It might have been a procession of ghostly Teutonic Knights in rusty, clanking armour, going home to rest in some funeral crypt after a midnight roust. The Order had ruled the Baltic coast with an iron fist for centuries. They had been the first to organise the gathering of amber, the first to regulate the trade. Control had passed to local lords, then, finally, to the Hohenzollerns. Now, the French had laid their hands upon our riches.
With a start, I realised that someone was lurking at my shoulder.
I am tall, but the man was taller. And he was thinner, too. His blue woollen jacket rucked up in folds where his belt pulled too tightly at his waist. His face was the ashen colour of lye soap, his features utterly undistinguished, except for two thick-lidded eyes which peered back at me without blinking. They reminded me of the unseeing black buttons sewn onto the pale cotton face of my daughter’s rag doll.
‘I am Pierre Grillet,’ he announced. ‘I was told that you wanted to speak with me.’
‘The soldier who found the body on the beach?’
‘The colonel said to take you in to breakfast,’ he said, though he did not confirm or deny what I had said. He simply turned and walked away, taking great long strides along the narrow walkway of rotting planks.
I had eaten nothing since leaving Lotingen, and I was famished. I followed him willingly to the hut at the far end of the row.
He threw open the door, then stepped aside to let me enter first.
The aroma of toasted corn hung in the air in wisps of blue smoke. Coffee had become a rare commodity since the English set up their blockade of the Channel, but toasted corn will do for men who have forgotten the taste of anything better. I looked with yearning at the breakfast table, the plates piled high with fresh bread. French officers were making short work of the feast. Every man in the room stopped eating. All of them stared at me, and not one word was said. It would have been impossible to hold a private conversation.
Reluctantly, I turned to Grillet.
‘It might better if we speak out here,’ I said.
‘As you prefer, monsieur.’
There was something sly and insinuating in his reedy voice.
‘You speak good French,’ he added, as he closed the door on the tempting smell of food, and we turned our faces to the fog once more.
The compliment spurred me to be brusque. ‘Just tell me how you found the body. Make it short, and keep it simple. For the sake of a foreigner, do you understand me?’
He nodded, sniffed, began to speak.
‘Three days ago, I was scouting up along the coast. It was shortly after breakfast. This time of day, more or less. I’d been on duty all that night, so I had the morning off. I’d gone about a mile in that direction,’ he pointed away to the east, ‘when I came upon her. She was lying face down on the beach. As naked as Eve before the Fall. I wondered what was going on, of course. It isn’t every day that you find a . . .’
‘You have told me what you saw,’ I said. ‘Now, tell me what you did.’
He cleared his throat. ‘I called out to her, that’s what I did. But she did not reply. I guessed what was up, of course. Like I said, a naked woman lying on the shore. And way above the waterline. She hadn’t been swept ashore. I went up close, and prodded her leg with the toe of my boot. When she didn’t move, or cry out, I ran back here and reported what I’d found. I didn’t even turn her over. No idea what she looked like. I didn’t see her face until the sergeant came and rolled her over . . .’
‘And you were alone when you found her?’
‘Just me, monsieur.’
He had no one to corroborate his story. What he told me was what he wished to tell me. It might be more or less than the truth.
‘What were you doing on that stretch of coast?’
‘I went to bathe,’ he replied.
Soldiers are not the cleanest men in the world.
‘Do you often wash?’ I asked him.
‘Tuesday, or Wednesday, as a rule,’ he said. ‘I’ll not wash this week, though. Not after what happened.’
‘Do you always go to the same spot?’
‘No, sir. I’d never been so far along the shore.’
‘Why did you go so far off this time, then?’
He pointed down to the beach. Beneath the blanket of fog, the noise of the work went on unbroken. ‘The sea is dirty here since they started digging. You go in white, but you come out blue.’
‘Blue?’ I quizzed him.
‘There’s something hidden under the sand and pebbles. It’s a blue clay, one of the girls was telling me. It breaks up into powder when they pierce it, and turns the water into a sort of blue dye. There’s a phrase for it in German . . . blaue Erde, I think they call it. That’s where the amber is found.’
