The Angel Makers

by Jessica Gregson

  ‘Did she—’ Sari frowns. It’s so hard to put this delicately. ‘Did she know about her son?’

  Francziska seems to catch her meaning. ‘I don’t know. She suspected, probably, but she never said anything. Never said anything about any of it. You know what it’s like.’

  Sari does know. People have drawn into themselves; it’s become a liability to care about anything but one’s own immediate well-being. She can’t help feeling a sudden surge of contempt for old Mrs Imanci, though. How can you sit silently by when you think something’s happening to your child? She shoots an instinctive glance at Rózsi, seemingly oblivious in the corner, head drooping over paper, a pencil curled into her fist. Perhaps it’s different when they’re older, when you know that they should be able to look after themselves. Perhaps it’s different when they’re married. Sari can’t imagine it, though, simply cannot imagine a time where she wouldn’t tear the guts out of anyone harming her child.

  ‘What was her health like when you last saw her?’ Judit asks. She’s trying to work out how far the woman could have gone, whether it’s safe to hope that she might be dead in the long grass just outside the village.

  ‘Not perfect, of course, but all right. I was trying to do it slowly. So that she wouldn’t get suspicious.’

  Francziska makes a noise somewhere between a sob and a laugh, and sniffs loudly. Absently, Sari passes her a handkerchief – she’s so used to doing this sort of thing for Rózsi – and Francziska dabs her face with it.

  ‘She has family in the next village,’ she goes on. ‘Her cousin. I think she might be trying to go there.’

  Sari calculates; she herself could walk it in two hours, and so even allowing for her age and illness, it seems likely that Mrs Imanci would be there by nightfall, depending on what time she left. Whether or not she would alert the authorities when she got there was anyone’s guess, but she certainly had nothing to lose by doing so with her son and husband already dead (her husband, at least, from natural causes) and her only relation in Falucska having tried to kill her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Francziska ventures. Her eyes are red rimmed and swimming, and she seems well aware of what she may have set in motion.

  Judit snorts derisively at her apology, but Sari’s more sympathetic. It could have happened to any of us, she thinks. Francziska’s mistake hasn’t come from arrogant stupidity, unlike the women who’ve been trying to fake drownings. Francziska certainly has no reason to believe that she’s invulnerable, and hasn’t acted like it, or no more so than any of the rest.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she says, her voice weary but steady. ‘Nothing may come of it. But we have to be very careful, now.’ She thinks for a moment. ‘Right. I need you to bring some people here. Orsolya, for one. And—’ she reels off a short list of five women, all strong personalities, all well connected, all with at least one death to their name. They’ll be the best for spreading the word.

  They’re back within the hour and when Sari looks at the white, hunted faces, she can’t help feeling a little vindictive. Although her head is on the proverbial block as much as any of the others, she feels that this lot have had it too easy. Let them worry for once, she thinks.

  Francziska’s obviously given them the gist of what’s happened, but Sari recaps it briefly for the sake of clarity, and she’s barely finished speaking before Zsofia Gyulai bursts out, ‘Well, we must find her, mustn’t we? She might not have reached the village by now. If we’re quick, we could make sure she never gets there.’

  ‘And then?’ Sari asks.

  Zsofia reddens. Sari’s always found it peculiar, how many of these women will happily feed poison to their nearest and dearest, but heaven forfend that their lips should form the words to describe what they’re doing. ‘Bring her back?’ Zsofia suggests lamely, though that clearly isn’t her intention. Sari has a mercifully brief vision of a group of them finishing off the old woman out there on the plain – bashing her head in with a branch, perhaps? No.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘To go after her would be idiocy. She’s got hours on us. She may well have reached the village by now, and even if she hasn’t, a group of six women roaming the plain is bound to get noticed. As it stands, there’s always the chance that, even if she does try and tell people what’s been happening here, she’ll just be discounted as a mad old woman.’

