‘Drink it!’ he hissed. ‘You’ll be needing it. They will start their work tomorrow, but you will start tonight.’
I
OBEYED WITHOUT
a word of protest.
Something in his manner warned me that it would be futile to resist.
I walked across to the table where the French officers were eating and drinking, took a firm grip on a warm bottle of red wine, filled an empty glass to the brim, then poured the contents straight down my throat. I took a deep breath, poured out another draught, then drained it off in the same fashion. On the far side of the room, les Halles nodded slowly, as if some ritual of initiation had been carried out to his liking.
I studied his face for a moment, defiantly poured myself a third glass of wine, and emptied it off just as quickly.
The French officers watched with indifference. I might have been a condemned man, availing himself of a final request before the sharp axe fell. The colonel’s staff must have known what was in store for me, yet no one uttered a word to warn me what it was. One of the officers who had travelled up from Lotingen took a pace towards me, his mouth full of bread, his eyes round with surprise.
A voice spoke out, and stopped him in his tracks.
‘This way, Herr Stiffeniis,’ the colonel called.
He swept a lantern from its hook on the wall, and threw open the door.
As I walked towards him, he addressed the men in the room.
‘By the time I return, you will be in your bunks, messieurs,’ he said. ‘My adjutant will show the new men where to sleep.’
No one said a word. They were going to bed, whether they liked the idea, or not. Colonel les Halles had decided.
‘If you are tired today,’ he added, ‘you’ll be exhausted tomorrow. I intend to work you to the bone.’
He stepped back, and ushered me out of the door.
The fog was as thick as a fire burning damp peat.
Dimly, I heard the murmur of conversation picking up inside the hut, the clink of glasses, a toast of some sort. For one moment, envy possessed me. I had eaten nothing since leaving Lotingen, and the wine was burning a hole in my stomach. The hot fumes rushed to my head.
‘Are we going far, Colonel les Halles?’
‘Not far,’ he growled, holding up his lantern.
The light glowed like sulphur. It hurt my eyes as I trailed behind him.
The night was warm, the damp air seemed to cling to my skin. A light breeze ruffled the hair on my neck, and I shivered. I was, I realised, a trifle inebriated. And yet, I thought (one of those blatant idiocies for which drunkards are renowned), a spinning head and a sheen of sweat on my brow were better than the gut-wrenching stink of excrement on the streets of Lotingen.
My thoughts flew home to Helena.
Her battle with the flies, her efforts to keep them away from the children and out of their food. If I could just conclude this case, I thought, I might be able to make capital of my success, and force General Malaport to take steps to resolve the situation.
I felt a sardonic smile form on my lips.
Was this what it meant to be a Prussian magistrate? If I were able to solve the problems of the French, would it result in a thinner layer of
merde
on the streets of my home town, and fractionally less fetid air for my children to breathe?
The colonel stopped in front of the last hut, and held the lamp up.
‘Tell no one of what you are about to see.’ He stared at me for longer than was necessary. ‘Is that quite clear, monsieur? The details, I mean. You must act with circumspection.’ Still, he held my gaze. ‘Are you ready?’ he asked, as if he were inviting me to leap into deep water from a great height.
‘I am here for no other reason,’ I said.
As he unlocked the door and ushered me into the room, my nerves were taut.
I was not prepared for the fetid smell, and had to swallow hard. A tangy stench of organic decomposition seemed to have worked its way into the wood from which the hut was built. You might consume it with fire, but you would never wash it away. An animal might have been rotting under the floorboards.
And what was that object laid out on the table?
In the gloom, it looked nothing like the body of the woman that I was expecting to find.
Indeed, it looked more like a very large badger.
Les Halles held up his light.
‘Blast their eyes!’ he cursed. ‘Somebody has been here.’
I did not hear the rest. My eyes were drawn to the object on the table in the centre of the room. It was draped with a cloak of animal pelts. Some were brown, others black and every shade of grey. Was this furry winding-sheet made of rat-skins? Only the head and the face remained exposed.
I corrected myself.
What remained of a face . . .
The conversation I had interrupted in Lotingen that morning came to my mind.
