St Paul’s Labyrinth. Jeroen Windmeijer

      ‘I have to leave you for a few minutes, but I’ll be back as soon as I can. I won’t be long.’

      Anja hurried back to the ward reception desk to report the patient’s progress to the doctor on call. He put her mind at rest and said that he would look in on him later. Since there didn’t appear to be anything medically wrong with him, no immediate action was necessary.

      She made a note in the records, along with a short summary of their conversation.

      Just as she was about to go back to the young man’s room, the ward telephone rang. She answered it, but kept an eye on the corridor.

      ‘Hi, it’s Patrick.’

      Anja and Patrick talked almost exclusively by phone, almost never in person. He worked in the hospital’s lab and often called to pass on test results.

      ‘Shouldn’t you be at home?’ she asked. ‘The lab’s closed, isn’t it?’

      ‘Normally I would be home by now, and we are actually closed for the day, but I’m calling about the man who came in this afternoon. You know, the one who was found after that accident with the mayor.’

      ‘Yes, he’s here. He woke up a few minutes ago, although he’s not said anything yet. I’ve just told the doctor.’

      ‘Good, listen … The bloodwork was scheduled for tomorrow but his case was so interesting that I went ahead and made a start already.’

      ‘Right. And?’

      ‘It’s not his blood,’ he said, sounding slightly hesitant.

      ‘No,’ Anja said, ‘but they were fairly sure of that already anyway, weren’t they? I mean, he didn’t have any wounds, right?’

      ‘No, he didn’t but …’

      ‘What’s wrong?’

      Patrick fell silent.

      ‘What’s wrong?’ Anja repeated the question, with an increasing mix of worry and curiosity.

      ‘Listen, it’s—’

      ‘Hang on a second,’ Anja said.

      She was sure she had just caught a glimpse of someone leaving the anonymous man’s room.

      ‘I think something’s not right here,’ she said to her colleague. ‘I’m just going to put the phone down for a second.’

      ‘But—’

      Anja threw the receiver down on the desk and ran down the hall to Anonymous’ room. The light, downy hairs on both her arms stood on end, like marram grass on a bare dune. Before she even got into the room, she could see that the pile of clothes was gone from the chair.

      The bed was empty.

      Anja ran back to her desk to call security.

      The phone’s receiver was still on the desk. When she picked it up, she heard her colleague’s voice again.

      ‘Oh, there you are. Listen—’

      ‘Sorry, I have to hang up. That man is gone.’

      ‘What? But … Wait, wait, this is important.’

      Her finger hovered over the button to hang up, but Patrick spoke so urgently that she hesitated for a second.

      ‘You know I said the blood wasn’t his?’

      ‘Yes. So?’

      ‘It’s not human blood.’

      ‘What? What do you mean?’

      ‘It’s from an animal.’

       5

       Friday 20 March, 5:55pm

      There were no more text messages. After the bizarre events of the afternoon, Peter’s unease about them faded into the background.

      The moment he had realised that someone was buried under the rubble, he and Daniël had crawled through the hole in the bottom of the pit. They had found a young man whose lower body was pinned to the ground. He was unconscious, but his breathing seemed normal. Working in the scant light provided by the helmet, they’d removed the bricks to free him.

      A putrid stench had emanated from the man and he was sticky with the congealed blood that covered him. Peter and Daniël had retched more than once.

      Getting him out of the hole had been no easy task. Another ambulance had been called for and arrived soon afterwards. After a stretcher had been lowered into the pit, two sturdy-looking paramedics had taken over. After briefly assessing him, they had put him inside a cover that looked like a body bag, then fastened him onto the stretcher and eventually lifted him up to the surface.

      Peter and Daniël had taken the opportunity to investigate further. With everyone else gone, a great silence had fallen over the site. They appeared to be in a tunnel, around two metres high and perhaps a metre and a half wide. The floor was made of stone, the walls and the vaulted ceiling that arched over their heads were constructed from red bricks.

      The tunnel ran in the direction of the Burcht one way and looked like it went towards the Hooglandse Kerk in the other.

      Peter had heard about the tunnels that were rumoured to run below Leiden’s streets, stories that did the rounds in many Dutch cities. Supposedly, some of them had been part of the original designs when the Pieterskerk, the Hooglandse Kerk and other churches were built. Others were thought to have been created to move supplies into the town during the Siege of Leiden, when it was twice besieged by the Spanish. It was said that secret tunnels led from the Burcht and the town hall to places that had once been outside the city walls.

      ‘This is just bizarre,’ Daniël had said.

      ‘How was this not discovered at the planning stage, before digging started?’

      ‘We relied on the Land Registry for information about pipes and cables. And of course, we have a good idea of where the former canals are. But maybe if you go down another layer, there are things that have never been mapped. They didn’t find anything when they were drilling either.’

      ‘That doesn’t seem possible.’ Peter still hadn’t been able to shake off his disbelief. ‘Surely this would have been discovered years ago?’

      ‘Apparently not,’ Daniël had replied testily. ‘Otherwise we wouldn’t be standing here.’

      ‘We need to hire one of those gadgets, a …’

      ‘A GeoSeeker? Yes, exactly, that’s what I was thinking.’

      Peter had worked with a GeoSeeker before, a device that detected cavities below ground. They were very expensive pieces of kit.

      ‘We’ll have to put in a request for one first. I don’t think we’ll be able to get it until Monday.’

      Daniël and Peter had walked just a few metres into the tunnel before turning around and going back to where they started.

      ‘It’s not safe to go any further,’ Daniël had said. ‘We’ll need to set it up properly with a team, decent lights …’

      They had climbed back up to the street, where the noise and activity had calmed down by now. Most of the spectators had gone home after the young man had been taken to hospital. The drinks reception had been cancelled, the tables had been collected by the catering company, and the drinks and food had been cleared away. A truck full of building materials had driven off as they emerged from the pit. When they were back on the surface, the police had placed two safety barriers over the hole and cordoned it off with red and white tape.

      Daniël and Janna had stayed behind, as had the unavoidable Arnold van Tiegem, who had been to fetch a Belgian