HS04 - Unholy Awakening (30 page)

The she-devil
, Lars Merson muttered when he saw Emma Rimmele entering the cemetery. Was this the reason for his resentment? Ludo Mittner had told me that Merson had done as Emma had asked. Had Merson then gone searching in the Lotingen archive for the documents that she had been unable to provide?

‘Merson wanted to remove the coffin,’ Helena concluded. ‘With Merson dead, that job was left for Ludo Mittner to do.’

Was it all a question of the disputed right to use a vault?

I jumped up. This time Lavedrine’s hand could not restrain me.

‘How could she produce such documents?’ I challenged Helena. ‘They told us in Kirchenfeld that she ran away, leaving everything behind her.’

‘If Emma’s mother was a Kassel,’ Lavedrine encouraged my wife, patting her hand, ignoring my protest, ‘why did Merson think that the body did not belong in the Kassel vault?’

‘In Merson’s opinion, the documents proved the illegitimacy of the burial…’

‘I examined the file myself,’ I contended.

‘Lars Merson had been there before you, Hanno,’ Helena replied quietly. ‘He did not believe what Emma Rimmele told him. And clearly, it cost him his life.’

‘What could it be? What could Merson have found?’ I asked her crossly. I had never spoken to my wife that way before. Nor had I ever seen her react to me in such a determined manner. She straightened her back, squared her shoulders, looked me in the eye in silence. She might have been daring me to go on, but Lavedrine stood suddenly between us.

‘What did Merson discover?’ he asked, holding both of her hands, looking into her eyes. This gesture of intimacy seemed to say: speak to
me
, Helena, tell
me
what Hanno does not wish to hear.

I studied Helena’s profile as she stared back at him. Her lower lip trembled visibly. And when she spoke again, her voice was laboured, as if it cost her a great deal. ‘Rupert Kassel, Marquis von Trauss, Emma Rimmele’s grandfather on her mother’s side, learnt some thing about his future son-in-law which frightened him. Indeed, he tried to stop the marriage which had been contracted between his only daughter and the young Erwin Rimmele.’

‘What was the accusation?’ Lavedrine persisted.

Helena clasped his hands more tightly. ‘Erwin Rimmele had been a wild young man, a fervid nationalist, it seems. He had conspired against the king, who embraced the Enlightenment and French ideas. Erwin was a founder member of a secret society, a sort of aristocratic cult, which idolised the power of Prussian blood. When the bride-to-be’s father found out, he opposed the marriage. The rebels ritualised their meetings with the sacrifice of animals…’

Helena’s words froze the blood in my veins. Adele Beckmann had told me that animals had always been slaughtered in the Blood Room at Kirchenfeld, though the law prohibited it. Even in his dotage, Erwin Rimmele had continued to re-enact the rituals of his youth, a violent cult, dedicated to blood, energy, the life force. My eyes met those of Lavedrine, a signal flashed between us. I feared he might tell Helena what we had seen in Kirchenfeld to demonstrate that he believed the truth of what she was saying.

He held my gaze for a moment, then nodded imperceptibly.

‘Prussia is full of legends regarding blood-letting,’ I began to say.

‘Rimmele was suspected of something worse,’ Helena insisted.

‘What?’

She looked down at her hands again. ‘I do not know,’ she admitted.

‘Whatever the objection may have been,’ I said, ‘it was soon overcome. Erwin Rimmele married Gisela Kassel, they had a daughter, and he lived out his life in peace on the estate in Kirchenfeld until the French arrived and drove them off.’

My head was spinning. Helena had picked up Merson’s malevolence towards Erwin Rimmele and his daughter. Was it not the same sort of prejudice that I had en countered in Lotingen from everyone who had met Emma? Everything that she had said and done had been interpreted in negative terms. Helena had stumbled onto the same downward path. I had still not heard a word which denied what Emma Rimmele had told me.

‘The fact remains that Rupert Kassel
did
refuse his daughter’s hand in marriage,’ she insisted, ‘even though the legal contract had been signed.’

‘If Erwin Rimmele was as powerful as it appears,’ said Lavedrine, letting go of Helena’s hands, running his hand through his hair, ‘would Rupert Kassel have dared to say no?’ He shook his head and breathed out noisily. ‘Is it possible that the colour of blood is always stronger in Prussia than the pale, untinted truth?’

