A Visible Darkness Part 18

'I have a question to ask you, sir. And a favour, too. Can I?'

I nodded.

'They say that you are married.' Her voice was so soft, I could hardly hear it. 'May I know the name of Frau Stiffeniis?'

This was the final impression Edviga Lornerssen left behind.

Shy, inquisitive, very vulnerable.

'Helena,' I said. But then, something prompted me to tell her more. 'My wife is waiting for me at home. She is expecting a child very soon.'

'Helena,' she repeated, as if the name were, somehow, magical.

'And what is this favour that you wish to ask?'

16.

I GAVE EDVIGA plenty of time to escape.

Then, I followed her out into the pale grey light of dawn.

A pair of brown Gaulisches were standing on the top step of the hut.

My heart beat violently, my legs gave way, and I sat down heavily. Colonel les Halles had spoken of the overshoes the night before. Had he delivered them in person to my hut? Had he overheard me talking with Edviga? Had he seen her creeping from my room at dawn?

My discomfiture did not last long. Would les Halles-deny himself the pleasure of breaking in on such an intimate tete-a-tete? Of course he wouldn't. Our secret was safe. I picked up the Gaulisches, slipped them on over my shoes, pulling the straps to tighten the leggings around my ankles and calves. Made of rough leather st.i.tched to a thick wooden sole, they were generally worn by engineers engaged in siege warfare. They would save my shoes if I had to wade through the sewage of the pigsty, and I expected to spend the day in that unenviable condition.

I took a few trial clomping steps, and looked out to sea.

The air was a s.h.i.+mmering translucent haze, quite unlike the dense fog of the day before. The vast banks of pebbles were dark and wet. The tide was at its lowest. The sea purled and lapped inside the haf like an old man over his pap. And floating on this tranquil pond, I caught my first glimpse of the coq du mer, of which les Halles was so proud. It was an exotic name for a flat-bottomed barge with a tall derrick reaching upwards. And in the smoke-like haze, I could just make out the figures of men who were working her. One of them was managing a long rudder; two more were manoeuvring a heavy anchor. As it fell with a splash, the noise echoed over the placid water.

Was les Halles himself out there?

At such a distance, it was hard to say. I strained to identify him, hoping that he was stranded in the middle of the sea. I had no wish to speak to him that morning. The colonel had already formed an opinion. A female corpse had been found in the Ansbach pigsty. Adam had murdered her. And if he had killed Ilse Bruen, he had murdered Kati Rodendahl, as well. Adam was a Prussian. It was all clear and simple, in his opinion.

A shrill trumpet sounded.

A procession was moving slowly along the beach.

I blinked, and peered harder in the weak morning light, remembering a picture in an ancient copy of Hartmann's Succini Prussici in our family library. As a child, I had been puzzled by the bizarre ill.u.s.trations in that book.

'Can lobsters really walk on their tails, papa?' I asked.

I knew what a lobster was. We had a Dutch still life of fish on the wall in the dining-room. Our lobster was a big, black creature with long, twitching feelers.

'Those are people.' My father laughed. 'Though it might be better for them if they were lobsters. They work in the Baltic Sea, and the water is always cold-summer or winter. Lobsters love cold water.'

The 'lobsters' down on the beach below were tall, strong creatures. They strutted along the pebble sh.o.r.e in stiff leather uniforms which hampered their every movement. Leather breeches, thighhigh leather waders, a stout leather jerkin with a pouch in the front, and a large leather cap. Some of them were armed with spears; others with nets attached to long poles.

At the second trumpet blast, they waded out into the water.

The 'prodders' began p.r.i.c.king at the sea-bed with their spears, the 'catchers' swept their nets in the waves, throwing away the weeds and rubbish, keeping any amber that they happened to find, storing it in the pouches of their waterproof clothing. Bubbles of air trapped inside the amber make it relatively buoyant in water, Hartmann wrote. The more air, he said, the better it floats. Yet the quant.i.ty of air is in inverse proportion to its commercial value. The finest-quality amber-denser material than the amber-gatherers would find-lies buried deep beneath the s.h.i.+ngle.

