A Visible Darkness Part 12

With deft chopping strokes, he hacked away the muscle from the calf.

As this tissue slopped onto the table-top, the lady mopped and dropped the dead meat into a bucket, wiping her b.l.o.o.d.y hands on her ap.r.o.n, swatting at the flies, of which there were a number in the room. With a dull thud and the sound of something tearing, the blade struck bone. The doctor glanced at his a.s.sistant as he handed her the cutter, then he stared at me.

'Well, sir?'

'I came to ask for your help,' I managed to murmur.

'Hacksaw number two, Frau Hummel,' he snapped.

With another little slap, the saw was in his hand. An instant later, he began to hack and cut with a will. 'Help?' he grunted.

I swallowed hard and looked away.

With that infernal rasping in my ears, I concentrated my attention on the case of implements laid out on top of a chest of drawers, and read the label: SURGICAL INSTRUMENTS OF HERMAN HEINRICH, MD DRESD.. The tools were arranged by shape and size: pliers and pincers for gripping flesh; sharp picks and pointed prodders of various dimensions, short to long; then, an armoury of surgical knives-some for paring, others for cleaving; and finally, a selection of saws, some small and fretted, larger ones for hacking. Above each item was a small label, neatly indicating the name of the maker, and date of manufacture. Had the man who was strapped to the mahogany table seen them before the operation began?

Instinctively, I looked across the room again.

Dr Heinrich stared back. In one hand he held up the saw. In the other, a severed calf and foot. He nodded sternly. 'There! Almost done. Just have to cauterise the wound and stop the bleeding . . .'

He must have spotted the expression on my face.

'Would you prefer to wait outside?'

It was very hot in the surgery. Despite the fine weather, the fire was lit, and I soon understood the purpose of it. The lady was coming towards the table, bearing a red-hot iron like a flatended poker which glowed menacingly in the thickening gloom.

'I think I better had,' I said.

No sooner had I closed the door than a raging scream announced that the patient had woken up. The sweet stench of burning flesh filled the house. Agonised shouting followed on, then great, gasping sobs. I had to cover my mouth with both hands to stop myself from retching, and would have welcomed another pair of hands to block my ears as well. Some minutes went by very slowly. The noise boomed suddenly louder as the doctor opened the door, then faded away as he closed it.

He had left the lady to cope with the patient's tears.

'A clod run over by his own milk-cart,' he sighed. He did not offer me his hand, but wiped away some unnameable remnant of gore on his ap.r.o.n. 'Best to have it off while the pain is fresh.'

'What a welcome surprise this is, sir!' I said with a genuine smile.

'Surprise?' he echoed, and his face seemed to darken.

'I had almost convinced myself that you were French. Your signature on the death certificate was . . . well-nigh illegible, to say the least.'

'I was in a hurry,' he replied brusquely, glancing pointedly at a ceramic clock that was hanging on the wall as if 'hurry' was his watchword.

His voice was strained and nervous, though he was young enough. His face was thin, his nose prominent, the skin of his cheeks taut and flat, his forehead broad. He wore his dark brown hair cut very short. His profession seemed to distance him, somehow, and yet, I thought, the doctor was hardly any older than I was. In his mid-thirties, I would have guessed. Only his eyes let him down. They were grey, dull, lacking in animation, as if he spent a great many hours alone in a room working closely on one thing only.

'You must be very busy,' I remarked.

'What can I do for you?' he said, ignoring any attempt at cordiality.

'The dead girl on the beach . . .'

'Another one?' he b.u.t.ted in again, as if such a discovery were not merely possible in Nordcopp, but highly probable.

'Oh no, sir,' I a.s.sured him. 'The same body, I believe. Three days ago . . .'

'I wrote it all in my report,' he interrupted me again. 'I had to certify that she was dead, nothing more. A cursory physical examination for form's sake. The colonel told me that a magistrate would be coming soon. A Prussian magistrate.'

He said no more, but his eyes were never still. If I had been measuring him, he was carefully measuring me.

'General Malaport insisted on it,' I began to say, then I baulked as I tried to find a convincing explanation for the general's decision. Could I tell him that the French high command believed that a public announcement of Prussian guilt would sound better if it came from a Prussian mouth, and in the German tongue?

'I had no choice in the matter,' I said.

'I understand your position,' he murmured dryly.

'I was the nearest Prussian magistrate to hand, I suppose.'

'I dare say,' he fired back, waving his hand dismissively, as if he did not care to know any more than I had already told him.

