HS03 - A Visible Darkness (22 page)

They were evacuating the pigsty.

My heart, lungs and brain seemed to seethe and gush in syncopated rhythm with the pump. I began to run towards them. I should have guessed when I spotted Hans Pastoris so surly. He had known what was going on. He must have thought that I was a party to it, and that it was the proof that I was in league with the French. Probably he believed it was all my idea.

I stopped before the pigsty.

If the curious onlookers had eliminated all signs of entrance and exit from the building the night before, les Halles was literally destroying whatever hope I had of finding anything useful in that sludge.

‘Colonel les Halles,’ I shouted, preparing myself for a confrontation.

He did not deign to look at me, but carried on dictating. ‘One hundred per cent effective. Six downward strokes for compression. Water to cleanse the nozzle. Eighty per cent immersion of the suction tube. Twenty per cent air content facilitates the degree of evacuation . . .’ He turned to me and said: ‘Oh, you are here, then.’ It was not a greeting, it was a statement of fact. He turned again to his amanuensis. ‘Cancel the last sentence,’ he snapped.

‘I am the magistrate in this case,’ I said, equally sharply. ‘You are interfering with the scene of a crime. Indeed, you’ve managed to spray away whatever signs the murderer may have left behind him, and cover half of the farm with it.’

He smiled at this rebuke.

‘You needed to free the corpse from the sludge, did you not? I wanted to calibrate the aperture of the tube which will suck up material of similar consistency from the sea-bed. I’d call it co-operation. This experiment provided the opportunity to solve a problem of dynamics which dogged my efforts yesterday. On the other hand, you’d have been here for hours with buckets and shovels. I’ve saved you the trouble. You ought to thank me.’

My anger mounted.

‘That body could have been easily moved, if that was what I wanted,’ I replied. ‘But that was not my only aim. I intended to search the place for any clue which might indicate a link between the murdered women. Amber, for example. Remember the piece that we found in the corpse of Kati Rodendahl? You didn’t think of that! I’ll be obliged to mention this fact in my report to the general . . .’

‘Before you waste more breath,’ he interrupted, ‘you will be pleased to learn that I have found something. It will interest you, I am certain of it.’

He placed his hand on his hip, and stared at me, smiling broadly. Then, he turned to the man holding the tube: ‘Show him what you found in the filter, Blanc.’

Private Blanc dropped his hose, and picked up a large, deep jute sack. He brought it to me, and held the bag open, inviting me to reach inside it, which I did. Finding nothing, I was obliged to reach in further. And further again, before my finger was pricked by something cold and damp at the very bottom. I closed my fist around the objects, then quickly pulled my hand from the fetid sack.

‘Fragments of bone,’ les Halles spoke out.

I opened my palm, and examined the slime-shaded slivers and splinters.

‘We found a lot of them,’ he said. ‘They certainly don’t belong to the corpse in there. Other bodies have been buried here less recently. Clearly, this was a private burial ground, Herr Magistrate. I bet we’ll find the remains of all the other girls who have gone missing.’

Again, he did not give me the opportunity to speak.

‘I am satisfied,’ he roared on boldly. ‘They are the equivalent of
amber. My engine sucked them up and spat them out. If we do half so well on the coast, the
coq du mer
will be a great success.’

‘Colonel,’ I interrupted him, ‘these finds might well have been important. Now, however, they are useless. We do not know precisely
where
they were located inside the pigsty. Nor can we say how deeply they were buried in the slime. They could be chicken wings, or dead pigs. There may even be some human bones, as well. But any fragments of clothing or flesh that had not already decomposed have been destroyed thanks to you and your “well calibrated” pump.’

He stared at me, and a frown of annoyance scarred his brow.

‘You have your bones, what more do you want?’ he said.

‘I want to question the Ansbachs,’ I said.

His confidence returned as he considered this request.

‘They’re in Nordcopp,’ he said offhandedly. ‘You’ll have to go there if you want to interrogate them. I had them taken into custody this morning. They are being held in the town gaol . . .’

‘In gaol?’ I said, as if the word were new to me. ‘On what charge? On the basis of what proof?’

