I will conclude this section only by expressing my concern for the health of the Lady in the present circumstances. The death of her child, and the fact that death was occasioned by murder, would be a trial for any woman. For Lady Dorothea-Ann, I fear, the consequences may be grave. I have had no opportunity to speak with Her Ladyship, given that I resigned from the Duke’s employ the morning after the murder, and I can only hope that she has not taken it too ill. I strongly advise that the Lady should be visited, comforted, and advised by a qualified person with wide experience in the moral and the religious disciplines. A suitable person might be my acquaintance, Christian Jacob Kraus, who is a moral philosopher of the first order, a gentleman destined for an important academic career.
PAGE 16 FF.: PLEA
Conclusions relating to the sentence due to be pronounced by Procurator Helmut-Philip Reimarus, magistrate, in the city of Königsberg on 26th October, in the year of God, 1766.
The conclusion of the trial of Karlus Wettig, footman, accused of the murder of the infant, Georg-Albert von Mandel, in accordance with the Law of all the Prussias, is as inevitable as it is unjust. There can only be one sentence, and that sentence is final and irrevocable. That is the Law regarding punishment of wilful murder. And the Law will prevail. As it must.
But I appeal to you, Excellency, Magistrate General, Baron von Bülow, at the very least for clemency. There is a Moral Order in the necessity for Justice which cannot be overlooked or ignored.
Is this man guilty beyond all reasonable doubt?
If any doubt remains, in what does it consist?
It must consist in the following: Karlus Wettig proclaims his innocence, and no evidence has been provided to negate that claim. He is of sound mind, and of a proven good character. Does this count for nothing? In the face of a capital sentence and the inevitable punishment, even the most depraved of men will recognise that it is better to be known for what he is, to admit his guilt, explain the motives which have led to his crime, and proffer weakness of character as his excuse. Better even this humiliation, than to be thought a coward—so ashamed of what he has done in the face of undeniable evidence, that he will deny it to the very end. Only a fool will rob himself of the flimsy moral justification which a clear motive may provide. Karlus Wettig is neither a fool, nor a coward. What possible reason could there be for this man to murder a child in his cot, and deny it to the end? There is neither monetary profit, nor blustering pride in his own evil to justify it.
Conclusion: If this man is hanged, an innocent will go to the gallows, and the guilty will escape scot-free.
Question: Is Karlus Wettig attempting to shield the name and the identity of the murderer?
There are innumerable reasons which suggest that this may be the case:
1. He may not know the name of the person, but believe (as I have been told by his pastor that he does) that somebody must pay for the crime, or the innocent child will not be permitted a Christian burial in a consecrated church. That is, Karlus Wettig may see himself as a scapegoat, morally obliged to pay for the expiation of a crime committed by an unknown killer, thinking that his own death will redeem the unblemished soul of the victim, and put further crushing weight on the uneasy conscience of the true perpetrator, inducing him or her to eventually confess to the murder of Georg-Albert von Mandel.
2. Karlus Wettig may know the actual name of the person who committed the crime, and may have decided, for reasons unknown to anyone (except himself and that other guilty person), to take the burden of punishment on his own head.
3. Karlus Wettig may not have known the name of the perpetrator, but he may have wished for some unspeakable reason that the child were dead. That is, he may feel that he has somehow invoked the boy’s death, and that some heartless demon god had acted upon his unrealised inclination.
How many times have you, Sir, wished that somebody were dead? It is a wish more commonly expressed than is generally realised. Indeed, if a man is so bold as to wish death upon another, he is under a moral obligation to commit the deed. This is, I know, a philosophical paradox, but it is true. And the converse is equally true. If Karlus Wettig has never publicly announced his desire for the death of the infant, Georg-Albert Mandel, if he has never admitted committing such a murder, and if there is no demonstrable evidence to the contrary, then we are morally obliged to believe that he has not committed the crime.
In conclusion, I believe that hate or malice are not the cause, but love and tenderness of a most particular nature, which need to be unravelled before the true motivation for the crime can be satisfactorily posited. Equally, I believe that I may, in part, have touched upon some elements of the mysterious nature of this passion. Naturally, I am unable to demonstrate my thesis, but such incontrovertible evidence might still be obtained if you, Sir, would admit the necessity to open the tomb and examine the corpse of the victim.
Love, Duty, or both, perhaps, may have condemned Karlus Wettig to pay for a crime which he did not commit.
In faith and loyalty,
Immanuel Kant, philosopher, this day, 1st October, 1766.
36
WE CLIMBED ABOARD the Danzig post-coach at half-past five that morning.
The same vehicle, or one very like it, would have taken us back to Lotingen, but Lavedrine and I were not going there directly. We had discussed the plan as we walked back through the streets from the university library to the post-inn. It was four o’clock, the night sky over Königsberg a black velvet curtain pinpricked with a thousand stars.
Lavedrine pulled on the hostelry bell and we waited for a yawning ostler to draw back the bolts and let us enter. ‘I see no reason to stay here any longer,’ he said. ‘Kant’s request for clemency was submitted. And it was rejected. No post-mortem examination was ever carried out by a qualified pathologist. If Kant was correct, the solution awaits us in Svetloye, ancestral home of the von Mandel family. The philosopher was helpless in the circumstances, but we are not.’
