HS02 - Days of Atonement Read online

‘There has been a killing. French and Prussian troopers were involved. Colonel Lavedrine and I have been ordered to look into the matter,’ I said, raising my hands to the heavens in a gesture of mock despair. ‘No more than that.’

  My greatest fear was that she would see through this protective wall of lies. How often in recent times had she caught me out with a penetrating stare, forcing me to tell her everything, no matter how cruel the truth was.

  ‘No more?’ she echoed, catching my tone exactly. ‘How many men are dead?’

  ‘Three,’ I said. My chest felt heavy and strained, as if I had been forced to run. ‘Two of them were Prussian,’ I clarified. ‘There’s some confusion about how the fight broke out. I must speak to our men; Colonel Lavedrine will question their soldiers. As the laws of both our nations require. The matter should be settled within a few days.’

  I was afraid that Helena would latch on to my embarrassment. I looked up at the sky, down at the ground, then at Lavedrine, as I told my tale. I scanned the far horizon, glanced at my pocket-watch, and straightened my cuffs, rather than look into her eyes. My son was four years old, yet even Manni was better at the business of lying. He would wolf down a piece of cake, then tell you doe-eyed—the crumbs and cream spattered all over his face and mouth—that he had not had his slice yet.

  ‘Bien sûr, madame!’ Lavedrine came to my aid. ‘A few days. I only hope that there will be sufficient time for us all to become good friends,’ he said jovially, clapping one hand on my shoulder, the other on my arm. ‘I am greatly interested in the working methods of Procurator Stiffeniis. Who knows, your husband may even learn something useful from me in exchange.’

  He turned in my direction, a sweet and amicable smile illuminating his face. We might have been two old friends recently reacquainted after a silly dispute, eager to put the past behind us. I glanced at the Frenchman, warning him not to go too far, smiling for Helena’s benefit. I knew him well enough to fear his irony and incisive tongue. Even so, I had to appreciate the skill with which he played his part in placating my wife’s fears.

  Helena’s hand reached for mine and gently pressed upon my fingers. It was a natural, assured gesture, apparently free of tension, and this impression was reinforced by the show of charm with which she turned and spoke to Lavedrine.

  ‘Do you intend to step into our house, sir?’ she asked.

  Though this invitation was intended to be cordial, it sounded like a challenge. As if she were trying to gauge Lavedrine’s true intentions. As if to remind me that this Frenchman was a dangerous interloper, capable of overturning our peaceful way of life, if he wished to do so.

  ‘That is most kind,’ he replied, narrowing his eyes. ‘Another time, perhaps?’

  I do not know whether Lavedrine had understood her motives, but his show of reluctance was a palpable flag of truce. It seemed to declare quite openly that he had no further wish to intrude upon our privacy, and was ready to retire from the field.

  ‘In my own defence, I insisted on coming for one reason alone, ma’am. To beg forgiveness for the discomfort to which you have been unreasonably subjected. I take the blame for myself, and’—he smiled ironically again— ‘for the Emperor Napoleon. I pray you will forgive us both. Now, I take my leave. You’ll have had your fill of Frenchmen, I do not doubt.’

  Before boarding Dittersdorf’s waiting coach, he turned to Helena, swept an imaginary hat from his uncovered head, and made a gallant bow. His eyebrows knitted once more, and he added in a serious tone: ‘I am your humble servant, Frau Stiffeniis. Do not hesitate to call me if I can be of any service.’

  He jumped up, slammed the door, then spoke to me from the window.

  ‘I will see you shortly, Stiffeniis. With good news, I hope, from one side or the other. I’ll have them send a coach the minute I reach the town. That should leave you time . . .’

  He said no more, but bunched his lips and widened his eyes in an expression that seemed to suggest that he might have said too much.

  I waved my hand. ‘Thank you, Colonel Lavedrine. I look forward to seeing you again. And, as you say, with good news.’

