Discovery of Four Bodies at the Holiday Cottage

The discovery at VIP holiday cottage Eekhoorn 1553 transforms a routine breakfast delivery into the book’s opening encounter with a violent death scene. A park worker enters because a child needs help, then finds a living survivor amid blood and the bodies of three adults; an urgent call for police and an ambulance is followed by the shouted discovery that another person is still alive. The scene withholds identities and explanations, making the cottage’s ordinary domestic traces, the worker’s limited viewpoint, and the unresolved count of those inside central to its effect.

The Uncollected Delivery

The discovery begins with a familiar inconvenience at De Kempervennen. The worker has spent more than two years at the park, where breakfast bags left hanging on cottage doors usually mean guests have checked out early and reception has failed to notify him. Seeing the bag still on the handle, he blames the reception staff for poor organization and approaches in a sour mood, intending to remove yesterday’s newspaper and replace the breakfast.

At first, the cottage seems occupied rather than abandoned. Through a side window he sees coats on the rack, firewood, and women’s shoes. The previous day’s newspaper remains in the bag, but he decides not to investigate further and heads back toward his van. His unease is physical and immediate: he hurries, nearly trips, and wants to get away. Then he sees a small child crawling toward the door. The child is difficult to identify as a boy or girl, has dark smears on the face, dirty blond curls, a soaked and stained greenish pajama suit, and a diaper hanging halfway down the legs. A worn long-eared toy is clutched in filthy hands.

The Child and the Emergency Call

The child’s condition makes the worker stop. The child reaches unsuccessfully for the door handle, points toward the room, and collapses onto the floor. The worker finds the door unlocked. His knowledge of death is limited to seeing his grandmother laid out in a coffin, an experience that taught him that the dead do not look peaceful simply because relatives say they do. At the cottage, he recognizes death by its smell before he understands what has happened inside.

The child is breathing, but only shallowly, and does not respond when he taps the child’s cheek. A sharp chemical smell comes from the child’s mouth. The worker calls reception on his radio and tells her to summon police and an ambulance immediately: it is a matter of life or death. He sits with the child in his lap, touches the cold forehead, holds the small hands, and rocks the child while trying not to vomit. Looking past the open doorway, he sees blood throughout the living room. When the first police car arrives, he begins to cry, afraid the child has died or fallen into a coma and blaming himself for not having managed resuscitation. Though he vaguely remembers first-aid training, he cannot bring himself to put his mouth to the child’s crusted lips.

Bodies Inside the Cottage

The ambulance arrives seconds after the police. One medic checks the child’s pulse and abdomen, lifts the eyelids, and shines a light into the eyes. The child is alive, though apparently malnourished and dehydrated, and is carried out on a stretcher. A commotion from inside interrupts the worker’s brief separation from the emergency. A medic calls for assistance, reporting that someone else is alive. Despite being released from the scene, the worker follows the medic into the cottage, unable to resist seeing what has happened.

Blood makes the hallway carpet cling to his shoes. In the kitchen area, a man is slumped against the counter behind the bar. Bloody smears across the beige tiles suggest that he dragged himself there with his remaining strength. In the living room, two women lie entwined on a red sofa: one has sought shelter in the other’s lap, while the other appears to have folded herself protectively around her. The arrangement registers as an intimate gesture amid the violence, but the scene does not identify either woman or explain their relationship.

The room also preserves evidence of an evening that had begun socially: broken wine glasses, a bottle, an untouched cold platter, and partly smoked cigarettes lie across the floor. The pine coffee table has been overturned. Near the fireplace, a man lies in congealed blood beside a weapon that the police immediately recognize as a Walther 9x9 mm police pistol. The overturned table and the pistol mark a violent interruption of the ordinary gathering suggested by the food and drink, but the opening discovery does not yet establish the exact sequence of events or who used the weapon.

The Count and the Aftermath

A cry from inside the bungalow announces that there are four people and that three are lying there. The distinction matters: the child has been carried out alive, and an additional survivor is reported inside, even as the visible scene presents three adult victims. The worker has been drawn into a count he cannot make sense of. Holding the doorframe, he backs against the wall, grows light-headed, and presses a fist into his stomach; his knees are too weak to run. The scene’s movement from a breakfast bag to an emergency rescue and then to this bewildered count makes the discovery an unfolding crisis rather than a detached inventory of bodies.

The later narrative gives the violence an intimate, lasting context without immediately resolving the mystery for the worker. Peter tells Hetty Vos that grief over losing a child and losing hope of having another remains beneath the apparent return of music, work, motorcycling, and new friendships. At Lieve’s grave, the white stone, forget-me-nots, and children playing nearby set bereavement against everyday life; Peter admits to jealousy of Eva’s intense grief, while Eva continues to identify herself as Lieve’s mother and fears that forgetting a few hours would mean letting her daughter go. These later scenes establish how the book attends to survival after loss, but they do not make the cottage worker an informed witness: at the discovery, he knows only what he can see, smell, and hear.

The event’s narrative force rests on that gap between evidence and explanation. The child’s shallow breathing makes immediate care necessary; the blood, three visible adult victims, and police weapon point toward a grave crime; the call reporting another living person unsettles any simple count. By anchoring the opening in the worker’s limited perceptions and bodily distress, the novel reveals the consequences before it supplies the history that might account for them.