HS04 - Unholy Awakening (18 page)

Lavedrine held up the lantern, pressing his nose against the glass, narrowing his eyes as he attempted to see what was lost inside the darkness of the room.

‘What’s this filth?’ he grumbled angrily, rubbing his leather sleeve in a circular motion on the glass pane in the hope of improving the poor visibility. ‘It must be on the inside of the window.’

It may have been the angle at which I came upon him, or the way that the lantern flame reflected off the glass surface. It may have been that I was concentrating less on what might lie beyond the window. I saw the hint of a brownish-orange colour that Italian artists call
sanguinaccio
.

‘It is blood,’ I said. ‘Dried blood. A great deal of it.’

The window looked like a map which shows the lie of the land, indicating the gradations in height by marking them with a different intensity of colour. Indeed, where the residue of blood was thickest, the colour was the rich dark brown of melted chocolate.

Lavedrine held the lantern closer to the glass.

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ he murmured, pulling back in disgust.

I briefly saw the shadow of a black lump which was lying on the floor beneath the window. Only the red jacket, dark trousers and glistening leather boots declared that this was a man. His epaulettes, cuffs and other markings indicated to Lavedrine that he was a French hussar. I looked closer, and saw a shako which had rolled onto the floor. Above the peak in silver figures, the number ‘11’ gleamed in the lantern light. Only then – I don’t know whether it was because of what I had seen, or because the sharp odour of tobacco in the courtyard had been dispersed – my nose rebelled against the fetid odour of human decomposition.

‘The body’s been there for a week at least,’ said Lavedrine. ‘A few more days, and there would have been little left of him, except the uniform. Rats have started chewing at it. And at him, of course.’

He shifted the lantern, making space for me.

The body was stretched out on what might have been a black carpet.

‘I saw the other corpse in Marienburg,’ he said. ‘You have seen the bodies found in Lotingen. We must look for anything…familiar.’ He turned to face me. ‘Are you ready to go in?’

I nodded without speaking. We had come there for no other reason.

Lavedrine stood back, preparing to put his shoulder to the door. Instead, he thought again, stretching out his hand to touch the wood. He pushed hard with the flat of his hand, and the door swung open with a painful creak.

He held up the lantern, looked at me, then crossed the threshold.

Cobwebs caught at my mouth and clung to my nose as I went in through the door. But it was the terrible smell in that enclosed space which was so oppressive. The stench of human decay is unmistakeable. There was something mouldy and unwholesome, too, as if the smell had once been many times more pungent.

Lavedrine stepped closer to the body, holding up the light, pulling a kerchief from his pocket, pressing it to his nose. Carefully he shifted the jacket of the uniform with his foot. Dust erupted into the lantern beam like smoke spouting from a volcano. The candle flared, then settled again.

‘Hold this,’ he said, passing the lantern to me.

He knelt down beside the corpse, the soles of his boots leaving clear imprints in what I had thought to be a dark carpet. A vast amount of blood had dried out on the floor, slowly turning to powdered, red dust. The body was stretched out on the floor beneath the window. The face was pressed up hard against the wall. The flesh on the back of his neck and the right side of the face was black where it had been exposed to the air. Patches of the skin had liquefied. His blond hair was tied up tightly in a neat waxed tail, though the whole thing seemed to have slipped sideways on his scalp, like a wig gone astray.

And yet, I noted, it was his natural hair.

Lavedrine let out a sigh and squared his shoulders.

‘He was reported missing five days before the other man was murdered,’ he said. ‘And two days before Gaspard was killed, a third man had been attacked inside the town, while returning to his lodgings. Ten days, give or take a day or two. He’s been lying here for almost two weeks. Indeed, I think we can say that he was probably murdered the day that he disappeared. That is why he never returned to his regiment, or reported again for duty.’

He looked at me, then back at the body.

‘The neck. We need to look more closely at his neck and his throat,’ I said. ‘This is how he fell, but it is not clear how he may have died. Nor if he was murdered. If we are to make useful comparison with the other murders…’

‘Give me a hand,’ said Lavedrine, taking the kerchief from his nose and mouth, stuffing it away in his pocket. Together, we rolled the body onto its back, shying away as it slowly settled onto the shoulders. The cheeks had disappeared, the gaping jaw revealed an empty mouth, no lips, good teeth. The ears were like black flaps of withered leather, the eyes two empty blood-dark pits. In places, especially around the forehead and nose, the skin was white and brittle, pulled tight. It looked as thin as writing-paper of the finest quality with many little rips and tears.

