The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge

by Patricia Duncker

  The Judge said nothing. She hunched her shoulders and shrank inside the hood of her winter coat, tense and bristling against the cold. For a long while she stood silent, absorbing the scene, her boots gently sinking as the melted crust of fresh snow crumbled beneath her heels. Then she set out around the periphery defined by the tape, with André Schweigen clamped to her side, gabbling quietly.

  ‘The hunters left prints everywhere. So did their dogs. The dogs also made those marks – that scratching in the snow. There were trails left by deer too, but those were nearly gone. More snow must have fallen in the small hours. The hunters say they didn’t touch the bodies. I don’t think they did. It’s hard to tell what the poison was. Cyanide, I should think. Like the Swiss departure. But listen, there’s one – one of them –’

  Schweigen’s excitement became uncontainable. He stepped in front of her.

  ‘Dominique, écoute-moi bien.’ His voice dropped to a hiss. ‘One of them’s been shot. The woman at the core. Just as it happened in Switzerland. And the gun’s not there. It’s gone. We’ll comb every inch. I’ll sift snow through sieves if I have to, but I think the gun’s gone. Obviously we’ll have to wait for ballistics to confirm the facts, but I’m willing to put money on the bet that it’s the same gun. Even after six years. Someone walked away from the mountain last night. And that’s not suicide, it’s murder.’

  ‘Calme-toi,’ replied the Judge softly. They stopped, facing the half-circle of the enraptured dead. ‘Of course it’s murder. How could those tiny children consent to their own deaths? We’re looking at a crime scene, André, whatever the results from your ballistics lab.’

  He stopped talking and took her arm. No matter what happened this was now their investigation. They were no longer trailing in the slipstream of the Swiss, who had buried the last departure, along with the dead, in a sarcophagus of platitudes: a tragic waste, incomprehensible and heartbreaking. But for Madame le Juge nothing remained incomprehensible or beyond the reach of pure reason. The mysteries of this world stained the bright radiance of eternity. Her method, tested and consistent, was to analyse the stains. They trudged onwards, the snow sucking at their boots. The Judge gazed impassive at the white faces of the dead, absorbing each one in turn, as if every detail should be remembered for ever. The smallest children were wrapped in furred cocoons, their puckered features scarcely visible. She lingered for many minutes over the fading face of the older woman at the centre of the half-circle.

  Schweigen leaned into her cheek.

  ‘That’s her, isn’t it? The sister?’

  ‘Yes. That’s Marie-Cécile Laval.’

  Finally the Judge stopped, stood perfectly still, and raised her eyes to the devastated forests on the surrounding slopes; the great trees, like liquidated giants, piled one upon another, their roots, naked and undignified, sprawled in their wake, the shallow holes already filled with snow. At once beautiful and desolate, the bare curves of the mountain stretched away towards the Rhine Valley and the shadows of the Black Forest in Southern Germany. The bodies all faced towards the east, to greet the rising sun. They had died in the night, certain that one short breath, wasted in this temporary world, riddled by time, was the prelude to their eternal awakening, promised in the stars.

  She looked again at the huddled soundless children, tenderly enveloped in hoods, scarves, mittens. What train of reason led a woman to protect her child against the night cold then fill his mouth with poison? She slouched down into her coat, and shivered against the quiet, thickening night. Reason had nothing to do with it. Before her on the forest floor, lay an extraordinary witness to the passion, that instinctive act of love. I will never leave you; I will never abandon you in the kingdom of this world, smothered by time, age, pain, heartbreak. I shall take you with me. Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom. This day shalt thou be with me in paradise. The Judge stared at the still, frozen face of Marie-Cécile Laval. Her unimaginable act represented one last gesture of boundless love, the love that had gathered up these children and borne them forth in triumph.

  * * *

  The sound of a heavy vehicle thumping against the branches in the distance disturbed the motionless, iced air. The Judge raised her head like a deer at bay. Schweigen was watching her carefully.

  ‘Have the press got hold of it yet?’

  ‘We’ve had one call. The hunters found them. No matter how often you tell them not to blab, people talk.’

