She stood up and carried the newspapers back to the issuing counter. Dead, she told herself once again. I have murdered Benjamin Kerran. It’s only a matter of time before his body is found, and the whole of Maardam will be able to read about it.
But just as she was about to thank the well-upholstered librarian for her help, once again that shout echoed inside her head.
Monica!
She felt herself shaking, and hurried out through the entrance hall. I’m a sick rose, she thought. A sick, sick rose.
Thy dark secret love does my life destroy.
It was not until an afternoon four days later that she left her flat the next time. Four days. As heavy as lead and as empty as a vacuum.
She had only come as far as the corner of Falckstraat and Zwille when she bumped into her English teacher, fröken Kluivert; and a few minutes later she saw a group of classmates crossing over Grote Torg. Girls with their arms around each other’s shoulders, laughing away somewhat artificially. It was Saturday, a free day.
She survived both incidents, just about, but made up her mind to postpone what she planned to do next until that evening, when it would be dark. She had realized that daylight, and the pale September sunshine, were not a combination likely to assist her in achieving her aims.
Not that anybody would have been especially interested, put two and two together and wondered why she had been off school for over a week. Certainly not.
But she had no desire to meet anybody. The bottom line was that it was her interests at stake, nobody else’s. She didn’t want to talk to anybody, or to look anybody else in the eye. These people had nothing to do with her, had never had any importance, and even less now. Everything was as it always had been, she thought, but her life had acquired a sort of significance that it hadn’t had before. A sort of transparency.
When she got back home she found her mother on the telephone. For a moment she thought it might have been Benjamin, and her heart felt as if it had just been kicked by a horse. Then she heard that it was in fact her aunt Barbara, and it was just the routine check, the call that came every third or fourth week, like clockwork, and which contained about as much empathy and sisterly love as there was blood in an ice crystal — to use an expression her father used occasionally. An expression based on deeply felt emotions.
Her mother kept a stiff upper lip to the best of her ability, and the call was terminated after less than a minute.
‘Have you met that Benjamin again lately?’ — the words slipped out of Monica’s mouth before she could stop them. She hadn’t planned to say that, but it seemed that her words had suddenly acquired an uncontrollable will of their own. She knew after all that her mother hadn’t set foot outside the door for a week.
‘Benjamin?’ said her mother, as if she had already forgotten who that was. ‘No, I don’t think there would be much point.’
‘Has he been in touch at all lately?’
That was also a pretty pointless question. She had barely been more than ten metres away from her mother recently.
‘No.’
‘Okay, I was just asking.’
‘I see.’
Monica went back to her room. Lay down on her bed and prepared to wait for the arrival of dusk. Stared up at the ceiling. Thought for a moment about Pastor Gassel, but pushed any such thoughts to one side as she had already done several times before. She had never really managed to believe wholly in him, and to do so now was a step too far. Much too far. She took out her Blake instead, and picked out a poem at random.
Cruelty has a Human Heart
And Jealousy a Human Face
Terror, the Human Form Divine
And Secrecy, the Human Dress
She read those lines over and over again until she was sure that she knew them off by heart. Then lay down with her eyes closed and repeated them over and over again, until she fell asleep under her blanket.
There was no Benjamin Kerran in the Maardam section of the telephone directory. Nobody by the name of Kerran at all, in fact.
An ex-directory number, then; but if things had been different, she could have asked her mother, of course.
There was nothing in her mother’s room either, in fact: she took the opportunity of making a search while her mother was in the bath with a glass of wine. Nothing in the address book. No number scribbled down on a scrap of paper or in the margin of a newspaper, places her mother liked to use for noting down important things.
So she would have to drop the idea of phoning him. There was nothing she could do about it, she thought. Never mind — perhaps she wouldn’t have dared to anyway, when the chips were down.
And directory enquiries had no current number for anybody called Kerran, no subscriber by that name. . And no, of course it was not possible to supply information about so-called ex-directory numbers: why did she think people took the trouble of keeping their private lives private?
Monica sighed. Back to plan A, then. Another little visit to see if it was possible to find out anything.
If there was a light in one of his windows, perhaps.
Or in the chink under the door.
Or if the mailbox down in the entrance hall seemed to be chock-full. There ought to be several indications to look for and interpret, without her needing to go so far as to press her nose against the keyhole and sniff for the smell of rotting flesh. Even if she couldn’t be certain, surely there would be a pointer or two.
A clear pointer, and with a bit of luck, certainty. Plan A it would have to be.
She left Moerckstraat at about nine. She noticed to her surprise that the evening was quite warm. Fifteen degrees or thereabouts. As far as she could recall it hadn’t rained all day, and the wind that had died away to become no more than a mild whisper was distinctly friendly as it wafted in from the south, despite the fact that it was almost October. She took the route past the canals and Keymer Plejn: it was a bit of a detour, but she felt that the walk would do her good. She also decided to skirt round the cemetery rather than cut through it, and when she turned into the right alley and could see the dreary old university building in the background, it was already turned half past nine.
She stopped on the pavement opposite, just in front of the steps down to some sort of zoological shop. She gazed up at the dark façade on the other side of the street. Five storeys, just as she had remembered it — the bottom floor some way above ground level so that nosy parkers peeping in through the windows were not a problem.
But Benjamin Kerran didn’t live on the bottom floor, and she suddenly realized that she wasn’t sure if it was on the third or fourth.
But surely it must be the fourth, she thought. The top floor, that must be it. In any case, he had windows both looking out over the street and into the courtyard, she was sure of that.
But which ones were they? Which windows? The building extended along the whole length of the alley, from the university at one end and the cemetery wall at the other, and she counted up to eighteen windows on the top floor, under the overhanging roof. Unless she was completely mistaken, the ones she was looking for should be slightly to the left of the centrally placed entrance door, from where she was standing.
But how many to the left?
At least four, she thought; and with the aid of some kind of obscure, intuitive sense of direction she picked out the four most likely ones. It was dark in two of them, light in the other two — a warm, yellow, slightly subdued light. No cold blue light from the television through lace curtains in this block. There were also lights in the windows to the right of the ones she had picked out, while on the other side everything was dark all the way to the cemetery. The shortcomings and uncertainties in these observations and calculations struck her at about the same time as she realized that the whole business of light and dark windows was nothing much to go by in any case.