“The two statues were originally looted from Molsberg Castle and placed as a matched pair flanking the main staircase in the French Officers’ Casino in the Corn Market.”
From the smooth way she recited this I guessed that this was part of Petra’s routine spiel. There was photographic evidence of the statue being fully intact as late as 1998, but when the square was redeveloped in the early 2000s it was found to be missing its face.
“It was quite a scandal,” said Petra. “The builders were adamant that they had found the statue in the present condition. Even if they were not directly responsible, the French military were certainly indirectly responsible for the safekeeping of such a valuable artefact.”
As a result it had been agreed that both statues would be relocated to the City Museum for safekeeping.
Staphylos had been depicted wearing what I could only describe as a hipster toga which hung precariously off his hips and left one shoulder bare. He held a bunch of grapes aloft in his left hand and a second bunch at waist level in the other.
“Notice anything?” I asked Vanessa, and pointed at the lower of the bunches of grapes.
“Oh shit,” she said.
With the same skill and attention that he’d shown depicting Methe’s see-through top, Tietz had sculpted the strands and fuzz of the fungal infection that covered the grapes.
I'm not exactly impressed with your police work so far,” said Vanessa.
We were sitting in her office back at the Kriminaldirection HQ, which I’d just learnt was nicknamed the Post Office because of the main branch located next door. They’d offered me one of the spare offices on the floor above but I’d chosen to stay in Vanessa’s. Once the local police had got over their unalloyed delight at having me in their midst, their first instinct was to give me an office and spend the rest of the inquiry tiptoeing past my door. The police believe they have enough problems without the weirdos from the KDA complicating things.
Most police—obviously Vanessa was different.
“Really? Which aspect do you find lacking?” I asked.
I was logged into the Rheinland-Pfälzer’s LaPo computer and making random keyword searches of their crime database to see if anything relevant jumped out.
“The lack of focus for one,” she said. “We drift from crime scene to autopsy to the victim’s house and look for… I don’t know what we’re looking for. What are we looking for?”
“We’re looking for the intangible,” I said. “And the problem with the intangible is that it’s pretty bloody hard to get your hands on.”
Try going into the prosecutor’s office and saying that you know a suspect did it because of the vague sense of unease you had at the crime scene.
“Your colleagues are perfectly capable of following up the mundane leads,” I said. “That leaves us with the things that aren’t there.”
“But we still have special witnesses,” she said. “Like your friend at the fountain.”
“You saw how useful that was,” I said.
“So how do we find the intangible?”
I looked up from the computer. Vanessa was looking at me with narrowed eyes—tapping her pen against her cheek. I wasn’t used to that kind of attention from my liaisons—usually they’re under orders to speed me on my way.
“How would you find something invisible?” I asked.
Vanessa nodded to herself, the pen tapped rapidly for a second or two and then stopped.
“By looking for the shape it makes in the world,” she said. “Like footprints in the sand or branches bending back on their own.”
“Yeah,” I said, trying not to sound too impressed. “By looking for the shape it makes.”
“So, what shape does it make?”
“That depends,” I said. And, when Vanessa gave me a stare, “If it was easy then they wouldn’t need us, would they?”
“Let’s start at the beginning, then,” said Vanessa. “You call these supernatural incidents ‘infractions’, yes?”
“When they’re serious enough to warrant our attention,” I said. “We don’t come out for every haunting or bowl of curdled milk.”
“So what causes an ‘infraction’?” asked Vanessa.
I explained that there can be many first-causes behind an infraction, but the main ones in the KDA’s experience were either exposure to, or the triggering of, special equipment left over from the Nazi era, or exposure to a supernatural entity or natural force.
“Such as Kelly and the child?” asked Vanessa.
“Precisely,” I said. “Location spirits, ghosts, revenants and the like. By the way, did you get the girl’s name?”
“I asked, but she wouldn’t say.”
There’s also vampires and elves, but decades of misplaced romanticism mean that however carefully you explain the dangers to colleagues, nobody ever believes you.
The other category was much less common.
“Deliberate instigation of an infraction by a practitioner or practitioner-group,” I said, which led predictably to Vanessa’s next question.
“What’s a practitioner?”
“Somebody who practises modern magic.”
“Like you?”
“Like me,” I said. “Although I’m properly trained in safe procedure.”
“So magic is dangerous?”
“To the practitioner as well as the general public,” I said.
Vanessa stopped tapping her pen and, putting it down, started methodically stretching her fingers. I wondered if she was suffering from rheumatism or RSI but it looked habitual rather than painful.
“Dangerous how?” she asked.
Dangerous in that one question leads to another, and that to the next, and suddenly you’re standing in a dark and dripping forest with nothing but a flamethrower to keep you warm.
“You saw the body,” I said. “Dangerous like that.”
“Is that why it’s restricted?”
“As I told you, if they’re not careful, a practitioner can injure themselves also. You can give yourself serious brain damage.”
Vanessa had one of those desks that could be raised to allow upright working. She raised it, did the strange finger exercise again and then started typing on her computer.
