The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge
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Authors: Patricia Duncker
A Novel
PATRICIA DUNCKER
Contents
12 AGAPE: HEALING THROUGH LOVE
For S.J.D.
I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driv’n by the spheres
Like a vast shadow moved; in which the world
And all her train were hurled.
Henry Vaughan
Gelobt sei uns die ew’ge Nacht …
Let us praise eternal night …
Novalis
HUNTERS IN THE SNOW
The bodies were found early in the afternoon of New Year’s Day. Hunters in the forest were rounding up their dogs, pulling their hats close over their ears against the frost, and heading for home. Several centimetres of snow had fallen in the night, and by dawn, when they had set out, the air sliced their lungs and faces, clean and hard. The trails on the lower slopes remained clear, but slush and ice rendered the tracks on high ground above the rocks impassable. They bagged two hares, and watched the deer rushing through the mangled green, leaping the fallen trunks left by the storms, but let them go. The hunters waded through the snow, discouraged by the devastated landscape and blocked paths. Every endeavour to negotiate clear space was thwarted and baffled. New Year’s Day. Someone proposed a tot of eau-de-vie, hot coffee and his wife’s chocolate-cream gâteau. A small fête for the New Year. Let’s go home. They called out to one of their number who was pissing against a pile of frozen logs. But he didn’t move or turn. He had seen something strange in the clearing below him.
This man, who lived just eight kilometres away from the white space where the bodies were discovered, had already seen the cars, five of them, massed at odd angles around the holiday chalet where, it was assumed, the gathering had passed their last night. He had noted the registrations – not one from the local department – and the wealth to which the vehicles bore witness: two Land Cruisers,
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s, a Renault Espace, a plush black Mercedes. Big slick vehicles from Paris, Nancy, Lyon. One of the cars was registered in Switzerland. He had noticed the CH sticker on the boot. But at that moment, when he raised his eyes from the steaming arc of his own piss, he did not associate the pattern in the snow beneath him with the visitors to the mountains. He peered forwards, uncertain. Were they tree trunks, already severed and arranged, awaiting transport? Surely he imagined the bare patches in the bark, which looked like faces, and the branches splintered open, like palms facing upwards. Two of his friends trudged over to his side and followed his stare down the rock face to the clearing.
All at once they knew that these were people, real people, tranquil, beautiful, arranged in a symmetrical half-circle, lying in the snow beneath them, and that every single one was dead.
There is no need for urgency if death has gone before us. Yet still they hurried, clambered in rapid silence down the icy fissure in the rock face, shouldering their guns, scuffing their gloves on the boulders. Quick! We must get to them. We must call for help. The dogs whined, yelped, then set off round the longer sloping route through the trees, their noses snuffling the hardening snow. They blundered downward, frightened, eager. But when they stood, puffing and confused, their breath condensing in clouds, before the silent, frozen forms, lapped in fresh snow, they lost all inclination to speak or act. They held back their dogs and spoke in whispers.
‘Appelle les pompiers. Et les flics. Call the emergency services. And the cops. Qu’est-ce que tu attends? What are you waiting for? Go on, do it.’
The hunter’s hands, which had killed many times and were always steady on his gun, now slithered and twitched over the buttons on his mobile phone. His dog circled the bodies, wary, uncertain.
But the signal fluctuated. How many? Where? You’re breaking up. Give me your exact position. The hunter gestured helplessly to his friends, and now they all had an opinion. This is the easiest way to find us. This is the road to take. Mais non, passe-moi le portable! Each one of them knew the body of the forest like a lover, all her secrets fingered and touched. They had walked every trail in all seasons; they knew the thickets, the buried cleft with the soft falling water, the deep pools. They nosed out the scents of the forest with an instinct as uncanny and subtle as their dogs. They knew every sound, every spoor, could smell the earth as keenly as the creatures they hunted: moss, water, fear. They would stand silent for hours, watching over their prey, tenderly plotting their kill, with the impassioned concentration of a bridegroom, waiting for the beloved to stir. Now they huddled together at the edge of the clearing, giving one another advice, puzzled, insecure, their voices lowered, not out of respect for the frozen dead, but in case they could hear.