It made for a strange stop-and-start sort of conversation. We must have seemed like two poor musicians attempting to play a difficult duet together.

'May I ask how you became involved with them?' I enquired.

'If you'd care to step into my study,' he said, 'you will understand, perhaps.'

He crossed to the other side of the hall.

'We should feel flattered that they choose to favour us,' he added, drawing aside a red curtain, and pushing open a narrow door. 'Though I doubt that you are,' he muttered as he led me into the room.

The Prussian soul is a strange, volatile creature. One minute, we are hard and cold, impenetrable and distant. The next, an upsurge of national sympathy, and tender feelings for a fellow Prussian break gently in upon our icy citadel.

'A drop of aqua vitae won't hurt,' he said, as I followed him inside.

I was no longer listening. I was staring at the walls. A collection of pale shapes hung from bright bra.s.s hooks. I realised at once what the future held for the man that I had seen tied down on the doctor's cutting-bench. Half of a left leg with an articulated foot was just one item in the vast display. We might have been inside a gallery of precious objects, but the forms on show were more macabre than they were artistic. There was a whole leg made of wood with metal pins in the knee and ankle joints. Segments of thighs made of plaster, I think. Calves and biceps beaten from metal, which served as moulds or models, perhaps. There were bunched fists, open hands, upper and lower arms, rough-shaped feet without toes. Splints made of wood and metal, braces, metal bands and other more mysterious props that made no sense to me. And all hanging up like pieces of armour in a baronial dining-hall.

'What are . . . they?' I could not find a suitable word.

There was a strong perfume of wax in the room, as if he spent long hours in there, reading or writing by candlelight, perhaps.

Dr Heinrich took two crystal thimbles and a matching decanter from a circular table. 'I have long been fascinated by human engineering,' he said, filling the gla.s.ses to the brim, pointing me to a horse-hair armchair. 'I fashion replacement limbs. There has always been a need for them here on the coast. That is what the French require of me. I am not merely a physician.'

He raised his gla.s.s in a toast, though he did not sit down.

'Have you been here long, sir?' I asked.

'I was born in this house,' he said. 'The practice was my father's. The Heinrich family of Nordcopp goes back a long way.'

'You must know the area well,' I said, intending to make the best advantage of his local knowledge.

'Better than most.'

He drained the contents of his gla.s.s in a single draught.

'It is fortunate for me,' I a.s.sured him. 'Local a.s.sistance is what I need. Your professional view of this case will be invaluable to me. I read your report, of course, but one thing puzzled me. You offered no opinion regarding the cause of death.'

Dr Heinrich raised his shoulders and blew out air.

'It could have been . . . well, just about anything at all,' he said. 'She was struck on the temple with a heavy object. A cudgel, a stone. Who knows? The blow stunned her, but it certainly did not carry off her jaw. I only hope that she was dead when the cutting started.'

'Indeed, the missing jaw.'

I paused, waiting in vain for him to offer some hypothesis.

'Not just the lower jaw,' I went on, breaking the heavy silence, 'the upper teeth as well. Why would anyone want to steal a jaw and a set of teeth? What purpose could such things serve?'

I could hear the note of pleading in my own voice.

He looked up at me. 'Like you, I have seen that stark barbarity and I can find no explanation for it.' He hesitated a moment, as if debating with himself. 'There is only one thing that any man wants in Nordcopp,' he said in a calm penetrating voice. 'Amber.'

He sank once more into silence.

I did not help him. I sipped from my gla.s.s and waited.

'It may not help you much,' he added some moments later, 'but this I can say. Her death was not an accident. It was nothing like the dreadful mishaps that take me down to the beach more often than I like.'

I grasped at this conversational straw. 'This morning on my way to Nordcopp,' I said, 'I saw a girl with her face blown away . . .'

His eyebrows shifted. 'Works for Pastoris in Nordbarn?'

'That's her.'

'Hilde Bruckner,' he confirmed. 'Now, that was an accident. Brought it on herself, the foolish wench! I was stuck with the task of trying to patch her up. She'll die if she comes down with so much as a cold.'

He had made a start, but he stopped again abruptly.

'That mutilation was caused by gunpowder,' I persisted. 'The person who told me also mentioned that a French soldier probably supplied it.'

'Really?' he said, busying himself again with the decanter.

