HS03 - A Visible Darkness

by Michael Gregorio

  I could hear her breathing, but I could not see her in the dark. I did not like the situation. That creature knew her way around those tunnels. I did not. If she could shake me off, I’d have trouble finding my way out. If that bit of amber was so valuable, I might have trouble finding her again. She struggled, but I felt her warm musty breath on my face. The air was tainted by the salty smell of her sweat.

  ‘The dead girl owned it, didn’t she?’

  Her voice sounded heavy and sad in the gloom.

  ‘Was she bringing it to you?’ I asked her, easing my grip on her arm.

  She let out a loud sigh. ‘No one in their right mind would come down here with a piece like this, sir. But I know . . . There are people in Nordcopp who’d do anything to get their hands on it.’

  ‘Who?’

  No answer came from the dark.

  Suddenly, she breathed in sharply. ‘You think that she was killed because of this jewel, don’t you, sir?’ she said.

  ‘It is very likely.’

  ‘You are wrong.’

  ‘What do you . . .’

  She did not let me finish. ‘He’d have known where to find it,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t interested in amber. He’d have turned her inside out for a gem like this one.’

  Her argument struck home. The killer had had the opportunity to rip the corpse apart in search of what he was looking for. But then again, I thought, if he did not want the amber, what did he want from Kati Rodendahl?

  ‘How much might this be worth?’ I asked her. ‘And who would buy it?’

  I saw a gleam in the dark, stretched out my hand, and plucked the amber nugget away from her.

  I might as well have uncaged a bear.

  Erika let out a howl and leapt on me like a fury. Her hands were everywhere. On my shirt, clinging to my jacket. Her boots dug into my knees, and scraped my bones. She scrambled after that piece of amber, climbing all over me like a beggar’s monkey, though I held it out beyond her reach, trying to fend her off with the other arm. Her nails clawed at my eyes, raked my cheek, ripped at my mouth.

  ‘Give it here!’ she screeched.

  I twisted and turned, throwing her off, kicking out as she tried to attack me again, holding her at bay as I edged back, following the tunnel upwards, never stopping until I reached the derelict house, the pigs, the hole in the wall, the street, and safety.

  As I rejoined the throng, her screams and swearing followed me. There were scratches on the back of my hands, and I felt the dribble of blood on my neck and throat. On the corner at the end of the street, there was a public water-pump. While washing my wounds and cleaning my face, drying myself off again with my pocket handkerchief, I cursed that little demon. The moment I did so, I realised the folly of it.

  Could I invoke anything worse than the affliction God had given to Erika Linder in the instant that she came into the world?

  12

  I DID NOT know the doctor’s name or his address.

  Grillet had told me that he could be found in Nordcopp.

  ‘It shouldn’t be hard to find him, sir,’ he had said. ‘The settlement is small. And there’s no one else.’

  The obvious place to start my search was in the French guard-post.

  I made my way back to the main gate and the watch-tower.

  There were three soldiers in the guard-room, which contained enough air to sustain one life alone. One of them was blowing clouds of blue smoke from a long clay pipe. Another man was gnawing on a black-pudding sausage, while the third, a sergeant, was fast asleep behind a desk, his large feet resting on the table-top.

  The man with the pipe was the soldier who had spoken to me as I entered the town an hour before.

  ‘Been robbed already?’ he asked. ‘Been fighting, have you?’

  Erika’s nails had evidently left their mark.

  ‘Two of us were scrapping over the same bit of amber.’ I nodded. ‘They told me there’s a doctor here in Nordcopp. Do you know where I can find him?’

  He did not know. Nor did the man with the sausage. And neither of them seemed inclined to wake their sleeping sergeant.

  ‘This doctor attends to the workers out on the coast,’ I insisted.

  The man who was eating tore off another piece of sausage. ‘There’s a doctor’s sign down that way,’ he growled, swallowing pork and words, pointing out of the door with what remained of the sausage.