‘Did you kill her?’ I asked him bluntly.
He was the first to admit that he had seen the body. He had been alone, and was in an area beyond regular French military control. He could have murdered her without being seen, then fabricated the story of happening by chance upon her body. It was a perfect cover. In his apparent openness, he appeared to be above suspicion.
His small eyes opened wide with shock.
‘Why would I do that?’ he protested, his voice rising sharply.
Clearly, he did not like being questioned by a Prussian. And by a Prussian magistrate even less.
‘I can think of a few good reasons,’ I replied flatly. ‘She was young and fit. She may have been a beauty before someone went to work on her face. Did she refuse to let you have your way with her?’
He pulled himself stiffly to attention, but he did not answer.
‘Why was she naked, Grillet? Did you tear her clothes off before you raped her?’
His cheeks were two inflamed red spots.
‘I’ll speak to the colonel about this,’ he muttered.
‘The colonel ordered you to speak to me,’ I snapped. ‘When I have finished, you may tell him what you wish. Why was the woman . . .’ I stopped, corrected myself. ‘Why do you think that she was naked, then? What logical explanation would you give for that fact?’
‘That’s obvious, sir,’ he spat back.
‘Not to me, it isn’t.’
He sighted down his long nose at me before he spoke.
‘They’re whores, sir. Every last one of them! They won’t consort with us, not openly, but they won’t stay put at night. I’d been on duty, as I told you. We guard the compound where those women sleep, or they’d all be off to the village, and half of them would never come back. We’ve lost many in the last few months . . .’
‘Lost, or gone?’
The idea that there might be other bodies struck me forcefully. The fact that les Halles had not informed me of the situation seemed like a grave omission. Did he suspect what I suspected? Was he covering up for his men? Did he believe that one of them was guilty of this murder? And of other murders, too?
Grillet shrugged. His bony shoulders grazed his ears. ‘They could be anywhere, sir. They are here one minute, gone the next. Smugglers head for the Russian border, I have heard. That’s where the women may have gone.’ He grunted mirthlessly, and I realised that he was laughing. ‘If that’s the case, we may catch up with them. Moscow. That’s where we’ll be heading next.’
Unless they send you off to Spain, I thought.
‘You have not answered my question,’ I said. ‘What do you believe may have happened to the dead girl’s clothes?’
He seemed to relax a fraction. ‘I’ve got two ideas on that front, sir,’ he said, then he made a loud clicking sound inside his mouth. ‘Either she was trying to swim out, or . . .’
‘Swim?’
‘That’s right, sir. They do it all the time.’ He pointed to the east. The fog had almost disappeared at the far end of the beach. A group of huts raised on stilts seemed to float above the waters of the lagoon half a mile away. ‘The women live down there,’ he pointed. ‘They swim to the shore at night. I reckon she met with something in the wat
er. Some sea-monster probably dug that hole in her face.’
‘Oh, yes?’ I encouraged him.
‘A basking whale, or something similar. Catch that fish, I bet you’d find a bundle of rags in its guts. Like Jonah in the Bible.’
Against my will, I let out a chuckle. ‘That is an ingenious explanation,’ I complimented him. ‘But you mentioned two possibilities. Let’s see if your second is as clever as the first, Grillet.’
‘Thieves,’ he said, and added quickly, ‘Prussian thieves.’
What else? I should have expected it. If I asked a Frenchman for an opinion, he would tell me that the guilty party was certainly a Prussian.
‘Prussian thieves, indeed!’ I challenged. ‘Excluding myself, I have not seen a single Prussian man in this encampment. Or are you talking about the Prussian women? Do you suspect the girls of murdering their workmate to rob her clothes?’
‘Not just her clothes, sir.’
He looked at me attentively, as if considering how much to tell me. Wondering, perhaps, if he had been too quick to tell a Prussian magistrate where he laid the blame for the murder of a Prussian girl.
