HS02 - Days of Atonement

by Michael Gregorio

  ‘It wasn’t easy, sir. Not at this time of night,’ he whispered back. ‘Count Dittersdorf had to send his men to find the clerk and tip him out of bed. The family name is Gottewald. The victims are registered as Helke, Martin, and the smallest, Ludwig, eleven months old. The children of Bruno Gottewald, first major in the Eighth Hussars. The father has been stationed out in Kamenetz, East Prussia, for the past four months. The family has been in Lotingen for five. He was sent here from Eischen-Luslau, but they moved him on again. And there’s the name of the mother, Sybille Gottewald.’

  ‘Where is she?’ Lavedrine asked, staring intently at Mutiez. ‘Is there no other room in the house?’

  ‘Just the kitchen, this bedroom, the closet over there,’ he pointed. ‘A privy built onto the side of the house, but there’s nobody . . . No body, I mean to say.’

  I dragged my eyes away from the bed and the rust-red spatter marks that had soaked into the pale ochre walls and ceiling, and turned to Mutiez, who continued to scrutinise the information on that paper as if his life depended on it.

  ‘Three dead children, and no adult?’ I puzzled.

  Mutiez nodded. ‘The corpse of the lady . . . It’s not in the garden. We’ve searched out there, sir. My men are spreading their net wider. All the roads out of Lotingen have been blocked.’

  I stepped to Lavedrine’s side, and looked down on the corpses.

  ‘These children were too young to be left alone. She must be here. Or else . . .’

  ‘She’s been carried off,’ Lavedrine concluded, air popping from his mouth like smoke from a volley of pistols. He stared accusingly at Mutiez, as if the fact that the children were dead and abandoned was the officer’s fault. ‘Well, Henri? What are our chances of catching him? Of finding her?’

  Mutiez raised his hands in a gesture of inadequacy. ‘Hard to say, sir. The woodsman reported finding the children, but he didn’t say a word about the mother. He’d seen her here in the afternoon, carrying water from the well. He was the last person to see them alive.’

  ‘Do you suspect the man?’ Lavedrine asked.

  ‘That’s not for me to say.’

  ‘But you do suspect him, don’t you?’

  Lavedrine leant over the bed, breath rising up above his head like a surging ectoplasm. He bent closer, studying spots of blood that had soaked into the cotton counterpane covering the bodies.

  ‘If you’re asking for my impression, sir,’ Mutiez began, ‘I do suspect him. He admits having seen the three children and the woman. He must have known that there was no man in the house. When we searched him, we found an item which could only have come from here. A scent bottle. That man has never smelled eau de Cologne. He hardly looks human. A sort of raving wild man, sir.’

  ‘The sort who might commit a crime such as this?’ Lavedrine added.

  ‘Would any normal man do such a thing?’

  ‘He entered the house,’ I summarised, ignoring this outburst. ‘To steal? To rape? In either case, why kill the children? And why carry the body of the woman somewhere else, alive or dead? Above all, why go to town and flaunt the curfew, knowing he’d be stopped by the first soldier he met? It sounds improbable . . .’

  ‘Wait till you see him. One look will change your mind.’

  ‘The mystery remains, lieutenant,’ I said. ‘Before going into town, he had to dispose of the mother. If he was capable of this,’ I waved my hand above the massacre, ‘he would hardly shrink from murdering her, or carrying her off. But where would he hide her?’

  ‘My men are searching in the forest,’ Mutiez replied. ‘He has a hut in the woods. She may be there.’

  ‘And if she isn’t?’

  Mutiez shrugged and looked away.

  Lavedrine broke the lingering silence.

  ‘Procurator Stiffeniis is convinced that you are taking the easy way out, Henri, because you have no better suspect.’ The Frenchman did not wait for a reply, as he lowered his lamp to examine the severed throats of the children. ‘Procurator Stiffeniis is asking himself whether we are interested in this fellow for no better reason than that he is Prussian.’

  Lavedrine had read my thoughts.

  ‘That isn’t true,’ Mutiez protested. ‘My fear is for the consequences. Things are tense already. When I knew that Prussian children had been slaughtered, I advised the Count to set up a joint investigation.’

  He looked at me pointedly.