‘Maggots,’ said Lavedrine.

I could see no moving worms, but the floor was carpeted with chrysalises, which we squashed beneath our feet as we moved about.

‘We must turn the head,’ said Lavedrine, dropping down on his haunches, holding out his hands, hovering close, but still not touching the body.

‘Let me. I’m closer. One moment,’ I said, opening my bag, taking out a pair of black leather gloves, slipping them on. ‘I’ll turn the skull. You lean over and see what there is to be seen.’

I placed my hands on the head, and slowly turned it.

Bones cracked, resisting. It was not so easy as I had foreseen.

‘A little more,’ ordered Lavedrine, and I obeyed him, forcing the unwilling parts to move at my command.

We seemed to breathe in the essence of the dead man. It was cloying, horrid.

And as I turned the head, I saw what Lavedrine saw. The skin which covered the throat and neck was like stiff dark card, where blood had drained, coagulated and dried. There was a wound, and it was vividly evident. Two small holes, one above the other, in the neck below the line of the jaw, following what had once been the artery. Shallow lacerations appeared in two channels etched as two darker lines into the skin, running from just beneath his ear towards his gullet.

The wounds to Angela Enke, Lars Merson, and, probably, Ludo Mittner, too, would have looked like this if I had been called to examine their corpses ten days or more after they had been murdered.

‘It is the same vampire, is it not?’ he said.

I nodded.

‘You can let him go, Stiffeniis. We’ve seen enough.’

I released the head, which rolled away and hit against the wall with a sickening crack which caused my heart to jar.

Lavedrine was on his feet. ‘I imagine that you have your drawing album in your bag,’ he said. He did not wait for me to reply. ‘Make a sketch of the body, together with a closer study of the fatal wounds. I want Layard to see what we have seen.’

I would have done so whether he had suggested it or not. I took up my position in the corner of the room, sitting at the table on one of the chairs, sketching the disposition of the corpse as I observed it, and the general layout of the room as it was. I did not need to examine the wounds again to remember what I had seen so shortly before. In cases such as this, I make an outline only, intending to finish off the drawings in greater detail in a more congenial and less macabre place.

Within ten minutes, I had done two adequate drawings

While I was working, I heard Lavedrine moving about in the next room, opening drawers, shifting furniture. He went up into the roof by means of a ladder in the corner, and came clattering down it again a minute later. He had examined the house and returned to my side before I had finished, standing at my shoulder, watching the movement of the graphite on the paper.

I found his constant presence a trifle intimidating.

‘What have you discovered?’ I asked him, rubbing with my finger on the paper, soothing the graphite into the weave to achieve the effect that I required to suggest the extent and the nature of the dried lake of blood in which the body lay.

I flicked the page, and worked on the drawing of the neck in a similar manner.

‘Next to nothing,’ he said. ‘This is it. There is a loft up there, but it is practically empty. Certainly, it has not been recently used. Anyone living here would be restricted to this room and the bedchamber. This room was used for eating too.’ He pointed to a small alcove which contained an open fireplace, and a bricked-in hob. ‘The bedroom is tiny. The man who used to live here – the one who worked down there in the slaughter-house – he lived alone, I think. It is hardly big enough for two people.’ He was quiet for some moments. ‘Unless, that is, Grangé was happy with the crush.’

I raised my eyes and looked at him. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Come and see,’ he said.

The bedroom was even smaller than the living-room. A single window looked onto a wood, beyond which the river gleamed in the light of a rising moon. There was a single wooden bed which had been dismantled, the pieces resting up against the wall. Another, larger sleeping place had been fashioned on the floor by spreading reeds and cut grass, and on this base was laid a twisted bed-sheet and a pile of blankets. They appeared to be clean, if one discounted the dust which had gathered on the bedding since the last time anyone had slept there. On the floor was an oil-lamp which had burnt down to the wick before extinguishing itself.

‘The single bed belonged to the workman,’ I began to say. ‘Before they sent him on his way.’

