Critique Of Criminal Reason Part 9

'Has a "leech" been called?' I asked.

'Papists!' she spat. 'Stayed clear so far, they have.'

'Your master was murdered three days ago,' I ploughed on. 'Late in the evening. Did he tell you where he was going when he left the house?'

The woman lifted her eyes, stretched her jaw, and grinned. 'Master allus kep' his counsel to hisself. Never knew what was going on in his mind. He was a dark horse, all right.'

'He carried on his business from this house,' I persisted. 'Which clients came to visit him that day?'

'I've no idea. None at all. That front door was allus open. Seven 'til five, Monday to Sat'day. They come, they go.'

I tried another tack. 'Did you hear anyone shouting, or quarrelling with Herr Tifferch?'

'I keeps meself to the kitchen,' she replied. 'It's warm out there.'

'Do you know if your master had any enemies?' I asked.

Agneta Susterich thought this question over for some moments. Then she looked at me with a smile, and my expectations rose.

'Only the missis,' she declared. 'Used to scream every time she saw his face. Does that answer you?'

It most certainly did not. Whoever had produced those livid cuts and scars on Lawyer Tifferch's body, it had undoubtedly not been his wife. 'Did anything out of the ordinary happen the day he died?' I pressed on.

Agneta Susterich sighed aloud, her annoyance growing more visible with each new question.

'He worked in the morning. As usual. Had lunch with his wife. As usual. Sat in his office 'til five. As usual, I went to Griisterstra.s.sehaus...'

'What's that?'

'The Pietist Temple. I left a cold supper out for them. As allus. I was back at half past seven to put the mistress into bed. As usual. I never seen him at all, but that was nothing new. He went out every night...'

'And where did he go?' I interrupted.

The woman's ugly face twisted with disgust. 'I can only imagine,' she said. 'I seen him staggering down them stairs that many times of a morning. Pain was writ all over his face. As if he just been kicked in the b.o.l.l.o.c.ks by an 'orse. Can't hardly stand on his own two feet some days! Them Catholics like to sin, all right. The priest absolves 'em quick enough for a thaler or two.'

'Do you hear him return at night as a rule?' I asked, coughing to stifle a laugh at this lurid description of the rival faith.

'I says my prayers and I goes to sleep. Ain't no use waiting up for the Devil. More so that night, 'cos he never come home, did he? Night Watch knocked us up afore the first crow of the c.o.c.k.'

'So, where is his office?'

'There are four doors out in that hallway,' the woman said. 'One's mine, one's hers, one's his. The other goes upstairs to the sleeping quarters.'

'Show me to your master's workroom,' I said.

Before leaving the sitting room, I turned to the widow again. She was as still and silent as the plaster idol in the corner. She had given no sign of life since we entered the room, and she showed no sign as we left it.

Agneta Susterich pointed to a closed door on the other side of the hall.

'That's where he worked,' she said. 'It's locked.'

'Do you have the key?'

'Master kept it,' she replied.

'But surely you cleaned the room for Herr Tifferch?'

'He cleans it hisself. Herr Tifferch let no one in, except when he was here. Customers, an' that. Go on, break it down,' she challenged. 'You're the police, ain't you?'

Koch stepped forward with his clasp-knife. 'Shall I try my luck, sir?'

I nodded and the sergeant dropped on one knee, thrusting the blade into the ancient lock. He prodded away and twisted, while the maid stood watching him, as if he were a thief, shaking her head with the disgust she seemed to reserve for the world at large. With a sudden crack, the door swung back on its hinges.

'You have a talent for the work, Koch!' I exclaimed.

'I just hope he can close it again,' the maid muttered, as if Herr Tifferch might come back and berate her for the ruined lock.

Larger than the sitting room we had left, there was only one desk in the centre of the room. Two straight-backed chairs were set out in front of it. The notary kept no clerk, the maid reported, but handled all his business for himself. Gla.s.s-fronted bookcases lining the walls held tight scrolls of doc.u.ments bound up with ribbons of diverse colours. Laid out in alphabetical order, they gave an impression of industriousness.

