The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge (2 page)

‘Voilà. Vous pouvez disposer. Come into the main station tomorrow morning at
9
a.m. to sign your statements. This officer will take down your names, addresses and telephone numbers. We will interview you again before the end of the week. Cartes d’identité? Thank you. And please don’t talk to the press. Do you understand that? Not a word to the journalists.’

They were dismissed.

Yet these men were the first witnesses to the events in the forest, the first to ask questions about the unfinished circle and the bodies of the children. These three men were the first to debate whether the members of the gathering had been murdered or chosen their own deaths, the first to wonder why the circle remained incomplete, the first to marvel at the children, tucked carefully into the space created beneath the feet of the men and women who had given them their lives and then, for the hunters assumed that this was so, had watched them die. The hunters strode down the ice trails, their boots leaving complete treads in the mud beneath the cracking sheets of ice, past the wooden chalet now surrounded with yellow tape, overrun with gendarmes and dark men without uniforms probing furniture, digging in suitcases. The cars were all opened, and painstakingly examined under the sizzling glare of artificial lights by men with supple white gloves, as if the machines themselves were also cadavers concealing their secrets. All the doors and windows of the chalet stood open to the leering cold.

The hunters retreated, clutching their guns, and their breath gleamed white in the twilight as they descended the mountain, climbing the fallen trunks, avoiding the police armed with chainsaws, who were clearing the trails. They could hear the muffled howls of their dogs, locked in the vans, long before the half-hidden vehicles loomed through the pines. A large dark car, wheels churning the slush, rose past them. They stepped back, nodding to the woman within. She returned their gaze with a flat blank stare. They feared that she was one of the relatives, one who had been summoned, one who already knew. Now the forest rustled with voices and the chortle of machines. The hunters slipped away.

_{*  *  *}

The winter sky surrendered cold blue into engulfing dark beneath the pines as the Judge’s car, a borrowed Kangoo, one of the more recent models, fitted with four-wheel drive, lurched up the track. She surged past the startled men standing in shadow, all armed with rifles, apparently captured in the process of vanishing. The car slithered to a standstill on the rim of the scene around the chalet, which now resembled a film set, trailing wires, arc lights and cameras, the actors busy in rehearsal. The Judge wore mud-spattered boots, an old brown overcoat and red leather gloves. Everyone stood back respectfully as she hovered outside the circle, gazing inwards. Her glasses had black frames and the thick lenses glittered under the lights. No one spoke. Everybody waited to take the next cue from her. She was now the principal element to be reckoned with in this eerie drama. One of the men stepped forward.

‘Madame le Juge? Monsieur le Commissaire is waiting for you. I’ll take you up.’ He carried a large torch, which was not yet necessary as they retraced the hunters’ tracks through the pines in the half-light. The earth hardened beneath them. The Judge could smell the ice forming, a rigid, fresh smell of damp, oozing resin and wet earth.

‘There’s a sheer rock face just behind them,’ said the officer, ‘so I’ll take you round. It’s a bit longer, but enough of us have already been over the ground.’

The Judge nodded.

‘We’ll have to carry them down on stretchers. The track is blocked at too many points by fallen trees for the pompiers to get up there. And the snow’s too deep,’ he added as an afterthought.

The Judge slipped a little in the murky slush. He put out his arm to help her. She waved him away. They could hear the faint hum of activity somewhere above them. He clicked on the torch. A yellow circle of light appeared in the churned snow before their advancing boots. The faint crunch as they broke the first crust of ice steadied their passage.

‘Monsieur Schweigen told us not to touch any of them until you got here. He said that you’d want to see the pattern that they make in the snow.’

