Gummerstett took a step backwards as if to avoid a blow. ‘Nothing, no one. As I have already explained to this man . . .’
‘Then get out!’ Lavedrine barked. ‘Before I order your arrest.’
The frustrated heir pulled angrily at his heavy plaid overcoat, then cursed the heavens roundly. But not before he had reached the safety of the door to the quay.
‘Where is she?’ Lavedrine growled.
‘Hard to call that
thing
a she, sir,’ Mutiez echoed, as he led us next door into a vast storeroom. ‘If it hadn’t been for the dress . . .’
He looked around as if the sheer size of the place had robbed him of breath.
‘Who found the body, Henri?’ Lavedrine pressed him.
‘The bargees, sir. They’d been given orders to empty the place. Our soldiers had been sent to safeguard the proceedings. They called for me at once.’
The room was piled high with barrels. There must have been three or four hundred stacked in row upon row along the back wall. Rich takings for an army marching on its stomach. Each barrel was taller than my waist, and there were four or five solid layers. On the face of each was a brand bearing a date. Near the door, 1789. But as we marched down the room, the year progressed to 1794, which was when Adolphus Gummerstett had died, and the Old Windlass had been placed under juridical supervision.
‘Why was this place not searched?’ Lavedrine demanded, his black eyes glinting.
‘It
was
searched,’ Mutiez replied. ‘Five days ago. Nothing was found.’
‘A body within the last week?’ Lavedrine looked away, as if digesting the news. ‘Did she come of her own volition, or was she brought?’ he murmured. Suddenly, he raised his nose in the air: ‘What smell is that?’
In Paris, I thought cynically, they recognise the smell of American oil from the South Seas, and pride themselves on dabbing ambergris behind the ears of their ladies. But we in Lotingen know the secrets of the Arctic whale, from the stink of rotting flesh to the odour of the densest spermaceti.
‘That is blubber oil, I think.’
Lavedrine looked at me. ‘There is a rancid quality to your Prussian oil that I have never met before,’ he observed.
The face of Mutiez was set in a grimace. ‘A quantity of oil has been spilled,’ he said, ‘but there are other odours in the air, sir, for a man with a sharp nose.’
‘What are you talking of?’ I asked as we reached the far end of the room.
A number of barrels had fallen away from the wall, crashing onto the floor and breaking, spilling their precious contents onto the paved flagstones.
‘Crushed spleen, spattered brains, a split stomach, the shit and piss of rats,’ the lieutenant said, pointing at a blackened mess beneath a creamy lake in the far corner. As we moved nearer, I saw that streams of blood had twisted and interlaced with the congealed oil, standing out like veins in the milky mess. At the source, just below the surface of the oil, was a body, like that of a person who had drowned.
Was this the corpse of Sybille Gottewald?
‘. . . ten barrels at least, sir.’
‘A crushing weight . . .’
Fragments of conversation seemed to reach me from some other world.
‘. . . if she’d been hidden here, against her will . . .’
‘There’s not a rope in sight, sir.’
‘They left the body here, confident that it would not be found. They did not know that the warehouse was about to be emptied.’ This was Lavedrine. ‘As you said before, Herr Procurator, a matter of chance, or miscalculation. Who would know of this place?’
I tried to drag my eyes from the matted soggy pile and the broken wood. A human hand protruded from the oil, as if the victim had not been quite struck dead on the spot. As if she had made a vain attempt to call for help, to lift and shift herself, perhaps, before the oil flowed into her throat and choked her life away.
‘I’m sorry?’ I said.
‘Who knows about Gummerstett’s warehouse?’
‘Everyone in Lotingen,’ I replied hopelessly. ‘Fourteen thousand, eight hundred and thirty-nine adult souls, according to the census taken seven years ago. This place is no secret to anyone. But how did she arrive here?’
‘I think we’d better take a closer look,’ Lavedrine responded. He began to remove his boots and peel off his stockings, urging me to do the same. ‘Are any other Lotingen women known to be missing?’ he asked.
I stifled a bitter laugh as I placed one naked foot on the cold stone floor. ‘How far do you wish to go back?’ I asked. ‘If you are asking how many women have disappeared since the French came to Prussia, I can give you a fair idea.’
