HS04 - Unholy Awakening (27 page)

‘Why did Emma and her father leave the estate?’ I asked.

She stared at me as if unable to believe what she had heard. ‘Haven’t you seen the soldiers, sir?’

‘They stayed on for some time after the soldiers came,’ I said. ‘Did something happen which…which drove them away?’

It was like dropping a stone into a very deep well. I listened for the splash, then realised that I would probably wait forever. Did the Widow Beckmann know that her mistress had been raped? And would she tell me if she had heard cries, or seen Emma’s reaction to the assault?

‘Emma carried off her father and her mother,’ she said at last.

I felt a surge of energy as I rushed over to the wall, grabbed a three-legged stool, and carried it back to where Adele Beckmann was standing.

‘Sit down, Widow Beckmann…’

‘Where are they?’ she asked, ignoring the stool.

‘In Lotingen,’ I replied, as if I had travelled all that way to tell her the news.

‘God be praised! My angel,’ the old woman said, looking up to heaven. ‘She took her mother home, then. The master will be better off for that. Here, there was only strife and commotion.’

I had to fight the temptation to look heavenwards, and repeat her words. Had Emma told me a single thing that was not confirmed by what I saw, or by what I heard from the lips of Adele Beckmann? I stole a glance at Lavedrine. He was on his feet now, legs apart, hands behind his back. His perplexed expression sent a shiver of satisfaction racing through my being. The servant’s words had cancelled out his sarcasm and his doubts.

‘Let me sort out
this
,’ the woman said, ‘and I’ll tell you everything.’

She gave a rapid twist of her left wrist, spinning the captive hare around by its ears, then jerked very hard to one side. A high-pitched squeal was stifled as the animal’s neck snapped with a loud crack. Adele Beckmann turned away and walked to the sink. As she returned, I saw that she was holding a rag in one hand, the dead hare in the other. She approached the hooks and the hanging meat, and fixed the hare by its bob-tail to one of the free hooks. In an instant, she raised the cloth to cover her blouse, whipped a small curved knife from beneath her apron, and slit the animal’s throat with a single thrust.

Blood began to stream into the bowl below.

Adele Beckmann breathed out loudly, turned towards us, wiped the knife on the cloth, put it back beneath her apron, then sat down on the stool.

‘When the master was young, there was no lack of game to bleed in this house. He was such a fine man, and powerful, too. The family was rich. But then…’ She clasped her hands, and shook her head. ‘Things got worse, sir. His health collapsed. His mind, sir. He didn’t recognise no-one. They had the farm, of course, but it wasn’t the same. Emma tried to brave it out with just her mother, but then the fever came and carried off the mistress. And then, sir, the last nail in the coffin,’ she said, uncaring of the pun, ‘the French came shortly afterwards.’

Adele Beckmann looked up at me, and her eyes were as dead as those of the hare’s.

‘And how did Emma react?’ I encouraged.

‘She suffered, sir. Hid her beauty from the world. I did not see the colour of her flesh for weeks. Tied up like a black bundle, she was. Black veil, black gloves. ’Twas as if they’d buried
her
in the funeral vault, along with her mother.’

I had seen the bare shoulders and the olive skin of Emma Rimmele. I recalled the dress that she wore. It was black, as ritual prescribed, but it was short and skimpy, showing off her arms, breasts and ankles. Lotingen had been shocked by it. I had caught my breath more than once at the sight of her. There was nothing remotely ‘buried’ about Emma Rimmele! Then again, I thought, far from home, her greatest worries left behind, the death of her mother more remote in time, Emma might have found that a new life was possible.

‘You mentioned the arrival of the French,’ I said.

‘That’s right,’ the woman replied. ‘Herr Erwin didn’t take it well. All those new faces to confuse him. But…well, it seemed to put a bit of life into Emma. She spoke French, of course. I suppose that was it. She seemed to find new reserves of strength.’

‘In what respect?’ I asked.

