HS03 - A Visible Darkness (17 page)

‘My only purpose,’ I said, intentionally echoing his own words, ‘is to end the killing of Pruschewed women

He clicked his tongue, and shook his head.

‘You fail to understand the situation, magistrate. The killer must be found because we want him found. You will find him, because you have been ordered to do so.’

The words flew out of my mouth before I could stop them. I was thinking of Lotingen, the filthy streets, the buzzing swarms of flies, the discomfort, the illness that the French had brought upon us like a plague, the threat that they posed to my wife and my children.

‘Such blind indifference may work against you in the end,’ I said. ‘As it has done in Spain, sir. If Prussia revolts, well, I hardly dare to think of what we Prussians would be prepared to do. You called us storytellers, and it is true. But you should remember, sir, we like our stories grim.’

We stared at each other across the table.

‘We are always looking out for danger,’ he replied sharply. ‘We crush resistance without thought or pity. But this is petty politics, monsieur. I am interested in one thing only the amber of Nordcopp.’ He let out a long sigh. ‘I hate the stuff. Indeed, I cannot see its graces. What is it, after all? It is resin, nothing more. Centuries ago, it dripped from trees, then it solidified. Occasionally, a creeping insect was trapped inside. Which makes it more revolting, I say. The death throes of an ant, the agony of a spider! Only a mind profoundly cruel can admire it. And as for women wearing it upon their bodies . . . Amber does not come from the sea, it comes from Hell. It is the colour of sulphur.’

Of blood,
I thought.

The sights I had seen that day came flooding back. The amber beads that Marta Linder had laid before me on the table. Like large red drops of congealed blood. Men’s eyes lit up greedily, as if inflamed to possess them. Erika had attacked me like a ravenous hawk to get her hands on the amber containing the wasp and its eggs. She would have murdered me to have it. Certainly, she would not have hesitated to offer me the dubious joys of her tiny, monstrous body.

Les Halles wiped his mouth, planted his elbows on the table, and stared at me again with hard, stubborn eyes. ‘So, let us be practical, Herr Magistrate. What have you found out today? What am I to tell General Malaport of his protégé’s doings?’

I bit my tongue, and sat back in my seat.

It was time for the
redde rationem
to begin.

I could not refuse to answer him. Nor would sarcasm protect me. I told him first of my meeting with Hans Pastoris, and then of the woman working there, Hilde Bruckner, the friend of the girl who had been murdered.

‘Her face has been ripped to shreds,’ I said at one point.

Les Halles looked over the rim of his glass. ‘What are you suggesting?’

‘Gunpowder destroyed that woman’s face. She was using it to search for amber.’

I saw him stiffen. ‘The woman is alive. Or am I mistaken?’ ‘You are not mistaken,’ I nodded. ‘So, what connection do you make between the cases?’ he growled. Clearly, the mention of gunpowder was not to his liking.

‘You mentioned it yourself a moment ago,’ I said. ‘Amber. The woman working for Hans Pastoris was looking for it; the woman who died had already found it. But I was wondering whether what had happened to them both is indicative of a general trend . . .’

‘I see no link.’ He smiled back. ‘Kati Rodendahl was mutilated
after
she was dead,’ I replied. ‘She did not blow herself up. But that is not my point. The point is this. Amber means wealth. Every man and woman on the coast wants their
share. No, I was thinking of the person who provided that woman with gunpowder. As I have been informed, a French soldier . . .’

A riotous laugh erupted from les Halles. He choked, coughed violently, and I was bombarded by a hail of half-chewed bits of bread. ‘Good God, Stiffeniis!’ He raised his wine-glass and took a mighty swig. ‘You almost did for me there. Still, I expect no less from you, I admit it.’

‘No less?’ I echoed, puzzled. ‘It was only a matter of time before you put the accusation into words. I warned General Malaport of the risk. He’ll throw the blame on us, sir. That is what I said. What else would one expect of a Prussian magistrate?’ He slammed his fist on the table, rattling the crockery. ‘Your French is excellent, monsieur, but do you know the popular expression among Parisians about going to work on your own balls with a hammer?’

I did not, and I told him so.

