The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge Read online

  We have to ask, we cannot demand. He’s not a French citizen; and he’s a famous, busy man. We have no evidence linking him to the New Year’s Day departure beyond a coded book, with its sinister annotations and a mobile phone message to the sister of his dead friend. But he is part of this. I can smell it; I can feel it on my skin. All the people he loves, or those he says he loves, end up dead with bullets in their brains before the gun vanishes. Who is this man with his brilliant career and his strange, ageless face? How does he come to own a copy of this coded missal, privately printed, and – I am assuming this – distributed only to members of the Faith? I know that he can read and speak that coded language – if it is ever spoken. How many other copies were printed? Or, for the thought struck her then, is this the only copy that exists? He is irrevocably implicated in this dark puzzle whose meaning remains obscure.

  Yet he is not obliged to see me, or to answer any of my questions. He can withdraw at any time. Be tactful. Bait the hook with respect for his position and authority. Let him take all the time he needs. Ask, ask; but don’t give him any clues to your paths and your directions.

  Lübeck

  1 March 2000

  Chère Madame,

  I am, of course, willing to cooperate with your enquiry although I fear that I can be of little use to you. If my assistance will ensure that the children of my dearest friend, Marie-Cécile Laval, will no longer be harassed by your over-zealous police force I shall be glad to answer all your questions. They must be allowed to grieve in peace without these remorseless intrusions.

  As you know, I am a busy man with many engagements abroad. I shall however be at home in Lübeck during the month of March for the annual Music Festival of which I am the Artistic Director and will be able to see you on one of the following Wednesday mornings indicated below. Please contact my secretary by e-mail or at one of the office numbers in Berlin.

  Yours sincerely,

  Friedrich Grosz

  The letter was written in English, dictated, typed, the signature an added scrawl. But this is his voice. I am hearing his voice. And he is standing between me and the Laval children. André Schweigen has already botched that avenue in this investigation. She wrinkled her nose in irritation, stood up and looked out upon the cold crimson glow, which illuminated the tiny, shutterless windows of the Salzspeicher. She heard the traffic hissing on the wet streets outside. Then she dressed in warm clothes, flat shoes and her red gloves, prepared to cast her own chill remorseless light into the dark places before her.

  The early spring braced itself for frost. As she set off in the gathering cold her breath surrounded her face like a nebula. She tucked the red leather gloves inside the black sleeves of her coat, pulled the hood over her head against the drizzle and marched down the Obertrave in the direction of the Dom. The cafés gathered in their chairs and tables, which had appeared on the pavements, optimistic in the midday sunshine. All the windows were double-glazed with a small shelf between the layers of glass. Here was the Music School, ablaze with light and bustle, voices, discordant instruments, the charmed sadness of a saxophone speaking to a piano. The Judge slid softly past, aware of how much smaller she was in comparison to this powerful mass of excited musicians in evening dress, disgorged into the streets, wielding large black cases shaped like weapons. She caught the odd word, but could make no real sense of their urgent shouts. The lower reaches of An der Obertrave appeared to contain only houses, silent, domestic. On her left the gabled buildings stood uncurtained, lit up, like the backdrop of an Advent calendar. She peered into their bright interiors, the gold pine tables decorated with candles and yellow flowers, vivid cushions and low lamps, half expecting to see hosts of angels and bewildered shepherds, receiving the good news. Planted vats of flowers and bulbs lurked by the festive doorways, many already filled with tiny green spears, rising to meet the inexorable spring. On her right, beyond the fragile early green of the trees, swam the river, shimmering dark, a faint mist hovering above the ripples and the lost floating leaves. She paused, examining the washing lines. These strange structures, the wires almost invisible, stood by the river, and the white sheets, hanging in still folds, now hardened, kissed by the plunging frost.

  The interior of the cathedral sizzled with humming floodlights and the orchestra, clamped in a semicircle, their heads bent over their illuminated scores, resembled a Vatican conclave of dark cardinals, buried in prayer, before casting lots. Then the second violin raised her head, and began. The terrifying sadness of these high, yearning notes sliced through Dominique Carpentier’s concentration, but only for a moment. The underlying cold beneath the heaters, the muggy damp and halogen brilliance sent her scurrying down the side aisle, keeping close to the darkness beside a parched white row of baroque tombs. The massive structure of red brick was painted white inside; huge white Gothic vaults, dusty and darkened with candle smoke, loomed above her, harbouring the cold. Everywhere else was filled with sound technicians and cables. The concert was being recorded and broadcast live later that night on Nord Deutsche Rundfunk. The Judge sought out a secure perch from which she could observe, without being seen.

