HS02 - Days of Atonement (8 page)

Mutiez’s angry hiss broke the shocked silence.

‘That damned woodsman . . .’

‘Later!’ Lavedrine snapped. ‘The boys were cut, but the children were dead already. No blood has flowed from those wounds. Only from the throats . . . And yet, even then, there’s no great quantity, given that three murders have been committed. The mattress is more or less dry. It is almost as if the blood has been carried away.’

Lavedrine hesitated, considering the immensity of what he had just supposed.

‘Like the mother,’ I reminded him. ‘She has to be found. That must be our immediate concern. She may still be living.’

Lavedrine nodded in agreement.

‘My men are combing the woods,’ Mutiez reported. ‘And the hunter can do no further harm in Bitternau. If she can be found, they’ll find her.’

‘The house must be sealed off until we can examine it more carefully,’ I said to the lieutenant. ‘Nothing is to be moved, or taken away. This is most important. The corpses should be stored in a cold, dry place until the father is found. He will decide where he wants to bury them.’

‘Follow those instructions to the letter, Henri,’ Lavedrine said, as he moved around the room, minutely inspecting everything.

I went downstairs again to retrieve the charcoal and paper that I had dropped coming up. Then I began to make a plan of the room, showing how the furniture was positioned. From different angles, I rapidly sketched the children. I heard Lavedrine opening and closing cupboards and drawers, dropping down on his knees to look under the bed. Grunts of disappointment signalled his findings as he passed into the small adjoining room, where he repeated his search.

Before long, he was at my side again.

‘Next to no furniture. Some shoes and gowns,’ he muttered. ‘Some children’s clothes. A cot next door, but very little else.’

He stood by my shoulder, watching as I put into practice the teachings of Immanuel Kant, drawing everything I thought would be of relevance. Meanwhile, his glance darted around the room, a bemused expression on his face. ‘There is something odd about this house,’ he murmured. ‘But I cannot put my finger on it.’

I stopped drawing and looked up.

‘Perhaps you Prussians are used to a more simple, spartan way of life than us,’ he said. ‘A family with three young children. So few things.’

‘The father is a soldier,’ I replied. ‘You ought to know from experience. They never carry much, or stay in one place long.’

‘Something is missing, I’m sure of it.’

‘I kept a close watch, sir,’ Mutiez spoke out. ‘None of my men has taken a thing.’

‘Don’t worry, Henri,’ Lavedrine cut him off. ‘That is not my meaning. I am struggling to understand what has happened here.’

Suddenly, he dropped to his knees on the far side of the bed, straining to see something, moving his lamp about, angling it beneath the window sill. ‘What do you make of this?’

I went across and knelt beside him, straining to see.

‘Blood,’ I said.

He huffed impatiently. ‘Why here, beneath the window? These marks are not spots or drops. They don’t appear to be accidental. It’s as if they had been made by somebody.’

I looked more closely.

There was nothing natural about the blood on that rough plaster surface, unlike the blood that had dripped to the floor, or spattered in a spray on the walls and ceiling. ‘How would such an abundance of blood reach this remote location, so far away from the bodies?’

‘It is physically impossible,’ he said, his gaze unwavering.

Professor Kant insisted that no detail should ever be ignored, or attributed to chance. I had made a passable series of sketches, but greater accuracy was required in this instance. I could have pressed paper against the blood, hoping to obtain a transfer of the impression, but I was hesitant to do so. The mark might be irreparably damaged in the process.

‘We can make a closer examination later on,’ I said. ‘We’ll do it better in the light of day . . .’

Down below, boots crashed loudly on the pavement of the kitchen, interrupting our scrutiny of the bedroom wall. A loud voice called out the name of Mutiez. ‘We’ve found it, sir. A cabin in the woods. A mile from here.’

‘What about the woman?’ the lieutenant shouted back from the top of the stairs.

But Lavedrine was already rushing past him, clattering down the stairramp.

