A Visible Darkness Part 6

'What is the name of the soldier?'

'Pierre Grillet,' he hissed, as if reluctant to reveal so little.

'What sort of a man is he?'

'First-rate.'

His answers were becoming shorter, as if he resented being questioned. The fact that I was a Prussian, a civilian, and a magistrate who threatened to block his schemes, went ill with him, I suppose.

'May I speak with him?' I asked carefully.

The colonel was silent for a moment.

'My men work very hard. Most of them will be sleeping. You can have a word tomorrow morning,' he conceded finally. 'I'll send him to you.'

I thanked him, wondering at the same time whether concern for his men and their sleep, or a reluctance to allow what I asked, had inspired his answer.

I put my alb.u.m away, picked up the hanging shroud, and was about to cover the body again, but the left hand of les Halles shot out and seized my wrist.

'What do you think you are doing?' he said, separating his words like a teacher telling off a boy who has been too bold.

'This body has been deprived of every dignity,' I said. 'I see no reason for her to go naked into the ground.'

'You have not done yet, monsieur,' he said roughly, pushing my hand away.

'What do you mean?' Did I need to explain to him what must be obvious to any man with eyes? 'This woman was killed by blows to the head. The lower half of her face has been ransacked by a maniac. This corpse can tell us nothing more.'

'I know why she was killed,' he snapped back. 'I know who did it. I cannot put my finger on the man, but I can point you in the right direction. This body will confirm what I am about to say.'

He raised his hand to hush me.

'She was trafficking in stolen amber,' he pressed on. 'She was murdered for it. Instead of paying what she asked, the smuggler struck her down and took it for free. She spoke out of turn, perhaps. She may have threatened to give his name to me. He made an example of her. A warning to all the other amber-girls. Keep your mouths shut. That was the message. That is the path you must follow. The illegal trade in stolen amber. Prussian thieves and smugglers . . .'

'General Malaport did not tell me you had solved the case,' I interrupted. 'Why did he bother to send for me?'

Irony was alien to les Halles, it seemed.

'I can tell you that, monsieur,' he replied a.s.suredly. 'The coffers of the army are low. Now, Spain is stretching our resources. A drawn-out war in a poor country costs vast amounts of money. That's where Prussian amber comes into the equation. Nordcopp will yield ten times as much to us as it ever did to you.'

'I do not see your point,' I objected.

'There's one small problem,' he nodded at the corpse on the table. 'A Prussian s.l.u.t has been murdered, and diplomacy dictates that a Prussian magistrate should examine the case. We want nothing to do with the business.'

'A Prussian s.l.u.t?' I repeated his phrase slowly, as if savouring the words. 'So much for French diplomacy.'

'Don't bandy morals with me,' he snarled. 'I was not born a colonel in the emperor's engineers. My words are rough, my thinking rougher. I know the tricks of the poor. They steal a silver thimble and swallow it, knowing that they'll s.h.i.t it out in a day or two. Amber is a jewel, and a stomach is a bank-vault. Open her up, Herr Procurator Stiffeniis, and see what's in her entrails. And while you're about it, stick your finger into every hole that you can think of. If I were you, I'd put my gloves back on.'

That night, I perpetrated the final indignity on the corpse of Kati Rodendahl.

The search did not prove fruitless.

8.

A NOISE DISTURBED my sleep.

A dull blow repeated at regular intervals.

A bludgeon beating me slowly into consciousness.

I listened in the darkness of the empty hut.

An echoing thump, the drawn-out rattle of chains, a brief pregnant pause, a teeth-clenching rasp of metal sliding on metal, then another resounding thump. I might have been in Paris once again, watching public executions from the foot of the guillotine in the Place de la Revolution, but no coa.r.s.e cheers went up as another once-n.o.ble head fell into the waiting wicker basket. Instead, the chains began to jingle and clank, metal sheared once more, and that thump pounded out again.

I sat up, felt around for my boots in the darkness. The leather was cold to my touch, slick with damp. A jolt of pain racked my shoulder as I stood up stiffly. I had not undressed the night before, but slept in the clothes I had worn all day. I did not need to drag myself from any warm coc.o.o.n; I was already wearing it.

