Three Knocks

Five people had vanished without a trace, and none of them knew the others. They lived in different neighbourhoods, were decades apart in age and shared no job, no parish and no friends. Only one thing linked them: a date. Each of them had disappeared on the night of 31 October, one a year, five years in a row.

Inspector Herbella had had the files open for weeks. There were no signs of violence in any of the houses. The doors were locked from the inside, with the key turned, and the wallets, phones and jewellery were still in their place. It was as if their owners had left without going through the door.

That Night of the Dead, the police station had emptied. When she arrived, Herbella had opened her office window because the heating was stifling her, and she had already forgotten about it. Every now and then, a cold draught lifted the corners of her papers. She poured herself a glass of water, left it by the desk lamp and went back to the photographs without tasting it.

In the first house, dry leaves were scattered across the living-room rug. In the third, a curtain had ended up tangled round a standard lamp. “Trivial details,” the officer who signed the report had written by hand. Herbella circled them in red.

Then she opened the recording from the last victim’s home camera, a retired teacher. The woman was reading in her armchair. At one point she got up and left the frame; when she came back, the pages of her book began to turn by themselves. She went out again, came back with a glass and put it on the side table before carrying on reading. Shortly afterwards there were three knocks.

“Coming,” the woman said, without looking up from her book. The recording ended there.

Herbella went through the neighbours’ statements. In three other cases, someone had heard three sharp knocks that night and, after them, the same reply: “Coming.”

She went back to the photos and, for the first time, compared the furniture instead of the faces. On every table there was a glass of water filled to the brim. She remembered her grandmother’s village and the night her grandfather died, when she was a child. Someone opened the bedroom window “so the soul could leave” and another hand left a glass of water on the bedside table “for the thirst of the journey”. Nobody touched it all night. That glass belonged to the dead man.

Then someone knocked at her office door. Knock, knock, knock. “Coming,” she replied, without taking her eyes off the screen.

She zoomed in on the last photo. The curtains: in every house they were blown inwards. The dry leaves, the tangled curtain, the pages turning by themselves… Herbella felt her blood run cold. She looked at the papers fluttering on her desk, the curtain billowing behind her, the untouched glass by the lamp.

On the other side of the door, three knocks sounded again, more slowly. The inspector grabbed the glass and drank it in one go, down to the last drop. The knocking stopped. A moment later, she heard footsteps moving away down the corridor, unhurried, like those of someone who has come to the wrong house.