HS02 - Days of Atonement (14 page)

There was not enough!

Had the killer cleaned the weapon, then cleaned the house as well?

Another thought flashed through my mind. A more terrible one.

The children had been stripped of their clothes, then they had been killed. Afterwards, the boys had been mutilated.

Were the boys the true object of the raid?

I sat back, gasping for air.

Was that the reason that the mother had been removed from the house?

Thinking like the perpetrator had become a nightmare. I shuddered with revulsion, my mind swamped with terrible images of gross, vile savagery. We ought to have called for a physician to verify whether the bodies of the children had been abused before they were killed. Or afterwards, when they were dead.

That possibility was more unbearable than any other violation. Worse than murder. The faces of my own dear little ones flashed graphically before my eyes. They seemed to accuse me of having abandoned them in Lotingen, all alone except for their mother and Lotte, undefended.

A sexual attack levelled at the children?

Was that the real reason Franz Durskeitner had been so reticent?

I looked out of the window, my mind a blur.

After climbing very slowly up the face of a steep escarpment, the carriage topped the hill and began to run more quickly over the exposed plateau of Górowo. The horses followed a long line of wooden poles which had been driven into the ground to indicate the way across the barren white plain. The undulating surface offered no shelter that could diminish the driving force of the Buran. The wind raked up a filmy dust of snow like the sweeping train of a bridal gown. My driver, Egon Eis, was sitting on his box exposed to the worst of the weather. If he were to die of exposure, I would know nothing of the matter until the reins slipped from his frozen hands and the horses ran off the road, dragging the heavy coach after them. I prayed that the pint of gin hanging from my driver’s neck would keep him alive. I had seen him replenish his flask religiously on every occasion that we stopped at an inn. If the weather doesn’t kill him, I thought grimly, he will end his days pickled in spirits.

I called up to ask him how he was.

‘Cold, your honour!’ he grunted back.

Unable to offer help or succour, I settled down again, wrapping my scarf more tightly around my neck, shivering violently as I huddled deep beneath my blanket.

I closed my eyes, and tried to picture the man towards whom I was travelling.

He was a Prussian officer. If he had been sent to the fortress to work under the command of General Juri Katowice, he must be a soldier of the very first order. He would be a vigilant man, one who was capable of defending himself and his family. Almost certainly, he would have taken the presence of Durskeitner into account. He might even have seen the hunter’s cabin. It was close enough to the haven he had chosen for his wife and children in the forest. Would such a man, trained to be aware of encroaching danger, leave his family alone in that isolated place if he truly believed that anyone was a threat to them? If he had even suspected that the hunter might harm his wife and babes, he would have carried them to Kamenetz, or found lodgings for them in Lotingen.

I glanced out of the window. Night was falling fast, and the wind had eased off somewhat as the vehicle passed the ten-mile stone and the first signpost to the settlement of Bartoszyce. Before we arrived at the ninth stone, the coach slewed to a sudden halt.

‘Hold fast, there!’

Uncertain whether that shout had come from Egon Eis, I pressed my nose close up against the frosted windowpane and attempted to look out. I could see nothing more than a dark shape in the frame. Suddenly, the door jerked open, and the muzzle of a pistol met the centre of my forehead, the metal as cold as a searing iron on my skin.

‘Dismount, sir!’

Five armed men in the tattered remains of regimental greatcoats stood in a half-circle. Prussian soldiers. They had removed the colours to avoid identification, but they were such muddy, dirty, ragged overcoats that recognition would have defied an expert. With one notable exception.

‘I am Prussian, like yourselves,’ I declared, holding up my hands as the man with the pistol waved me down to the ground. I glanced up at Eis in his sparkling, frost-coated waterproof. He sat snivelling high on his box, wiping tears from his eyes, the perfect picture of a helpless waif.

‘What do you want from us?’ I asked.

A tall, mustachioed man with rough, red skin and the bearing of an officer stepped forward. He wore a uniform that denoted rank, and a shoulder-flap of the 2nd Regiment of the Hussars. A well-cut dark-blue overcoat with
an upright collar and broad lapels of a rich, bright red stretched down beneath his knees, a sabre hanging from his broad brown belt. His black eyes held immovably on me. They were cold, humourless, pitiless. In that moment, I wondered whether my journey to Kamenetz had come to a premature end. Our rebel soldiers are ferocious in their treatment of Prussians they believe have bent beneath the foreign yoke.