Eventually it was decided that one of them should descend to the lower trails, where the mobile phone could locate a clear signal and the emergency services, taking the dogs with him, to wait at the crossroads where the tarmac ended and their abandoned vans nuzzled the forest. He could guide the police, pompiers, premiers secours, all the necessary procession which promised the help no longer needed. As he tramped away into the misty, declining light the others gathered together, fearful guardians of whatever had been accomplished in the clearing on the brink of the ravine. They did not study the bodies but looked out over the snowy hills and shattered tunnels of broken trees. Mist boiled in the distant valleys; the white light, deepening to blue, veiled the horizon. The best of the day had already gone.
They began counting the dead.
The bodies lay close together, woven into a pattern. Nine adults, partially exposed in the soft wash of snow, stretched out upon their backs, settled into a sedate, reclining curve. Their elbows were bent back, their hands raised, palms facing upwards, as if they had all completed a complex movement in the dance, and died in the very act. The hunters did not pry too closely, but stood back enthralled, for they were used to death. The dead and the moment of dying accompanied them through the forest, their daily companions, who held no secrets from them. But this was an event of a different order. The black fixed eyes gaped open, gazing at the winter sky, their lashes and eyebrows white with frost. The hunters kept their distance, not because they were afraid, but because they were disturbed by the bodies of the children.
The children formed a smaller group, nestled at the feet of the adults, like loyal greyhounds carved on the tombs of heroes. The curled figures were wearing pyjamas beneath their outdoor coats and heavily swaddled in blankets; their arms and fingers tucked away, invisible in gloves and mittens. Two of them embraced half-chewed fluffy animals, a panda, a small grey koala bear. The youngest child looked tiny, perhaps just over a year old. Who would murder little children and then lay them with such careful tenderness at their parents’ feet? The woods cracked and whispered with the coming frost. As the light shrank into the pines the hunters heard the murmur of diesel engines, then voices approaching from the left, at last, the crunch of heavy boots breaking the snow’s crust. Dark figures, laden with bulky equipment, arc lights, cameras, grey plastic coffins roped to sledges, rose towards them, moving slowly through the trees.
* * *
The officer in charge of the police investigation rummaged in the pockets of his hooded coat. There was still enough light to make out the tracks around the half-circle of bodies. He began to draw upon a pad.
‘Vous n’avez rien touché? Are you sure you didn’t touch the bodies?’ He accused the hunters, without even looking at them.
‘We haven’t gone near the bodies.’
‘So whose tracks are these?’
Three sets of indentations in the snow marked the outer circle. The most recent belonged to the dogs.
‘Deer. Those tracks were left by deer.’
The deer had come very close. They must have stood over the dead, then gently stepped away, back into the shadowed green. The oldest marks were half filled with fresh snow. A flurry of tracks hovered near one of the bodies. This corpse occupied a central place at the circle’s core, and they could now see that it was a woman’s face, pale and shocked by the suddenness of her death, her mouth gaped slightly open, her white tongue visible. She was not young, but her face was drawn in strong lines and bold gestures, her dark hair flooded back, escaping from the furred hood of her coat. The Commissaire stared at her face for a long time, then blew on his fingers and continued drawing the scene, while his white-suited myrmidons, all looking puzzled rather than shocked, staked out the circle to include the tracks. No one looked closely at the children.
‘Any sign of the Judge yet?’ snapped the Commissaire. ‘I rang her over an hour ago.’
The hunters felt excluded from their discovery. No one asked their opinion. Why weren’t they suspects? They had seen enough crime scenes on TV to know that whoever admitted to the discovery of the body had usually committed the murder, except in the case of dead wives, where the husband, absent or present, was always the only one with the motive. And here they were, armed to the teeth, with enough ammunition to massacre the forest, yet no one had even asked for an alibi. The hunters were not ignorant men. They were trained to read signs, even small signs, a broken branch, a snapped twig, a disturbance in the waters. They watched the white ghosts of the police scientifique moving quickly, staking out the bodies, photographing each face in turn, the flash slapping the snow in a sudden white flare. And then they realised what was missing from each man’s face. No one balked on the brink of the circle as the hunters had done. They strode forth like conquerors, buckled beneath the weight of their equipment. They carried the right things. They had expected to see this strange gathering of the dead, arranged in precisely this pattern, hidden from the world on a remote outcrop in the forest. They had all known what awaited them. They had seen this before.