HS04 - Unholy Awakening (12 page)

Ludo’s voice was a low growl. ‘Maybe you ain’t seen her, sir. Lars Merson hadn’t been himself since then. When she comes a-visiting with her father, it’s, well, it’s like he was seeing the devil waltzing through a holy place. The devil-of-the-tombs, he used to call her.’

I remembered the anger in Merson’s voice, the dark look on his face as he saw Emma Rimmele and her father entering his cemetery that very morning.

‘If she lied, Herr Procurator, if she put a corpse where it shouldn’t be, no-one in Lotingen will rest in peace.’ Ludo spoke in angry spurts, like water gushing from a pipe. ‘I’ll be in charge now,’ he mused bitterly. ‘Merson’s things will fall to me. I’ll sleep in the sexton’s office, and get to do what he once did. The old tombs, and the new ones…all my responsibility now. It’s up to me to make my peace with them that lies beneath the ground.’

He stared at me in resentful silence.

‘Might that be why he’s dead?’ he asked at last. ‘The revenge of creatures that will never have eternal rest? We have set ’em loose, and now they’ve come back. I mean to say, sir, maybe me and him did some thing that…well, that
they
didn’t like.’

‘Let there be no talk of vampires,’ I admonished him. ‘There is a murderer in Lotingen. He should be blamed for what is happening here. He’ll be brought to justice, I promise you.’

I stood up, preparing to leave.

‘Frau Stiffeniis comes there every day,’ Ludo murmured. His eyes were downcast as he spoke, as if he were saying what he had to say, though he didn’t like to say it. ‘She…she’s always asking about the tomb stone for your child, and when…’

‘Herr Meyer delivered it this afternoon,’ I interrupted.

‘She told me once,’ he continued, apparently deaf to what I had just said, ‘she won’t be easy ’til the child is properly settled, sir. Without a stone to mark the spot, she said, she thought the little one might be in danger. That is…you know, he might not sleep in peace, sir.’

I felt an ache in my breast, as if a hand had seized my own heart and squeezed it very hard. Was that what was going through Helena’s mind? She had been going to the cemetery when we had taken refuge from the dogs. Was she standing guard over the grave of her child in the belief that a cross not his could do little to protect him? Did she think that a stone and a name would protect him better?

‘I’ll do your son’s stone first thing tomorrow morning,’ Ludo promised.

My nostrils filled with the smell of the man and his clothes, yet it was not the same stink that had repulsed me earlier. Now, I smelt damp freshly-turned earth, the perfumed odour of death. I had breathed the same odour the night before, burying Angela Enke, and that other night, too, when Merson and I had buried my youngest child.

I took a deep breath as I stepped out into the night.

What was I to tell Claudet?

Half an hour later, I stood in front of Colonel Claudet.

He glared at me suspiciously, one eye open and furious, the other one permanently closed and dead. Finally, he invited me to sit down. He had been appointed commander of the Lotingen garrison the year before, but those two eyes spoke of many years of peering down the length of a musket barrel. Perhaps a faulty powder-pan had once exploded in his face? He appeared to be taking aim at me. He would never shrug off the air of the peasant recruit and humble infantry man that he had once been, though I knew that the all-seeing eye of his was waiting for me to bow my head with shame for being born a Prussian, expecting me to tremble in the presence of the conqueror.

Instead, I sat erect before his desk, and awaited his judgement.

In the end, he brought himself to use the word that I refused to pronounce.

‘
Vampirism
,’ he said, as if he was spitting out some vile phlegm that blocked his skinny throat. ‘I have never heard such rubbish. Rest assured, monsieur, the French will not be taken in by these ridiculous tales. Your countrymen are plotting beneath the cloak of a mystery, Herr Stiffeniis.’

He thumped his forefinger on the broadsheet that he had thrust in front of my face the moment that I arrived in his office. It was a copy of
Le Bulletin Militaire
. I knew the news-sheet very well. The year before I had been sent to the Baltic coast to investigate the murders of the girls who were gathering amber there; the same newspaper had published a woodcut caricature of myself and a pregnant Helena, together with sarcastic suggestions that I would never solve the crime. They had never published anything to say that I had been successful.

He held the paper up to me.

‘Read it, monsieur! We have become the laughing stock of the Empire.’

I read:

‘It is happening in other places in the north, too!’ he cried, snatching the broadsheet from my hand. ‘There is something going on, monsieur, some plot is being hatched, there can be no doubt of it. We must be on our guard, it says here, and I assure you, Procurator Stiffeniis, I am watching every move that you make.’