‘There is no time to lose!’ he urged.

 7 

W
E ADVANCED AT
a jog-trot in single file.

Spruce trees formed a shallow canopy, blocking out the light. The tangled undergrowth became thicker, wilder, ever more treacherous, thorns and hip-rose bushes catching and pricking at our hands and clothes. A lashing branch had caught Lavedrine in the face, tracing a row of tiny bloody droplets beneath his left eye. The pale winter sun had crested the horizon an hour before, but we were obliged to keep our lanterns lit.

Lavedrine, Mutiez, the troopers who had taken me captive, two more who acted as guides. I brought up the rear, my head a jumble of thoughts. Three hours earlier, I had been sleeping in my own warm bed. Now, I was trudging through the sort of inhospitable wilderness that cropped up so often in the tales that Lotte told the children when it was time for bed. Her forests were full of witches, ogres and hobgoblins, places where magic and trickery abounded. There was something dreamlike about the forest at that hour. Frosted leaves crackled and crunched beneath our boots as we moved over the frozen ground. If a branch snapped, it sounded like the crack of a musket, and raised raucous cries of protest from rooks nesting high in occasional bare oak trees which towered above the evergreen pines. For the rest, apart from the occasional hoot of an owl, or the cooing of a partridge, all was silent and still.

Even the soldiers seemed to have lost their tongues. Mutiez was the first to break the silence. He spoke to the man in the lead, then announced that we had ten minutes’ marching ahead of us. No one else had a word to say, nor any wish to say it. The memory of what we had seen in that cottage had seized hold of our minds. But as we pressed on through the all-pervading smell of decaying leaves, bog-moss and deer-musk, a number of questions troubled me. Why would a salaried officer in the Prussian army leave his wife and children in such a godforsaken part of the countryside? Why take himself off so quickly to Kamenetz? Could he find no better refuge for his family? Surely, they would have been safer inside the barracks, or in one of
the requisitioned houses set aside for officers in the poorer part of town. What had attracted Gottewald to that cottage? And how would he react to the news? Would he blame himself for what had happened? Had he put the safety of his loved ones at risk for the sake of his career?

‘Are you sure we’re going in the right direction?’

The voice of Mutiez brought me to earth with a bump. We halted in a glade, surrounded on all sides by skeletal trees which reached up to the leaden sky, shielding us from the biting wind. The smell of decay was stronger there. The man in the lead looked left and right. He seemed unsure of his bearings.

Lavedrine turned to me.

‘Is this going to take much longer?’ I asked.

‘God knows!’ he murmured, shaking his head. ‘The guide’s been sniffing the air for the past ten minutes.’

He raised his nose to the damp air, closed his eyes, and twitched his nostrils.

‘There
is
a trace of something, though,’ he said. ‘Can you smell it?’

I stared into the forest gloom. The atmosphere was dominated by the mouldering damp of the earth and decaying leaves which lay thick on the ground. But beneath it all, there was the merest trace of a stench.

‘Sweet and penetrating,’ he suggested. ‘Something organic left to putrefy above the ground.’

As the breeze shifted quarter, that stench seemed to vanquish every other vegetable essence, like the cloying miasma that issued from the town drains in summer.

Had we stumbled on the corpse of Frau Gottewald?

‘Over there, sir,’ the lead soldier informed Mutiez, and led the way at a run towards a thicket which seemed to float above a waving sea of pale green nettles and brown decaying ferns.

‘The smell of shit drew us here, sir,’ the guide announced. With a mirthless laugh, he added, ‘Gournier has a nose for it. Heaved his guts all over the place.’

Trooper Gournier, a fat, red-faced man, cursed fiercely beneath his breath, but hung back as we moved around the perimeter looking for the entrance.

‘Worse than the camp privy after the battle!’ the lead man prattled. ‘We were told to bring you gentlemen here, sir. No one said a word about going in again. There’s the entrance. Can we take a blow, sir?’