‘So who left this?’ said Lavedrine, dropping down on his haunches, and flicking the bedding to one side. The under-side of the bottom sheet was stained dark brown in large patches. ‘This is blood,’ he said. And when he shifted the rest of the bedding out of the way, I could see that there was more red dust on the wooden floor. It appeared to have soaked into the boards. ‘And here there’s more of it.’

‘Was he still alive?’ I asked. ‘Did he try to crawl to the door before he died?’

Lavedrine did not reply immediately. ‘I doubt it,’ he said at last.

‘In that case, from whose throat did
this
blood come?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ he said.

‘And where is the body?’

I felt like a prisoner in a cell.

I heard soldiers marching past the door. Sometimes the sharp intonation of a Gallic voice, or the sounding of a distant trumpet, disturbed the heavy silence. I was surrounded by Frenchmen, enclosed on all sides by the enemy.

Yet this was not the true measure of my confinement.

Before they would allow me into that room in the heart of Marienburg Castle – a stronghold of the Teutonic Knights for centuries, a barracks of the Prussian army until the siege of January 1807 – I had been forced to wait out side a closed door while Lavedrine attempted to convince General Olivier Layard that my presence inside the castle was a necessary part of an on going investigation into the deaths of two French cavalry officers, and the grievous wounding of a third. That was what galled me. Finally, I had been allowed to enter the castle, but not because I was a Prussian magistrate with power to investigate any crime committed in my country.

I was held to be the drudge of Serge Lavedrine, and nothing more.

I looked around the room. A French soldier had led me there in silence, passing along dark, lofty corridors which were lit with nothing more than the lantern that he held in his hand. Now and then he glanced behind, as if he feared the worst of a Prussian. The fact that I had been admitted to the castle on the orders of the governor himself seemed to make no difference. Lavedrine might have eased my way more gently into the place, but he had remained behind with General Layard, who had given the order that I was to be ‘escorted to the zone which will be occupied by Procurator Stiffeniis’.

The ‘zone’ was neither big, nor small. While no smaller than I expected, I was surprised to think that it was probably larger than the private quarters reserved for many of the French officers. The towering ramparts and stark exterior of the castle gave no hint of the welcoming aspect of the interior. The room, I reluctantly conceded, was pleasant beyond my hopes. The walls were painted a pale shade of blue; a ceramic stove of darker blue stood in one corner beside a bucket filled with logs. The Gothic arches of the door and window were decorated with alternating edging tiles of bright red and green, while the wooden fittings had been recently painted bright green.

I wondered what the room had been used for in the five centuries before the French arrived. Too small for any military gathering, it could have been an office, where some accountant worked at his ledgers. He might have been concerned with grain, or any one of a hundred products passing up and down the river, with shipbuilding, pine wood imported from the Scandinavian countries, furs from the east, or even amber from the Baltic coast.

As we were coming back to town by carriage, crossing the bridge, Lavedrine had responded to my proud Prussian praise of the history, the size and the noble architecture of Marienburg Castle as we saw it from the water, with a single word.

‘Dreary,’ he said. A minute later, he added: ‘It’s too large, too draughty, much too Prussian for my simple Gallic tastes.’

He had been explaining to me the role that the castle played in the case which he was investigating. The entire French garrison had been housed inside the castle precincts immediately after its capture, though restrictions had recently been lifted, he said. Junior and middle-ranking officers, who did not have a role to play in the day-to-day running of the three regiments, gathered there and had been allowed to take up residence in the town at their own expense, if that was what they wished to do.

‘As three second lieutenants in different companies of the Eleventh Hussars made haste to do,’ he explained. ‘It is a risk when soldiers live among the civilian population, and yet it is an essential part of any military occupation. We must mix if we hope to win their sympathy. We cannot live forever behind high walls and barricades. But what we must ask ourselves, Stiffeniis, is what Sebastien Grangé was doing in that lonely place on the other side of the river. He was not registered as living there. What could he do over there that he could not do better here in the regimental barracks, or in a private apartment in the town?’

I kicked at the stout wooden frame of the bed.

The straw mattress was provided with a lumpy pillow and a thick woollen blanket. Moths had eaten a hole or two in the off-white wool, but that would hardly spoil my sleep. And beneath the bed within easy reach there was a large ceramic chamber-pot with a ribbon of small red flowers painted on the rim and handle. Even better, it had a lid, which meant that I would sleep without the smell of piss to foul the night air. I looked towards the corner and the window. There was a triangular wooden table on which stood an ample, matching flowered bowl and a jug which was filled to the brim with water. Beside it, on an iron frame hung a folded cotton cloth with blue stripes. I would be able to wash in private without the need to mix with French soldiers.

