HS04 - Unholy Awakening (4 page)

The brothers exchanged a smile, but it was always Gurt who spoke.

‘You have spoken with the mistress, have you not, sir?’

Perhaps I should have summoned them to my office in town, and questioned them separately. ‘Answer my questions directly,’ I ordered him. ‘Did Angela Enke work for you two?’

‘Not for us. For Fraulein Rimmele, sir.’

‘The lady has only recently arrived in Lotingen,’ I said. ‘How did she know of Angela Enke?’

‘She came knocking on our door, sir, asking if we knew of anyone that was good with a needle. Well, I sent her to that place in town…the one with the girls that sew and knit. Someone there must have given her Angela’s name,’ Gurt Schuettler replied. ‘The mistress wanted some one who would come up to the house to work. Said she didn’t want to leave her father on his own.’

I made a note of what he had just told me.
Check Frau Graube’s
.

‘What about the father?’ I resumed. ‘Have you seen him?’

Schuettler grimaced, tapping his right temple with his finger. ‘Something wrong up here,’ he said. ‘She never lets him out on his own.’

‘When Angela Enke came here to work, how long did she stay?’

The brothers’ eyes met for a moment. The silent one nodded as if Gurt had asked him a question. I wondered how they communicated. Was a glance sufficient? Could they read each other’s thoughts? There was a close tie between them, certainly, but I could not determine whether it was based on love, respect, or subjection.

‘That’s hard to say, sir. A couple of hours, I suppose. She worked in the kitchen, as a rule. It’s that door over there,’ he said, pointing through the archway to a narrow door on the ground floor of the house, which gave onto the garden.

The image flashed through my own mind as he spoke.

I saw the girl alone in the kitchen, the door open, her clever hands busy with her needles and thread, while those two strange Schuettler brothers stood watching her from beneath the archway which led into the sunken garden.

Spying
on her.

Was that it? Two strong countrymen against a defenceless woman? An attempted rape: the girl screams; one of the men strikes her with the garden rake he is carrying: together they throw her body into the well before Fraulein Rimmele or her invalid father can appear on the scene…

The objections to my hypothesis were all too evident: would they have put the tooth into the bucket? Would they have left the well-cover on the lawn, calling attention to the crime? And why would they have called the magistrate from town?

‘Regarding the tooth you showed me,’ I said. ‘Did you call Fraulein Rimmele’s attention to it?’

Gurt Schuettler shrugged his shoulders. ‘One minute we’re looking down the well. Next thing, so was she.’

‘You did not call her?’ I asked, surprised.

‘She must have seen us from the window,’ he said, glancing towards the broad façade of the house, ‘and come down as the fancy took her.’

They had probably made a great deal of noise, I supposed. I could imagine the brothers, working in the garden, sweeping up leaves, finding the cover lifted off from the well, discovering what was hidden in the old bucket, shouting out loud, expressing their surprise. Emma had heard them, of course. Her sitting-room overlooked the garden. Concerned for the peace of her father, she had come down, meaning to ask them to be quiet. Then, she had seen what they had seen.

‘Was she afraid?’ I asked.

‘Frightened? Her, sir?’ He seemed about to say something more. I stopped writing, and looked up at him. Gurt Schuettler scratched his chin, then winked at me. ‘I got the impression she was furious, sir.’

‘Furious? Why was that, do you think?’

He spread his arms in a gesture of helplessness. ‘She said she was sure that there was something nasty in the well. She would have climbed down there on her own, if we had let her. Why, she even went and brought a lamp.’

‘A reasonable reaction, I suppose.’

I remembered the fixed intensity with which she was staring down the well when I arrived in the garden of the Prior’s House. Such curiosity was an understandable reaction in a man, more surprising in a woman. Then again, everything about Emma Rimmele had come as a surprise to me.

‘Reasonable, Herr Procurator?’

The vehemence in these words struck me like a bolt of lightning.

It was not Gurt Schuettler who had spoken, but Benjamin, the silent one.

‘Nothing about that woman’s reasonable,’ he said with all the passion of a misogynist. ‘Is it reasonable to travel with your mother loaded on the carriage along with the baggage? In a coffin, I mean to say?’

He turned to his brother with a sneer.

‘I told you she would bring us bad luck.’