That was it. He had nothing more to say. I had learnt twice as much from Grillet. And yet, I could not believe that Dr Heinrich was so detached, so apparently unconcerned about what was happening in Nordcopp.

I tried a different route.

'I suppose you see a lot of accidents,' I said, nodding at the casts on the wall.

'Farm accidents, like that man in the other room,' he replied. 'Industrial accidents since the French arrived. The girls in Nordbarn sometimes manage to slice off a finger on those grinding-machines, having already lost a foot or a leg in the sea. Aye, that's the major part: the girls on the sh.o.r.e. Gangrene is as common as an ingrown toenail. Occasional explosions, loss of a hand or an eye. I do what I can, but it amounts to little more than chopping.'

'I heard another rumour coming here,' I said.

'You did?' he asked, as my silence stretched out.

I looked hard into his eyes.

They did not flinch away, as I expected. And yet, there was something flinty and fixed about the way he returned my gaze, as if he resented the fact that I obliged him to be sociable. As if he had decided for reasons of his own to say as little to me as possible.

'I heard that other girls have disappeared. Girls who harvest the amber. It is thought that they may have run away . . .'

'Oh, it's quite likely,' he said. 'They run away all the time.'

I sat forward in my chair, edging closer to him.

'They also say,' I lowered my voice, as if to confide in him, 'that human remains have been found along the seash.o.r.e. And that bones have been found in the sand-dunes. Have you heard such rumours, doctor?'

To my surprise, he smiled. It was the first time he had done so since I entered the house. 'Human bones are often found in this area,' he answered promptly. 'I have a small collection of my own.'

My heart seemed to leap inside my ribcage.

'May I see them?' I asked.

He went across to a large black dresser with carved panels, curly spindles and a dozen shallow drawers. 'I keep them here in my Cabinet of Curiosities,' he said, sliding out one of the drawers. It was six or seven feet long, a yard deep. It had been divided up into twenty-odd smaller s.p.a.ces, none of which was shaped quite like any other, by an ingenious system of interlacing struts. The exhibits were of differing sizes: some quite tiny, others relatively large. I recognised a tibia.

'Did you find them all yourself?' I asked.

'I have bought one or two of proven local origin, but the others were found in the area by my father, or myself. A natural philosopher, he started off this collection more than fifty years ago. He discovered this skull in the dunes out beyond Nordbarn.' He ran his finger around the rim of a large hole in the brow. 'It was made by a stone axe, I'd say. I have a decent watercolour of such a weapon somewhere in my print collection. Our ancestors lived by hunting and fishing. Sometimes, when food was short, I suspect that they may have eaten one another.'

'How old are these bones, then?'

Dr Heinrich smiled. 'There you have it, sir,' he said. 'Exactly, I cannot say. Accurate dating is the great curse of modern antiquarianism. My father used to make an educated guess, but that is hardly scientific, as I'm certain you would agree. There is a lively academic debate going on at the moment. There is no known method for judging the age of ancient bones. Being so resistant to decay, they are usually dated by a.s.sociation. If we find, say, a small skeleton in a tomb along with a round Roman shield and a short sword, we may safely a.s.sume that the contents, including the bones, date from Roman times.'

'And in the absence of such evidence?'

'Your guess is as good as mine.'

I took a deep breath. 'How many of these exhibits can be reliably dated?'

Heinrich lifted up the tibia and held it in his hands. 'I know what are thinking, sir. You are asking yourself whether this bone, and others like it, might belong to women who have died more recently on the coast.'

'You are correct,' I admitted.

'And you are wrong,' he said with the measured authority of a collector. 'The bones found by my father and I have all been carefully doc.u.mented. Regarding exactly where and when they were found, that is. Each one bears a label, and is carefully entered in the Heinrich catalogue. There is little room for doubt.'

He picked up a small hollow bone, held it to his eye and stared at me through the hole. 'This one, for example. It is very well-doc.u.mented, sir. A vertebra amulet. It came from the crypt of the local church three years ago. The coast of Prussia has always been a violent place. Pagan tribes, Vikings, brigands, the Teutonic Order, all of them seeking amber. Then, the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Russians. Now, the French . . .'

'You mention amber,' I said. 'As a collector . . .'

'Not of amber, sir, I a.s.sure you. It costs too much for my humble means.'

'Still, you must have an opinion,' I insisted. 'For instance, regarding the creatures, flies and so on, that are sometimes found in amber. Were there men on Earth when those insects ruled the air?'

Dr Heinrich fixed me with an inquisitive stare.