HS04 - Unholy Awakening (11 page)

‘Did you notice anything else?’ I insisted.

He hesitated, and I thought he might begin to cry. ‘My father said that I must call the French soldiers. That I must run fast, sir. I didn’t see no more ’til I came back.’

‘Thank you, Joseph,’ I said, ‘you have been most helpful. Go now. Wait outside the cemetery gate, if you will.’

I watched him go, waiting before I turned again to face the father.

‘What really happened, Meyer?’ I asked quietly, standing very close beside him.

Ulrich Meyer glared at me defiantly, but he did not speak.

‘I’ll tell you how I see it,’ I said. ‘You found the body, you thought he had been bitten by a vampire. Is that correct? You sent your son to call the soldiers, and while he was away you did what…what had to be done. You took the opportunity to drive a metal spike through Merson’s heart. It was not murder. He was dead already.’

I expected a fiery protestation of innocence, a feverish denial. Instead, the man squared up to me. ‘Terrible things are happening in this town, Herr Procurator,’ he said, his voice steady. ‘First the fever, people dropping dead all over the place. Now this. A girl bitten to death, thrown down a well, and Krupeken in an uproar. Wild dogs in the market square this morning. Then, this death here…But I didn’t do it. I couldn’t do such a thing. I sent the boy to bring the authorities…the French…you, sir.’ He pursed his lips, then bit hard on the lower one, as if he did not wish to say what followed. ‘Send for the gypsies, Herr Stiffeniis. Let them enter the city. Let them find the creature. It’s the only way to calm the people down, sir. They’ll do it themselves, if you don’t, sir.’

‘Wait here,’ I ordered him.

I looked at the crowd. The number had grown; they were watching silently. They hoped that I, their magistrate, would protect them. They trusted me for the moment, but what if I deluded them?

I walked a little way towards the gate and I made my voice heard. ‘Take aim, soldiers,’ I shouted. ‘Fire upon the first man or woman who tries to enter here. Let no-one through, but Major Glatigny.’

I hurried on towards the sexton’s office. The door was open. I entered, raising the lantern towards the end wall. The old gravestones were still there, and so were the new ones. The name of Anders was inscribed on one of the stones. Ulrich Meyer had finally completed it. Emotion took me by the throat. I fought against it. I could not give way in that moment. I turned away, concentrating all of my attention on Merson’s tools. I had no idea what I was searching for. I had no idea how many iron bars I had seen there the night before. Even so, I took down one, and weighed it in my hands. They were used for opening graves and vaults. The point on this one would be pushed between two stones and used as a lever. There were a dozen bars of different lengths and thicknesses. Was one missing? Had Meyer removed it? If only hands could leave a permanent impression, I thought.

‘What should be done with the new corpse, monsieur?’

Major Glatigny was standing in the shadows, a bitter smile set on his lips. ‘It is happening, Procurator Stiffeniis. Just as you feared. A lethal epidemic, and far swifter than any illness. Have you no idea who is killing people in such a fashion?’

‘A vampire,’ I said. ‘Who else? Have you seen the corpse?’

The Frenchman nodded. ‘I saw the iron bar. Is that the way it’s done?’

I nodded. ‘It is supposed to stop them coming back.’

‘Someone knows, then,’ he said very calmly.

‘Knows what?’

‘That the girl is buried here in the cemetery.’ Glatigny’s pale face seemed to hover in the gloom above the dark cape that he was wearing. ‘My men informed me of the trick you played last night, the stones that they found inside an otherwise empty box. I said that you were acting for the common good.’

‘We buried her here together,’ I admitted. ‘Lars Merson and myself. But he was attacked in daylight. Vampires are forbidden to roam by the light of the sun, it is said. Who ever killed him took advantage of a moment when the cemetery was quiet. One grievous blow to the neck. It didn’t take much.’

He was silent for some moments. ‘How did he end up in the stream? Was he running away, do you think?’

I shook my head. ‘Maybe he was working down there. Someone managed to approach without arousing his suspicions. Somebody who wants the world to think that Merson was slaughtered by a vampire, that the girl rose up from her grave, perhaps.’

My words echoed around the large room, and slowly died away.

‘This corpse is more problematic than the last, is it not?’ the Frenchman murmured. ‘The people out there know very well what has happened. And, unfortunately for you, so does Colonel Claudet. He orders you to present yourself at the earliest opportunity, monsieur. I’d make your report as mild as you can. He is worried by the escalating situation. When the French allow themselves to be intimidated by the Prussians, there’s trouble in store for all of us.’

I was obliged to smile. ‘When the French are provoked, we Prussians pay the price.’

We exchanged a complicit glance.