'Mistress needs a-changing,' the maid announced from the doorway, gazing into the office as if it were a forbidden land. She disappeared without waiting for permission, and shortly after, we heard her shouting in the room across the hall. In answer, the lady of the house began to scream. The high-pitched keening went on for quite some time.

'Herr Tifferch's situation was not a comfortable one,' Koch observed.

'Light some candles, Koch,' I said. 'I hope to know a great deal more about his life before we've done.'

For the next two hours, we sifted through the dusty doc.u.ments in that room, rolling them up again and putting away what was useless or irrelevant. Some were thirty years old, the paper yellow and brittle with age, legal transactions of every imaginable sort: marriage contracts, bills of purchase, receipts of sale and lading, inheritances resolved and claims disputed. Anything in those papers might have been important, I suppose, but nothing came to light that could be directly linked with the lawyer's death, no indication that might serve to connect his murder with any of the other recent killings.

The last case on which Tifferch had been working was laid out neatly on his desk. Arnolph von Rooysters, a rich burgher, had left all his moveable property to his butler, a man named Ludwig Frontissen. Apparently, the relatives had tried to reverse this decision, but Tifferch had a sworn testament in the hand of the dead man in favour of the servant which settled the argument. I had sat myself down at Tifferch's desk to read these papers; Koch was busy on the other side of the room with the last of the scrolls.

'Herr Stiffeniis,' Koch said, 'there's a cupboard here that's locked.'

Having noticed a large bunch of keys in one of the desk-drawers, I took them out and tossed them across to him. 'See if one of those will fit,' I said.

I heard him jangling the keys uselessly against the lock while I continued reading a sequence of letters and declarations relating to the quarrel between von Rooysters' relatives and the butler. The descendants of the deceased had appealed to a certain Minister in Berlin who had written to Tifferch to know exactly how things stood in the case. Tifferch maintained that the law was undeniably on the side of the fortunate butler. Minister Aschenbrenner, who was a distant relative of the von Rooysters, agreed with Tifferch, but proposed a compromise to put an end to the squabble. Accordingly, Tifferch had offered the family members one half of the inheritance, which, it seemed, the butler was well disposed to share with them. The dates on some of these doc.u.ments went back a couple of years, and Tifferch had most recently concluded the dispute to the advantage and the satisfaction of all parties. There was absolutely nothing that might suggest a possible reason for his murder.

'It's no good, sir,' Koch's voice broke in upon my thoughts. 'None of the keys fits.'

'Well, then,' I replied, 'do as the housemaid suggests.'

'Sir?'

'Force the lock, Sergeant. If he hid the key, he probably kept money and valuables in there.'

With a nod Koch set to work on the lock. Some minutes later, he let out a grunt of triumphant satisfaction. Then, silence followed.

'Well, Koch?' I asked impatiently, dragging myself away from the paper I was reading. 'What have you found?'

'You'd better come and see for yourself, sir,' he replied.

I clapped my hands to remove the dust, then joined him on the far side of the room. Koch had placed a candle on one of the chairs to light the cupboard, which was deep and dark. On the top shelf stood a grinning porcelain bust of Napoleon Bonaparte. I stretched out my hand to pick the statue up, and almost dropped it as my fingers closed upon the base. The pressure of my thumb had triggered a hair-spring: the Emperor's hat flipped up and two satanic horns popped out of the flat hair on his head.

'What a remarkable toy!' I exclaimed with a laugh. 'What else is there?'

On the shelf below was a stack of pamphlets and broadsheets, which Koch and I examined with mounting curiosity. They were ribald and even erotic in their contents, and referred in the most scabrous terms to the Emperor of France. If the anonymous cartoonists were to be believed, Bonaparte showed a marked s.e.xual preference for the animal world. Donkeys he particularly favoured, though in one instance, he was portrayed in amorous coupling with a female elephant. As Koch was quick to point out, the satirical comments beneath these drawings were in the German language, and the obscenities appeared to have been printed on a hand-press using wooden print-blocks, a system long out of commercial fashion.

'I wonder where he bought these,' I said, glancing through the pages.

'Do you think he might belong to a political group, sir?' Koch asked.

