HS04 - Unholy Awakening (34 page)
I heard the door in the outer office.
It opened, then closed, and silence followed on.
Knutzen
.
The first thing that my secretary did each morning was tend his vegetables and feed his pigs. Arriving afterwards at the office, he would put aside the filthy smock that he always wore, replacing it with the thread bare black jacket which he invariably donned for work.
I let out a sigh.
Every time that the door opened in the last few days, I had been straining to hear the voice of Serge Lavedrine, fully expecting the Frenchman to come barging into my room, up setting my plans for the day. The official report had still to be written up; I was waiting anxiously on his news from Marienburg regarding the fate of the Prussian prisoners.
I would have suffered the Frenchman gladly, but Gudjøn Knutzen was the last thing that I needed. He would harp on endlessly about what had happened in Lotingen the week before, explaining for the umpteenth time why he had been obliged to tell Selleck, the saddler from Krupeken, about the finding of the body of Angela Enke, and how, in doing so,
he
had saved the village burial ground from the desecration which had ravaged the cemetery here in town. With each repetition of these themes, the suggestion that I had not done my duty seemed to swell and grow.
I rose from my desk instinctively, meaning to send him home for the day.
I threw the door open, and found Helena standing on the threshold.
‘Hanno…’
She was very pale, her eyes huge and restless. Her dress and bonnet might have been hewn from black granite, they seemed so stiff and heavy. A stray curl had escaped from her bonnet. It was the only point of colour about her.
‘What brings you here?’ I asked, my voice gruffer than I intended it to be. Helena made a point of never coming to the procurator’s office. Only a matter of the greatest urgency would drive her to do so. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘It’s Lavedrine,’ she said in a rush. ‘He was at the house an hour ago.’
‘The house?’
‘On his way to Königsberg. Under military escort, Hanno. Four armed soldiers, a sergeant…’ Helena laid her hand on my chest, and pushed me backwards. ‘Let me in,’ she gasped. ‘I must sit down. I’m out of breath.’
I stood aside, watching and waiting in great confusion, while she sank down on the visitor’s chair which stands in front of my desk. For an instant, the figure of my wife was cancelled out by a memory of a wild mass of auburn hair, the Medusa clip holding it in place, the face and perfume of another. My head was filled with the essence of the person that I was trying to forget. Emma Rimmele. The things that we had said and done.
Not
Emma, I corrected myself. The woman who had murdered her.
‘What’s all this about?’ I asked, sitting down on the far side of the desk.
Helena took off her bonnet, and her hair fell free. As she pushed it back behind her ears, I saw the red coral droplets hanging from her lobes. Sharp needles coursed through my veins in the place of blood. Lavedrine had been to the house unexpectedly, taking Helena by surprise. He would certainly have noticed the earrings. He must have realised that she wore them always, and that she held them very dear.
‘General Malaport has sent for him,’ she said. ‘There is to be an inquiry of some sort. He would say no more.’
I collapsed back in my seat.
‘Why did he not tell me this himself?’
Helena stared into my face. ‘He wasn’t sure that he would find you in the office. The soldiers were impatient to be gone. He knew, instead, that I would be at home. He asked me to deliver this note to you without delay.’
She put her hand in her pocket, and brought out a folded sheet of paper.
‘You must add the details to your report, he said. And sign it in your name only.’
I took the crumpled paper from her outstretched hand. There was no wax, no seal.
‘Have you read it?’ I asked her.
Helena shook her head.
I opened the paper, glancing quickly at the contents. It was an informal letter, a hastily written note. He signed himself familiarly, Serge Lavedrine, without mentioning his rank in the French army.
I read aloud:
Dear Hanno,
In Kirchenfeld, I should have realised that a battle was about to begin. Jacques Massur has accused me of bringing the ‘enemy’ into his camp. He was speaking of you, of course. You’ve seen enough to understand the nature of our relationship. It is a question of giving blows, and taking them. I have responded, accusing him of failing to discipline the officers from Marienburg who were under his command in Kirchenfeld.