‘The crowd must not enter,’ I said, pointing to the wall. ‘Those iron spikes will be driven through every corpse in the cemetery.’

Glatigny raised his lantern and stared at me.

‘Not if we carry him off exactly as he is!’ There was a triumphant curl to his lip. ‘Out through the crowd with that iron spike sticking out of his breast. We’ll show them that the vampire Merson is truly dead.’

I was struck silent by what Glatigny had said. Lars Merson had worked long and hard to keep the city cemetery in order. Now, he would be thrown into a common pit in a French cemetery. It was a cruel fate for such a man. But what was the alternative?

‘I’ll let you know in which trench he has been laid,’ Glatigny continued. ‘It is a small price to pay for peace, but some body must pay it.’

‘The cemetery will need to be guarded,’ I said.

‘Leave that to me,’ he replied. ‘You must put an end to these blasphemies.’

Ten minutes later, Glatigny and his men marched out of the cemetery with Merson’s body on a cart. I sent Ulrich and Joseph Meyer home, then I joined the parade.

Not a word was heard from the crowd. Not a shout.

They were wondering whether the spike had had the desired effect.

‘Lars always did his duty by the dead,’ he protested dully.

‘To the very end,’ I said, pushing past, not waiting for him to shift his bulk.

Ludo Mittner ran his hand across his face as he followed me into the cramped room.

‘Who’d have thought it?’ he whispered. ‘Killed by one of them he’d buried.’

I said nothing to oppose this notion.

Ludo had known Lars Merson well. Better than any other man, perhaps. He had been the under-sexton at the cemetery for as long as I had lived in Lotingen. Now, I had brought the news that his master was dead, and that he was the custodian of the cemetery.

‘I need to check a number of things,’ I said. ‘Only you can help me.’

‘Whatever I can do, sir,’ Ludo said with a shake of his head.

He lived in one of the enclosures on the Rectory Close, a cobbled alley which stands in the eternal shadow of the cathedral. Built some centuries before as stabling for the horses of the clergy, the stalls had been converted into living quarters. The cells were high, too narrow to allow a horse to turn around. The French had talked of requisitioning them again as stables, until the officers of a lancer regiment rejected the accommodation as being ‘cramped and unhealthy’. It was better that the Prussians living there should die of cold, they said, and not the Emperor’s chargers.

In exchange for these lodgings, single men like Ludo were expected to scrub the cathedral floors, and carry the sick to the nearby Pietist congregation of Divine Love. When not at the cemetery, Ludo was generally to be found in one of those places. Merson had never offered to share the sexton’s office with any man, not even Ludo Mittner. The cemetery was Lars Merson’s kingdom. This is how the hierarchy works – every man in Prussia has his place, and he defends it to the bitter end. Ludo Mittner’s turn to rule the cemetery had arrived.

I had followed the cart with Merson’s uncovered body as far as the cathedral square. As the procession slowly wound its way through the town, more and more people came out of their houses to watch, bearing witness to the iron spike which poked from Merson’s heart. ‘Seeing is believing,’ Major Glatigny confided to me. ‘They’ll see that there’s no need for them to do anything. God above, what
more
needs to be done to him?’

On either side the watchers formed a solid wall, dividing left and right to let the cart pass. Hardly a word was said. No voice was raised in protest. It all went off with relative decorum. Had there been any breach of the peace, I would have recognised no-one. It was dark by then. Hoods, caps, hats had been pulled low to hide the identity of the wearer. If any man held a lantern, he closed the beam, or kept it low.

‘I cannot say how long these pantomimes that you oblige me to invent will hold them back,’ Glatigny murmured. ‘This fear of the unknown is what the French hate most of all. Let me remind you again, monsieur, to report to Colonel Claudet without delay. He did insist upon it.’

As I stepped away from the procession, I cast a final look at the corpse. Had we done the right thing to display the body in public in that hideous manner? I shook my head, and cut across the cathedral square in the direction of the Rectory Close, wondering whether I would find Mittner at home. Almost everybody else was on the streets. Before presenting myself to Colonel Claudet, I hoped to have something in hand, something which would suggest that I was making progress in my investigation. So far, I had found no thing to placate his fright, except a bare chronicle of the events. For all the rest – suspects, lines of enquiry to follow, persons to interrogate – I was totally disorientated, my confusion compounded by the signs of mounting terror on the streets. I had nothing to offer Claudet which promised a swift end to the unrest and might lead to the solution of the murders.

Fortunately, Ludo Mittner was at home.

There was no furniture in the tiny room except for a pile of straw and some crumpled blankets in one corner, an unlit stove with a long rusty pipe poking out of a broken corner of the window high above the door, and a single three-legged stool. It looked more like the cell of a condemned man than a room provided by a Pietist charity.

