HS02 - Days of Atonement (40 page)

Professor Kant was in my thoughts when I spoke to Mutiez. Kant had devised an ingenious method to preserve the body of a murdered man in Königsberg four years before, instructing soldiers to protect the corpse inside a tarpaulin, then cover it with snow. I had asked the lieutenant to find a dry, cold place where I might examine the body that I believed was Sybille Gottewald’s. Kant’s methods had horrified me at the time, but I found myself in the same position. I did not want that corpse to decompose before I had made every effort to identify it.

Was this the best that Mutiez could do? He had sent me to a place where putrefaction was the order of the day.

The coach stopped suddenly, and the driver announced that we had arrived.

I stepped down before a huge double door which opened into the rock. The wood was ancient, pitted and rotten, grey with caked salt and the spray of the sea. The number ‘11’ had been painted freshly on the door in large white strokes.

The coachman leant down from his box, holding out a large key in his
hand. ‘For you, monsieur,’ he muttered. ‘I’ll be back with the other gentleman inside the hour. The fog seems to be lifting.’ He whipped the horse, and cantered ahead, looking for a place to turn the vehicle and retrace his route to town, while I stood before the door, jiggling the ancient key in the rusty lock.

The door swung inwards, and cold air swept out to meet the damp of the day.

On the floor lay a storm lantern and a flint. I struck a light, adjusted the wick, then pushed the door closed behind me. As I looked about, I began to wonder whether I ought to revise my unkind opinion of Lieutenant Mutiez.

The air was incredibly dry compared to the fog on the dock. There was a constant whistling current of ventilation, as cold as a mountain breeze. So cold, indeed, that my teeth began to chatter as the bones and muscles grew rigid in my jaw. Holding up the lantern, I made my way deeper into an unexpectedly vast space. The hollow in the rock was twenty yards wide, but three times as long, and surprisingly well lit even by a single lamp. The walls had been covered with shining white ceramic tiles, and on each tile there was a tiny design of a fish, and undulating green lines to represent the shifting sea. I might have been walking under water in the middle of an extraordinary shoal of every imaginable species, each one of an identical size. Crabs, clams, crayfish, flounders, brill, halibut, narwhals, plaice, eels, a thousand other mysteries of the deep. Huge beams had been fixed crossways in the roof, and the wrinkled carcasses of larger fish suspended from the tree trunks shifted and swayed in the air currents above my head. I spotted a huge stingray, a dolphin, the body of a shark, the corpse of a walrus with curving tusks almost as long as my legs.

Along the walls and down the centre of the room, wooden tabletops had been used to display the catch before it was sold. But my attention was captured by a table at the far end of the hall. In the gloom, I could just make out the uneven contour of the remains of the woman, which had been laid out for my inspection. Moving closer, I had to marvel once again at the freshness of the place. Cold was hardly the word for it, and only the merest hint of the smell of fish remained. As I held up the lamp, and looked down onto that table, I saw that Henri Mutiez had not merely done what I had asked—he had done a great deal more.

The shattered remains of the corpse had been carefully recomposed to form the shape of a body, while the clothes, now washed and dried, had been laid out in perfect order next to the corpse. It was as if a set of twins had been laid out side by side. One was decently dressed, if flat, lacking only a head and hands and legs. The other was a ravaged skeleton: the
head, the hands, the legs, the feet, and all the rest were visible, but the skin and the recognisable features of the face were crushed and mangled.

I set the lantern to rest, then turned my attention to the corpse, starting from the top, and working slowly down, as Kant had taught me to do. The skull had been broken into several pieces, most probably crushed under the weight of falling barrels. I counted them. There were six plates of different sizes, which would have formed the casket of the head. Brain tissue, stained dark-grey by oil, traced scrimshaw patterns over the remains. Clumps of straggling hair and wrinkled skin still held the pieces together. Shattered fragments of vertebrae led down to the ribcage which had split apart, like the gaping halves of a huge oyster shell. The bones of the ribs had splintered, but they hung together as if the calciferous fibres refused to be parted. And in the centre of this human oyster, a terrible spectacle of crushed, compounded organs had coagulated as a formless black pearl, the size of a plum cake.

