HS04 - Unholy Awakening (6 page)

Angela Enke lay on the table, naked except for a ragged pair of culottes the colour of mud which covered her sex. Her breasts sagged heavily upon her ribs. Her skin was so pasty and pale, it might have been rubbed with powdered chalk. Blood had flowed out in a torrent from the punctures in the left side of her neck, pooling in the deep crook of her shoulder bone, where it had hardened as a sticky cake, spilling over and thinning out onto her left breast, before running away in a narrower stream beneath her left armpit.

I had seen the wound at the bottom of the well, though not so clearly. I prayed silently that I would find some other injury which might explain her death, and put an end to the superstitious speculation which had spread like a raging fire through Krupeken, and which threatened now to engulf Lotingen, as well.

I began with the face.

The tip of her nose was ragged and bloody, broken perhaps. There were scratches and scrapes impressed on her temples and her forehead at different angles, as if she had been rubbed with a carpenter’s rasp. I moved down, pressing my thumb against a large black bruise on her upper right arm. Some drops of blood seeped out of it. The arms and hands were scarified at numerous points. There was, indeed, a great deal of superficial damage to the skin, but that was easily explained. She must have bounced from wall to wall as she fell, and the well was as deep as two houses placed one on top of the other. From the quantity of blood which had issued from the cuts and scratches, it was evident that she had still been alive when she hit the bottom of the shaft. Her heart was pumping, she was bleeding copiously.

There was nothing fatal in those injuries.

The most notable damage to the upper part of her body was a large livid red-and-blue contusion on her left breast. The nipple had been torn away, the blood had flowed profusely, rolling away down the side of her ribs and underneath her back. I bent closer, looking more carefully. There was no sign of intrusion, or puncture, such as one might expect from a knife, a pike, or some other lethal weapon. Again, I concluded that the flesh had been ripped away on some sharp point – a nail, perhaps – as she fell. That wound alone had not caused her death.

I pointed at the rough culottes.

They hung down low on one hip, partially exposing her belly and the first trace of pubic hair. There were stains of blood which had soaked into the heavy material. I touched one spot with my forefinger. The blood was damp; it left a mark on my skin. Was the fatal injury concealed beneath her underwear? Had she been stabbed in the belly with some sharp blade which had robbed her life away?

My tongue was dry and pulled against my palate.

‘Cut them away, Merson.’

He clicked his scissors together twice, then did as I had told him, cutting up one side-seam, then down the other, pulling the wool away, exposing the belly, womb and the dark bush of brown hair which covered her sexual organs.

There was a cut running almost parallel with the line where her left leg joined the trunk. It was long, and it was wide. I pushed at her left knee and the cut gaped open wide. It had bled abundantly, though it was not so deep. I put it down to a sharp stone or a jagged bit of metal which had ripped her body as she brushed against it, falling.

There was nothing else to go on.

That wound in her neck had signalled the beginning of the end. Her death had not been rapid, but it had been inevitable. Perhaps the vocal cords had been damaged during the attack, preventing her from shouting or screaming. Certainly, no-one at the Prior’s House had heard her cry for help.

I examined the other side of her neck, but there were no bruises, no signs of any rough attempt at strangling.

I forced my fingers in between her teeth and prised open her mouth. As Schuettler had suspected, the tooth left in the bucket was a wisdom tooth, and it belonged to Angela Enke. There was a gaping black hole in the left side of her gum. It had bled copiously, staining her teeth and gums dark red.

‘It looks as if she’s been sucking blood,’ murmured Merson.

‘The blood is
hers
,’ I said emphatically. ‘Whoever killed her pulled that tooth out, then he threw her down the well. The tooth was found in a bucket…’

‘Where’s the sense in that?’ he quietly asked himself.