Adele Beckmann looked down at the rough red hands which were clasped in her lap. ‘I thought…that is, I think she was in love, sir.’

Lavedrine appeared at her shoulder, leaning over, looking into her face.

‘With one of the French officers?’ he asked.

Widow Beckmann glanced at him, eyes wide with surprise. ‘Oh no, sir. Not one of them. How could she? They were the enemy.’

Evidently, she thought that Lavedrine was Prussian, regardless of his accent.

‘Who, then?’ he asked.

‘She had had to go to Marienburg, sir. She’d been there several times. Her father was sick, and there was business to attend to, things to do with the house. I suppose she must have met him there.’

‘Who?’ Lavedrine insisted.

The woman shrugged. ‘Whoever he was, sir. She didn’t say. She’d go to Marienburg for a day or two. And then, one day, she didn’t come back. Two men came to the house with a cart that afternoon, and they brought a note from Emma. It seemed a strange request at the time…’

‘What did she want?’ I asked before Lavedrine could intervene.

‘Her father was to go to Marienburg. She’d found a doctor who could treat him. The problem was that Herr Erwin would never have abandoned the Mistress. But Emma had thought of that. The men had been told to remove Frau Gisela’s coffin from the family vault. Emma had found a safer place to lay her, she said, and she’d sent those men to do just that: to carry Herr Rimmele and her mother’s coffin to Marienburg.’

‘It seems odd that she did not come back herself,’ Lavedrine interposed. ‘And that she would entrust such a delicate task to strangers.’

‘Come back here, sir?’ Adele Beckmann appealed to him. ‘It don’t seem odd to me. The French would have tried to stop her leaving. She’d have had to ask permission, and she would never have done that, sir. She had taken flight. She wasn’t coming back to ask no favours.’

‘When did the men take the coffin?’ I asked her.

‘’Twas after dark, sir. Our cemetery is close to the woods and the highroad, and the French had started drinking by then. While the men were opening up the vault, I dressed Herr Erwin and I walked him down the lane to the front gate. Those were Fraulein Emma’s instructions, the men said. They would all be going home. Her very words, sir. That’s what I was to tell Herr Erwin. Going home. He went as meek as a lamb.’

‘Home?’ I repeated.

Adele Beckmann wiped a tear from her cheek. ‘Poor man! He didn’t recognise this place no longer. Everywhere he looked there were Frenchmen. It drove him mad, sir. She had to take him away. You mentioned Lotingen before, sir. That’s where Emma’s mother came from.’

There was a question that I had to ask. I felt as if I were using that short curved knife of hers to cut her own throat as I asked it. ‘Had Emma been raped by one of the French officers? Was that why she was afraid to return, do you think?’

Adele Beckmann smothered a cry with her hands.

‘Is that what happened, sir?’

I heard a hiss from Lavedrine. ‘Stiffeniis, this is not the way to go about it.’

‘Would she have told you?’ I insisted, ignoring his protest.

She raised her eyes to me in supplication. I could see how upset she was. ‘But she…she was…I’d have sworn that she was in love. I thought she’d met a gentleman. She seemed so…so radiant. Her mother’s death was painful…a terrible shock, but she was getting over it.’

She broke down, sobbing, thoughts and phrases spilling from her lips as quickly as the tears flowed. ‘This house is cursed,’ she said. ‘Cursed forever. The blood of these small creatures is not enough to save them.’

‘It’s not your fault,’ I murmured gently, trying to reassure her. ‘There was no thing you could do. You did your best by him, and by her.’

As I spoke I thought that all the blood in Prussia could not have saved them.

‘They’ll not be coming back,’ she cried, sobbing into her apron. ‘Never more.’

There was no consoling her, nothing to be done.

We left by the narrow side door which Adele Beckmann had used to enter the Blood Room. Behind us, we could hear her voice, repeating the plaint over and over again to her self.

