Free HS03 - A Visible Darkness by Michael Gregorio Page A

It was a ravishing 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 God’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 shores.
    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 shiver 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 establishing 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.
Naked body of a woman found on Nordcopp shore. Aged thirty, give or take a year or two. Deceased as a result of blows to the head. Whether accidental or intentional remains unclear. Grave damage to the face inhibits easy identification. Savaged by animals after death?
    Signed & sworn, this day, 11th August 1808.
    The report was written in French. It had been signed with an illegible scrawl by the company doctor.
    Here was another source of information.
    A brief note had been added in the same hand, identifying Kati Rodendahl as one of the amber-workers from the camp.
    I let the piece of amber slide back into the safety of my pocket.
    ‘It is evidence,’ I had insisted. ‘It may prove useful.’
    ‘Keep it safe,’ les Halles had warned me, giving in at last, reluctantly allowing me to carry it away with me. ‘That piece of amber was stolen from us. It belongs to France.’
    A narrow plank walkway linked the seven huts which stood on the crest of the dunes. Somewhere below was the beach. I could hear the sound of waves. I was fifty yards away from the waterline, though I did not know it. The dense white fog shrouded the scene that would, otherwise, have presented itself to my sight. All was still and silent, except for that endless sequence of repeated sounds: the rattling of chains, the shriek of metal, the concluding
thump.
    Far out to sea, the fog merged with the grey waters of the Baltic Sea. It was impossible to say where one began and the other ended. Further out, however, I could see a silhouetted gold-edged horizon, and I caught a glimpse of a sail—a fishing-boat?—a mere flash of white in the far distance. Suddenly, a bar of pink shot into the sky. Other bars shot off at different angles as the sun floated gentlyupwards like a wedge of honey-coloured amber. It had no more power to heat the world than the glimmering stub of a distant candle. And where the weak light could not penetrate, the sky above the fog was dark blue, shimmering into coal-black.
    The noise did not cease.
    Somebody was already hard at work.
    It might have been a