I felt the same perplexity. That tooth seemed to me to be the most obscene of all the indignities that Angela Enke had suffered. Her tongue was caught in a bulge in her gullet, as if she had begun to swallow it. I prised the organ out with my forefinger, pulling hard against the retracted muscles, pressing it flat upon her lower lip. It was grey like a boiled sausage, but there was no blistering or burning, no sign that she might have been poisoned.

‘Help me to turn her over.’

Though rigor mortis had made the joints stiff, it was now beginning to pass off, which made the body difficult to manage. It gave with a series of sharp cracks as we held her up, rolling her onto her right hip, then placing her face down. The ruined clothes clung to her shoulders, back, buttocks and legs. They had been pressed flat by the dead weight of the corpse. It made external examination a matter of an instant. I noted some minor rips and ruptures – the jagged wall, I presumed again – but there was no evidence of wilful wounding. No external bleeding, anyway.

As I peeled the clothes away from her skin, I saw something that I will not easily forget, a condition which is often found in a corpse which has been abandoned, or which has lain undiscovered for any length of time. The skin, especially of her buttocks, was no longer white. It was a mottled red, blue and black carpet, the colours startlingly bright. This was what the onset of decomposition did to a body which had not been shifted. The blood settled to its lowest gravitational point in the human vessel which contained it, and there it pooled, slowly losing its familiar red colour as necrosis set in. On the basis of what I knew of her movements, I calculated that Angela Enke had been dead for almost twenty hours, and possibly more. Since the previous evening, that is, shortly after she had left her home to go to the Prior’s House.

I looked up as Merson spoke.

‘The blood’s almost turned,’ he grunted, confirming my guess with the expertise of a lifetime in the business. ‘Been there all night, I’ll warrant you that, sir. But it’s that wound in the neck that did for her. It looks like a bite…’

He pointed with his finger, but he did not touch the wounds.

‘I do not think it is a bite,’ I countered, but I could offer nothing better.

I bent forward, looking into the girl’s face. Her left eye was badly bruised, swollen tightly shut. The right eye was wide open, the iris had once been dark, I guessed, from the colour of her hair, though now it was the neutral colour of dark slate, the eyeball itself a sickly jaundiced yellow.

‘She sure looks dead,’ Merson muttered.

‘She is dead,’ I said sharply, admitting no discussion.

‘Maybe, falling, she has broken her neck,’ he suggested.

I had checked the body in the cistern, of course. Even so, I placed my hands beneath her head, felt the weight of her head in my palms, and slowly moved the head to the left, and to the right. There was no sign of breakage. Which left only one possibility. That she had been damaged internally. We turned her over once again, and I laid my palms on her rib cage beneath her breasts. Her skin was cold, and damp, as if she had been sweating.

I pressed down hard again.

When nothing happened, I moved six inches further down and tried again.

The corpse shifted slightly, and made a sound.

I stepped back, pulled my hands away. Had I found the cause? The sound that issued was not the cracking of broken bone, but some indication of inner devastation, how ever. It sounded like the gurgling of water in a bottle, or the noisy rumbling of an empty stomach.

‘She probably swallowed water in the well, sir,’ Merson murmured.

‘Water?’ I echoed.

The well in Emma Rimmele’s garden had been dry for half a century.

I placed my hands, one over the other, and pressed hard in the same spot.

The same noise came again. Far louder this time. I felt movement beneath my hands, as if whatever was trapped in there was fighting to find its way out. It seemed to vibrate up through her thorax, rushing upwards through her chest. Suddenly, her mouth fell open, and blood gushed out like molten lava. It welled up over her lips, then spilled out onto her chin, as if from the body of a living person, running out of the corners of her mouth, dribbling away down either side of her throat. It flowed for some moments. Just as quickly, it stopped.

Whatever had happened, it was over.

‘Best get her in the ground, sir. Now. Tonight.’

‘They won’t have her in Krupeken,’ I said. ‘The mother refused to have her body in the house.’

Merson spoke, and his words ran through me like an electric current.

