Purgatory Read online

  He noticed Dewaal writing in her black notebook. She caught him staring. “I’m just trying to . . .” she said, as if she needed to apologize. And she made a gesture, encompassing the clearing, as if she wanted to say: I need to write a couple of things down to give meaning to our presence, as if this is a routine police investigation. He understood, and he took some more pictures.

  After a while he switched off the camera and returned it to his bag. They stood side by side in the circle of death. “It’s a ritual,” she said. “It serves no other purpose.”

  “You realize no one was supposed to discover this.”

  “Maybe not,” she admitted. “A ritual doesn’t need the attention of the outside world. And I guess if you do something like this, you want to avoid other people knowing about it. Certainly, if you have very, very personal reasons to commit a crime like this, this far removed from the outside world. In the end, it’s enough that it’s done.”

  “And your informant sent us here because he felt we needed to see this?”

  “He wanted me to see this. Because he trusts me.”

  “A ritual.”

  She looked up at him. “That’s what it is, I guess.”

  “We need to identify them.”

  “The victims? Right away? I don’t think we can . . .”

  “I mean, let’s get a forensic team over.” He inspected her pale face. She looked ill. They both were going to be sorry they came here.

  “Our Belgian colleagues? I guess we need to alert them as soon as we can. We don’t have cell reception here, but when we get back to the car, I’ll alert them right away. Problem will be to keep this out of the press.” She looked past him. “Is that a cabin or something?”

  At the edge of the clearing, slightly higher against the slope, stood a small rectangular building that looked as gray and lifeless as everything around it. Dewaal stepped away from Eekhaut and approached the building. He went after her, keeping the camera ready.

  A ritual. Nothing good could come of this. Seven bodies. Why seven? He had a bad feeling about symbolic numbers like that.

  The cabin turned out to be a run-down and roughly constructed building made of thin tree trunks. It had a door but no window. It didn’t look as if it would serve as a permanent residence. The roof was of corrugated iron, rusty under a partial layer of snow.

  Dewaal stopped and made no move to open the door. Eekhaut could easily guess what she was thinking. Inside, there would be more horrors. More bodies. More evidence of a perverse ritual.

  She was also looking at something on the wall.

  He approached and saw what it was.

  His blood ran cold. He forgot to use the camera.

  On the wall of the cabin, close to the door, was writing. It took him some effort to decipher the words. Someone had patiently, probably with their fingers, left behind these three lines:

  This world seems to take forever,

  But it is only

  The dream of a sleeper.

  Dewaal spoke up. “It’s blood. It is written in blood.”

  Someone had taken the trouble to write these words in blood. That same person, or persons, had probably chained seven people on stakes and set them on fire. The words on the wall were almost black. None of this had happened recently, but neither had it happened long ago.

  “Maybe,” Eekhaut suggested, “it’s a collective suicide. We cannot yet exclude anything, however horrible.”

  Dewaal looked at him in surprise. He understood. Why had he wanted to comfort himself with such an illusion? A collective suicide? It was something he wanted to cling to, while he wanted not to believe how much evil there was in the world.

  “Nobody,” she said, “commits suicide this way.”

  She probably knew more about this case. She had an informant.

  “Want to go inside?” she said.

  “The cabin?”

  “We have to. And we have to search the whole clearing, for clues.”

  “Clues? Right now?”

  “This is a murder investigation, Walter. You’re experienced enough to know how things work.”

  Her face had gotten some of its color back, except for the tip of her nose. “When I was carted off from Brussels to your unit in Amsterdam, I assumed I’d left my homicide days behind me. I still remember what the assignment read: to investigate subversive organizations and to—”

  “I know exactly what the terms of your assignment stated and what I’m responsible for, Eekhaut,” Dewaal said sharply. The hood of her parka was still flat against her pack, but she didn’t seem cold anymore. There was a fire in her eyes, a kind of fever. Considering the circumstances, he didn’t find that remarkable.

  “You want me to walk in there, into that cabin.”

  “Well,” she said peevishly, “or I’ll do it myself. I just assumed, with you being the alpha male and all, it would be obvious which one of us would walk in there first. You don’t want a female officer running risks, do you? Would be an insult to your manhood?”

  He would normally not let himself be challenged by her. At least not this way. But now, with the cold and the gruesome scene behind them, he couldn’t refuse. What could there be waiting for them inside the cabin that could be worse than the charred corpses?

  A lot of things. A lot of things could be worse.

  He flicked on his flashlight and pulled out his gun.

  He kicked open the door of the hut. It went easily enough, frame and all. Rotten, completely.

  From the cabin an old, musty smell emerged, and Eekhaut knew it would linger in his nostrils for the rest of the day. And it would be in his clothes. And everywhere. A basement stench, a cellar kept closed for much too long.

  He did what he had done in the past, under similar circumstances. He thought of Fox Mulder in The X-Files and stepped over what remained of the threshold.

  “What do you see?” Dewaal asked, standing behind him in the grim light and clean air. Eekhaut kept his gun ready and the flashlight in front of him. The cabin had no window, and he blocked the light from behind him. The beam of the flashlight moved like a lingering finger on what passed for walls and then over the floor.