I had to go to Krupeken at once.

After what Knutzen had told Selleck the saddler, the villagers would be like sailors caught in a sudden squall.

The village was a half-mile walk along the Cut, a balancing act across a narrow lock-gate, a half-mile more along a beaten path which led across the empty fields. I felt vulnerable and alone in that vast landscape. The harvest was in, the fields were cut to a stubble, the prospect was as flat as a billiard-table. If anyone had tried to follow me, I could not have failed to see that person.

Was that why Angela Enke had been butchered close to where the Rimmeles lived?

Was the Prior’s House the only spot where she could be taken by surprise?

Krupeken consisted of one street only, if it could be called a street at all. A dusty lane of hardened cart-ruts wound between one-and two-room cottages spaced higgledy-piggledy in a clearing in the centre of the wood. A dozen cottages of ancient, weather-washed wood and crumbling daub, each one crowned with a steep sloping roof of black thatch. There were wooden shutters in the place of doors and windows. Each house had a fenced-in garden and a lean-to shed where the villagers might lock up their animals for the night.

Everything seemed tranquil as I approached the village.

Suddenly, an old man in a brown smock began to shout and whistle, chasing ducks and geese out of a stagnant pond of emerald green, herding them quickly along the street before him with a stick. I might have been a poultry thief.

He did not acknowledge my presence, except by running away.

‘I am looking for the family Enke,’ I called after him.

‘Oh, aye?’ he said, hardly looking back.

‘Where do they live?’

He pointed with his chin as he herded the fowl into a side lane. ‘End house on the left,’ he said.

As I walked past him, he did something that I did not expect. He held up his hands, forming a cross with his forefingers, as if to ward off evil. Selleck had done a good job, raising the alarm and putting his neighbours on their guard.

I glimpsed other persons as I moved along the road. That is, I saw them for a moment or two, then I saw them no more. A man was walking around his house with a basket on his arm, sprinkling thorn branches on the ground. I had seen this sort of ritual on my father’s estate when I was a child. On the 30th of April, we celebrated the holy feast of Saint Walpurgis. Huge bonfires were lit, and thorn branches were thrown on the flames. On
Walpurgisnacht
the dead rose up from their tombs, it was said, and they went on the prowl, looking to sate their thirst on fresh human blood.

The man saw me, dropped his basket, and ran.

A woman in a linen bonnet was hanging some thing up above her door. Our eyes met for an instant. She blessed herself rapidly, then darted into the house, leaving behind her a cross made of straw bound up with long white ribbons. It dangled starkly fresh and new from the ancient thatch. Two boys were painting a cottage with lime, as if to change the appearance of the house in which they lived. A third was nailing dead rats up by their tails. Fresh blood dripped on the daub of the wall. If Angela Enke returned that night, she would hardly recognise what had once been her home.

Fear had laid its hand on Krupeken, and it would soon infect Lotingen, too. The panic would be multiplied a thousand times, and I would be unable to stop it. I would have to be careful when I spoke to the parents, I realised. I must impress on them that I was looking for a
real
killer, a murderer of flesh and blood, and not some troubled spirit of legend and myth.

I stopped at the gate, and looked at the last house at the end of the lane. I saw no straw crosses or bunches of ribbons hanging from the eaves; no nets or knotted ropes to confound and confuse the invader; no branches of thorns to wound and tempt the monster with the sight of her own blood; no freshly painted door to send her on her way; no rats’ blood inviting her to sate her hunger before she knocked on the door. I felt a sense of relief, daring to hope that the grief of the parents and siblings of Angela Enke had taken more conventional forms.

The rapping of my knuckles on the door sounded loud.

‘Reverend Pastor?’ a female voice called out, though the door did not open.

The simple fact that they had sent for a priest comforted me further. The family had begun to make arrangements for a funeral service which would be performed in a church, according to the usual Christian rites of burial.

‘It is I, Procurator Stiffeniis,’ I replied. ‘The magistrate in Lotingen. I wish to speak with you, ma’am.’

I heard a metal bolt being drawn. Then the heavy clunk of wood as a crossbar was removed from behind the door. Slowly, it opened a crack, and a sliver of a woman’s face peered out at me. ‘We don’t need no magistrate,’ she said. ‘We need a holy pastor with the communion host!’