  As Paulus cracked his whip and the carriage creaked into motion, Lavedrine appeared at the window again, moving his hand in an agitated circle above the crown of his head. ‘Forgive me if I sound foolish. I do like your hair, Frau Stiffeniis,’ he called back. ‘It is tout le mode. The finest ladies in Paris favour the free and the wild this year, but your style is truly . . .’ He struggled for a moment, searching for the phrase, then cried out with a laugh which was warm and genuine: ‘Truly à la Sturm und Drang!’

  Helena touched her hair thoughtfully, standing close beside me, as we watched the coach carry Lavedrine towards town. The instant the vehicle disappeared from view, she withdrew her hand and turned to me with great seriousness.

  ‘Must I really go to him while you are away, Hanno?’ she asked.

  She gazed into my eyes. Her tone was dry, acidic. It did not sound like a question that required an answer. It was more of a rebuke.

  ‘And where will you be?’ she added.

  Her voice was soft, suddenly tremulous. She appeared to be concerned for my safety, no longer angry for the trick that had been played upon her.

  ‘I must go East. To Kamenetz fortress. General Katowice is there,’ I said, adding detail to detail in the hope of persuading her that the soldiers I had mentioned earlier, the dead soldiers, were Prussians. ‘Count Dittersdorf insists. I must bring back an officer who knew the victims.’

  Her hand came up to rest on my elbow. ‘You’ll need to pack, Hanno. All your heaviest clothes. The wind here is raw, but out there, they say, it is the Devil’s own work.’

  While my bag was being prepared, I went upstairs and spoke privately to Lotte, warning her to take good care of her mistress while I was away.

  ‘Do not let her out of your sight,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll do my best, sir,’ she replied somewhat hesitantly.

  ‘Your very best, I beg you,’ I urged her. ‘Whatever you may hear in town, do not frighten Helena with it. I’ll be back as soon as I am able.’

  A short time after, the municipal coach arrived for me.

  While my leather sack was being stowed away by the driver, I took leave of my family in the biting wind by the garden gate. The cheeks of the children were red and very cold. As I held them in my arms and kissed them, I tried not to think of the pale cheeks of the three small corpses I had examined the night before. In that moment, the notion that Lavedrine would keep a vigilant eye upon my wife and babies was a great comfort to me.

  ‘God keep you safe out there,’ Helena whispered, clasping me in her arms as if she never intended to let me free. ‘May He lead you home quickly, bringing peace for us, and for all in Lotingen.’

  I knew not how to respond, and held my tongue tightly in check. She seemed to sense that something bad had happened in Lotingen, something immense, which went far beyond the small-minded violence of rough soldiers.

  ‘Promise me,’ she urged. ‘Take care out there.’

  It was the third time Helena had used that expression.

  I kissed her passionately on the lips, then drew away.

  Suddenly, I felt sure that she was right. Kamenetz was out there. The coldest, the most forgotten place in Prussia.

  10

  BURAN BLOW! BURAN blow!

  Bringing snow! Bringing woe!

  I used to sing this rhyme when I was a little child, standing in a circle, holding the hands of my brother and my cousins. At the end of the song, we all fell down dead from the cold.

  My father’s serfs sang another version as they swung their picks and shovels.

  Buran blow! Buran blow!

  Bury Russians in the snow!

  Sometimes it was the Russians, but they could just as easily be Poles, or Jews, depending on the political mood of the day.

  The driving wind from the East began to batter the coach head-on shortly after I left Lotingen, and that
song rang obsessively in my head as the afternoon wore on. To make matters worse, approaching Braniewo at dusk the vehicle began suddenly to jolt and jerk violently over the pitted surface of the highway. It was like being tossed about in a coracle adrift on the high seas. The keeper of the toll-bridge over the Mülder Canal informed me that fierce fighting had gone on along that road not many months before. Extensive damage had been caused by French cannon and Prussian mortars, then winter had come along to destroy what was left.

  ‘All’s wreck and ruin in the area, sir,’ he said.