The Judge nodded again, but did not reply. The white path juddered and shook in the torchlight, then slithered into a firebreak, sliced up the vertical slope. The going was slower in deep snow. The officer waited for her as she rummaged in the powder with the toes of her boots, trying to find solid ground. She stretched out her arms like a tightrope walker, hesitated, then found her uneasy balance once again. The light renewed itself in the open, a distinct, luminous and deepening blue; but the mountain’s flank seemed to warp the space and sounds above, which sometimes ballooned outwards into the valley, so clear that she could hear individual voices, then shrank away into whispers and echoes that thumped dull against the heavy, laden green.

‘La voilà!’

Schweigen peered down the dark cliff where the rocks dripped icicles from the overhang and saw her coming, a tiny dark figure following one of his officers. He watched her bowed head and cautious steps, jubilant and relieved. She had been in Strasbourg with her brother’s family, just over an hour away, and listened without comment to his agitated, rushing talk – the hunters have found the bodies in the snow. Then she simply said that she would leave at once. And now here she was. He watched her clutching the rock to steady herself in thick fallen snow at the foot of the cliff. Red gloves. He remembered those red gloves from that long winter investigation in Switzerland. She was wearing the same red gloves and she was directly below him. As if aware of his beady stare, she looked up, raising her face to his. He stretched out his hand in greeting as if to draw her up towards him. She smiled slightly, but did not hurry. The light was almost gone. I want her to see them before the light goes, before we ignite the generator and the whole place looks like a frontier outpost under siege. He slithered towards her, engulfed in a spray of wet earth, cracking branches and hardening slush.

‘Bonne Année, Madame le Juge!’ A small wry smile appeared in her eyes. He was so close to her that his breath steamed up her lenses. She took off her glasses and wiped them on her scarf.

‘Bonne Année, André. Although best wishes do seem a little out of place here.’

He stood before her, excited as a schoolboy, full of his own prowess; he had summoned her up and she had come to him.

The Judge stepped into the blue circle of the last light on the mountains and surveyed the fan of bodies in the snow before them. The freezing gendarmes, many of them still bleary from their millennium celebrations, rustled in the slush, tense and shifty, discomfited by the tiny wrapped bodies of the children that Schweigen had forbidden them to touch. The Commissaire babbled in the Judge’s ear.

‘They celebrated their departure. We’ve found the remains of their final meal, champagne, bûche de Noël, extra presents for the children. They’d actually decorated the entire chalet.’

The Judge said nothing. She hunched her shoulders and shrank inside the hood of her winter coat, tense and bristling against the cold. For a long while she stood silent, absorbing the scene, her boots gently sinking as the melted crust of fresh snow crumbled beneath her heels. Then she set out around the periphery defined by the tape, with André Schweigen clamped to her side, gabbling quietly.

‘The hunters left prints everywhere. So did their dogs. The dogs also made those marks – that scratching in the snow. There were trails left by deer too, but those were nearly gone. More snow must have fallen in the small hours. The hunters say they didn’t touch the bodies. I don’t think they did. It’s hard to tell what the poison was. Cyanide, I should think. Like the Swiss departure. But listen, there’s one – one of them –’

Schweigen’s excitement became uncontainable. He stepped in front of her.

‘Dominique, écoute-moi bien.’ His voice dropped to a hiss. ‘One of them’s been shot. The woman at the core. Just as it happened in Switzerland. And the gun’s not there. It’s gone. We’ll comb every inch. I’ll sift snow through sieves if I have to, but I think the gun’s gone. Obviously we’ll have to wait for ballistics to confirm the facts, but I’m willing to put money on the bet that it’s the same gun. Even after six years. Someone walked away from the mountain last night. And that’s not suicide, it’s murder.’

‘Calme-toi,’ replied the Judge softly. They stopped, facing the half-circle of the enraptured dead. ‘Of course it’s murder. How could those tiny children consent to their own deaths? We’re looking at a crime scene, André, whatever the results from your ballistics lab.’