  All five – six, Judit included – look sceptical. Sari is sceptical too, but continues: ‘It’s unlikely, true, but think how much easier it would be for her to be believed if it’s obvious that us lot don’t want her to get where she’s going.’

  The women still look doubtful, but reluctantly they nod. Sari tries hard not to feel a twinge of triumph when she notices Orsolya looking at her expectantly, waiting for guidance. This is not the way that she would have chosen to earn Orsolya’s respect, but she’d have to be made of stone not to derive a slight shiver of pleasure from it.

  ‘So what do we do?’ Matild Nagy asks sulkily. Sari’s never been particularly fond of her, one of Orsolya’s little acolytes. ‘Just wait here to be arrested?’

  Sari sighs, slightly ostentatiously. ‘They can’t arrest us just on Ilona Imanci’s word. Nothing might come of it at all, and even if anything does, there’ll have to be a proper investigation. We need to expect inspectors to arrive here over the next few weeks. We’ll deal with that if and when it happens. Until then, everything stops. This place has to look as much like a normal village as possible. We can’t have people ill if they come; we can’t have any evidence of what’s been happening. Pass the word around to everyone you know who’s been involved in this. I don’t want anyone coming around here asking for extra privileges or special treatment, because they won’t get them. From now on, it’s all over.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  He’s not sure what he expected, but it wasn’t this. Géza Forgacs has spent almost all of his nineteen years in Budapest, and in the city, you’re fed images about the beautiful simplicity of bucolic life. While he’d known that they must be false, that life in the villages could be brutal and harsh, he hadn’t expected it to be so immediately evident. The way that the brown wooden houses cluster around the river, as if straining away from or towards something; the suffocating blackness of the nearby woods, and the stark reality of the existence of the village in the middle of the breathless plain – these things combine to make him feel unsettled, ill at ease. He pushes these feelings to the back of his mind, feeling that they are pure superstition.

  The older man isn’t so sure. Béla is twenty-four, and he grew up in a household with a cook from the plain, from a village, he thinks now, probably very much like this. She’d been a funny mixture of sweet and sour when he’d been a child, slipping him pastry off-cuts one minute, and scaring him to death with fairy stories the next. She’d been young, casually cruel in the way that only girls barely out of their teens can be, and Béla had adored her with all of his childish heart. She’d had a full repertoire of stories about fairies and demons and incubi but the ones that had frightened him the most were the ones that were closest to the truth, the stories about the women in the countryside who would take in unwanted children from rich city women, which the cook had always presented in the manner of cautionary tales.

  ‘They’re called the angel makers,’ she’d said, and even now, seventeen years later, Béla can still see the way that her knuckles whitened as she kneaded the dough while she was speaking. Seven-year-old Béla knew what angels were, knew that people became angels when they died, but couldn’t quite grasp how a person could make an angel, and he’d asked, unable to restrain his curiosity, despite knowing from bitter experience that he wouldn’t like the answer.

  ‘Well, the rich women don’t want the children,’ the cook had said, ‘so the poor women in the countryside take their money to look after them, and the mothers can go back to the city, happy that their children are being looked after. But the angel makers, they know that these rich women aren’t going to come back and look f
or their children, so do you think they’re going to use that money feeding and clothing a child that’s not theirs, that they couldn’t care less about? So they kill the children, and keep the money.’ She’d turned back to the bread then, a glimmer of triumph on her face at Béla’s stricken expression.

  ‘But how?’ Béla had asked. He had to know, couldn’t bear not to.

  The cook had shrugged. ‘Whatever’s easiest. Depends how old they are, too. If they’re small, they’ll smother them.’ Seeing that Béla didn’t understand, she flipped one of the kitchen cloths over his face, holding it there with a gentle pressure. He’d stood as still as death, too frightened to move, and after only a moment she removed it. ‘That’s smothering,’ she said coolly, turning back to the bread. ‘Or they’ll leave them out in the cold. Or for the older ones, they’ll just stop feeding them. And that,’ she finishes with a flourish, ‘is what happens to children when their parents don’t want them any more.’