I might have thanked Lavedrine for what he had just said. Helena’s imagination needed to be curbed, not encouraged. It would not be easy for her to accept the truth. It had cost her a lot to come to Marienburg and throw these fantasies in my face. Her credibility was now in question. She had brought herself to that pass.

But she was not defeated.

‘I wondered about that,’ she said, looking up at Lavedrine. ‘And Merson took it very seriously. To exhume a coffin and refuse a Christian burial is not a question to be treated lightly. Merson believed that Gisela Kassel had married Erwin Rimmele against the will of her father. In his opinion, she was no longer a member of the family. Indeed, he had found a document to that effect in the archives, and he had removed it…’

‘Preventing you from finding it,’ Lavedrine put in, glancing at me.

Helena turned to me, her face set grimly. ‘You convinced yourself that there was nothing more to be said on Emma Rimmele’s account, Hanno. You never considered the possibility that she might lie to you, as well.’

She bowed her head, and crossed her arms, like a lawyer who has finished making his appeal to the court, and turns towards the judge, waiting patiently for the sentence to be pronounced.

‘How does this relate to what has happened in Marienburg?’ I asked Lavedrine, ignoring Helena. ‘We are talking about five murders. Six, if we include the failed attempt on Lecompte. I do not see what Emma Rimmele stands accused of.’

Helena did not look up.

‘I have not come here to accuse Emma Rimmele. Nor do I accuse you, Hanno. Still you fail to understand me. I came to Marienburg hoping to put an end to an epidemic. An epidemic, I would say, more terrible than the fever which carried off our little son.’ She stared at me. I had seen that look a thousand times before. Her eyes were alive. They were gleaming bright with passion and with love.

For me.

‘I know that the vampire really does exist, Hanno,’ she said, her eyes not leaving mine for an instant. ‘This creature is possessed of vast and terrible powers. All of us in Lotingen have fallen victim to her in some way or other. Only the truth can save us.’

I had no answer, and Helena had no more to say.

Lavedrine stepped into the silent space between us. Suddenly, the room seemed very small indeed.

‘It is time for us to rest,’ he said, wagging his fore finger at my wife. ‘You, above all, Helena Stiffeniis. The instant I saw you here, I knew that you had come to save us from ourselves. Hanno and I are like two bulls locked horn to horn. You have done much to unlock us, I think.’

He glanced at me, and a smile lit up his face.

Whether in complicity or embarrassment, Helena smiled at him.

‘There!’ he declared. ‘That’s what I wanted to see. We’ve been short on pretty smiles in Marienburg for quite some time. Can you make yourself comfortable in this room for tonight? It is too late to send you home again.’

Helena looked around her, taking in the narrow single bed, as if seeing the place for the very first time.

‘Thank you, it will do perfectly well,’ she said.

‘Excellent. I’ll give orders for food, hot water and some towels to be brought.’

He hooked his arm in mine. ‘Hanno, you’ll be in your old room just across the corridor. Sleep well, Helena!’

‘Good night,’ I said, and Helena returned it.

Outside in the corridor, Lavedrine was not so tender with me. ‘Can’t you understand that her heart is torn apart by jealousy and fear? She really thought that she had lost you to that woman. She is telling the truth when she says that she has come to help you. Hold tightly to her hand and seize the olive branch that she is offering you.’

‘I don’t know what you want from me,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what either of you expects. I only wish that my wife had never become involved in this affair.’

He bared his teeth and smiled in my face. ‘You dragged her into this mess, Hanno, and you must never forget it.’ He stood aside, made a flourish of a bow, and let me pass. ‘I’ll have food and hot water sent up for you, as well.’

‘Thank you kindly,’ I replied, turning away towards my room, then turning back to face him. ‘If you need to enter my room for any reason, Lavedrine, I’d be grateful if you knock. I prefer to wash in private.’

I thought he was about to throw a punch at me. He raised his fist, and took aim at my nose. An instant later, the punch fell gently on my upper arm, and his face relaxed into a smile.

‘I’ll try to resist the temptation that those doors represent for me. Both doors!’

