HS03 - A Visible Darkness (20 page)

My wrist was suddenly crushed against my larynx.

Strong fingers pressed flat against my mouth, preventing me from crying out.

I felt hot breath on my ear.

‘Do not shout, Herr Magistrate, or they’ll find themselves another corpse!’

A shadow hovered over me. Darker than the gloom which reigned in the cabin. Those cold fingers hampered my breathing; that strong wrist was capable of snapping my neck.

‘Will you speak quietly? Nod once, and I’ll let you up.’

I pushed my head up off the straw mattress.

The pressure began to relax. The fingers slid away from my lips, resting lightly against my cheek. The shadow shifted, as I gasped for air. A little harder, I would have been dead.

‘How did Ilse die?’

Had I ever heard such pain in so few words?

‘Please, let me sit,’ I hissed.

The shadow made no attempt to stop me, and I caught my first glimpse of the assailant. Moonlight or mist had turned the window a dull grey. Perfectly framed by this pale screen, the shadow took on the shape of a human profile skilfully cut with scissors from black paper. It was not the length of her hair, nor the curve of the
shoulder, that told me that my attacker was a woman. It was the way in which she retreated as I levered myself onto my elbows. A graceful retreat as I advanced, making room for my legs to slide down from the cot and touch the floor.

‘Who are you?’ I asked.

The reply was so low, I could hardly hear the words.

‘One of those that the killer is hunting. Just tell me what he did this time.’

A great weight seemed to slide from my shoulders as I tried to paint a picture of the revolting compound of human blood and animal filth that I had seen in Nordbarn earlier that night. Indeed, I felt strangely soothed as I shared the horror with another person.

The shadow did not say a word until I had finished.

‘But the pigs did not kill her,’ she said at last, as if stunned by what I had told her.

‘No, it was not the pigs.’

Again, she was silent for some moments.

‘Do you know who did it?’ she asked.

‘I have no idea.’

Time stretched out in heavy silence. On the shore down below, I heard the waves break gently on the pebbles, the slow rattling as the brine drained back to meet the next onslaught. When she spoke again, her voice seemed gentler. A child would be soothed by such a voice as it spun the web of tales intended to hasten sleep. I might have been lulled, were it not for the things that she said.

‘What did he rip out this time?’

‘I . . . I cannot say,’ I whispered helplessly.

‘There isn’t much you seem to know, sir. How are you going to stop him chopping up the rest of us?’

‘What is your name?’ I asked.

‘Do you want to tell les Halles?’

‘God, no! It is only that . . . well, you know who I am.’

‘Do you have a candle?’ she asked me. ‘I want to see your face.’

I remembered the taper that I had stubbed out before coming to bed, and dropped down on my knees, feeling about on the floor
with my hands. I brushed against her foot, then found what I was looking for, together with the flint-box.

‘If the colonel is up, he may see . . .’

‘Light it, sir,’ she chided. ‘He went to bed as soon as you left him. He’s been working like the Dev il to night. His little engine won’t do what he wants.’

I heard her giggling in the dark.

How many emotions had swept over her since she entered my cabin? Violence, certainly. I had felt the strength in her arms and fingers, convinced that she was going to smother me. Anxious concern, as she quizzed me about the fate of her friend. Great calm, as she listened to what I had to tell her. Irony, as she revealed that she knew too well the dangers faced by herself and the other women on Nordcopp shore. Now, mirth. The
coq du mer
was playing up.

I struck the stone against the flint, held the candle close to the spark, and the wick caught. I shielded the flame, sat down on the cot, and looked at her. The first thing that struck me was the strange manner of her dress. Above, she wore a vest which exposed her neck and her arms. Below, a pair of trousers cut off below the knee. The two pieces were made of waxed material which was stiff and grey. That plain, drab outfit could not humiliate the body it contained. Everything proclaimed her strength. Well-proportioned breasts, arms and shoulders moulded by the flow of muscle, the ripple of taut sinew. Her thighs and calves were powerful, her hands and fingers long, graceful, expressive. Exposure to the sun had tinged her skin the deep, dark colour of the amber that she fished for on the shore.

I raised the candle. I wanted to see her face, too.

‘They eye us up like that at the Round Fort,’ she said boldly.