  The implication had been clear, and Béla’s dreams had been haunted by the angel makers for years afterwards and, if he’s honest with himself, they haunt him still. In his dreams he wakes, but even before he’s opened his eyes he knows that he isn’t in his warm, comfortable bed in town, that his parents have decided that they don’t want him any more, and he’s been sent off to the angel makers. The dreams are always painfully vivid. He can feel the coarse, woollen blankets on his skin; the air that he breathes in is cold and icy, and in his head is an image of a grim, gaunt hamlet, shuddering its way out of the plain. And then he hears the footsteps, and he knows that She’s coming, coming with a cloth in her hand, coming to finish him off, and he wakes, properly this time, shaking and sweating, unable to believe that the dream hadn’t been true, and that he is safe.

  He realises now, with a touch of irony and very little surprise, that the village he sees spread out in front of him is similar to the village from his dreams, and although he knows that much of the similarity is due to his subconscious bending the memory of the dreams so that they fit the reality he’s now seeing, it doesn’t make him feel any happier about where he is. He wishes, not for the first time, that he was safely back in Város and far away from here.

  ‘This is nonsense,’ Béla says to himself, forgetting for a moment that Géza is beside him, until, out of the corner of his eye, he sees the boy jerk slightly. For the first time, he’s glad that the boy is with him. Béla persists in mentally calling Géza The Boy, despite there being scarcely five years between their ages. He’d been reluctant to bring him at first, certain that this was a wild goose chase, and it would be better for Géza to stay behind in Város, where there were lots of things that he could be getting on with.

  Certainly, when they’d first heard the stories about the village, they’d all smiled and dismissed them as the rantings of a mad old woman. Yes, perhaps her daughter-in-law had tried to finish her off. It was plausible, but not really worth making a fuss about. Domestic murders haven’t exactly been uncommon since the war. It’s not that they’re not serious, but, in Béla’s experience, once the intended victim has been removed from the situation, the murderer or murderess is unlikely to try and turn their hand to anyone else. Besides, Mrs Imanci had hardly been a reliable informant: when she’d been brought into the office by her cousin, she’d rambled on for nearly an hour, a bizarre mixture of accusations of murder, aimed at her daughter-in-law, and witchcraft, aimed at the rest of the village she’d come from, and when she left they’d laughed.

  But something had alerted the attention of Béla’s superior, that much-vaunted instinct that Béla had been taught was vital for a successful inspector, and which Béla was desperately trying to develop, and the next day Béla had come in to find Emil poring over a sheaf of documents at his desk.

  ‘Look at this,’ Emil said, and Béla had looked. It was a list of the deaths in Falucska over the past ten years. It did seem very high, but then …

  ‘What about the influenza? Plenty of villages have lost large numbers of people because of that,’ he’d suggested.

  ‘Could be,’ Emil said thoughtfully, but Béla could tell that he wasn’t convinced. He wasn’t sure whether he was entirely convinced, either, but he certainly wasn’t worried. People in the villages got ill a lot; it was, and always had been, a fact of life.

  He said as much to Emil, and Emil had nodded again in that faintly irritating manner of his, as if agreeing purely for the sake of politeness. ‘True. But it’s a small village. And also, do you notice anything else?’

  Béla squinted at the paper. ‘Look at the names,’ Emil hinted.

  ‘Men,’ Béla said suddenly. ‘They’re almost all men.’ He looked at Emil in surprise, and Emil nodded, smiling this time.

  ‘Quite. It’s not what you would expect. Usually, if it’s an illness or an epidemic it’s women who dominate the lists of the dead. Men tend to be stronger, more resilient. And yet—’ he waved his hand at the paper again. ‘Of course, it might be nothing. But it might not.’

  ‘So …?’

  ‘I want you to go out there, have a look around, ask some questions. Particularly of this Imanci woman. And—’ he ruffled through the papers again, ‘find Sari Arany. She’s one of the village midwives, and has been responsible for filing the death certificates. Talk to her, ask her what she thinks about all of this.’

