HS02 - Days of Atonement (56 page)

He did not register my confusion.

‘I’m not surprised,’ he went on. ‘Colonel Lavedrine decided on the spur of the moment. We are in a bit of a muddle, as you can see. The Ministry of Defence has issued orders for joint manoeuvres. You just missed the colonel. Or he missed you. In a word, you missed each other. If you will just be patient, Herr Stiffeniis, I’ll see if I can find you some means of transportation. These blasted manoeuvres!’ He held up his hands and let out a sigh. ‘Of course, I realise the urgency of your investigations. The sooner the matter is cleared up, the better for us all, French and Prussians alike. If I can manage to get you there, Colonel Lavedrine will bring you back with him.’ He shook his head and laughed as he led me out of the door. ‘That coach will take you,’ he said. Still smiling broadly, he added: ‘You and Lavedrine do mix with such strange company,
monsieur!’

Still he did not see the confusion which possessed me. Perhaps he put it down to mortification at missing an appointment with Lavedrine. In any case, he made nothing of my silence. He rapped his baton against the coach door.

‘Take His Excellency to join Colonel Lavedrine,’ he called to the driver. ‘You know where the Gottewald house is, don’t you?’

‘Who doesn’t, sir?’ the man grumbled.

Despite the amount of traffic on the road, cannon and other engines of war being moved into position, more troops than I had even seen amassed in Lotingen, infantry and cavalry and teams of sappers and artillerymen, the journey was over almost as soon as it began. I took little note of the busy military world through which we passed. My head was spinning with questions.

Why had Lavedrine gone back to the house?

And what strange company was Mutiez referring to?

The cabriolet lurched to a halt, leather brakes screeching against the iron wheels.

Another carriage stood in the clearing. A soldier was asleep on the box. Lavedrine was there, then. And he had been there for quite some time, it appeared. He was alone in the cottage with his chosen guest.

I leapt to the ground and charged along the leafy tunnel leading to the house.

At the end, I drew up short.

In a calm, ordered, commanding voice, Lavedrine was giving orders.

‘Slowly. More slowly!’ he exhorted. ‘Take your time. No one is hounding us.’

I listened for a reply, but there was none.

I moved to the shelter of a tree and took stock of the place.

The Frenchman was standing in the garden at the corner of the house. He was wrapped up in his leather overcoat, his arms outstretched, watching, or directing, something that I was not able to see. He looked taller, more imperious, than when I had seen him last. His hair was tied up at the nape of his neck with a gleaming white ring, the vertebra of a bull, or something equally bizarre. As he glanced left and right, loose silver curls danced in the stiff breeze. His profile was fixed on someone that I could not see. Someone hiding behind the impenetrable screen of his leather mantle.

I took a step forward, holding my breath.

I craned my neck to see.

A small man was gripping the arm of a tiny woman. Wrapped up in vast cloaks and serpentine scarves, they might have been preparing to set off across the Siberian wastes with only Lavedrine to lead them.

But what was he doing there with his landlord and that man’s wife?

 38 

I
DID NOT
shift from my vantage point behind the tree.

Landlord Böll was dressed in a bulging brown ball of an oversized topcoat. The rough-cut fur was shaggy and bristling. He might have been a captive bear at a country fair. All that was lacking was a dark-skinned urchin to blow a fife and make him dance. His round bulk and diminutive size were not improved by a tall black stove-pipe hat that sat uneasily on his head. It was festooned from the crown down to the brim—long white ribbons pinned up with silvery buttons. His wife was holding tightly on to his arm, as if in danger of collapsing. She might have been going to a summer wedding. Her tightly bodiced gown was sky-blue, unseasonable satin, which shimmered and shifted in the stiff breeze. As she turned this way and that, her dress billowed out and trailed lazily behind her, like a deflating hot-air balloon. Frau Böll’s air-filled gown seemed to drag her fitfully in one direction, while her legs struggled to take her the opposite way. Her eyes were clenched and closed, as if she were concentrating. Clearly, she was in a trance.

This state of other-worldliness was not the only strange thing about the scene.

Lavedrine stepped aside, then quickly chased behind them, as the husband and wife swirled and floundered around in a never-ceasing dance that twirled the length and the breadth of the garden. In their interlacing hands they held long silver sticks, like rapiers. The couple appeared to be acting out a furious, silent duel against an invisible enemy.

Suddenly, they froze.

‘It’s stronger here, sir. Isn’t it so, Rumeliah?’

Böll’s voice was thin and nasal, oddly feminine. His tone was timorous, as if he feared to say what he ought. He watched his wife like a man feeding a hawk, ready at any moment to pull back his finger before it was bitten off. Without any warning, his eyes rolled up into his skull, showing off the whites. He looked like a man who had been blinded by cataracts. He
lurched, began to stumble, then righted himself, as if that stick pointing at the earth were welded to the spot, holding him in place.

‘Don’t move, sir!’ he snapped. Lavedrine had launched himself forward, either to support the man, or to help the lady. ‘You’ll ruin everything. She’s far stronger than me, Herr Lavedrine. Her powers are pure celestial.’

Lavedrine stopped in his tracks, his gaze fixed on the points of the silver sticks that hovered over the surface of the ground. Böll held one in his right hand, his wife gripped the other in her left. Whenever their rods happened to touch, the couple recoiled as if a painful electrical shock had passed between them. The tips twitched and quivered like the antennae of sounding insects, vibrating, wavering, separating, coming together again with the attendant shock. Suddenly, the couple’s twin sticks rose in unison into the air, and hovered for a moment, before plunging down to the ground again.