‘She’s suffered enough, sir. If the news gets out, God knows what the Prussians will try to do to her. If you give her to the French, she’s lost forever. She’ll be condemned to wander in the dark for all eternity. Let’s bury her here, sir, in the old cemetery.’

Was that why Merson had helped me to bury my son?

Anders had died of the fever; the French would have thrown his corpse into a trench. No tomb, no stone, no name, no dates, no words to express our anguish for a child who had been cruelly taken from us. His soul, too, would have wandered in the dark for all eternity. Helena believed it. Merson, too.

That was what Merson had proposed to me that night two and a half months before.

‘You’re a magistrate,’ he had said. ‘Just tell the French that the baby died of a fall. Who’d dare to challenge your word, sir? Get the family doctor to sign it for you. He’s a good friend of yours, no doubt. I’ll come for him, sir. I have a covered basket. Trust me, sir, I’ll put him under. The boy will sleep in Prussian soil. It will be the family plot…’

Merson had chosen the place. A plot which was no longer used, he swore. And he had placed an old wooden cross to mark the spot. My child was laid in a grave that might have been hundreds of years old, but anything was better than a French pit. And I had paid the stonecutter, Ulrich Meyer, to carve a stone in memory of Anders. When the French left, I would have it erected. This was Merson’s war, I thought, a personal war that he was waging against the French. They threw Prussians nameless into common pits, and doused them with quicklime. Lars Merson kept the bodies back whenever he could, and buried them in Prussian ground to spite the French invader. He was a rule unto himself in Lotingen cemetery.

‘What are we to do, then, Merson?’

In this case, it was not a question of
if
, but of
how
.

Merson looked at me, then he nodded grimly. ‘Glatigny has left his men here, sir. They’re under your command. The crowd has gone, but they won’t be far away, I’d bet. They’ll be waiting to see her body carried off to the pits by the French squaddies.’ He pointed to an ancient coffin propped against the wall. ‘We’ll give them a body to follow. Inside that coffin there.’

An hour later, the French soldiers loaded the wooden box onto a cart.

My instructions were clear and simple. They were to go to the new French cemetery on the far side of the river. ‘Put the coffin into the trench, and get someone to fill it in,’ I said. ‘Ask Major Glatigny to make sure that the place is guarded over the next few days, and tell him that the guards must be armed and ready to shoot.’

‘The area’s a military zone,’ said one of the soldiers. ‘Our men are always armed.’

As they marched off into the night, two with their muskets on their shoulders, while the other two pushed the cart, I saw a contented smile on the face of Lars Merson.

‘That’s all they’re good for,’ he laughed. ‘Heaving stones.’

The idea of four French soldiers carrying an old tombstone in a second-hand coffin was too much for him. Another Prussian corpse had been plundered from the French. He had won another battle.

‘And now, sir, if you are ready, let’s get down to work!’

A cemetery is never silent, nor is it ever entirely still.

Life goes on quietly within its walls, and endlessly beneath the ground.

Merson laboured steadily, his spade slicing easily through the loose soil, while I froze at every possible announcement that we might have been discovered: the scampering of unseen creatures of the night; the rasp of a predator sharpening its beak or claws against a grave stone; a cry, a bark, or a howl; the endless orchestra of rustling and shifting which disturbed the darkness.

I prodded the blade of my long-handled spade into the yielding soil, and my lungs filled with the odour of vegetal decay. The deeper the hole became, the more intense the perfume grew. This was the wettest soil in the cemetery, according to Merson, the earth was full of worms. ‘She’ll rot far faster than normal here,’ he announced, and that was what I wanted to hear.

The sooner Angela Enke became a harmless heap of bones, the better.

I winced as soil cascaded noisily into the trench. Something shifted in the canopy of trees above my head. I heard a soft hoot, the rustle of feathers, a swish of wings. Some moments later, the final squeal of a doomed mouse.

I leant on my shovel, catching my breath.