‘Murder. That’s the charge,’ he said, as if the judgement were a foregone conclusion. ‘I’ll leave you to find the proof, and tie up loose ends. Things will soon return to normal here, mark my words! There’ll be no danger of a repetition of the crime. Indeed, as a direct result of this successful trial run with the pumping engine, I expect to send the women on their way in a week or two. They’ll be out of harm’s way. If any danger still remains, that is. The amber mining industry will be supervised by men. My own.’

He seemed to have satisfied himself that the case was closed. Of course, a report would have to be sent to General Malaport. He would sign it with a flourish, I would countersign it in much smaller letters at the bottom of the page, and that would be the end of the story. He had found the Prussian scapegoat he was looking for, but that is not the same thing as arresting the perpetrator. There was no incontrovertible evidence, much less an open admission, that Adam Ansbach had been trafficking with the girls from the coast, let alone murdering them.

I took the
Gaulisches
from around my neck, set them down on the ground, slipped my shoes inside, then pulled the leather straps tight. I had been carrying them for over an hour. It was time to put them to good use. Les Halles watched what I did, but I did not say a word to him.

‘Do you intend to examine the corpse, monsieur?’ he enquired.

Again, I did not answer him, but made straight for the pigsty.

I heard him tell his men to leave off pumping. Then, he strode across to me. ‘Shall I tell the men to come in with us?’ he asked, puffing as he struggled to keep pace with me.

‘Enough damage has been done,’ I muttered to myself.

He nodded, but there was a hint of irony in his voice. ‘Just you and I, then?’

‘You and I,’ I replied, bending low, ducking beneath the door.

The sea of sludge had been entirely removed, stripped away. Indeed, as I stepped inside, I plummeted down a sharp slope. The slime had been sucked out, together with a great deal of the dark, stained, underlying soil. The smell was strong, but it was different from before. The musty smell clogged the air. The roof had been ripped away on one side of the sty to let in light.

Only the body seemed immune to change.

She was sitting in the far corner of the sty, her head hanging down, her chin resting heavily on her breast, exactly as I had left her the night before.

She might have been waiting for me.

‘Don’t you want the body carried outside?’ les Halles asked at my back.

‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘She needs to be examined inch by inch before she is moved.’

‘Get on with it, then!’ he groaned.

As I bent to look at her, I heard his voice outside the pigsty, ordering his men to start packing up their equipment and get it loaded onto the carts, ready for its immediate return to the coast. I was glad that he was gone, though not comfortable to be alone with the corpse. The exposed skin of the arms, the bloody circles where her breasts had once been, the dark cavern of the ravaged
stomach, had altered since the night before. She was now entirely black, her skin spotted with drops of dried mud and yellow slime.

I reached out a finger and laid it on her forehead.

It was warmer than I expected. It might have been an effect of the interminable organic decomposition of the slime in the sty, though I could not be sure. I slid my hand beneath hers, and lifted. Her stiff left arm came up. I repeated the operation with the right arm with the same result. Nothing was broken there.

I felt for the bones in her legs, squeezing the rigid muscles between my thumb and forefinger. The bones of both legs were intact, though the pigs had caused great damage to the soft tissue of the calves and the lower legs.

I closed my eyes for a moment and silently asked forgiveness to her, placing my hands flat against her blood-caked breast, pressing hard against the ribcage. Nothing cracked, nothing gave, which seemed to suggest that there was no internal damage to her upper body.

I lifted her dress and looked up between her parted legs, moving my head left and right to take advantage of the light, searching in vain for amber hidden in that mass of meat and blood and innards. I did not have the courage to search with my fingers. If anything were amiss, it might be the work of man or swine. It was hard to imagine which was worse.

I dropped the skirt-hem quickly.

‘What killed her?’

Les Halles was standing behind me once again.

‘It is hard to say,’ I admitted.

Her scalp was marked, despite the filth, by a clear line of division where her hair was parted in the centre.

I lifted a lank, filthy curtain of hair away from her left cheek, bent down beside her, my face inches away from hers. She did not smell like any person I have ever met; no individual human odour could match the stench in that place. I examined her left ear and temple and felt her skull with my fingers.

