Part 6 (1/2)

'What is the name of the soldier?'

'Pierre Grillet,' he hissed, as if reluctant to reveal so little.

'What sort of a man is he?'

'First-rate.'

His answers were becoming shorter, as if he resented being questioned. The fact that I was a Prussian, a civilian, and a magistrate who threatened to block his schemes, went ill with him, I suppose.

'May I speak with him?' I asked carefully.

The colonel was silent for a moment.

'My men work very hard. Most of them will be sleeping. You can have a word tomorrow morning,' he conceded finally. 'I'll send him to you.'

I thanked him, wondering at the same time whether concern for his men and their sleep, or a reluctance to allow what I asked, had inspired his answer.

I put my alb.u.m away, picked up the hanging shroud, and was about to cover the body again, but the left hand of les Halles shot out and seized my wrist.

'What do you think you are doing?' he said, separating his words like a teacher telling off a boy who has been too bold.

'This body has been deprived of every dignity,' I said. 'I see no reason for her to go naked into the ground.'

'You have not done yet, monsieur,' he said roughly, pus.h.i.+ng my hand away.

'What do you mean?' Did I need to explain to him what must be obvious to any man with eyes? 'This woman was killed by blows to the head. The lower half of her face has been ransacked by a maniac. This corpse can tell us nothing more.'

'I know why she was killed,' he snapped back. 'I know who did it. I cannot put my finger on the man, but I can point you in the right direction. This body will confirm what I am about to say.'

He raised his hand to hush me.

'She was trafficking in stolen amber,' he pressed on. 'She was murdered for it. Instead of paying what she asked, the smuggler struck her down and took it for free. She spoke out of turn, perhaps. She may have threatened to give his name to me. He made an example of her. A warning to all the other amber-girls. Keep your mouths shut. That was the message. That is the path you must follow. The illegal trade in stolen amber. Prussian thieves and smugglers . . .'

'General Malaport did not tell me you had solved the case,' I interrupted. 'Why did he bother to send for me?'

Irony was alien to les Halles, it seemed.

'I can tell you that, monsieur,' he replied a.s.suredly. 'The coffers of the army are low. Now, Spain is stretching our resources. A drawn-out war in a poor country costs vast amounts of money. That's where Prussian amber comes into the equation. Nordcopp will yield ten times as much to us as it ever did to you.'

'I do not see your point,' I objected.

'There's one small problem,' he nodded at the corpse on the table. 'A Prussian s.l.u.t has been murdered, and diplomacy dictates that a Prussian magistrate should examine the case. We want nothing to do with the business.'

'A Prussian s.l.u.t?' I repeated his phrase slowly, as if savouring the words. 'So much for French diplomacy.'

'Don't bandy morals with me,' he snarled. 'I was not born a colonel in the emperor's engineers. My words are rough, my thinking rougher. I know the tricks of the poor. They steal a silver thimble and swallow it, knowing that they'll s.h.i.+t it out in a day or two. Amber is a jewel, and a stomach is a bank-vault. Open her up, Herr Procurator Stiffeniis, and see what's in her entrails. And while you're about it, stick your finger into every hole that you can think of. If I were you, I'd put my gloves back on.'

That night, I perpetrated the final indignity on the corpse of Kati Rodendahl.

The search did not prove fruitless.

8.

A NOISE DISTURBED my sleep.

A dull blow repeated at regular intervals.

A bludgeon beating me slowly into consciousness.

I listened in the darkness of the empty hut.

An echoing thump, the drawn-out rattle of chains, a brief pregnant pause, a teeth-clenching rasp of metal sliding on metal, then another resounding thump. I might have been in Paris once again, watching public executions from the foot of the guillotine in the Place de la Revolution, but no coa.r.s.e cheers went up as another once-n.o.ble head fell into the waiting wicker basket. Instead, the chains began to jingle and clank, metal sheared once more, and that thump pounded out again.

I sat up, felt around for my boots in the darkness. The leather was cold to my touch, slick with damp. A jolt of pain racked my shoulder as I stood up stiffly. I had not undressed the night before, but slept in the clothes I had worn all day. I did not need to drag myself from any warm coc.o.o.n; I was already wearing it.

I unlatched the door and stepped outside.

The sharp chill of the early morning was unexpected.

A dense white fog rolled in off the sea.

Instinctively, I slipped my hands into my pockets.

My fingers closed around the piece of amber that I had removed from the mutilated corpse the night before. I held the nugget up, recalling last night's labour in all its horror. Though diabolical, the colonel's intuition had been correct. The dead girl had hidden a stolen piece of amber about her body. She had tucked it deep inside her s.e.x. Larger than a plum, even I could see that the stone was valuable. It was a ravis.h.i.+ng gold colour, as if it had been cleaned and polished, with darker veins of red threading through it.

More surprising still was what that piece contained.

A female wasp in the act of laying her eggs. A stream of tiny bubbles squirted from its tail like the trail of a shooting star. The insect was large, its thorax swollen. Each detail of its body and wings was as perfect as the day that it had died. Its front legs pushed forward, as if it had been seeking desperately to break free from the dripping resin that had fixed and drowned it.

Had a thousand years gone by?

More, perhaps?

Scientists in Prussia and abroad had recently begun to study amber, claiming that G.o.d's Creation might be better understood by examining the plants and creatures which it contained, claiming, indeed, that the Garden of Eden itself had once existed somewhere on our Prussian sh.o.r.es.

The memory of the insects in my garden returned to mind.

Flies, ants, beetles, attacking and devouring anything that could be eaten. I did not pretend to be a man of science, yet there seemed to me to be nothing which distinguished those living insects from the creature trapped inside that piece of amber. That wasp could be dated to the birth of the world, they said. Insects had survived for aeons. Like us, they had persevered. And yet, I thought, insects had no visible conscience, showed no mercy. Eat, or be eaten, that was the law of Nature. They had consumed the corpse of every creature born since Adam and Eve.

A cold s.h.i.+ver ran across my shoulders.

Would they persist when I-when we-had turned to long-forgotten dust?

I shook these strange ideas from my head. I had a case to solve. I must begin by establis.h.i.+ng the facts. Had the girl been murdered as she tried to smuggle her treasure away from the coast, as Colonel les Halles believed?

He had shown me the death certificate the night before.