  “It’s dead,” he finally said, over his shoulder.

  He enjoyed the short silence before Dewaal said, “What is?” The timbre of her voice told him she expected the worst. It being dead didn’t seem to reassure her. “What is dead?”

  He stepped back, then stepped outside, turned toward her. “It has tentacles and the body of a spider.”

  For a moment, he saw horror in her expression. Then she frowned. “Tentacles?”

  “One of the Old Gods,” he said. “Never read Lovecraft? The details have eluded me, but it was something with tentacles and . . .”

  She might have slapped him, under other circumstances. Like when nobody was around. Which was the case here. But she didn’t. Because she held her gun in her right hand.

  “It’s a fox,” he said. “His head shot off or something. Probably used for the bloody message on the wall.”

  She abruptly turned and stepped away from the cabin. He had behaved badly, as usual, although he felt a bit sorry for her. Just a bit. It had been, after all, her idea to come wandering around in the Ardennes, far from her jurisdiction, based on nothing more than a message from an informant and a set of coordinates. An informant who assured her something big was going on. Well, that at least seemed correct. Seven corpses and a dead fox in a cabin. That would not sit well with animal rights organizations. Things would go downhill after that.

  Cut it out, he thought. You only make things worse with your stupid jokes. These people died horribly.

  Dewaal holstered her gun again and turned toward him. “What’s the time?”

  He glanced at his watch. “Bit after three.”

  “Mmm. There’s not much daylight left. We’re not going to spend the night here. How long will it take to get back to the car?”

  “An hour.”

  “We have
to get back right now.”

  “And all this?”

  “Nothing here is going to abscond on its own account, is it, Chief Inspector? What does this whole setup tell us? Tourists not welcome. I don’t think anyone will come and meddle with the evidence before we can bring in the circus. Once we’re in the car, I’ll make calls to everyone, including the local authorities and our own people, and with luck they’ll all show up by tomorrow morning. Enough people, I assume, to explore every square inch of this place. Can you live with that, Chief Inspector? Otherwise, I invite you to remain here, but on your own.”

  He wouldn’t do that. Not even Fox Mulder would do that. Not here, with the hideous shrieking of the victims still resounding among the trees.

  They walked back together. He wasn’t surprised she’d snapped at him, considering the circumstances. She seemed furious—furious for the seven lives destroyed in this terrible place.

  MONDAY

  Amsterdam. Three weeks later.

  1

  “TWO?” CHIEF COMMISSIONER DEWAAL said with a frown that seemed to have taken permanent possession of her. “Are you serious? It took them three weeks to tell us they found usable DNA for only two of the victims?”

  Eekhaut, neatly dressed in gray corduroy trousers, a dark blue shirt, and a wool sports jacket, sat across from her in her stern and austere office at the Kerkstraat, in the heart of Amsterdam between Keizersgracht and Herengracht, two of the main grachten or canals around the center of the city. He had been going through a leather folder that contained documents and photographs, all pertaining to the Ardennes incident.

  Eekhaut knew in advance what these pictures would show him. Things he had seen all too often for the past three weeks, which were gradually losing their meaning. Two or three of the barely recognizable faces might provide clues for the investigation. Until then, they gave nothing away but proof of unbearable suffering.

  Brief suffering, Eekhaut hoped. He would probably never know how long it had taken these people to die, unless some specialist told him. But he didn’t want to know. A look at these remains showed him more than enough.

  As Dewaal had predicted, the clearing in the forest wasn’t an isolated patch of the Ardennes by the morning after they’d found it. At one point, Eekhaut counted thirty people, who had all had to walk for an hour through the forest, as it was impossible for vehicles to get any closer. Which by itself was remarkable, given the effort of the murderer, or murderers, to get their victims to that place.

  Local police, Belgian federal police, two teams from the Victims Identification Unit, a federal prosecutor who would lead the Belgian side of the investigation, pathologists, some members of the local fire brigade, two foresters, and four men in suits and black overcoats who avoided talking to anyone but each other. Probably State Security, Eekhaut assumed. All the members of the extended family in one spot, as if this were a picnic. He knew none of those present and didn’t feel the need to talk to anyone, which suited him fine. It suited everybody fine, since Dewaal, along with her superiors, had decided to keep this discovery from the newspapers, at least until any real progress was made on the identity of the victims.

  Three weeks later, and surprisingly—seeing the number of people who had been involved from the beginning—the press still had not published or broadcast anything concerning the affair.

  Everyone present wanted to know how Dewaal and Eekhaut had ended up at this precise spot and what they knew. Dewaal kept them at a distance, referring to an ongoing investigation by the Dutch State Security. The prosecutor, who spoke Dutch with a thick French accent, reminded her she was operating on Belgian soil, without an international mandate. She reminded him that she represented an international organization and was accompanied by a Belgian colleague, so no, she wasn’t intruding on anyone’s territory. The Belgian colleague said he had no intention of interfering, not in the presence of the prosecutor. He had never been friendly with prosecutors. This being a small world, the man might at some point recall Eekhaut’s reputation from his time in Brussels.