'A scurrilous circulating library, more like! You could be right, though. It seems as if Herr Tifferch led a busy secret life.'

Were these seditious materials, I asked myself, the cause of his domestic problems? Had his wife chanced upon those disgusting images, the shock proving too great for her health to withstand? The sudden knowledge that one's apparently respectable husband was, instead, a radical pervert might quite easily trans.m.u.te a woman of over-strong religious ideals into a living statue.

A living statue...

My mother's image rose to my mind once more. Sweat broke out on my forehead, and a nervous tic in my throat brought on a coughing fit.

'It is dusty in here, isn't it, sir?' Koch responded diligently. 'Would you like me to get you a gla.s.s of water?'

'That won't be necessary,' I replied, and really it was not. The maternal ghost with her desolate air of constant accusation had fled at the sound of his voice.

'Do we need to go through all of these pamphlets, Herr Procurator?' Koch asked, his dislike for the task quite evident.

'I am afraid we must, Koch,' I said. 'We cannot afford to leave any avenue unexplored.'

'I see, sir,' Koch replied, and made haste to do what he had so hastily wished to abandon not a moment before.

Still, I tried to make it easier for him. We examined the leaflets front and back, looking for names. None was found, of course, except for noms-de-plume of an evidently fantastical and francophobic origin: Cul de Monsieur, Seigneur Duc de Porc, Milord Mont du Merde, and so on. We returned this material to its shelf, then moved on down the cupboard. A large, brown velvet box on the next shelf was closed by a small padlock. Applying himself to the key-ring again, and finding no help there, Koch removed the padlock with his knife on my orders. The box opened up to reveal a domestic tableau in wax and wood: Bonaparte and his paramour, Josephine Beauharnais. The Emperor was standing, the Empress sitting on a stool, and they were facing one another. There was an odd expression on the woman's pretty face, her mouth open, her eyes gaping wide, as if she were in a state of shock or terror. At the jerk of a rod on the base of the model, Napoleon's trousers slid down around his ankles, his third leg rose stiffly into the air it was as long as the other two and hovered close to the mouth of the lady. A lever on the other side of the automaton caused the woman's head to lean forward and do perverse and beastly things that no self-respecting French Empress ought to do in public.

'A most...unusual sense of humour,' Koch murmured uncertainly.

Without looking at his face, I knew that he was blushing.

Could Herr Tifferch have been murdered by Napoleonic sympathisers in Konigsberg? A man might keep such toys a secret from his wife and maid, but surely he would share them with his friends. And friends in times as dangerous as ours need to be handled with care. Since the revolution in France, not every man in Prussia is as patriotic as he ought to be.

'How strong are sympathies for France in the city, Sergeant?'

Koch stroked his chin before he answered. 'Prussia has been isolated by the political events of the past few months, sir. We have so few allies, and Bonaparte intends that we shall have none. Then, he will attack. But he does have followers in Konigsberg. He has supporters all over Europe...' He stopped, and looked at me. 'But do you really think that some fanatic killed Herr Tifferch for his ribald att.i.tude towards the French Emperor, sir? What about those scars on his body? How do they fit in?'

'I don't know,' I said with a sigh. 'I can't see any link. Rhunken's reports make no mention of whip marks on the other bodies, but he seemed to believe that the connection between the murders was political. He suspected that there was a conspiracy of some sort behind all of these deaths, although he could not say what sort of plot it was. This,' I said, indicating the collection of items in the cupboard, 'appears to lead us in the same general direction.'

Just then, a ray of sunlight entered the room. Like a beam piercing the dark interior of a camera obscura, the light settled for an instant on a rolled-up bundle of dark purple silk pushed to the back of the bottom shelf. Uncertain what Herr Tifferch's next posthumous trick might be, I retrieved the bundle carefully and held it up in both hands for Koch to see. It was as long and thick as a spicy Danish dried sausage.

Setting this object down on the top of the notary's desk, I carefully rolled it open. Koch and I looked at the contents in silent disbelief for some moments.

'This may explain the pained expression on Tifferch's face when he came down to breakfast,' I said.

