by Carla Vermaat

Dutch author Carla Vermaat currently divides her time between the Netherlands and Great Britain. The mother of three saw her first novel published in 1978, but took a number of years off writing in the eighties and nineties to raise her children. Her first crime novel was published in 2002. She is now the author of thirteen books: nine mainstream novels and four thrillers. She sometimes writes under the pseudonym Mary Morgan, and is under contract for three new novels.

Translated from the Dutch by Josh Pachter

he garden was a long-cherished dream. Although it wasn’t as spacious as Nico had hoped, it was far better than the plastic window boxes on their last apartment’s balcony.

They’d argued about it for quite a while before reaching a compromise. Emma had wanted a big patio with a cozy table and chairs and lounges, but his idea was to divide the entire yard into rectangular flower beds separated by narrow strips of tile. In his imagination, he’d already planted the blood-red roses Emma loved and, along the edges of the yard, lavender bushes, so she could make sachets for their dresserdrawers and to give as gifts. And there would be plenty of cut flowers to decorate the living room for the admiration of visitors.

The complexities of moving and settling in had forced him to delay starting work on the garden, but as soon as everything indoors was arranged to Emma’s satisfaction he had tiled the area just outside the patio doors, and they’d picked out garden furniture of a rich green plastic, with bright yellow sunflowers on the cushions.

After that, he’d finally been able to attack the hard ground with his spade, turning it over with enthusiasm and energy. At last he’d begun to bring his dream to life—until his shovel’s blade unexpectedly struck something hard, something buried several inches beneath the surface.

Now he stood deathly still at the edge of the terrace, his heart heavy with anxiety. Unable even to imagine the consequences of his discovery, he just stood there shaking his head. His dream, cherished for so long, flickered like a silent film on the screen of his mind. With a certainty as stifling as a fist clamped around his throat, he suddenly knew that his dream would never become a reality. Even if he were able to finish laying out his tiled pathways and planting his flower beds, he would never be able to enjoy them. Not now, now that he’d recognized that shape in the dirt.

With Emma only a few meters away, preparing their afternoon tea in the kitchen, he felt a sense of urgency. He took a deep breath and leaned heavily on his spade handle. He noticed that his thoughts had slowed, that he was having trouble weighing the few alternatives that were open to him. His head seemed wreathed in the same troubling fog that also limited his ability to see clearly. His knees were weak, trembling, and he worried that he might keel over at any moment.

Nothing would ever be the same again. Nothing. Never again.

The teakettle’s whistle and the clatter of china brought him back to reality. At any moment, Emma would announce that their tea was ready. Then they would take their seats on the new garden furniture in the sun. She would start in on the latest neighborhood gossip, pouring out a stream of words that were so uninteresting they would flutter away into nothingness as he sat there overwhelmed by the dark thoughts that consumed him. She would probably notice that something was bothering him. Once he assured her that everything was fine, though, she wouldn’t press him. That wasn’t Emma’s way. This was one of the rare occasions when he regretted her characteristic willingness to take him at his word.

Somehow he managed to bring his emotions under control. He turned towards the kitchen, unaware that his fingers had left streaks of dirt on his face.

* * * *

“I just don’t understand what’s wrong with Nic,” Emma said into the telephone, her voice low.

Nico stood behind the half-opened door, listening, his mouth drawn. Why couldn’t she just leave it alone? Since the day he’d made his awful discovery in the garden and been forced to drastically change all of his plans, Emma had suspected that something was up. And now she wouldn’t give him a moment’s peace.

“No, no, he’s not sick, that’s not what I mean.”

He tried to figure out who she was talking to. Probably Lies, her best girlfriend. The two of them spoke on the phone for at least an hour every day, and when there was shopping that needed to be done, she’d rather go with Lies than with him.

“You don’t think it’s weird that, after all those months of planning, evening after evening sitting there calculating which flowers and plants and bushes and shrubs to put where, now he’s suddenly just let it all drop, just like that?”

He shook his head in annoyance. Without realizing it, she was rubbing salt in his wounds. She didn’t know, couldn’t imagine—let alone understand—what was happening inside him. He barely understood it himself. Except that he simply found it unacceptable to have policemen and reporters crawling all over his property. He could see the headlines: Local man finds human skull in garden. Forever after, he’d be remembered as the guy who’d spent most of his life in a dark, cramped flat, working in a boring stationery wholesaler’s office, who’d retired to a lovely ground-floor apartment with a beautiful garden ... full of human remains. No, he couldn’t handle that, it would turn his dreams to dust.