‘Food, money,’ he said, looking hard at me. ‘And information. What is your business in Bartoszyce?’

‘I have no business there,’ I answered. ‘I am a magistrate on official business. I am bound for Kamenetz fortress . . .’

‘Kamenetz?’ he interrupted sharply. ‘You are going to Kamenetz?’

‘That is what I said,’ I replied.

‘Why, may I ask?’

He was polite enough, though his pistol never shifted from my heart by so much as an inch.

‘One of the officers there is involved in a case that I am investigating,’ I said. It was the truth, less than the whole truth, but I hoped it would be enough to satisfy his curiosity and let me pass.

‘Nothing more?’ he queried with a hostile stare.

‘Nothing,’ I confirmed. ‘If you will allow me, sir, I have a pass and other official documents in my pouch. My papers will confirm all that I have said.’

He waved his pistol in the air with a gesture of annoyance. He might have been swatting at a fly. ‘I am not interested in papers signed by Prussian puppets who choose to collaborate with the French,’ he said.

This declaration of insubordination raised a cackle of wild laughter from his men.

‘What I am asking,’ he continued, ‘is whether you have been sent by those who would like to see the French attack the fortress?’

He closed one eye, cocked his pistol, and pointed it at me.

‘Are you a spy?’ he asked.

If I hoped to save my own skin, and the wrinkled carcass of Egon Eis, who was wailing like a newborn baby, much to the amusement of the renegades, it was best to confess the truth.

‘If you read my orders, you will see that I have been sent to prevent the French from entering Kamenetz,’ I said boldly. ‘I am conducting an investigation into a murder in Lotingen. Naturally, my enquiry has been authorised by the French. But it has been managed in such a way that they will not be involved directly. That is why I am travelling alone, with no one but my coachman to protect me.’

He waved the pistol impatiently, gesturing to see the documents.

I searched in my shoulder bag, my hand steadier than before, then handed him Count Dittersdorf’s letter.

‘What is the officer’s name?’ he snapped, glancing quickly at the contents.

The gang of rebels stood in a threatening semicircle, their eyes flicking between myself and their chief. Once, they must have looked like other men, but the scars and the sacrifices of a hundred skirmishes were savagely carved upon their mangled features. It was hard to look at them with hope. A single word from him, they would shoot us dead.

‘I seek a man named Bruno Gottewald,’ I replied.

‘Not the general?’ he asked after some moments, turning his head to one side, peering at me through that half-closed eye again.

‘General Katowice?’ I said. ‘I’ll have to speak to him before I can talk to Officer Gottewald. He is in command of Kamenetz garrison.’

My inquisitor said nothing, but he clenched his jaw and nodded his head. The answer seemed to satisfy him. He held Dittersdorf’s letter up and let it catch in the driving wind. For a moment I had the impression that he was about to let it blow away.

‘Inform the general that you met von Schill along the road. Baptista von Schill,’ he said with a hint of pride, stepping forward and handing back the papers. ‘Tell him that I let you pass, and say that all is quiet looking westward.’

‘Major von Schill,’ I repeated slowly, my interest fully awakened. I had always thought he was a phantom, a Prussian scarecrow meant to put the fear of God into the French. After every massacre, the name of Baptista von Schill was on all men’s lips. A full major in the Brandenburg Hussars, he had led his men out of the besieged bastion of Kolberg in Pomerania after the disgrace at Auerstädt, transforming his followers into a band of bloodthirsty nationalists, desperate men who refused to contemplate surrender. The
Freikorps
of von Schill were feared as much as they were hated, not only by the emperor’s troops, but by Prussian traitors also. The rumours spoke of farms and villages being wiped out after the inhabitants refused to aid or shelter the rebels. One story told of a large copper vat which had been filled with snow. Flames had been lit beneath it, and three men accused of treason by the major had been boiled alive.

Had I just run that fatal risk?