'I've never seen such a thing,' said Koch in a hushed voice.

I took up the dark leather stick, and shook it in the air. Three long tails with knotted tips waved free in a sinister cascade. 'At least we know what made those lacerations on Tifferch's body, Koch. Old scars, new wounds...'

Koch struggled to find his voice. 'Do you think he did it to himself, sir?'

'There can be little doubt,' I said. 'But whether to punish himself for his sins, or as a source of s.e.xual pleasure, we cannot even begin to guess. Perhaps both?'

'That such a thing could exist in Konigsberg!' It was clear from the expression of shock on Koch's plain, honest face that he found himself in a new and disturbing dimension. 'In France they do such things, I've heard. In Paris. But here in Prussia?'

'Put everything back where you found it,' I said quietly, watching as he returned each object to its allotted place in the cupboard. He handled them as if they might corrode his fingertips, closing the door again with gusto.

As we took our leave, Agneta Susterich was preparing to feed her mistress. Frau Tifferch was seated in a stiff-backed chair without her veil, a white linen cloth spread protectively over her finery. Her round face was puffy, white, expressionless, her pale blue eyes two empty blanks fixed on the bowl of gruel on the table before her.

'I hope you've found what you need to catch Herr Tifferch's murderer,' the maid huffed sharply over her shoulder, the only note of sympathy she had offered for her master since we stepped into the house. 'You know where the front door is. Her pap's the only blessed thing the lady's interested in. She won't be kept a-waiting.'

Outside in the street I felt a grey blanket of depression fall upon my spirits. What sort of life would Frau Tifferch lead without her husband? What future did she have, a helpless woman in the company of a bitter maid in an empty house? Then again, I thought, what was Agneta Susterich's lot? A Pietist forced to live in a Catholic shrine she hated, she was bound to discover the secrets of her master's cupboard sooner or later. Would the stark revelation make her less caring of her mistress, more resentful of her sinful master? Would she continue to nurse Frau Tifferch? And if she did not, who would? The person, or persons, who had killed Jeronimus Tifferch had brought distress into that household. How much havoc had been caused, and how much more had been swept away forever, with the deaths of Jan Konnen, Paula-Anne Brunner and Johann Gottfried Haase? I knew from my own personal experience the immense distress that a single thoughtless action could unleash on the lives of the people close to a family tragedy.

'Sir?'

I looked up, and took stock of my surroundings. The winter sun shone weakly above the almost-touching roofs in a narrow strip of blue sky. Packed ice flashed as blue as steel on the cobblestones. The cold wind cut deeper than a sharp knife as it whistled in from the sea.

'What are your conclusions, Herr Stiffeniis?' Koch asked cautiously as we made our way to the end of the street.

'We have found a whip in a cupboard,' I said. 'But we still do not know exactly how or why Herr Tifferch died. And neither have we been able to find any connection between him and the others who were murdered. I hardly have room in my head for conclusions.'

I lapsed into a dejected silence as we emerged from the street into a small snow-filled square with a huddle of leafless trees in the centre. I had hoped to discover a great deal more.

'Do you think that a war with France is inevitable, sir?' Koch asked suddenly.

'I certainly hope not,' I returned promptly, 'but there isn't much we can do about it. Russia hovering on our right flank; France on the other, and all this idle chatter about Bonaparte! Who's for him, who's against him. And whether King Frederick Wilhelm can keep Prussia out of it. And will the Frenchman let him? The argument never seems to end. In such a climate of mounting suspicion and intrigue, these murders aren't helping things one little bit.'

General Katowice had warned me that whether the country went to war, or not, might depend on how I managed the criminal investigation. The memory of his alarm set my head spinning once again. Nervously, I unhooked my fob-watch and glanced at the face. It was almost ten to twelve.

'Is Klopstra.s.se far from here?' I asked briskly.

I had no wish to be late. Herr Jachmann was a stickler for watching the clock. He was very like his oldest and dearest friend in that respect.

'It's just across the square, sir.'

'Good!' I exclaimed.

Before Koch could say a word, I struck out across the snow-filled square.

Chapter 10.