  ‘Then let’s get to work. But keep it quiet as long as you can. I’ll need to interview the men who found them. I’ll do that tomorrow morning early. Before they start seeing things in their heads and imagining details that weren’t there. Have you got all the photographs?’

  ‘Yes. And something even better than that.’ Schweigen presented her with the drawings, the measurements between each body carefully noted. His record of the scene looked slightly sinister, for alongside a careful diagram showing the positions of each corpse was a sketch of the older woman’s face, the open eyes and the expression of startled amazement, exactly caught.

  ‘That’s excellent,’ said the Judge, thrown off guard by Schweigen’s unexpected talent and the grotesque, disturbing subject.

  ‘I was all set for the Beaux-Arts,’ he said, with a small shrug of regret. ‘It’s harder to draw faces you’ve never seen before. She’s the only one I knew.’

  The first shift of actors surrounding the spectacle began to pack up, ready to bear the bodies away from the darkening apse of the mountain; the lorries from the morgue were stuck further down the slope. The second shift of forensic experts hovered on the brink of the circle, ready to sift through the snow, their searchlights tilted at odd angles, picking out the whitened, laden branches of the pines. Schweigen was relieved that none of his team knew any of the dead and said so. The Judge stood over the men as they lifted the children, ostensibly daring them to be anything other than gentle with the stiff, small forms, but in fact giving them something else to think about, in case anyone shuddered or cracked. She eyed them carefully. Some seemed too young, far too young, to touch the dead. As each corpse was packed up and gently zipped into a yellow folded sack its outline became momentarily visible upon the forest floor, then appeared to fade. The dead left barely a shadowed trace behind them. The gathering at the foot of the rock cliffs had already melted into the past.

  ‘Le Parquet rang me right after you did,’ said the Judge, ‘and just as well he did. I had to listen to it all again and pretend I didn’t know. You don’t give me instructions, André, he does. If he knew that you had already been in touch with me he’d think that you were running your own private war against these people.’ She gestured towards the empty clearing, now ablaze with lights as each morsel of snow was stabbed and turned.

  Schweigen, unabashed, put his drawings away inside his coat and took her arm again.

  ‘But aren’t you glad I did?’

  The Judge smiled slightly and they set off together, concentrating on their boots, heads bowed as if they were the chief mourners, following the slow procession into the darkness and the freezing trees.

  * * *

  No heating was turned on in the chalet and there was no question of turning it on until the boiler and all the electrical devices in the house had been examined and cleared. The investigating team worked into the night, swathed in mufflers, their gloved hands searching, recording, collecting. Boxes of odd personal material, diaries, notebooks, wallets, car-registration documents, meal plans, the rubbish rota, dry-cleaning stubs, were all inspected, listed and removed. There was a moment of horror and excitement when the mobile phone in one of the Land Cruisers sprang into luminous life and began to sing. The relatives had still not been contacted or informed.

  ‘Leave it,’ snapped the Judge, noting down the incoming number. The echoes of the Christmas theme tune, ‘Jingle Bells’, died into silence. The Judge turned to Schweigen.

  ‘We have all their identities now. I think you can begin contacting whatever
’s left of their families. Let’s look at that list.’

  The chalet was privately owned and littered with the personal clutter that every household generates year after year. A cork poster board, overrun with holiday photographs, showed some of the dramatis personae from the clearing on the mountainside, ebullient on skis, or with raised glasses, sitting around candle-covered cakes. The local free newspaper lay abandoned behind the sofa. Schweigen checked the date. A wilted heap of flowers slumped on the table, withered with cold. The air, glacial and still, shifted like a curtain as the Judge passed softly over the threshold into the kitchen. The possessions of the dead lay scattered in the convivial disorder of a Christmas family holiday. Here were presents still resting in their wrapping paper, washing-up neatly stacked on the draining board, but not stowed away. A light still glimmered, eerie and blurred, on the telephone’s screen. The words were in English: You were called at 12.31 … and the red eye glared with the threat that the caller has left you a message.