I was too tired to disagree.
Lavedrine was a colonel in the French army, I was a Prussian magistrate. Our investigative powers were endorsed by the executive authorities of both countries. We represented a force that no local interest could lightly oppose—not even the descendants of an aristocratic family who ruled their estates and tenants with all the power of wealth and feudal law at their disposal.
‘We can catch a nap in the coach,’ Lavedrine went on, ordering the ostler to set about preparing a breakfast of boiled eggs. We went upstairs, but only to collect our bags. ‘If I were to close my eyes now,’ the Frenchman said, ‘I would never open them again. I suggest that we pay our bill, then catch the first coach.’
An hour later, as the post-coach trundled out of town and began to climb the glistening snow-covered hills, the rising sun broke bravely through the massive clouds, its rays flashing like multiple rainbows. It was the first time I had ever seen Königsberg by sunlight. Looking back, I thought instinctively of Immanuel Kant. The city he loved lay shimmering beneath us, untroubled by the threat of rain or further snow.
If I was thinking of Kant, so was Lavedrine.
‘I wonder whether we have come away too soon,’ he said, cutting in upon my meditations.
‘What do you mean?’
Lavedrine rubbed his chin, and sniffed. ‘That case we read about last night. I’ve been puzzling over it. It occurred in 1765 . . . Forgive me if I say again that I was correct. Kant was drawn to criminal investigation long before he wrote to me in late 1793, shortly after I had published my thesis.’
‘L’assassix rural,’ I murmured dutifully.
He beamed with delight. ‘You remember, Stiffeniis. Good for you! My point is this. What reawakened his interest in crime so many years later? Did something specific occur in 1793, which caused Kant to get in touch with me?’
‘Your book was published,’ I answered, almost too quickly. ‘He must have read it, and found the ideas stimulating.’
‘I am not so presumptu
ous,’ he said with a smile and a shake of the head. ‘He contacted me because of something specific in my book. I will never forget the words that he used. “I have recently been studying the springs of criminal motivation”,’ he recited, as if holding that letter of Kant’s in his hand, reading it out to me verbatim.
He leant forward in his seat—there were no other passengers—and fixed me with a questioning stare. ‘You met him in ’93. Did he mention being involved in any criminal investigation at that date?’
He reclined comfortably back against the leather upholstery, inviting me to entertain him with an account of my relationship with Professor Kant.
But I stared out of the window, and refused to say a word.
I had passed the night in a state of nervous anxiety as we sifted the mass of papers in Kant’s archive, fearing that my name would appear at any moment in an incriminating note. Somewhere amongst those papers, Kant had written a full account of the day that I went to visit him in Königsberg. I was sure of it. I had found the courage to confess my obsession with violent death, and Professor Kant had offered advice that had radically altered my life. ‘Restore order where crime has brought chaos.’ That day, I chose to be a magistrate, though I might as easily have become a murderer.
‘I attended one of his lectures in 1793,’ I answered, shaking off my reluctance to speak of it. ‘I was extremely surprised when he remembered my name a decade later.’
‘But he did not forget you,’ Lavedrine replied swiftly. ‘And I wonder why he thought of you in connection with such a troublesome investigation when his own life was so close to its end. I mean to say, you were only . . . what? Twenty-six, twenty-seven? And without any experience in such a demanding field.’
‘I was twenty-eight,’ I corrected him. ‘He believed that a young magistrate, a person like myself, would be more willing to follow his suggestions than a seasoned investigator.’
Lavedrine stared thoughtfully out of the window.
A moment later, he turned to me again. ‘Let me tell you how I see it,’ he said. ‘You, a young man from an aristocratic family—lively, intelligent, interested in philosophy—meet Immanuel Kant one day. The greatest Prussian thinker, a metaphysician of extraordinary capability. Does he invite you to study moral philosophy in Königsberg under his tutelage? No, he does not. He sends you off to study Law. And ten years later, still lacking any real investigative experience, Herr Professor Kant calls you to Königsberg to help him solve a murder case.’
He shook his head, as if the life that he had just related were beyond belief. That familiar, ironic smile lit up his face and set his eyes a-glistening.
‘At pretty much the same time,’ he continued, ‘I receive a letter from Professor Kant, relating to murder and its causes. I do not mean to draw any facile conclusions, but, well, I mean to say! It’s hard to avoid them. Kant, murder, you. You, Kant, and a murder to be solved? These elements are so closely linked, they are almost a syllogism.’
‘Syllogisms are often false,’ I observed neutrally.
‘True,’ he agreed. ‘But I recall how angry you were at Dittersdorf’s feast. I do believe you would have planted your knife and fork in my heart with a little more goading. Thank God Helena was present! We might have ended at each other’s throats. And all because I insisted that Kant was interested in murder long before he sent for you. Now, we have conclusive proof. I was right, and you were wrong, Stiffeniis. But you already knew the truth, I’m convinced of it. That was why you were in such a rage. And for the same reason, that is why you are so reluctant to talk now.’