Never more, never more
…

The woods on that side of the park were an impenetrable thicket. It was there that Widow Beckmann went in search of animals to trap and slay. A herd of bulls would not have been sufficient, I thought, to assuage the gods who had brought down evil on the house of Erwin Rimmele.

Lavedrine was in a dark humour.

He had no wish to meet Massur again, he said, as we turned the corner of the house, and saw our carriage standing by the bridge where we had left it, the driver asleep on his box.

With a quick rap on the roof, Lavedrine jumped aboard and I followed him.

As we were driving down the avenue towards the gate, he turned to me and said: ‘What really happened here, do you think? Why did Emma and her father abandon the house? If she had been raped by a Frenchman, wouldn’t she have told you, a Prussian magistrate, of the injury that she had suffered?’

Rage choked me for some moments. Could he be so sceptical regarding all that he had seen and heard? ‘Would a woman admit such a vile thing to a man?’ I said angrily. ‘She was in danger. She
is
in danger. The threat is still hanging over her. If you ask me, Lavedrine,
that
is the connection with the murders in Lotingen.’

‘What are you thinking?’ he asked.

It had come to me in a blinding flash.

‘Sebastien Grangé boasted that he had found a treasure. He was speaking of the riches of the Rimmeles. He may have blackmailed Emma, threatening to tell the world what she had been subjected to. She suffered violence, and the shame which followed it. Let’s say that she paid him off the first time. He and his friends may have become more pressing. The violence may have been repeated. Other officers may have learnt of it, and tried to press their own advantage. Either for sexual rewards, or for a share in the profits of the extortion. Wasn’t this what you suspected?’

Lavedrine held my gaze, but he did not reply.

‘Emma Rimmele could be the next victim of the vampire,’ I insisted.

An ironic smile appeared on Lavedrine’s lips.

‘If it was a rape,’ he said. ‘But what if she was moved by love? By passion? Adele Beckmann said that she was radiant, despite her mother’s death and her father’s decline. Is there any reason why a Prussian woman should not lose her heart to a Frenchman? Even if he has invaded her country, and her home?’

I clenched my fists until they hurt, but I did not answer him.

‘Are you jealous at the thought that she might be enamoured of a Frenchman?’

‘We must go to Lotingen,’ I growled, ignoring his arrogance.

‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘One thing remains to be done in Marienburg.’

‘He appeared out of nowhere the day that I arrived in town.’

Lavedrine stopped the coach before it could enter the city gates. ‘It is quicker to walk from here, and twice as pleasant,’ he said, climbing down into the road. ‘On the way, I’ll tell you what I know about the man.’

We went along a riverside lane which was not much more than a narrow gravel path. The red-brick walls of the castle loomed high above us on the left. Had anyone been looking down from the battlements, we would have seemed like tiny dots. It was chilly in the shadows, though the day was bright, even dazzling, as the afternoon sun flashed off the surface of the river.

‘Is he Prussian?’ I asked.

‘Alexander Oleg Krebbe was born in Marienburg,’ he said. ‘When I say that he
appeared
, I mean exactly that. He is ghostly white, almost transparent. When I spotted him standing in the court yard, I was tempted to believe that he had passed through the castle walls. No-one had tried to stop him at the gate. He simply walked into the guards’ office and told the sergeant that he wished to see the colonel who was investigating the murders of the French officers.’

‘Murders? Only Gaspard was known to be dead at that time.’

‘Precisely! No-one knew that Lecompte had been wounded, or that Grangé was still missing. Even so, he used the plural. Murders. And he had another surprise in store for me. Whatever was going on in Marienburg, he said, and he was most emphatic,
it had to be
connected with events in Lotingen. Well, until that moment I had heard no news of anything out of the ordinary in Lotingen. Imagine!’

I stared at him, puzzled.

‘I must have looked as shocked as you do now,’ he said. ‘I thought that he was raving mad. There he was, standing in the castle courtyard, using that word as if it was quite normal, telling me what I ought to do about it.’

