Read Online HS03 - A Visible Darkness by Michael Gregorio - Free Book Online

They must have wormed their way in here, covered the body with that vile thing, then laid these baubles out on the table. Thieves, the whole blasted pack of them!’
    ‘I’m sorry?’ I said.
    Faced with a corpse, he seemed more interested in bits of stone.
    ‘This is amber,’ he replied, as if he were spitting out nails. ‘Unpolished amber! These women are barbarians, monsieur. They’ll steal it and sell it, yet they believe in every legend that is spoken about it. This, I suppose, is some sort of pagan funeral rite. Somebody’s going to pay for this . . .’
    I raised my eyes and stared at him.
    ‘Would you punish this woman’s friends because they care?’ I asked.
    ‘I don’t give a damn about her friends!’ he exclaimed. ‘There are more important issues. One of my men has been seduced. How could they get in here without help? That soldier has disobeyed
me
. Do you see now, Herr Magistrate? Do you understand the gravity of it? They wrap my men around their little fingers. If those girls know what happened to her, everyone in Nordcopp will know.’
    I looked down at the damaged face.
    Which religion prescribed the strange manner in which that corpse had been laid out?
    ‘A ritual, you say? What kind of ritual?’
    Colonel les Halles shook his head. ‘This cloak is supposed to save her from the Baltic cold when she’s laid in the ground. The amber will buy a seat near the fire in their Valhalla.’ He blew his lips together noisily. ‘You Prussians are master storytellers. This coast has more tall tales to its name than a children’s nursery.’
    He spoke of barbarity as if he were an apostle of civilisation. Why would he not allow the women to mourn for their comrade who was dead?
    ‘What was her name?’ I asked, unable to tear my eyes away.
    I heard him rustling in his pocket, the sound of a paper being unfolded.
    He had written out her name. He had no idea who she was.
    ‘Kati . . . uscka . . . Rod . . . end . . . ahl,’ he grunted, struggling with the syllables, as if the foreign name were hateful to him.
    I leant over the body, looking closely at the bruised and battered forehead. The head had been struck twice, I judged. The greatestdamage was concentrated in the area above her left eye. The eye was closed, the skin bulging, purple, the eyelid grossly swollen up, black with blood. A further blow had dug deep into the bridge of her nose. Had the blows been delivered by a hammer? The blunt edge of an axe? The weapon had been heavy enough to stun her, though the initial attack had not killed her. She was still alive when the butcher began to carry out the mutilations on her unresisting body. Blood had flowed freely down her face and neck, and curdled in her hair. Her heart had gone on beating for quite some time. The battered brow and broken nose told their story of violence, but what was I to make of the yawning emptiness below?
    It was as if her face had collapsed in upon itself. She might have swallowed the pieces. Her upper lip drooped down into the formless space where her mouth ought to have been. A wild beast might have torn the lower part of her face away with a single, ripping bite. The red-raw pit stretched from earlobe to earlobe, encompassing what had been her mouth, her chin and her throat. Scraps of flesh, tangles of nerves, fragments of bone, torn gristle, muscle and shredded cartilage had been roughly hacked away, as if by a demon surgeon.
    Why attack the face alone?
    There was nothing instinctive about it. I had no doubt in my mind. The attack had been carefully planned, premeditated, then put into effect. Those flaps of skin hung loose inside the cavity of the face because the central prop had been torn away, taken out as a single piece. That human face had been—the word took on a strange, perplexing significance—
mined
. It appeared as if some insane anatomical engineer had drilled and emptied the lower half of her skull, hollowing it out, removing only the deposits