HS03 - A Visible Darkness (30 page)

The barge creaked and groaned as it rose and fell on the gentle swell of the sea.

‘What makes you think that I would accept such a task?’

‘Use your head, Stiffeniis. I built the naval dockyard in Boulogne. I planned the undermining of the Spanish forts. No Frenchman would ever dare to spy on me. But a Prussian who has worked for the French would. A magistrate that even the great Serge Lavedrine approves of. A man without scruples, who would sell his country to a foreign power. A man of talent. A man like you! A man who could write not
one
report, but
two
. The first about the murders, the second concerning my success here on the coast. Or lack of it. The emperor likes to know exactly who is doing what. That’s the way it works in France.’

I opened my mouth to speak, but he held up his hand.

‘Six months ago I spoke to the emperor about my project. I spoke to him in person.’ He smiled as he told me, but he did not look remotely happy. ‘Not a day passes but I get a despatch from Bonaparte’s aides inviting me to speed the business up. Inside twelve months, I promised him, but continents can change in such a short time. Indeed, they have already changed. The treasury wants more amber and wants it fast. They want it more than I do. The emperor wants to see a hundred
coqs du mer
strung out along the Baltic coast. Spain is costing a fortune. But down there . . .’ He pointed his finger at the sea. ‘Under those grey waters, there’s amber enough to finance a hundred campaigning seasons in Spain, a long-term invasion
of Russia. There’s more wealth in this sea than you Prussians have pulled out in the whole of your history.’

‘Your steam-pump is of no interest to me, Colonel les Halles,’ I said carefully.

I did not deny what he said. I meant to ease his fear and reassure him, but, equally, I intended to profit from his misunderstanding of my situation. If he believed that I was a spy, the gods had decided to assist me. ‘My only concern is to identify the killer of the women. The true killer. Not the first poor Prussian soul who happens to cross your path.’

Les Halles sat heavily on the stern-rail. From a distance, we must have looked like two old friends. ‘You are not convinced that Adam Ansbach killed the women, then?’ he asked.

‘I have found out something in Nordcopp which makes me doubt that he is guilty,’ I replied. ‘I am convinced . . .’

‘That corpse was in his pigsty,’ he objected. ‘A mass of other bones, too.’

I remembered touching those damp splinters of bone with the tips of my fingers.

‘According to Dr Heinrich, bones are spread all over this area. He collects them, and is an expert palaeontologist in his own opinion. If you ask him, sir, he will tell you . . .’

Les Halles nodded, interrupting me. ‘I sent the sack of bones from the farm to Dr Heinrich. You’ll trust his opinion of them, I hope? He is a Prussian, like yourself, after all.’

‘And like me, he works for the French.’

‘We’ll see what he has to say,’ he fired back sharply. ‘What strange things to collect! I have never understood the value of anything that is dug up from the ground. Apart from turnips and potatoes. If it cannot be eaten, what use is it? Gold and silver have their uses, but old bones . . . Even amber. It is hard to see why people pay so much for it.’

‘Even harder to imagine why they would kill for it, then?’

He shook his finger sternly at me. ‘You still believe that smuggling is the cause of those deaths. So how do you explain the mutilations?’

I did not answer him at once. I wanted him to take careful note of what I was about to say. ‘I know that the women come and go from your camp with great ease, Colonel les Halles. The guards are slack. Complicit is the word that I would use. Your men and those women are working hand in hand to smuggle amber that they hide from
you,
sir. Now, what would General Malaport, or the emperor Napoleon, have to say about that?’

He sat in silence, his hands clasping the wooden rail so tightly that his knuckles stood out stark white on his filthy hands.

‘Is that a threat?”

I did not reply. I had no need to answer him. He thought I was his watchdog.

‘What do you want to know?’

He spoke as if the words had been torn from his throat.

‘I went to the old recruiting station yesterday. The records there have not been updated. That information should have come from you,’ I said, and I made no attempt to soften the accusation. ‘The lists kept by your own men are a shambles. It is impossible to say with certainty who is working here at this moment. Women come, women go, they disappear and sometimes they die. And no record is kept of their vicissitudes. To cite one glaring instance, Ilse Bruen, the girl whose corpse you dug out of the pigsty yesterday, is apparently alive and well and working on the shore at this very moment.’

