Chapter 3

The Lake of Love

On Thursday morning, Aimé was playing Le plat pays beneath my feet, and I was brushing my teeth and humming along, and that's why I almost didn't hear the radio.

Aimé Ghysels lives on the floor below mine, in the narrow house on the Sint-Annarei where I rent two attic rooms under the roof. He is seventy-four. For forty years he was the city's assistant carillonneur: he climbed the Belfry three times a week to play for the tourists and the pigeons, and he says the pigeons were the better audience. He used to say so. Since his stroke in June, he hardly says anything. The words have got caught on something, somewhere behind his faded blue eyes, and they only come out one at a time, when they come out at all, and often it's the wrong one.

But his hands, the stroke didn't get.

In his sitting room he has a practice keyboard, an oak cabinet the size of a sideboard, with two rows of wooden batons you strike with a closed fist and a pedalboard for the feet, like an organ that has taken up boxing. Instead of bells, metal bars that chime inside the case. It's what carillonneurs practise on, so as not to wake the whole town. Aimé plays every morning at eight. The whole house hums gently: the floorboards, the mugs on my shelf, my toothbrush in its glass.

I've learnt, since June, that his music speaks for him. When he agrees, he plays Le plat pays, by Brel. When he disagrees, he plays Sur le pont d'Avignon, with a kind of mocking fury, as if the nursery rhyme itself were an insult. I don't know who taught him that. I think he invented it himself, one day when I was asking him for the tenth time whether he wanted me to call his doctor.

That morning, he was playing Le plat pays. All was well. And the little radio in my kitchen, between two songs, said:

“…found during the night in the reeds of the Minnewater, near the lock, by a man walking his dog. According to our information, the victim was carrying the identity papers of a Bruges architect, Thomas V., thirty-eight. The case has been referred to the prosecutor's office…”

I spat the toothpaste into the sink, half rinsed my mouth, and ran.

It's six minutes on foot from my place to Thomas's office, along the water. I did it in three, in trainers on frozen cobbles, jacket open, Jasper's grey scarf round my neck because mine no longer existed. I skidded along the Sint-Annarei, crossed at the bridge without looking at the cars, followed the Spiegelrei, with the fog still rising off the water in threads and the gulls screaming on the rooftops.

I didn't know who I was running for.

That's the truth. For those three minutes there were two faces in my head that were only one. The one who had whistled Vivaldi in the café and eaten his rice tart with his eyes closed. And the one who had bled against my back under the tarp, with his March-water eyes, and gone off into the fog with half my mother's scarf. One of the two had died at the Lake of Love in the night, with Thomas Verlinde's papers in his pocket, and I didn't know which one I wanted alive.

I'd be lying if I said I chose. I didn't choose. I ran faster.

Thomas's office takes up the ground floor of a straight-gabled merchant's house on the Spiegelrei, right across from the water. Tall windows with small panes, a bottle-green door, a brass plate: Verlinde Architectuur — Erfgoed. An unmarked car was parked askew on the pavement, two wheels on the cobbles.

The door was open.

He was there. Standing in the hallway, in a white shirt, sleeves rolled up, a mug in his hand. Alive. Shaved. Whole. He was talking to a woman in a dark parka, not quite fifty, salt-and-pepper hair scraped back into a tight ponytail, a lean face, black eyes that didn't blink. She was holding a notebook. She wasn't taking notes. She was watching him.

“…last week,” Thomas was saying. “My wallet was stolen last week. Tuesday or Wednesday, I can't remember. I'd left it in my coat pocket, here, on the peg. Someone came in while I was on the phone in the back office, I suppose. I reported it.”

“You didn't report it, Mr Verlinde. I checked before I came.”

“Then I meant to report it. That's almost the same thing, isn't it?”

He smiled. She didn't.

That was when he saw me, on the pavement, out of breath, hair all over the place, with toothpaste on my lip, as I found out later. His face did something very quick that I couldn't read. Surprise. And then a smile, a real one, that went all the way up to his eyes.

“Mila?”

The woman turned round.

“And you are?”

“A… customer of the… I work at the café,” I said, which meant nothing at all. “I heard the radio. I thought…”

“That it was him,” said the woman.

“Yes.”

