HS02 - Days of Atonement (7 page)

‘It’s the sort of scene that you might find in any cottage in the neighbourhood,
monsieur
,’ I said, more nervous about saying too little than too much.

Lavedrine walked twice around the table, holding up his lantern as if it were a compass.

‘They sat down to eat,’ he confirmed, taking up the dishes, one after the other, raising them to his nose. ‘But I’d swear that this bowl was never used.’

Setting down the bowl, he pointed to the nearby cup.

‘And neither was this vessel. There is liquid in the others, while this one is empty. Can you see?’

He stood with his lantern tilted above the cup, inviting me to step close and share his discovery. I looked around the room instead, noting a small ramshackle cupboard, an ancient armchair next to the fireplace, a shelf above it, holding cups and plates. It was a country cottage, rough and ready, but well kept in its way.

‘The man who reported the discovery,’ I said. ‘What did you say his name was, Mutiez?’

‘Durskeitner, sir,’ the lieutenant replied.

‘Did he find nothing more than this?’

‘Upstairs, sir,’ the lieutenant murmured, glancing at the ceiling. ‘In the bedroom.’

He made for the staircase in the far corner of the room, which creaked as he placed his weight on it and began to climb.

Lavedrine got there before me, and began to follow him.

Halfway up, he turned and looked down at me. ‘You will observe,’ he said, ‘that there are no unsightly marks, no mud, no scuffs, on these stairs.’

I looked at the wood before my face. Each plane was varnished black at either extreme, well worn, almost white in the centre. Even in the poor light, it was easy to see that the stairs were clean.

Lavedrine reached the top. He stood in silence, as if he were waiting for me before he stepped up into the bedroom. Thinking that it was a gesture of unexpected courtesy, I hurried to reach him. But when I did so, he made no effort to move on, or make space for me. He was standing frozen, as if a large hound had appeared in the upstairs room and threatened to bite his head off. Even so, I heard the creaking of the boards as Mutiez moved around in the room.

‘Lavedrine?’ I questioned, inciting him to move forward.

Without a word, he edged up to the wall, making way for me.

I stood by his side, and looked into the bedroom.

A broad marriage-bed with a white counterpane dominated the room, the ample carved-oak headboard pushed up against the far wall. Next to the bed, on the right, stood a small bedside table. On the left, a double casement window took up half the wall. The curtains had been left open all night. A single chair was placed at the foot of the bed. Lavedrine had set his lantern on the floor, lighting up the bare wooden boards, and the stains.

The light was of such an unnatural pearly hue that morning that everything seemed unreal. My mind was pulled and torn in every direction. The paper slipped from my hand, the stick of graphite rattled and broke as it fell down the stairs.

Three lifeless bodies had been laid out on the double bed.

Not end to end, as one usually sleeps, with the feet aiming at where we were standing, but side by side across the mattress, the heads aligned along the right-hand edge.

‘Dear God!’ I gasped. ‘Children!’

 6 

L
AVEDRINE PICKED HIS
way to the bed with infinite care.

‘Who are they?’ he whispered across the void, as if his voice might wake them up. The
Grande Armée
could have marched in at the casement window and exited down the staircase, trumpets blasting, fifes a-piping, drummer-boys beating their hearts out, without any risk of disturbing those three tiny corpses.

I heard Mutiez rummaging in his satchel, then the crackle of paper being unfolded. Every sound seemed to be abnormally magnified.

‘It wasn’t easy, sir. Not at this time of night,’ he whispered back. ‘Count Dittersdorf had to send his men to find the clerk and tip him out of bed. The family name is Gottewald. The victims are registered as Helke, Martin, and the smallest, Ludwig, eleven months old. The children of Bruno Gottewald, first major in the Eighth Hussars. The father has been stationed out in Kamenetz, East Prussia, for the past four months. The family has been in Lotingen for five. He was sent here from Eischen-Luslau, but they moved him on again. And there’s the name of the mother, Sybille Gottewald.’

‘Where is she?’ Lavedrine asked, staring intently at Mutiez. ‘Is there no other room in the house?’

‘Just the kitchen, this bedroom, the closet over there,’ he pointed. ‘A privy built onto the side of the house, but there’s nobody . . . No
body,
I mean to say.’

I dragged my eyes away from the bed and the rust-red spatter marks that had soaked into the pale ochre walls and ceiling, and turned to Mutiez, who continued to scrutinise the information on that paper as if his life depended on it.

‘Three dead children, and no adult?’ I puzzled.

Mutiez nodded. ‘The corpse of the lady . . . It’s not in the garden. We’ve searched out there, sir. My men are spreading their net wider. All the roads out of Lotingen have been blocked.’

I stepped to Lavedrine’s side, and looked down on the corpses.

‘These children were too young to be left alone. She
must
be here. Or else . . .’

‘She’s been carried off,’ Lavedrine concluded, air popping from his mouth like smoke from a volley of pistols. He stared accusingly at Mutiez, as if the fact that the children were dead and abandoned was the officer’s fault. ‘Well, Henri? What are our chances of catching him? Of finding her?’

Mutiez raised his hands in a gesture of inadequacy. ‘Hard to say, sir. The woodsman reported finding the children, but he didn’t say a word about the mother. He’d seen her here in the afternoon, carrying water from the well. He was the last person to see them alive.’

‘Do you suspect the man?’ Lavedrine asked.

‘That’s not for me to say.’

‘But you do suspect him, don’t you?’