‘One thing remains,’ he said, nodding to one of his henchmen, who stepped up close to me and drew his knife, a six-inch blade flashing close to my throat. I was not half so frightened of the weapon as I was of the man himself. As he stood beside me, the wind lifted the thin leather mask covering the left side of his face, and his features were caught in the light of the
carriage for an instant. One cheek and the side of his nose had been torn away with violence. A mottled flap of glistening scar tissue had been pulled tight by a ham-fisted surgeon and roughly stitched from the cheekbone down to his mouth. I could not tell which was worse: the sight and the stink of this monster, or the thought of what he might do.

‘Do you mean to kill me?’ I asked von Schill.

‘Who knows?’ he replied. ‘The honour of old Prussia lives on in Kamenetz. If you betray the general, I’ll search you out in hell and have that head off your shoulders!’

He nodded to the man beside me.

That grotesque face twisted into a horrid grin, the serrated blade slashed down wildly towards my innards. A gasp blocked my throat, everything was a sudden blur. The world turned white, then slowly faded into smothering black fog. Was this the end? A stab of pain, a blinding flash of light, then darkness? I heard the hammering thud of my heart. When its furious beating stopped, I knew, I would be dead.

Raucous laughter brought me to my senses.

It must have seemed a tremendous jape as my money-pouch crashed to the ground with a loud tinkle of coins. Ninety thalers of the cash that Dittersdorf had handed me for the journey lay sparkling in the snow at my feet.

‘Dead men don’t carry messages,’ said Major von Schill, an evil glint in his eye. ‘Now, climb aboard and take this moaning wretch away with you. You’ll be in Kamenetz fortress before dark, Herr Magistrate. If anyone stops you on the road, tell them that you’ve had the pleasure of our company. My name will be your safest passport.’

The deformed man grinned and threatened me with his knife again, edging me towards the coach, prodding me up the steps, closing the door firmly behind me. My coachman jumped up nimbly onto his box, as if to give the lie to his age. He cracked his whip, and a minute later we were travelling down the hill again.

Count Dittersdorf had just been robbed by patriots.

I sat in a cold sweat, thinking of the folded twenty-thaler note that Helena had given me, insisting that I slip it inside my stocking for safe keeping.

The major had been precise in his estimation. It was not yet night as the ancient fortress of Kamenetz loomed up two hours later. I lowered the window sash the better to see it. From a distance, a full moon glinting through dark clouds, accompanied by the insistent whistling of the Buran, the fortress was impressively menacing. It was an ugly brute of a place—not on account of its size, which was not so very grand, but for its shape. Eight tall bastions glistened like polished silver, seeming to support the dark, solid mass of the castellated walls above. The fortress perched on the crown of a
barren hillside like a huge, hideous spider, ready to attack its prey. So this was the extreme edge of East Prussia, the fort from which the Teutonic Knights led by Ulrich von Jungingen had launched their murderous onslaught against Ladislao Jagellone and the tribes of Poles and Lithuanians. It was the last remaining Prussian stronghold, which the French invader had never reached, or tried to roust.

Twenty minutes more, and we were called to halt outside the gate, then obliged to await the captain-of-the-watch. He came at once, cutting a smart figure, marching quickly over the snow-sprinkled cobblestones, his heels raising a spark now and then. I watched with interest, and despite my doubts I was impressed. It was rare to see a Prussian soldier with military snap in his step, even rarer to see a Prussian officer so immaculately turned out since the coming of the French. His leather riding boots gleamed like polished ebony.

The words of von Schill sounded in my ears again.

He had spoken of Prussia as it used to be, before the coming of the French. Suddenly, I shared his nostalgia.
This
was the Prussia that I remembered. The wonder was that it had all been cancelled out so quickly.

‘Good evening.’ The officer came to attention with a spine-snapping salute. ‘What is your business here?’

‘I have come from some way off,’ I said guardedly, ‘with important news for the commanding officer. Can I see him?’

Though stiff and formal, I thought I saw a sardonic smile flit across the young captain’s lips and light up his eyes.

‘Sir?’

‘General Katowice,’ I insisted.

‘You’ll have to wait until morning. Herr General’s orders. You can speak with him at eight o’clock.’