LITMIR.BIZ

       10

       Friday 20 March, 8:58pm

      Peter rushed outside, slamming Judith’s front door behind him. He bounded across the courtyard to Mark’s house and pounded on the windows, shouting his name. He realised immediately that it was useless.

      Feeling helpless, he stretched out his hands, then curled his tensed fingers as though he was kneading a stress ball. His lips were tightly pressed together.

      He had to go to the police of course, as he had originally intended. He would be able to explain the whole Arnold business, including why he’d foolishly run away earlier in the evening. He would be completely open and honest … up to the point where he’d met Raven in the park.

      He pivoted around on one leg, like a soldier at the changing of the guard. At that exact moment, another message arrived.

      Do not seek help. The same message as before. But now it was followed by something more sinister. If you ever want to see her alive again.

      He looked up in panic. The timing of the messages was worryingly precise, as though someone was aware of every step he took. He searched the sky. Was there a drone up there, with a camera watching him?

      Do not seek help …

      He opened Google and typed in ‘black raven Leiden’, but it didn’t bring up anything useful. The first hit was a barber in Groningen of all things. So he tried ‘raven Leiden’. A student dorm, entries in a telephone book for people called Raven, a seaside holiday park, the puppet from a children’s TV show … they all led nowhere.

      Peter was desperate to do something, but he didn’t know where to focus his energy. He felt like the substitute in a football match who has just spent half an hour warming up on the sidelines before being told he won’t be sent on.

      Of course! The phone’s location services. He slapped his forehead, almost as though it would wake up the grey matter inside.

      He opened the settings and deactivated them. It was the obvious thing to do, but it still felt devious.

      ‘Raven, raven …’ he mumbled. Follow the black raven. It had to be symbolic. They couldn’t possibly have meant a real raven. Could they?

      He opened Google again and typed in ‘raven symbol’. Less than half a second later the search term had produced tens of thousands of hits. On the first page, there was a reference to the raven that Noah had released, but Peter’s eye was drawn to the words below the blue, underlined title of one of the links. ‘The raven is featured as a messenger in mythological tales from all over the world …’

      Peter had a feeling this would lead him to something useful, so he clicked on the link. It was part of a website about mythology through the ages, a subpage with an almost endless list of animals in mythological stories. He clicked on the word ‘raven’ and skimmed through the text.

      The story about Noah again, Greek mythology, Egypt, Chinese literature … the raven as harbinger of death … Edgar Allan Poe … And closer to home, the Norse myths and sagas. ‘The god Odin had two ravens,’ he read. ‘Munin and Hugin, who flew around the world during the day, and returned to Odin at night to tell him everything they had seen the people do.’

      Just like Raven in the park, Peter thought.

      He impatiently clicked everything away, and shoved the phone in his pocket. Then he left the courtyard via the large door. He had no idea where he was going to go; he simply wanted to keep moving so that he would feel like he was doing something. He walked past the Kijkhuis cinema, and the gothic remains of the Vrouwenkerk.

      The shops on the Harlemmerstaat had closed an hour ago, but the street still sounded busy. Friday nights in Leiden were as in many Dutch towns for going out.

      A group of people walked by, two female students in identical red student association jackets together with two men and two women, all having an animated conversation.

      ‘After hearing all those stories,’ Peter heard one of the women say, ‘it’s so nice to be able to finally see where you’ve been spending all this time.’

      Many student associations held an annual ‘parents’ evening’ and invited parents to come and look around. It went without saying that everything was much quieter than normal on those evenings. There was no rowdiness, no beer was thrown around, and the music was kept at a volume that allowed proper conversation.

      When the group passed him, Peter noticed the word DIONYSUS on the backs of their jackets. It was the god of wine, but also a fraternity of the Quintus student association. One of his colleagues had been a member and had told him about it. Peter himself had never joined a fraternity.

      A thought began to take shape somewhere in the back of his mind. He stood still, closed his eyes and concentrated. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was. Something he had seen.

      Peter walked aimlessly on, but he was careful to avoid the Haarlemmerstraat. He crossed the Lange Mare, a street that had been a canal until the early 1950s when it had been filled in. So they were true after all, the stories about the tunnels that ran beneath the city’s many former canals. It was almost impossible to imagine.

      He thought back to 1978, the first time he’d gone abroad without his parents. With the ink barely dry on his exam certificates, he’d travelled through Italy, ready to conquer the world.

      He’d spent a long time in Rome, staying in a seedy youth hostel where men slept twenty to a room on bunk beds with filthy mattresses. He did everything he could to make his money last as long as possible, not even travelling low budget but no budget.

      He had visited the catacombs, the city’s complex system of tunnels and underground burial chambers, some of which had only been discovered in the second half of the twentieth century. Many of the tunnels had been built in secret by the persecuted early Christians. It was easy to carve out tunnels and chambers in the soft, volcanic tufo that formed the bedrock of Rome. After it had been exposed to the air, the rock would eventually harden, and the result was a sturdy structure, a city beneath the city, up to four layers deep. They placed their dead in elongated niches that had been carved into the walls. The graves were sealed with slabs of terracotta or marble, although these were unlikely to have prevented the smell of death and decay from permeating this underworld.

      He’d taken hundreds of photographs, carrying the rolls of film around in their little canisters for weeks so that he could have them developed in the Netherlands. When he got home, he had been disappointed to discover that the many photographs he’d taken of the frescoes were washed out because he’d had to use the flash.

      But who on earth had built this tunnel in Leiden? And how had it remained undiscovered for centuries? The depth of the tunnel had probably played a role, deep below the canals that had once run above it, or ran above it still.

      Could there really be an entire system of tunnels under the city? It was difficult to believe. Rome had tufo, but here in Leiden, there was soft earth, groundwater and subsidence. How had they done it?

      Peter slowed his pace. He walked a few metres into the broad alley of the Mirakelsteeg and leaned against a wall.

      There was something … something he couldn’t quite remember. What was it?

      He pictured in his mind’s eye the one photograph he’d taken of a fresco that had come out well. It had hung on the cork board in his dorm room for years. The flash

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