Was privacy what Grangé had been looking for?

If the room in which I found myself was typical of the castle as a whole, then Sebastien Grangé was either a Spartan or a fool.

I thought of Lionel, the large grey cat that Lavedrine had entrusted to the care of Helena before he left for Bialystok two years before. When Lavedrine first brought him to the house, the animal had crowned himself sovereign of our home the very next day by urinating in every corner of every room. Unbuttoning the flap of my trousers, I decided that I would mark my ‘territory’ by using the ceramic night-bowl.

Cautiously I lifted the lid.

It was not only empty, it had been freshly rinsed.

I imagined that some poor soldier had been told to wash it out as a punishment. How much more of a punishment, I thought, if he ever learnt that he had washed it out for a visiting Prussian.

I emptied my bladder, emitting a sigh of pleasure as I did so. I had just conquered my own little square of French-occupied territory. I closed the lid and placed the bowl in the corner furthest from the bed. Even so, a nauseating stink seemed to hang upon me, or on my clothes. I had not been conscious of it while we were crossing the water, but in the confines of that room, I could smell the decomposition of human tissue, as if I had been infected by the foul air in the cottage where we had found the corpse.

I opened the window, leant out and breathed in deeply. The night air was cold, lightly scented with wood smoke. I looked up at the stars for some minutes. But as I closed the window, I was aware of that sweet, revolting smell coming from my person. I threw the window open again, preferring the chill. At the same time, I decided to use the basin and the jug of water which French hospitality had provided for my comfort. I poured water into the bowl, then went to search in my bag for the small Meissen jar filled with liquid lye soap. Lotte makes it once a month by mixing lard and wood-ash. I unscrewed the lid, closed my eyes, and I was at home again. I could almost have been in the kitchen, watching her prepare the concoction. As I dreamt of home, I stripped off my clothes, letting my shirt, my trousers and under-hose slip to the tiles. I stood naked for a moment by the window, exposed to the cold night air, immediately feeling a little cleaner for it. And yet, that smell was with me in the room.

Like the ghost of Sebastien Grangé.

I stepped over to the bowl and began to wash myself from head to toe, careless of the water which splattered onto the tiles and ran away to the centre of the room. I went to work with the soap, concentrating on the parts which were most likely to have suffered from the journey and the fatigues of that long day.

Suddenly, I felt a rush of air at my back. Then, I heard the click of the door.

No-one had knocked, but I realised that I was no longer alone.

‘What a sight, Stiffeniis! A Nordic god from Valhalla!’

I turned around, pulling the towel from the stand as if it were a sword with which I might defend my honour. I felt exposed, ridiculous. I had made a mistake. I was not in my own home. I had forgotten to lock the door.

Lavedrine was standing there.

He was groomed to perfection. He had already washed and changed his soiled clothes. He had brushed his silvery mop of hair, and tied it tightly in a pigtail at the nape of his neck, exposing his ears and the dangling mosaic ear ring. He was wearing a blue military half-cape on one shoulder, a mess-jacket of the same colour, a pair of light-grey riding breeches and black leather boots. Even so, it could not be said that he was wearing any thing so bland as a uniform. A colonel’s wide gold chevrons emblazoned the sleeves of his short jacket, though he had left it carelessly unbuttoned, showing off a most unmilitary waistcoat of green silk worked with embroidered flowers along the line of brass buttons. He looked like a man who had put on whatever conveniently came to hand in his wardrobe. And luck had clearly guided his choice, because the ensemble was excellent.

He was, as always, elegant, though not in any conventional way.

In his right hand he held a roll of papers.

It was a strange, intimate moment.
Intimidating
, I should say. My first thought was that no woman could resist such a look from a man like Lavedrine. His gaze was fixed on me, slowly moving down from my face, seeming to appraise the form of my chest, which rose and fell in response to my intense embarrassment, lingering a moment longer than was polite on my sex, running down my legs to my bare feet and the water that was pooling on the tiles. Having sunk so low, his bright eyes began to work their way back up again to meet my own. In silence. I felt the blood rush to my face, and I was tempted to cover my nudity with the striped cloth which I still held in my hand.