He waved his forefinger, circling behind me, forcing me to twist and turn in my chair to follow his menacing antics. ‘And now, there is a second victim, which makes the situation all the more alarming. Where do we stand, Herr Magistrate Stiffeniis? What have you discovered? When can I expect to see the culprit in chains?’

‘Major Glatigny and I have been working closely together to contain the growing fear and unrest,’ I replied, refusing to speculate further about the situation or its causes, fearing that he would act upon any hint that I might give him.

‘You and Glatigny, indeed!’ he snarled, resting his forearms on the back of my chair, leaning over my shoulder. ‘I’ll paint you in the blackest colours, Herr Magistrate, especially to General Malaport – you know him well enough, I think! – unless you bring this farce to a conclusion, and in the shortest space of time. Now, get out!’

I closed the door and stepped out into the corridor, congratulating myself that it had not gone quite so badly as I feared. Indeed, I thought, there was one bit of good news in what he had told me, and in what I had read.

I was not yet the Prussian butt of
Le Bulletin Militaire
.

For the moment, anyway.

I walked in the direction of the Old Town Hall.

Abandoned after the invasion, the roof having been severely damaged by fire-bombs, the building had been put in order in the last two years, and many of the civic offices which had formerly been housed there were now in full and useful employment once again.

I made my way up the broad wooden staircase.

The Records Office of Lotingen was on the second floor. The ledger books of Births, Marriages and Deaths were kept up there. If I wanted information about the Kassel family into which the mother of Emma Rimmele had been born, that was where I would find it. As I pushed open the door, a youngish couple were on the point of coming out. I knew them well enough to acknowledge them. There was nothing remarkable about the pair, except that the woman was carrying a newborn baby wrapped up in a brown woollen quilt, while the man lacked his right leg below the knee, skipping sideways through the doorway with the help of crutches. Gregor Brandt’s leg had been blown away by a chain-shot in the service of his king and country. There were a dozen other men who were missing a limb in town. They are, indeed, such a familiar sight in Prussia that one hardly thinks to comment on it any longer.

‘Herr Stiffeniis, sir.’

‘Good evening, Brandt.’

‘Been to register the latest,’ the man said with a broad smile.

‘Congratulations,’ I said, offering him my hand.

‘It’s a blessing after so many deaths,’ he began to say enthusiastically, but then, remembering the fact that my youngest child had been one of the victims, his voice faded to a whisper.

I nodded glumly, and passed in through the door.

An other one of the mutilated was sitting behind the main desk in the Records Office. Otto Geisler had lost an arm at Eisenstadt to a sabre-cut. To my mind, he was one of Count Dittersdorf’s rare mistakes. It is all very well to find public work for an invalid of war, but it should be the right kind of work, a job which will not be hampered by his disability. Geisler could write with out any trouble – he had lost his left arm, after all, and he wrote in a bold and natural right hand. The problem was the ledgers. They were large, thick books in studded leather bindings, and they were exceedingly heavy. The room was al most full of them, and many of the older volumes were situated on shelves above head height.

‘Procurator Stiffeniis, what can I do for you, sir?’

Geisler was on his feet the instant he saw me. His right hand shot up to salute.

‘At ease, corporal,’ I said.

There was something not quite right in Geisler’s head. If you called him by his proper name, he might not respond. If you called him by his rank, and used the sort of language that a soldier understood, he would obey you instantly.

‘I am looking for some line of attack,’ I said carefully.

‘In what direction, sir?’

I thought for a moment. I could start with the Deaths, of course, but I had no clear idea when Emma Rimmele’s mother had died. I was no nearer to knowing when she had been born either, but I thought that I could estimate it to within ten years or so. Having once dug out that information, the rest would follow on. I conjured up Emma Rimmele in my mind’s eye – her dress was still torn, her shoulder still naked. She must be – what? – twenty-seven years old. A year or two younger? And how old had her mother been when her daughter was born? I added on another twenty-five years, which made a total of fifty, more or less.

‘I am interested in a Birth,’ I announced. ‘Let’s begin some time before 1760.’

‘Glorious battle of Leuthen, 1757. Will that do you, sir?’

‘It will do me admirably, corporal.’

