The Angel Makers

by Jessica Gregson

  ‘So,’ Sari says. ‘What would you like to talk to me about?’

  Suddenly, discussing work is the last thing that Béla wants to do with Sari. He’d love to hear her views on the books that she’s read, or to probe her about the intricacies of her work. A dry dissection of the papers that he has in his bag is utterly unappealing, and, of course, utterly necessary.

  ‘You know that we came here because of the accusations of Francziska Imanci’s mother-in-law?’ he asks, and she nods. ‘Well, she also made some rather outlandish accusations about things going on in the village in general. Things like …’ He sputters a little under her steady gaze.

  ‘Like witchcraft?’ she asks calmly, and he blushes.

  ‘Yes. I know it sounds ridiculous.’

  ‘Oh, it’s hardly a new accusation as far as Judit and I are concerned. I imagine that she was claiming that we’ve put curses on the village?’

  ‘Something like that, yes. Of course we don’t take accusations like that seriously, but then we did look at the death records, and it does seem that a disproportionate number of – of men have died here. And as the person who filed the death certificates, we wanted to find out what you think about … about it all,’ he finishes lamely.

  Sari spreads her hands in an elegant gesture, and seems to consider for a moment before she speaks.

  ‘I’m sure that it must seem strange to you, and it seems strange to a lot of people here, as well – there’s more than one person who’s spoken about a curse!’ She laughs a little, and Géza looks up from the notes that he’s taking.

  ‘Mrs Imanci – Francziska – said that.’

  ‘Well, you can understand why people think it. But the facts are, firstly, we had an unusually high number of men go away to war and of course many of those who came back didn’t come back in very good health, which meant that they were susceptible to all the diseases that came through the village. And again, because we’re isolated, it’s very rare for an ill person here to be able to see a doctor. Judit and I do our best, but—’ She shrugs. ‘– we can’t do the job of qualified doctors, no matter how hard we try.’

  She smiles a little, the sun catches her hair, and something catches in Béla’s throat. What a brave woman she is, he thinks, selflessly nursing people in the village back to health, and what does she get in return but accusations of witchcraft? He’s heard about this sort of thing before, healers and midwives in the countryside being thought supernaturally responsible when things go wrong as much as when things go right, but for a moment he feels a violent surge of fury towards old Mrs Imanci with her bizarre, unjust accusations. At his elbow, Géza sits poised, ready to take notes, but really, Béla thinks, it would be cruel and unnecessary to probe her further. Instead he sits back in his chair, and smiles.

  ‘Perhaps you could tell me a little about the work you do? I’d be very interested to learn more about it.’

  Sari’s exhausted. It’s hard work to charm and sparkle all afternoon, especially when you’re unused to it, but Béla has proven unexpectedly pleasant. After giving a detailed account of the trials and tribulations of a country midwife, they turned to the subject of books, and Béla even went so far as to write down a couple of titles that he promised to send to her when he goes back to Város. The two of them finally left about fifteen minutes ago, and now Sari is slouched at the table with a cup of coffee, enjoying the silence, when Judit and Rózsi suddenly burst through the door, Judit grinning maliciously.

  ‘Well, then, how did it go? Though I think I can guess.’

  ‘Better than I could have hoped. He asked me a couple of simple, straightforward questions, seemed to believe my answers, and then we talked about herbs and books for the past couple of hours. The young one, Géza, looked absolutely baffled.’

  Judit’s grin widens. ‘You cunning bitch! You’ve got him wrapped around your finger. How the hell did you do it?’

  ‘Not intentional, I promise. Sometimes these things just happen, don’t they?’

  ‘Makes me think that there might be someone looking down on us after all.’

  Sari takes a deep breath. ‘We might just be all right, you know. We might.’

  ‘This is a lovely place, don’t you think?’ Béla says offhandedly to Géza on the way back to Sari’s father’s house. Géza isn’t convinced. Certainly, it’s a lovely day, but the village is far from his personal definition of lovely. If it weren’t a deeply heretical thought to have, Géza would believe that Béla’s new-found fondness is less for Falucska than for Sari Arany, but he doesn’t dare suggest an idea like that even to himself, let alone to Béla.