  The nave was divided into distinct sections with raised seating beneath the west windows, and across a dozen of these fixed rows sprawled a mass of bored young people in white shirts and dark jackets, clutching floppy green scores of music. The choir, waiting. Around the altar spun the orchestra, in an ever-widening arc, and before them, white head bowed, listening intently, stood the giant, skeletal form of the Composer. The Judge faded into a pillar for a moment, to be quite sure, and to assess the difference made by five years. He wore a black jacket over a white T-shirt with a faded symbol across his chest; his white hair hung over his eyes and forehead as he bent down, studying the score, gently marking time as the solitary violin steadied and soared. Then suddenly he looked up and the floodlights coupled with the rimless glare of his eyes; the orchestra flexed, like a great beast awoken. The strings raised their bows, expectant, tense.

  The Judge took hold of her shawl, drew its mask more closely round her face and tiptoed up the steps beneath the Gothic clock beyond the apse. The font, a brass treasure with a giant candelabrum poised just above it, dripping real wax, lay in a sunken circular pit surrounded by chairs. She had just vanished into a large straw seat with oaken arms and a high back when the low murmur from the strings arose, blocked out the woodwind and settled into a peculiar, haunting monolithic sound, subtle and vast, at once near and distant, as if the notes originated in some far corner of the world, but came back, bearing an echo of silence and darkness, by a special grace. The Judge caught her breath, arranged her shawl and settled her nerves. She found herself corralled by painted Gothic saints, somewhat larger than life, brandishing symbolic animals, doves, parrots and a chubby leopard, their dusty eyes all fixed upon the Virgin. She watched the Composer, and him alone; the rest was nothing but the backcloth. She had not expected to see him, conducting a rehearsal, but now she intended to put the moment to good use.

  Dominique Carpentier had all the subtlety and patience of a good psychoanalyst. She listened like a stoat, ears alert for any change in the bushes and the grass. Now she calculated, space, shadow, distance. Could she remain here, unobserved at the Composer’s back, watching him at work, beneath the savage lights? The music bit into her consciousness, strange, monumental, solid as the painted brick pillars, a dense intricate texture of embroidered sound. She listened carefully, finding herself unable to follow any single section of the orchestra, aware only of the layered change when the brass entered the dance, steady and mannered as a pavane. The Judge disliked music for the simple reason that it muddied her emotions. And she never went to concerts. The occasion was therefore unusual, provocative as well as interesting, for here was her subject, unwitting, unguarded, performing on this Gothic stage before her. The music shuddered and broke off. A shocking silence followed in which an unfortunate trombonist attempted to slink in unnoticed and was called to account. The
exchange took place in English. The Judge heard every bellowed word, magnified by the booming acoustic.

  ‘I’m sorry sir, I just –’

  ‘Take your place. I do not accept excuses as you well know. Speak to me afterwards. SILENCE! Again, from the entrance of the oboes.’

  The choir sat taut, upright, like naughty children whose knuckles smarted from the cane. The Judge concentrated on the Composer’s hunched back and shoulders. She watched his anger dissolving as the music returned. She could learn a lot about someone from studying how he worked. How did he treat his colleagues? What mattered most to him? Suddenly, he stopped them all again.

  ‘No, no, no. Dah, dah, dah, dah. Don’t change the pace. More volume, more breath, but keep the pace steady, steady.’

  Pause.

  ‘Again.’

  He raised his baton. She watched them rise like a wave into the eerie toll of the music and descend, rise, sway, fall, again and again. Outside, the last red light glowed and died in the clear glass windows. Darkness.

  ‘Better, better. Alison, you are a fraction late coming in.’ He bent down to the second violin. ‘I need to hear you just a moment before I do.’ Suddenly he threatened her. ‘If you can’t get it right I’ll hand the part back to Johann.’

  The first violin, who sat waiting, patient, mute, looked up, outraged.