The bones of the upper and lower arms had been fragmented into pieces of varying lengths. The pelvis was cracked and broken, the larger bones of the thighs also. One hand was whole; the other a collection of bones, too many, too fractured, and too small to be reassembled. How many barrels had fallen on the woman? I hoped to God that she had died in an instant, or was already dead. The frail composite bones of the lower legs and feet had been roughly laid out as a primitive and approximate map of human anatomy. It would have foxed the wits of the author of
Exercitatio anatomica
to make sense of that osseous puzzle, but Lieutenant Mutiez, or one of his men, had done a remarkable job of reconstruction.

‘Who were you, ma’am?’ I murmured helplessly.

I looked from the clothes to the bones, and back again, trying to imagine what that body had once looked like. I struggled to see that woman on her feet, fully clothed, her hair neatly dressed, but I floundered. What had she been in life? A wife, a mother? Who had she loved, and who had reciprocated that affection? Was somebody somewhere still seeking the dear companion that he had lost? Or were they all dead? Helena had told me of the woman she had met. She was dark of skin, small of stature. She had been afraid, as if some imminent danger threatened her. If the body were truly Sybille Gottewald’s, my lantern supplied irrefutable proof of the implacable destruction that had fallen like a thunder-clap on every single member of that ill-fated family.

‘Herr Procurator?’

I started with fright.

How long had I been staring at those remains, searching for some clue that would confirm the identity of Sybille Gottewald?

The door at the other end of the cavern had opened a crack. The tenuous light of day crept in with a swirling cloud of fog. A solid figure stood silhouetted against the light, starkly framed in the doorway. I stared down at the corpse again, wondering whether I had made a mistake by inviting him there.

‘Did anyone see you board the coach?’ I asked.

His footsteps halted short of the table. ‘I don’t think so, sir. Your instructions were precise, the coachman acted with caution. I didn’t realise he was French till we were well away from Judenstrasse.’

I felt better for that. ‘It was not my intention to bring more trouble on you, or on your people,’ I said, turning to look at him.

He was wearing an ancient overcoat which fell far below his knees, blue trousers with ragged cuffs that had seen better days, and an enormous tricorn hat. In his left hand he held a dirty sack of jute. He might have been a man who had fallen on hard times, wearing clothes that he had found by chance, rather than picked by choice. He was certainly not recognisable as a Jew.

‘Are they your own garments, Aaron Jacob?’

‘A loan from Burckhardt, the ragman,’ he murmured.

We stood together in silence, looking down on the body. His clothes gave off a smell of soap and mould, as if they had been washed a long time ago, but never worn until that day.

‘Sir?’ he asked, a note of uncertainty in his voice.

‘This is why I had them bring you here,’ I said.

‘Whose body is this? A woman, I can see that. But what happened to her?’

‘Colonel Lavedrine and I suspect that this is what remains of Sybille Gottewald,’ I said, never taking my eyes from the corpse. ‘We have no proof to confirm or confound the hypothesis. I have a task for you, if you accept it.’

He replied with such eagerness, I felt the need to block him immediately.

‘Is it possible to find some evidence that this woman was the mother of those three murdered children?’

No noise disturbed the silence but the high-pitched whistling of the draught in that large storeroom. I felt it race across the surface of my face like a cold shiver.

Aaron Jacob nodded, set his sack on the table, untied the knot, and carefully extracted the skull casts of the Gottewald children. He laid them out next to one another above the woman’s head.

‘I was wondering why you wanted to see them again,’ he began, his voice trailing away as he spoke.

‘I did not know where to start,’ I answered brusquely. I did not mention my fear that he would find only what he was looking for. I hoped against
hope that this man was as scientific and analytical as he claimed. ‘I had a feeling that some sort of comparative physiognomic examination might . . .’

He raised his hand, and I fell silent, uncertain what to add.

‘I congratulate you on your intuition, sir,’ he murmured. ‘Comparison may be possible. But the plates of her skull have been laid out in a very rough approximation. Do you mind if I set them straight?’