I unlatched the door and stepped outside.

The sharp chill of the early morning was unexpected.

A dense white fog rolled in off the sea.

Instinctively, I slipped my hands into my pockets.

My fingers closed around the piece of amber that I had removed from the mutilated corpse the night before. I held the nugget up, recalling last night's labour in all its horror. Though diabolical, the colonel's intuition had been correct. The dead girl had hidden a stolen piece of amber about her body. She had tucked it deep inside her s.e.x. Larger than a plum, even I could see that the stone was valuable. It was a ravishing gold colour, as if it had been cleaned and polished, with darker veins of red threading through it.

More surprising still was what that piece contained.

A female wasp in the act of laying her eggs. A stream of tiny bubbles squirted from its tail like the trail of a shooting star. The insect was large, its thorax swollen. Each detail of its body and wings was as perfect as the day that it had died. Its front legs pushed forward, as if it had been seeking desperately to break free from the dripping resin that had fixed and drowned it.

Had a thousand years gone by?

More, perhaps?

Scientists in Prussia and abroad had recently begun to study amber, claiming that G.o.d's Creation might be better understood by examining the plants and creatures which it contained, claiming, indeed, that the Garden of Eden itself had once existed somewhere on our Prussian sh.o.r.es.

The memory of the insects in my garden returned to mind.

Flies, ants, beetles, attacking and devouring anything that could be eaten. I did not pretend to be a man of science, yet there seemed to me to be nothing which distinguished those living insects from the creature trapped inside that piece of amber. That wasp could be dated to the birth of the world, they said. Insects had survived for aeons. Like us, they had persevered. And yet, I thought, insects had no visible conscience, showed no mercy. Eat, or be eaten, that was the law of Nature. They had consumed the corpse of every creature born since Adam and Eve.

A cold shiver ran across my shoulders.

Would they persist when I-when we-had turned to long-forgotten dust?

I shook these strange ideas from my head. I had a case to solve. I must begin by establishing the facts. Had the girl been murdered as she tried to smuggle her treasure away from the coast, as Colonel les Halles believed?

He had shown me the death certificate the night before.

Naked body of a woman found on Nordcopp sh.o.r.e. Aged thirty, give or take a year or two. Deceased as a result of blows to the head. Whether accidental or intentional remains unclear. Grave damage to the face inhibits easy identification. Savaged by animals after death?

Signed & sworn, this day, 11th August 1808.

The report was written in French. It had been signed with an illegible scrawl by the company doctor.

Here was another source of information.

A brief note had been added in the same hand, identifying Kati Rodendahl as one of the amber-workers from the camp.

I let the piece of amber slide back into the safety of my pocket.

'It is evidence,' I had insisted. 'It may prove useful.'

'Keep it safe,' les Halles had warned me, giving in at last, reluctantly allowing me to carry it away with me. 'That piece of amber was stolen from us. It belongs to France.'

A narrow plank walkway linked the seven huts which stood on the crest of the dunes. Somewhere below was the beach. I could hear the sound of waves. I was fifty yards away from the waterline, though I did not know it. The dense white fog shrouded the scene that would, otherwise, have presented itself to my sight. All was still and silent, except for that endless sequence of repeated sounds: the rattling of chains, the shriek of metal, the concluding thump.

Far out to sea, the fog merged with the grey waters of the Baltic Sea. It was impossible to say where one began and the other ended. Further out, however, I could see a silhouetted gold-edged horizon, and I caught a glimpse of a sail-a fishing-boat?-a mere flash of white in the far distance. Suddenly, a bar of pink shot into the sky. Other bars shot off at different angles as the sun floated gently upwards like a wedge of honey-coloured amber. It had no more power to heat the world than the glimmering stub of a distant candle. And where the weak light could not penetrate, the sky above the fog was dark blue, shimmering into coal-black.

The noise did not cease.

Somebody was already hard at work.

It might have been a procession of ghostly Teutonic Knights in rusty, clanking armour, going home to rest in some funeral crypt after a midnight roust. The Order had ruled the Baltic coast with an iron fist for centuries. They had been the first to organise the gathering of amber, the first to regulate the trade. Control had pa.s.sed to local lords, then, finally, to the Hohenzollerns. Now, the French had laid their hands upon our riches.