  The prosecutor also asked why such a high-ranking Dutch police officer would want to come all the way to the Ardennes and do the fieldwork herself, instead of sending a team. Dewaal shrugged him off. She would not explain—she didn’t want to jeopardize the confidentiality of her information.

  Seven black body bags had been laid out in a neat row, as if order needed to be preserved to compensate for the terrible fate of the victims. As if it would make their final moments bearable. The members of the forensics team, clad in white overalls like ghosts crafted out of snow, gathered the stakes and the chains, while others walked the perimeter of the crime scene, looking for traces. Ultimately there was nothing helpful to be found, not even in the cabin.

  Nevertheless, samples of everything were taken, because with a site like this, no one could afford to be negligent. A helicopter was needed to take pictures of the site and the surroundings. Even the dead fox was bagged and carried off. By the end of the day, a Dutch team of forensic investigators arrived on the scene. It was assumed that at least some of the victims could be Dutch, given the background story Dewaal had shared with just three people at that time.

  The days after had been particularly busy, especially for Dewaal and Eekhaut, who drew up a strategy for dealing with the details of the investigation, although they were hindered by the lack of information about the victims. Dewaal wanted a small team from the Bureau only, making sure no information went out to other departments and certainly not to the press. She drew up requests for additional expenses, overtime, and an extension of the Bureau’s jurisdiction. All this resulted in almost endless counter-requests for revisions of budgets, estimates for the extra work hours, and warnings against meddling with foreign law enforcement agencies.

  Inspector Van Gils, an old hand at avoiding both red tape and annoying chores, was initially added to the team as the part-time third member. He would snoop around in Amsterdam and have chats with people he knew from the old days. He was not directly going to mention the Ardennes or the burning of seven people, but he would carefully ask around for missing persons and strange tales of abduction. The contacts he had, however, were usually petty criminals, not the sort of people who would go all-out on apocalyptic rituals.

  All this had started, three weeks earlier, with Dewaal showing Eekhaut, in confidence, a piece of paper with some numbers on it. He had just finished his third coffee of the morning, more than his usual ration. He needed the caffeine, having come to terms with Linda, his girlfriend, having left the night before for Africa. They would be separated for several months, a decision that had been hard on him, but one she had made after much soul-searching. The previous evening, as a sort of farewell, they had visited several pubs, and things had gotten a bit out of hand. He had said a proper goodbye in the early morning, after which she left with her luggage.

  “Do you know what these are?” Dewaal had asked him. She shoved the piece of paper toward him. It was half a page from a yellow pad, with a series of numbers on it.

  “Numbers,” he said. Good thing he’d had his coffee, since she seemed to want to test him with some trick question.

  She sighed. “I know they’re numbers, obviously, but what do they mean?”

  He cocked his head. “Coordinates?” They looked like coordinates. But they could be anything. Winning numbers of last week’s lotto, for instance.

  “You’re awake after all. Good. I had a look at a map. If they’re coordinates, they point to a spot in the Ardennes. Your Ardennes, in Belgium.”

  He grimaced. “What’s so special about that place? The whole planet has coordinates. There are tons of coordinates around. And the Ardennes these days are full of Dutch tourists. Whenever Belgium is finally divided between Flanders and Wallonia, the Dutch ought to buy the Ardennes from our Walloon brothers, since hardly anybody lives there. And it’s high enough above the current sea levels, which can’t be said for much of Holland.”

  “I hav
e this informant, and he gave me these numbers. He didn’t say what we could find there. Figure it out, he told me. He’s usually very reliable, or I wouldn’t take this seriously.”

  “Reliable? But about what? What’s he informing you about?”

  “Ah,” she said. “Among other things, about the Church of the Supreme Purification.”

  Eekhaut frowned.

  “Never heard of it?” she inquired.

  Eekhaut grimaced again, needing another coffee. This day wasn’t going to get any better. “Have to hand it to you Dutchies. You have almost as many Christian denominations as the Americans. I find that odd for such a godless people, to have so many churches and sects. Are you sure you need that many? I’ve never met anyone here in Amsterdam who’s religious. And then there’s the name. Who would come up with a name like that for a religion?”

  “Keep your arrogant Catholic humor to yourself, Eekhaut.”

  “I’m not Catholic. Not anymore, anyway. I’m a godforsaken atheist.”

  “The Church of the Supreme Purification isn’t a bona fide church or religion. You should be aware of it, though, this being one of the subjects you’re supposed to follow up on. How long have you been a member of this team now? Four months? Five? Your status as the token Belgian member of this section of the AIVD is becoming a very thin excuse . . .”

  He ignored her. They had asked him to come work in the Netherlands, mainly because the Brussels crime squad he’d been part of had gotten fed up with his personal brand of insubordination and capricious behavior (their words). That had been in September of last year. So he’d been here for four months. “So what? There’s about . . . how many? How many Dutch organizations have you got tucked away in your filing system whose behavior you consider suspect? Close to five hundred? From private militia to people engaged in the practice of voodoo. So I haven’t read about all of them yet. Fine, I’ll get to it in the end. Give me some space.”