Colonel les Halles intended to dig for it with his machines.

I glanced from the workers to the French barge.

Here it was, then, a vision of the industrial future in the form of the coq du mer; and material evidence of Prus sia's disappearing past in the shape of the amber-girls. The amber-fishers described and drawn by Hartmann were mainly men, but in more recent times, it had become a job exclusively for women. They asked for, or accepted, less, I suppose. I watched them for some time, thinking now and then to catch a glimpse of Edviga Lornerssen. It was impossible to distinguish one girl from her neighbour. In their leather uniforms and sou'westers, any one of them could have been Edviga.

And any one of them could be the next victim.

I turned away, praying to the Lord to keep a watchful eye on those women, as I went to breakfast. To my surprise the officers' mess was empty. Where were the French? Were they all down on the sh.o.r.e already? Les Halles had promised to work them hard, after all. I helped myself to a piece of bread, and a lukewarm cup of toasted corn. Five minutes later, I hurried to the gate, intending to requisition a horse and return to the Ansbach farm.

A French soldier was repairing a broken saddle beside an empty stall.

'All gone,' he grunted, forcing a stout needle into the leather. 'Something important's going on this morning. There's not one left.'

His flat nose, the bridge collapsed, the nostrils wide and fuming, spoke all too clearly of some ravaging venereal illness.

I tied my heavy Gaulisches together by the laces, hung them around my neck, and began to walk along the path to Nordbarn. The weather was not so stiflingly hot as the previous day, thank G.o.d. I did not try to take the route that I had ridden the night before with Adam Ansbach as my guide. So long as I followed the rutted track, I knew that I would get there in one piece.

Eventually, I caught sight of Nordbarn.

The workshop of Pastoris was strangely silent. No whirring grindstones could be heard that morning. Had the bees abandoned the hive? As if in answer to my question, the door opened and Pastoris himself appeared on the threshold.

I stopped, waiting for him to come across and join me. If his people were up at the farm, I thought, surely he intended to join them there. He settled himself against the door-frame, instead, as if expecting me to go to him.

I raised my hand and waved.

He did not s.h.i.+ft or reply. Even at that distance, his goitre rested on his chest like a second head. Remembering his cataracts, I wondered whether he had failed to recognise me. I took a step in his direction, intending to tell him that I would welcome his presence when the time came to interrogate Adam and Magda Ansbach. Surely, they would think of him as a rea.s.suring old friend.

The 'old friend' withdrew inside his door.

I heard it slam, then the harsh rasp of metal bolts being drawn.

I recalled his protectiveness towards his employees the night before. Did he wish to s.h.i.+eld the women from what was happening up at the farm? If he wanted to restore peace in his workshop, my presence would only remind them all of the body in the pigsty.

I turned back to the path, my mind racing ahead to the task which awaited me.

This morning, I would be obliged to make a thorough examination of the corpse. I would have to establish precisely how the girl had been murdered. And I would need to sift through the pig-slime in search of the probable presence of a piece of amber, or some other clue.

If I did find amber, what would it signify? That both the girls were thieves? That both of them were pregnant and had attempted to rid themselves of an unwanted child by provoking a spontaneous evacuation of the foetus?

And what if I found nothing?

What if the pigs had swallowed the amber as greedily as human flesh?

I veered to the left and walked through the rough gra.s.s towards the stunted trees which marked the perimeter of the Ansbach farm. As I left the silence of the Pastoris workshop behind me, I began to distinguish a different noise, a noise that I recognised, though I was still a quarter of a mile from my destination.

Was someone doing the was.h.i.+ng?

