HS03 - A Visible Darkness (13 page)

‘I’ll take your order now,’ she said. ‘Then, Marta will dish up what you are hungering for.’

There was a look of unconcealed excitement in her eyes. They were dark green with sparkling points of light. She was playing the part of a coquetting waitress, but that image of a hunting cat refused to go away. The feline was closing in for the kill, and I could not shake off the feeling that I was the mouse. ‘I told my mother what a fine gentleman you are,’ she added. ‘I said she’d better treat you well. So, you just tell me what you’d like to have, sir.’

‘Isn’t there a list?’ I asked.

Erika smiled uncertainly. ‘Just tell me which colour you’d prefer.’

I was silent for a moment.

‘I have . . . no particular preference,’ I said.

This vague order sent the wrinkled child spinning away. She crossed the room and spoke again in whispers to the cook. A minute later, the woman in the bright red turban came over to my table carrying a bowl of fish soup. She set it down with a smile, then she sat herself down on the bench opposite me.

‘Welcome to Nordcopp, sir. I am Marta Linder. We’ve not seen you before. What are you looking for exactly? Erika couldn’t say for certain.’

I spooned the broth into my mouth, and chewed on a piece of fish.

She watched me attentively. ‘About the amber,’ she specified. ‘Is it the shape, the weight, or the colour that interests you the most? Just name it, and I’ll have the girl bring it over.’

They were selling amber under the cover of serving fish.

What had Pastoris said? The French were most particular about the weight. They weighed the amber when they brought it to his workshop, and weighed it again when they came to carry it off. So, weight was important. But was it the most important factor? The French took it to Pastoris to be cleaned and polished. Were shape and appearance more important, then? And how would one choose between two pieces of amber which were exactly the same weight and shape?

‘Colour,’ I decided, removing a fishbone from the tip of my tongue.

The woman was past her prime, but she was still handsome. A
row of black kiss-curls was stamped flat across her forehead by the weight of her red turban. She pursed her lips, her eyebrows arched as she studied my face.

‘Oh I see,’ she said. ‘You are a jeweller. I should have guessed. And from Königsberg, Erika tells me. So not a wholesale trader. Quality is what you’re after. Is that right?’

I returned her smile, as if to confirm her deductions. At the same time, I had to say something. ‘The fish is very good,’ I commented, raising the spoon to my mouth again to put an end to the conversation, swallowing bits of haddock and eel, and the thin broth in which they were swimming.

‘I’ll show you something really tasty,’ the woman declared. ‘Ten pieces. All the same size. As smooth as pebbles from a fast-flowing stream. Oval in form and slightly smoky. A deep, dark red. That colour never is truly transparent, sir.’ She leaned closer, and peered into my eyes. ‘A great lady will want to wear them day and night. Can you imagine the beauty of a necklace made from those fine baubles?’ She kissed the tips of her fingers. ‘Dragon’s blood. The name they give to the finest rubies. But you know that, of course. These are a thousand times prettier than the purest Indian rubies. You’ll make something fit for a queen, I’m sure of it.’

‘There aren’t so many left,’ I joked, thinking of Marie Antoinette, and the horde of noblewomen who had lost their heads in France. ‘Great ladies,’ I explained.

She did not smile. Perhaps she hadn’t heard me. Someone in the room called for more, but she didn’t shift.

‘Erika!’ she shouted over her shoulder. Then, she turned to me again. ‘She’ll be very pleased with you, sir. She knows she’ll get her share. She did bring you down here, after all. And as it is your first time here, you can have her when you have done your trading. It won’t cost nothing extra.’

Her words affected me like the shearing of a metal blade against a whetstone.

‘Is that the way to speak of your daughter?’ I managed to say.

Marta Linder stared at me as if I were a branded fool.

‘Do you want to see my amber, or not?’ she asked me coldly.

‘It won’t change colour while we’re speaking, surely?’ I challenged her. ‘Tell me, Marta. What is wrong with the child?’

‘The
child
?’ she mimicked.

I lost my patience. ‘Erika. Your little girl,’ I said.

‘Erika ceased to be a little girl a while back,’ she replied, and laughed. But then her expression softened, as if the artist who had drawn her face had rubbed it with a cloth, and instantly sketched in a more accommodating look. She lowered her head, and whispered across the table. ‘She’s mighty popular with the gents. You’d be surprised, sir. There’s many a man who’ll go with her.’

