HS03 - A Visible Darkness (54 page)

‘Why did you enter that house alone?’ les Halles demanded.

His eyes were red, he had not slept all night. The blazing orbs of a man possessed. They peered out from his smoke-blackened face with demonic energy. Success was the only reward that he craved. Amber was there to be taken; he would take it.

I envied him.

Had I conducted my investigation into the murders half so well? Had I saved a single Prussian life that might have been saved? Or was I, on the other hand, assisting the French to strip my native country of its wealth?

The killer had beaten me at every stage, but now I knew for certain who he was.

‘I wonder why you took such risks,’ he said with a loud sigh. ‘This was not a contest between the two of you alone. A duel, let us say. The aim of your enquiries was to put an end to these disturbances, restore the peace, and let me to get on with my job.’

I could not tell les Halles why I had been so foolhardy. I had feared to lose far more than just my life. My soul was in the balance. My integrity. I had to outface Heinrich, and get back what was mine. By confessing what I had revealed to Kant, I had persuaded him to spare my life in Königsberg. But now, I wanted that secret back.

No ghost must haunt me.

‘And why would he leave the front door open?’ Les Halles frowned. ‘It is almost as if he wished you to find what he had left behind.’

His eyes flashed up into mine.

‘Is that his game, do you think? Is he playing with you?’

My first impulse had been to call Gurten from the Church of the Saviour. But in the pale glimmer of the moonlight, I had seen the dark gap between the frame and the door. It was a clear sign of the killer’s presence. He had used the same trick on me in Königsberg, luring me into Rickert’s house.

Like a fool, I rushed into the trap, slamming the door back on its hinges, crashing it against the wall, announcing my arrival.

‘You expected to meet the doctor,’ les Halles summarised.

‘I saw two hands,’ I said. ‘Gripping the bottom of the door like talons. The body was in the kitchen, I could not see it from the hall. But those eight fingers caught the ray of a moonbeam. Blood had run beneath the door and formed a pool of glistening darkness on the tiles. I stepped into the room.’

A loud, dismissive grunt confirmed what he considered to be my
foolishness in entering the house alone. ‘What had he done to the corpse?’ he asked with barely controlled impatience.

‘The right side of the skull had caved in. Blood and brains spilled out . . .’

I could not finish. I saw once more the blue, metallic sheen that the moonlight cast on her skin. The blood seemed as heavy as molasses. It had congealed in the folds of her face and neck. The skull had been crushed by a massive blow. White fragments glinted like pinpoints in her tangled brown hair. She had been bludgeoned to death with one of Heinrich’s plaster casts. It lay in smashed and bloody pieces beside her body. The ample breasts which had barred my way to the doctor’s surgery but a week before had settled heavily to the side, pulling her body aslant. Her white linen blouse was piebald black with blood.

Can one feel relief at the sight of a corpse so brutally slaughtered?

I breathed more easily as I stared into those lifeless eyes. They were not Edviga’s, as I had feared. I recognised Frau Hummel. Dr Heinrich had murdered his housekeeper.

‘Had he mutilated her?’ les Halles insisted.

‘She was not what he was looking for,’ I said. ‘He is only interested in the girls who gather amber.’

‘You said that there was more than one,’ les Halles prodded, impatiently.

‘Indeed,’ I said. ‘There is another room where Heinrich performs his surgery. The same room where he makes casts of human limbs from gypsum and wax . . .’

I paused.

There was a smell of wax in the surgery, but it was nothing like as strong as the smell of wax in the house of Frau Poborovsky, nor could it ever hope to compare with the overwhelming atmosphere of DeWitz’s workshop.

I took a deep breath, preparing myself to tell the worst.

‘He was tied to a chair,’ I said. ‘He was sitting at the desk . . .’

‘But how did he die?’ the colonel snapped, as if the deed did not interest him. He wanted facts, and nothing more.

‘Face down in a bowl of plaster,’ I replied, equally brutal in my description, recalling the large blue bowl in which Heinrich had been mixing plaster when I called on him in the company of Gurten. ‘Heinrich held him down until he drowned, then left him where he sat. The plaster had set hard and fast. It was a horrid way to die,’ I said. ‘The agony was long. His wrists were deeply cut as he tore against the rope. This killer likes to torture his prey . . .’

Whenever I thought of Heinrich, that word rose spontaneously to my lips.