“Well, sure, Lies, of course I’m happy about it, since I wind up with a bigger patio than I thought I was going to get, but still, it’s just all so strange.”

Nico couldn’t listen to any more of it. He slammed the door and stormed outside.

* * * *

“That was Lies,” she told him later. “I said you’d changed your plans for the garden.” She paused. “I still don’t understand why you’ve suddenly lost interest in it, Nic.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t lost interest. It’s just that, if we leave it this way, there’s so much less work I have to do.”

He hesitated for a moment, then gathered his resolve and told her that he wanted to know who’d lived in the apartment before them.

“Where’s that coming from?”

“It just seems like it’d be interesting to know. Who they were, what their lives were like.”

“I never thought you much cared about history, Nic.”

Embarrassed, he ran a hand through his hair. “No? Well, I’ve got to have something to keep me busy, don’t I? I don’t want to just mope around here, getting in your way. It just seems like something I could do.”

She gestured absently towards the identical block of flats on the other side of their living-room wall. “You could talk to Mrs. Colijn.”

“Mrs. Colijn?”

“The old lady next-door, on the second floor. She was born in that apartment, she’s lived there her entire life, she must know everything there is to know about the neighborhood.”

“I had no idea.”

She examined him reproachfully. “I run into her at the market sometimes and we talk, but I never thought you’d be interested.” For a moment, she was silent, and then she added, sadly, “Sometimes I feel like I hardly know you anymore, Nic.”

He nodded without looking at her. He regretted not having called for her the moment he’d seen the bleached skull staring up at him from the earth and pulled away from it in shock. If he’d only told her about it then, he wouldn’t now have to face the situation alone. When he thought back to his gruesome discovery, the horror of it made him want to vomit.

At first, he’d thought that the emotions would fade away in time, that the awful images in his mind would dissipate into half-forgotten memories. But that hadn’t happened. He couldn’t stop thinking about it, and whenever they sat together in the garden, his gaze was drawn as if magnetically to that one terrible spot in the dirt.

* * * *

He couldn’t imagine ever wanting to work in the garden again, but there seemed to be no way around it. Emma nagged him about it more frequently, insisting that he had to finish what he’d started. There was just that one last bed to plant—why didn’t he just do it already?

Dizzy, he jabbed his spade into the ground. It worried him that the residents of the upper apartments could watch him from behind their drawn curtains, could look down and observe everything he did, every move he made. He hoped that no one happened to be watching at the moment he exposed the skull to the light for the second time. He wiped his forehead and blinked the sweat from his eyes. Keep going. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about anything.

The dull sound of metal on bone sent a shiver of horror through him. He wouldn’t have believed it possible, but the hairs on the back of his neck actually stood on end. As if his mind and body were no longer connected, he deliberately scraped away the earth and soon uncovered more bones. Ribs, he thought. So his suspicions were right. There was more than just a skull buried in his garden. There had to be an entire body there. All at once, he found himself unexpectedly, icily calm.

He blinked again, but this time his eyes were dry. As he stood there wondering what to do next, his gaze fell on something that sparkled unnaturally against the dark brown dirt.

He reached for it mechanically, picked it up and wiped away the soil that caked it with his fingers, and stared, bemused, at a round bit of polished crystal, about a centimeter in diameter.

* * * *

Mrs. Colijn lived next-door, on the second floor. She was a tall, deeply tanned woman with a shapeless body and lightly bent shoulders. Steel-gray hair cut straight just beneath her ears was held off her face by cheap plastic barrettes.

“Why are you so interested in the past, Mr. Schuurman?” she asked, her tone not especially friendly, when Nico explained that he was wondering about the street’s former residents.

“I’m just curious,” he said simply. If she thought he was perhaps a bit eccentric, that was no concern of his.

“Well, fine, would you like a cup of tea? If you really want to dig up ancient history, it’ll take awhile.”

“Please.”

“I’ve got an old photo album here somewhere,” she said, searching through a row of aging volumes on the bottom shelf of an oak bookcase, “full of pictures of my family—and I think some of the neighbors.”

He sat in a brown leather armchair and dutifully paged through the tattered black album she handed him.