Mutiez hissed something harsh between his teeth, and the men dropped down on their haunches, unscrewing the caps of their tin bottles, pulling out smoke-stained pipes from their leather pouches.

An expression of resigned disgust on his face, Mutiez turned to
Lavedrine and myself, and made a sign to follow as he pushed aside a roughly woven gate of branches and twigs and led the way into the compound. Inside, the smell of rottenness was overwhelming. I raised my scarf, veiling my nose from the vapours, which hung in the air like a plague. Lavedrine reached for the hem of his cloak, while Mutiez held his
képi
to his face like a mask as we advanced on a mound in the centre.

A mass of sticks like an unlit bonfire had been raised in the clearing. It might have been an otter’s lodge, but there was no water nearby. And it was six feet tall. Long branches had been raised to form a skeleton, the frame dressed with sticks, mud, leaves, and ferns. There was method in the construction. The pieces of wood diminished in size as the edifice rose to a point, where a mesh of willow canes bound the lot together. I had read that the savages in Canada made shelters of this sort. Signs of the hunter were everywhere. Animal skins in various stages of curing or decomposition, pieces of meat—some fresh, dripping blood, others black and rotten—dangled from nooses thrown into the branches overhead, then tied fast to the trunks lower down.

As we moved around, looking for a way inside, the stench grew overpowering. Severed heads had been impaled on pointed sticks. I recognised the curved tusks of a boar, a black bear, the striped muzzle of a large badger, the rotting head of a lynx, but could not put a name to others. They reminded me of the hideous gargoyles the French used to decorate their Gothic cathedrals. But this blood was real, the eyes glazed, the yellow teeth long and sharp.

‘What sort of beast would live in such a manner?’ muttered Mutiez, turning to me. ‘Will this convince you, sir?’

I did not reply, but forced myself to examine the trophies attentively, noting the worms and maggots that wriggled and squirmed inside the eye sockets and muzzle of the boar.

‘He is quite a hunter,’ I said.

‘A prodigious supplier to the company cook . . .’

The lieutenant’s voice faded away, a grimace twisted his face.

‘What’s up, Henri?’ Lavedrine enquired. ‘Wondering whether the meat from these things ended up on your plate?’

I could not shake free of the belief that what we had seen in the house, what we were seeing there, were related episodes in the same nightmare. The mutilation of the children and this butchery were the work of the same remorseless hand. My heart sank at the thought of finding Frau Gottewald. Whatever Durskeitner was, his predatory nature seemed no different from that of the beasts he trapped and slaughtered. I shrank with shame to think that he was Prussian.

‘Shall we go in?’

Lavedrine narrowed his eyes and glanced at me.

‘I am ready,’ I said, hiding behind a show of boldness, taking paper and graphite from my satchel, though my hands were shaking.

Mutiez pulled aside the wicket gate and bent low. He seemed to think twice, as if some obstacle prevented him from going further. The creaking of the door had set off a barrage of noise inside, as if a thousand devils were eager to escape from Durskeitner’s hell.

He drew his sword and dashed in. Lavedrine and I followed him.

Our lanterns illuminated a scene that I will never forget. The hut was crammed with roughly made wooden cages. On one side, squirrels, moles, ferrets, hedgehogs, rats, and voles. Against the other wall, animals of potentially greater dimensions, though they were all extremely young: a deer, three snarling lynx kittens, a baby bear, three infant badgers, a dozen fox cubs, and many another creature. Along the far wall, cages full of birds were piled precariously one upon another. Twittering sparrows, tits, blackbirds, crows and starlings. A young kestrel or kite, which was nursing a broken wing. Before we finished that morning, I had counted fifty-seven cages in the menagerie. All these creatures began to cry out in fear, showing off sharp teeth and baring their claws, while some began to squabble in their cages, snarling and snapping at one another, as if our arrival had signalled the start of a fight to the death.