‘Monsieur Magistrate, the situation here is complicated. We are French soldiers. We have no wives, no women of our own. And there are no whore-houses nearby, like you’d find in a decent town. Some of these girls are up for it, though. Why would we kill them? You could buy all the girls on Nordcopp shore for a napoleon d’or! Dead girls are no use to any man. No use to us, nor to the colonel.’ He jerked his thumb decisively back over his shoulder. ‘But for them it’s different!’
‘Who do you mean?’ I asked.
His eyes fixed mine again, and held them. ‘The local men, monsieur. There are Prussians living near to the shore. They have a different trade with the women. Stolen amber, monsieur. There’s a motive for you! The girls must put some by. They’re always trying to smuggle it out under our noses. They’d have to try and sell it to someone, don’t you think? Those men have wives and women of their own, they are not like us. What’s a dead Prussian wench to them?’
‘Are you suggesting that the girl was murdered by a smuggler?’
‘I am, monsieur.’
I nodded, thinking of the amber in my pocket.
‘Let’s say, Grillet, for just one moment, that this idea of yours is correct. The girl broke out of the compound and swam to the shore, intending to sell her amber to a local man, and, for some reason, he murdered her.’
That piece of amber was worth a lot of money. But Grillet’s reasoning was faulty. Kati Rodendahl had never been given the opportunity to sell it. She’d been murdered before she got the chance to make a trade. Whatever it was, the motive was not theft.
‘Why would the killer strip the body naked?’ I challenged him.
Grillet looked at me for a moment, then he smirked. ‘Why not, monsieur? If you have stolen a life, you might as well steal her clothes. And every other thing that she had hidden about her person.’
Did Grillet know Kati’s secret?
Did all the French soldiers on the shore know where the girls hid their amber?
‘What things are you speaking of?’ I asked him.
He was still smiling. The roots of his teeth were black with the stains of tobacco wads. ‘I’m guessing,’ Grillet went on. ‘She might have had a ring, earrings, a sacred medallion. Depends on whether she was planning to leave, or not.’
‘It is certainly possible,’ I conceded.
‘Then again,’ he pressed on, ‘if a deal had been already struck, he might have cheated her. If she threatened to report him to the colonel, he might have killed her to protect his identity. For me, it’s Prussian business,’ he concluded emphatically, and he appeared to believe what he said.
I did not react.
Grillet proposed that Prussians were killing the girls for profit, or to maintain the secrets of their illegal trade in amber. But what if the nationalities were changed about? Might the French be staging murders for political reasons known to themselves alone? Might the French officers—and les Halles himself—be involved in the conspiracy? The idea that girls had run away to Russia was plausible, but was it true? What if they had died like Kati Rodendahl? What if the bodies had never been found? If the French could frighten the women into avoiding any contact with the smugglers, wouldn’t it be to their own advantage?
Was that why they had sent for a Prussian magistrate? In the hope that he would find a Prussian scapegoat? Was that why Malaport had called for a man whose wife was in the final stages of a difficult pregnancy? Knowing that I would agree to anything for the sake of a quick and easy passage home?
The sun was burning off the fog like a bright phosphorescent flame.
‘Very good, Grillet,’ I said, shading my eyes. ‘Colonel les Halles will be told that you have answered all my questions. Now, where can I find the women who work the amber? Her friends, for instance. I’ll need to speak with them . . .’
‘You cannot,’ Grillet interrupted brusquely.
‘Cannot?’ I frowned.
‘Colonel les Halles is on the beach with the engineers who arrived last evening,’ he said. ‘The new machines are being set up. His specific orders. No one can go down there today. Excepting the builders and the colonel himself, that is.’
‘What about the women?’
‘Confined to their cabins. There is no way to reach them.’
Was he about to inform me that I would be confined to my hut, as well?
I skipped to the next point on the agenda that I had set myself for the day.
‘I mean to speak to the company doctor. Where can I find him?’