  ‘Écoutez la bande, Madame le Juge,’ Schweigen suggested in respectful, formal tones. Two of his men were working in the kitchen.

  ‘I want that board of photographs recorded,’ said the Judge. ‘We have to track down everyone in those pictures who isn’t already on the slab in the Institut médico-légal.’ She looked at Schweigen. ‘All right. Play it.’

  She noted down the number. It was the same one that she had recorded from the car’s mobile phone. A shiver of sadness washed over her shoulders. Someone was out there, trying to get through, ringing again and again, someone who didn’t know. The tape hissed and clicked. Then a man’s voice spoke in English, leaving the briefest possible message.

  ‘Cécile? Happy New Year. Please ring me today.’

  And the line went dead. Schweigen checked his list.

  ‘He’s after Madame Laval. The only one who wasn’t apparently poisoned. One bullet to the left temple. Very little blood loss. And the only woman whose children weren’t with her.’

  ‘Impound the tape. And I want a list of all calls to and from the chalet as far back as you can. When did they get here? December the 23rd?’ She steadied her glasses and looked closely at the numbers. ‘0049? Isn’t that Germany?’

  Schweigen nodded. He plucked out the tape and labelled the bag, then looked over her shoulder at the number.

  ‘It’s a mobile. A German mobile.’

  ‘Identify it.’

  ‘Could be one of her family trying to get through. We should contact her children.’

  ‘That was the voice of a man her age. Or older. Find out who he is.’

  Three entire families, nine adults and seven children, had perished in the forest clearing: Marie-Cécile Laval, another older woman, possibly a grandmother, a teenage boy of seventeen, three married couples and all their children, some of them barely toddlers. They had taken their children with them. Here were all their papers, cartes d’identité, driving licences, car insurance documents, credit cards, abandoned either in the chalet or in their cars. The money left in handbags, drawers and coats amounted to over five thousand francs. The Judge sat at the dining table in the main room of the chalet, wearing a pair of gloves borrowed from the police scientifique. Her red leather gloves, the ones that Schweigen had recognised, stuck out of her pocket. She checked all the jettisoned labels on the Christmas presents and decoded the Christmas wishes, scratched in biro on the decorated wrapping she had fished out of the waste-paper basket. Had anyone else taken part in the celebration and then returned from the mountain? The presents themselves still littered the rooms: an amber bottle of Coco from Chanel, a CD rack shaped like a giraffe, a motorised truck for one of the children that could be controlled with a télécommande, a new DVD player and a handful of war films. What on earth had possessed them to spend so much money just before they died? She began noting down the names, terms of endearment, generic names, pet names – who was ‘ma petite chouchoute’? My beloved wife? That could have been any one of the three women. Before her lay a little solid pile of mobile phones. She activated each one in turn and went through the calls dialled and received and the entire mass of text messages. Hours later, she fixed André Schweigen with a steady glare, her mind elsewhere.

  ‘They died last night. They went up the mountain long after midnight.’

  ‘They did?’

  ‘Yes. All the text messages on the mobiles saying Bonne Année have been read.’

  ‘Join my team.’ He grinned at her. ‘Do you want to look at these photographs now or shall I bag them up?’

  ‘Pass them over.’

  He gave her a small halogen torch to amplify the light above the dining table that was still draped with swags of green pine and ivy from the forest. Jaunty strings of fairy lights flickered on the Christmas tree, changing the colours of the swaying crystal baubles. Schweigen turned off the flashing trails that chased each other round the picture rails and across the perked ears of a wild boar’s head, stuffed and mounted above the sofa. The Judge settled down to study the photographs. Two men shouldering a canoe. Sports Day. A child dwarfed by his safety helmet, winning the cycle race. A woman on a driveway lifting a tiny toy dog towards the camera. No family pets had been left locked in the chalet. Where were the animals? The Judge got up, still carrying the photographs, and went through to look over the kitchen floor: no bowls, no rugs, no basket, no cat flap. She shrugged and continued peering into these lost lives. Tropics. Very possibly Martinique, all the signs are in French. Here is a black man on a beach carrying a calabash. The images were of family, anniversaries, holidays, moments of success. But who takes pictures of their loved ones at nine-thirty on a November night, sunk into the sofa in front of the television? Here were life’s landmarks: the weddings, birthdays, sports day, the new baby in her grandmother’s arms. And surely this was Madame Laval, swinging on a ski lift, beside one of the women who died in the forest, with another young girl clinging to her arm, smiling – the same smile. This is her daughter.