‘Which word?’ I interrupted.

Lavedrine raised his chin, and smiled. ‘
Vampire
. Krebbe was convinced that a vampire was responsible for all of the murders, both here and in Lotingen. And he was glad a Frenchman was conducting operations, he said. It was the only way to put an end to tales which had been circulating for centuries in Prussia. More deaths would certainly follow on, he predicted. Accurately, it should be added. He had come to offer me his help.’

‘That was generous of him.’

Lavedrine smiled again. ‘I did not take him up on the offer. Oh, I was not brutal with him, Hanno, if that’s what you are thinking. He was very old, most dignified, and extremely polite. I found him altogether a most intriguing gentleman. I informed him that we French have no practical experience of vampires, and I warned him to be careful with the guards. They don’t like it when someone pulls their pigtails. He took it all very calmly. He handed me a German-language newspaper, and asked if I’d be kind enough to read the front-page article at my leisure, and then, so to speak, he excused himself and…well,
disappeared
. Like a ghost, as I said before. I went to my room and I read the piece – it was about the body of the girl found dead in the well in Lotingen, and it described the manner of her death. Two wounds to the neck, it said. Just like the officers who’d been attacked in Marienburg. Your name was mentioned, as was the news that vampire fever had broken out. Well, I saddled my horse and I rode at once to Lotingen, as you know.’

I thought it over for a moment. ‘What we have heard today in Kirchenfeld suggests a better line of attack,’ I said. ‘Rivalry between French officer groups should convince us that the opinions expressed in Lotingen are the fruit of childish ignorance and fear. Equally, they show us that Prussians have a hard time explaining anything with out inventing a sinister story.’

‘Still, we must take Professor Krebbe’s offer of help seriously,’ he countered. ‘His perspicacity merits our attention. Firstly, in spotting the similarities, and, in the second place, by attributing the crimes to a vampire. Aren’t you curious to hear how he reached his conclusions?’

I was, of course, though I was careful not to say so.

‘This is the very oldest part of town,’ said Lavedrine, turning left and heading for a low bailey-gate which led into the district, making a quick demonstrative gesture with his hand as we came into the street.

It was a rank, unhealthy place, the roofs so close together that the sky was reduced to a narrow blue strip above our heads. The houses had once been rich. Now, the black timber frames leaned precariously like a row of drunks, crowding each other for space, all swaying in the direction of the river. Bottle-glass windows bulged into the street in the ancient style of bays, while the wood en shutters seemed to be in a state of universal decay.

‘I traced his address in the Realm of Universal Intellect,’ Lavedrine went on. ‘He is classified as a “metaphysician”. As they share the same initial letter, his file and Kant’s were close together, and that is another interesting coincidence.’

Could the French use the same descriptive label for a serious philosopher like Immanuel Kant, and a man like Alexander Oleg Krebbe, who appeared to be a dabbler in vampire lore? I began to doubt the value – and the danger to Prussia – of the information which was being gathered in the intelligence room that General Olivier Layard held dear.

The street broadened out to form a bulge. There were six or seven stalls in this space, mostly selling vegetables, though one was offering fish none-too-recently arrived from the Baltic Sea, if the lustreless eyes of the halibut were anything to go by. An impressive brick tower stood on the corner.

‘This should be his house,’ said Lavedrine.

As he raised the heavy iron door-knocker, and let it rap, I hoped that the Realm of Universal Intellect might once again fall flat on its nose.

The studded black door swung open. A tiny lady of great age, and even greater dignity, looked out at us. She was wearing a severe black dress with a starched linen bib, and a stiff winged bonnet like a French nun. Lavedrine announced his name and his rank, and was about to do the same for me, when the lady clapped her hands, as if some long-awaited fortune had fallen on the house, and she answered his good German in perfect French.

‘Monsieur le Colonel,’ she said, waving him into the hall, ‘I am certain that my husband will be delighted to receive you.’

