HS02 - Days of Atonement (57 page)

‘Not just liquids, sir. Objects, too. Buried things, things that careless persons have lost. Things that give off a strong magnetic signal. Objects that were living once . . .’

‘Could you be more precise?’

‘Blood, Herr Procurator. Fresh is easy. Old blood has a different ring to it. It’s all a question of the throbbing energy it gives off. Dry blood, now,
that
has a very distinct sort of quivering feel . . .’

‘We retraced this path from the house, Stiffeniis,’ Lavedrine added brusquely.

‘I was watching,’ I told him with a smile.

‘The vibrations are strong at this point,’ he continued unflustered. ‘Perhaps they stopped here. Frau Gottewald and the killers. She was definitely alive as she made her way across the garden.’

‘Alive,’ Frau Böll echoed the foreign word with a shudder.

I shuddered myself at the outrageousness of the suggestion.

‘Let me explain, Herr Procurator,’ Böll intervened. ‘Our rods vibrated all the way along the path from
the house, but here the energy really is
tremendous
. That woman was breathing, sir, palpitating with emotion.’

‘You and I have passed this way, Lavedrine,’ I commented. ‘So have the soldiers. If there is any truth in what they assert, it may be misleading.’

Böll hurried to reassure me with a sickly smile. ‘You are correct, sir. But let me ask you this, sir. Were
you
afraid for your life? Were
you
trembling with terror? In any case, my wife insists that the presence was female.’

Helena had passed that way.

The thought sent a cold ripple down my back. What passionate emotions had
she
experienced?

‘The quivering is powerful here,’ Lavedrine seconded, ‘but it is even more pronounced on other parts of the property. We must return towards the house—by the garden path, I think—we have not been that way. We will let Herr Stiffeniis see for himself. Frau Böll, will you take my arm?’

Lavedrine bowed and offered his arm with a show of French gallantry that would have stolen any Prussian woman’s heart away. Frau Böll looked at the arm, looked at her husband, then deigned to accept, carrying herself as if the benefits were all on the French pretender’s side.

‘You will be devastated,
madame
,’ Lavedrine confided, ‘but this will be the last time, I promise you.’

The woman frowned and pursed her lips in confusion, but she allowed herself to be led. I fell into step behind that ill-assorted couple, with Herr Böll at my side. Which pair made the more ridiculous sight, I did not like to think.

‘Poor Rumeliah almost fainted just now,’ Böll confided in a whisper. ‘The force was so strong, as if it meant to rip the sounding-rods from our hands. There are powerful demons present in the earth hereabouts.’

We followed Frau Böll and Lavedrine along the path and began to approach the front of the house. I knew where we were heading. Lavedrine would open the cottage door, lead us all up the stairs, then set those damned divining-rods twitching at the sight of the blood-stained walls in the room where the massacre had taken place. In front of those mysterious letters inscribed on the wall in blood.

But as we were passing through the kitchen garden, before we reached the door, Rumeliah Böll began to perform without any prompting. She let out a bloodcurdling shriek, and broke away from Lavedrine. She gripped her wand and tugged with both of her hands, as if some unseen person were trying to pull it away from her. She staggered across the garden, trying vainly to dig her heels in the frozen ground. Then, all of a sudden, the rod struck the ground and began to quiver violently like a plucked viola string.
She was applying the pressure, making the baton vibrate, I was convinced of it, but I did not say a word. Let them act out their little charade, I thought, steeling myself to suffer the play without comment. I would save my ironic remarks for Lavedrine, when we were left alone. My triumph, and his come-uppance, were drawing nearer with every moment.

But the woman did not stop screaming, as I half expected.

Her nutbrown face was a mask of pain. Her physical posture was quite unnatural. She seemed to curve further and further backwards, towards a point at which she must inevitably fall, or turn a somersault. Lavedrine sprang forward to assist her, but Böll got there before him.

‘Stand back, sir,’ he warned, waving Lavedrine away. ‘We don’t want to lose the contact, do we?’

He bent close to his wife, whispering, ‘Easy, my dear. Hold on, hold on. I’ll take as much of it as I can, I promise you.’

His rod stretched out, touched the point of his wife’s stick, and suddenly the pair of them began to spin and spin, chasing after one another, circling around that spot on the ground, going faster and faster with every turn. Frau Böll screamed like a frightened child on a garden swing, but Böll began to shout as he ran, his eyes popping, twirling, twisting his head as he tried to catch sight of Lavedrine.

‘This is it, sir!’ he called. ‘I think we’ve found something!’

I stood transfixed. I could find no explanation for what I saw. Their divining rods seemed to turn to liquid silver, entwining and running one into the other, as the Bölls circled and chased each other round and round that fixed point on the ground. The laws of Natural Science were cancelled out. I saw their two sticks blend into one.

‘This is the place,’ a voice breathed warmly into my ear.

Lavedrine’s eyes were afire with excitement, his hair caught wildly in the wind.

‘We should have guessed,’ he hissed. ‘Your wife pointed out that spot. Helena has greater gifts then these two put together.’

We were not in the bedroom. We were not
inside
the house at all. Not even close to the door. He and I were standing on the edge of the kitchen garden, while the Bölls were running round and round the tiny enclosed circle of stones in which someone had planted two oak stems and three smaller sprigs of holly.

Without another word, Lavedrine stepped forward, caught Böll by his collar, and his wife by her arm, and yanked them away from the spot. Their sticks seemed to twirl of their own accord before they fell to the ground. He stood like a rock in the centre, holding them apart, waiting for the fit to ease. When he did let them go, Böll staggered off in one direction, his wife
spun away in another. They came to rest like spinning tops when they hit something. Böll bounced off the wall of the house, and sat down in a large rosemary bush. His wife was more fortunate, running into a tree, which she had the good sense to hold on to.