‘He used the plaster of Paris like the resin which forms amber,’ I continued. ‘It smothers, chokes and kills the victim as it hardens. Just like the insects trapped inside it.’

Colonel les Halles let out a groan of dubious perplexity.

‘Never let it be said that Prussians lack imagination!’ he exclaimed. ‘And what do you think he had in mind when he mutilated those women? Is it not the inspiration of the moment which guides his cruelty?’

I admired the practical nature of his thinking.

‘If the victim’s face had set fast inside a bowl of plaster,’ les Halles ploughed on, ‘how did you recognise him?’

The only source of light in Heinrich’s surgery was a candle on the mantelpiece. The tallow was almost out, burnt down to a stub, but there was flame enough to see what had happened.

‘I recognised his jacket,’ I said. ‘The same dark brown riding-jacket that he always wore. And the ring on his finger. A cornelian with a swan and the initials J.G.’

Heinrich had murdered my assistant.

Johannes Gurten had returned to Nordcopp, as I instructed him, but he had ignored the warning that fright had inspired me to add: ‘
Prudence—prudence—prudence!
’

He had paid for his rashness with his life. Heinrich had pushed his face into a bowl of plaster, and held him there until he was dead.

‘You know his name, then?’

‘Johannes Gurten was a trainee magistrate,’ I told him. ‘He had been sent to Lotingen to serve his apprenticeship with me, but
when he learnt that I was engaged on a case in Nordcopp, he took it on himself to follow me to the coast. He had been . . . helping me, let’s say.’

‘Did he not go with you to Königsberg?’ he enquired sharply.

‘I assigned a different task to him. Concerning Heinrich. He was to search for information . . .’

‘I knew nothing of this person,’ les Halles interrupted me.

‘I knew you would not let him into the camp. I did not ask. I, too, have had my share of obstacles,’ I reminded him, without insisting that those obstacles were of his making.

‘I suppose you have,’ he agreed, looking out over the shore.

Down below, the machines continued to thump and pound like a dismal orchestra playing some strange, heathen symphony. Pride gleamed in his eyes, however. Nordcopp shore was where he wished to be.

‘Very good, Stiffeniis,’ he said. ‘Now, let’s conclude. What about the other one?’

I thought I had misheard him. There was a great deal of noise. The sea, of course. The thundering engines of the
coq du mer.
The rushing water in the flume, the crashing of the pebbles as they clattered into the metal tray, the shouts of the French soldiers as they urged the women to work without respite. The sounds of labour on the Baltic coast had been for ever amplified.

‘I did not catch what you said,’ I apologised.

He turned on me, his face a mask of angry impatience. ‘You have said nothing of the third corpse in the house. Surely there were mutilations in that case?’

‘Third corpse?’ I repeated in surprise.

My legs turned to the consistency of the fine sand beneath my feet. Cold sweat erupted on my body, as if I had that very moment emerged from a nocturnal bathe in the Baltic Sea. This was the news that he had been expecting to hear. This was the part that interested him. Not the corpse of Frau Hummel. Nor the body of Johannes Gurten. There was another corpse, about which I knew nothing. A mutilated corpse.

One of the amber-girls . . .

‘You reported to Malaport’s office, did you not?’

‘The minute I arrived in Königsberg . . .’

‘You did not go back to him, I take it?’ He wiped the sweat from his upper lip with his thumb and forefinger. ‘Before you left to come here, I mean.’

‘I did not think . . .’

‘If you had gone to Malaport, he would have informed you that another worker has gone missing. Shortly after you departed,’ he hissed. ‘Edviga Lornerssen. The girls who shared the hut with her reported her missing. They came to me like a bunch of frightened rabbits. They did not want to be killed as well, they said. They were preparing to leave.’ He opened his arms in a gesture of helplessness. ‘I let them go, but no dead body has been found so far . . .’

He did not finish, leaving me to draw my own conclusions.

I did so, but I could not find the strength to put them into words.

‘I searched the house from top to bottom,’ I said. ‘I found two bodies only. Then, I went at once to seek out Tessier and tell him what I had discovered.’

Les Halles turned to me.

‘Why kill
those
two people, Stiffeniis? Why would he murder your assistant, and his own housekeeper?’

My ideas were clear regarding Johannes Gurten.