Helena feared the silence of the cemetery. She could not accept the fact that Anders was there. She thought that the child would be cloaked in silence for all Eternity, and the fixation tormented her. ‘He hated silence,’ she had said in tears. ‘He seemed to be for ever chattering from the day that he was born. Even when he was playing on his own. In his sleep, he burbled like a brook. How will he cope with the silence?’

Anders would be entertained by the unseen creatures moving in the darkness, I thought. The slow creeping of worms, the shifting of the soil. He would know those sounds by now, and they would keep him company. The child was not alone. Not there, among his fellows.

I shook my head and continued to dig. I suppose it was the strangeness of the situation in which I found myself. My mind seemed to fix on possibilities which had never occurred to me before. What stupefied me most was the similarity between the bizarre thoughts flitting through my imagination, and the superstitions that I had opposed so strongly in other people earlier in the day.

The dead do not hear what the living hear.

The dead do not lead the life that we lead.

The dead do not return to torment us.

Each sentence was a spadeful of earth, taken from deep down in the pit and thrown up into the pale sliver of light beyond my left shoulder. The moon was our only lantern – a clear silver disc with a bite out of the upper segment.

‘As a rule, when digging down, the earth gets harder, more compact,’ Merson grunted. ‘There’s clay, or shale grit hereabouts. But this soil’s getting sloppier than mud. Can you feel it, sir? There’s a spring just a few feet further down. That’s what we are looking for. We’re nearly done, I think.’

I stood up straight; the edge of the grave was level with my heart.

‘It’s time to bring her out,’ Lars Merson muttered, rubbing his hands together, as if he were eager to get the business over.

We climbed up out of the trench, planted our shovels in the earth, and returned to the chapel, where a single lantern flickered. The corpse of the seamstress lay naked on the canvas. Merson positioned himself at her feet, leaving me no alternative but to stand where her head was. We covered her in an instant, wrapping her up inside that canvas shroud.

‘Makes it easier to carry her,’ Merson said, taking hold. ‘Are you ready, sir? Lift when I give the word.’

She was heavy, but manageable.

I followed Merson out through the door and into the night.

Minutes later, the body fell with a dull thud into the bottom of the trench.

As he bent to pick up his shovel, I laid my hand on his arm and stopped him. We had acted too hastily. ‘She must go naked into the ground,’ I reminded him. ‘You said so yourself. She’ll decompose faster.’

‘Aye, sir. You’re right,’ Merson growled defiantly, turning away, planting his shovel in the loose earth.

I did not wait for him. I skipped down into the trench, and began to pull the canvas roughly away from the corpse. It was no easy task. The dead weight of her body pressed down on the stiff material. As it came away, her arms and her breasts gleamed blue in the moonlight. The wounds on the side of her neck were two black holes, the traces of blood like a black, spidery web that ran across the upper half of her body.

‘Do you need my help, sir?’

I did not answer, handing the canvas up to Merson, scrambling quickly out of the hole. I stood by the graveside, catching my breath, and I swore a solemn oath to the girl that I would find and punish the person who had murdered her. I would return by daylight to dig her up again when I had freed her of the superstition that had been attached to her name. I would take her home to her village and her parents. I would have her laid to rest by the pastor who had deserted them all.

I placed my hand on the shaft of the spade, preparing to cover her up.

‘Hang on, sir!’ Merson was standing by my side, looking down into the grave. ‘There’s some thing else that we have to do before we can fill her in.’

‘Oh yes, of course,’ I said.

The gravedigger was right. I felt ashamed of myself for my thoughtlessness. I looked down into the grave, made the sign of the Cross, and asked the Lord aloud to have mercy on the soul of Angela Enke.

‘We don’t have time for that, sir,’ Merson growled.

‘What do you mean?’

I could hear his laboured breathing. He laid his right hand on his heart and let out a groan, as if the work had robbed him of his strength. He was an old man, sixty years of age at the least. During the day he had a robust young lad to do the heavy work for him, Ludo Mittner by name.

