Free HS03 - A Visible Darkness by Michael Gregorio Page B

procession of ghostly Teutonic Knights in rusty, clanking armour, going home to rest in some funeral crypt after a midnight roust. The Order had ruled the Baltic coast with an iron fist for centuries. They had been the first to organise the gathering of amber, the first to regulate the trade. Control had passed to local lords, then, finally, to the Hohenzollerns. Now, the French had laid their hands upon our riches.
    With a start, I realised that someone was lurking at my shoulder.
    I am tall, but the man was taller. And he was thinner, too. His blue woollen jacket rucked up in folds where his belt pulled too tightly at his waist. His face was the ashen colour of lye soap, his features utterly undistinguished, except for two thick-lidded eyes which peered back at me without blinking. They reminded me of the unseeing black buttons sewn onto the pale cotton face of my daughter’s rag doll.
    ‘I am Pierre Grillet,’ he announced. ‘I was told that you wanted to speak with me.’
    ‘The soldier who found the body on the beach?’
    ‘The colonel said to take you in to breakfast,’ he said, though he did not confirm or deny what I had said. He simply turned and walked away, taking great long strides along the narrow walkway of rotting planks.
    I had eaten nothing since leaving Lotingen, and I was famished. I followed him willingly to the hut at the far end of the row.
    He threw open the door, then stepped aside to let me enter first.
    The aroma of toasted corn hung in the air in wisps of blue smoke. Coffee had become a rare commodity since the English set up their blockade of the Channel, but toasted corn will do for men who have forgotten the taste of anything better. I looked withyearning at the breakfast table, the plates piled high with fresh bread. French officers were making short work of the feast. Every man in the room stopped eating. All of them stared at me, and not one word was said. It would have been impossible to hold a private conversation.
    Reluctantly, I turned to Grillet.
    ‘It might better if we speak out here,’ I said.
    ‘As you prefer, monsieur.’
    There was something sly and insinuating in his reedy voice.
    ‘You speak good French,’ he added, as he closed the door on the tempting smell of food, and we turned our faces to the fog once more.
    The compliment spurred me to be brusque. ‘Just tell me how you found the body. Make it short, and keep it simple. For the sake of a foreigner, do you understand me?’
    He nodded, sniffed, began to speak.
    ‘Three days ago, I was scouting up along the coast. It was shortly after breakfast. This time of day, more or less. I’d been on duty all that night, so I had the morning off. I’d gone about a mile in that direction,’ he pointed away to the east, ‘when I came upon her. She was lying face down on the beach. As naked as Eve before the Fall. I wondered what was going on, of course. It isn’t every day that you find a . . .’
    ‘You have told me what you saw,’ I said. ‘Now, tell me what you did.’
    He cleared his throat. ‘I called out to her, that’s what I did. But she did not reply. I guessed what was up, of course. Like I said, a naked woman lying on the shore. And way above the waterline. She hadn’t been swept ashore. I went up close, and prodded her leg with the toe of my boot. When she didn’t move, or cry out, I ran back here and reported what I’d found. I didn’t even turn her over. No idea what she looked like. I didn’t see her face until the sergeant came and rolled her over . . .’
    ‘And you were alone when you found her?’
    ‘Just me, monsieur.’
    He had no one to corroborate his story. What he told me was what he wished to tell me. It might be more or less than the truth.
    ‘What were you doing on that stretch of coast?’
    ‘I went to bathe,’ he replied.
    Soldiers are not the cleanest men in the world.
    ‘Do you often wash?’ I asked him.
    ‘Tuesday, or Wednesday, as a rule,’ he said. ‘I’ll not