I held the lantern up, and looked more closely at the picture.
A pretty young woman dressed in a long dark cape with a hood. She might have been another one of the amber-gatherers. The image did not seem to have any religious significance. Nor did the nail on which it had been crudely impaled suggest any sign of reverence.
Not a saint, then. It was simply a decoration, like the strings of sea-shells which dangled from the ceiling, and the misshapen tangles of driftwood which hung from the walls like stags’ heads in a hunting-lodge.
Edviga’s amber-gathering gear was draped over another rusty nail. Her stout jerkin and stiff leather trousers dangled in a careless twist, as if the uniform had been peeled off in one piece from her body. Like the shell stripped from a shrimp.
Beneath, neatly aligned, stood her heavy thigh-length boots.
As I lifted the lantern, I caught a glimpse of something peeping out from beneath the bed. It was dark and triangular. Bending down, I saw a medium-sized wooden box that was partially hidden in the shadows. I pushed the bed aside, and pulled it out. It was the sort of box that they use for packing roundels of cheese. Two large initial letters had been unevenly burnt with a red-hot iron on the lid.
E.L.
It was not locked, and I carefully opened the lid. My fingers hovered in the air for a moment, hardly daring to touch the contents. What did this mean? Were these the clothes that she had arrived in? Were they the clothes that she would have worn if she had left of her own free will? I lifted up a crushed green bonnet, which I set down on the floor. A dress had been carefully folded beneath it. Printed with a pattern of pink flowers, that poor faded frock had seen a good few summers. It was, indeed, little more than
a rag. Had Edviga nothing better to show for her labour on the seashore? I saw her in my mind’s eye. Any other woman would have been demeaned by those poor garments.
Not Edviga.
I laid my fingers on the dress, shifted it aside, and examined the contents of the box. I was surprised by how little it contained. No bag, no shawl, no vest or stockings, no keepsake from home, no letters. There was nothing except for a pair of cracked leather pumps, one of which had lost a buckle. Having removed the contents, I turned the box over, wondering if something might be hidden under it. A tiny fragment of stone clattered onto the floor. I picked it up between my thumb and finger and held it to the light.
It was a dense, dark red. Very dark, indeed, but it was amber. A piece of no great value. Of all the valuable amber that had passed through her hands, was this the only fragment she had kept for herself? Had she left it in the box, asking her friends to bury her and it together in the sea if anything should ever happen to her? I replaced the clothes, and the chip of amber, closed the lid, and made to slide the box back into its place beneath the bed.
Something scraped on the wooden boards.
I pushed the box aside, fell to my knees, and peered into the darkness. Almost hidden in the corner, an object glinted. I stretched forward, felt cold metal, then pulled it out. I turned it over in my hands, examining it more carefully in the lamplight. It was an implement of some sort. A tool connected with her work, perhaps? Fashioned neatly from an amber-worker’s rake, it had been transformed by a blacksmith. All the teeth had been removed from the rake—with one exception—leaving a flat grip which fitted snugly into the palm of my hand. That one remaining tooth protruded as a sharp prong about five inches long. When I closed my fingers around it, that prong jutted out from between the closed fingers of my bunched fist. It was an ingenious tool. Or was it a weapon? Did she take it with her when she left the camp at night? Did she carry it to protect herself when she went to Nordcopp?
She had left it behind when she met Dr Heinrich . . .
That thought was like a hammer-blow.
It tolled the death-knell of my hopes of finding the girl alive. In a panic, I dropped to my knees again, thumping the lantern down on the wooden floor. I brought my right eye close to the floorboards, and sighted along the plank. Splinters stood out like the spines on a hedgehog’s back. The crazed grain of warped wood was a maze of rival lanes running away in the same direction. I was looking for blood. For the stains of Edviga’s blood on the soft wood. For darker traces which might have found their way into the grain, distinguishing one anonymous, narrow track from the guilty one next to it.
But there was nothing. No blood. No sign of violence.
No clue which might tell me whether the girl was alive, or dead, or where she might have gone.
I stood up, dropped the metal implement on the bed, then bent again with a sigh, intending to retrieve the lantern from the floor. The flickering light glared brightly in my eyes. Then, a dark shadow moved over me.
