HS01 - Critique of Criminal Reason

by Michael Gregorio

  ‘This is not a social visit, ma’am,’ I corrected her. ‘My name is Hanno Stiffeniis. I am an investigating magistrate and I wish to speak to your mistress about her late husband.’

  The woman cackled again, and said quite plainly, ‘You won’t have much luck there!’

  She did not seem put out by the fact that her master had been murdered, her mistress widowed. Despite the mourning weeds, her attitude was most irreverent in the circumstances. ‘What d’you want to see her for?’ she asked.

  ‘I need to look through Herr Tifferch’s things,’ I said.

  ‘Help yourself,’ she shrugged. ‘What’s stopping you?’

  ‘I wish to ask permission of your mistress first.’

  The maid stepped back, and waved us in, nodding towards a closed door on the right of the entrance hall. ‘Her ladyship’s in there. In all her glory! Ask her all you want.’

  I was puzzled by this cryptic description. Her Ladyship? Was Frau Tifferch a member of the Junker aristocracy? Certainly, the surname she had acquired by marriage had nothing noble-sounding about it. Before I had the chance to ask, however, the maid had slammed the door to the street, and taken herself off along a dark corridor to the left without another word, her pattens clacking noisily on the floor tiles as she went away.

  ‘Not the sort of maid I’d have in my house,’ I muttered, remembering my father’s terrified domestics and our own compliant Lotte, as I tapped my knuckles gently on the sitting-room door.

  ‘Go on in!’ the maid screeched from the end of the corridor. ‘She’ll not answer, though you wait all bloomin’ day.’

  Koch pushed the door open, and I followed him into the room. It was dark and gloomy, more like a funeral parlour than a suburban sitting room. Wide black swathes of ribbon had been tied to all the candlestick holders, and the tapers were lit. Black shrouds glistened everywhere, hiding the furniture, the fittings, and even the pictures on the walls, though a plaster statue standing almost three feet high on a table in the far corner had not been covered from view. It represented Jesus Christ. A sort of shrine reigned over there. Red votive lamps burned beside His pierced and naked feet, and Our Saviour held His vestments open wide in a most unseemly fashion, His heart exposed for the careless world to see. This organ was crowned with golden tongues of flame, bright red, pulsing with blood. I looked at Sergeant Koch. And Koch held my gaze. We had entered Roman territory. In the centre of the room sat a woman in a high-backed chair. Dressed like the maid in black from head to toe, her finery was of an earlier generation, richer by far, costly silk with trimmed flounces and ribbed fustian. She wore a magnificent jet necklace which covered her breast, while matching jet bracelets weighed down her slender wrists. Death seemed to have figured prominently in this woman’s history.

  ‘Frau Tifferch?’ I asked, advancing across the room. ‘May I offer my most sincere condolences on your unfortunate loss?’

  The woman looked at me. That is, she lifted her face at the sound of my voice. Bright pinpoints seemed to glint at me from beneath the veil, but no word of greeting or gratitude issued from her lips.

  ‘Your husband, ma’am,’ I hinted, pausing to hear the sound of her voice.

  Frau Tifferch did not move. She appeared not to breathe.

  ‘I am leading the enquiry into the circumstances regarding his murder,’ I was obliged to continue. ‘I must ask you some questions about your husband. I’m interested in any business he might have been engaged upon when he was killed. He was out of doors after dark, it seems…’

  The woman reached out a hand. Her bracelets tinkled as she took a black handkerchief from a small table at her side, carried it beneath her veil, and began to sob.

  ‘Frau Tifferch?’ I pressed gently.

  Silence answered.

  ‘Frau Tifferch?’ I repeated.

  Koch crossed the room on tiptoe and stood behind the lady’s chair. Leaning forward, he whispered in her ear, ‘Frau Tifferch?’

  Standing to his full height at the woman’s back, he raised his forefinger, touched himself twice on the temple, then shook his head.