‘. . . Pure evil! Why would anyone . . . ?’
Les Halles set his lantern down on the edge of the table.
The light revealed a forehead that was blue, the skin pulped and split. A thick crust of blood had congealed in a black sheet across the woman’s left temple. Her left ear was a solid lump of blood, which had dripped down onto her slender neck. The nose was
turned up at an angle that was obviously unnatural. But below the nose, all was a mystery. There was a gaping hole where the lower half of the face ought to have been.
‘You won’t see much if you stand dithering there,’ les Halles called sharply. ‘Come closer, man. You’ll need more light. There ought to be some candles.’
While he rummaged on the shelves which ran the length of the far wall, I stood beside the table, alone with the body. He wished to illuminate it, render it more terrible, more indelible in my mind. He fumbled in the gloom, while I prayed that he would not find what he was looking for. There was too much light for me as it was. I cringed at the task which lay before me. No sight is worse than a lifeless corpse, except the spectacle of a woman who has been hideously mutilated.
‘What do you make of it?’ he called over, roughly opening drawers, slamming them closed again.
‘That wound is terrible,’ I managed to say.
He returned with a fistful of candles, muttering beneath his breath, lighting them from the lantern-flame, setting each candle firmly upright in a pool of its own wax along the table edge. Like the high altar in a church. The orange light swelled, casting dancing shadows on the brutalised face. The sunken cheeks seemed to quiver with animated life.
‘What’s this?’ les Halles exploded, as he set a candle down beside her head.
I looked where he was pointing.
A trail of stones had been laid out on the table like a halo.
He snatched one up, held it to his eye, then threw it to the farthest corner of the room. ‘I gave strict orders that no one be allowed in here,’ he hissed. ‘They are devils. They come and go as they please. God knows how, but they do it. There’s no stopping them . . .’
‘Of whom do you speak?’ I asked.
I was unable to look away from that devastated face.
‘The Prussian girls. They must have wormed their way in here, covered the body with that vile thing, then laid these baubles out on the table. Thieves, the whole blasted pack of them!’
‘I’m sorry?’ I said.
Faced with a corpse, he seemed more interested in bits of stone.
‘This is amber,’ he replied, as if he were spitting out nails. ‘Unpolished amber! These women are barbarians, monsieur. They’ll steal it and sell it, yet they believe in every legend that is spoken about it. This, I suppose, is some sort of pagan funeral rite. Somebody’s going to pay for this . . .’
I raised my eyes and stared at him.
‘Would you punish this woman’s friends because they care?’ I asked.
‘I don’t give a damn about her friends!’ he exclaimed. ‘There are more important issues. One of my men has been seduced. How could they get in here without help? That soldier has disobeyed
me
. Do you see now, Herr Magistrate? Do you understand the gravity of it? They wrap my men around their little fingers. If those girls know what happened to her, everyone in Nordcopp will know.’
I looked down at the damaged face.
Which religion prescribed the strange manner in which that corpse had been laid out?
‘A ritual, you say? What kind of ritual?’
Colonel les Halles shook his head. ‘This cloak is supposed to save her from the Baltic cold when she’s laid in the ground. The amber will buy a seat near the fire in their Valhalla.’ He blew his lips together noisily. ‘You Prussians are master storytellers. This coast has more tall tales to its name than a children’s nursery.’
He spoke of barbarity as if he were an apostle of civilisation. Why would he not allow the women to mourn for their comrade who was dead?
‘What was her name?’ I asked, unable to tear my eyes away.
I heard him rustling in his pocket, the sound of a paper being unfolded.
He had written out her name. He had no idea who she was.
‘Kati . . . uscka . . . Rod . . . end . . . ahl,’ he grunted, struggling with the syllables, as if the foreign name were hateful to him.
I leant over the body, looking closely at the bruised and battered forehead. The head had been struck twice, I judged. The greatest
damage was concentrated in the area above her left eye. The eye was closed, the skin bulging, purple, the eyelid grossly swollen up, black with blood. A further blow had dug deep into the bridge of her nose. Had the blows been delivered by a hammer? The blunt edge of an axe? The weapon had been heavy enough to stun her, though the initial attack had not killed her. She was still alive when the butcher began to carry out the mutilations on her unresisting body. Blood had flowed freely down her face and neck, and curdled in her hair. Her heart had gone on beating for quite some time. The battered brow and broken nose told their story of violence, but what was I to make of the yawning emptiness below?