  ‘So what do you think about—’ Géza jerks his head back towards the house that they’ve just left.

  ‘What? What Miss Arany was saying? Sounds pretty convincing to me. We can’t fall into the trap of seeing crimes where there are none. Doesn’t do anyone any good.’

  ‘But—’ It’s not that Géza disbelieves Sari. It’s just that he’s long had an idea of what a police investigation is supposed to entail, and it involves rather more rigorous questioning and research than what has just gone on.

  ‘We should go and see Mrs Imanci again, of course,’ Béla says thoughtfully, ‘but aside from that …’ He shrugs.

  ‘Don’t you think,’ Géza ventures after a pause, ‘that perhaps we should speak to some of the other people in the village? Perhaps some of the relatives of the people who have died? It’s not that I don’t believe Miss Arany,’ he adds swiftly, noticing Béla’s face darkening, ‘but she might not be aware of everything that’s going on here. Just to make sure.’

  Béla considers. On one hand, it seems the gentlemanly thing to do to simply take Sari at her word, and conclude that nothing peculiar has been going on in Falucska whatsoever. On the other hand – well, Emil might ask some awkward questions if it looks like they’ve returned to Város with the job half done. It wouldn’t look good.

  ‘It’s probably a good idea if we stay a week or so, then,’ Béla declares. ‘Talk to a few more people.’ He ignores the tiny quiver of excitement he feels at the thought of a week’s more exposure to Sari.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Tuesday, and: ‘Mrs Gersek,’ Géza says decisively, looking up from the papers.

  Béla nods. It can’t hurt Géza to have a go at running the investigation here, particularly as it’s all bound to come to naught in the end, he considers.

  ‘Very well,’ Béla says. ‘We’ll go and see her in the morning.’

  ‘Mrs Gersek,’ Béla announces to Sari the next morning when she arrives with food for their breakfast.

  ‘I’ll take you there after you’ve finished eating,’ Sari says, and leaves, on the pretext of tending to Rózsi’s breakfast.

  ‘They’re coming to see you today,’ she says to Jakova Gersek, five minutes later.

  Another wasted morning, Géza thinks, coming out of Mrs Gersek’s house around midday. Mrs Gersek had been intractable, furious from the moment of their arrival, shrieking over and over about how dare they accuse her of murdering her husband, how dare they? That had been before they’d even had time to say what they were there for.

  ‘Oh, I can guess,’ she’d spat, when Béla pointed this out. ‘I know you were round at Francziska Imanci’s yesterday morning, harassing the poor woman, after all she’s had to put up with!’

  The rest of the morning had proceeded roughly along those lines, with Mrs Gersek occasionally calming down, only to explode into fury again at the implications of some innocuous-seeming remark on Béla or Géza’s part.

  ‘That seemed pretty conclusive,’ Béla says to Géza, who frowns.

  ‘Well, yes. But … it seemed a bit much, maybe, didn’t it? Almost as if – as if she was putting it on for our benefit?’

  Béla smiles. ‘Perhaps, perhaps. But you have to understand, Géza, that these people are innocent until proven guilty. We can’t do anything – and we shouldn’t do anything – unless we have concrete proof of some wrong-d
oing.’

  ‘What sort of thing do you mean?’

  ‘In this case, it would have to be a confession. Or, perhaps, the discovery of a murder weapon. None of which seem forthcoming, do they?’

  ‘But what about the bodies? Couldn’t we—’

  ‘Géza, any justification we have for investigating things here is nothing more than suspicion and speculation. To get permission to exhume corpses.’ He shakes his head. ‘We’d need something significantly more concrete than we have at the moment. Can you imagine the reaction of the people here if we started digging up their churchyard? Anything that Mrs Gersek said to us this morning would be nothing compared to that.’