‘There, sir. What do you think now?’ Böll called weakly to me. ‘That’s the second time it’s happened. I ain’t never seen Rumeliah like this before. Never have I known such a compelling force.’ He sank back exhausted against the wall. ‘Right in the middle of them plants. Ain’t that correct, Rumeliah?’

Frau Böll had recovered her senses more quickly, and had swayed across the garden to his side. She knelt on the ground and ran her dark hand gently over his red face.

‘And there we will begin,’ announced Lavedrine, shrugging off his cloak.

‘What are you intending to do?’ I asked.

He did not reply, but strode away to the end of the garden. He returned with a spade in his hand.

‘That’s simple, Stiffeniis. I am going to dig!’

‘Helena pointed out those plants the other day,’ I said. ‘Naturally, you mentioned them to your guests.’

Lavedrine shook his head and rested his weight on the handle of the spade.

‘I like to experiment,’ he declared. ‘But I do not bend the rules. Of course I didn’t tell them! If we find anything at all, we’ll have Helena to thank for it. We ought to have taken her a good deal more seriously.’ He picked up the spade as if it were a broadsword. He might have been the Archangel Michael getting ready to do battle with Satan and his horde of fiends. Such was the look of grim determination on his pale face. ‘And now, a little healthy
travail
, as we call it.’

He bent and swept away the dead leaves with his hand, using the point of the spade to lever out the encircling stones. Then he set his foot on the spade and attempted to dig in earnest. I almost laughed as the metal blade of the implement struck in vain and bounced up with a sharp ring off the permafrost.
He was deluding himself
. There was nothing to find. That ground had been frozen solid ever since the beginning of October. There had been a hard frost every night for the past two months. It would take a pick and a couple of hours’ work to make a hole.
He would find nothing buried in the garden
. The proposal was preposterous anyway. Why would any person who had just committed a murder bother to dig a hole in the garden? With each unsuccessful jab at the ground, I rejoiced in the futility of it.
He was wrong. Wrong!
The answer lay in Kamenetz. Within a day or two, I would be able to prove it . . .

My exultation froze as hard as the ground.

I heard the dull sound of the spade slicing into soil, rather than a clanging rebound.

I watched in awe as he pushed that blade deep into the ground. His foot pressed hard, but not so very hard. The earth had yielded. It had given in more easily than it ought.

Lavedrine looked up at me.

The signs of disappointment on his face had grown more marked with each failed attempt to breach the earth. Suddenly, Janus changed his mask. His eyes gleamed, his features seemed to stretch with amazement, his mouth wide with shock. With a rapid thrust, he bent his body to the spade again, and heaved. His silver hair shook and sparkled in the cold air, beads of sweat glistened on his brow, as he tossed a quantity of loose soil to one side.

He repeated the gesture twice more. My heart was in my mouth.

Frau Böll, standing close by his side, let out a piercing cry, pointing at something dragging on the point of the spade, half in, half out of the hole.

I took three or four steps towards them. Lavedrine laid the spade flat on the ground, then lifted it quickly again at the bottom of the shaft, the handle resting on the ground, the blade rising into the air.

‘In heaven’s name,’ he murmured.

A piece of meat, I thought—black, old, rotten, the buried carcass of a dog or cat.

The tense expression on Lavedrine’s face warned me to be careful. He brought his nose close to the spade, and breathed in deeply. His eyes flashed wide open, and I knew that I had lost. Helena had guessed. The Bölls had pointed it out. But
he
had found it.

He raised his hand and touched the heavy object with reverence.

‘They are here,’ he murmured.

There was no note of triumph in the declaration.

Instead, I thought I heard a fearful tremor.

I fell down on my knees—he sank down beside me—and together we began to dig with our hands, pulling out the heavy pieces of frozen cloth, one after the other, laying them one on top of the other beside the hole in the ground. Each piece was the same dull red-brown tint. The colour of blood.

‘Try to lift, rather than pull,’ he warned.

Indeed, each piece—there were more than a dozen—had been carefully folded into a neat square before it had been put into the ground, as if they had been put there by some tidy maid.

‘A most peculiar domesticity, Stiffeniis,’ he murmured as the last of the Gottewald rags was placed on top of the pile. ‘They are here. Just as Helena
suspected.’

Lavedrine ran his hand gently over the topmost cloth, almost as if he could not believe in the physical nature of the find, as if his fingers must tell him what his eyes would otherwise have doubted, as if they might have been conjured up by Böll and his wife. Then, he stretched down into the hole.

‘There’s something more,’ he grunted.

He held up a piece of paper which had been buried at the very bottom of the pit. He handed it to me.

‘Read it out, would you mind?’ he asked.

I unfolded the paper, which was soiled, barely legible in places, where blood and damp had fouled the ink. The calligraphy was childlike. One line rose up, the next sank down, as if it had been written by someone in a hurry, the paper resting on the writer’s knee for want of any better surface.

‘I cannot make it out,’ I said, holding the letter close to my eyes. ‘The paper is badly stained, the ink has run.’

‘Do your best,’ Lavedrine replied quickly. ‘We have this, and nothing else.’

‘Gubermann?’ Lavedrine interjected. ‘That sounds like a Jewish name.’

I remembered what I had read regarding two Jews who had been killed in Korbern, when Gottewald led a night patrol on the village. Might these Gubermanns be the same people? No name had been mentioned in that report. I hesitated, wondering whether to tell Lavedrine. It would mean breaking my word to Dittersdorf. More to the point, I did not know if there
was any connection between the murdered Jews, and the name Gubermann. Nor could I guess what that name might have meant to Bruno Gottewald.

‘What did he have in mind?’ Lavedrine murmured.