Through Dead Eyes (6 page)

‘Show me what?’

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go now. I’m probably wrong anyway.’

‘Wrong about what?’ said Alex.

‘There is something I want to show you,’ she said.

Alex had no idea what Angelien was talking about but was curious enough to want to find out. He locked up the room and they left the hotel.

Angelien set off across a nearby bridge and down a narrow alleyway that opened up on to a wide street criss-crossed with tramlines.

‘If we’re quick, we can catch that one,’ said Angelien as a tram rounded the corner, its wheels whistling and grating on the rails.

Alex ran to keep up with Angelien and they reached the tram stop just as the doors opened and a small queue of people began to step aboard. Angelien paid the driver.

They sat down, the doors shut and the tram moved away with a hum and a faint clanking. It stopped at a set of lights before setting off up a long straight and very wide avenue.

‘So where are we going?’ asked Alex.

‘To the Rijksmuseum,’ she answered.

‘The what?’ said Alex.

‘Rijksmuseum,’ said Angelien, over the whining of a tram as it rounded a bend.

‘And there’s something there to do with my mask?’ he asked. ‘Is that it?’

‘Wait and see,’ said Angelien.

They both looked out of the window as the tram continued on its way crossing bridge after bridge, canal after canal, until Angelien signalled it was time to get off.

They walked along the Singel canal for a while. The sky was filthy grey and a murky twilight had descended.

Another glass-roofed tour boat went by, filled with passengers. Alex could hear the voice of the guide on board but couldn’t recognise the language. It started to spit with rain as they reached a large, rather grim-looking building partially obscured by construction hoardings. A steady stream of people were crossing the road ahead of them.

‘So is this the place?’ said Alex.

‘The Rijksmuseum,’ said Angelien.

‘It looks like a building site,’ said Alex. ‘Is it open?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Well – not all of it. It is an art museum – like your National Gallery in London. It is very well known. It has paintings by Vermeer, Frans Hals and Rembrandt and lots of other famous painters. You’ve never heard of it?’

Alex shook his head. They crossed the road and followed the painted arrows that led round the side of the building.

‘Do you like paintings?’ Angelien asked Alex, as she handed her bag to the security guard.

‘Yeah,’ said Alex. ‘Some paintings.’

Alex passed his bag over as well and they waited for them to emerge from the scanner. Then they checked them into the cloakroom, along with their jackets, and Angelien went to buy their tickets.

‘Are you ever going to tell me why we’ve come here?’ asked Alex.

Angelien smiled.

‘Don’t you like surprises?’ she said.

‘Depends,’ said Alex. ‘
Some
surprises are OK.’

Angelien turned and put her hand on his shoulder.

‘Trust me. I think there is a painting here that you will want to see,’ she said. ‘Come on.’

They walked into a large room. The walls were high and wide. Above them was a kind of walkway. It was all much more modern inside than Alex had expected.

There was a massive wooden model of a sailing ship with a huge cannon laid out horizontally. There seemed to be a military theme to the room, with armour and flintlock pistols and a cabinet of swords.

‘They look like samurai swords,’ said Alex.

‘They are,’ said Angelien. ‘The Dutch were a superpower in those days. Before you had the British Empire we had colonies all over the world. New York was New Amsterdam first you know.’

‘Really?’ said Alex.

‘Sure,’ said Angelien. ‘Don’t they teach you anything in England? The Dutch were especially big in the Far East – hence all the Indonesian restaurants. Van Kampen – who owned the house that became your hotel – made a lot of his money trading with Japan.’

And the next few paintings seemed to illustrate this, with scenes of exotic places. Not that anyone looked happy. There was a gloomy portrait where the whole family looked thoroughly miserable at finding themselves in whatever tropical paradise it depicted.

‘This way,’ said Angelien, and they climbed a wooden staircase to the upstairs galleries. They walked past still lifes and paintings of tulips. Alex stopped to look at a winter landscape with lots of black-clad figures like beetles on a frozen lake. He spent a long time studying all the little figures and grinned at the bare bottom sticking out of one of the buildings, the comical effect of some kind of primitive toilet.

They passed a painting of figures outside a church, all in black with wide-brimmed hats. The Dutch seemed to be in love with black in those days; practically everyone in these pictures was wearing it.

Alex was beginning to feel that his interest in painting was being pushed to the limits. But he didn’t want to show that to Angelien and so he followed and said nothing.

Angelien had moved ahead to stand beside a painting and was beckoning to him to come over. Alex walked slowly towards her. An elderly couple stepped in front of him and blocked his view. The woman turned and saw him coming and there was something about the look on Alex’s face that made her tug her husband’s arm and pull him away.

Alex stood in front of the painting, mesmerised. It was not large but it had a wide and ornate golden frame around it. In the centre of the painting was a figure standing in a window, the face a pale and smiling mask.

‘That mask,’ said Alex quietly. ‘It looks just like my mask.’

Angelien nodded, clearly waiting for Alex to notice something else.

‘And that looks just like the hotel.’

‘It
is
your hotel,’ said Angelien. ‘The part that you are staying in. Spooky, huh?’

Suddenly it was as though the floor was tilting towards the painting ahead of him, and he would stumble and fall into it. It seemed to take an effort of will to stay upright as he struggled against the dizziness.

He felt himself drawn into the painting, leaning forward, his eyes and attention pulled towards the window of the room he knew was his hotel room, and to the strange masked face that looked out at him through the grimy varnish and cracked paint.

The masked figure was a girl, he could now see. The painting showed a night scene, but age had darkened it further. Much of the painting was impenetrable blackness, out of which loomed various figures – figures of children running and playing – illuminated by a full moon that shone overhead. Alex turned to look at Angelien.