My presence was superfluous, I gathered.

‘The vampire scholar is expecting you,’ I hissed as I followed him in.

The hall was bright and austere. Black and white tiles, a carved ebony chair with bits of mother-of-pearl set in the frame and legs, a matching mirror on the wall, nothing else. ‘Welcome to heaven,’ she said, her tiny wrinkled face and bright eyes crack ling with humour, ‘though I know you are more interested in hell.’ She added snappishly: ‘Hell is up the stairs in this house. I’ll have none of it down here!’

She threw aside a dark red velvet curtain, pushed open a door, and shouted: ‘Alexander Oleg!’

‘Yes?’ a gruff, distant voice replied.

‘You have guests, Herr Professor!’

‘Who is it, my dear?’

‘A French colonel and another gentleman,’ she called back.

‘Well, send them up!’

She stepped aside. ‘He’s up there, messieurs.’

There
sounded like a place that she avoided. As we began to climb the stairs, I wondered what I was letting myself in for. We seemed to have stepped into a different world. If heaven below was empty, hell above was full. The walls were covered with slips of paper – letters, notes, and annotations of every colour, shape and size. Some were sheaves of many leaves which had been tacked to the walls with pins, while others were skimpy notes scrawled in ink on torn scraps of paper and card. Frau Krebbe shut the hall-door abruptly at our backs, and the multitude of papers shifted and rustled in the sudden draught, like an army of crows rustling their dark finery.

‘All the way to the top,’ the voice boomed down.

Looking upwards, I saw that the stairwell rose three floors, and that it was illuminated by a skylight. The tower seemed to shimmer with the improvised wall-papering, as if it were going to crumble and collapse. And that was not the end of the chaos. From the first step at the bottom to the last step at the top, the wooden stairs were cluttered with boxes, three or four in height, all containing bundles of paper, each one marked with a letter of the alphabet and a number.

‘What is this place?’ I whispered to Lavedrine, as we turned on the first landing and began to climb to the next floor.

He looked at me, pursed his downturned mouth, and shook his head.

We must have mounted fifty stairs before we reached the summit and Professor Krebbe. He was closer to eighty years of age than seventy, yet his face was plump and pale – youthful, I would have said – his skin the consistency of dough which had risen, then slowly begun to gather dust. His hair was a wild white mane which framed a large mouth, large ears, a handsome nose, and two blue eyes which would have looked well on a man of twenty. His glance flashed from Lavedrine to me, then back again.

‘You came at last, sir,’ he said to the Frenchman, offering his hand. ‘You, instead, are Prussian,’ he said, turning to me. ‘I heard your intonation, though you were speaking French.’

‘I did not speak,’ I said.

‘You were whispering,’ he replied with a smile. ‘That stairwell is like an ear-trumpet, magnifying sounds. I could hear you breathing. I hear every word that my wife says to my detriment, too, but please don’t tell her.’

I smiled and told him who I was.

His eyes lit up. ‘Herr Procurator Stiffeniis, I had formed the impression that you were shorter and slighter from the newspaper report. One must always be careful of words. You’ll have told the colonel that this is no ordinary investigation,’ he said, and now he seemed to be more interested in me than in Lavedrine, as if, being Prussians, we shared some common ground which might exclude a Frenchman.

‘I certainly have,’ I said, for want of anything better.

‘Come in, sirs.’

The room was square, large and high. Massive wooden beams as black as pitch revealed the sand-coloured tiles of the roof directly above our heads. Double windows gave a view of Marienburg Fortress, three castles sitting inside its curtain walls, each keep higher than the next, and the cathedral at the far end. More bewildering than the view was the state of the room. Boxes, boxes, and more boxes. Papers pinned to the walls, papers massed in heaps on tables, papers scattered on the floor in tottering piles. Everywhere, bits and scraps and pages of paper, and all written on.