  ‘What’s Laval’s daughter called? Laval’s a widow, isn’t she?’ Schweigen consulted a printout, the Judge recited the names.

  ‘Un fils, Paul, né le 15 octobre 1971, et une fille, Marie-Thérèse, née le 2 novembre 1983. We never interrogated either of them after the Swiss departure. They weren’t there. The boy was still at university in Paris and the girl was too young.’

  She reached down into the mass of salvaged Christmas paper and handed him a small crushed heap of green-and-white stripes, holding out the matching card beneath the light. He studied the curling script. To my darling Marie-T, Je t’aime, ma petite chérie, Bisous, Maman.

  ‘Find that girl for me, André. No one else in last night’s departure is called Marie-T. And this present, whatever it was, has been opened.’

  She measured the size of the wrapping paper and noted the pattern of the first folds. Schweigen turned the card round in his hand.

  ‘Yes, but do the two go together? This paper and this card? The card’s not attached to anything and the DVDs were wrapped in the same paper.’

  ‘We must check.’

  Schweigen strode outside to use the radio car. The Judge laid out a newspaper flat upon the table and emptied the contents of every single waste-paper basket that could be found, downstairs and upstairs, on to the table. She began to examine the scrabbled pile of objects in turn, raising each strange scrap into the air, tissues, used biros, the last cylinder from a lavatory roll, discarded plastic bags, an empty can of Coca-Cola Light, a broken stapler and an exploded balloon. She gazed at each pointless, redundant item with an intense and tender concentration. The forensic team tiptoed around her; a small cloud of her warm breath billowed into the cold.

  * * *

  The forensic pathologist from the university hospital lab rang Schweigen at 1 a.m. Everyone looked up expectantly. He stood in front of the charred logs left in the massive fireplace, black volcanic stone, with a huge slab of dark slate beneath the irons, and simply listened. The team lost interest and
continued their travail de fourmi, the ant-like crawl, turning over all the daily objects, touched by the dead. Schweigen’s team was known for its thoroughness; one of them dusted off the plastic fridge magnets, in case they revealed a different set of prints, and photographed the cheery plastic alphabet, arranged into insane, compelling poetry.

  ‘Well?’ The Judge glowered at him. Schweigen consulted his notes.

  ‘Exactly the same pattern as the Swiss departure. He won’t say anything definite. You know what he’s like. And he’s being very cagy about the exact time of death. Apparently he’s got to measure the potassium content of the fluid in the eye. All the bodies were as cold as the ground beneath them. But here’s the basics: apart from Laval, who was shot, and we don’t yet have the ballistics report, they all died of potassium cyanide poisoning, except for the children, who seem to have been dosed with a mild form of chloroform, then injected with sodium thiopentone. But he’s only examined two of them so far. We’ve sent down the syringes we found in the bathroom. The old lady was diabetic and he thinks they’re hers. It looks as if they murdered their children while they slept and then carried them up the mountain.’

  ‘No.’ The Judge contradicted him. ‘They wouldn’t have done that. They would have knocked them out down here and then killed them on the spot. How many of your people are still up there?’

  ‘About five. I can’t get a signal from their mobiles.’

  A young woman in a white plastic overall and red scarf stepped up to the Judge.

  ‘I’ll go up. We’re now looking for one or more disposable syringes in the clearing. Right?’

  The Judge inspected the unlined face before her. Surely this girl was too young to be staring at these monstrous deaths?

  ‘Yes. That’s right. Off you go. Take this torch.’ The Judge got up, stretched her arms over her head and then accompanied the girl to the door. The frost had now hardened the earth into a sparkling crust that glinted in evil buckled sheets across the muddied tracks and spattered snow.