dry so that it stuck up in places like the thick fur of an animal. He was unshaven, and the dark stubble stood out against the skin, which was so pallid that it had an almost grey tinge in the cold morning sunlight. His mouth was open and so were his eyes. Veerle saw that they were blue-grey. There was a strange fixed look to that dead gaze that made her think of the opaqueness of glass tumbled by the sea.
Under Marnix’s jaw there was a bloody and mangled rent.
Veerle wanted to turn her head and look away, but she couldn’t. She just stood there, taking it in: the twisted body, frozen in place by Death; the open eyes; the gash under the jaw.
Bram made an incomprehensible noise beside her, a harsh sound in his throat as though he were choking on what he was seeing. Veerle reached out blindly for his hand, gripping it with her fingers; it was lifeless in hers, as though Bram were unaware that she was even there.
After a moment he said, ‘I thought – I was hoping . . .’
‘I know,’ said Veerle, her own voice unnatural in her ears. Bram had hoped that perhaps she had been mistaken, that there would be nothing to find up here. Perhaps he had even been talking himself into thinking that she, Veerle, was deluded – seeing murder where there was none. She was, after all, the ultimate unreliable witness – the girl who had seen a dead man trying to drag the living back into Death with him. But Veerle had known what she had seen from the top of the Gravensteen: it wasn’t a practical joke or a half-hearted scuffle. It was the brutal extinguishing of life.
The body still held her gaze with some grim magnetism.
‘What’s that?’ she said suddenly.
‘What?’ said Bram. He sounded groggy, punch drunk.
‘That white stuff.’ Veerle let go of Bram’s hand and pointed. There was a line of it – or at least, there had been to begin with, before the white powder, whatever it was, had become soaked in the red-brown stain on Marnix’s T-shirt. A wavering blurry line, running across Marnix’s chest like a knife slash. Where there was no blood it showed clearly; where it crossed the drenched T-shirt it was visible only as a texture.
Salt, thought Veerle. Then she thought, Salt, like that line of it we saw on the roof, the first time Bram took me up there. Salt, like they found on Daan De Moor’s body. She could make no immediate sense of it, but she understood that there was some meaning here, something she wasn’t grasping.
Bram said, ‘And what’s that?’
Neither of them liked to get too close to the body, with those twisted limbs and those wide open eyes. Instead they leaned over, trying to see.
‘It looks like a nail,’ said Veerle eventually. ‘An old one. It’s all black.’
Bram moved forward, brushing her as he did so, and she reached out to try to grab his arm, to tell him not to touch the body; that was a job for the police. Too late: Bram was already squatting on the roof, but the thing he picked up was not the iron nail, it was something else, something that lay within an arm’s length of Marnix’s dead hand.
Bram picked it up carefully, making sure not to leave tracks on the dusty roof surface with his fingers. Then he showed it to Veerle.
‘Marnix’s mobile phone.’ He slid it into his pocket.
‘Shouldn’t we leave it here?’
Bram shook his head. ‘We need it.’
‘What for?’
Bram looked at her, and his expression was so fierce that Veerle was taken aback. ‘I’m not leaving him here. How often does anyone come up here? Practically never. We have to call the police.’
‘I know, Bram.’
‘We use my phone or your phone, the police are going to have the number in two seconds flat. There are probably a few public call boxes left in Ghent, but the only ones I can think of are at the station, which is full of people. You want someone standing next to you listening to every word?’
‘No,’ said Veerle. She didn’t want to argue with Bram. This was grief wearing anger like mourning dress. There was nothing she could say to make it better.
After a moment Bram said abruptly, ‘We should go.’
‘Bram,’ said Veerle reluctantly, ‘I meant what I said. I don’t want to go back the same way.’
‘We’ll try the way we saw Marnix coming,’ said Bram.