‘You are the hammer; the balls belong to us!’ He shook his head, then drank more wine. ‘Soldiers are the same the whole world over. It is more than possible that my men trade gunpowder for sexual favours, but that doesn’t mean . . .’ He did not finish what he meant to say. He leaned forward, his face inches from my own. ‘What we saw laid out on that table last is altogether different. It goes beyond amber. The killer was interested in her body. He took what he wanted, and he left the rest. Including the amber. He left her corpse on public display. Now, that’s what I call evil. He meant to put the fear of God in every woman working on this coast. He intended to unleash terror, and chaos. Now, why would
we
want to do that?’

I had a theory. I had heard it from the mouth of Hans Pastoris in Nordbarn. The French were trying to make the women flee, rather than be obliged to drive them off the coast.

‘Two of your soldiers, Pillard and Margiot, did exactly that the other day in Nordbarn,’ I replied. ‘They terrified the women there, talking openly of the girl who had been murdered . . .’

‘Do you really think, Herr Magistrate, that they would brag if they had something to do with it?’ he asked sarcastically.

‘You threw a Pa ri sian saying at me,’ I replied. ‘Very well, sir. Let
me throw a Prussian proverb at you. “Put a wolf in a hen-house, leave the door open, you know which way the hens will run.” I do not point my finger against the French . . .’

I heard no noise, but les Halles jumped up, raising his finger to his lips.

‘What is going on out there?’ he murmured.

In that instant, a fist rapped sharply on the wooden door.

Les Halles strode over to the door, and threw it open on a sea of faces.

The men drew back, as if they were contrite for having disturbed him.

I caught my breath: a different message was written on their faces.

‘What is this fracas?’ he growled. ‘A problem with the barge? God be damned, I don’t intend to go back in the sea at this hour . . .’

‘Not the drill, sir,’ a voice cried out.

‘What, then?’

‘A man has come. From Nordbarn, sir.’

I knew what had happened before I heard it from the soldier’s lips.

‘I
KNEW THAT
there was something strange in there. The pigs would not come out. They had already feasted.’

The voice of Adam Ansbach was thick and heavy, a sort of rasping, country sing-song. The young man had discovered a body in the pigsty, and he would lead me back the way he had come. His mother’s farm was half a mile from the hamlet of Nordbarn, he said.

Colonel les Halles would not be accompanying us.

‘“To each man his own task,”’ he said tritely. ‘Another proverb, Stiffeniis. Latin in origin, I do believe, though mighty popular with engineers. It looks to me as though your hard day’s work will continue on through the night. Report to me as soon as you return.’

The women had been summoned from their cabins down on the shore. While I was in my hut, gathering my bag, I heard the roll of names being called. Over a dozen had been read off the list when I heard the ominous silence.

‘Ilse Bruen?’

No answering female voice cried out.

‘Ilse Bruen?’

The name hung as heavy as the pillow of fog which had slunk in from the Baltic Sea to suffocate the land.

‘Provide horses for the procurator and his guide,’ the colonel ordered.

I was glad of the offer though my guide was not so pleased, as I was soon to realise. He had little experience of saddle-riding, he said, and all his attention was given over to that difficult task.

‘Can we go no faster?’ I asked impatiently.

‘Need to be careful cutting through the dunes, sir,’ he warned. ‘If the animals put a foot wrong in the fog, we might not get there. Follow hard on the tail of my mount, if you will. Should you lose sight of me, stop at once and call for me to come back. There are shifting sands off the main track. The French colonel would not be happy if we lost his horses.’

I took him at his word and rode attentively in his wake.

The fog was like a wet cloth that wrapped itself around our faces. The air was perfectly still. The horses made next to no noise on the damp, shifting sand. It might have been quicker to walk, though we would have been exhausted by the time we got there. I found it hard to believe that the boy had run all the way from the farm to the coast without a light if the way was as dangerous as he claimed.

We had been riding ten minutes or so when he fell back to ride at my side.

‘The going’s safer here, sir,’ he said.

We rejoined the rutted, sandy track that I had walked that day to Nordcopp and back. While taking the short-cut through the dunes, I had wondered whether he might be exaggerating the danger as a way of avoiding the questions that I wished to ask him.

‘We are getting close to Nordbarn Sheds,’ he announced, his voice uncertain, low, as if the silence of the night imposed it.

‘The place where Pastoris works,’ I added, meaning to show him that I knew the general direction we were taking.

‘Pretty close, sir. Our farm is more to the east, a bit further on . . .’