‘Have a seat, sir,’ he invited me.

He was in his shirt-sleeves, while I felt frozen in my heavy ribbed jacket.

I sat down on the stool. Ludo set his heavy hip on the edge of the table. We were close, too close. The lingering perfume of burnt wood could not conquer the putrid smell of his unwashed flesh.

‘Did you know Angela Enke, the girl from Krupeken?’ I asked him.

He looked down on me from his higher perch. ‘I’d never heard of her before today, sir,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Now no-one talks of anything else. I suppose I may have seen her in the town, but I couldn’t put a face to the name.’

‘Did Merson know her?’

‘Not that I’m aware of. Why should he know her?’

‘And when did you last see Merson?’

‘Yesterday morning,’ he replied. ‘One of the vaults on the river side was filling up with water. We drained it out, then had a look at the old oak nearby. The heavy rain last month had uncovered the roots. We had to cut them back.’

‘And what about today? Were you not at work?’

Ludo rubbed his hands together. ‘It’s my day off, sir. When I don’t go to the cemetery, I go up to the Pietist hospice. I was there all the morning, swilling out the dormitories. I was there most of last night, too. One of the old men had his leg cut off. The surgeon will tell you, sir.’

‘If need be, I will speak to him,’ I said. I did not suspect Ludo of murdering his master, but I was hoping that he might tell me something that Lars Merson had failed to mention. ‘Had Merson quarrelled with anyone recently?’

Ludo’s blue eyes flashed a look of dull surprise. ‘Merson? He don’t fight with no-one, sir. Keeps himself to himself. He wouldn’t tell me anyway. The sexton never told me nothing, ’cept for what I had to do. I’ve been his work-horse these twenty years…’

‘Not any more, you aren’t.’

He nodded his head morosely. ‘It wasn’t meant to happen like this.’

I was silent for some moments.

Did Merson’s death and the burial of Angela Enke have anything in common? And if so, what could it be, apart from the fact that they had both been murdered in the same way, and probably by the same hand?

The name of Emma Rimmele loomed in my thoughts.

Angela had altered the mourning clothes of Emma and her father. Merson had opened up the Kassel vault and placed the coffin of Frau Gisela Rimmele inside the family tomb. Might Emma Rimmele be the connection?

‘Were you and Merson working on the Kassel tomb?’ I asked.

‘It was in their well that the body of the girl was found, isn’t that so, sir?’ It was not a question. He seemed certain of the facts. ‘Father and daughter came to live in Lotingen quite recently, so I’ve been told.’

‘They are renting a house,’ I corrected him. ‘Did you meet the Rimmeles?’

Ludo nodded.

‘One of them, or both of them?’ I asked him.

Ludo swung his leg on the edge of the table. ‘The daughter, sir. She spoke with Merson. I was there, but she didn’t speak to me.’ He shrugged in an exaggerated manner, raising his shoulders as high as his ear, and I wondered whether Emma Rimmele had made an impression on Ludo, as well.

‘What did she want?’ I asked him.

‘It was most irregular, sir. She wanted him to open up a tomb that had been abandoned for many years.’

‘Her mother was born in Lotingen,’ I said. ‘What’s so odd about that?’

Like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, Ludo Mittner gave me a first glimpse of the new custodian of Lotingen cemetery. He shook his head disapprovingly. ‘The law, sir. The law. Opening up a funeral vault’s a serious business. You need the documents to prove descent. I’d have…’ He sniffed dismissively. ‘That woman did have papers, but it was the Devil’s job to read ’em.’ He waved his finger in a circle in the air. ‘The father’s signature was like a fly that had fallen in an inkwell, and crawled its way out again. She said that he was ill and couldn’t barely hold a pen, but Lars said the law’s the law, miss, and he wouldn’t touch that vault ’til things was straightened out.’

‘He didn’t hold out for long,’ I objected. ‘Evidently Fraulein Rimmele provided some further documentary proof.’

I knew Lars Merson well. He was a stickler for Prussian law, yet he had bent the French rules for Anders. And he had done the same in the case of Angela Enke. ‘You’re the magistrate, Procurator Stiffeniis,’ he had said when I told him that my son had died. ‘You’re the law in Lotingen. The French won’t last for ever. Tell me what’s to be done for the child.’

Ludo was now the heir to the cemetery, which allowed him to criticise his erstwhile master, and probably for the very first time.

‘That Fraulein Rimmele didn’t need no document,’ he sneered. ‘She had a way about her. Tears was her strength. She had brought her poor mother’s body to be buried in Lotingen cemetery, she said. She had her poor sick father to think of and what was she supposed to do? Take that body back to where it had come from?’