I glanced up.
There was a silhouette against the canvas of the doorway.
‘Edviga?’
My lips closed in silence as the shadow stepped into the room.
Wet clothes clung to that body like a second skin. Water formed a shallow pool around the naked white feet. That figure had come upon me silently. Every fibre in my body tensed as I struggled to make sense of it. The night before, he had let me live in Königsberg. Now, it seemed, he had dogged my heels, and followed me to Nordcopp. Had he decided that I must die, as well?
Dogged my heels?
Surely not. He must have reached the town before me. The instant I slid down from the saddle, I had gone to Heinrich’s house and discovered the bodies. I had touched the lady’s cold cheek, and clasped the stiff hand of the other corpse, concluding that they had both been dead at least an hour.
‘You got here quickly,’ I managed to say.
‘Quicker than you think, Herr Magistrate,’ he answered with an enigmatic smile. ‘I am here, there. I am everywhere.’
It was a strange thing to say, and it jarred with what I knew. He had been in Königsberg the night before. He must have returned to Nordcopp in the early hours of the morning. He had killed Edviga, and now he had come to kill me, too.
He took three steps into the light, and shook the water from his hair. Some drops touched the hot glass of the lantern, sizzling loudly as they instantly turned to steam. He seemed to shimmer. The effect was unexpected. His face was bright where I expected dark, distorting shadows. The lantern projected a honeyed gold glow on his pale skin. His brow was smooth, as gently curved as a dune of wind-planed sand. His cheeks stood out like perfect halves of the same round apple. The contour of his lips was soft and delicate. His short hair sat stiffly on his head, which glistened with tiny liquid sea-pearls. I recalled the first time I had met him, meditating in the Pietist convent in Nordcopp. Then, too, he had seemed to emanate light.
‘You came from the sea.’
‘You came by land,’ he answered swiftly
It hardly mattered where he had sprung from. He had evaded the guards on the landward side of the camp, that was all I needed to know. Edviga had told me how the girls came and went at night, walking along the ancient harbour wall submerged a few feet below the shallow waters of the bay. They went that way to Nordcopp, carrying amber, meaning to avoid the rude attention of the French soldiers on the gate. It came as no surprise that he knew the route. He knew the amber-girls, he knew their secrets.
He had murdered them.
He seemed imperturbably calm. Relaxed, but concentrated. Was this the effect of transcendental meditation? Or was the act of murder his Nirvana, joy in the destruction he had wrought in the doctor’s house three miles away?
It was time to pick up the conversation we had broken off in Königsberg. Now, the questions would be different. Even so, I could not predict whether his replies would clarify the situation, or confound me all the more.
‘Why kill Dr Heinrich and his housekeeper?’ I asked.
My voice was firm. The shock had quite drained out of me. He was the very last person that I had expected to encounter. And yet, I wondered, had some seed of doubt been planted in my heart from our first meeting? Instinctively, I had tried to keep him at a distance. Even so, I should have known. I should have realised who he really was.
He smiled, his teeth tinged yellow by the flame which flared up from the lantern.
‘You disappoint me, Stiffeniis! Is this the dull procedure that they teach in Prussian law schools?’ He made a grimace of disgust, which distorted his handsome mouth. ‘I expected you to start with the other deaths. The ones that you were ordered to investigate by the French. Don’t you want to know what you were really up against?’
His words flew rattling through my head like a flight of cawing crows. What did he mean? What more remained to be said about the murders that he had not already told me in Königsberg?
My mind was in a whirl.
He knew me intimately. What I had told him freely, and what he had extracted from me by force and guile. He probably knew a great deal more, and weighed it more objectively than I could ever do. He knew the darkest secret of my soul. I would have killed him to retrieve it. Surely, he knew that, too.
I called myself to order. I must concentrate on the one undeniable fact in my possession: Dr Heinrich was not the killer that I had been seeking.
‘Let us begin, then, with my error,’ I said. My voice sounded calm enough, but my heart was pumping furiously. ‘I thought that I was on the trail of Dr Heinrich. I believed that he had taken me prisoner in Rickert’s house last night. But then again, I thought I saw your corpse an hour ago in Nordcopp.’
He threw back his head and laughed.
