The October Man

by Ben Aaronovitch

  “Did he know you were a river?”

  “Let us say he knew I was special,” said Kelly. “He called me his angel. We were married by the bishop himself in the cathedral and we lived in a house near the island where you left the wine. It’s underneath the new road now.”

  Vanessa came back alone and looking much more cheerful.

  “The nice old lady who runs the place is demonstrating her collection of wind-up antiques,” she said. “That should keep them quiet for a while.”

  I brought Vanessa up to speed.

  “Did you really make him immortal?” she asked Kelly.

  “Absolutely,” said Kelly. “And all it took was the blood of forty virgins.”

  There was a pause and then Vanessa asked how she’d been sure they were virgins.

  “I raised them in cages,” said Kelly. “How do you think?” She sighed. “People used to be more fun. Nobody knows why some of us are touched. I’m a goddess, but I can’t tell you why I am not mortal any more than you can say why you’re not a donkey. But it’s well known amongst us that if we love someone and give them our favour unconditionally then they can live long and happy lives. Perhaps even for ever. Or so we believe.”

  “And Christian?” I asked.

  “I had hopes,” said Kelly, her lips turning down.

  “What happened?” asked Vanessa gently.

  “There was another man who thought he loved me,” she said. “A clerk in the Elector’s court and a black-hearted sorcerer.”

  “What was his name?” I asked, because that’s always the first question you ask a witness even when the case is historical.

  “Gabriel Beck of Koblenz and a fellow of the White Library.”

  So definitely a practitioner, then.

  “He courted me, and at first I thought nothing of it,” said Kelly.

  Because she was the Goddess of the Kyll, and beautiful, and the daughter of the Mosel the life-bringer and Rhine-daughter. Whose every step brought forth flowers and fruitful vines.

  Kelly paused at a sound from upstairs.

  “Were those screams?” she asked.

  “Laughter,” said Vanessa.

  “Then we’re probably okay,” said Kelly. “Where was I?”

  “Fruitful vines,” I said.

  “Who wouldn’t love me?” she said.

  And Kelly was gracious and kind and let such suitors down gently. And if they didn’t get the hint, then a polite suggestion from a goddess is as good as a command from an empress.

  But not with Gabriel Beck.

  “He was like you,” she said, tapping me on the chest. “All wrapped up in his own power. I could smell it on him like perfume on a goat.”

  But Kelly was gracious. Have I mentioned how gracious Kelly was? She chose to deal with Gabriel Beck’s attentions through a mixture of benign indifference and subtle avoidance. A policy made that much easier when she met her Christian.

  “It was as if the sun had risen in my heart,” she said. “I felt I had lived through a long cold night and had arisen on the first bright morning of summer.”

  “How old were you?” asked Vanessa.

  Kelly sighed.

  “Two thousand years, going on sixteen,” she said.

  Gabriel Beck showed a similar level of maturity or, more precisely, a precocious sense of entitlement.

  “He said Christian wasn’t good enough for me and that he was going to save me from myself,” she said. “I persuaded the bishop to have Beck arrested and banished. Christian and I were married that year and the next I fell pregnant. The first child of my own body.”

  Ferdinand Tietz did the preliminary sketches for his statues of Methe and Staphylos that year.

  “That’s why the statue makes me look so round,” said Kelly.

  But Gabriel was obsessed and returned to spread vile rumours that Kelly was the spawn of the Devil, who had bewitched both the bishop and Christian. He had warrants signed by the Chancellor of the White Library that gave him the authority to lay those charges.

  “And you let him?” I asked.

  “I would have washed him away. But it was my time and I had returned to my mother’s arms for my confinement,” she said. “And Christian, being young, foolish and German, challenged Beck—” she spat the name like a curse—“to a duel for my honour.”

  Christian was a notoriously bad swordsman, but even so the duel was to first blood.

  “Would that the first blood had not come from his heart,” said Kelly. “I felt him die even as I gave my daughter life.”