I might have been at home. Every Tuesday morning, Lotte piles the dirty linen into a large barrel in the kitchen by the water-pump. A layer of stockings and hose on the bottom, then a generous sprinkling of grey ashes and lye made from crushed cinders. A layer of undergarments after that, then more lye and ashes. s.h.i.+rts, blouses, bed-sheets, each layer separated by ashes and lye. When the barrel is filled with water, Lotte presses down hard on a paddle that enters through a hole in the lid. Manni and Suzi often watch her as she labours. The harder she presses, the ruddier her large face grows. Which will burst first, Lotte's cheeks or the ribs of the barrel? But what delights the children most is the sound the was.h.i.+ng makes. Air gets trapped inside the sheets and the clothes. As she pushes downwards, it comes bursting out in an endless succession of rude noises. 'Big farts,' as Manni learnt to call them, from Lotte herself, who laughs out loud whenever she-that is, the was.h.i.+ng-tub-produces them.

As I approached the Ansbach farm, the noise grew louder.

I pa.s.sed the house, and marched towards the pigsty. The noise was coming from there.

While still at a distance, I saw a strange tableau before the door of the pig-sty. Colonel les Halles was not on board the coq du mer. He was there at the Ansbach farm, standing in the very centre of the group, directing operations of some sort. A man was seated nearby on a camp-stool, writing notes as les Halles dictated them. Soldiers in rolled-up s.h.i.+rt-sleeves were working the handles of a very large pump. Two men pressed down on one side, two more pulled up on the other side, and with a loud organic eruption the contents of the pigsty began to spout out in a shower from a pipe that a fifth man was obliged to hold in his hands, his face distorted by a grimace of revulsion. Beside him, another soldier was standing with a bucket in his hands.

They were evacuating the pigsty.

My heart, lungs and brain seemed to seethe and gush in syncopated rhythm with the pump. I began to run towards them. I should have guessed when I spotted Hans Pastoris so surly. He had known what was going on. He must have thought that I was a party to it, and that it was the proof that I was in league with the French. Probably he believed it was all my idea.

I stopped before the pigsty.

If the curious onlookers had eliminated all signs of entrance and exit from the building the night before, les Halles was literally destroying whatever hope I had of finding anything useful in that sludge.

'Colonel les Halles,' I shouted, preparing myself for a confrontation.

He did not deign to look at me, but carried on dictating. 'One hundred per cent effective. Six downward strokes for compression. Water to cleanse the nozzle. Eighty per cent immersion of the suction tube. Twenty per cent air content facilitates the degree of evacuation . . .' He turned to me and said: 'Oh, you are here, then.' It was not a greeting, it was a statement of fact. He turned again to his amanuensis. 'Cancel the last sentence,' he snapped.

'I am the magistrate in this case,' I said, equally sharply. 'You are interfering with the scene of a crime. Indeed, you've managed to spray away whatever signs the murderer may have left behind him, and cover half of the farm with it.'

He smiled at this rebuke.

'You needed to free the corpse from the sludge, did you not? I wanted to calibrate the aperture of the tube which will suck up material of similar consistency from the sea-bed. I'd call it co-operation. This experiment provided the opportunity to solve a problem of dynamics which dogged my efforts yesterday. On the other hand, you'd have been here for hours with buckets and shovels. I've saved you the trouble. You ought to thank me.'

My anger mounted.

'That body could have been easily moved, if that was what I wanted,' I replied. 'But that was not my only aim. I intended to search the place for any clue which might indicate a link between the murdered women. Amber, for example. Remember the piece that we found in the corpse of Kati Rodendahl? You didn't think of that! I'll be obliged to mention this fact in my report to the general . . .'

'Before you waste more breath,' he interrupted, 'you will be pleased to learn that I have found something. It will interest you, I am certain of it.'

He placed his hand on his hip, and stared at me, smiling broadly. Then, he turned to the man holding the tube: 'Show him what you found in the filter, Blanc.'