He stopped talking and took her arm. No matter what happened this was now their investigation. They were no longer trailing in the slipstream of the Swiss, who had buried the last departure, along with the dead, in a sarcophagus of platitudes: a tragic waste, incomprehensible and heartbreaking. But for Madame le Juge nothing remained incomprehensible or beyond the reach of pure reason. The mysteries of this world stained the bright radiance of eternity. Her method, tested and consistent, was to analyse the stains. They trudged onwards, the snow sucking at their boots. The Judge gazed impassive at the white faces of the dead, absorbing each one in turn, as if every detail should be remembered for ever. The smallest children were wrapped in furred cocoons, their puckered features scarcely visible. She lingered for many minutes over the fading face of the older woman at the centre of the half-circle.

Schweigen leaned into her cheek.

‘That’s her, isn’t it? The sister?’

‘Yes. That’s Marie-Cécile Laval.’

Finally the Judge stopped, stood perfectly still, and raised her eyes to the devastated forests on the surrounding slopes; the great trees, like liquidated giants, piled one upon another, their roots, naked and undignified, sprawled in their wake, the shallow holes already filled with snow. At once beautiful and desolate, the bare curves of the mountain stretched away towards the Rhine Valley and the shadows of the Black Forest in Southern Germany. The bodies all faced towards the east, to greet the rising sun. They had died in the night, certain that one short breath, wasted in this temporary world, riddled by time, was the prelude to their eternal awakening, promised in the stars.

She looked again at the huddled soundless children, tenderly enveloped in hoods, scarves, mittens. What train of reason led a woman to protect her child against the night cold then fill his mouth with poison? She slouched down into her coat, and shivered against the quiet, thickening night. Reason had nothing to do with it. Before her on the forest floor, lay an extraordinary witness to the passion, that instinctive act of love. I will never leave you; I will never abandon you in the kingdom of this world, smothered by time, age, pain, heartbreak. I shall take you with me. Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom. This day shalt thou be with me in paradise. The Judge stared at the still, frozen face of Marie-Cécile Laval. Her unimaginable act represented one last gesture of boundless love, the love that had gathered up these children and borne them forth in triumph.

_{*  *  *}

The sound of a heavy vehicle thumping against the branches in the distance disturbed the motionless, iced air. The Judge raised her head like a deer at bay. Schweigen was watching her carefully.

‘Have the press got hold of it yet?’

‘We’ve had one call. The hunters found them. No matter how often you tell them not to blab, people talk.’

‘Then let’s get to work. But keep it quiet as long as you can. I’ll need to interview the men who found them. I’ll do that tomorrow morning early. Before they start seeing things in their heads and imagining details that weren’t there. Have you got all the photographs?’

‘Yes. And something even better than that.’ Schweigen presented her with the drawings, the measurements between each body carefully noted. His record of the scene looked slightly sinister, for alongside a careful diagram showing the positions of each corpse was a sketch of the older woman’s face, the open eyes and the expression of startled amazement, exactly caught.

‘That’s excellent,’ said the Judge, thrown off guard by Schweigen’s unexpected talent and the grotesque, disturbing subject.

‘I was all set for the Beaux-Arts,’ he said, with a small shrug of regret. ‘It’s harder to draw faces you’ve never seen before. She’s the only one I knew.’

The first shift of actors surrounding the spectacle began to pack up, ready to bear the bodies away from the darkening apse of the mountain; the lorries from the morgue were stuck further down the slope. The second shift of forensic experts hovered on the brink of the circle, ready to sift through the snow, their searchlights tilted at odd angles, picking out the whitened, laden branches of the pines. Schweigen was relieved that none of his team knew any of the dead and said so. The Judge stood over the men as they lifted the children, ostensibly daring them to be anything other than gentle with the stiff, small forms, but in fact giving them something else to think about, in case anyone shuddered or cracked. She eyed them carefully. Some seemed too young, far too young, to touch the dead. As each corpse was packed up and gently zipped into a yellow folded sack its outline became momentarily visible upon the forest floor, then appeared to fade. The dead left barely a shadowed trace behind them. The gathering at the foot of the rock cliffs had already melted into the past.