“If we assume that Ferdinand Tietz based his statue on the goddess of the River Kyll…” She stopped typing and stared at me. “Then she would be hundreds of years old.”
“Possibly thousands,” I said.
Vanessa’s brow wrinkled, then cleared. She shrugged and went back to work.
“Perhaps he based other statues on people of a supernatural inclination,” she said. “So if we grab images of the statues’ faces and manipulate them to make them look a bit more lifelike…”
“We might be able to get our witnesses to identify them,” I said. “Perhaps that’s why the statue of Staphylos was defaced—to prevent an identification.”
“Precisely.”
I did a global search for criminal statue defacement in Trier and got nothing. But when I expanded it to all of Rheinland-Pfalz I found a reference as part of another case. A Landgericht Koblenz hearing in 1977 concerning one Heinrich Brandt, born 1945, who had attacked a statue at the Elector’s castle in Molsberg but was deemed to be mentally incompetent. Six months earlier he’d been arrested at the French Officers’ Casino for being drunk and disorderly, vandalism and trespass.
The damage was to the staircase and the statue of Methe.
“Not Staphylos?” Vanessa asked.
Brandt had claimed to have confused the statue for his wife.
“Although there was no record of him being married,” I said.
“Perhaps we should ask Kelly whether she knew him,” said Vanessa.
There were no further details on the computer, which wasn’t unusual given that the crime had taken place twenty years before routine computerisation. Vanessa called the RLP archives, but they were closed for staff training that afternoon. There had been a couple of photocopies in the
file dating from the late seventies. Heinrich Brandt had been briefly famous when a historian uncovered the circumstances of his birth. He’d been found orphaned, aged two weeks, in the rubble of his family home after the notorious RAF Christmas raids of 1944 pulverised Trier city centre. He was considered a Christmas miracle and was adopted by the Brandt family shortly after the end of the war. It was an unusual enough event that I considered calling the Research Department at the KDA, but it had just turned five and staff there would have all gone home.
Vanessa and I made a note to follow up first thing the next morning and called it a day.
After changing at the hotel I went for a jog down to the river path and ran south towards the hydroelectric power station. There and back again would be a little bit over eight kilometres—enough to stretch me out without making me tired.
I crossed the main road by the hospital and went down a steep flight of steps beside an old medieval crane with white walls and wooden cranes projecting from a witch’s hat roof.
Being at least three metres below the level of the main road, the path was quiet and surprisingly deserted. I passed a couple of dog walkers and a knot of laughing children. Ahead I could see a pair of runners passing under the arch of the Roman bridge.
I love to run. Not just because it builds up stamina, and is always a useful skill for police, but because in the rhythm of my feet on the ground I find a space where I can think in peace. Or choose not to think at all, and lose myself in the physicality of the movement.
My mother, who keeps a copy of Sun Tzu by her bed, says that a wise person knows when to act and when not to act. My father agrees.
“Know when to speak,” he says. “When to listen and, most importantly, when to call for backup.”
The sun had fallen behind the western ridge as I passed under the old stone arch of the Roman bridge. The valley was in shadow but the sky was a swathe of fading blue. Across the river the lights were coming on in the homes and hotels. There was no sign of the runners I’d seen earlier and, apart from the restless grumble of the main road, I could have been alone.
Only I wasn’t.
I began to feel I was being followed.
Suspicion is a virtue in policing, and doubly so for magically trained police. Still, you’ve got to be pragmatic. As my father says, you must resist the temptation to become the job…or the job will destroy you.
I turned and jogged backwards for ten metres—there was nothing behind me.
I turned around again and ran on. Under the Konrad Adenauer Bridge with my footfalls echoing off the graffiti-covered concrete slabs. I listened carefully, but there was no echo, no second set of footsteps behind me.
And still I was sure I was being followed.
You can’t go running in a shoulder holster. Not only do members of the public become alarmed at the sight of you, but a fully loaded pistol is heavy and throws off your balance. Since I’m forbidden to leave my service weapon in a hotel room safe, I’d taken the chance to leave it, and the dossier, safely locked in Vanessa’s secure storage locker.
It grew darker, as if the shadows under the bridge had followed me down the footpath. There were trees growing along the riverbank and between them and the tree-covered elevation masking the road, it made it suddenly like running through a tunnel.
When the Newtonian synthesis came to Germany from England in the early eighteenth century its most famous centre was in Cologne, where the White Library took a proud but unobtrusive place somewhere between the university and the famous craft guilds of the city. The scholar practitioners of the White Library developed their own sophisticated and nuanced terminology to replace what the Director calls the maddening Anglo-Saxon vagueness of British wizardry.
While keeping the Latin names for the formae that are the building blocks of magic, they switched to the serious academic German of the time for everything else. Hence Ortsgeist: location spirit; Schwebelicht: palm-light; and Seelen-Präsenz: soul presence. Being methodical, they broke soul-presence into sub-categories such as Natur-Seelen-Präsenz: natural-soul-presence; Stadt-Seelen-Präsenz: city-soul-presence; Geister-Seelen-Präsenz: spirit-soul-presence—which is what you feel when a ghost takes an interest in you—and Ortsgeister-Seelen-Präsenz: location-spirit-soul-presence. It’s extremely difficult to tell these various sensations apart and, as a result, German practitioners have spent the last three centuries cheerfully mislabelling everything around them.