‘If he had tried to confront the doctor, or arrest him, Heinrich would have had no alternative but to kill him. Frau Hummel may have accidentally witnessed the slaying of my assistant,’ I said. ‘If that was the case, then she, too, had to be silenced.’

Les Halles shook his head.

‘There must be another corpse hidden in the house or the garden,’ he repeated stubbornly, a note of acidity in his voice, as if he did not trust me to search the house properly. I had thrown the name of the murderer at his feet, but that was not enough for Richard les Halles. There was a hitch, and it threatened to distract him from the work that was going on along the shoreline.

‘That house must be turned inside out,’ he growled impatiently.

There was no corpse hidden in Heinrich’s house. He had never bothered to hide the evidence of his crimes. He could have thrown Kati Rodendahl into the sea, but he had left her corpse on the shore where she was bound to be seen. He might easily have buried Ilse Bruen beneath the loose sand of the dunes. Instead, he had abandoned her body carelessly in the pigsty of the only farm in the district. He had left the corpses of Rickert, Gurten and Frau Hummel where he had slaughtered them. If he had ripped the child from Edviga’s womb, he would have left the body for the world to see.

‘You won’t need me in Nordcopp,’ I said. ‘I want to look in Edviga’s hut. She may have left some clue behind to tell us what has become of her.’

I wanted to be alone when I discovered what he had done with Edviga.

I wanted to be alone when I met Dr Heinrich again.

E
XCEPT FOR A
single light, it was dark out on the water.

Moonlight cut black chasms between the wooden slats as I crossed the pontoon bridge and clattered up the ladder onto the platform. The huts were shrouded in darkness, and they appeared to be deserted.

An untrimmed lantern guttered in the centre of the space, as if the women had been whisked away by some spirit even more malign than Colonel les Halles. I could make them out, labouring on the shore beneath the flaming braziers to turn the Frenchman’s dream into reality.

The forgotten lantern gave off a slanting plume of trailing black smoke.

I raised the glass, adjusted the wick, then went forward, my footsteps beating on the wooden boards like a muffled funeral drum, towards Edviga’s hut. It was on the far side of the compound, looking over the sea; she had pointed it out to me the day les Halles had let me speak to her. The smell of the sea was strong, stagnant, almost rank. I might have been on a seaweed-covered rock at low tide. The wooden cabins reminded me of the lean-to huts where fishermen hang their fish to dry along the northern shore. They
were very old—the ancient wood dark, cracked, warped—very different from the new huts where the French had installed themselves, where I myself had slept. Being so close to the sea and the spray, those huts had soaked up more water than the timbers of a sailing-ship.

I stopped outside her lodging, listening for any sound.

Waves were breaking gently in a shimmering silver line along the shingle half a quarter-mile out from the shore. Further down the beach came the rude suckling of the
coq du mer
, the sharp exchange of orders being shouted, the muted murmuring of the women’s voices as they worked together, learning the new task which would render them unemployed the instant they had mastered it.

The air was fresher than it had been for many a night. The first hint of summer’s imminent end, I thought. The Arctic ice would soon invigorate the wind as autumn came. That gentle breeze would turn into a howling gale, racing down from the north, sweeping away the stale odours of the stagnant sea. It would soon disperse the fetid air of that long summer.

I pushed the door open, and entered the cabin.

The air was heavy with the odour of damp clothes, and with the acidic smell of the bodies that had worn them. The lantern lit up four trestle beds, the general clutter of the women who had been living there together. Clothes and clogs lay in great disorder on the floor, as if they had been hastily thrown aside. Earthenware cups, metal spoons and a covered pot set down in a circle in the centre of the room. The other women had run off, leaving everything as it was. Their cots were stripped bare to the bones of their latticed wooden frames. Only the cot in the farthest corner remained untouched, the covers thrown back, exposing crumpled bedding, as Edviga Lornerssen had left it.

I began to search the room more thoroughly, concentrating my attention on the area around that bed. Apart from the bedclothes, some traces of the girl’s presence remained. A flimsy printed woodcut was fixed to the wall above the spot where her head must have lain. A female saint, I thought at first, wondering whether Edviga might have been a Catholic. I had never asked about her beliefs.
And yet, religion of any sort seemed at odds with her desire to bury a piece of amber with Ilse Bruen, and with the superstitious ritual she had performed over the corpse of Kati, covering her nudity with a blanket of fur, surrounding it with a scattering of amber fragments.