‘I smell the stink of Massur in all of this.’

We huddled together in the corridor – Lavedrine, Helena and myself – talking in whispers, looking all around, like prisoners who had just escaped from captivity, and who feared being taken into custody again. Lavedrine glanced again at the contents of the note, shaking it angrily in his fist.

General Layard refused to allow me into the prison where the Prussians from the Black Bull inn were being held. ‘The fact that you have questioned them already counts for no thing,’ Lavedrine snarled. ‘I should have guessed! Massur is behind it, advising Layard to rid him self of you, and to keep me on a very tight chain. The general wants me to go there alone and interrogate them all again!’

‘Are Helena and I supposed to disappear?’

‘He wants you both to go home,’ he said, staring beyond my shoulder, his face twisted with rage. ‘What a waste of my time! What will they tell me, a Frenchman, that they have not told you already? If they told you little, will they tell me more? If the girl pulls out that tale of a mysterious female, I’ll force the details from her…’ He stopped in mid-sentence, a puzzled expression frozen on his face, as if to ask us both what was wrong. A moment later, he smiled. ‘Nothing physical, I promise you. I’ll bring French rationalism to bear on wild Prussian fantasy. Lecompte has been infected by the same disease since coming here to Marienburg. He and the girl appear to share the same set of sinister impressions. I’ll have them bring up a carriage for you. You’ll be in Lotingen in a couple of hours.’

‘I am not leaving,’ I said defiantly.

Lavedrine peered hard at me. ‘Layard will send someone to throw you out of the fortress. Don’t even dream of trying to enter the prison. They will not let you out again. His word is law in both those places.’

‘I want to take another look at the cottage where Sebastien Grangé was killed,’ I said. ‘Over there, the general commands no-one. It happens to be the scene of a murder. I can go there if I wish to.’

‘What is there to see?’ he protested. ‘Grangé’s body—’

‘Has been removed,’ I said. ‘I know all that. I’m interested in the place itself. Puzzled, rather. Do you recall our conversation last night? How was it possible to creep up on the victim, a trained French soldier, a man of considerable experience, catch him off his guard, and do away with him? Didn’t he try to defend himself? And if not, why not?’

He listened to me, a familiar ironic smile playing about his lips.

‘You want to know what danger threatens Emma Rimmele,’ he said quietly. ‘And discover how the attack might be arranged. You are still convinced that she will be the next victim, aren’t you, Hanno?’

‘The danger may have reached her door already,’ I said, thinking of the news that Helena had brought. ‘Emma Rimmele may have tried to run away, but it does not mean that she escaped them.’

Lavedrine did not reply immediately. What ever he was thinking, it made him smile. ‘I’ll go at once to the prison, get it over with, then write up my report for General Layard,’ he said. ‘It will give me the greatest pleasure to do so. Jacques Massur will get much more than he bargained for.’

‘Massur?’ I asked, perplexed.

Lavedrine’s eyes were cold and distant. ‘This story begins in Kirchenfeld, Stiffeniis. Those three lieutenants were serving there under his command. If he had done
his
job, none of this might have happened.’

He intended to denounce his rival, it seemed.

‘I’ll have the carriage brought for you, then, Helena.’

She stepped up to him, those red coral earrings dancing wildly. ‘I won’t be needing one, thank you,’ she said, ‘I will be with Hanno.’

If she surprised me, she certainly surprised him. He opened his mouth to say some thing, then closed it wordlessly again, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his leather coat, staring down at the points of his Italian riding-boots.

Helena watched him steadily, a fixed smile on her lips.

‘I’ve come between the two of you enough as it is,’ he said at last. ‘You must decide for yourselves who stays, who goes, and where and when and how.’

Helena lifted her hands, pushing vagrant curls behind her ears with trembling fingers, exposing the earrings more markedly. There was something defiant in the way that she did it. ‘It has nothing to do with Hanno,’ she said. ‘I am capable of making my own decisions, Monsieur le Colonel.’ She looked at me, and her gaze was penetrating. ‘I wish to see the house,’ she said. ‘I wish to see it with you, Hanno.’

What more was there to say?