  On a map the town of Nordcopp looks no bigger than a spot of filth that a fly might leave behind. In reality, it is a swarming, seething labyrinth of narrow lanes that twist and turn like wriggling worms in a fisherman’s bucket. It is like a living organism: small and compact on the outside, crammed to bursting with intestines, arteries and veins, each smaller and narrower than the one before.

  Outside the door, I turned to the left, then followed a dark, winding, surprisingly empty alley to the very end, where it opened into a cramped and irregular little square.

  This space was dominated by the crumbling façade of a very old church.

  Had I been a Roman Catholic, I might have cried miracle. The name of the temple was cut into the lintel, CHRIST THE SAVIOUR. Next door, I saw the signboard hanging over a house that must once have belonged to the priest. Carved of wood, nailed together in the form of a star were two small arms and legs. When new, they might have been flesh-pink, but rain and damp had leached out all the colour. Those dangling limbs were pale ash-grey, except for more resistant spots of bright red paint which clearly signified blood.

  I went across and pulled on a bell-rope.

  What was a French doctor doing in Nordcopp, I asked myself. Did his presence there signify the dawn of a career which would eventually flourish on the streets of Paris, or was this the twilight of a military hack-bones who had been despatched to the farthest northern reach of the empire?

  A vision in white opened the door. A stout old woman with long white hair and very large bosoms filled the doorway. Her face was extremely pale, her eyes bright blue. She was wearing a long white apron and matching linen bonnet.

  ‘May I speak to the doctor?’ I asked in exploratory German, wondering whether the French doctor had found himself a local housekeeper.

  ‘Doctor’s busy,’ she replied in the uncouth dialect of the north coast.

  ‘I’ll wait for him, if I may,’ I replied.

  ‘Who shall I tell him’s calling?’

  ‘Procurator Stiffeniis of Lotingen,’ I announced.

  A resonating German voice called out: ‘Herr Magistrate, come through.’

  At the sound of the voice, the woman stepped aside like a stronghold door swinging partially open. I was obliged to squeeze through the narrow gap between the doorpost and her forbidding chest. The doctor was Prussian. I could not have been more relieved. And if I was eager to speak with him, it seemed that he was equally keen to talk with me. Had the wind changed in my favour?

  It shifted again as I followed the matron into his room.

  ‘Herr Procurator,’ he greeted me, his hand closed tightly on the carved horn-handle of a surgical knife. ‘What can I do for you, sir?’

  I gaped in reply.

  A young man was tied to the table-top by his hands and ankles. A farm labourer, I judged, from the filthy state of his shorn head and his collarless grey shirt. He looked to be no more than thirty years of age, and his trousers had been cut away. His lower left leg was the colour of the sugared swizzle-sticks that I sometimes buy for the children. The calf was fiery red, the foot bright purple, the toes a plump row of rotten black plums. Below the knee, the limb had swollen up to the size of a fisherman’s over-boot.

  ‘I . . . I had some trouble finding you,’ I began to explain.

  The doctor jabbed hard, and jerked downwards.

  ‘I’ll be with you in a moment,’ he said.

  A terrible stench engulfed the room, together with a scream that was barely human. Blood gushed, surprisingly rich and red in colour. Oily green pus came oozing out of the wound, thick and dripp
ing, like warm lard.

  The screaming died away in a dead faint.

  Immediately, I felt the fish in my stomach begin to swim upwards.

  But none of it made the least impression on the surgeon. To the sight, the smell and the sounds, he was apparently immune. He worked the knife in deeper, parallel with the shin-bone, filleting quickly, peeling away the dead skin and the rotten flesh, releasing the inner contents of a limb that looked for all the world like the leg of a statue that had been carved from yellow-veined basalt.

  ‘Flat scraper number one, Frau Hummel,’ he ordered briskly, without looking up.

  The lady stepped over, picked an instrument up by the blade and laid the bone handle in his outstretched left palm with a mild slap. His thin white fingers closed around it, while his right hand held the other knife steady in the patient’s leg. He slid the larger, wider blade inside the wound, then changed hands, extracting the smaller scalpel, which he gave over to the care of the lady. Then he went back the way he had come, working up from the ankle to the knee, opening and widening the incision.