When she came back with cups and saucers and a dish of chocolate squares broken from a candy bar on a tray, she peered with interest over his shoulder at the thick volume open on his lap.

“Ah, those are my in-laws. They were visiting us from Amsterdam.” She tapped each of the four figures with a long, bony forefinger. “That’s Anton, my father-in-law, my mother-in-law Genevieve—she was French—my husband Claude, and that’s me.”

“Do you have pictures of the people who lived in our house?” he asked, cautiously insistent.

“Oh, I’m sure they’re in there somewhere. We were all one big family in those days. Today, people keep more to themselves. It was different then, we all really cared about each other in the neighborhood.” She made a face, as if she wasn’t quite sure that modern life was actually worse than the Good Old Days.

Nico tapped the very edge of the frame, where a man with his hands in his trouser pockets was just visible. “Who’s that?”

She unfolded a pair of spectacles from their case and bent over the image to study it. “Oh, he shouldn’t even be in this picture. That’s our neighbor. Wim Boersma. He and his daughter lived in your apartment.”

She folded away her glasses and offered him the dish of chocolate squares. He politely took one.

“So, are you two enjoying it here? You moved from a smaller flat, didn’t you? Your wife told me how much she loves sitting out on your new terrace. It’s looking lovely, Mr. Schuurman—it must be such a lot of work?”

“It is. But, please, call me Nico.”

“Nico, then. And I’m Penny.” A smile flickered across her pale lips.

“It’s more work than I expected, ah, Penny.”

“Sugar? Milk?” She poured a splash of milk in her own tea and dropped a sugar cube into his. “My goodness, that Wim Boersma and his daughter didn’t live here very long. When the girl married and moved away, her father went with her.”

“And of course someone else lived there before them?”

“Certainly. A family with two sons and two daughters—and before them a family with six girls—Catholics, they were, from Brabant.”

“One second.” He raised a hand, and, surprised to be interrupted, she fell silent. “What was the name of the people between the Brabanters and the Boersmas? And when was it that they lived there?”

“Gracious, why do you ask, Nico?”

“I told you, I’m curious.” She gazed at him so intently that he had the idea she was waiting for something else. “Um, Penny, was there ever any sort of, well, criminal activity here in the neighborhood?”

To his surprise, her face lit up in a grin. “What do you think? We were all lower-class people. The families were large and the menfolk were often unemployed. How were they supposed to feed their wives and children?”

“Petty thefts, you mean?”

“Yes, of course. You’re not suggesting there were major crimes being committed here, are you?”

“No,” he said with a sigh, and he thanked her politely for the tea and the candy and the information.

* * * *

He had the foolish idea that Emma might have changed her mind, that she hadn’t boarded the cruise ship after all, that she’d had her luggage offloaded and taken the bus back home. Only when the bell continued to ring did he realize that it couldn’t be Emma at the door. She had her key with her, in case he was out when she returned.

He shuffled to the foyer, in his hand the tea bag he’d just fished out of the box. The aroma from the toaster followed him, until he swung open the door and the fresh air from outside dispelled it.

“Mrs. Colijn!” He stared at her, and suddenly felt embarrassed to be standing there in his striped gray pajamas and bathrobe. Emma’s absence had left him grouchy, and a distant memory of his youth had led him to the rebellious decision to make himself a cup of tea before he showered and dressed.

“What can I do for you, Mrs.—ah, Penny?”

She shook her head tightly and stepped across the threshold, forcing him to take a step back. Whatever the reason for her early appearance, it must be something serious. He told her that he was just making tea.

“Fine, then let’s go to the kitchen,” she said, her voice barely recognizable from their previous conversation.

“The kettle’s on,” he said, confused, wishing Emma were there, so that she could take over while he dashed upstairs to dress. He felt himself somehow at a disadvantage with his bare feet so white in scuffed old slippers.

The old woman strode into the kitchen, but she didn’t sit at the little table. She tried the knob of the back door and, when she found it unlocked, turned the key.

“Mrs. Colijn?” For some reason, he found it hard to remember to call her Penny.

She calmly pointed to a chair. “Sit down, Nico.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to protest that that was Emma’s chair, but she stood blocking him from his own.

“Your wife isn’t here,” she said, leaning back against the sideboard, the words a statement, not a question.

“Yes, she left yesterday. She went on a cruise with a girlfriend.”