Les Halles crossed his arms. ‘What use are lists to us?’ he said defiantly. ‘Soon they will be swept away. When a hundred
coqs
are strung out along the coastline, there’ll be no work for the women. Three Frenchmen on board each rig will handle every task. Registration, lists, documents . . . I am not here to drag archaic Prussia into the nineteenth century, Herr Procurator. I am here to strangle that outmoded system. And I will do it quickly.’

‘A killer is preventing you. General Malaport knows it. The murders of the amber-workers, and the slower death that your machines will bring to everyone on this coast, are dangerous. The Prussian people are not prepared for such dramatic events. They might rise up. They might revolt. Unless we find the killer. The true killer, that is.’

‘What can I tell you that the old and new lists cannot?’ he said angrily, springing to his feet.

I had hooked my fish.

‘You can tell me nothing,’ I replied. ‘But someone can. I want to speak with the amber-gatherers. The girls who work here on the shore. You have kept me well away from them. Now, I want to talk to them freely.’

Les Halles watched me for some moments. Still in silence, he walked over to the derrick, picked up a wooden mallet, and hit the bell three times very hard. He stood by the side, looking out over the water as the boat pushed off from the shore and began to glide across the mercury pond towards the
coq du mer
.

Suddenly, he turned to me.

‘You might think of it as a diplomatic exchange,’ he said. ‘I prefer to consider it a swapping of favours.’

He said no more until the boat drew alongside.

As the men climbed aboard, les Halles leant over the water. ‘Robert,’ he called. ‘Row the magistrate back to the beach. Make sure that he is permitted to speak with the women. He can question whoever he pleases, and go wherever he wishes to go inside the camp today.’

He turned to me, his eyes bright. ‘Now, it is your turn, Stiffeniis.’

‘My turn for what?’

‘To give me something in exchange. Your report to the general. I mean to read it.’

T
HE TRUMPET SHALL
sound,

The dead will be raised . . .

Bodies lying prone and apparently lifeless on the shore suddenly began to stir and rise up. It was like the vision of the Day of Judgement in Corinthians.

‘That first blast sounds the
reveille
,’ Robert explained, more loquacious now that Colonel les Halles had sanctioned fraternisation with the Prussian. ‘When it blows again, the women must enter the sea. It’ll be hard to know exactly where each one is. Do you have any names in mind, monsieur?’

The girls were spreading out along the shore. In their gleaming leather garments, each one holding up a spear or net on a long pole, they looked like insects, their antennae twitching defensively as if they feared to be attacked. Glancing down the line, I searched for the girl. The women’s faces were invisible inside their leather hoods, so I was obliged to name her.

‘Only that one, monsieur?’

‘For the moment,’ I nodded.

The boat beached on the pebbles some way from the women. As we dragged the boat out of the water, I looked back over the sea
that we had crossed. Sitting low on the eastern horizon was a burnished silvery plate, looking more like a pale moon than the sun of a new day. It cast a blue metallic light on the sea, the sky and the distant barge.

Another squall was coming on.

For a moment I imagined the
coq du mer
swept away.

But then again, the women would be carried off, as well.

‘Find her quickly, Robert,’ I incited him, struggling forward on the shifting pebbles. I had to stop her from entering the water, keep her safe by speaking to me until the storm had passed.

‘Wait over there, monsieur.’ He pointed to a group of huts raised on stilts above the sea. ‘I’ll send her to you.’

He sounded like a pimp, and this unpleasant impression was reinforced, as I made my way towards the huts. ‘Hang on a minute,’ I heard him call across to the trumpeter. ‘The Prussian magistrate’s got his eye on one of the lasses.’

Vulgarities followed on, but the trumpet did not blow.

I swallowed my pride as I stepped onto the narrow wooden gang-plank which connected the shore and the compound where the women lived. The place was deserted. Six wooden huts protected from the worst of the sea by a small bay and a curving shingle
haf
a mile from the shore. I stuck my head inside the first cabin, quickly pulled it out again. The air was stale and salty, rotten with the mouldy smell of warm bodies and damp clothes. Like seaweed-covered rocks at low tide.