Her head lolled back as if she were about to laugh. Instead, she ran her hand through her hair. In such proximity, I could not help but think of my wife. Helena’s curls were wiry and stiff; this girl’s tresses were long and gently undulating.

‘What is the Round Fort?’ I asked.

‘It’s where they take on girls who want to work on the shore,’ she answered.

‘You did not tell me your name.’

The softness of my own voice surprised me.

‘You just watch your step now, Edviga Lornerssen,’ she said, laughing lightly, covering her mouth with her hand, turning her face aside. ‘Herr Magistrate means to interrogate you.’

I could see what Magda Ansbach feared. This girl was charged with boundless energy. It was as if the magnetism of the amber that they harvested had rubbed off on her skin. Was it vibrant, gleaming health that made these women seem so dangerous to Adam Ansbach’s mother?

‘I thought you would have done so sooner,’ she added.

‘I did intend to question the girls today,’ I hedged, wanting to win her confidence. I tried to paint myself as another Prussian oppressed and hindered by the French. ‘But Herr Colonel les Halles would not allow it. Only soldiers were admitted to the beach today, as you know.’

She seemed to listen very carefully, still doubting me, perhaps.

‘Why don’t you sit down?’ I invited her.

She glanced at the bed. ‘Here?’

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘There’s nowhere else.’

‘I am soaked through,’ she said, and crouched cross-legged on the floor.

She had not been beautiful as a child. Her height and the width of her shoulders would have made her seem too boyish. The shaven head that parents impose on girls to fight off lice would not have added to her childish graces either. Nor was she beautiful now. Striking was the word. Her face was well formed, the forehead broad, the cheekbones strongly pronounced. Her eyes were her jewels. They were penetrating pale green studs. In puberty they must have startled many a man who looked at her and saw her truly for the first time. A deep scar sliced her left cheek between the corner of her eye and the angle of her jaw. She had been a beauty once, but not for very long.

‘When did you realise that Ilse was missing?’ I asked.

‘At the roll-call last night.’

She clasped her hands to her mouth. To stop her tears, I thought,
but her hand slid down and caressed her throat instead. She was shaken with anguish as she relived that instant.

‘Did you know that she had gone to the Ansbach farm?’

Edviga shook her head. ‘I knew that she was dead. Wherever she had gone.’

I felt a wave of disappointment: she knew nothing.

‘Tell me about Ilse Bruen,’ I said.

‘I . . .’ she hesitated. ‘I did not know Ilse well. We have lived in the same hut on and off, that’s all. But the other day, they moved me to a different cabin.’

‘Why would the French do that?’ I asked.

She shrugged. ‘They do it all the time, sir. For a hundred reasons. It depends on whether they want to reward you, or punish you. The huts are not all the same down there on the shore. Some are old and damp. Some are newer. I’ve been put in the very oldest, smelliest one . . .’

‘What have you been punished for?’

Edviga raised her knees even higher, hugging them tighter with her arms, pressing her chin against them, rocking backwards and forwards.

‘It was for . . . for something that I had done,’ she said at last. ‘Something that Colonel les Halles didn’t like. He wants the bodies,
our bodies
, to be sewn in sacks and thrown into the sea. He says it is for the best. But it isn’t, sir. He robs us of eternal peace. He shuts us off from the next world. Why, there are things that have to be done when a body crosses over. There are prayers, rites and rituals to perform. Otherwise, we’d live forever in endless pain. I did what had to be done.’

I remembered the way that Kati Rodendahl’s corpse had been laid out: the rough cape of animal skins that covered her nudity, the circle of tiny amber fragments that had been carefully placed around her head. I could almost hear the prayers that Edviga had uttered over her dead body.

‘So, you were the one who covered her up.’

‘I’d have done the same for Ilse, too,’ she went on, ‘but there was
no getting out of here last night, not once the news was brought from the farm.’

This declaration raised a practical question.

‘How do you manage to slip past the guards?’ I asked. ‘All of you girls, I mean. You were able to enter the cabin where Kati’s corpse was kept. Ilse walked at least as far as the Ansbach farm last night. And here you are, in my room now. Do all of the girls go walking when they ought to be in bed?’