Five minutes later, standing by the main gate, we parted from Lavedrine. Five minutes more, and Helena and I were seated side by side on the bench seat of a rowing boat, as it pushed off from the bank. The wherry-man had agreed to carry us across the river in the direction of the Black Bull inn. Ten minutes more, a steady breeze in our faces, we had landed on the other bank, and begun to walk in the direction of the slaughter-house, and the cottage beyond it.

We had not exchanged a word since leaving Lavedrine.

‘Soldiers,’ she said, looking to the right.

Two French sentries were standing guard outside the closed door of the tavern. If that side of the river had been a Prussian domain the day before, the French were out in force there now. And even if Lavedrine persuaded General Layard to free the landlord, I could not avoid thinking that Wilhelm Voigt’s alehouse might remain forever empty, his beer turning sour in untapped barrels. Would he ever claim again that only German was spoken over there?

The slaughter-house seemed more forlorn than I remembered it. A large empty shed, and nothing more. If Voigt and Elspeth had told the truth when they spoke of animals being butchered there, fresh blood to assuage the ‘creatures of the night’, then the French had put them all to flight: Prussians, butchers, beasts, and creatures. The vampires had been driven off, at least for the moment. No blood would be spilled while the French were there, unless it were Prussian.

As we entered the yard of the cottage, heads looked over the balustrade which gave access to the upper floor of the dwelling. Two French soldiers had been lounging on the wooden steps. They jumped up, shouting, muskets in hand, pointing them at us. One man came running down the stairs, levelling his firearm at my stomach.

‘This place is off-limits,’ he shouted in French, as if it were a
lingua franca
known to every man who walked upon the earth. ‘There’s a murder enquiry going on.’

The other soldier came down to join him. He stood there, smiling sullenly, ogling Helena, jibbing the firing-end of his musket up and down. ‘What’s the judy doing here, then? And what are
you
up to, my friend?’

There was no mistaking his meaning. I realised the danger we had walked into. Helena, most particularly. I had never seen those men before. The guard had changed; Sergeant Coin and his soldiers had gone, and Lavedrine was not there to protect us. These Frenchmen understood that I was a Prussian, nothing more. And at my side there was a Prussian woman.

‘The “judy” is my wife,’ I corrected him. ‘And I am the magistrate who must investigate the murder.’

‘Wife?’ the soldier snorted sarcastically.

‘Magistrate?’ the other one said.

I saw the scene as it might unfold. One man would hold me at gunpoint, while the other had his way with Helena. She would resist, of course, and I would try to save her. Would they shoot me first, or make me watch, before they shot the pair of us? Something of the sort had happened to Emma Rimmele, after all.

A look passed between those men.

They were weighing up the risks.

I glanced at Helena. Did she see fright in my eyes? When she spoke up, I thought I was imagining it. Her French is quite as good as mine. ‘My husband and I were asked to come here by a French officer, Colonel Lavedrine,’ she said boldly. ‘Serge invited us to look inside the cottage where the murder had taken place. He’ll be here very shortly. Now, you,’ she pointed at the bolder of the men, ‘what is your name?’

The two men exchanged another look.

‘We’ll give our names to the colonel when he turns up,’ the first man said, lowering his musket, stepping aside.

‘We’ll wait for him upstairs,’ I managed to add.

‘
Comme vous voudrez, monsieur
,’ the soldier replied, and this time he saluted. He turned away, put his fingers to his lips and let out two sharp whistle blasts, calling to an other sentry who was upstairs on the balcony leaning out to watch the scene. ‘Let them in, Louis,’ he shouted. ‘Colonel Lavedrine will be here any minute.’

We climbed the stairs, Helena going first.

The third man pressed himself against the rough daub wall to let us pass.

‘
Bonjour, madame
,’ he said with a rapid nod of his red-capped head to Helena. And then, to me: ‘
Bonjour, monsieur
.’

Helena stopped in front of the door. ‘Is this the place?’

I nodded, though it was nothing like the gloomy murder house that I had entered with Lavedrine two nights before. Bright sunlight lit the balcony, bouncing off the wall, the door and the window. By lantern-light it had seemed dark and sinister. Now, it was nothing more than rough plaster, wooden joists, and a steep sloping roof of ancient tiles. Helena laid her hand on the door, a panel of which was split where the French soldiers had broken in. I felt no great anxiety about letting her go in there. The corpse had been removed and buried. And yet, she did not enter at once.