And yet, I did not.

I knew that he would consider such an action to be infantile.

I forced myself to face him, letting my hand and the cloth fall along my flank, setting my feet more squarely on the floor, bracing myself to meet his challenge. Indeed, I managed to fold my arms, and even raised my chin in the hope of appearing nonchalant and disdainful.

‘I did not hear you knock,’ I said.

‘Nor did I,’ Lavedrine replied with a smile, shifting his head slightly, his eyes still on me, as if to alter or improve the perspective of what he saw from the doorway.

‘Because we are in French territory, I suppose?’ I could hear the venom in my voice.

Lavedrine took two steps forward, lowered his head to one side and peered at the fading marks the lips of Emma Rimmele had left on the right side of my neck without saying a word.

Instinctively, I took a step backwards, bumping my hip against the basin, spilling water onto the floor.

He raised his hand and waved the tube of rolled papers at me.

‘This report regards the finding of the corpse of Philippe Gaspard, the first victim in Marienburg,’ he announced. ‘I doubt that the general would be happy if he saw me handing it to you, as if you were a Frenchman and privy to our secrets.’

‘You could persuade him with your supernatural powers,’ I replied.

He shrugged, and looked away. ‘That’s why I crept in without knocking,’ he said. ‘It might be thought that I was playing the traitor. If news got back to the general…’

‘A different explanation comes to my mind,’ I interrupted him.

‘What might that be?’

‘You will keep a constant check on what I do. As, and when, you wish. Without bothering to knock. I am your prisoner.’

He rested his fist upon his hip, pursed his lips, and exhaled loudly. ‘I do not understand you, Stiffeniis,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I’m very tired, and you appear to be in a foul humour. You seem to be engaged in some sort of private debate, and I have no time for it. I brought these papers to share the information with you. I happen to have read them first, of course. The same thing happened to me when I arrived in Lotingen. I read your reports
after
the events that they described.’

‘I did not know you were in Lotingen,’ I objected.

He stepped across to the bed, and dropped the roll of papers on it.

‘If I were you,’ he said, ‘I’d get dressed quickly. This damned fortress is worse than the Arctic north, not some glorious château on the sunny banks of the River Loire. Helena would not approve of your decision to wash beside an open window. Then again,’ he added with a smirk, ‘it may be that you wished to be found in this state of undress. Did you think to impress me with the fact that a Prussian body may be closer to the Greek ideal of harmony than some flabby Mediterranean peasant with a pot belly and dirty finger nails?’

I felt my cheeks begin to burn again, and hid my reaction by vigorously towelling off my body, intending to get dressed at once.

‘There’ll be no mention of vampires in those papers,’ I murmured, wiping the damp from my upper arms and chest. ‘I must forget all that I have heard and seen in Lotingen if we are to get to the bottom of what’s going on here.’

Lavedrine stepped close. His hand grasped my wrist.

‘Forget nothing!’ he snapped. ‘It is part of the same story. Get that idea straight in your head. Vampires go wherever they wish, and do whatever they like. If they can kill in Lotingen, they can kill in Marienburg, too. They are diabolical creatures, Stiffeniis, what ever else they are. But we will catch them!’

His hand let go of my arm, hovering for a moment close to my chest.

Like a diving hawk, his finger jabbed at my breast-bone. His fingernail pressed against my skin, running quickly up to my chest, coming to rest on my throat. ‘From these strange signs, I would say that you had met a vampire recently,’ he said with a harsh staccato laugh, his face very close to mine, his eyes half-closing as he stared at me. ‘Lips…Teeth…Tongue…Hmm, a female vampire, I would say.’ He pulled his finger away, and took two paces back. ‘And not an unpleasant experience. Am I wrong, Hanno Stiffeniis?’

He had entered the room on a draught of cold air.

He went away on another.

‘I told Layard that I would return those papers first thing tomorrow morning. See if you can make some sense of the fact that the vampire who killed two French lieutenants and attacked a third in Marienburg, was just as keen to gorge on Prussian blood. We have seen too much blood tonight, more than one man could lose, yet the general says that no-one else under his command is now missing. Grangé makes up his tally. Think on that.’