My heart sank as I pushed against the door and forced my way inside.

The woman backed off, holding up her hands, as if she thought that I was going to strike her.

‘Are you the mother of Angela Enke?’ I asked.

The woman nodded warily.

‘I bring bad news,’ I began to say.

A shrill laugh exploded from her lips, and she crossed herself three times.

‘You’ve come too late, sir! What took you so bloody long?’

‘Your daughter is dead…’

‘Dead ain’t the word that
I
would use,’ she snapped.

As my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, I made out two other people who were cowering in a corner: an old man, and a young one. As my eye fell on them, they did as the woman had done, touching the tips of their right-hand fingers to their foreheads, mid riffs and shoulders in the sign of the Cross.

‘Who are you?’ I asked, ignoring the woman.

The men stared sullenly back, but they did not answer.

‘My husband, and my son,’ the woman muttered gruffly at my side. ‘For all the use they are! They’re afraid to step outside the door. Not long now, and it’ll be dark, I warned them. We’ll need all the help that we can get. It ain’t easy keeping
them
out!’

My hope of finding natural sorrow and Christian sentiment sank without a trace.

That explained the absence of charms, amulets and religious gewgaws outside the Enke house: the men were too scared to go out and arm the dwelling against the attack from infernal forces which the lady expected to arrive at any moment. I concentrated my attention on her. She had spirit. Tragedy had not put a gag on her tongue.

‘Frau Enke.’

Her eyes flashed, weighing me up, looking defiantly from my hair down to my leather shoes and brass buckles.

‘I am here about your daughter, Frau Enke. I only know that Angela was a seam stress. You must tell me more if I am to catch whoever killed her.’

The woman crossed herself again and stared at the beaten floor.

‘She had a red mole,’ she muttered, touching her skeletal cheekbone with her finger. ‘Just here, sir. I should have known what
that
meant! The Dark One left his mark on her.’

I had noticed nothing of the sort, though that was not the issue. I pulled up sharply. I would need to be more pointed in my questioning. ‘When did you last see Angela, Frau Enke?’

The woman’s mouth was an ugly sneer, her skin a porous yellow. ‘She went out yesterday,’ she said. ‘She didn’t come back. Not
yet
, anyways…’

I ignored this provocation, pressing on. ‘Did she tell you where she was going?’

The woman stared at me. ‘What are all these questions for?’

It was clear that she did not trust me.

‘Somebody has murdered Angela,’ I said.

‘Some
thing
,’ she answered bitterly. ‘Some creatures do not die, sir.’

‘Some
person
,’ I insisted. ‘I intend to catch him.’

She mumbled a curse beneath her breath.

‘When did Angela go out yesterday?’ I asked her.

‘Late afternoon,’ the woman replied. ‘She was going to Frau Graube’s…’

‘That’s where she works, I’ve been told.’

Everyone in Lotingen knew Frau Graube. The mother let out a sigh of exasperation, but at least she had begun to talk. By speaking, she may have hoped to free herself of me.

‘My girl plied a pretty needle,’ she said more quietly. ‘She often went to see Frau Graube when she was looking for employment.’

‘Perhaps you know already,’ I said, ‘that Angela’s body was recovered from the well of the Prior’s House. Angela had been working for a family that had rented the house.’

Frau Enke nodded. ‘The mother recently dead?’

‘Fraulein Rimmele and her widowed father,’ I confirmed.

The woman raised her hand to her mouth. ‘Angela had been there, though the work was finished, she said. She had to go because the daughter couldn’t leave the old man on his own. Domestic work pays best, sir, though my girl had to give up part of what she got to Frau Graube. Frau Graube doles out the work she doesn’t want to girls like Angela.’

I began to wonder whether Angela had been robbed as well as murdered.

‘Did Angela have any money on her person?’ I asked.

‘She wouldn’t tell
me
if she did,’ the woman answered sharply.

‘Did she tell you anything about the Prior’s House?’ I pressed on pragmatically, ignoring her hostility.

‘She did not like the place,’ Frau Enke replied frostily. ‘It was big and old, she said. Cold, too. Some times she sat out in the garden, working in the sun. But even then, she said, she had no peace, them Schuettlers watching her all the time. She told me they was ogling her while she was doing her sewing.’

