A Visible Darkness Part 51

'I have no idea,' I lied.

He narrowed his eyes and peered at me.

'You know me well enough by now, Herr Magistrate. You know that I am a practical man, a mechanical engineer. I do not easily follow certain ways of reasoning. A mind like Gurten's, well, I . . . I hardly know what to make of it.' He waved his hands at a swarm of midges that might have been a manifestation of the strangeness he was talking of. 'If I thought I might be able to persuade the emperor to wash his hands of Prussian amber, I wouldn't hesitate one moment. Good G.o.d!' he exclaimed. 'You'd think we had violated sacred ground, and that the local G.o.ds and devils had risen up as one to protect it. The Spanish have got their claws into us, but they might prove nothing in comparison to these fiends of yours.' He shook his head again. 'I'd have had a hard job believing you, sir, if not for what one of my men dragged out of the sea.'

It was my turn to frown. Had he been hiding something from me?

'You said that you did not find a corpse . . .'

'Not Gurten's, no. But we found what Gurten showed to you, claiming that it was your son.' He turned away and cursed beneath his breath. 'What sort of a devil would think to play such a vicious trick on his neighbour? It would have been kinder if he had tried to murder you.'

'What was it?' I asked, hardly expecting an explanation which would diminish the horror of what I believed I had seen.

Les Halles leant forward over the table. 'A badger, Stiffeniis. A badger cub that he had skinned. It made a fair pa.s.s for an unborn child.' He sat back more easily. 'The man was an illusionist, a mighty cruel one. He had set his heart on one thing: he wanted to break yours.'

He stared at me in silence. He expected me to make some comment.

I stared back, said nothing.

'He almost managed. Isn't that true?' He breathed out with such force and for so long that he must have risked a collapse of his lungs. 'When I saw that gruesome thing, I realised something terrible was happening. Having seen it, I can comprehend the folly that you have just described, including this mad desire to make a statue based on the anatomy of his victims. How long has it been going on? How many women had to die?'

I shook my head. 'The deaths of Kati and Ilse only came to light because their mutilated corpses were found. Two more were found in Konigsberg. G.o.d knows how many other victims there have been.'

I spread my hands wide in a gesture of helplessness.

'Or where the body of Edviga lies,' he added. 'If he killed her, too.'

'Impossible to say.'

He pushed his empty cup towards me. 'I don't suppose you've anything stronger to offer me?'

I went across to the pantry. Lotte kept a bottle of sloe gin there for emergencies. I remembered her opening it the day the news arrived that the battle of Jena had been lost. I placed the flagon on the table, pulled out the stopper, half-filled his cup, and pushed it over to him.

His large square hand closed around it like a vice.

'Let me ask you something,' he said, and drank it off in a single draught.

I raised my palms, as if to say that I was at his service, ready to try and cope with him and his doubts.

'When you told the soldier that your family was in danger,' he began, his eyes sparkling bright, 'you thought that he'd been here already. That he had killed your wife, your child, and whoever else was in the house. Very good,' he said, running his finger first around the inside of the cup, then licking it. 'So, why do you think he didn't do so? What was there to stop him?'

For an instant I was tempted to tell him that Edviga had saved my wife. But I did not do so. I would have set him on her trail. Then again, if he discovered that I had lied to him once, he would believe that I had hidden other facts from him.

'Gurten-Vulpius was human,' I replied. 'He was not the demon that you seem to think. Obviously, he could not be in every place at once. He left Konigsberg long before I did. I had to free myself, walk all the way to DeWitz's workshop, see the statue, then find myself a horse. A common hack from the coaching-inn, as it happens. He had a couple of hours' lead on me, I'd guess. When he arrived in Nordcopp, he killed those people at the doctor's house. Perhaps . . .' The idea took shape as I said it. 'Perhaps he had not even been to Lotingen at that point. He may have wished to kill me first. To clear me out of his path, so to speak. That trick with the dead badger was meant to stun me, and render me defenceless. It almost worked. Having killed me, he would then have made his way to Lotingen and obtained with great tranquillity what he was really after. My wife would have been entirely at his mercy.'

As I spun this fantasy to hide Edviga's role, I wondered whether it was a true reflection of what Gurten had actually done. In reverse, of course. He had come too late to Lotingen. The child had been delivered prematurely. Had he returned to Konigsberg to show me what he had actually achieved, then followed me to Nordcopp to punish me for what he considered to be my treachery?

'Let me say one thing, Herr Magistrate Stiffeniis.' The forefinger of les Halles came up and pointed at my heart. 'We'll give ourselves a week. You write your summary of the investigation for General Malaport, and see if you can make some sense of what has happened. In the meantime, I'll keep looking for the corpse of Gurten.' He shook his finger sternly at me. 'That man did not think like any other human being, nor did he behave like one. I'll keep looking 'til I find him. The baby is a girl, you said?'

I nodded.

'I want that child and her mother to sleep in peace in the nights to come!'

40.

LIGHT SHONE FORTH in fragmented sunbeams which caught the clouds, highlighting the edges, darkening the shadows. The mist began to lift. I could see the fields, the trees, the house. All was calm. All seemed right. The night had pa.s.sed. Another day had begun. As it must.

I closed the gate and made my way along the lane to town, as I had done almost every day of the nine years that I had been living in Lotingen. I had called the a.s.sizes for that morning, intending to conclude the case of Keillerhaus v. Gaffenburger, the very same litigation that I had been obliged to postpone the day that General Malaport had sent me post-haste to the coast.

The 'Silly Cow-Pat' case, as I had privately christened it.

My boots crunched loudly on a black carpet of flies and insects. The noise raised my spirits. That enemy had been defeated. The night before, a cold wind had begun to blow. It whistled in from the coast like a witch's breath, and instantly all the flies and insects fell dead. That wind had sucked the life out of them. They dropped to the ground like bits of lead, their wings and sh.e.l.ls hard, dry, dull in colour.

In no time, the earth was coated with them.

I thought of the creatures imprisoned in the frozen world of amber. They were larger and more monstrous than the ones that I was stepping on.

Could anyone hope to bring that world to life again?

Could any man believe that such b.e.s.t.i.a.lity was buried in our minds and souls?

In my mind and soul?

Also by Michael Gregorio.

Days of Atonement.

Critique of Criminal Reason.