The lantern played new shadows over the surface of his face. Dark pits with gleaming needle-points replaced his eyes. His mouth became a black and toothless trough. This ugliness was a revelation. I saw him suddenly for what he was: a sinister creature who had crawled out from the sulphurous pit.
‘Do not blame yourself, Herr Stiffeniis. You saw what you were inclined to see. You can blame my ability to produce convincing illusions, if you’re feeling generous.’ Clearly, he was pleased with his own ingenuity. ‘While dressing up the corpse in my jacket, I was moved, believe me. With his face set fast in plaster, and my seal-ring on his finger, Heinrich looked as
I
would have looked if he had murdered me!’ A gasp of emotion issued from his lips. ‘You know, I actually said a prayer for my soul, while standing over what appeared to be my own body.’
He shrugged his shoulders.
‘I used every trick the theatre can inspire. The dark setting, pale moonlight shining in through half-closed shutters. A single, flickering candle. Like a symbolic, flailing soul. I knew you’d be enticed by the open door. Who can resist it? Did you enjoy that moment? You thought that
I
was there, and that you might be able to prevent whatever was about to happen. It’s fair to say that I outwitted you at every turn, Herr Stiffeniis. Noble thoughts buoyed you up, I know. Your young assistant had been taken prisoner, probably murdered. You couldn’t save him, but you would take revenge for his life. You hoped to wash your own hands clean in the murderer’s blood.’
Suddenly, as if the slide had changed in a magic lantern, his face was a mask of rage. ‘You sacrificed Gurten, your newly acquired assistant. You offered him up to the killer as final proof of your theory. You knew that he would go to Nordcopp the instant you told him that you, too, suspected Heinrich of the murders. Could he stay in Lotingen, safe inside a library? Of course he couldn’t! A young man with great ambitions. You
knew
what he would do. Isn’t that what went through your mind, Herr Magistrate? Is that not what you felt when you saw his—
my
—corpse?’
Could I offer a word in my own defence?
‘Gurten does not exist,’ I said. ‘He never has.’
He took no notice.
‘Heinrich appeared in Königsberg.’ His voice was raw with excitement. ‘Or so you thought. Exactly as I
wanted
you to think . . .’
‘Why?’ I asked, hardly daring to hope that he would clarify
his motives. ‘Why lead me to believe that Heinrich was the murderer?’
His eyes lit up with surprise, and a smile flashed across his lips. ‘He was perfectly placed to kill the women. How warmly you embraced the notion when you spoke to Erika in the cells! She was terrified. She knew the victims, and she thought that she’d be the next. And she suspected
him
. Don’t you think a creature such as her might feel and see things that you aren’t able to?’ He fixed me sternly with his gaze. ‘Who knows, Heinrich may well have been a murderer. Why not? I mean to say, the truth could well be this. If that’s the case, then
I
have done what you lacked courage to do. I stopped him in his tracks.’
He continued to make light of me for his own perverse amusement.
‘You killed the women,’ I stated plainly. ‘You murdered Heinrich, and you slaughtered his housekeeper. Your actions are crystal clear. It is the motive which escapes me.’
‘Everything must be plain and simple. Explanation. Justification. Motivation. No ambiguity must remain. Reason is everything. Am I right, Herr Procurator? People are dead; there must be a killer. And if so, what can he say to explain his crimes?’ He laughed again, nodding as he did so. ‘I agree with you. After all, I
am
your assistant. I’ll give you a valid reason, then. Heinrich wanted amber. At any cost. Like everyone else on the coast, French or Prussian. He’d have committed any outrage to lay his hands on the pieces that he wanted.’ He twisted his lips derisively. ‘Indeed, he has done so heartlessly. In the interests of science, so to speak. He tricked a helpless cripple, promising to cure her in exchange for amber. Can you believe that he possessed those paltry bits he showed to us, and no others?’
My thoughts flashed back to Frau Poborovsky’s attic.
The amber collection on the shelves. Some pieces large, others small, containing an incredible menagerie of unknown flies and insects. I had been in no doubt that Heinrich had collected them. That he was Vulpius. Yet Heinrich had never been there. The amber did not belong to him. Nor did the drawings, or the collection of creatures floating in the jars of preserving wine.