‘I know,’ said Angelien in response to Alex’s baffled expression. ‘You can see why I was so surprised when I saw the mask. I had been looking at the painting only two days before.’

Alex looked back at the painting. It was so dark, so gloomy. It seemed to carry the night with it and, just as though he were looking at a real night scene, Alex’s eyes strained to adjust to the low light.

‘I don’t . . .’ he began. ‘How? How can that be?’

Angelien shrugged and looked back at the picture.

‘Honestly, I don’t have any explanation,’ she said with a shake of her head. ‘It’s crazy.’

Alex looked at the girl in the painting and it felt as though he was being pulled towards her. He could see her so vividly – every crease in her clothes, every pore on the flesh of her pale arms. He could see her eyes glistening in the shadows in the dark sockets of the mask.

The strange feeling of dread he had experienced in his hotel room returned and gripped his body. His breathing was becoming shorter and his throat seemed to be tightening up as though he was being choked by a powerful hand.

‘Alex?’ said Angelien. ‘Are you OK?’

‘I’m fine,’ said Alex with a weak smile, rubbing his forehead with the tips of his fingers.

‘Sure?’ said Angelien.

‘I’m OK – really,’ said Alex, pulling his eyes from the masked girl with some difficulty and moving across the picture, taking in the full strangeness of it. ‘It’s so weird.’

‘Come,’ said Angelien, putting her arm round him. ‘Let’s go and sit.’

Angelien led Alex out to the stairs they had walked up and they sat down on the top step. Alex felt nauseous and his legs ached as though he had just been for a long run.

‘You looked as though you were about to pass out on me,’ Angelien said. ‘Maybe you shouldn’t look so hard.’

Nearby a family hissed angrily to each other. They kept this low volume argument up for a few minutes and then left in a sullen knot, muttering rhythmically with each step of their descent.

The family’s mood was mirrored by the weather, which had worsened. Rain was now dribbling down the panes of the windows and the sky was dark and brooding. When Angelien spoke, it was in a near whisper.

‘That painting was done by a man called Pieter Graaf?,’ said Angelien. ‘He lived in a house on the opposite side of the canal from where your hotel is now.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I have been given access to the letters and journals of Pieter Graaf for my research. They were mislabelled and have lain in a box in the university archive ever since they were donated by his family back in the 1880s. I’m very lucky actually. A friend came across them by accident and knew I was researching in this area –’

‘But why did he paint my mask?’ interrupted Alex.

‘I’m still trying to find out what that painting’s about. It’s a strange picture – unlike the rest of his work.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Graaf was a portrait painter mostly. Not a famous one, not Rembrandt or anything, but a successful one all the same. That picture is clearly more than just a painting of the girl.

‘He was a young painter on the make,’ said Angelien. ‘He had come to the city to make his fortune. There were plenty of vain and wealthy merchants here. It was a good move.

‘He was the son of wealthy merchants himself, in fact, so he must have found it easy to move in those circles. Amsterdam was the place to be if you wanted to earn your living as a painter. Paintings were seen as really fashionable in the Golden Age. Anyone who was anyone had to have paintings on the wall. They were everywhere – in homes, in shops, in warehouses.

‘Graaf was in competition with some of the greatest painters Holland has ever seen, but there was enough work to go round and enough money to pay for it.’

Angelien pulled in her feet to let someone pass.

‘He lived pretty well and moved in high society. He seems to have enjoyed himself immensely if half of what is in his journals is true. But he was clearly fascinated with the family who lived opposite.’

‘So does that mean you know all about the girl?’ said Alex. ‘The girl in the painting?’

‘Hanna,’ said Angelien.

The name seemed to echo round the stairwell and flutter towards Alex’s ear to die as a whisper.

‘Is that her name?’

But some part of Alex already seemed to know this.

Angelien nodded.

‘I do know some things,’ she said. ‘Quite a lot actually. But I haven’t finished reading the journals yet. I’ve only just been given access to Graaf’s journals and his writing is really hard to read a lot of the time. It’s taking for ever to decipher. Plus I’ve been a bit distracted with babysitting duties, as you know.’

Angelien smiled and Alex smiled back, blushing a little.

‘Graaf seems to have been intrigued by the Van Kampens right from the start. He was always on the lookout for new clients and he wasn’t going to ignore a rich merchant living right opposite.

‘The painter went over to introduce himself and noted that Van Kampen had no wife, that he seemed very strict and severe and, even more surprisingly, that the daughter wore a mask.’

‘Did he meet Hanna?’ asked Alex.

‘No,’ said Angelien. ‘That’s the strange thing. He writes about her for years but never ever seems to physically meet her. Maybe that’s why he became so obsessed by her.’

‘But why did she wear the mask?’ asked Alex. ‘Did Graaf find out?’

Angelien nodded.

‘Hanna had been badly burned in a fire as a small child. Her face had been horribly disfigured and so she wore that mask at all times and never left the house. She was so horrified by her appearance that she did not want to see it or to have others see it. They allowed no mirrors in the house for fear that Hanna would see her own terrible face.’

Alex thought how strange it was that a young girl like Hanna had worn a mask showing the face of an old woman.

‘Do you really think the mask I bought could be the one from the painting?’ said Alex. ‘The one the girl is wearing?’

‘Who knows,’ she said. ‘Maybe. Anything’s possible, right? The mask itself looks like a Japanese
noh
mask – a mask used in Japanese theatre – though I’m no expert. But it makes sense that her father brought it back from Japan.’

‘What about her mother?’ he said. ‘Where was she?’