  And when her baby’s cord was cut and she was safely swaddled in the care of her grandmother, Kelly swept up the Mosel with bloody vengeance on her mind. They must have felt her coming as far away as Koblenz.

  Certainly Gabriel Beck must have realised what he had done.

  “He ran from me,” she said. “He couldn’t cross my mother or my sisters, so he climbed the highest and driest hill he could find. And there he hid from me. But I found him.”

  “And which hill was that?” I asked, as if I hadn’t guessed.

  “The Markusberg,” she said. “Opposite the city.”

  “Where the Mariensäule stands?” I said.

  “Oh shit,” said Vanessa, proving that she had been paying attention.

  “It wasn’t there when I did it,” said Kelly. “I didn’t tell them to put that stupid thing there. Mother thought it looked pretty, and I hadn’t told her what I’d done, so she didn’t know that it might cause complications.”

  “So what,” said Vanessa carefully, “did you do?”

  “I sealed him up in the ground,” said Kelly. “While he was still alive.”

  It’s an odd thing. When someone tells you something that horrible, your brain often takes some time to register the implications. When it did, I actually flinched away from Kelly. She gave me a defiant look.

  “He killed my Christian,” she said. “This was not a good man.”

  “It’s still a horrible way to die,” said Vanessa.

  “Ah, yes,” said Kelly. “You see, I fixed it so he wouldn’t. Die, that is. At least not in the short term.”

  As if that made it better.

  I was suddenly aware of the clanking and whirring noise of the mechanical village. Grinding on regardless.

  “Are you sure he stayed buried?” I asked.

  “I have people keeping an eye on the…” She hesitated. “The site.”

  “For two hundred and fifty years?” asked Vanessa.

  “There are people, families, with long memories who haven’t forgotten their old allegiances,” she said, but then she shrugged. “Possibly not that long.”

  I definitely wanted another word with Gunter Hirsch, our friend with the horns, about why he liked to visit the Mariensäule. “I like to come up here and look at the city” my arse.

  “Can you remember exactly where you buried him?” I asked.

  “I think so,” said Kelly. “Why?”

  “Because we’re going to dig him up and make sure he’s still down there,” I said.

  First we had to carefully retrieve Morgane and extract her from the gang of children that had accreted around her. While Vanessa and Kelly lured her away with promises of ice cream, I assessed the slightly dazed museum curator and ensured that none of the children went home with Morgane by “mistake”.

  After her ice cream, Morgane was further mollified when she joined us for a jolly jaunt up the Markusberg, where she’d never been before, and a stroll through the woods to the position where, Kelly was certain, she’d buried the unfortunate Gabriel Beck. It was less than five metres downslope from the Mariensäule.

  That done, Vanessa ferried Kelly and Morgane back to town while I called Special Circumstances and told them what needed doing.

  Elton said that I’d have to wait a bit while he rustled up a digger.

  “Unless you want me to use explosives,” he said, and sounded very disappointed when I said no.

  Fortunately, t
wo of Special Circumstances had degrees in archaeology. So three hours later we managed to recover the bones of a human male, along with the rusted remains of a belt buckle and a knife. The two archaeologists said they were amazed how well preserved the bones were, given the general acidity of the surrounding soil.

  Vanessa returned while our archaeologists were painstakingly recording the remains prior to recovery.

  I asked if there’d been any problems, but she said no.

  “Although Morgane is trying to persuade Kelly to let her go to kindergarten,” said Vanessa, Morgane having learnt about this “magical” place from the little friends she’d made at the museum. I said we could worry about that once we’d dealt with our immediate case.

  “We?” asked Vanessa.

  “Förstner made you the liaison,” I said quickly. “So that means it’s your problem too.”

  “Well, don’t look now,” said Vanessa, “but we’re being watched—again.”

  I glanced over to see Gunter Hirsch watching us from among the trees on the other side of the road. When he saw he had my attention he looked both ways to check nobody else was watching and beckoned us over.