‘Notable turbulence,’ rasped Böll. ‘She passed this way for certain . . .’

A shriek cut him short.

‘It’s pulling her hand off,’ Böll confided, glancing with concern at his tortured wife. ‘That woman passed here, she did. And she were . . . yes, sir, she were
alive!
’

The landlord’s diminutive companion began to scream and screech again. Her mouth gaped open frantically, saliva dribbling in a white froth from her pale lips.

‘What can you tell me?’ Lavedrine demanded. ‘What’s happening?’

‘I was asking myself the very same question.’

I might have waved a magic wand and cast a spell on all three of them.

The penetrating eyes of Böll fixed unblinkingly on me as I stepped out from the greenery. His wife was in a fright. For some unimaginable reason, their divining rods seemed to have lost all their gravitational pull. They might have been a pair of truffle-hounds that had lost the scent. As I stepped into the garden, the landlord and his wife took a step backwards.

‘What strange goings-on are these?’ I asked.

Lavedrine passed his hand through his unruly locks. He did not seem pleased to see me. ‘I knew it would not be to your taste, Stiffeniis,’ he murmured. ‘I’d have told you, if anything had come of it. Otherwise . . . well, what would there be to tell?’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I would have put it down to experience. An experiment, let’s say. I requested these people to come and use their powers for me. You’ve met Herr Böll, the sensitive, and his wife, I believe?’

The lady and gentleman bowed together, perfectly synchronised, their eyes and dowsing sticks fixed modestly upon the ground, like performing illusionists in a theatre. Lavedrine, the master of ceremonies, had introduced them as if they were a famous stage act.

‘I was under the impression that they kept a lodging house,’ I remarked. I did not look at the pair, my eyes still fixed on Lavedrine. Even so, I perceived that Böll and his wife relaxed and breathed more easily, as if some necessary clarification had been made, which released them from all responsibility.

‘Very well. You know what we are doing.’ Lavedrine stepped in front of the pair, as if to hide them from my sight. ‘Those missing rags and cloths that Helena pointed out must be hidden somewhere near the house, Stiffeniis. They were
not
carried away. There is no reason to believe such a thing.’

‘Your folly amazes me,’ I said.

His face grew ugly. Lines bit deeply into his brow, his eyes narrowed. ‘Your lack of faith shocks me,’ he replied. ‘Are you suggesting that your wife invented everything?’

I shook my head. ‘Helena pointed out what was obvious to any woman,’ I replied. ‘There could be more than one explanation for the lack of rags. Helena herself provided one. The family may have been preparing to abandon the cottage. A tidy woman would destroy everything she was not intending to carry off. Sybille Gottewald did not know that her children were about to be butchered. Or that she herself . . .’

‘Oh, that’s excellent, sir!’ Lavedrine exclaimed haughtily.

He stumped up the garden, then back again. ‘If we find nothing, I will publicly admit that I am wrong. I’ve been pondering on this experiment for quite some time. If paranormal sensibility can help us resolve the matter, why deprive ourselves of such aid? It may be a valuable resource. And how much more intriguing, if such persons may lead us to the heart of an impenetrable criminal mystery? This was too good an opportunity to miss. Humour me for once, I pray you.’

He might have been a father chiding a wayward child. He had the gift of finding the chinks in my armour. It was true, I was too harsh, too dismissive to trust such unscientific claims. I would rather avoid the risk of being taken for a dupe than fall into such a trap. He saw the breach, and thrust through it.

‘Herr Böll, would you be so kind as to answer his question?’

Böll looked at me, then rolled his eyes. I stared into the blanks. A moment later, the pupils slotted back into place. ‘It’s all a question of flux, Herr Procurator. Electrical flux, I mean to say. Energy passes from Rumeliah to me, and back again, by way of these batons.’ He raised his silver wand for me to inspect. ‘They are copper sticks wrapped around with finest silver wire. Voltaic coils, they call ’em. Copper is dull, but it picks up the smallest trace of any charge. Then the twists of coiled silver accelerate it up to human sensibility.’

‘How interesting!’ I said. I had never heard such babble in my life.

‘The energy increases as me an’ Rumeliah make the triangle with our points. The perfect form. The all-seeing Eye. Eye-sosceles triangle. It’s not called that for nothing!’

He smiled to his wife.

‘Rumeliah’s more the practical sort,’ he declared. ‘I dabble in the theory. Then again, sir, she’s Turkish. Doesn’t speak or read a word of German. Just feels. I am something of a dab hand myself, but she’s the true phenomenon. If there’s a tremor, the slightest tickle, she’ll feel it coursing through her rod. She’s good at fluids and fluxes, but Material Emanation is not beyond her skills . . .’

‘What’s that?’ I asked.

Böll glanced at Lavedrine, who nodded encouragingly. While he looked at the Frenchman with his left eye, his right remained fixed immovably on me. He might have been gifted with independent vision, as certain species of reptile—lizards from Tierra del Fuego, in particular—are thought to be.

‘
Effluvia
, sir. Manifestations. Ectoplasms. Spirits . . . There’s words and words for it. I only knew of dowsing myself, sir. But then I met Rumeliah.’

‘Water dowsing? Divining springs and sinking wells?’ I interupted him. ‘My father had a man who used to do it with a willow branch.’

‘Indeed, sir?’

My father never trusted that dowser, and cursed when he had to pay. He swore that the cunning fellow knew exactly where to look for water before he started searching with his twitching stick.