‘We have to bury her face-down,’ he whispered.

‘She is dead,’ I protested. ‘An inanimate corpse.’

Again I heard the heavy rumble of his breathing.

‘It will not harm her, then,’ he said flatly. ‘Tradition demands it, sir. Face-down in the dark, she won’t know which way is up. If she should try to dig herself out, she’ll dig her self deeper into the ground. That’s what they always do in cases like this one.’

I did not oppose his whim.

We dropped down into the grave again. He chose the lower half of the body, leaving the head to me once more. I groped about in the darkness, struggling to turn her limp, naked body over, and lay her face down on the damp soil. What harm could it do, after all?

Dawn comes early on the Baltic coast in summer. The sky was glistening like a piece of mother-of-pearl. By the time that we had finished filling in the hole, the first cold rays of sunlight had broken over the far horizon.

‘I am grateful for your help,’ I said, as I watched him finishing off the job.

Before we began, Merson had removed the grass in large squares from the ground where we intended to dig with a scything motion of his spade, laying the pieces of turf aside in a fussy pile. Now, he replaced the squares of grass on the grave, pressing them down heavily with his boot.

‘There!’ he said, standing back. ‘Who’s to know?’

We were like a pair of thieves, I thought. Having ransacked the house, we were closing the doors and putting the cushions back in order. Though the grass was crushed, it would pass casual muster.

‘No-one comes to this part of the cemetery much,’ he murmured. ‘But we must look to appearances, sir. The beadle comes and opens the gates at dawn. There’ll be folk on the road from town already. If they see dirt on your clothes, they’ll be curious…Hmm, it might be better if they see you praying by the grave of your son, sir.’

I felt exhausted, and confused. I wanted to go home and sleep. ‘Every bone and muscle in my body is sore,’ I said with a shiver.

Merson eyed me critically. ‘Come with me, sir,’ he ordered.

I followed him between the tombs and vaults like a child. He strode on ahead, a shovel over each shoulder, making for the sexton’s office. He closed the door behind me as I entered the room. I sat on one of his chairs for fear of falling down, my eyes drawn to the names chiselled on the old tombstones standing up against the wall.

‘How long will it take?’ I asked, as Merson handed me a stiff brush.

‘Take?’ he echoed, as I began to brush my trousers and my jacket.

‘For the worms to do their work.’

‘Within a day her mother won’t recognise her,’ he said, rubbing his face with the palms of his hands. ‘No-one will know that she’s been buried there.’

‘No-one must ever know,’ I said emphatically. ‘Until I find the killer.’

Merson breathed in noisily through his nose. ‘Do it quickly, Herr Stiffeniis,’ he snorted. ‘You know what people are. Someone will say that she has been to visit them, and next thing, they’ll all be saying it. Then, the trouble will start.’

The gravedigger turned away, reaching for an earthenware bottle and two pewter chalices, which might once have held flowers. ‘We need a good stiff drink. Bischoff’s cordial,’ he said with a smack of his lips, taking out the stopper and beginning to pour. ‘The longer you leave it, the better it is.’

I raised the cup to my lips, grateful as I drank the cordial, and a fire burnt its way down my throat and deep into my intestines.

‘You’re beginning to look like one of the living again, sir,’ Merson said, handing me a cloth, nodding down at my muddy boots, watching as I wiped them clean.

I pulled at the leather string, let my hair hang loose and ran my hands through it, pulling out the tangles before I knotted it up again.

I was ready to say good morning to Anders.

The rose petals were the hue of a baby’s blushing cheek.

‘These are for your child, Herr Stiffeniis,’ Merson said, handing them to me.

He had cut the flowers from a bush which grew beside the door of the chapel of rest. I felt a lump in my throat as I took them from him, and walked out into the cemetery.

A number of women were bending over graves, brushing off tombstones, clearing away the windblown leaves, removing wilting blooms, changing the water in vases before filling them with fresh flowers that they had brought from home.