‘But we are talking,’ I replied.
‘I am talking,’ he said. ‘You are not.’
He stared at me in silence, as if challenging me to react to the provocation.
Again, I avoided his scrutiny, looking out of the window at the distant hills, the bare trees, the endless snow.
‘You would make a most intriguing subject for my studies,’ he probed again.
‘Really?’ I laughed without humour, never shifting my eyes from the scene beyond the window-glass. ‘You are a criminologist,’ I said. ‘I have committed no crime.’
Lavedrine laughed in his turn, but his laughter was genuine.
‘Now, you are making connections that are mechanistic,’ he said. ‘That thin smile of yours gives nothing away. Those dark-brown eyes never betray what is passing through your mind. Did Kant see something there that no one else had seen? Not even you, perhaps? There is a strange ambivalence between the hunter and the hunted, the criminal and the magistrate. They share a set of common values, they move in the same shadowy world.’ He looked thoughtfully at me. ‘Is that what Helena finds so fascinating? You are a man of dark secrets and violent passions, I think, though you hide them deep beneath a glacial outer crust. I’d love to know what attracts you to crime. I’ll ferret it out, I promise you. Sooner or later. The enigma is enthralling, Stiffeniis.’
I did not rise to the fly. He will talk himself out, I thought.
To my immense relief, the coach lurched to a halt twenty minutes later.
We had passed through Svetloye the previous day. I had taken little notice of the place then, but I looked around me more carefully as we jumped down into the road. It was eight o’clock. Not much more. Snow lay thick on the frozen earth, giving the small straggling hamlet an aspect of gleaming purity that it would not have had in more muddy circumstances. The houses along the road were mean straw-thatched cottages, though they were picturesque enough beneath a blanket of snow. On a hill to the north stood a larger house, the von Mandel mansion, as we were told by a group of boys throwing snowballs at each other and at the departing post-coach, much to the anger of the driver cracking his whip on his box, and the red-faced postillion riding the lead-horse.
‘There isn’t anyone up there now, sir.’
‘But there is a church, I believe?’
The boys pointed us in the direction of a pine wood on the western slope of the hill, and Lavedrine tossed them a Pfennig or two.
‘Are you in the mood for walking?’ he asked.
‘We have little choice,’ I replied.
I slipped and fell down once, but otherwise we proceeded without mishap, emerging from a thick stand of trees to find the small stone chapel and silent churchyard bordering the von Mandel estate. The church was small and squat, little more than a large single room or prayer-hall, with a stone bell tower, but there was a twirl of smoke rising from the chimney of a clapperboard barn that had been built onto the side of the building.
‘The priest is at home,’ said Lavedrine, stepping up to knock.
But the old man who answered the door was not a priest. He was dressed in the clothes of a countryman, his ancient overcoat tied tight with string at the waist, his legs clad with canvas leggings secured above the knee. He was the estate guardian—‘living in the pastor’s cottage’, he explained, ‘for it is warmer and drier than the house up there on the hill’.
‘Where is the owner of the estate?’ I asked.
The man ran his gnarled hand through the straggling grey hairs of his long beard.
‘Over there, sir,’ he said, pointing to a funeral monument shaped like a pyramid that stood out from the snow like a soaring Alpine peak. ‘Died last year, he did. Them lawyers do take their time to settle things. An’ gets paid for doing so. I am a-waiting on them. They’ll get shut of me, no doubt. One of these days. Till then, I just keeps the place tidy, and safe from tinkering thieves.’
That word seemed to strike a violent discord in his head.
‘What can I do for you gentlemen?’ he asked warily.
Lavedrine told him who we were and why we had come. Not in detail, of course, but in a general sort of way. ‘Who is buried beneath the pyramid?’ he asked.
‘Henry Ffinch, sir, a retired, English seafaring gentleman what bought up the old property many years ago.’
‘What about the von Mandels?’
‘Over there, sir,’ the man said,
shading his eyes against the harsh glare of light reflecting off the snow, pointing to another part of the cemetery.
‘Is there a sexton or a gravedigger?’ Lavedrine asked the man.
‘There’s Pieter Sweiten, sir,’ the man replied quickly enough.
‘Who is he, and where might he be found?’ I asked.
A crack appeared in the old man’s funeral slab of a face.
‘Why, sir, right here,’ he said, tapping his forefinger on his chest. ‘I am he.’
Lavedrine pulled out his purse and shook it, noisily rattling the coins. ‘We need you to do a little job for us, Herr Sweiten.’
‘What’s that, Herr Magistrate?’ he said, turning back to me, apparently more impressed by my title than that of a colonel in an occupying army, even if the foreigner was the one with the clinking purse in his hand.
‘Where lies the grave of Georg-Albert von Mandel?’
‘There ain’t no grave,’ he said.
‘No grave?’ I echoed.
‘No, sir,’ the old man replied, his voice a vibrating country burr. ‘Not for family. That babe was laid to rest in the von Mandel vault. ’Tain’t a grave, if you see what I mean.’
‘Can you open it?’ I asked, the words out of my mouth before I realised the enormity of the proposal and how it must have sounded to Pieter Sweiten.
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