  ‘What were you saying, sir?’ he muttered through his teeth, as more blood and pus came spurting out. The lady deftly dropped the used knife into a glass jar, then held up a large sponge of torn rags to absorb the noxious fluxes.

  The stench was now intolerable.

  With deft chopping strokes, he hacked away the muscle from the calf.

  As this tissue slopped onto the table-top, the lady mopped and dropped the dead meat into a bucket, wiping her bloody hands on her apron, swatting at the flies, of which there were a number in the room. With a dull thud and the sound of something tearing, the blade struck bone. The doctor glanced at his assistant as he handed her the cutter, then he stared at me.

  ‘Well, sir?’

  ‘I came to ask for your help,’ I managed to murmur.

  ‘Hacksaw number two, Frau Hummel,’ he snapped.

  With another little slap, the saw was in his hand. An instant later, he began to hack and cut with a will. ‘Help?’ he grunted.

  I swallowed hard and looked away.

  With that infernal rasping in my ears, I concentrated my attention on the case of implements laid out on top of a chest of drawers, and read the label: SURGICAL INSTRUMENTS OF HERMAN HEINRICH, MD DRESD.. The tools were arranged by shape and size: pliers and pincers for gripping flesh; sharp picks and pointed prodders of various dimensions, short to long; then, an armoury of surgical knives—some for paring, others for cleaving; and finally, a selection of saws, some small and fretted, larger ones for hacking. Above each item was a small label, neatly indicating the name of the maker, and date of manufacture. Had the man who was strapped to the mahogany table seen them before the operation began?

  Instinctively, I looked across the room again.

  Dr Heinrich stared back. In one hand he held up the saw. In the other, a severed calf and foot. He nodded sternly. ‘There! Almost done. Just have to cauterise the wound and stop the bleeding . . .’

  He must have spotted the expression on my face.

  ‘Would you prefer to wait outside?’

  It was very hot in the surgery. Despite the fine weather, the fire was lit, and I soon understood the purpose of it. The lady was coming towards the table, bearing a red-hot iron like a flatended poker which glowed menacingly in the thickening gloom.

  ‘I think I better had,’ I said.

  No sooner had I closed the door than a raging scream announced that the patient had woken up. The sweet stench of burning flesh filled the house. Agonised shouting followed on, then great, gasping sobs. I had to cover my mouth with both hands to stop myself from retching, and would have welcomed another pair of hands to block my ears as well. Some minutes went by very slowly. The noise boomed suddenly louder as the doctor opened the door, then faded away as he closed it.

  He had left the lady to cope with the patient’s tears.

  ‘A clod run over by his own milk-cart,’ he sighed. He did not offer me his hand, but wiped away some unnameable remnant of gore on his apron. ‘Best to have it off while the pain is fresh.’

  ‘What a welcome surprise this is, sir!’ I said with a genuine smile.

  ‘Surprise?’ he echoed, and his face seemed to darken.

  ‘I had almost convinced myself that you were French. Your signature on the death certificate was . . . well-nigh illegible, to say the least.’

  ‘I was in a hurry,’ he replied brusquely, glancing pointedly at a ceramic clock that was hanging on the wall as if ‘hurry’ was his watchword.

  His voice was strained and nervous, though he was young enough. His face was thin, his nose prominent, the skin of his cheeks taut and flat, his forehead broad. He wore his dark brown hair cut very short. His profession seemed to distance him, somehow, and yet, I thought, the doctor was hardly any older than I was. In his mid-thirties, I would have guessed. Only his eyes let him down. They were grey, dull, lacking in animation, as if he spent a great many hours alone in a room working closely on one thing only.

  ‘You must be very busy,’ I remarked.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ he said, ignoring any attempt at cordiality.

  ‘The dead girl on the beach . . .’

  ‘Another one?’ he butted in again, as if such a discovery were not merely possible in Nordcopp, but highly probable.

  ‘Oh no, sir,’ I assured him. ‘The same body, I believe. Three days ago . . .’