I recalled the French soldier in the street above, and his allusive words to Erika.

‘Sex, is that what you are speaking of?’

She stared at me for some moments, her black eyes twinkling. ‘What else, sir?’

‘Is that why the French soldiers don’t bother her? They think she’s bringing men down here for . . . for . . .’ I could not find a suitable word. ‘To cover up the fact that you are selling amber? They think instead in terms of fish. And flesh . . .’

She seemed amused by what I had said.

‘Nothing in Nordcopp is what it seems, sir. Amber, fish, flesh; each man has his preferences. Especially regarding amber, sir. It must be big, or bright. It must be round, or flat.
De gustibus
,’ she said, surprising me with a Latin idiom she must have picked up from one of her clients.

She laid her hands flat on the table, and leaned forward.

‘Do you want to see them, then? The red ones, I mean. Colour of blood . . .’

I nodded. ‘Let’s start with the blood.’

As she rose and turned away, I thought I heard her muttering, ‘Thank the Lord!’ under her breath. She went across the room, murmuring to Erika as she passed. The girl was stirring the pot of boiling fish, but she stepped aside quickly. Marta Linder glanced cautiously around the cellar, then stretched her hand behind a cupboard and retrieved a little packet from some secret hiding-place. As she came back to my table, she untied the strings that held this
bundle closed. Sitting down again, she shook the contents out on the wooden surface.

My appetite for fish dissolved as I stared at those stones.

The colour was truly spectacular, as she had promised. She lifted the candle, shifting it across the table. The variegated colours—light and dark—seemed to ripple and flow like fresh blood spurting from a vein.

‘They are very beautiful,’ I said, whispering despite myself.

‘Just feel them, sir!’

My hand stretched out mechanically. I took the nearest piece between my thumb and forefinger and held it up to the light. Like every man in that room, I had succumbed to the passion for amber in an instant. I must have looked as dazed, seduced and ravished as they did.

‘Smooth,’ I murmured. ‘And warm to the touch.’

‘A lover’s kiss on a slender neck.’

‘Have you been long in the trade, ma’am?’

I held the piece of amber close to my eye, as I had seen the other customers do.

‘In this trade . . . no, sir,’ she murmured softly with a wilful smile.

I did not need to ask what trade she had been in before.

I picked up another piece of amber. A stream of golden bubbles deep inside the oval nugget caught the light. Each bead was somehow like, but quite unlike, the other pieces in the set. ‘This one would make a wonderful ring,’ I said for want of saying something.

‘Oh, I wouldn’t split ’em up,’ she said quickly.

I set the bead down on the table, and sat back, tapping my fingernail against my teeth, wondering how to bring the conversation to a head. Should I ask her directly if she had ever had any dealings with Kati Rodendahl?

‘Don’t you like the colour?’ she asked.

‘The colour is pleasing enough,’ I said, thinking of the startling colour of the piece of amber in my pocket, ‘but . . .’

‘But what, sir?’

‘I was looking for something brighter. Yellow, perhaps . . .’

‘The colour of piss? Or more like what a dying old lady coughs up?’

She smiled no longer. She had seen through my pretence, and shrugged off ingratiation like an uncomfortable cloak. Her face seemed angular, her eyes sharper and more inquisitive. I thought I could see a marked resemblance to the daughter. Her hand reached out and slid the candle to one side. Then she sat forward, filling the space, her breath hot in my face.

‘One word from me,’ she said, ‘and these gentlemen here will rip you to bits. They don’t take risks. Your corpse will rot with the rats in that tunnel over there. Out with it! Who are you?’

‘I am a magistrate,’ I admitted, my voice barely audible. ‘And I’m investigating a murder. One of the girls who gather amber on the coast was . . .’

‘What are you doing
here
?’ she hissed. ‘Shouldn’t you be out
there
looking for answers? What do you want from us?’

‘I need to know . . .’

‘Ask the French squaddies how she died,’ she seethed before I could finish.

‘You know something that the French do not,’ I pressed on quickly. ‘That is why I am here.’

Her eyes glistened. ‘What do you want to know?’

I picked up one of the fine amber beads that lay glistening and forgotten on the table, and held it in front of her nose. ‘Somebody sells you amber like this. Who brings it to you?’