I hurried over to the spot where Anders had been buried.

A bunch of wild white crocuses lay next to the small wooden cross. The petals were huge, the pistils rigid, the green leaves waxed and shining. Helena had been there the day before, then. I had no idea how often she went to the cemetery. She did not tell me that she went at all. Whenever I visited the grave, I found the evidence, however: fresh flowers, or some other fruit of the season had been laid on the grass beside the ancient wooden cross. Even so, I had never met her there, not even by accident. Would she ever come to terms with her sorrow, I asked myself. Would repetition erode the hard stone of her pain, and smooth it into a smaller pebble of consolation?

I hoped that it would.

My wife and I had grown distant since the death of our youngest child.

I felt a flush of anger as I stood beside his grave. The stone was still not ready. There was nothing to read. No date of birth, or death. Ulrich Meyer, the stone-cutter, was notoriously slow. There was a shortage of quarried stone, he said, as a result of the epidemic, persuading us to choose an old stone which could be altered. It was still in Meyer’s work shop, though Helena had insisted that I should pay him in advance to carve a cherub’s pretty face, and a parchment scroll in bas relief with Anders’ name, and a pair of angel’s wings which would carry the note to the Gates of Heaven.

As I bent forward to lay my tiny spray of roses on the grass, I stopped dead.

Merson was standing some way off. His face was a mask of displeasure, as if he had just been nipped by a horse. His cheeks were pale and drawn, his eyes fixed on some point far beyond my shoulder.

‘I might have guessed it,’ he hissed, jerking forward, rushing up to me. ‘After such a night as this, the she-devil’s come a-calling!’

I turned to see what had provoked this change of humour.

My fingers parted, the roses fell on the ground.

Emma Rimmele was striding through the cemetery. A dense black cloud danced around her as she moved. I had never seen a garment like it. She moved rapidly forward as if she meant to leave behind the material in which she had so carelessly wrapped her self. Had Angela Enke had a hand in the making of it? Was this the mourning dress that Angela’s mother had told me about? The material ballooned out around her knees and ankles. Her feet and legs seemed to thrust forward out of nothing, then slide back inside the dark cloud; she might have been slithering on marble, rather than walking on the ground. Above the waist, constricting whalebone pressed all too tight. A modesty cape of trans parent black silk tried to hide, but succeeded only in revealing, acres of pale flesh – arms, shoulders, breasts. A gentleman’s overcoat hung halfway down her back, trailing behind her on the ground.

There was nothing funereal in those clothes. On any other woman, they would have seemed ridiculous. Her hands held up her gown to facilitate her forward motion. She was wearing the same black boots that she had worn before, but she had forgotten to tie them up. The long laces whipped and played around her feet like twitching serpents. Her legs were bare, and visible almost to the knee. They were the colour of amber, as if they had been exposed to the burning rays of the summer heat. As if she had been walking, or running, in the sun…

Naked legs that the sun had warmed.

I felt embarrassed by the ideas which flashed through my mind.

She did not look like a woman in mourning. She did not wear a hat, or cover her face. Her hair was tied up on her head with that Medusa clasp, though loose swathes of it fell on her neck, cheeks and shoulders.

A gentleman was following her.

Though old enough to be her father, Herr Rimmele was not quite the invalid that she had led me to believe. White hair poked out in a stiff fringe from beneath his black top-hat. Now
that
, I assured myself, was a mourning hat. And the cape which flowed be hind him as he shuffled in her wake was, unmistakeably, a black mourning cape. Black eyebrows sprouted in gentle arches above deep-set eyes. He was not unlike his daughter in that respect. In every other respect, he was totally different. Nothing reminded me of her. His receding chin, sunken cheeks, pronounced cheekbones, bony nose, lips so thin and grey that they were almost invisible. Her chin was bold, her cheeks were blooming, her lips were full and round. His eyes were pale, while hers were two dark mysterious pools.