‘No sign of cutting here,’ I said.

I doubt that anyone who had known her would have recognised
her face. The skin was mottled black and blue, swollen around her eyes, the lips, nose and cheeks shredded and torn. I could only say, as her hair fell back into place, that it had been blonde before she entered the pigsty.

‘What about the other side?’

There was something blunt, practical, inhuman about the Frenchman. In that instant, I abhorred the sound of his voice, resented his interference, though he suggested no more than I would have done without his help.

My hand grazed her cheek as I lifted the filthy, heavy hair away. My fingers trembled as I bent close. Dead flesh has a texture like no other. It was as if the life had evaporated out of her, leaving something behind which was human in shape alone.

‘Impossible to say what has happened . . .’ I said.

‘Adam Ansbach will tell you.’ Les Halles was burbling at my back like a brook in spring flood. ‘And if he does not, well . . . he will . . . But what do you think he wanted from her? And from the other girl, too, of course. Amber? Sex?’

That was not the end, but I stopped listening.

‘She will need to be turned over,’ I said. ‘He may have stabbed her from behind . . .’

Words failed me. So did my strength. I gathered just enough. It was concentrated in the tips of my fingers as I placed them on the point of her jaw and tried to lift the head up, pushing it backwards with all the force that I could manage.

As the head lolled back against the meeting of the walls, I believe I may have cried out. Certainly, I fell backwards, and I felt the cold dampness soak quickly through the seat of my trousers.

Her chin had been covering her throat, protecting it from the assault of the pigs, from the sludge and the slime as the draining of the sty was carried out by the suction pump of les Halles and his intrusive team of labourers. The skin beneath her throat was surprisingly white, starkly contrasting with all the rest. It was like a white picture-frame enclosing a surgical drawing that had been made by an expert medical illustrator. Three neat cuts made a neat triangle, the horizontal upper line shorter than the two downward
strokes which met at a point where her Adam’s apple had once been. All was red and fresh within. Maggots wriggled where an entire section of her gullet had been removed.

‘He has stolen the larynx,’ I remember saying.

I came to, lying on my back in the open air, gazing up at the sky.

A soldier had just poured a bucket of water in my face.

‘B
EYOND—YOUR—JURISDICTION
.’

His fleshy lips made a sucking sound as he read the words out slowly.

I had seen the sergeant sleeping in the guard-room the day before when I went there to enquire where the doctor might be found. Now, he was wide awake, his piercing black eyes bold and challenging. It was hard to say how old he was. Two deep wrinkles scarred his puffy cheeks; blond curls worthy of Apollo framed his chubby pink face. His blue tunic was pulled as tight across his broad chest as if he had donned his younger brother’s jacket by mistake. Tiny eruptions sprouted from the cloth where buttons had been shifted to accommodate his bulk. The company tailor had had to labour hard to fit him into that uniform, but his authority was in no way diminished. His epaulettes and buckles gleamed, his belt and cross-belts as black and shiny as a quivering blancmange. They might have come from the tanner’s workshop five minutes before.

‘The prisoners are your concern no longer, monsieur,’ he insisted.

Jean Tessier, Sergeant of the Guard, sat behind his desk in the
North Tower, balancing the conflicting papers in either hand, while I looked down on him. It was less humiliating to stand than sit: the stool he had offered me was lower than the table which separated us.

‘My authority is signed by General Malaport,’ I challenged. ‘He ordered me to investigate what is happening here. The persons taken into custody are my responsibility. I have not yet finished questioning them.’

He let out a sigh.

‘Adam Ansbach is twice accused of murder,’ he replied, holding up the document in his right hand. ‘The woman is listed as his accomplice.’

I could not accuse him of failing to co-operate. Still, I felt humiliated, imagining what had been said when the soldiers of les Halles brought the prisoners in that morning:
The colonel says to humour the Prussian magistrate. He’s Malaport’s man, so he’s bound to kick up a fuss. It’s a bureaucratic question, Tessier. Nothing more. His task is over once the guilty parties are found. He’s the investigator, not the judge. Tell him that, then send him on his way
.