She pursed her lips, but she did not reply.

‘Does it come from the girls on Nordcopp shore?’ I asked.

Her eyes flashed angrily. ‘Why don’t you ask them who they take it to?’

Had she done business with those girls in the past? Was there some lingering insult, some outstanding debt that still rankled? She seemed to have neither time nor pity regarding them.

‘You have not answered my question,’ I said. ‘Who brings it here?’

‘I have my suppliers,’ she snapped, ‘and that’s the end of it!’

Our huddled conversation made no impression on the other
people in the room. Doubtless, when a deal was being struck, they all held huddled conversations of their own.

‘Someone in Nordcopp takes pleasure in chopping women into pieces,’ I said. ‘I want to stop him. The French do, too. Unless I catch him soon, they’ll come through here like a howling gale. Wouldn’t it be wiser if you talked to me?’

She stared sullenly at me, but still she would not speak.

I swept my hand slowly around the room.

My eyes went with it, looking at the tables, the entrance to the tunnel, the seated men, the fireplace where her daughter tended the pots. ‘I could have brought the French here with me,’ I said as my eyes locked into hers. ‘I could have brought ten gendarmes. But that was not my plan. I don’t want them involved in this affair.’

‘A Prussian working for the French?’

She pronounced each word as if it fouled her tongue. ‘A Prussian trying to save the lives of Prussian women,’ I corrected her.

As I spoke, I reached into my pocket and closed my fist around Kati Rodendahl’s piece of amber. ‘Who would be interested in a piece like this one?’ I asked, unclenching my fingers slowly to reveal what was hidden in my palm.

She stared for a moment, as if she could not quite believe what she was seeing.

‘Where did you get it?’ she whispered, stretching forward.

I grabbed her hand, twisted hard at the wrist and pressed her skin into the flame of the candle. ‘It came from the body of a murdered girl. Now, tell me, ma’am. Who would she have tried to sell it to in Nordcopp? Would she have come to you?’

I felt hot breath on the nape of my neck.

‘Let me see it.’

The strange voice of Erika sounded in my ear. She darted forward and plucked the amber from my hand. She lifted it to her nose, sniffed it like a squirrel that has found a nut, then began to turn the piece in her fingers and examine it from different angles by the light of the flame.

‘This is not our usual trade,’ she said, cocking her head to one
side, stepping back from the table. ‘But I know who handles stuff like this.’

‘Who?’

‘Follow me,’ she said, clasping the amber tightly in her fist.

I stood up quickly, while Marta Linder caressed her burnt flesh and cursed me under her breath.

‘I’ll handle him,’ Erika whispered to her mother. She led me towards the tunnel entrance without a backward glance, still clasping Kati Rodendahl’s amber treasure as she darted forward into the pitch darkness.

I reached out, caught hold of her slender arm, but the girl kicked out, and tried to shake herself free of me. ‘Why are you pulling at me?’ she screeched.

‘Give it back,’ I warned her, catching hold of her hand.

‘Just let me hold it for a bit,’ she whined, like a child who has taken possession of another’s doll, and doesn’t want to give it up.

I could hear her breathing, but I could not see her in the dark. I did not like the situation. That creature knew her way around those tunnels. I did not. If she could shake me off, I’d have trouble finding my way out. If that bit of amber was so valuable, I might have trouble finding her again. She struggled, but I felt her warm musty breath on my face. The air was tainted by the salty smell of her sweat.

‘The dead girl owned it, didn’t she?’

Her voice sounded heavy and sad in the gloom.

‘Was she bringing it to you?’ I asked her, easing my grip on her arm.

She let out a loud sigh. ‘No one in their right mind would come down here with a piece like this, sir. But I know . . . There are people in Nordcopp who’d do anything to get their hands on it.’

‘Who?’

No answer came from the dark.

Suddenly, she breathed in sharply. ‘You think that she was killed because of this jewel, don’t you, sir?’ she said.

‘It is very likely.’

‘You are wrong.’

‘What do you . . .’

She did not let me finish. ‘He’d have known where to find it,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t interested in amber. He’d have turned her inside out for a gem like this one.’

Her argument struck home. The killer had had the opportunity to rip the corpse apart in search of what he was looking for.
But then again
, I thought,
if he did not want the amber, what
did
he want from Kati Rodendahl?