The problem was that the volume with that date gold-chiselled on the spine was four shelves up on the far side of the room. As Geisler tried to carry his folding steps to the spot, and I tried to help him, the poor man tripped. It took a moment to help him to his feet, more time again to prevent him from mounting the steps and trying to extract the heavy volume from its place with just one hand. I ordered him to step aside in a brusque and manly fashion, as an officer might do, then I climbed up the wobbling wooden death-trap and pulled the volume out for myself.

‘Thank you, Corporal Geisler,’ I said. ‘If I need to consult another volume, I’ll see to it. I am certain you have more important duties to be getting on with.’

‘That’s very kind, sir.’

He saluted again and retired to his post, while I placed the volume directly under a lamp on a sloping reading-shelf. The volume was difficult to hold open; being generally closed, the covers and the boards were very stiff. Moreover, the turning of each page threw up a cloud of dust. I would have to breathe a great deal of it, I thought, before I had finished my research. For each single entry there was a wad of documentation – names and addresses of the father and the mother, a paper signed by a doctor or marked by a midwife to the effect that the child had been delivered that night by his/her hand, neither stolen from a neighbour, nor purchased from gypsies. The practice of careful registration had started with the reign of Frederick the Great: knowing exactly how many boys had been born in any single year, the king knew precisely how many men might be called up for military service sixteen years later.

It did not take me long to conclude that Gisela Kassel had not been born in Lotingen in 1757. Clapping the dust from my hands, I closed the book, climbed back up the ladder, replaced it on the correct shelf, and took down the volume for 1758. By the time I got to 1760, my hands were filthy, but I had found her.

Gisela Anne Alberta Kassel, born 2nd January, 1760
, I read,
daughter of Alberta Frederika von Alfensstadt (mother), and Mikhail Erik Rupert Kassel, the Marquis von Trauss (father)
. Gisela Kassel had been one of a pair of twins, though the other child had died on the night of their delivery. There had been an informal inquiry by a justice of the peace into the circumstances, though it did not amount to anything. The JP reported the testimony of an unidentified doctor, saying:
The un-named infant – a fully-formed male, posthumously baptised in the name of Jesus Christ – was strangled in the womb, or during parturition, by a fatal twisting of the umbilical cord, an accident which provoked a partial ripping of the placenta
.

In a word, the king had lost a potential soldier, and a girl-child had survived.

Among the documents which were attached to the page, I could expect to find a great deal more, and so it turned out. The next piece of paper that I opened was a stiff folded copy of the lady’s marriage certificate. A copy had been sent to the Records Office in Lotingen, and it bore the stamps and the seals of the Municipality of Danzig. It was a magnificent document on a heavy sheet of parchment, despite the loss of brilliant colour which age had leached away. Floral decorations, garlands and drapes, surmounted by two winged angels, had been painted by a skilled artist, who had then inscribed the names of the parties involved in a swirling artistic hand. It was of some interest to me.

On this, the twelfth day in the month of October, in the year of the Lord 1780, in the family chapel of Saint Saviour in the canton of Danzig, on the private estate of Albert Peter Johann Rimmele, gentleman,
[I read]
, a wedding agreement was solemnly drawn up and contracted between the following parties: Erwin Oskar Rimmele, and Gisela Ann Alberta Kassel. Vows were sworn before Pastor Albrecht J. Kuster, who also celebrated the holy service on the same day
.

This same Erwin Rimmele was now in his dotage being cared for by his daughter, Emma, in the Prior’s House. I turned to the next page, expecting to read of the birth of Emma her self. Instead, I found a sheet of paper, which ought to have preceded the one that I had just read. It was the letter of a lawyer, a man named Cornelius Haengel, and it had been written on the instructions of the father of the bride-to-be. Indeed, it pre-dated the wedding of Erwin and Gisela by six months, and was a copy of a copy which had been registered in the first instance at the town hall in Danzig. It was a proposal to with draw from the marriage agreement ‘at a sum to be agreed upon’, and it was counter signed by Gisela Kassel’s father. ‘On the grounds of serious differences’, the letter stated in couched and careful terms. No specific reason was given, though there must have been some infringement, or impediment which, in the watchful eyes of the young lady’s father, had advised at least a temporary postponement, if not the definitive cancellation, of the wedding.

What could have caused the dispute? And why had the couple been married six months later, as if nothing at all had happened to compromise the match?

I wondered whether Emma Rimmele might know the reason. Then again, if she knew nothing, and if I brought up the matter, it might cause offence, and serve no useful purpose anyway. I turned to the next document in the sequence. It was a registered copy of the birth certificate of Emma Rimmele, and it was dated 14th April 1781.