  Béla had been quite happy about that, envisioning a few relaxing days in the countryside. In the middle of the town in the middle of the day, he was well able to ignore the gloomy, sinister villages of his dreams. He’d been discomfited, though, when ordered to take Géza with him.

  ‘But surely he’d be better off staying here?’

  Emil shook his head. ‘I can’t send you out there alone. It might be nothing, but it might be something, and if it is, it’s best if there’s two of you.’

  It wasn’t that he had anything against Géza, Bela mused, and in a way it was flattering that, young as he was, Emil trusted him enough to put him in a position of responsibility over the younger man. But still, all those questions of Géza’s that always need answering! Béla has enough of his own work to concentrate on, and prefers not to have to worry about someone else’s on top of it. He’s been trying to fight back his resentment all the way to the village, but now, as they walk towards the village from the spot where the farmer was able to drop them off, he finds he’s glad of the young man’s company.

  ‘Where will we stay when we get there?’ Géza asks, breaking the silence. ‘Will there be an inn?’

  Bela laughs. ‘I doubt it very much, not in a place this size. It’s not on the way to anywhere; why would anyone want or need to stay there? An inn-keeper wouldn’t make any money.’

  ‘So where will we get lodgings?’ Géza asks. He’s feeling more than a little anxious, sensing both that Béla is uneasy about something, and that Béla doesn’t want him there.

  Béla has the idea that they should ask the priest, and that’s the first surprise that they face when they get into the village. They’re on the outskirts when they first encounter a person, and it’s a middle-aged woman, her eyes wide with what seems to be fear. I suppose they’re not used to strangers here, Béla thinks, and puts on his friendliest smile.

  ‘Good evening,’ he says, because by then the darkness is closing in. ‘We need lodgings in the village for a few days. I don’t suppose you could take us to the village priest, who might be able to provide us with beds?’

  For a moment, the woman looks so shocked to be addressed by strangers that Béla thinks that she’ll flee, or at the very least stay silent, but she pulls herself together after an instant. Her accent is countrified and some of the words that she uses sound archaic to Béla’s ears, but he puts that down to the isolation of the village.

  ‘There is no priest,’ she says, and Béla raises his eyebrows.

  ‘No priest?’ he queries.

  ‘We had one,’ the woman goes on. ‘Father István. But he left here years ago. He had no family here. No o
ne knows where he went. We kept expecting a new priest to replace him, but none ever came.’ She appears to mistake Béla’s look of consternation as a criticism of her faith. ‘Some of us sometimes go to the next village for church,’ she says defensively. ‘But it’s seven miles away, so it’s hard to manage every week …’

  ‘No matter,’ he says, cutting her short. ‘Do you know of anyone else who might be able to provide us with lodgings?’

  The woman bites her lip for a moment, then appears to come to a decision. ‘I’ll take you to Sari,’ she says.

  ‘Would that be Sari Arany?’ Géza asks, suddenly excited, remembering the name from the conversation they’d had with Emil before leaving Város. He subsides when Béla shoots him a quelling look.

  ‘Do you know her?’ the woman asks.

  ‘We know of her,’ Béla replies, in a tone that invites no further questions. She nods, and leads them down towards the village, to a wooden house in the centre, by the river. She knocks on the door, which is opened by a young, darkhaired woman, who looks coolly at Béla with her startling blue eyes. And Béla feels his heart stop.

  Sari knows who they must be as soon as she opens the door and sees Kornelia Gyulai, looking scared out of her wits, standing in front of two smartly dressed men. She heaves an internal sigh. Things had been quiet for a couple of weeks, and she’d allowed herself to hope that it would all blow over, that they were safe. It’s all up to her now; up to all of them, really, but she’s learnt from bitter experience that if she wants something done properly, she has to do it herself. They seem very young, which is a comfort – if anyone was taking this seriously, surely they would have sent someone a little more senior?