‘They do not interest me,’ he said, as we took our first careful steps into the chill, slippery pond. ‘Has any woman disappeared in the past few weeks with the exception of Frau Gottewald? That’s the period I am concerned about.’
‘No one, so far as we know,’ I said, struggling to keep my balance and prevent myself from falling. ‘Of course, not everything is reported to the police.’
‘The clothes may help us identify her.’
Even as he said it, the conviction seemed to die on Lavedrine’s lips.
A tun of oil holds 252 gallons. A fair-sized whale will yield 150 barrels, ten or twelve of which had cascaded down from a height of twenty feet and struck the body. A great deal of oil had run away down the guttering which formed a canal down the centre of the long narrow room. It would have trickled out of the building and dribbled into the estuary without anybody noticing. But a huge slick had frozen solid, and in the middle of this milky mess was the flattened form of a black dress, a black bonnet, and a vivid red
mash which had once been a human body. That grasping hand protruded from the oil like an isolated tree in a field that had been flooded.
We stood on either side of the body, looking down into the ooze.
‘It will not be an easy task,’ I said. The face had been crushed and splattered by the falling weight. Fragments of the skull were scattered like a broken moon suspended in aspic, as if the head had shattered beneath the repeated blows of a heavy sledgehammer. A halo of brain fluid and tissue made a pale trace in the dark blood and greenish oil. The body was flattened to a wafer in places, as if some malignant force had chosen to take a flat-iron and impress that woman’s form on the ground. Entrails spread like pink tentacles from her stomach and her abdomen. ‘Impossible to tell how old she was,’ I said. ‘Or whether she was dead before the barrels fell on her.’
‘The clothes,’ Lavedrine repeated stubbornly. ‘They can be recovered, Stiffeniis. They can be washed and cleaned. There may be a tailor’s mark, a name-tag, or some clue in her pockets. The shoes, too,’ he pointed. ‘Would you mind? You are closer. Moving is a risky business.’
I steadied myself, bent forward, and stuck my hands into the oily goo, which was cold and dense, but malleable, like soap that has been left in water and forgotten overnight. I felt a sense of sickness and revulsion as I moved my hand down the woman’s leg. The bones shifted easily beneath my fingers, not one of them was whole. At last, I touched the foot, and felt the raised surface of leather. I pulled the shoe away from its sticky moorings with a sickening squelch, and held it up.
‘The heel has broken off . . .’
I said no more, but vomited where I stood, a shower spurting out from my mouth to compound the oily soup in which I was standing, ankle-deep.
‘Impossible to distinguish the colour,’ Lavedrine murmured. Then he looked at me with an air of concern. ‘Are you all right?’
My hands were slick with oil; blood and blubber slowly trickled from the shoe and ran down my wrists and inside the cuffs of my shirt.
‘Well enough,’ I replied, gulping air into my lungs, holding on to my hard-won prize, struggling to quell the queasy rhythms of my stomach, and calm the racing of my pulse. ‘Her hair,’ I said, making an attempt to be as cold and practical as he appeared to be. ‘You are nearer. Can you see the colour?’
Lavedrine let out a snort of frustration. ‘This damned stuff has impregnated everything. Her hair was long, but more than that I cannot say. Blonde, black, or brown. Who can tell?’
‘All we have for the moment,’ I said, ‘is that hand. The rest will have to be collected.’
‘It is not the hand of an old woman,’ he said, sitting back on his heels, the tail of his coat soaking up oil, visibly changing colour before my eyes.
‘If she had been dead long,’ I said, ‘it ought to have rotted away to nothing.’
‘Have you never . . .’ He stopped, turned to me, smiled wanly. ‘But no, of course, you haven’t. You have no oil of olives here in Prussia. The merchants in the south of France use olive oil to conserve certain delicacies—olives themselves, truffles, and certain precious kinds of mushroom. Oil will preserve anything for an indefinite length of time.’
‘There’s nothing to preserve,’ I said, forgetting the tail of my own coat, sinking down on my haunches close to that clutching hand. ‘The nails and the tips of the fingers are black with decomposition . . .’
‘Where the oil has run away,’ he insisted, ‘but the hand is a young hand. There are no age wrinkles. And there is a callus on the knuckle of the thumb. Can you see it?’