  The inn in Braniewo, an ancient wattle-and-daub hovel, sagged in a state of near-collapse. But the potato soup was thick, the black bread crusty, and I washed it down with ale set sizzling with a poker in the company of my driver. His name was Egon Eis. I had never before seen his cratered moonlike face, though he knew me as the magistrate of Lotingen, he said, and we were forced to share the necessary confidences that plague the lives of travellers thrown together on the road. Coachman Eis told me that he was sixty-five years of age, and added that he had spent the last forty years on the box-seat of the civic coach.

  There was nothing for it. I had to ask him how he got the job.

  ‘Honourable conduct in battles, Herr Magistrate, sir,’ he mumbled gruffly in reply, though which particular honours he had won, which battles he had fought in, he did not care to mention. Nor did I press him. He must have seen action at Rossbach or Leuthen, and had probably invaded Silesia under the old king. After ten minutes more of gloomy silence, we lay down on our respective benches before the sinking fire and attempted to sleep.

  Just after dawn, we set off on the road that would take us to Bartoszyce. Icy draughts nimbly worked their way inside my cloak, and whistled through the holes in the musty carriage blanket with which I tried to shield my legs. I attempted to distract myself by reading a book I had brought along to lighten the journey. It was a new and revised edition of Baruch Spinoza’s Ethica more geometrico demonstrata. Condemned by Pietists, Papists, and Lutherans alike when published over a century before, in our Enlightened age it had been given a fresh breath of life. But no matter how I tried, the cold was so stultifying that I never got beyond the third page. Alone inside the coach, the landscape rendered flat and featureless beneath an endless coverlet of snow, one tedious league following another, I drifted into a sort of mental stupor.

  Four years earlier I had been summoned to investigate a series of murders that had disturbed the peace in Königsberg. The philosopher, Immanuel Kant, had been my guide through the labyrinth of criminal science, which he himself had invented on that very occasion. Above all, Professor Kant advised me, the investigator must attempt to enter the killer’s mind if he wished to understand what was passing through it—before, during, and after the crime. ‘There is a curious and compelling logic, even in the most perverse of human thought,’ he insisted. Like an obedient hound, I now did what Immanuel Kant had taught me to do: I began to sniff.

  I closed my eyes.

  I was standing in the dark outside the cottage.

  There were three children and a woman inside. They would be taken by surprise when I broke in on them. But for how long would shock immobilise them? Before they could be slaughtered, I would have to catch and pinion each of them.

  Was the massacre the work of one man alone?

  I considered the possibility for quite some time before dismissing the idea. There was no sign of a struggle. Submission had been immediate and it had been total. So, I must have entered the house and taken control of the situation in the company of others. Then, we had unsheathed our knives and used the sharp blades to slit the throats of the three children.

  Had we come intending to slay the Gottewald family?

  No other murder had been reported that night, or earlier that week in Lotingen, or anywhere else in the province. Therefore, I reasoned, it was more than probable that we had come to that house, armed and ready to perpetrate that murder, and no other.

  Was there some cause to explain the choice of that family?

  They were not rich, and nothing appeared to have been stolen. If Bruno Gottewald were able to supply an answer, I intended to force it out of him as soon as I arrived in Kamenetz. Then again, I thought, there was at least one other explanation. I placed myself in the dark outside the door of the cottage again, and allowed the thoughts to come. I had not come armed to kill the Gottewalds, or anyone else. Instead, I had found myself by chance in that forsaken place, and a sudden murderous impulse had taken possession of my mind.

  Where had I laid my hands upon a suitable weapon?

  There were knives in the kitchen of the house, and some were probably sharp. But Lavedrine and I had noted no blood in the kitchen, no stains on the wooden handle of the bread-knife on the table. If I had used one of the other household knives, then I had carried it away with me. Or I had taken the trouble to wash it, then put it back where I had found it.

  Why remove, or hide the murder weapon?

  Nothing in the kitchen appeared to have been disturbed. No furniture had been overturned, nothing had been broken, all seemed to be in a state of reasonable order. The table had been laid for the evening meal, the food had been consumed. The chairs were pushed back, as if the family had risen tranquilly from the table after eating. As if the time had arrived for the children to be put to bed.