  ‘Now from the beginning again right through to the episode with the brass. Tu n’as pas la partition? Pourquoi? Pourquoi? Réponds-moi!’

  The Judge was sitting behind the rood screen, or the Lettner, so that she was looking at the underbelly of the cathedral, the blank boards, crossbars and supports which held the great wooden crucifix in place, as if she were viewing Golgotha from the wings and observing the technical expertise necessary for the performance. She was also behind the clock. The clock was a surreal, gigantic Gothic folly, carved in wood with a long gallery and intermittent turrets, topped by white saints, a great streaming sun upon its face, the eyes of which actually rotated in time to the ticking seconds. The thing proclaimed: Unsere Zeit in Gottes Händen – Our time in God’s hands, puffed up behind its smug, fat cheeks, and glowered down upon the orchestra. Above the complacent sun stood Death, his skeleton face streaked, as if painted with cat’s whiskers, clutching the raised hammer above his bell to count out the appointed hour. And next to him stood Judgement, her sword in one hand and her own hammer raised in the other, ready to sound the quarter-hours. When the hour arrived, with an echoing groan, clatter and whirr from the creature’s innards, Death turned his double hour glass upside down and banged out the time upon his bell, jerking his head from side to side, again and again and again. Another hour gone, another hour closer to Judgement Day. The mechanism inside the Lettneruhr, as it was called, had survived the RAF air attack in March 1942, but was considered too delicate to be stopped by anyone but an expert in seventeenth-century clocks. The expert had been summoned from Hamburg and was in fact busy with the saw-tooth wheels during the rehearsal. Unfortunately he managed to arrest only one of the inexorable wooden figures on the apex. The quarter-hours were already silenced. He had stopped not Death, but Judgement. Therefore, as six o’ clock arrived in a trembling hiss of machinery, the hour glass turned over and into the eerie surge of unearthly music came that very human toll, calling us all to our final engagement, concerning whose approaching moment we possess neither power nor choice.

  Dong, dong, dong. The hammer collided with the bell and Death’s nodding head wobbled above the severed hands, which now divided the clock.

  The Composer exploded, leaped from the podium with startling rapidity and blazed through the church like a comet, his white hair flying. He stormed straight towards the Judge, who shrank, rigid with surprise and alarm, back into the bishop’s throne. She had heard the bell, but because she sat behind the clock she had no idea what had occurred. The Composer plunged up the steps and pounded upon the antique wooden door, which held the secrets of the clock.

  ‘Um Gottes Willen, was machen Sie denn eigentlich?’ he roared. ‘What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?’

  He was a mere ten feet away from Dominique Carpentier. She saw the liver spots on the back of his clenched hands as he dragged the door open, revealing a gnome-like figure in the entrails of the clock.

  ‘Vorsicht! Mensch! Passen Sie doch auf!’ yelled the expert. ‘Watch it. Be careful! That door’s fragile!’

  A nerve throbbed in the Composer’s throat. The two men screeched at one another. The Judge, certain that the Composer had never even seen her, picked her moment carefully and slipped away. As she pattered past the orchestra she noticed their amused relief that his rage had settled upon another, different victim.

  * * *

  ‘Where have you been? I looked everywhere. Reception said you’d gone out. Why don’t you ever leave messages?’ Gaëlle, surrounded by empty crisp packets and Coke cans, crouched indignantly amongst her scrunched duvet and cushions. ‘I’ve watched two hours of cartoons on TV5 and four lots of news on CNN. Are we ever going to eat? And don’t you want to do some preparation for the interview? Where have you been?’

  The Judge sat down on the edge of the bed and offered her Greffière a boiled sweet. Gaëlle, now aged twenty-eight, could still revert to torrents of childish demand when they were alone together. Now she bristled at the Judge, but accepted the sweet as a peace offering.

  ‘I have been doing a little unexpected preparation for tomorrow. The Composer was rehearsing in the cathedral and I went to watch.’

  ‘Really?’ Gaëlle’s eyes widened. ‘What’s he like? Schweigen says he’s a monster.’

  ‘A perfectionist. Short-tempered. Choleric. Lots of white hair. Physically very powerful for a man of sixty-four.’

  ‘Ughhhh. You didn’t tell me he was so old.’ Gaëlle put out her tongue and revealed a large silver spike, solid enough to endanger the enamel on her teeth.