Lavedrine leant over the bed, breath rising up above his head like a surging ectoplasm. He bent closer, studying spots of blood that had soaked into the cotton counterpane covering the bodies.

‘If you’re asking for my impression, sir,’ Mutiez began, ‘I
do
suspect him. He admits having seen the three children and the woman. He must have known that there was no man in the house. When we searched him, we found an item which could only have come from here. A scent bottle. That man has never smelled
eau de Cologne.
He hardly looks human. A sort of raving wild man, sir.’

‘The sort who might commit a crime such as this?’ Lavedrine added.

‘Would any normal man do such a thing?’

‘He entered the house,’ I summarised, ignoring this outburst. ‘To steal? To rape? In either case, why kill the children? And why carry the body of the woman somewhere else, alive or dead? Above all, why go to town and flaunt the curfew, knowing he’d be stopped by the first soldier he met? It sounds improbable . . .’

‘Wait till you see him. One look will change your mind.’

‘The mystery remains, lieutenant,’ I said. ‘Before going into town, he had to dispose of the mother. If he was capable of
this
,’ I waved my hand above the massacre, ‘he would hardly shrink from murdering her, or carrying her off. But where would he hide her?’

‘My men are searching in the forest,’ Mutiez replied. ‘He has a hut in the woods. She may be there.’

‘And if she isn’t?’

Mutiez shrugged and looked away.

Lavedrine broke the lingering silence.

‘Procurator Stiffeniis is convinced that you are taking the easy way out, Henri, because you have no better suspect.’ The Frenchman did not wait for
a reply, as he lowered his lamp to examine the severed throats of the children. ‘Procurator Stiffeniis is asking himself whether we are interested in this fellow for no better reason than that he is
Prussian.
’

Lavedrine had read my thoughts.

‘That isn’t true,’ Mutiez protested. ‘My fear is for the consequences. Things are tense already. When I knew that Prussian children had been slaughtered, I advised the Count to set up a joint investigation.’

He looked at me pointedly.

‘I am not seeking a scapegoat. I have simply related my suspicions, as an officer should. That man admits entering the house. He points his finger at no one else. There were no French patrols around last night. No one reported sighting rebels in the area. It’s in everyone’s interests to clear this matter up. With all the cards laid plainly on the table. Count Dittersdorf shares my view, I assure you.’

‘In a nutshell, we must work together to find him guilty,’ Lavedrine observed with a wry smile. ‘Politics makes our business urgent, but we will need cold hearts and clear minds to make sense of this butchery. Let’s start.’

We held up our lanterns, and the shadows slid down the wall like retreating assassins. My shoulder brushed Lavedrine’s. The children had been laid out face upwards across the mattress, a white counterpane covering their bodies. The child nearest to me, head and long hair dangling back over the edge of the mattress, was the girl. Her nose was thin and long, her cheeks sucked in by the sudden agony. There was a pale yellowish pallor to her skin. Her eyes stared back to a point where the wall and ceiling met. They seemed to express surprise, rather than fright. That was my impression. It was cold in the room, the fluid surface of her eyeballs flashed brilliantly with every shift of light. Her lips were parted, the tongue protruding from between sparkling white teeth. On the extreme tip was a globule of something that looked like sticky strawberry jam.

I bent closer.

‘Congealed blood,’ Lavedrine explained, moving his forefinger above the child’s face, never once touching her. ‘A clot of formidable proportions. It must have curdled almost instantaneously.’

I looked away, reminded of my own children’s insatiable desire for strawberry preserve. Manni would stick out his tongue at Süzi, trying to frighten his sister, giggling and spluttering, spitting chunks of jellied fruit onto his chin.

‘It came from here,’ Lavedrine added. ‘The blood surged upwards from the throat. This clot fell short, being heavy.’

His finger traced an arc from the windpipe to the tongue. From the instant we entered the room, I had found it hard to tear my eyes from those massive
gashes at the children’s throats. The wounds were unsightly. A stroke from right to left, narrow and incisive where the knife had entered; wider, larger, more hideous where it had pulled against the muscles on its way out. Blood had gushed up like wine from a barrel split with a sharp axe, and left a curving trail of spots on the low ceiling, larger at one end, thinning to infinity at the other. The slanting light of early morning tinted the larger droplets a dark blue against the yellow wash of domestic colouring. Was that the last thing the child had seen? Her life’s blood spouting in the air like a fountain?

‘There’s no sign of a weapon,’ I said.

‘The killer took it away with him,’ Lavedrine replied distractedly. ‘Or used a knife from the kitchen. We can look, but blades don’t speak.’

He turned and looked at me.

‘Have you noticed how little blood there is?’

There was too much of everything in that tiny room for my taste.

‘I’d have expected more,’ he continued. ‘On the floor, for example.’

As the first flush of daylight swelled, the traces of blood on the wooden floorboards to the right of the bed, a crazed puzzle of black streaks and slither marks, began to turn a dull shade of brown.

‘Do you know how much a body contains?’ he enquired calmly. ‘A child holds enough to fill several wine bottles.’

‘What are you suggesting?’

‘It may have soaked into the mattress,’ he replied, beginning to peel back the bedspread, lifting the corner nearest to the pillow, pulling it away in a triangle as he moved in front of me towards the foot of the bed.

‘Heavens!’ I whispered, as the bodies lay exposed and the yellow lamplight danced on the cold, sallow surface of the flesh.

The nightshirts of the boys had been pulled up to their chests. Their tiny penises had been neatly cut away, and laid out in orderly fashion on a pillow at the bottom end of the bed like two small slugs.