  ‘I wrote it all in my report,’ he interrupted me again. ‘I had to certify that she was dead, nothing more. A cursory physical examination for form’s sake. The colonel told me that a magistrate would be coming soon. A Prussian magistrate.’

  He said no more, but his eyes were never still. If I had been measuring him, he was carefully measuring me.

  ‘General Malaport insisted on it,’ I began to say, then I baulked as I tried to find a convincing explanation for the general’s decision. Could I tell him that the French high command believed that a public announcement of Prussian guilt would sound better if it came from a Prussian mouth, and in the German tongue?

  ‘I had no choice in the matter,’ I said.

  ‘I understand your position,’ he murmured dryly.

  ‘I was the nearest Prussian magistrate to hand, I suppose.’

  ‘I dare say,’ he fired back, waving his hand dismissively, as if he did not care to know any more than I had already told him.

  It made for a strange stop-and-start sort of conversation. We must have seemed like two poor musicians attempting to play a difficult duet together.

  ‘May I ask how you became involved with them?’ I enquired.

  ‘If you’d care to step into my study,’ he said, ‘you will understand, perhaps.’

  He crossed to the other side of the hall.

  ‘We should feel flattered that they choose to favour us,’ he added, drawing aside a red curtain, and pushing open a narrow door. ‘Though I doubt that you are,’ he muttered as he led me into the room.

  The Prussian soul is a strange, volatile creature. One minute, we are hard and cold, impenetrable and distant. The next, an upsurge of national sympathy, and tender feelings for a fellow Prussian break gently in upon our icy citadel.

  ‘A drop of aqua vitae won’t hurt,’ he said, as I followed him inside.

  I was no longer listening. I was staring at the walls. A collection of pale shapes hung from bright brass hooks. I realised at once what the future held for the man that I had seen tied down on the doctor’s cutting-bench. Half of a left leg with an articulated foot was just one item in the vast display. We might have been inside a gallery of precious objects, but the forms on show were more macabre than they were artistic. There was a whole leg made of wood with metal pins in the knee and ankle joints. Segments of thighs made of plaster, I think. Calves and biceps beaten from metal, which served as moulds or models, perhaps. There were bunched fists, open hands, upper and lower arms, rough-shaped feet without toes. Splints made of wood and metal, braces, m
etal bands and other more mysterious props that made no sense to me. And all hanging up like pieces of armour in a baronial dining-hall.

  ‘What are . . . they?’ I could not find a suitable word.

  There was a strong perfume of wax in the room, as if he spent long hours in there, reading or writing by candlelight, perhaps.

  Dr Heinrich took two crystal thimbles and a matching decanter from a circular table. ‘I have long been fascinated by human engineering,’ he said, filling the glasses to the brim, pointing me to a horse-hair armchair. ‘I fashion replacement limbs. There has always been a need for them here on the coast. That is what the French require of me. I am not merely a physician.’

  He raised his glass in a toast, though he did not sit down.

  ‘Have you been here long, sir?’ I asked.

  ‘I was born in this house,’ he said. ‘The practice was my father’s. The Heinrich family of Nordcopp goes back a long way.’

  ‘You must know the area well,’ I said, intending to make the best advantage of his local knowledge.

  ‘Better than most.’

  He drained the contents of his glass in a single draught.

  ‘It is fortunate for me,’ I assured him. ‘Local assistance is what I need. Your professional view of this case will be invaluable to me. I read your report, of course, but one thing puzzled me. You offered no opinion regarding the cause of death.’

  Dr Heinrich raised his shoulders and blew out air.

  ‘It could have been . . . well, just about anything at all,’ he said. ‘She was struck on the temple with a heavy object. A cudgel, a stone. Who knows? The blow stunned her, but it certainly did not carry off her jaw. I only hope that she was dead when the cutting started.’

  ‘Indeed, the missing jaw.’

  I paused, waiting in vain for him to offer some hypothesis.

  ‘Not just the lower jaw,’ I went on, breaking the heavy silence, ‘the upper teeth as well. Why would anyone want to steal a jaw and a set of teeth? What purpose could such things serve?’

  I could hear the note of pleading in my own voice.