  Géza shrugs. ‘I suppose so.’ He’s not happy about it, though. They’ve spent nearly three days in the village now, and the absence of male faces has struck him sharply. He’s never been anywhere like this before, and he can’t quite bring himself to believe that there’s a natural explanation for it. And in little gushes and trickles, he can feel his stored up respect for Béla ebbing away, however hard he tries to tell himself that Béla is right, and that he’s doing the right thing. It’s difficult. Géza has felt something akin to hero-worship for Béla for the year that they’ve been working together, and watching one’s idol fall is not an enjoyable experience. Anyway, perhaps he is doing the right thing, Géza tells himself. But he can’t ignore the way that Béla has been looking at Sari Arany. Even now, walking beside him, Géza can feel something like longing coming off Béla in waves.

  They round the corner, and Judit’s house come into view. The door opens, and Sari comes out onto the step, waving. Géza looks at Béla’s face and sighs.

  On Wednesday, Béla and Géza visit Mrs Gyulai in the morning, who doesn’t rage at them like Mrs Gersek did, but sits weeping quietly through the entire interview, which makes them feel somehow worse. On Wednesday afternoon, Béla and Sari discuss Goethe at the kitchen table while Géza painstakingly writes up his notes of the morning’s discussions. He tries to ignore the nagging voice in his head, which keeps telling him, this is not the way things should work.

  On Thursday, Béla and Géza visit Mrs Kiss in the morning. Not even Béla is won over by this woman, who sits through the interview in preternatural calm, her face occasionally slipping into an unpleasant smirk at seemingly random times. She doesn’t express any grief when discussing the death of her husband, or her mother, or even her son, in a string of freak accidents and illnesses.

  Géza’s fairly bursting with excitement by the time they leave the house, but as ever, Bela shakes his head.

  ‘You can’t prosecute someone just for being an unpleasant person, Géza.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Remember what I said about confessions or evidence? We can’t do anything without that.’

  Géza subsides sulkily. Béla is right on this, it’s true, but he’s convinced by this point that Béla simply isn’t trying hard enough to elicit a confession or find evidence. This Mrs Kiss, for example. Géza is convinced, as convinced as he could possibly be, that not all of her dead family members died of natural causes, and he’s almost positive that he would be just as convinced even if Mrs Kiss hadn’t been so smug and unctuous. No normal family has that amount of freak accidents – or, Géza corrects himself, even if they did, no woman would accept it with the bland smile that Mrs Kiss presents to the world. And yet Béla only asked Mrs Kiss the simplest questions, and invariably took her answers at face value, and Géza is certain that she contradicted herself at a couple of points, about the symptoms her son suffered leading up to his death, but Béla didn’t even seem to notice, let alone pursue the contradictions.

  Women, Géza thinks dismissively, unable to believe the hold that they can get over men. He sneaks a look at Béla out of the corner of his eye, taking in the anticipatory gleam in his eyes, and mentally braces himself for yet another afternoon discussing herbs and literature.

  On Friday, Géza suggests that it might be useful to talk to Judit Fekete alone, and, shrugging, Béla agrees, though neither of them much relish the idea of a morning spent in Judit’s company. Sari obliges them easily enough, disappearing into the forest with Rózsi on a herb-gathering mission. The two hours that Béla and Géza spend with Judit are practically pleasant compared to their time with Mrs Kiss the day before, but once the conversation is over, Géza feels as if he’s learned nothing at all about the deaths in the village. Judit has truly amazing circumlocutory powers. Whenever asked a direct question, she gives the impression of considering it, before leading Géza and Béla down the most confusing series of narrative back alleys, to the extent that, by the time she lapses into silence, the two inspectors have usually forgotten what the question was in the first place.

  ‘She keeps evading our questions,’ Géza hisses to Béla when Judit excuses herself to use the privy, but Béla just laughs, irritating Géza beyond belief. It would seem that not only is Sari above reproach and criticism, but so is anybody closely associated with her, even though Judit is clearly a malevolent old hag, Géza thinks viciously.

  ‘Think of how old she is,’ Béla whispers back. ‘People’s minds start to wander at that sort of age. It’s not her fault. I’m sure that she’s doing the best that she can.’ But when Judit comes back into the room, Géza eyes the sly grin on her face, and he finds he can’t believe that Judit has any good intentions at all.