She continued to rock slowly, but she did not say a word.

I let her be, listening to the sound of the sea, wondering how long it would be before the camp began to wake up to another day. She needs time, I thought. She is uncertain whether she can trust me.

Still, the silence lasted longer than I expected.

‘I am a Prussian magistrate,’ I began to say, hoping to persuade her to tell me what I wanted to know.

Edviga Lornerssen let out a sigh, as if regretting what she felt she had to say. ‘A Prussian working to a French mandate, as you said yourself, sir. You must report what ever you learn to les Halles.’

‘Not everything,’ I said. ‘Was Ilse seeing someone out there? A lover, perhaps?’ I pressed on.

Edviga looked at me, held my gaze, then nodded.

I tensed instinctively, waiting for her to say the name.

Adam Ansbach
. . .

But Edviga named no man.

‘Who is this lover?’ I asked again, though I did it gently.

She rested her chin on her knees again. ‘The kindest lover of them all. A prince who brings us royal gifts,’ she said at last. Then, she sang a line from what must have been an amber-gathering ditty.

O, the Baltic Sea is my only love.

He is hard, he is cold, but he’s fair . . .

‘This floor is very cold, too,’ she said, nodding towards the bed. ‘Can I change my mind, sir?’

I made space for her.

As she sat down close beside me, the straw mattress shifted beneath her weight. I felt intimidated by her presence. The air around her was fresh and clean, damp and salty, as if she had walked or swum through the sea. It was as almost as if she had been formed from the elements around her: the pale light of the moon, white sand, dark sea.

‘Amber?’ I prompted. ‘Is that that the gift you are speaking of?’

She nodded.

‘Soon the French will take it all . . .’

‘They only want it for the riches it can bring them,’ she bridled angrily. ‘Like the Prussian lords before them.’ After a moment, she added more calmly: ‘Like
we
do, I suppose. We keep what we can hide away, and we sell it, too. But we see something different in it.’

There was a simplicity about the girl which I found disarming. Certainly, she had never been educated. No one had ever taken the trouble to refine her thoughts and train her mind, but her sensibility was of an extraordinary sort. She seemed to envisage far more than her words alone could express.

‘What do you see in amber, Edviga?’ I asked.

Her calves and her feet were bare beneath the knee-length trousers that she wore. She stretched out her legs in front of her, gently massaging the muscles, caressing the skin. Then, she turned her head and looked at me.

‘There are creatures locked inside the amber, sir,’ she said in a whisper. ‘You have seen them, surely. God Himself put them there. He wanted us to see the Garden of Eden as He saw it. That is the greatest gift of the Baltic.’

‘Insects,’ I murmured. ‘Dead ants, dead flies.’

Her eyes flashed wide with anger. ‘You are wrong, Herr Magistrate,’ she hissed vehemently, as if she did not wish to hear such sentiments as I had expressed. ‘They are no longer insects. They are much, much more. Would people pay so much for insects? Would they do
anything
at all just to possess them?’

Her voice faded into silence.

Edviga, too, had her superstitions. But they were of a different
order from those of Magda Ansbach. I heard enchantment, admiration, awe. For God, the Baltic Sea, and the amber that it showered upon them. There was nothing dark or ominous in what Edviga said. And yet, something struck a discordant note in my head.

‘There are men who would do anything to get those pieces,’ I said. I spoke calmly. I had no wish to frighten her. ‘You said so yourself. Do you think that there are men—one man, perhaps—who would kill for amber?’

‘Two girls have died, have they not? Kati and Ilse are not the only ones. Other girls have disappeared before,’ she protested.

It was not the first time that I had heard that story, but perhaps this girl knew more than anyone else.

‘Do you know how many girls have disappeared?’ I asked.

As she shook her head, her hair swished softly. ‘Many.’

The word hung in the air like a phantom.

‘When did it start, do you think?’

‘This terror?’ she said offhandedly. ‘Months ago. A year, perhaps. Names were called, and no one answered.’

‘But only two bodies have been found,’ I opposed.

‘The others may have run away,’ she conceded, just as Pastoris had done. He had begun to tell me what he thought, but then had watered it down for fear of me, for fear of my dependence on the French. Would I learn no more from her than the little I had learnt from him?