The British, the Director sometimes concedes, might have had a point.
Still, there was no mistaking the sudden sensation of excited movement and chocolate flavoured ice-cream for anything other than Ortsgeister-Seelen-Präsenz.
I was coming up on a set of steps that ran down to the water in one direction and up to the roadway in the other. Perfect for both a confrontation and a fast tactical retreat if things went wrong. There was also a gap in the trees that would allow me to see what was coming.
I stopped at the top of the steps and turned to face the river.
“Show yourself,” I said, and mentally rehearsed the shield spell the Director had drilled into me that spring.
The Mosel rolled past in the darkness. To my left was the impatient rumble of the barrage, behind me the swish of the evening’s traffic.
Then I saw it. A pale streak in the water. The bow wave of something moving quickly just under the surface. It raced towards the steps and I took a deep breath to clear my mind.
The bow wave crested at the foot of the steps and flowed away to reveal a small figure in red-and-black check pyjamas. It was the girl who’d been with Kelly in the square.
Her pyjamas were soaked and the water had straightened her ringlets so that they fell untidily to her shoulders.
“Hello,” I said in my best friendly manner, while not relaxing one bit.
The girl gave me an exasperated look. Then she shook herself, exactly like a dog, starting at her legs and working her way up to her crown and causing her hair to whip around her head. When she stopped she was completely dry.
“Come here,” she said, and her voice promised slides and swings and sunshine.
I felt the pull of her authority, but my first lesson from the Director had been how to resist the glamour. It’s exactly the same as resisting a bad habit—you just have to be aware of the problem and not let your unconscious talk you into anything you might regret the next morning.
Easier said than done—right?
“We can have fun.” She was as irresistible as a puppy.
“Why don’t you come up here?” I said, keeping my tone light but implacable. It helps that my mother’s a teacher of the unfailingly firm but fair variety. She’s used that tone indiscriminately on my father and me since I can remember.
The girl tilted her head to one side for a moment and then skipped up the steps to join me on the path. Close up she smelt of turned soil, hayseed and peaches, with just a hint of motor oil behind it all.
I asked her name, and she said I could call her Morgane—her German was perfect.
“What do you want, Morgane?” I asked.
Morgane looked down at her bare feet and scuffed the ground with her toes.
“I want to see Vanessa again,” she said.
“Why are you telling me this?”
Morgane mumbled something inaudible.
“Pardon?”
“Kelly says I’m not to talk to her,” she said.
“Did she say why?”
“No.”
“Why do you think she doesn’t want you to see Vanessa?”
Morgane looked up at me and squinted—her face was a pale oval in the twilight.
“Because she’s a big meanie.”
“Or perhaps she’s worried you’ll be bad,” I said.
“I can be good,” said Morgane, hopping restlessly on one leg. “I can be very good.”
“I believe you, but…”
“I can tell you something you don’t know.”
Strangely, the intelli
gence on baby goddesses is a bit sparse. We’ve been getting unusual reports out of London for years, and hints from other countries. But this was the first time I’d had direct dealings with one. Making this, I was sure the Director would point out, an opportunity as well as a danger.
“Such as?”
“Stuff,” said Morgane. “From before.”
“Before what?”
Morgane looked down to check that her feet were still attached to her legs and, satisfied they were, mumbled, “Before I was here.”
“You remember that?”
“Sort of,” she said, but I recognised that tone from my own childhood as in: “Have you done your homework?” “Sort of…”
“Why don’t you tell me what you know and I’ll see what I can do about setting up a meet,” I said.
Morgane screwed up her face and then thrust out a small hand.
“Promise?” she said.
“I promise to try,” I said, and extended my hand.
Morgane harrumphed then shook my hand. Hers was warm and soft and for a moment my nostrils were filled with the scent of cherry blossom and I was bathed in the endless summer sun of my childhood.
Then the October chill crept in around the edges and the world darkened again.
“Do you know the Strackers that live up on the hill?” said Morgane, pointing downstream towards Ehrang. I said I did.
“Aunty Kelly had a boyfriend who she liked to kiss and kiss and kiss.” Morgane pulled a face at this inexplicable behaviour. “Only he was like you, you know, going to die. And Aunty Kelly was sad and angry. So she did a bad thing to make him live longer. Only he died anyway and she was even more sad.”
“Do you know what she did?” I asked, but Morgane shook her head. “Do you know when this happened?”
“A long long long long time ago,” she said. “Now I’ve told you stuff. When can I go play with Vani?”
“I’ll have to ask her first,” I said, which got me a long suspicious look. “How can I contact you?”
“Easy,” she said. “Put a note in a bottle and throw it in the river.”
“Can you read?”
“Of course I can read. French and German and—” she put a long stress on the second and—“Luxembourgish.” She paused, waiting for praise.
The October Man Page 6