Grillet’s French was rural, his pronunciation more heavily accented than the norm, brutal in its directness. ‘Le médecin n’est pas ici,’ he said.
‘Not in the camp?’ I repeated.
‘He lives in Nordcopp. Three miles inland.’
I was surprised. Did Colonel les Halles allow his officers to live in the town?
‘That’s half an hour by horse,’ I insisted stubbornly. ‘However slow the nag may be.’
‘The horses are on the shore, as well, monsieur. There’s heavy stuff to be moved about down there.’ He paused, like a wrestler looking for a better hold. Then, he leapt to the attack again. ‘If you want to go, you’ll have to walk.’
The trace of a sardonic smile graced his thin lips. I had met this sort of insolence before when working with the French. They might need me, but they were not prepared to help me overmuch.
‘Just point me in the right direction,’ I said, ignoring the provocation.
He looked inland. ‘Follow the track leading out of the main gate. It will take you straight to Nordcopp by way of Nordbarn.’
‘Nordbarn?’
Grillet settled the strap of his cap more comfortably beneath his chin.
‘You asked about her friends, monsieur,’ he volunteered. ‘Those women up in Nordbarn used to work down here on the shore themselves. They may have known the woman that you are interested in. And now, monsieur, if you’ve done with me, I’ll have my breakfast.’
He placed his hand upon the door and pushed.
The smell of French bread and toasted corn wafted over me again.
‘Will you come, too, sir?’
I peered inside and met the suspicious glances of the French soldiers. They all knew who I was. They also knew that I had just interrogated one of their number. My stomach ached with hunger, but I did not go in.
‘Thank you, no,’ I said.
I would eat Prussian food.
Nordcopp was not so very far away.
9
THE SUN BEAT mercilessly down upon my head.
It was three miles to Nordcopp, even less to Nordbarn, according to Grillet, but it seemed like thirty as I tramped along the narrow rutted carriage-track which had brought me to the Baltic shore the night before. Fishermen and the people who worked the local amber were reputed to dwell there, but I saw no man. Grillet had al
so warned me that the area was rigorously patrolled by French troops, but I did not meet a single soldier.
I seemed to be going nowhere, beating time in the middle of a desolate wilderness, a vast expanse of rolling sand-dunes crowned with withered clumps of stunted grass. The only sounds that shattered the persistent shrilling of the wind were the sharp shriek of an occasional solitary gull high above my head or the softer piping of an unseen curlew. As time dragged on and nothing changed, I began to wonder whether Moses himself could have led me safely out of that desert.
Then, a stunted laurel bush appeared like a mirage on the horizon.
I reached it, and I saw a stand of slanting ash trees further off. Sheltering in their lee was a cluster of low broken-backed roofs. I counted five huts as I approached, five long buildings covered with salt-blackened thatch that was hanging almost to the ground. They were set in a horse-shoe which enclosed a small bare space, and leant so close together that the villagers must have heard their neighbours rutting.
Nordbarn.
The settlement was like a primitive fortress. There was one way in and out, a narrow passage that pointed towards the coast. That was where the amber came from. That was where the French soldiers came from. In ages past, the Baltic Sea had been the local people’s only source of livelihood, the source of all the dangers that they faced. I could only hope that they would not see me in the same menacing light.
My ears were throbbing. The sensation had been annoying me for quite a while, long before I actually saw the place. The noise increased in intensity, the nearer that I came to the village. It might have been the droning of a hive of bumblebees. Or the streets of Lotingen at midday, I recalled ruefully, when the clouds of flies and midges were most bothersome.
Yet, no fly troubled me.
No droning bee was anywhere to be seen.
And suddenly the throbbing ceased.
A wooden shutter was thrown back, a face looked out.
I froze on the spot.
Let them see you plainly, I thought.
They would see a man who had not shaved since the previous morning. A man whose hair was tussled by the wind, and stiff with sand. A man who had slept all night in the rumpled, sweaty clothes that he was wearing. I began to regret my slovenliness. Would I look to them like a magistrate who had the power to conduct an important criminal investigation?
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