‘Go ahead,’ I encouraged, watching as he shuffled the pieces into a different sequence on the table, like a dealer shifting playing cards.

‘We must establish the lines of the
sutura sagittalis
and the
coronalis
, both of which appear to be relatively intact. I’ll need to clean these fragments properly first. The bone will have to be separated from the tissue, decomposing skin and compacted hair.’

He turned to me for permission, and I nodded solemnly.

He bent to his sack, took out a scalpel, then leaned on the table, his elbows braced, his eyes inches away from those human remains. Knife in one hand, a fragment of skull in the other, he began to peel away the rags of flesh from the bone, like a cook preparing onions for the pot, moving from one piece of the skull to the next, removing skin here, skeins of knotted hair and blood-spots there, cleaning and polishing each piece attentively with a rag.

Hardly a word was said for twenty minutes.

His blade clicked and scratched against the bone. No other sound penetrated the vault of the Old Fish Market. As each piece was cleaned to his satisfaction, he set it aside, then moved on scrupulously to the next, accumulating a pile of detritus, slowly separating the remains of the head from the clinging remains of the body.

‘There,’ he murmured, at last. He stood upright, stretched himself, then bent back to examine the fragments on the left-hand side of the table. Having arranged them to his own satisfaction, he looked at me.

‘The largest piece is this one,’ he said, indicating with the point of the scalpel. ‘It is one exact half of the
squama frontalis,
that is, the bone that supports the forehead.’

He picked it up, and held it close to the lamplight. ‘The two sutures of the
margo supraorbitalis
are intact, together with a connected part of the
os parietalis
. They will be sufficient for our purposes. The blows to the skull were devastating, sir. Do you know how this woman died?’

‘I have no idea,’ I murmured. It would not serve my interest if I told him more. I wanted him to tell me. ‘This is what was found.’

Aaron Jacob sighed out loud. ‘Hmm, just as I thought. The problem,
my
problem, is this. In the present state of damage, it is impossible to trace the patterns of the maternal
suturae
and make a fair comparison with those of the
children. The lines are interrupted here, and here,’ he pointed. ‘Fragmentation of the missing pieces as a result of the impact makes any true comparison invalid.’

He held the pieces of the female skull in his hands, then set them down on the table close to one of the plaster casts. ‘There are junctures missing at this point, and this one. Can you see? The child’s skull has a squiggly imprint at this meeting-point. These are the telltale signs in an undamaged skull, but in these pieces, they have been obliterated.’ He looked up and shook his head uncertainly. ‘The remaining pieces of the woman’s cranial plates have been even more severely damaged. I am not certain that I can help you. Not on the basis of the skull alone.’

I had dared to hope that I would find definitive proof before Lavedrine returned. I had been silently praying that Aaron Jacob’s ability in the handling of skulls would pay dividends. I felt my heart sink. All that remained to convince me that the body belonged to Frau Gottewald was the fragile statistic that no other woman had been reported missing recently.

‘Is there no other way?’ I asked, impatience welling up inside me.

Aaron Jacob held a piece of the skull in his hands, running his fingers over the surface with a look of intense concentration on his face.

‘I might be able to reconstruct the face,’ he murmured. ‘Not the details, but the general shape and form. Whether it was long or round. Whether the cheekbones were high, or prominent. The jaw is broken into five pieces, but it could be reassembled. We might attempt a general description. Approximate in the extreme, but better than the fragments of the faceless ghost that lie here on this table.’

‘Have you attempted it before?’

His words had thrown fresh wood on the dying fire of my hopes.

‘Sometimes,’ he replied, ‘but only as an academic exercise. I have made a face when a skull came my way without accompanying notes, trying to imagine what the person looked like in life, but . . .’

‘But what?’ I insisted.

The man smiled uneasily. ‘There was no way of verifying whether I was right, Herr Procurator. I did not ask for a portrait when I was looking for a skull. That aspect did not form part of my studies.’

I began to search inside my leather shoulder bag. I carried it with me wherever I went. It contained a spirit-case, an assortment of linen handkerchiefs, which Helena always pressed upon me as I left the house, my French and Prussian identification papers, and a hundred other odds and ends.