  “There’s somebody else here,” he said when we joined him.

  “Where?” asked Vanessa.

  Gunter pointed further down the slope.

  “It’s just a guy,” he said. “I think he needs help.”

  The slope was steep and covered in bushes and trees and sudden vertical drops. Vanessa and I made our way down very carefully. Three metres or so below the road, in a space hollowed out by an uprooted tree, we found a man crouched down with his hands clasped over his head. He was dressed in a brown loden hunting jacket and grey-green corduroy trousers—all of which showed signs of hard use. Hanging on to an outstretched root for safety, I lowered myself until I could see his face.

  One of the things you get used to as police is recognising people from their ID photographs.

  “Herr Kinsmann?” I said. “Are you all right?”

  Chapter 11:

  Supper

  Club

  Special Circumstances has an alpine rescue kit and rather than risk trying to coax Uwe Kinsmann up the steep slope, Elton abseiled down to him with a stretcher. I said Kinsmann’s name a couple of times and snapped my fingers in front of his face, but while his eyes tracked the movement there was no other response. An ambulance was waiting by the time we’d hauled him up to the road. The paramedics gave him a once-over and threw him in the back. I rode down the hill with them in case he spontaneously combusted or did something else equally disconcerting.

  I sensed no vestigia off him but human beings shed traces of the uncanny very quickly, so that meant nothing.

  Trier has a big, well-equipped hospital with a helicopter landing pad on the roof and all the modern trimmings. After a couple of hours they declared him to be suffering from mild exposure, but otherwise undamaged. His mental state worried them since, while he was definitely responsive to stimuli, he was vague and unresponsive to questions. They wanted to keep him in overnight for observation.

  Given that we were equally vague as to whether he was a witness, victim or suspect, Vanessa and I, after consultation with Ziegler, decided to leave him there with the ever-enthusiastic Maximilian to watch over him. I also asked Elton to stay and watch over both of them.

  It was mid-evening by the time Vanessa and I walked out into the hospital car park. I was tired but I wasn’t sleepy enough to face the inside of my hotel room. And I was hungry but I didn’t want another restaurant.

  “Do you have a kitchen?” I asked Vanessa.

  “What?”

  “At your flat,” I said. “Do you have a kitchen?”

  “Of course I have a kitchen.”

  “No, I mean: do you have a properly equipped kitchen with pots and strainers and cheese graters and stuff?” I said.

  There was a pause while she did a mental inventory.

  “Yes,” said Vanessa. “Well, the usual things, yes. But I’m not a chef.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Can I borrow your kitchen? I really need to cook something.”

  “What are you going to cook?”

  “What would you like?”

  She gave me a sceptical look.

  “Anything except chicken,” she said.

  You can’t always tell what a police officer’s home is going to be like from their office. I’ve had colleagues with neat offices who live like slobs and vice versa. My dad has a picture of him meeting Helmut Kohl on his office wall and returns to a home with a framed poster from the late seventies with Atomkraft? Nein danke hanging in the hallway. Vanessa’s office was full of papers, Post-it notes, and things printed off the internet, cut out and stuck on the walls with Blu Tack. In contrast, the walls of her flat were painted white with a hint of beige and, while I nearly tripped over a box full of framed photographs in the hallway, none had actually been hung. The furniture was worn and threadbare and, I suspected, had come with the flat. I would have said her place was completely without character except for the concert harp that dominated the living room. It was huge, like the guts of a grand piano that had been stripped down and propped up on one end. It was as tall as I was and, I decided, of limited value as conversation piece since the only question it begged was do you play the harp?

  “Yes,” she said before I could ask. “But I don’t enjoy it.”

  I wasn’t sure whether I’d misheard, so I asked her if she really didn’t enjoy playing. I mean, the thing took up a quarter of her living room.

  “My mum wanted me to be a harpist,” she said. “I had private lessons from the age of five.”

  “Did you want to be a harpist?”