‘Are you ready now to tell me what you saw this night?’ I interrupted him.

As I spoke, I was seized with doubts.

Had anyone told him who I was? Had the French bothered to mention that I was an investigating magistrate, that I would have to ask him questions, and that he was obliged to answer me?

He did not answer me, in any case.

Instead, he raised his hands to his mouth and let out a long, loud whoop.

Gleaming lights appeared like pinpoints in the swirling white opaqueness, waving gently as the lanterns signalled the direction for us to take. Voices sounded faintly in the distance, whooping back like a pack of ululating wolves.

Some minutes later, we pulled up before a tumbledown house. Ignoring the large woman who wrested the reins from my hands, I stepped directly over to Adam Ansbach.

‘Where is she?’ I asked.

While riding there, I had examined the matter from a hundred different angles, and met with a thousand doubts. If the French had reinforced their guard after the murder three days before, how had this woman managed to leave the compound and reach that place in the fog at night? She must have known that Kati Rodendahl had been murdered, but that had not stopped her. Was she going on purpose to meet the killer, believing that he was something else, perhaps? And if so, how had he won her trust? Posing as a sweet-heart, a smuggler, a soldier? I shrank from the thought of having to rummage heartlessly through the secret places of another female corpse in search of hidden amber. Yet, everyone seemed determined to help me do it without delay.

‘Follow me, sir.’

The young man turned away from the house.

I strode off beside him.

A group of women fell in behind us, holding up lanterns.

Then a man stepped into the light. His goitre seemed to swell and gleam with all the colours of the rainbow. ‘May I join you, sir?’ he rasped, as if he were a talking toad.

‘Herr Pastoris.’ I nodded.

‘Magistrate Stiffeniis,’ he wheezed. ‘If only I could say how glad I am to see you here, sir. You’ll forgive me if I don’t.’

I forgave him without saying a word, and turned back to Adam Ansbach.

‘You mentioned a pigsty,’ I said.

‘It’s over this way, sir.’

We had not gone thirty yards before we reached the scrawny, stunted wood of wind-bent trees that I had noticed on my way to Nordcopp that morning. At the time, it had seemed to promise salvation from the desert wastes. I had wondered then what secrets it contained. My nose was quick to identify one of them.

‘What smell is that?’ I asked.

Adam moved a few yards to the right, then stopped, holding up the lantern.

‘The shitting-stile,’ he answered bluntly. ‘As I told you, sir, the pigs clean it out. But not tonight. Tonight they would not leave the sty.’

It was a simple construction. An open trench, two uprights and a cross-beam made of stout branches. No need to crouch over the filth, no compression of the bowels, no risk of soiling one’s boots, or ruining one’s trousers, no chance of slipping backwards into the mire. When the latrine is full, they fill in the old trench, dig an other one nearby, and reposition the stile. Sometimes such constructions are hidden by a wicket enclosure, sometimes they cover them with a lean to roof. This drain was open to the night sky, and it was full of excrement. It reminded me unpleasantly of the streets of Lotingen in recent weeks.

‘Is the trench old?’ I asked him, glancing into it.

‘We never fill it in, sir,’ Adam said. ‘We let the pigs do the dirty work.’

‘This is where your family . . .’ I hesitated.

‘Me and my mother, sir,’ he said, ‘and the lad who comes from Nordcopp every day to help us. Sometimes women drift across from the Sheds. We never turn them away when their latrine is full. Our pigs make short work of it.’

‘These pigs,’ I hazarded. ‘Do you eat them?’

Adam Ansbach held up his lamp. There was a lopsided grin on
his face. ‘The pigs go to the French. We sell them bacon, eggs, and vegetables, as well.’

I had not eaten in the French kitchen that morning. No pork bacon had touched my lips, nor would it do so while I remained on Nordcopp shore.

‘Very good, we’ve seen your toilet,’ I said shortly. ‘I want to see the body.’

I was quivering with tense anticipation.

Adam pointed beyond the stile. ‘The pigsty’s over there, sir.’

I followed him in a wide half-circle around the stile. Pastoris and his flock of women came hard on my heels. The smell of pigs soon took the place of the fetid latrine, clutching at my throat like a strangling hand. Ancient filth and fresh filth all jumbled up together. I searched in my pocket for a handkerchief. Not finding one, I pinched my nose closed with fingers, and opened my mouth wide.