Mostly my friend F, in fact, who I was on a train with, on our way to a conference or something where she was going to speak and I was going to be her sound, slides and confidence assistant, as we did before. When we changed to a small grass-green local train two plain-clothes policemen came to talk to us, saying that there’d been an attempt on the king’s life at Deventer station just as we were leaving there by the previous train. The king’s glasses had been rigged to explode in his face, but the plan had been foiled by the fact that the king was just then wearing his brother’s glasses to see how they would look on him so the glasses exploded harmlessly on a table. (Note: our king doesn’t wear glasses. His brother does, though.)
“This is going to take a while,” the policemen said. As they asked more and more questions about our presence at the station it dawned on me that they were accusing us, and especially F, of having been behind the attack. I desperately wanted to say that I was innocent but knew that that would only incriminate us more.
One policeman took F to a separate compartment for more rigorous interrogation and I was left with the other one and a stack of magazines, which I flipped through to find news but of course there wasn’t any. Then the first policeman came back (without F) and said “it’s all been solved, it was a [word I couldn’t understand, but I took it to mean ‘vampire’], they killed him the moment he came out of the station”.
We couldn’t get to the conference in time (F had reappeared, I think) so we travelled back. At the station –unlike the real station of Deventer, a small terminus with an empty platform all along one side like some stations in Italy and Spain where I’ve been– the main building was closed off and we could see through the window that forensics was being done on a man’s body, conceivably the attacker.
I didn’t know whether it had been an honest mistake or someone had really wanted to kill the king and frame F for it, and that made me very anxious.
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