The old woman nodded. “She told me she’d always dreamed of being able to afford a cruise.”

All at once he found himself hoping that Emma’s dream wouldn’t come to as gruesome an ending as his had.

“Cruises are quite expensive,” his neighbor continued.

“Yes.” He gestured towards the kettle as it reached the boil and made as if to get to his feet. “Are you sure you won’t have a cup of tea, Mrs. Colijn—ah, Penny?”

“Shut up and answer my questions,” she snarled. He was so taken aback by the violence in her voice that he remained half-standing for several seconds.

“What’s the matter? Is something wrong? Is there something I can help you with?”

She didn’t answer. “Your wife told me you had a bit of good luck, and that’s why you could suddenly afford to send her off on her cruise.”

He glanced at the tea bag he still held in his hand and told her the same story he’d told Emma. “I won a nice little jackpot in the lottery.”

She barked out a harsh laugh. “You think I’ll believe that?”

He wanted to say that Emma had believed it, that Lies—who was always suspicious of him—had believed it, but something in the woman’s hard stare told him that the words would fall on deaf ears. The Penny Colijn he had visited, who had offered him tea and chocolate and information about the neighborhood, suddenly seemed to have morphed into an entirely different person.

“You found them,” she announced without preamble.

“What?”

“The diamonds. You found them, you must have.”

He knew immediately that there was no point in denying it. She must have been watching as he’d combed through the dirt, crumbling away the concealing clumps of earth with endless patience to reveal the glittering gemstones within.

“It’s the only way you could possibly have afforded to pay for that cruise.” Her steely gaze grew even harder. “Where were they, Nico? I searched for them for so long. I must have gone through the entire house twenty times.”

“Which house?”

Then she understood. Her eyes widened, and a screeching sound burst out of her that chilled him to the marrow. “You didn’t find them in the garden?!”

“Ah, well, yes, I did.” He was so mystified that it never even occurred to him to ask how she knew all this.

She pointed through the little window in the kitchen door, half covered by a thin curtain. “Where exactly?”

He couldn’t see any reason to lie about it. “In the last flower bed, the one I’m still working on.”

“You mean he had them with him, all this time?” She examined him closely and then broke out in hysterical laughter. “Were they in a leather pouch?”

“No.” He played absently with the corners of the tea bag until the paper tore and the fine tea leaves drifted onto the tablecloth. “They must have been in his stomach.”

He should have been surprised by this sudden clear insight, but her reaction gave him the chills. She laughed, loud and humorless, a high-pitched sound, and, because he had never heard her laugh before, he didn’t realize at first that her hysteria bordered on insanity.

“He swallowed them!” she cried. “The bastard! He cheated me!”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Her grin was broad and fanatic. He could see in her eyes that her thoughts had traveled back to a long-ago time.

“We were the Bonnie and Clyde of Holland,” she said softly. “I can’t remember which of us noticed the similarity of names—Penny and Claude, Bonnie and Clyde—but that’s what gave us the idea in the first place. We had wings, my Claude and me. Post offices, betting parlors, jewelry stores, banks. Every caper we pulled, we got away with it. We had such incredible luck!”

It dizzied him. The idea that this old woman could have robbed banks, robbed jewelry stores, took his breath away.

“It all changed when that Boersma girl moved in next-door,” she went on. “Claude fell for her. And she saw it and played up to him, flirted with him every chance she got. He said—”

Nico reached into his memory for the name. “Jolanda Boersma?”

She ignored the interruption, lost in her story. “He didn’t care about me anymore. The only thing I was good for was to help him with the robberies. And then he said we had to quit. Enough was enough. We’d been lucky to get away with it for so long, but our luck couldn’t last forever, and he didn’t want to wait for the tide to turn against us.”

“Well, he might have been right about that.”

“He wanted to get rid of me, that was the point. He wanted to go away with her. He wanted a divorce.” Her voice was toneless, her gaze fixed on a point somewhere above his head. “After everything we’d been through together, he wanted to trade me in for that worthless slut.”

Without warning, she slid open a drawer and pulled out a long, razor-sharp kitchen knife. “Then, finally, after we’d knocked over one particular jewelry store, Claude told me that that had been the last time.” She traced the edge of the blade lightly with her thumb. “So I got a knife—just like this one—and I stuck him.”

His heart stood still. “You stabbed him to death? Your own husband?”