She looked me up and down. My trainers, my jeans, my open jacket. I remembered the brown stain on my back and zipped it up, too fast.

“Chief Inspector Goossens,” she said. “Federal Judicial Police. Have you known Mr Verlinde long?”

“Since yesterday.”

“Since yesterday,” she repeated. “And you're running across town in trainers at eight in the morning because a man you've known since yesterday might be dead.”

“He ate a very big slice of rice tart,” I said. “You get attached.”

Thomas burst out laughing. Goossens wrote something in her notebook. It was the first thing she had written.

They let me in because it was minus two and Thomas had already filled a second mug of coffee without asking anyone. The office smelt of tracing paper, polished wood and cardamom. There were plans everywhere, pinned to the walls, rolled up in tubes, spread over a big tilted drawing table, and on the windowsill a row of little cardboard models of gables, lined up like teeth.

Goossens didn't talk about me in front of me. She talked about the dead man.

“His name was Dylan Vercruysse,” she said. “Twenty-four. Lived in Heist. We identified him from his fingerprints: he was known to us. Does the name mean anything to you?”

“Nothing at all,” said Thomas.

“He had your identity card in the inside pocket of his jacket. Nothing else. No wallet, no money, no phone. Only your card.”

“Then he's the one who stole it. Or someone gave it to him. I don't know, Inspector. I draw cornices.”

I listened with my mug in both hands. Twenty-four. It wasn't the man in the boat. The man in the boat had lines at the corners of his eyes, calluses on his hands, a voice that had lived. It wasn't him. The relief hit me so hard I had to put the mug down on the drawing table, and Thomas caught it before it rolled onto a seventeenth-century façade plan, and he gave me a mock glare, and I laughed, and Goossens watched the two of us laughing, and she didn't laugh.

And then, underneath the relief, another thought rose, slowly, like a bubble from the bottom of the silt.

The drowned twenty-four-year-old had Thomas's papers. The man in the boat had Thomas's face. And the man in the boat had been chased, on Tuesday night, by two men, one of whom had a young voice, almost shrill, that swore too much.

I felt the key against my breastbone. It seemed to weigh a kilo.

“Did he fall in?” Thomas asked. “Had he been drinking?”

“The post-mortem will tell us that.”

That wasn't an answer. Goossens didn't give answers. She collected them.

She closed her notebook at eight forty-five, just as the Belfry was counting out the three-quarters above the rooftops, and thanked Thomas with a politeness so icy you could have kept fish fresh on it. She handed me a business card. Ch. Insp. S. Goossens, a mobile number, a landline.

“In case you remember something,” she said.

“Remember what?”

“I don't know. You're the one who'll remember.”

She went out onto the doorstep. Thomas took his midnight-blue coat from the peg, the one where he claimed to have left his wallet.

“I'll walk you back,” he said. “You're not crossing town again in trainers on black ice. That's a sure way to end up in Sint-Jan with your wrist in plaster.”

Without warning, he had started talking to me like an old friend. I didn't correct him.

“I know the cobbles of Bruges better than you do.”

“Nobody knows the cobbles of Bruges better than I do. I wrote a dissertation on the paving of the Sint-Gillis quarter. Ninety pages. My mother had it bound in leather. She's the only person who's ever read it.”

He wound his cashmere scarf round my neck, over Jasper's, without asking. He smelt of cardamom too.

“And tomorrow night,” he said, lower, “you're having dinner with me. There's a little restaurant on the Groenerei, six tables, an owner who hates everyone except me. I'm not asking whether you want to. I'm asking what time.”

I should have said no. There was a dead man at the Lake of Love with his papers in his pocket, an inspector on the pavement, a brass key under my jumper, and a man with his face somewhere in the town. I should have said no for a hundred reasons.

“Eight o'clock,” I said.

He smiled. He started to whistle, very softly, as he buttoned his coat.

On the doorstep, Goossens had stopped. She turned round, her phone in her hand.

“One last thing, Mr Verlinde. Our technicians found this on the body. Does it mean anything to you?”

She turned the screen towards him. I saw it over his shoulder.

A white wrist, swollen, a black plastic diver's watch, and caught under the strap, wound twice round the buckle, a strand of mustard-yellow wool.