  ‘I am not seeking a scapegoat. I have simply related my suspicions, as an officer should. That man admits entering the house. He points his finger at no one else. There were no French patrols around last night. No one reported sighting rebels in the area. It’s in everyone’s interests to clear this matter up. With all the cards laid plainly on the table. Count Dittersdorf shares my view, I assure you.’

  ‘In a nutshell, we must work together to find him guilty,’ Lavedrine observed with a wry smile. ‘Politics makes our business urgent, but we will need cold hearts and clear minds to make sense of this butchery. Let’s start.’

  We held up our lanterns, and the shadows slid down the wall like retreating assassins. My shoulder brushed Lavedrine’s. The children had been laid out face upwards across the mattress, a white counterpane covering their bodies. The child nearest to me, head and long hair dangling back over the edge of the mattress, was the girl. Her nose was thin and long, her cheeks sucked in by the sudden agony. There was a pale yellowish pallor to her skin. Her eyes stared back to a point where the wall and ceiling met. They seemed to express surprise, rather than fright. That was my impression. It was cold in the room, the fluid surface of her eyeballs flashed brilliantly with every shift of light. Her lips were parted, the tongue protruding from between sparkling white teeth. On the extreme tip was a globule of something that looked like sticky strawberry jam.

  I bent closer.

  ‘Congealed blood,’ Lavedrine explained, moving his forefinger above the child’s face, never once touching her. ‘A clot of formidable proportions. It must have curdled almost instantaneously.’

  I looked away, reminded of my own children’s insatiable desire for strawberry preserve. Manni would stick out his tongue at Süzi, trying to frighten his sister, giggling and spluttering, spitting chunks of jellied fruit onto his chin.

  ‘It came from here,’ Lavedrine added. ‘The blood surged upwards from the throat. This clot fell short, being heavy.’

  His finger traced an arc from the windpipe to the tongue. From the instant we entered the room, I had found it hard to tear my eyes from those massive gashes at the children’s throats. The wounds were unsightly. A stroke from right to left, narrow and incisive where the knife had entered; wider, larger, more hideous where it had pulled against the muscles on its way out. Blood had gushed up like wine from a barrel split with a sharp axe, and left a curving trail of spots on the low ceiling, larger at one end, thinning to infinity at the other. The slanting light of early morning tinted the larger droplets a dark blue against the yellow wash of domestic colouring. Was that the last thing the child had seen? Her life’s blood spouting in the air like a fountain?

  ‘There’s no sign of a weapon,’ I said.

  ‘The killer took it away with him,’ Lavedrine replied distractedly. ‘Or used a knife from the kitchen. We can look, but blades don’t speak.’

  He turned and looked at me.

  ‘Have you noticed how little blood there is?’

  There was too much of everything in that tiny room for my taste.

  ‘I’d have expected more,’ he continued. ‘On the floor, for example.’

  As the first flush of daylight swelled, the traces of blood on the wooden floorboards to the right of the bed, a crazed puzzle of black streaks and slither marks, began to turn a dull shade of brown.

  ‘Do you know how much a body contains?’ he enquired calmly. ‘A child holds enough to fill several wine bottles.’

  ‘What are you suggesting?’

  ‘It may have soaked into the mattress,’ he replied, beginn
ing to peel back the bedspread, lifting the corner nearest to the pillow, pulling it away in a triangle as he moved in front of me towards the foot of the bed.

  ‘Heavens!’ I whispered, as the bodies lay exposed and the yellow lamplight danced on the cold, sallow surface of the flesh.

  The nightshirts of the boys had been pulled up to their chests. Their tiny penises had been neatly cut away, and laid out in orderly fashion on a pillow at the bottom end of the bed like two small slugs.

  Mutiez’s angry hiss broke the shocked silence.

  ‘That damned woodsman . . .’

  ‘Later!’ Lavedrine snapped. ‘The boys were cut, but the children were dead already. No blood has flowed from those wounds. Only from the throats . . . And yet, even then, there’s no great quantity, given that three murders have been committed. The mattress is more or less dry. It is almost as if the blood has been carried away.’

  Lavedrine hesitated, considering the immensity of what he had just supposed.

  ‘Like the mother,’ I reminded him. ‘She has to be found. That must be our immediate concern. She may still be living.’

  Lavedrine nodded in agreement.