  ‘Call the maid back in,’ I said, waiting in silence until the servant traipsed noisily into the room a minute later, followed by Sergeant Koch.

  ‘What do you want?’ she muttered. Her ill disposition had not softened in the least in the interval.

  ‘Is your mistress feeling unwell?’ I asked.

  ‘You could call it that,’ she said. ‘Out of her wits. That’s what I would say. Frau Tifferch’s in a world of her own. Never says nowt, she don’t.’

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’

  She shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea. No one told me, did they? I’m just the nursemaid. It happened four or five years ago, I believe. I wasn’t working in this house then. But this I was told by the neighbours. It happened out of the blue. She was strong and active before.’ She pointed at her charge and shook her head. ‘It must have been something fearful, that’s all I can say.’

  I frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  She shrugged again. ‘You don’t become a turnip for no good reason, do you?’

  I stiffened, fighting off the sudden overlapping of images in my mind. I saw my own mother sitting there before me in the place of that heavily veiled widow, her eyes fixing themselves on mine while she asked a question for which there was no simple answer: ‘How could you do it, Hanno?’ That was the last coherent sentence she had ever uttered. A spasm had wracked her body and she collapsed apparently lifeless at my feet. Her tomblike silence endured for days. The doctors were called, but no remedy could be found. The pastor came to pray, and stayed to read the Last Rites. And all that time, my father said not a single word to me. But in his gaze I saw my mother’s question. ‘How could you, Hanno? Why did you do it?’

  I closed my eyes to free myself from those painful memories, and opened them again on the gaping lantern jaw of the housemaid.

  ‘What is your name?’ I asked.

  ‘Agneta Süsterich.’

  ‘How long have you been working here, Agneta?’

  ‘Too long.’

  There was nothing subservient about the old woman. Words like ‘sir’, phrases such as ‘by your leave’, did not figure in her already limited vocabulary. She was brusque to the point of rudeness. Had Lawyer Tifferch never taken the surly drudge to task for her foul manners?

  ‘Be more precise!’ I insisted.

  ‘Two years,’ she replied in a forced fashion. ‘An’ curse the day I came! Once this lot’s over, I’ll be on my way. I should have left him to it…’

  ‘Does your mistress have anyone else? Sons or daughters?’ I pressed on.

  ‘No one,’ the woman replied. ‘No relatives. I never seen a soul all the time I been a-staying here. No one visits this house. No one…’

  She paused significantly, as if inviting me to complete the sentence.

  ‘Except for whom?’ I said.

  ‘Priests!’ she flared. ‘Catholic priests! Blasphemous vermin! An’ now, the police messing around…’

  ‘You are not of that religion, I take it?’

  The maid’s eyes narrowed, as if I had just accused her of the most heinous crime under the sun. ‘I am a Pietist!’ she protested. ‘Everyone in Königsberg’s a Pietist. I goes to my Bible reading every night to cleanse my Christian lungs of the foul Catholic air I am forced to breathe in this house. I told the master. Told him straight, I did. I goes to Bible meetings, Herr Tifferch, I said, or else. But now there’s no one to look after her. What am I going to do?’

  ‘Did you light all those candles?’ I intervened, trying to stop the angry flow before it became a raging flood.

  ‘I had to, didn’t I?’ the woman muttered. ‘Only way to keep her quiet. She likes her candles. All them Catholics do. Heathen rubbish, I say!’

  ‘What are your duties here?’ I asked with all the patience I could muster.

  ‘Everything.’ She started ticking items off on her fingers as she spoke. ‘Wash her
, clean her, dress her, comb her, feed her. I decked her out in black in case one of them bloodsuckers came.’

  ‘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 Süsterich 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 Süsterich 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 Griisterstrassehaus…’

  ‘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 bollocks 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 cock.’

  ‘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 Süsterich 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. Glass-fronted bookcases lining the walls held tight scrolls of documents 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 documents 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 documents 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 sexual 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 transmute a woman of over-strong religious ideals into a living statue.