I caught my breath. Had I chanced on something concrete?

‘Angela did not like that, I suppose? Being spied on…’

‘On the contrary,’ the woman snapped. ‘So long as those old men were watching her, she said, she felt quite safe. She knew that nothing bad would happen.’

‘Bad, Frau Enke?’ I cut in quickly. ‘Why should Angela fear that anything bad would happen to her at the Prior’s House?’

‘That’s where you should take your questions!’ snapped the woman. ‘The Prior’s House. We don’t know nothing here.’

Again, I ignored her rudeness. She had lost a daughter, after all.

‘What else did she say about the house?’

Frau Enke folded her arms, and shook her shoulders. ‘Not much about the house…She spoke about the mistress, though. A right strange creature
she
must be!’

‘Strange?’ I queried. ‘What do you mean by that, ma’am?’

I thought I knew where the conversation was heading. A rich woman from another town, an educated lady with unusual and extravagant tastes, of marriageable age, but still unmarried, who travelled in the company of her ailing father. Angela Enke was a peasant girl. She would have judged them badly, no doubt. People of means, who chose, never the less, to take up residence in a spartan country house. The seamstress would have found them just as odd as her mother did.

‘Angela told me of the dress she was making,’ Frau Enke went on, adding in a sort of sneering exclamation: ‘Supposed to be a mourning dress, puh!’

I jotted down what she was saying.

‘Her mother died quite recently,’ I explained, without going into detail, hoping to win some sympathy for Emma.

‘I ask you, sir! What sort of a girl would have a mourning dress cobbled up from a cast-off, moth-eaten ball gown? And for her own dead mother! That’s what she had my girl doing.’ She bridled, and shook her head. ‘She couldn’t be bothered to waste good money. As if she had decided on the spur of the moment…’

‘As if she had decided to do what?’ I intervened. I wanted information, not slander and wild superstition.

‘To wear a mourning dress, Herr Magistrate. If you want my opinion, sir, that woman grabbed the first black rag that came to hand.’

This was leading my investigation nowhere.

‘Had anyone ever threatened your daughter, Frau Enke?’

‘Why would they do that?’ she spat back acidly. ‘She ain’t done harm to no-one. Not
yet
, at any rate.’

She looked directly into my eyes as she let fire this deadly bolt.

Again, I did not rise to the provocation, but I continued patiently to question her.

‘Did Angela have a sweetheart? A man that she had refused, perhaps?’

The term ‘lover’ came more readily to my lips, but the girl was dead, and these people were her family.

‘She had a lover once,’ the mother said bluntly. ‘They butchered him four years ago at Jena. He was forced into service with the Duke of Brunswick. Poor Pieter Guntzl’s buried on the battle field, they say. They never brought his body home.’ The woman wrung her hands. ‘That lad was a skilled cobbler, sir. Everyone needs shoes, or needs them fixing. They would have been wed by now, Instead, she’s a…Well, you know…what she is…’

Tears flowed for the first time since I had entered the house, but not for long.

‘Has there been no-one since?’ I asked.

‘No-one that
I
knew of,’ the woman replied sharply with a shrug of her shoulder.

I glanced in turn at the two men, and they both shook their heads forlornly.

‘What about her friends?’ I tried.

The woman looked at me uncertainly, as if she feared to implicate anyone who had been a friend to Angela. ‘Well, there…there was only the other girls at Frau Graube’s institute,’ she said at last.

I waited in silence. It is a trick that magistrates often use. If the witness has any thing to add, something that we may not have taken into account, it may come out by means of silence and a moment to think.

‘When Pieter died, she took it bad, sir,’ the woman murmured. ‘Angela wasn’t a bad-looking girl. She was just twenty-three at that time. And as for other men, well, she never seemed to pay them any heed. Afterwards, I mean…She was a good girl, though very quiet.’

I was beginning to feel exasperated. Frau Enke had a way of couching everything in terms which were, to her way of thinking, obvious and conclusive. I could not quite picture a young woman who rejected all amorous advances in the noble remembrance of a childhood courtship which had died on the field of Jena. Especially in the countryside. In another year or two, Angela would have been too old to marry and bear a child. No man would have wanted her.