Her face was a crazed mask. “I wasn’t about to let him leave me for her! If I couldn’t have him, she certainly couldn’t! I rolled him up in an old sheet and dragged him down to the shed. Don’t ask me how I did it—he was bigger than me, heavier—but I managed. I waited days, until the Boersmas were away for the weekend, and then I buried him in the garden, in her garden.”

“How did you do that without anyone noticing?” he demanded, with a mixture of disbelief and respect.

She shrugged. “It was raining, a moonless night. Who was looking out their windows? No one. And the rain washed away any traces I might have left.”

“But you never found the diamonds,” he said.

She seemed completely lost in her thoughts. “I never even imagined he might have swallowed them,” she defended herself.

Nico shifted position in his chair, wondering what would happen if he stood up. Just as he resolved to try it, she looked up, suddenly back in the present moment.

“How many diamonds did you find?”

“Twenty-four.”

She gasped. “It didn’t take all of them to pay for that cruise?”

He hesitated and, thinking feverishly, realized that the only way to convince her would be by answering quickly.

“Yes,” he said, “it did.”

She waved the knife back and forth, mere centimeters from his face. “I don’t believe you. You wouldn’t have thrown them away foolishly like that. You’re not that stupid. You’ve still got most of them squirreled away somewhere. Where are they?”

He stared at the knife, trying to convince himself that she couldn’t hurt him. She had to be seventy years old or more, at least ten years older than he. On the other hand, she was a head taller than he was, and a tremor of anxiety ran through him as he suddenly remembered that she’d locked the kitchen door.

The point of the knife was dangerously close. “I want them back, Nico. They’re mine.”

“They were never yours,” he said, with more spirit than he would have thought he could muster. “You stole them. And I found them, so now they’re mine.”

She drew even closer, the knife blade almost touching his throat.

“When’s your pretty little wife coming back? Not for ten days, I think? That should give me plenty of time to find them.”

Emma had undoubtedly told her all about the cruise. About the windfall he’d gotten from the lottery, his offer to send her off on holiday, how he’d said he wasn’t interested in going himself but that they could now afford to pay for her friend to accompany her. She might as well just have come right out and told Mrs. Colijn exactly what he’d found....

“I’m sorry Emma’s in for such a nasty shock when she gets home,” the old woman muttered, half to herself, “but you don’t leave me any choice, Nico.”

She came still closer, the knife glittering in her hand. He sat paralyzed on Emma’s chair, held prisoner between the wall, the table, and the side of the hutch that was filled with their crystal glasses and good china. He began to talk, to argue, to beg, desperately trying to reason with her. And, at the moment that he finally felt the knife’s point press relentlessly into his flesh, he understood that she would commit a second murder without the slightest hesitation.

Emma looked wonderful. Her face was lightly bronzed, her eyes sparkled, and she admitted that she’d allowed the hairdresser aboard ship to tempt her into a modern cut and a color rinse that took years off her age. He quickly dismissed the suspicion that she’d met someone, another man. Emma wasn’t that sort of woman—although he knew now how easy it was to be mistaken about someone’s character.

“I’m so happy you finished the garden, Nic,” she said cheerfully, setting a tray laden with tea things on the patio table. “I was really starting to worry when you just refused to plant that one last bed.”

He took a seat and dropped a sugar cube in his cup. He gestured towards the bed where, not a week earlier, he had planted the rosebushes which would soon unfold their first blossoms. “You like it, Em? The roses? They’ll be red, you know, blood-red, just what you wanted.” He stirred his tea.

“I love it!” She opened the cookie tin and held it out to him. “Did you see Mrs. Colijn at all while I was gone? I brought a little something back for her. She’s such a dear old soul.”

Nico nibbled at a cookie. The thin layer of chocolate that coated one side of it melted beneath the warmth of his fingertips. “Not that I remember, no,” he said, his mouth full.

“I rang her bell this morning, a couple of times,” she said, a slight frown creasing her forehead. “Her downstairs neighbor told me he’s beginning to worry about her. He hasn’t seen her in a week or more.”

Nico pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and calmly wiped the melted chocolate from his fingers.

Then he gazed proudly out across his garden, his long-cherished dream, and with a little laugh he said, “I wouldn’t worry too much about her, honey. Remember, a bad Penny always turns up sooner or later. I’m sure she’s around here somewhere.”