The hut was tiny, yet it contained six narrow pallets, one along each wall, two more in the centre. Each head would be very close to someone else’s feet. What little space remained was taken up by a makeshift table and two wobbly chairs. The walls were hung with grotesque souvenirs of the deep: knotted tangles of wood like arthritic hands, the skeleton of a tope, a collection of dried-out crabcases. Large sea-shells dangled from the ceiling, tinkling like bells as I touched them. It would be a crashing symphony when a wind rushed through the room. In the corner, a covered pan stood on a tiny cast-iron stove. The odour of recently fried fish hung heavily in the air. A small wooden shutter had been thrown open to expose
a tiny hole in the wall, though it could not improve the circulation of air.

‘Where were you last night, Herr Stiffeniis?’

Edviga Lornerssen seemed taller, even more statuesque, than I remembered.

‘Is the baby born?’ she asked me eagerly.

‘I’ve not been home,’ I replied defensively. ‘I stayed in Nordbarn, sheltering from the weather.’

What was I doing? Justifying the fact that I had not been in the camp last night?

She came towards me slowly, shrugging off her leather hood, shaking out her hair like a hunting-dog after a ducking. Droplets of dew glistened in her hair. With a sudden sweep of her hands she pulled back her tresses, revealing her ears and the fullness of her face. Two points of colour hung from her lobes. Amber suspended on knotted thread. Tiny pink eggs, glazed and polished to perfection. The Botticelli
Venus
flashed into my mind. I had seen it once in Florence. Only the pale nudity was missing and the sea-shell on which the
dea
floated. Edviga had not emerged from some azure southern sea, but from our own murky northern pond. She was taking a risk, showing herself to the world with amber hanging from her ears.

‘Were you looking for me again last night, Edviga?’

Was she wearing amber the night before, as well? For me to see?

‘I was,’ she said. ‘I came in the dark so nobody could see me.’

She looked around the hut to check that there was no one else. She was reproaching me, I realised. Meeting her alone like this was dangerous for her. Everybody in the camp might suspect that she was telling me things that were better left unsaid. Her friends, the friends of those friends, might believe it was best if she did not speak to me at all. I was, and always would be, the Prussian working for the French.

We stood in silence, face to face.

‘What do you want from me?’ she asked.

I saw her ner vous ness, and felt the ambiguity of the situation.

‘You must help me,’ I said, my voice harsher than I intended.

‘First let me out of this restrictive cage,’ she said, her fingers running like quick spiders over the thick laces of her bulky leather uniform. She slipped the upper half of the heavy costume off from her shoulders. Beneath, she wore a thin white singlet. As she sat herself down on the nearest bed, she wrinkled her nose. ‘Last night was dreadful, the sea was wild and cruel. It isn’t over yet,’ she said, looking towards the door.

Black clouds were gathering on the horizon, swallowing up the grey.

‘If you are here,’ I said, ‘you’ll not be in the water . . .’

‘That’s not what I’m afraid of, sir,’ she said, staring fixedly at me. ‘I was thinking of poor Ilse. They threw her body in the sea last night. You kept your promise, didn’t you? I mean, you know, the bit of amber . . .’

A lie may damn one’s soul, yet ease the suffering of someone else’s.

‘I placed it where you said. Beneath her tongue.’

‘Thank God for that,’ she said in a whisper.

Outside, the trumpet sounded. Muted cries were heard. Women crying to their neighbours to ‘stand further off’ or ‘go more to the left.’ The language was strong in tone, the vocabulary rich, but the racket soon died down, and the soothing flow of the waves lapping gently on the shore took its place.

‘Kati and Ilse may have gone to Nordcopp,’ I began. ‘Some months ago.’

Edviga looked up sharply.

‘Two girls took refuge in the Church of the Saviour. They stole amber relics from the sacristy when they left. Did all of the women know that there was precious amber in the church?’

Edviga shrugged her shoulders. ‘There has always been chatter.’

‘Did Kati and Ilse do the chattering?’ I asked.

‘We all tell tales,’ she laughed carelessly, ‘but we are a bunch of seasoned liars. Whores, thieves,
and
liars, as the French would say. And the folk in Nordcopp agree with them.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘The amber in Nordcopp church was not a fairy tale, then? And Kati had one of those pieces?’