  ‘My men are combing the woods,’ Mutiez reported. ‘And the hunter can do no further harm in Bitternau. If she can be found, they’ll find her.’

  ‘The house must be sealed off until we can examine it more carefully,’ I said to the lieutenant. ‘Nothing is to be moved, or taken away. This is most important. The corpses should be stored in a cold, dry place until the father is found. He will decide where he wants to bury them.’

  ‘Follow those instructions to the letter, Henri,’ Lavedrine said, as he moved around the room, minutely inspecting everything.

  I went downstairs again to retrieve the charcoal and paper that I had dropped coming up. Then I began to make a plan of the room, showing how the furniture was positioned. From different angles, I rapidly sketched the children. I heard Lavedrine opening and closing cupboards and drawers, dropping down on his knees to look under the bed. Grunts of disappointment signalled his findings as he passed into the small adjoining room, where he repeated his search.

  Before long, he was at my side again.

  ‘Next to no furniture. Some shoes and gowns,’ he muttered. ‘Some children’s clothes. A cot next door, but very little else.’

  He stood by my shoulder, watching as I put into practice the teachings of Immanuel Kant, drawing everything I thought would be of relevance. Meanwhile, his glance darted around the room, a bemused expression on his face. ‘There is something odd about this house,’ he murmured. ‘But I cannot put my finger on it.’

  I stopped drawing and looked up.

  ‘Perhaps you Prussians are used to a more simple, spartan way of life than us,’ he said. ‘A family with three young children. So few things.’

  ‘The father is a soldier,’ I replied. ‘You ought to know from experience. They never carry much, or stay in one place long.’

  ‘Something is missing, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘I kept a close watch, sir,’ Mutiez spoke out. ‘None of my men has taken a thing.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Henri,’ Lavedrine cut him off. ‘That is not my meaning. I am struggling to understand what has happened here.’

  Suddenly, he dropped to his knees on the far side of the bed, straining to see something, moving his lamp about, angling it beneath the window sill. ‘What do you make of this?’

  I went across and knelt beside him, straining to see.

  ‘Blood,’ I said.

  He huffed impatiently. ‘Why here, beneath the window? These marks are not spots or drops. They don’t appear to be accidental. It’s as if they had been made by somebody.’

  I looked more closely.

  There was nothing natural about the blood on that rough plaster surface, unlike the blood that had dripped to the floor, or spattered in a spray on the walls and ceiling. ‘How would such an abundance of blood reach this remote location, so far away from the bodies?’

  ‘It is physically impossible,’ he said, his gaze unwavering.

  Professor Kant insisted that no detail should ever be ignored, or attributed to chance. I had made a passable series of sketches, but greater accuracy was required in this instance. I could have pressed paper against the blood, hoping to obtain a transfer of the impression, but I was hesitant to do so. The mark might be irreparably damaged in the process.

  ‘We can make a closer examination later on,’ I said. ‘We’ll do it better in the light of day . . .’

  Down below, boots crashed loudly on the pavement of the kitchen, interrupting our scrutiny of the bedroom wall. A loud voice called out the name of Mutiez. ‘We’ve found it, sir. A cabin in the woods. A mile from here.’

  ‘What about the woman?’ the lieutenant shouted back from the top of the stairs.

  But Lavedrine was already rushing past him, clattering down the stairramp.

  ‘There is no time to lose!’ he urged.

  7

  WE ADVANCED AT a jog-trot in single file.

  Spruce trees formed a shallow canopy, blocking out the light. The tangled undergrowth became thicker, wilder, ever more treacherous, thorns and hip-rose bushes catching and pricking at our hands and clothes. A lashing branch had caught Lavedrine in the face, tracing a row of tiny bloody droplets beneath his left eye. The pale winter sun had crested the horizon an hour before, but we were obliged to keep our lanterns lit.

  Lavedrine, Mutiez, the troopers who had taken me captive, two more who acted as guides. I brought up the rear, my head a jumble of thoughts. Three hours earlier, I had been sleeping in my own warm bed. Now, I was trudging through the sort of inhospitable wilderness that cropped up so often in the tales that Lotte told the children when it was time for bed. Her forests were full of witches, ogres and hobgoblins, places where magic and trickery abounded. There was something dreamlike about the forest at that hour. Frosted leaves crackled and crunched beneath our boots as we moved over the frozen ground. If a branch snapped, it sounded like the crack of a musket, and raised raucous cries of protest from rooks nesting high in occasional bare oak trees which towered above the evergreen pines. For the rest, apart from the occasional hoot of an owl, or the cooing of a partridge, all was silent and still.