The dispute will be heard by General Malaport, and I must go to Königsberg.
At the same time, I do not want this feud to compromise our investigation.
We cannot allow the Prussians in Lotingen to live in fear of vampires and the disturbances which terror brings. Nor can I allow the rivalry between officer groups within our ranks to persist. Everyone must know – French and Prussians alike – that the killing is over, and that the murderers have been identified.
I trust you to do that, and ask you to submit a full report.
Strange as it may seem, Jacques Massur has done us one good turn.
As you know, he was about to take possession of the estate in Kirchenfeld. No sooner had we left the house than he arrested Adele Beckmann, the last remaining one of the Rimmeles’ servants. He had her sent to Marienburg where she was imprisoned with the Prussians from the Black Bull inn. You will recall that General Layard had ordered me to question them again. Adele was among the prisoners. She had seen us together, you and I, and she seemed disposed to answer my questions. I did not ask about the house, her master, or the master’s daughter. I said no thing of blood rituals, or esoteric practices. I asked her for names, and nothing more. The names of the men who frequented the Rimmele household.
The following details should be included in your report.
First, the conspirators.
Three young Prussians have been taken into custody, and they have confessed their crimes. These terrorists once courted Erwin Rimmele as the high priest of their patriotic order. In truth, they wanted his money to finance their own rebellious adventures. They saw the declining state of his body and mind, and they determined to relieve him of his riches. Their scheme was hampered by the fact that Erwin had a faithful daughter. A daughter, I should add, who showed no interest in her father’s adepts and their attempts to court her. Emma Rimmele’s heart was pledged elsewhere. She had fallen in love with a French officer, Sebastien Grangé. The conspirators decided to replace the daughter with a female guardian who would answer only to them. This was their scheme: to persuade Erwin to allow her access to his bank and funds.
Second, the creature herself.
Her real name is a mystery. Where she may have come from is more mysterious still. Some Eastern tribe, perhaps, which trains its children in the arts of assassination. On no account would they admit – not even under the threat of torture – to having any precise knowledge of the woman. It was sufficient for them that she was a murderess, and that she served their purposes. She murdered Grangé and Emma, then she turned on Lieutenants Gaspard and Lecompte. However, she served her masters only up to a point! If they were greedy, she was greedier still. She tried to outwit them, intending to carry off Rimmele’s riches for herself. The conspirators hounded her to Lotingen, threatening to expose her as a fraud and a killer. When she ran away, they followed her, and murdered her in Danzig with the very same instrument she had used to visit death on anyone who opposed her plans: a metal brooch with two sharp prongs.
Their description of her murder matches yours in every detail, except one…
I stopped reading.
‘This may be gruesome,’ I warned, looking at my wife.
Helena stared boldly back at me. ‘I am not afraid,’ she said, and I took up where I had left.
…in every detail, except one. The most hideous of all. You report that a wooden spike had been driven through the killer’s heart. They swear to heaven that they did not do it. Having admitted everything else, I wonder why they baulk before that accusation? I don’t know what to make of it, except to say that we are in Prussia. In this strange land of yours, some things will always remain in the shadows, I suppose…
My mind was in Danzig in that dark room. I could not shake that image from my thoughts: the naked breast, the wooden stake, the lake of blood. Erwin Rimmele had been alone with the corpse. Did he have the strength to cleave the usurper’s heart? Or had he watched as the deed was done by someone else?
Helena stood up.
‘Lavedrine said something else before he left.’
She was, I realised, waving a piece of paper in the air in front of my nose, as if to wake me from some spell which had possessed my senses. ‘It is a
laissez-passer
,’ she said, ‘made out in your name, and in mine. We can go to the cemetery whenever we wish. Come with me, Hanno. There’s some thing there that we must see. Both of us. Lavedrine was most insistent about it.’