  The more people they talk to, the more comfortable Béla is becoming, and, the more suspicious Géza is. No one in Falucska seems to behave like a normal person. Francziska was as twitchy as a man just back from the front; then there was Mrs Gersek’s pathological raging, Mrs Gyulai weeping like a martyred saint, Mrs Kiss’s unbearable air of self satisfaction. Even Sari Arany is strange; that degree of selfpossession and intelligence in a place like this can’t be natural. But in the end, of course, it’s Béla’s view, not Géza’s, that matters. Géza finds this an increasingly insupportable idea.

  Evening is darkening the sky like a bruise, and Béla thinks that he hasn’t felt this way since he was a child at school, who had taken a groundless fancy to the daughter of a neighbour. His heart had sunk when Sari had been unable to eat with them at lunchtime – an illness to tend to, apparently – but she had seemed genuinely sorry, particularly when he said that they would probably be leaving the next day, after a valedictory talk with Francziska Imanci.

  Then her face had brightened. ‘As it’s your last night here,’ she suggested, her voice slow and drawn out like honey, ‘why don’t we eat supper together tonight? Géza, too, of course. Rózsi and Judit will be all right without me for one evening, I’m sure.’

  Béla’s not quite sure of the propriety of this, but finds that he doesn’t care; it’s as if his heart is no longer beating, but instead jumping up in great, breathless leaps. He looks at himself in the mirror – not an overwhelmingly handsome man, no, but acceptable, surely? He smoothes down his wavy brown hair one last time, and leans in to the mirror to check that nothing untoward is caught between his teeth. It’s nothing more than a dinner, nothing more, but maybe he won’t see her again after tonight, and that makes any effort worthwhile.

  Sari arrives as the sun is nodding below the trees. She’s abrought gulyás – ‘I made it myself,’ she says, smiling shyly. ‘Rózsi’s is better, but I wanted to make it myself’ – and a bottle of red wine. They sit at the weathered wooden table and the flames of the lamps rear up towards the ceiling.

  Géza looks bored and says little, but to Béla, the minutes slip by like the tiny silver fish that race through the river outside the cottage. Conversation is awkward, stilted, as Sari tries to draw out the obstinately close-mouthed Géza, and Béla wishes as hard as he can that Géza would leave – surely it can’t be pleasant for him sitting here in that glutinous silence? He wills him to go and finally Géza gets to his feet, with a polite bow in Sari’s direction.

  ‘Thank you for the meal,’ he says, ‘I don’t wish to be rude, but I have to write up my notes from tod
ay’s interviews.’

  Béla narrows his eyes, knowing perfectly well that the notes were written up in the afternoon, but of course he doesn’t argue. Raising an unmistakeably sardonic eyebrow in Béla’s direction, Géza leaves the room – for a split second, Béla has time to woefully realise that Géza will be totally unmanageable when they get back to Város, but he’s swallowed by Sari’s gaze before he has time to muse on it any more.

  As soon as Géza is gone, their conversation seems to catch alight; no longer sluggish, it snaps and burns between them. It’s dark outside, and with her face half-shrouded in shadow, Sari seems to let go of some of her inhibitions. While their discussions before have been impassioned, they’ve also been impersonal, whereas now, Béla feels sufficiently emboldened to ask Sari about herself.

  She talks a little about her fiancé, Ferenc, the one who died; her words are precise and carefully chosen, but Béla senses a weight of grief behind them. She talks also about her interests, about the books that she wishes that she could read, about her passion for reading plays that she wishes that she could see performed. She says a few words about her father, how he infused a love of learning into her, and what a shock it was when she learnt that a formal education was more or less and impossibility for someone like her.

  Béla sips his wine – it’s not bad, he’s surprised to note, not bad at all – and he finds himself asking what he’s been wondering for days. ‘Do you ever think about leaving?’

  Her eyebrows shoot up. ‘Leaving the village? And going where?’