It was as if her face had collapsed in upon itself. She might have swallowed the pieces. Her upper lip drooped down into the formless space where her mouth ought to have been. A wild beast might have torn the lower part of her face away with a single, ripping bite. The red-raw pit stretched from earlobe to earlobe, encompassing what had been her mouth, her chin and her throat. Scraps of flesh, tangles of nerves, fragments of bone, torn gristle, muscle and shredded cartilage had been roughly hacked away, as if by a demon surgeon.
Why attack the face alone?
There was nothing instinctive about it. I had no doubt in my mind. The attack had been carefully planned, premeditated, then put into effect. Those flaps of skin hung loose inside the cavity of the face because the central prop had been torn away, taken out as a single piece. That human face had been—the word took on a strange, perplexing significance—
mined
. It appeared as if some insane anatomical engineer had drilled and emptied the lower half of her skull, hollowing it out, removing only the deposits that interested him, leaving the rest alone.
Holding my breath I edged closer to the chasm.
‘The jawbone has been cut out,’ I murmured, angling my head, taking advantage of the flickering candlelight to verify the point. ‘I am not an anatomist, but . . . well, you can see the damage clearly enough. These tissues here . . . They would have held the jawbone fixed in place. They are dangling in shreds, like strips of torn paper against the inner walls of the larynx. The teeth are missing, too.’
The teeth . . .
Not one remained in the upper jaw.
‘Where was she found?’ I asked.
Katiuscka Rodendahl had been found on the beach beyond the military boundary. She had not presented herself for roll-call at the start of the working day, but no one had attached much importance to that fact.
‘They pass through our pickets like shadows,’ he added. ‘She probably left the compound during the night, as many of them do. We search the ones who leave by the gate, of course, but it’s the Devil’s own job. I can hardly trust my men. These girls have a way with lonely Frenchmen far from home.’ He laughed sardonically. ‘They make for Nordcopp village. No one there would chase them away. These girls have money . . .’
‘Is that why she was murdered, do you think? For money?’
A grumbling laugh rumbled out from his throat.
‘Amber is more valuable than money, Herr Procurator. Gold comes cheaper. We carry out random body-searches and they yield significant results. But for every piece that we find on them, another bit goes out unnoticed. The traders in Nordcopp are waiting to buy it from them. Amber-trading is against the law, but when did the law stop people trying? Thieving is an art on the Baltic coast. If you hope to stop the theft, you must change the method of collection. And that’s what I intend to do. There’ll be machines all along the coast.’ He made an extravagant gesture with his outstretched hand towards infinity. ‘Machines don’t steal.’
I had nothing to say on that count.
‘Well?’ he growled again. ‘Don’t you want to see the rest of the body?’
I wanted nothing less in the world.
My hand was shaking as I threw back the fur coverlet.
The corpse was naked. And cold, though I barely touched it. The orange glow of a million candles would never warm her up. The body might have been sculpted in grey marble that was veined and mottled with impurities. Light bounced off the taut surface of her skin, leaving shadows in the rolling contours of her well-formed
muscles, firm breasts, strong arms, powerful legs. No outward damage was apparent. None at all, indeed. It was as if the torso and the limbs were of no concern to the person who had killed her.
‘She was handsome,’ the colonel murmured quietly. ‘Most of them are.’
His eyes were fixed on the triangle formed by her stomach and thighs. A thicket of curly dark hair cloaked her sex. I had heard men gossip over pipes and ale, naming the peasant girls, pronouncing judgement on the qualities which proclaimed that this or that maid would make the perfect wife and bear a dozen children.
I thought of Helena’s slender arms, tiny wrists, long neck. Her bulging belly made her seem more fragile still. This woman and my wife did not belong to the same species. They might have come from different worlds. This girl was a big, strong physical presence, even in death. I put all thoughts of Helena aside, and tried to think of nothing but the woman stretched out on the table.