They backed away from the body. Veerle looked at the flat roof surface, at the sweeps and gouges in the accumulated dust and grime. She didn’t think either she or Bram had left an identifiable footprint in any of that muck, but who could say for certain? It was a relief when they got to the far corner of the flat section, and were able to climb into the valley between two roofs from which they had seen Marnix appear the night before. Here the surfaces were smooth, rain washing most debris into a central gutter.
They followed the gully to its end and found themselves on another flat section of roof. Perhaps it had originally been intended for a roof garden, although the only signs of occupancy were the droppings of birds. There was a small structure like a hut with a door in it, and the door was ajar. When they looked inside, the sunlight behind them showed steps leading down into the dimness below.
Bram looked at Veerle and raised a finger to his lips. She knew what he was thinking: there could be anyone in there. She was past caring, though; all she knew was that she was not going to walk along that parapet again, the one with the drop. No way.
They descended the stairs and realized that they were in an apartment block. How did Marnix get in here? Veerle wondered. She supposed they would never know.
They moved cautiously, making as little noise as possible, but all it would take was for someone to open their door and challenge them, and they would be in trouble. Especially when the police found out what was on the roof . . .
In the event, though, they got to the ground floor without incident. The front door had a simple pin tumbler lock, opened from the inside by turning a little knob. There was no need for a key. A minute later they were back on the street, walking away from the door without looking back.
Their bags and Bram’s sweat top were still inside the other building, the one they had broken into, so they went round the block to see whether it was safe to go in and retrieve them. Incredibly, the broken window seemed to have gone unnoticed. Veerle kept watch while Bram retrieved their belongings. Nobody came down the street while she waited. She saw one person pass the end of it, but they didn’t look her way. Then Bram was back, and they were hurrying away, putting as much space as they could between themselves and the empty house.
They walked for a long time, until the Gravensteen was no longer visible behind the buildings that surrounded them and the nature of the streets had changed – they were no longer passing groups of tourists and little boutiques; instead the streets were quiet and cool and they could glimpse the green surface of a canal.
Bram stopped and took Marnix’s mobile phone out of his pocket. He and Veerle looked at each other.
Do it, telegraphed Veerle with her eyes.
Bram turned away, the phone to his ear, concentrating on the call. He spoke rapidly and urgently, and Veerle was surprised how quickly he had finished.
‘They wanted me to stay on the line,’ he told Veerle grimly. ‘They must be joking.’
Already he was prising off the back of the phone, levering out the battery with his fingernails. He took out the SIM card too, and put both of them in his pocket.
They walked on for a while, each lost in their own thoughts.
Salt, Veerle was thinking, remembering the stuff that had been sprinkled over the body. But had it been salt? There was no way to be sure. It could have been sugar, or some kind of cleaning product, anything white and powdery. It made no sense at all. Why scatter something like that on someone you had just killed? Even if it had been something poisonous or corrosive, it couldn’t hurt Marnix now. It couldn’t make him any more dead.
And the nail? She wondered whether that was simply incidental, a piece of random debris. But she couldn’t think where it had come from. It wasn’t as though Marnix had been climbing something studded with them.
They came to a building site, temporarily deserted, and Bram ducked under fluttering tape to pick up a large chunk of stone. He put Marnix’s mobile phone on the ground and struck it several times, smashing it until it was nothing but a heap of plastic shards. He swept them into his hand and pocketed them. Later, they came to a drain and he dropped the pieces down through the grille into the obscurity beyond. The battery went into a rubbish bin on another street, and the SIM card into a drain somewhere else. Marnix’s phone had ceased to exist.
They walked on, but any sense of purpose had evaporated now that the call had been made.
We got away with it, thought Veerle, but the knowledge gave her no pleasure. She kept thinking about that stiff and silent figure on the rooftop. The dark hair, thick as fur. The skin that was bloodless and almost grey. Those open eyes. Veerle thought she would never forget those.
She wished she could go home and climb into bed and pull the covers over her head, but of course that was impossible. The school trip to Amsterdam was not due to return until the middle of the evening. The rest of the day stretched out ahead of her, featureless and dismal.
They walked on.