‘What are we doing here, Hanno?’

I was surprised at how calm she sounded.

‘This is where Sebastien Grangé was found,’ I said, telling her quickly who he was, mentioning the condition in which his body had been discovered.

Helena listened in silence. Then, she looked out over the balcony and into the small enclosed courtyard. ‘Who was living here before he came?’

‘Nobody,’ I replied, explaining that the house had been abandoned when the French closed down the abattoir. I was careful not to repeat what the chamber maid had said about the continuing illicit use of the slaughter-house, nor about the people who were supposed to go there, and what they did with the blood of the animals that they butchered. I did not wish to frighten her. ‘There is no good reason for anyone to come here,’ I said. ‘Nevertheless, this is where Grangé was murdered.’

‘Did he know that the place was deserted?’ she whispered, leaning close to me.

‘Probably. That’s why he came here,’ I said. ‘He certainly knew that there were no Frenchmen on this side of the river.’

‘Why would a French officer wish to avoid people who spoke his language?’ she asked, stretching up on her toes, leaning out over the balustrade, looking in the direction of the slaughter-house, which was fifty paces or so beyond the gate and the yard. ‘And why, having seized the place, do the French not use that building?’

‘They have built their own abattoir on the downwind side of town.’

‘Wherever they go, they must have abattoirs and cemeteries which are to their liking,’ Helena murmured. ‘Don’t you think that’s odd, Hanno?’

‘What?’

‘Animals must not be killed where the stench of blood might give them offence. The dead must not be buried anywhere near the living. They make such sharp divisions between life and death.’

She was looking at me as she spoke, but she did not seem to see me. Her eyes were hooded, blank, expressionless.

‘I like to think that we, and they, are not so very far apart…’

I was perplexed, lost. ‘What are you saying, Helena?’

She was silent for some moments. ‘Anders is very close,’ she whispered. ‘I can almost see him…just there beyond my reach, but I…I cannot touch him. And yet it is just a tiny step…’

Suddenly, whatever she had seen was gone.

‘Have you no idea what Grangé was doing in this place? Alone among Prussians?’

‘No-one knows, or will say. The Prussians deny having seen him…’

‘So, what was his connection with Emma Rimmele?’

I took a deep breath, then told her what had happened on the Rimmele estate in Kirchen feld. I kept nothing back. The rivalry between the officers, the groups that formed, the loyalties that were made and broken, the duelling and deaths. Then I spoke to her of Emma Rimmele, saying that she had become the object of Grangé and his friends, and of other groups, too.

‘Nobody remains untouched by her presence,’ she said quietly.

‘They hoped to lay their hands upon her father’s wealth,’ I said, as if that were the prime consideration, as if to remove myself from Emma Rimmele’s sphere of influence. ‘We believe…that is, Lavedrine and I think that she may have been…raped.’

‘Raped?’

I saw the look of distress on her face. Having risked a similar fate herself at the hands of the French soldiers, I hoped that Helena would understand the situation in which Emma Rimmele had found herself. Alone, undefended. Without a Prussian magistrate, or the name of a French colonel to protect her.

‘She is still their object, their prey, though she managed to escape them here,’ I continued quickly. ‘That’s why she came to Lotingen. Wherever she goes, they go, too, scattering death around her, isolating her, driving her to submit…’

‘You and Lavedrine believe that Grangé was killed by a rival group of officers that was chasing her?’

I nodded, surprised at the ease with which Helena managed to comprehend the complexity of what had taken place. ‘That’s the way it seems,’ I said. ‘A second officer was murdered in town in the same fashion. A third man barely escaped with his life. They were both close friends of the first.’ I told her what we thought had happened, and how Grangé had been killed. ‘Two wounds to the neck, puncturing a vital artery. The victim quickly bleeds to death.’

Helena looked at me, her head on one side. ‘That is the way the vampire kills,’ she hissed between her teeth, her voice so low that I was not certain whether I had heard it, or imagined it. ‘That’s why Lavedrine was drawn to Lotingen. He was following hard on the vampire’s trail.’

She placed her hand upon the door, which swung back gently on its hinges.