  “Not really,” she said. “But I’m actually very accomplished. Not to a professional standard, of course, but I can make it do what I want.”

  “But you don’t enjoy it?”

  “Mama went to a lot of effort and I am proficient—it seems a shame to let the skill go to waste.”

  “That,” I said, “is the stupidest reason for doing something I’ve ever heard.”

  “If that’s true then you really haven’t done much street level policing, have you?”

  Vanessa’s kitchen was depressingly normal for a young German living alone, in that the microwave was obviously the most frequently used device and the cupboard was bare of spices except for a jar of mixed herbs that had never even been unsealed. Fortunately, Vanessa’s flat was located up towards the university where there was a Wasgau Fresh Market that opened late—so I’d managed to do a decent shop on the way over.

  At least Vanessa kept the kitchen clean and tidy, and it had a nice big counter for me to dump the bags on. I unpacked the lamb, the oil and the rosemary. She had one good knife and a chopping board that was mercifully clean, if only because I don’t think it had ever been used. While I chopped the rosemary Vanessa opened up the files she’d brought from the Post Office and started working her way through the statements K11 had taken from the surviving members of the Good Wine Drinking Association.

  “Anything?” I asked.

  “Not so far,” she said. “But Kurt Omdale’s fiancée is his philosophy teacher from the People’s College.”

  I mixed the rosemary with the olive oil and rubbed the mixture over the lamb steaks. They needed to marinate for a bit so I cleaned my hands and joined Vanessa at the table.

  “I hope you like lamb,” I said.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve had it since I left home.”

  “You’ll like this,” I said.

  K11 had done a thorough job with their interviews and we had a convincing timeline for all of the members of the Good Wine Drinking Association for the last two weeks. The two crucial times and dates were the Thursday evening, when Jörg Koch died, and the following Saturday night, when Jason Agnelli followed suit.

  “Shouldn’t they have met on the Saturday night?” I said. “Wasn’t that their routine?”

>   “Jörg Koch was responsible for that Saturday’s activities,” said Vanessa, paging through the documents. “When he didn’t contact the others, they assumed he was busy getting ready for the visit by his kids.”

  I opened my own laptop and plugged in my master USB pen. I’ve run through three laptops in as many years and no longer bother even customising the desktop wallpaper. Everything is on the USB pen which, providing you remember to disengage it, doesn’t get reduced to a fine sand as a side effect of magic use.

  “Did anyone call him?” I asked.

  “Simon Haas said he did, but the call went to mailbox.”

  I read through Simon Haas’s statement until it was time to fry the lamb and the tomatoes.

  “I don’t think the drinking club would have lasted much longer,” said Vanessa, as I wrestled with the total lack of a proper slotted spatula and had to turn my steaks with a wooden scraper instead. Once I was sure the lamb wasn’t going to overcook, I asked her what she meant.

  “They missed three out of the last six Saturday meetings, and two of the eight before that.”

  But only one in the whole previous six-month period. Vanessa’s theory was that the Good Wine Drinking Association had served its purpose and was breaking up naturally as its members settled into their new lives. Markus Nerlinger, who had been the original man in a bar with Jörg Koch, had been promoted by his firm and was being sent back to the University of Applied Sciences to take his Master’s. Jonas Diekmeier, Markus’s co-worker and the youngest member of the club, told his interviewer that, ironically, hanging around with the old men, as he called the others, had made it easier to make friends among his peers.

  “Kurt, as we know, is getting married,” said Vanessa. “And Simon Haas has met the man of his dreams.”

  I had the lamb out of the frying pan by then and was using it to mix up the sauce.

  “Did the rest of the group know?” I asked, wondering if homophobia could have been a trigger.

  “Apparently he told them this June.” Vanessa read off her screen. “He said, ‘The others thought it was hilarious because I blew the most money on the strippers,’ he said. He claims he felt sorry for them— Your mobile is buzzing,” called Vanessa.