  Even the soldiers seemed to have lost their tongues. Mutiez was the first to break the silence. He spoke to the man in the lead, then announced that we had ten minutes’ marching ahead of us. No one else had a word to say, nor any wish to say it. The memory of what we had seen in that cottage had seized hold of our minds. But as we pressed on through the all-pervading smell of decaying leaves, bog-moss and deer-musk, a number of questions troubled me. Why would a salaried officer in the Prussian army leave his wife and children in such a godforsaken part of the countryside? Why take himself off so quickly to Kamenetz? Could he find no better refuge for his family? Surely, they would have been safer inside the barracks, or in one of the requisitioned houses set aside for officers in the poorer part of town. What had attracted Gottewald to that cottage? And how would he react to the news? Would he blame himself for what had happened? Had he put the safety of his loved ones at risk for the sake of his career?

  ‘Are you sure we’re going in the right direction?’

  The voice of Mutiez brought me to earth with a bump. We halted in a glade, surrounded on all sides by skeletal trees which reached up to the leaden sky, shielding us from the biting wind. The smell of decay was stronger there. The man in the lead looked left and right. He seemed unsure of his bearings.

  Lavedrine turned to me.

  ‘Is this going to take much longer?’ I asked.

  ‘God knows!’ he murmured, shaking his head. ‘The guide’s been sniffing the air for the past ten minutes.’

  He raised his nose to the damp air, closed his eyes, and twitched his nostrils.

  ‘There is a trace of something, though,’ he said. ‘Can you smell it?’

  I stared into the forest gloom. The atmos
phere was dominated by the mouldering damp of the earth and decaying leaves which lay thick on the ground. But beneath it all, there was the merest trace of a stench.

  ‘Sweet and penetrating,’ he suggested. ‘Something organic left to putrefy above the ground.’

  As the breeze shifted quarter, that stench seemed to vanquish every other vegetable essence, like the cloying miasma that issued from the town drains in summer.

  Had we stumbled on the corpse of Frau Gottewald?

  ‘Over there, sir,’ the lead soldier informed Mutiez, and led the way at a run towards a thicket which seemed to float above a waving sea of pale green nettles and brown decaying ferns.

  ‘The smell of shit drew us here, sir,’ the guide announced. With a mirthless laugh, he added, ‘Gournier has a nose for it. Heaved his guts all over the place.’

  Trooper Gournier, a fat, red-faced man, cursed fiercely beneath his breath, but hung back as we moved around the perimeter looking for the entrance.

  ‘Worse than the camp privy after the battle!’ the lead man prattled. ‘We were told to bring you gentlemen here, sir. No one said a word about going in again. There’s the entrance. Can we take a blow, sir?’

  Mutiez hissed something harsh between his teeth, and the men dropped down on their haunches, unscrewing the caps of their tin bottles, pulling out smoke-stained pipes from their leather pouches.

  An expression of resigned disgust on his face, Mutiez turned to Lavedrine and myself, and made a sign to follow as he pushed aside a roughly woven gate of branches and twigs and led the way into the compound. Inside, the smell of rottenness was overwhelming. I raised my scarf, veiling my nose from the vapours, which hung in the air like a plague. Lavedrine reached for the hem of his cloak, while Mutiez held his képi to his face like a mask as we advanced on a mound in the centre.

  A mass of sticks like an unlit bonfire had been raised in the clearing. It might have been an otter’s lodge, but there was no water nearby. And it was six feet tall. Long branches had been raised to form a skeleton, the frame dressed with sticks, mud, leaves, and ferns. There was method in the construction. The pieces of wood diminished in size as the edifice rose to a point, where a mesh of willow canes bound the lot together. I had read that the savages in Canada made shelters of this sort. Signs of the hunter were everywhere. Animal skins in various stages of curing or decomposition, pieces of meat—some fresh, dripping blood, others black and rotten—dangled from nooses thrown into the branches overhead, then tied fast to the trunks lower down.