Private Blanc dropped his hose, and picked up a large, deep jute sack. He brought it to me, and held the bag open, inviting me to reach inside it, which I did. Finding nothing, I was obliged to reach in further. And further again, before my finger was p.r.i.c.ked by something cold and damp at the very bottom. I closed my fist around the objects, then quickly pulled my hand from the fetid sack.

'Fragments of bone,' les Halles spoke out.

I opened my palm, and examined the slime-shaded slivers and splinters.

'We found a lot of them,' he said. 'They certainly don't belong to the corpse in there. Other bodies have been buried here less recently. Clearly, this was a private burial ground, Herr Magistrate. I bet we'll find the remains of all the other girls who have gone missing.'

Again, he did not give me the opportunity to speak.

'I am satisfied,' he roared on boldly. 'They are the equivalent of amber. My engine sucked them up and spat them out. If we do half so well on the coast, the coq du mer will be a great success.'

'Colonel,' I interrupted him, 'these finds might well have been important. Now, however, they are useless. We do not know precisely where they were located inside the pigsty. Nor can we say how deeply they were buried in the slime. They could be chicken wings, or dead pigs. There may even be some human bones, as well. But any fragments of clothing or flesh that had not already decomposed have been destroyed thanks to you and your "well calibrated" pump.'

He stared at me, and a frown of annoyance scarred his brow.

'You have your bones, what more do you want?' he said.

'I want to question the Ansbachs,' I said.

His confidence returned as he considered this request.

'They're in Nordcopp,' he said offhandedly. 'You'll have to go there if you want to interrogate them. I had them taken into custody this morning. They are being held in the town gaol . . .'

'In gaol?' I said, as if the word were new to me. 'On what charge? On the basis of what proof?'

'Murder. That's the charge,' he said, as if the judgement were a foregone conclusion. 'I'll leave you to find the proof, and tie up loose ends. Things will soon return to normal here, mark my words! There'll be no danger of a repet.i.tion of the crime. Indeed, as a direct result of this successful trial run with the pumping engine, I expect to send the women on their way in a week or two. They'll be out of harm's way. If any danger still remains, that is. The amber mining industry will be supervised by men. My own.'

He seemed to have satisfied himself that the case was closed. Of course, a report would have to be sent to General Malaport. He would sign it with a flourish, I would countersign it in much smaller letters at the bottom of the page, and that would be the end of the story. He had found the Prussian scapegoat he was looking for, but that is not the same thing as arresting the perpetrator. There was no incontrovertible evidence, much less an open admission, that Adam Ansbach had been trafficking with the girls from the coast, let alone murdering them.

I took the Gaulisches from around my neck, set them down on the ground, slipped my shoes inside, then pulled the leather straps tight. I had been carrying them for over an hour. It was time to put them to good use. Les Halles watched what I did, but I did not say a word to him.

'Do you intend to examine the corpse, monsieur?' he enquired.

Again, I did not answer him, but made straight for the pigsty.

I heard him tell his men to leave off pumping. Then, he strode across to me. 'Shall I tell the men to come in with us?' he asked, puffing as he struggled to keep pace with me.

'Enough damage has been done,' I muttered to myself.

He nodded, but there was a hint of irony in his voice. 'Just you and I, then?'

'You and I,' I replied, bending low, ducking beneath the door.

The sea of sludge had been entirely removed, stripped away. Indeed, as I stepped inside, I plummeted down a sharp slope. The slime had been sucked out, together with a great deal of the dark, stained, underlying soil. The smell was strong, but it was different from before. The musty smell clogged the air. The roof had been ripped away on one side of the sty to let in light.

Only the body seemed immune to change.

She was sitting in the far corner of the sty, her head hanging down, her chin resting heavily on her breast, exactly as I had left her the night before.

She might have been waiting for me.

'Don't you want the body carried outside?' les Halles asked at my back.

'Not yet,' I said. 'She needs to be examined inch by inch before she is moved.'

'Get on with it, then!' he groaned.