With trepidation, I leaned closer. A wave of nausea swept over me in a shudder as I pulled the clutching fingers open, letting the hand flop back lazily onto the oxidised skin of oil. ‘There are hard pads on the other fingers,’ I said, fighting to hold down another retching lurch of my stomach. ‘This woman worked . . .’
‘We have no way of knowing what she may have done. Housework, perhaps.’
‘Or chopping wood . . . The nails are broken. There is a trace of blood.’
‘Her own, or someone else’s?’
‘She’ll never tell us,’ I said, standing up, feeling the cold, grasping damp of oily stickiness as my coat attached itself to the calves of my legs. ‘We cannot proceed in this manner,’ I said. I was thinking of Professor Kant, and the investigation we had undertaken together four years earlier in Königsberg. ‘We need to be more scientific in our approach. Everything here must be gathered up, then examined in conditions that are conducive to a more precise analysis.’
‘I agree,’ he said, raising himself to his full height.
With some difficulty we slithered and waded our way back to where Mutiez was waiting.
‘Can you get a gang of men in here?’ I asked him. ‘Fellows with strong stomachs. Tell them to recover whatever they can lay their hands on. There are four tanks ranged along the wall,’ I said, walking across and placing the sodden shoe in one of them. ‘They can drop everything in these, and leave them to soak. Water can be heated up in tubs, I suppose.’
The lieutenant saluted and ran off to bring his men.
I tried the handle of a water-pump beside the sinks. Cold water gushed forth, and I began to remove the blood and blubber from my hands and
feet. Shivering as I cleaned myself, I glanced at the wreckage in the corner—the smashed wood, the forest of broken laths and twisted metal hoops. A cannon might have scored a direct hit in the warehouse.
‘There must be some way of identifying her,’ Lavedrine murmured, almost to himself, as he came across to clean himself up.
The clatter of steel-tipped boots coming in through the door distracted me for a moment. ‘When her things are clean and dried,’ I said forlornly, sitting down to put on my stockings and shoes, ‘some person may be able to recognise them.’
‘Your wife? Is that what you are thinking? She met the woman.’
Lavedrine was not looking at me as he said it.
‘Helena was
not
the person I had in mind,’ I insisted. ‘There are seamstresses, shoe shops, hatmakers, and the like, who may be able to distinguish their own work. If doubt remains, then, I suppose we may be forced to ask Helena. We can show her a scrap of cloth or leather, for all the good it’s likely to do.’
I had no intention of subjecting Helena to the horror.
‘Would you care to instruct them in their duties, sir?’ Mutiez enquired, as the men formed up in a line. He addressed himself to Lavedrine, though there was a wayward drift in the question, which seemed to include myself.
‘Speak to them, Stiffeniis,’ Lavedrine urged. ‘Your investigation with Professor Kant was motivated by detailed analysis of the minutiae that were found at the scene of each crime. My own experience is limited to the study of criminal behaviour, and the perverted nature of the men who commit such acts.’
I turned to the men.
‘A woman has been crushed beyond recognition. Her clothes and other effects are preserved in whale oil. Those objects must all be carefully collected,’ I stated mechanically, struggling not to think of the horror of the task. ‘Every item, no matter how small, which may have come from that woman’s body will be subjected to detailed examination. Do not ignore a hairpin, a clip, or a scrap of paper. Do not cast aside anything. If it is located within a ten-yard radius of the corpse, it probably came into this place with the victim, or with whoever killed her. It may be useful in our attempt to establish her identity.’
I paused for a moment, collecting my thoughts for what I was about to add.
‘There is a need for delicacy in what you are about to do,’ I continued. ‘It will not be pleasant. Many bones have been broken into fragments. I want every piece of the skeleton separated from the rest. Anything that you think is human’—I looked around, then pointed to the tin sink nearest to the
open door—‘should be placed in that tray over there. If you are not certain, but you think that something may be organic, it should go into that tray, and no other. I will examine the contents and judge what is to be kept, and what is to be discarded. Do you understand me?’
The soldiers were a fair cross-section of the French forces in the town. Some were large, some were smaller, all were battle-hardened, proud of their waxed moustaches and their greasy pigtails. Some nodded, some sighed.
‘Are there any questions?’ I asked.
A tall fellow with a pair of gleaming black eyes beneath his weatherworn canvas-covered
shako
spoke up at once. ‘Jewellery, sir? Personal effects? What d’you want us to do with those?’