‘She appealed to Merson’s generosity. Is that what you are saying?’

Ludo ran his hand through his unruly blond hair. ‘An’ that’s the truth of it, sir. Wrapped him round her middle finger, she did. Still, one thing surprised me.’

‘What was that?’

‘The way she handled it, sir,’ he said. ‘One minute, gentle as a kitten. The next, she’s screaming like a fury. And having got what she wanted, all smiles and apologies. I thought that she was going to kiss him. No man had ever been so good to her. That’s what she said, sir. I ain’t never seen no-one get round Merson before. Not so fast, at any rate.’

I could imagine Emma’s frustration. She had leapt from the frying pan into a pot of boiling water. She knew no-one in Lotingen. None of her relations was living; she had to bury the body. The sexton of the cemetery had raised objections to her plans. Merson had played with Emma as a cat plays with a mouse. But instead of eating her, he had thrown her a piece of cheese in the end.

Her wild behaviour had thrown Merson into confusion, it appeared, though once she got her way, she had rewarded him with charm and grace. She had done some thing similar with me that morning. I could not shake off the memory of her lips pressing hotly on my neck, her teeth against my skin, the wet heat of her tongue.

‘When he took her to inspect the vault, he had to hold her up by the elbow,’ Ludo added. ‘She was almost fainting.’

‘Where were you?’

‘Following close behind them, sir,’ Ludo said. ‘When they reached the vault, she fell down on her knees and said a prayer. And when she’d finished, why, it was like she was transformed! She was all of a flurry, wild again. The coffin’s on its way, she cries. ’Twill be arriving any minute. We have to do it straight away. Can’t bring her father ’til her mother’s safe inside the tomb. It don’t matter if it is a mess…’

I held up my hand to slow the torrent of his words. ‘Was it in a mess?’

‘It was abandoned, sir. No-one had done any work in thirty years. The vault was green with moss, the stones were chipped, the names hardly visible. It needed quite a lick of work, and Merson told her so. If it had been up to me…’

I interrupted, asking, ‘How did Fraulein Rimmele react to that?’

Mittner rubbed his nose with his forefinger, and smiled shyly. ‘She put her hand on his arm, sir. Like this,’ he showed me, gently laying his right hand on his left wrist. ‘Me father’s getting worse each day, sir! It won’t be long a’fore he’s in his grave! A week an’ he’ll be gone!’ he trilled in a gruff sing-song falsetto which was as unlike the voice of Emma Rimmele as anything imaginable. ‘I want to bring Papa tomorrow!’

The she-devil
, Merson had called her afterwards.

But what had Emma done that was so terrible in his eyes? Wiping her dirty boots on an ancient tomb, he had said. On the other hand, might he have regretted making such generous concessions to a stranger?

Or was there something else?

Emma Rimmele had told him the truth. She had come to Lotingen to lay her mother’s body at rest. Merson had fallen in with her request at last. But then, for some unknown reason, he had changed his mind. Perhaps he had seen her in the guise of a diabolical temptress, who had used her beauty and tears to get her way. And having obtained what she craved, she had wiped the mud from her boots on Merson’s gift.

Whatever the truth of the matter, Emma Rimmele was right. Every step she took in Lotingen was fraught with misunderstanding. It had all begun
before
the seamstress was found dead at the bottom of the well at the Prior’s House.

‘Had anyone laid flowers on that tomb before the Rimmeles came?’

‘Never, sir. Not since I’ve been working in the cemetery, anyway. Never a flower or a wreath. That’s why Merson should have insisted on seeing the documents to prove that they had a right to use it.’

I frowned at his insistence. ‘If the Lotingen branch of the family no longer exists,’ I said, ‘who else would be interested in that tomb?’

Ludo’s limp foot began to swing back and forth again. He pushed his fingers beneath his collar, as if it were suffocating him. ‘Lars himself said that it would be an intrusion, sir. So many other souls was resting peaceful there. You can’t just put a body where it don’t belong. It’s the sort of thing that makes ’em come back!’

‘They must have come to some sort of an agreement,’ I objected.

Ludo pursed his lips, as if reluctant to continue. ‘He put the coffin in the vault that very day,’ he said suddenly. ‘Just the way she wanted.’

I let out a deep breath, as if I had been present at the battle of wills between Emma Rimmele and Lars Merson. Ludo continued to stare at me. There might be more to say, but he seemed hesitant about saying it. ‘You seem to think that Merson made a mistake, I take it?’

‘We profaned the tomb, sir. I had no choice, he made me do it. We went in there and worked all morning, shifting things about, making room for someone who…well, who may not belong. An intruder.’

He blew loudly upon his lips.

‘What reason could Emma Rimmele have to lie?’ I countered.