  I tried to imagine the exact sequence of events as the killers moved through the house. Domestic peace had been shattered when they burst in at the door. The woman and her children had been quickly taken prisoner. Then, the serious work began. The three children had been massacred, and the boys had been mutilated. There had been blood . . .

  I sat up with a start.

  Lavedrine had pointed out the anomaly while we were standing in the bedroom two nights before, but we had been distracted by the horror of what we were seeing, and the urgency of the search for the missing woman.

  There was blood in the upstairs bedroom only.

  There were traces of blood on the ceiling, but there should have been blood all over the house. On the floor, on the stairs, on the walls. There ought to have been oceans of blood in the room where the children had been killed. Blood that gushed from slashed throats. Blood that coagulated in the freezing cold night air. Blood that formed a dark lake on the mattress. Blood should have cascaded onto the floor, running in rivulets under the bed. We had noted those heavy spots on the wall beneath the window, far from the bed, but they did not explain the lack of blood in the rest of the room.

  There was not enough!

  Had the killer cleaned the weapon, then cleaned the house as well?

  Another thought flashed through my mind. A more terrible one.

  The children had been stripped of their clothes, then they had been killed. Afterwards, the boys had been mutilated.

  Were the boys the true object of the raid?

  I sat back, gasping for air.

  Was that the reason that the mother had been removed from the house?

  Thinking like the perpetrator had become a nightmare. I shuddered with revulsion, my mind swamped with terrible images of gross, vile savagery. We ought to have called for a physician to verify whether the bodies of the children had been abused before they were killed. Or afterwards, when they were dead.

  That possibility was more unbearable than any other violation. Worse than murder. The faces of my own dear little ones flashed graphically before my eyes. They seemed to accuse me of having abandoned them in Lotingen, all alone except for their mother and Lotte, undefended.

  A sexual attack levelled at the children?

  Was that the real reason Franz Durskeitner had been so reticent?

  I looked out of the window, my mind a blur.

  After climbing very slowly up the face of a steep escarpment, the carriage topped the hill and began to run more quickly over the exposed plateau of Górowo. The horses followed a long line of wooden poles which had been driven into the ground to indicate the way across
the barren white plain. The undulating surface offered no shelter that could diminish the driving force of the Buran. The wind raked up a filmy dust of snow like the sweeping train of a bridal gown. My driver, Egon Eis, was sitting on his box exposed to the worst of the weather. If he were to die of exposure, I would know nothing of the matter until the reins slipped from his frozen hands and the horses ran off the road, dragging the heavy coach after them. I prayed that the pint of gin hanging from my driver’s neck would keep him alive. I had seen him replenish his flask religiously on every occasion that we stopped at an inn. If the weather doesn’t kill him, I thought grimly, he will end his days pickled in spirits.

  I called up to ask him how he was.

  ‘Cold, your honour!’ he grunted back.

  Unable to offer help or succour, I settled down again, wrapping my scarf more tightly around my neck, shivering violently as I huddled deep beneath my blanket.

  I closed my eyes, and tried to picture the man towards whom I was travelling.

  He was a Prussian officer. If he had been sent to the fortress to work under the command of General Juri Katowice, he must be a soldier of the very first order. He would be a vigilant man, one who was capable of defending himself and his family. Almost certainly, he would have taken the presence of Durskeitner into account. He might even have seen the hunter’s cabin. It was close enough to the haven he had chosen for his wife and children in the forest. Would such a man, trained to be aware of encroaching danger, leave his family alone in that isolated place if he truly believed that anyone was a threat to them? If he had even suspected that the hunter might harm his wife and babes, he would have carried them to Kamenetz, or found lodgings for them in Lotingen.

  I glanced out of the window. Night was falling fast, and the wind had eased off somewhat as the vehicle passed the ten-mile stone and the first signpost to the settlement of Bartoszyce. Before we arrived at the ninth stone, the coach slewed to a sudden halt.

  ‘Hold fast, there!’