  ‘Hmmm,’ said the Judge, ‘you’d better not smile tomorrow. And don’t wear that T-shirt with the slogans.’

  * * *

  The Composer’s house in the Effengrube stepped upwards into a Gothic red-brick gable, a little lopsided, but still elegant and luminous, pierced by a steeple pattern of tiny windows. The unshuttered squares on the lower floors were larger, double-glazed and utterly clear, so that the sombre costumes of Gaëlle, now in a long, dark-purple coat, purchased that morning, and the Judge in flat shoes and Lincoln green, with tiny creases in her skirt, were reflected back, mirrored again in segments. They stood looking at themselves carved and divided up into oblongs of white wood. Two dark columns on either side of the double doors were decorated with modern wooden carvings of haunted faces and strange musical instruments, one of which resembled an elongated harp. An odd key lodged in the wood generated an electric chime. There was no name on the door. Large Italian pots, presumably frost-proofed and filled with rising bulbs, pushed outwards, colonising the pavement, and a torrent of winter jasmine, still heavy and golden with blossoms, nudged the doorway. The Judge calculated that the vegetation in Lübeck flowered at least two months after it had done in the Midi. The jasmine in her mother’s garden expended all its force and beauty at the same time as the mimosa. Just to the left of the house a small dark tunnel led into the illuminated Gang, the courtyards and passages with small gardens and tiny squares behind the houses on the street fronts. The Gänge contributed to the city’s charm and were often full of tourists, ogling the tiny squares and pretty houses. The Judge peered down the dark shaft and saw, at the far end, framed by the red-brick archway, a different world of early flowers, sharp light, cobbles and tiny fences, sandpits, tricycles and climbing frames, a small domestic haven, well swept, exclusive, painted, polished. Gaëlle bent down to look; the curved brick vault brushed her spiked hair.

  ‘Why don’t the bicycles get nicked?’ she demanded.

  The Judge stood tense, expectant, her eyes screwed up against the sun that was licking long straight lines through the melting frost. She ra
ised her hand to her tortoiseshell clip and checked that her black hair was firmly locked in place. I want to look neutral, plain; should I have changed my glasses?

  ‘Do you think he’s in there?’ Gaëlle rang the bell again and stepped back; the Judge confronted the locked doors.

  Both carved wings of the entrance suddenly opened and the Composer stood before her, slightly hunched in his own doorway, his rimless glasses catching the glare. They both drew back, startled, unprepared for the masked glimmer of each other’s faces.

  ‘Vous êtes Madame Carpentier? Entrez donc. Entrez.’ He stood aside and waved them into his kingdom. He did not offer to shake hands with either of them.

  They had expected the house, given the pierced Gothic front, to be filled with dark spaces, but once past the coats and boots in the vestibule they entered a great arc of light and green. A conservatory had been built at the back of the house, its roof rising to the second floor. The glass room extended into a walled garden, already flourishing with spring. The forsythia mutating from yellow into green; huge red geraniums standing proud of their earthen pots bolstered up the red-brick walls with even stronger colours. Then the Judge realised that the geraniums were actually inside the glass. They were standing in a greenhouse.

  The high, lighted space oozed a strange mixture of wealth and austerity and promised neither comfort nor welcome. There were rows and rows of books, untidy, uneven, clearly often consulted, on either side of an open fireplace and a cold, unused grate. There were no ornaments and no personal photographs of any kind. A small pale painting of a sandy landscape appeared to be the only framed object on the walls. There were no curtains, no fabrics, no shutters; all around them arose solid surfaces of wood, brick, glass. The great double walls of glass climbed upwards, without fleck or smudge, so that they appeared to be waiting outside in the hard, bright light. The Judge let out her breath, resolved to be quite silent, and then realised, discomfited, that she could hear herself breathing. They could hear no sounds at all, other than their own. The space was sealed away from the outside world. The silence contained something uncompromising, habitual, terrible; as if they had stepped into a pocket of cold air. A giant piano, covered in sheets of music, crouched in a domed alcove, out of the light. All the chairs promised to be uncomfortable, but the Composer indicated that they should install themselves at the long table. He took his place at the head, his back to the illuminated garden. Gaëlle faced him out, frowning across the pale scrubbed wood.