Читать книгу St Paul’s Labyrinth: The explosive new thriller perfect for fans of Dan Brown and Robert Harris! - Jeroen Windmeijer - Страница 16

Friday 20 March, 9:35pm

Two police officers stood on the quayside, trying to pull the floating body towards them with a hook on the end of a long pole. It was harder than it looked. The body seemed to be stuck, caught, perhaps on one of the hundreds of bicycles that were dumped in the canals each year.

An ambulance waited behind them, with two police cars parked diagonally across the street behind it. Two paramedics leaned against their vehicle and watched.

When the body didn’t budge, the policemen abandoned their attempt.

‘What do we do now?’ one of them asked as he took photographs of the body’s position in the water.

They looked around them. Small groups of people stood watching from behind the red and white tape that the police had used to cordon off the scene. A few of them held their phones in the air to take photos or record videos. The dots of light on their telephones looked like a constellation of bright little stars.

Curtains twitched behind windows here and there and people peered outside.

A rowing boat in the distance paddled towards them. Two policemen had had the presence of mind to unhitch a boat that was moored further up the canal. When they reached the body, they manoeuvred the boat alongside it. One of them took off his coat and rolled up his shirt sleeve so that he could stick his arm in the water and free the body from whatever it had snagged on.

It proved to be the handlebars of a bike.

The men in the boat took the pole from their colleagues and hooked it onto the victim’s collar. They rowed the boat further down the canal, to the pier opposite the town hall that was normally used as a dock for canal tour boats. They towed the body behind them, like fishermen with a catch too big to bring on board.

They moored at the stone steps and managed between them to haul the body onto the pavement. The paramedics brought out a stretcher.

‘That’s the missing professor all right,’ a policeman said. ‘This is Van Tiegem.’

He took out his radio to report the news to the control room.

‘What a sad way to go,’ someone said.

Van Tiegem lay on his back, with his head rolled to the side and his eyes wide open, like someone in fright.

An officer knelt down and closed Van Tiegem’s eyes, mumbling something the others couldn’t hear while his colleague took photographs to document the scene.

Van Tiegem’s socks had slipped down his ankles, revealing white legs with blond hairs. He had lost a shoe.

‘By the look of his skin, he’s not been in the water very long,’ one of the officers said. ‘Two hours, at most, definitely not longer.’

Two policemen rowed the little boat back to its mooring. When they came back, the four officers carried the surprisingly heavy corpse away from the water and heaved it onto the stretcher. Water streamed from the body onto the ground until the ambulance crew had wrapped it in a sheet of plastic and secured it with two straps.

The heaving and shoving had twisted Van Tiegem’s jacket upwards. To their bewilderment, it revealed an empty wine bottle sticking out of the waistband of his trousers.

‘Have you got some gloves for me?’ one of the officers asked a paramedic.

He walked back to the ambulance and returned with a pair of latex gloves. The officer struggled them over his wet hands.

He used his thumb and forefinger like a small pair of tongs to carefully remove the bottle. The label was hanging off, but it was still legible: a Beaujolais Nouveau from the Dionysuswine estate.

‘Mitra,’ his colleague said. ‘This bottle comes from the Mitra off-licence. There’s one in the town centre, isn’t there?’

‘If you say so …’ he replied, smoothly sliding the bottle into a clear plastic bag that the other paramedic had had the foresight to go and find in the meantime.

‘Then we should drop by there later today. Maybe they know who bought this bottle. They might have CCTV footage.’

They rolled the stretcher awkwardly over the uneven cobbles and lifted it into the ambulance.

‘Let’s start by doing a house-to-house in this area, from the Koornbrug to Annie’s,’ one of the police team said. ‘Someone might have seen something.’

He took out his notebook. They watched the paramedics put Van Tiegem’s body into the ambulance.

One of them climbed into the back of the ambulance and the other shut the doors behind him, gently, as though he didn’t want to wake Van Tiegem. He walked round to the front and got into the driver’s seat, but before he’d even put the key in the ignition, the doors at the back flew open, and his colleague, who had been sitting almost in vigil next to Van Tiegem, leapt out. He banged loudly on the side of the ambulance and gestured wildly to the police officers.

‘What the …’ said the officer who was holding the notebook.

The two of them ran over to the paramedic who had been joined by his colleague. ‘What’s wrong?’ the officer asked when they reached them.