‘My dictionary,’ Professor Krebbe explained. ‘The roots and derivations of the Germanic language groups. First use, and all subsequent usages of a word or phrase,’ he added in a modulated breath with all the passion of a believer. ‘All subsequent modifications of its sound, tonal shifts and meanings.’

How many ducks had lost their quills in his service? How much ink gall had the oak trees of Prussia yielded up to him? The entire Black Forest must have been torn from the ground and pulped with rags to make up all the paper that he had used.

‘My
magnum opus
will soon be finished,’ he said, noting our amazement at the mess. ‘I’m currently working on the letter O, enriching the
lemmata
. Fresh data comes inconstantly, you see. Words and their meanings grow like trees. New leaves and branches sprout all the time, while others remain like the rings inside the trunk itself. A word is never fixed in meaning for very long. Each meaning has its history, and it tells us what was in the heads of the people who used, or continue to use, them…’

‘Give me an example, professor,’ Lavedrine interrupted brusquely.

Krebbe chuckled to himself. ‘My hobby-horse, forgive me. I so admire French thinking, it goes straight to the heart of the argument.’ He raised his finger. ‘So, where were we? Well, some words may seem basic and unchanging – mother, father, life and death, for example – yet it is not so. If these basic concepts were to stop expanding to accommodate the range of new everyday meanings, they would shortly die out and be replaced by something better.’

He hesitated, snapping his fingers.

‘Take a word like…like…’

‘Vampire,’ Lavedrine suggested immediately. ‘Isn’t that why you came to see me at the fortress?’

Krebbe looked left and right, as if to be certain that we were alone.

‘You are correct, monsieur. I have long collected folk tales which speak of the vampire, or blood-sucking witch. Here in Marienburg we call it the
Nachzehrer
, but there are a host of names for it. You would be surprised how many vampire tales still circulate in Germany. I have made it my business to speak with any academic or scholar who has ever mentioned such phenomena. Rasmus Christian Rask, librarian in Copenhagen, for example. Jakob Grimm, the court librarian in Westphalia, and his brother. Poets and seers, I have been in touch with them all, from Masäus to von Arnim, von Kleist, even Goethe himself. And every one of them reports at least one legend or story in which the vampire makes an appearance.’

‘Let me ask you a question, sir,’ Lavedrine cut in, arms folded, eyebrows raised, half way between curiosity to hear more, and impatience with the old man’s loquacity. ‘How can you help us to find the killer?’

Professor Krebbe looked at him for a moment. ‘You can only defeat an enemy that you know, monsieur. I am sure the French don’t need lessons in military tactics from an old Prussian scholar like me?’ Then, his glance fell on me. Surely he was asking himself what my position was. Did I collaborate with the French invaders, or did my duty oblige me to follow them around?

Lavedrine was not provoked.

‘I am asking whether you believe in the existence of vampires, Professor Krebbe.’

Krebbe closed his eyes, and grimaced.

‘Even the most practical of Frenchmen would agree, I hope, that there are many aspects to the concept of “existence”? Do I believe in supernatural creatures which refuse to die, which feed their immortality on the blood of the living? Frankly, I do not. Do I believe that there are mortals who kill by striking at the victim’s neck and throat in the manner of the vampire? Certainly, I do. I believe that these
vampires
have appeared many times in the history of Prussia, and not here alone. The chronicles of northern and eastern Europe – from the most ancient to the most recent – provide detailed accounts from the mouths of reliable witnesses, regarding people who have been murdered in this specific fashion, the sequence of events repeating itself
ad infinitum
: a knock at the door, a familiar face, an invitation to enter, the fatal attack with the teeth, the sucking of blood. There! All this leads me to believe that vampires
do
exist, Colonel Lavedrine. And that the deaths that you are investigating here, and which Herr Stiffeniis is facing in Lotingen, are the work of vampires. The question is…Do you mind if we sit down and discuss this matter more calmly? I only have one chair, but…’