With a start, I realised that someone was lurking at my shoulder.

I am tall, but the man was taller. And he was thinner, too. His blue woollen jacket rucked up in folds where his belt pulled too tightly at his waist. His face was the ashen colour of lye soap, his features utterly undistinguished, except for two thick-lidded eyes which peered back at me without blinking. They reminded me of the unseeing black b.u.t.tons sewn onto the pale cotton face of my daughter's rag doll.

'I am Pierre Grillet,' he announced. 'I was told that you wanted to speak with me.'

'The soldier who found the body on the beach?'

'The colonel said to take you in to breakfast,' he said, though he did not confirm or deny what I had said. He simply turned and walked away, taking great long strides along the narrow walkway of rotting planks.

I had eaten nothing since leaving Lotingen, and I was famished. I followed him willingly to the hut at the far end of the row.

He threw open the door, then stepped aside to let me enter first.

The aroma of toasted corn hung in the air in wisps of blue smoke. Coffee had become a rare commodity since the English set up their blockade of the Channel, but toasted corn will do for men who have forgotten the taste of anything better. I looked with yearning at the breakfast table, the plates piled high with fresh bread. French officers were making short work of the feast. Every man in the room stopped eating. All of them stared at me, and not one word was said. It would have been impossible to hold a private conversation.

Reluctantly, I turned to Grillet.

'It might better if we speak out here,' I said.

'As you prefer, monsieur.'

There was something sly and insinuating in his reedy voice.

'You speak good French,' he added, as he closed the door on the tempting smell of food, and we turned our faces to the fog once more.

The compliment spurred me to be brusque. 'Just tell me how you found the body. Make it short, and keep it simple. For the sake of a foreigner, do you understand me?'

He nodded, sniffed, began to speak.

'Three days ago, I was scouting up along the coast. It was shortly after breakfast. This time of day, more or less. I'd been on duty all that night, so I had the morning off. I'd gone about a mile in that direction,' he pointed away to the east, 'when I came upon her. She was lying face down on the beach. As naked as Eve before the Fall. I wondered what was going on, of course. It isn't every day that you find a . . .'

'You have told me what you saw,' I said. 'Now, tell me what you did.'

He cleared his throat. 'I called out to her, that's what I did. But she did not reply. I guessed what was up, of course. Like I said, a naked woman lying on the sh.o.r.e. And way above the waterline. She hadn't been swept ash.o.r.e. I went up close, and prodded her leg with the toe of my boot. When she didn't move, or cry out, I ran back here and reported what I'd found. I didn't even turn her over. No idea what she looked like. I didn't see her face until the sergeant came and rolled her over . . .'

'And you were alone when you found her?'

'Just me, monsieur.'

He had no one to corroborate his story. What he told me was what he wished to tell me. It might be more or less than the truth.

'What were you doing on that stretch of coast?'

'I went to bathe,' he replied.

Soldiers are not the cleanest men in the world.

'Do you often wash?' I asked him.

'Tuesday, or Wednesday, as a rule,' he said. 'I'll not wash this week, though. Not after what happened.'

'Do you always go to the same spot?'

'No, sir. I'd never been so far along the sh.o.r.e.'

'Why did you go so far off this time, then?'

He pointed down to the beach. Beneath the blanket of fog, the noise of the work went on unbroken. 'The sea is dirty here since they started digging. You go in white, but you come out blue.'

'Blue?' I quizzed him.

'There's something hidden under the sand and pebbles. It's a blue clay, one of the girls was telling me. It breaks up into powder when they pierce it, and turns the water into a sort of blue dye. There's a phrase for it in German . . . blaue Erde, I think they call it. That's where the amber is found.'

'Did you kill her?' I asked him bluntly.

He was the first to admit that he had seen the body. He had been alone, and was in an area beyond regular French military control. He could have murdered her without being seen, then fabricated the story of happening by chance upon her body. It was a perfect cover. In his apparent openness, he appeared to be above suspicion.

His small eyes opened wide with shock.