I bit my lip and thought on that.

Though born within a recognised and legal marriage, Emma had been born only six months after the wedding of her mother and father. The child had been conceived illegitimately. Was this the cause of Gisela Kassel’s father’s opposition to the match? Had he realised that the wedding rites had been celebrated by the pair before their union had been rendered legal in a church? Had he tried to save his daughter’s good name before it was too late?

I was just about to put the lawyer’s letter back, when I noticed that the bottom of the page was folded upwards. Had I creased the letter while reading it? Had someone else at some time in the past? I turned back the fold, meaning to restore the letter to the ledger in the same condition in which I had found it, when I noticed two tiny sets of matching symbols at the foot of the page. They had not been printed on the paper by the paper maker, as had the lawyer’s address. These signs had been added intentionally – by the lawyer, Cornelius Haengel, or by someone else – with a pen and ink. The first symbol represented three tiny green crowns placed one above the other. The cipher beside it was even more unusual; it featured what appeared to be three lines. It took some while for me to make it out, but even then it made no sense. The pen strokes were like a tiny, roughly-drawn kitchen-table. It was, I realised, the Greek letter
pi
, and it was written in blue ink. And, what was even more odd, the symbol of the three crowns had been heavily crossed out with a bold letter X in the same blue ink, and the word ‘Agreed’ had been written next to it.

What did it mean?

I turned to the next page, and I found no more regarding the Rimmeles or the Kassels. Emma Rimmele had told me why. Gisela Kassel had been the last of the family line. Emma had brought her mother home to Lotingen to lie beside her ancestors in the family vault which had been built for them in the old town cemetery. Indeed, I thought, with those documents she would have been able to satisfy any objection that Merson might have made.

‘Finished, sir?’ asked Geisler, as I came back down the ladder empty-handed, having returned the volume to its allotted place.

‘Not quite, corporal,’ I said. ‘I need to check on a Death.’

‘Death is hard by on the east flank, sir,’ he said, pointing with his remaining hand to the far end of the room. ‘In which year are you interested?’

‘I do not know,’ I admitted.

His face clouded over. ‘Can I ask you something, Herr Procurator?’

‘Certainly,’ I said.

‘Has this got something to do with what is happening in Lotingen, sir?’

‘I am making enquiries of a general nature,’ I said. I had no intention of taking the clerk into my confidence. Nor did I wish him to draw any conclusions from what he had seen me doing. ‘There are many aspects of this case…’

‘I want you to know, sir,’ he interrupted me, pursing his lips, narrowing his eyes, glancing left and right as if the empty room were full of enemy spies, ‘that you can count on me. I have an honourable service record to my credit, and I am ready to fight again in
this
battle.’

‘Which battle, Corporal Geisler?’

I tried without success to swallow. I knew what he was going to tell me.

‘The battle against these new invaders, sir,’ he hissed. ‘Hands don’t come into it. You’ll need brave hearts, strong wills, experienced soldiers who aren’t afraid to rout out the infected ones among the tombs, sir. I’ll not fail you, sir, I promise. I’ll be ready when the battle comes.’

‘There is no war to fight,’ I said. ‘Only a killer who must be found. I need to see the register of Deaths. The letter K,’ I reminded him.

‘Kassel again, sir?’

‘Kassel again.’

‘The letters J–K,’ said Geisler, pointing to the middle shelf of three on the far side of the room.

‘I’ll get it, corporal,’ I informed him quickly.

‘Very good, sir. As you wish.’

He retired to his seat again, while I carried the volume over to the window.

Oddly enough, while Births were registered in volumes bound in dour black leather, Deaths were recorded in volumes that were a rich shade of red morocco. I soon found the page, and I began to read the information. Only one daughter had ever been buried in the vault – Paulina Erika Kassel in the early 1700s – and she had been unmarried. The fathers of the Kassel family seemed to have been extremely good at marrying off their daughters, who, when the time came, were buried by their husbands, or at the expense of the family into which the girl in question had been joined in marriage.

‘Are there other documents relating to them?’ I called to the corporal.

Geisler cocked his head at me.

‘You have come too late, sir,’ he called back. ‘Lars Merson came scouting the other day. He withdrew a sheaf of documents, and he has not brought them back yet.’

I was not surprised. Certainly, Merson would have checked the relevant papers regarding Emma Rimmele’s claim to bury her mother in the family vault. Probably, he had left them somewhere in the sexton’s office jumbled up with all the other papers on his work-table.