I stood up, barely taking in the news, hardly hearing her voice. My head was still thumping with that unanswered question, which bounced around the walls of my brain like a fly trapped inside a bottle.
Who had quieted the vampire in Danzig?
‘Let me put this note in a safe place,’ I murmured, reaching for the
nécessaire
which Helena had given me for my birthday, untying the knot, rolling out the leather pad and the sheet of un-sized paper which I used for drying the ink.
I had brought the
nécessaire
to work with me, having carelessly left it on the table in the entrance-hall at home when Lavedrine had whisked me off to Marienburg. Before I took my leave of Helena that morning, I had made a great show of picking it up, shaking it in my fist.
‘My baton of office,’ I proclaimed, wanting Helena to see that I was home, intent on taking up my life again where I had left it off. I wanted my wife to understand how much I valued it, and her. I wanted to put the recent past behind me.
As I rolled it out on the desk-top, I recalled the last time that I had used it. The day that the impostor came to my office, asking me to write a note which would testify to her father’s precarious mental health, and verify her identity as his one and only lawful heir. ‘What a pretty object!’ she had remarked, watching as I pressed the affidavit down to dry the ink, then taking the
nécessaire
from my hands, rolling it tightly up again, knotting the ribbon, where I would have tied a bow.
Knot or bow?
I could not remember how the ribbon had been when I unloosed it just moments before.
As I placed Lavedrine’s letter inside the
nécessaire
, I felt a shock go through my body, robbing me of breath. My eyes were fixed on the white sheet of blotting-paper. The letters were blurred, though the words were clear enough. Impressed in reverse on the blotter, I saw my own signature, and the words,
I, Hanno Stiffeniis, Magistrate of Lotingen, affirm as follows: that the bearer of this document is Emma Rimmele.
Below this declaration was the name of the merchants’ bank in Danzig.
I might have been at sea in a squall. I felt the roll of the waves beneath the keel, I gripped the edge of the table to steady myself.
Helena was standing at my shoulder, staring fixedly at the blotter.
‘That paper absorbs everything, doesn’t it, Hanno? There is some thing almost magical about it.’ More quietly she added: ‘The vampire left her mark, I see. She told you where she was going. You were the only person who could stop her.’
I had never seen such an expression on her face.
Had Helena opened the
nécessaire
in my absence? Had she seen what I had written? Had she known of my involvement with that woman, the extent to which my judgement had been swept aside by the force of my emotions?
Lavedrine had dismissed the wooden stake through the vampire’s heart in Danzig as a matter of no great importance. Would Helena see it in the same light, knowing what she knew? Would she suspect me of a hideous crime against the dead? Would she think that I had quieted the vampire, freeing myself forever of that creature?
‘Helena, I…’
Her hand fell gently on my own.
‘Take me to the cemetery,’ she said.
We stood in silence before the grave for quite some time.
Then, Helena read the inscription out loud.
A
NDERS
S
TIFFENIIS
F
EBRUARY,
1810–J
ULY,
1810.
H
E SLEEPS IN THE ARMS OF THE
L
ORD BEFORE HIS TIME.
Lavedrine had ordered the French soldiers guarding the cemetery to erect the headstone and place the curb-stones around the grave. They could not refuse to obey a colonel, I suppose. Helena had what she had wanted since the day that our little boy passed away.
I felt her hand searching for mine.
I caught her fingers, squeezed them gently, carried them to my lips.
‘I’ll go to Königsberg tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I’ll take my report, and testify in his favour before General Malaport. The French will learn of the debt that Prussia owes him.’
‘Lavedrine has freed us of our vampires,’ she said.
‘They must never be allowed to rise again.’
‘Amen,’ Helena intoned.
That night there was a full moon.
There were dogs in the front garden. I heard them howling for some minutes.
Then, I heard them no more.
At first light, I set out for Königsberg.