“Inspector Marot will not be able to get here for a few hours, and I would like to have her examined before rigor mortis sets in,” he said. “Dear Madeleine. Could you draw a sketch for the inspector?”
It was the first time I had been at the scene of a murder. And once again it was a person I had met when she was alive. I could feel my saliva dry up, and the muscles in my abdomen contract in involuntary spasms. But I just nodded with my mouth closed, in order not to release the vomit I was fighting off.
Oddly enough, it helped to draw it. To notice angles and lines, shadow and light, instead of looking at the terrible totality. I was even able to make a closer study of the abbess’s cloven face.
Then a stretcher arrived from the hospital, and with the help of the Commissioner, two sisters carefully lifted the abbess’s body onto it.
“Where may I perform my examination?” asked Papa.
That simple question caused some uncertainty. The sisters clearly believed that their dead abbess belonged in the chapel of the convent church, but that was one of the places to which they could not allow my father access. They settled on a compromise. The examination could take place in the hospital wing, and only when it was over would Mother Filippa come to rest where she belonged.
“What about the wolf?” I said. “Does he need to be examined as well?”
“Later,” said my father with a glance at the sisters. “Humans first, then the animals.”
Predictably enough there were more protests when my father and I wanted to undress the body. In consideration of the nuns’ sense of propriety, both my father and the Commissioner had to leave the room while I and Sister Agnes took off the abbess’s nightdress and underwear and covered the dead body with a sheet.
At that point I was already conscious that something was not right.
There were several things to note about the naked body. In addition to the bloody incision that continued down between the abbess’s small, pointed breasts, most noticeable were the bite marks that covered breast, stomach, and thighs, eleven in all. On one breast, the bite was so deep that there was actual tissue missing.
But that was not all. On the stomach, lower body, and the inside of the thighs were smeared splotches of blood and some uneven brownish tracks that, judging by smell and appearance, were feces. It looked as if someone had attempted to wipe it off, but in the daylight the smears were clear. I had to look a little more closely to discover the long dark animal hairs that stuck to the blood.
Sister Agnes cried quietly during our work, and her usual, “Oh dear. Oh dear,” had been replaced by a despairing little, “Oh no. Oh no. Oh no.”
Together we spread the clean white sheet and let it fall around the abused body. At this point I hardly knew if it was for the sake of the dead woman or for ours. It was a mercy in any case.
This morning I was glad that my father would come in and take over. His even voice noted the facts with a calming objectivity, and all I had to do was write them down:
“Height: one hundred sixty-two centimeters. Build: normal. Hair color: dark chestnut brown. Eyes—”
“They were olive green,” I said.
The sheet was lifted from one body part at a time, which not only removed the general impression of exposure and nakedness but also isolated the relevant area and made it an object of inquiry rather than an arm, a leg, a breast. My father had me place a piece of silk paper over each of the eleven bite marks and carefully draw them on a 1:1 scale. As I had, he noted and described the animal hair, the bloody tracks, “which do not seem to originate from the victim’s own wounds,” and the smears of intestinal contents.
“The bite wounds are generally shallow and possibly made after death. The lesions in the head, throat, and chest . . .”
“Knife?” asked the Commissioner.
“I do not think so. The edges of the wound are too jagged, too torn. A knife would have made a cleaner incision. I think we should be looking for a saw.”
“But she would not have just stood there while the killer started sawing through her head,” objected the Commissioner.
“No. That is why I also looked carefully for other lesions, a blow that might have knocked her unconscious, for example. But I could find nothing like that. Perhaps some kind of anesthesia?”
“And the bite marks. Did the wolf bite her?”
“Probably not. They are almost certainly from a human being.”
“As with Cecile Montaine.”
“Yes. But Cecile was not murdered.”
“So you think these are the murderer’s teeth?”
“That was one of the reasons why I got Maddie to trace the marks. As I said, the victim was most likely bitten postmortem, so it is at the very least strong circumstantial evidence.”
“Anything else?”
“The abbess was naked when the damage was done. She was dressed later.”
“Do you mean that the murderer dressed her?”
“It is possible. But . . . it could also have been someone else.”
Sister Marie-Claire sat with her hands folded, but there was no serenity in the gesture, one hand was gripping the other so tightly that the knuckles whitened, and occasionally they performed a spasmodic leap in her lap, like a wounded rabbit. Her voice was oddly monotonous; it was as if her attempts to control her emotions squeezed all other expression out of it as well.
“Mother Filippa woke me up shortly after midnight to say that she was going to check on the new wolves. She thought they were restless.”
“But you did not go with her?”
“No. I . . . went back to bed. It was not until she did not show up for matins . . .” The hands jumped, and Sister Marie-Claire did not finish her sentence.
“How much time passed from your last words with her until you found her dead?” asked Inspector Marot.
“Perhaps two hours,” she said. “I had, as I said, gone back to bed, but I didn’t completely fall asleep.”
“Did you notice anything during that time?”
“No, I cannot say that I did.”
“It is important, Sister.”
“I am well aware of that. But I drifted off, I wasn’t really awake.” Then she suddenly raised her head, but not to look at us. Her eyes were unfocused and became distant. “It cannot be true,” she said.
“What?”
“I thought I heard a dog bark.”
“That is hardly unusual, is it?”
“Yes. At least so close by. Because of the wolves, we have no dogs at the convent.”
“Why is that?”
“Wolves can be quite aggressive toward those they consider invaders of their territory. As recently as last fall, we found a puppy that had somehow got into the pen. The wolves had practically torn it in half.”
“But you think you heard a dog bark,” said Marot and made a note. “Would you be kind enough to describe how you found the dead woman?”
The hands jumped again. “I went down to the stables. I could see that the sack was gone . . .”
Inspector Marot immediately took note. “What sack?”
Sister Marie-Claire stared at him with her mouth half open, stopped midsentence.
“Oh . . .” She sighed.
Inspector Marot waited. My father, the Commissioner, and I did as well. She bent her head under our probing eyes.
“She thought . . . that is, Mother Filippa thought it might have been Emile who had come back. She asked me to get some food for him.”
“Why did you not say so right away?” asked Marot.
She looked up.
“People misunderstand Emile,” she said. “It has perhaps become a habit to protect him. It was for Mother Filippa as well.”
“So this sack of food, where was it?”
“I had placed it right outside the stable, as she asked me to. Now it was gone.”
“So one may assume that the murderer took it with him.” Marot stroked his walrus mustache and made a note.
Sister Ma
rie-Claire protested. “I cannot say that. I did not see it.”
She was still protecting Emile, I thought. Perhaps she thinks he was the one who took the sack. But would she still try to shield him if she thought he was the murderer?
“So I assume you went into the stable?”
“Yes. The male wolf’s cage was open, and there was blood on the floor. That was when I knew something was wrong.”
“But you did not go for help?”
“No.”
“And then?”
“Then . . . I followed the trail of blood into the wolf pen and . . . found her.”
“Would you please describe what you saw?”
“The other gentlemen saw it themselves,” she said, and bent her head lightly in the direction of my father and the Commissioner. “I do not have much to add. It . . . It was a shocking sight.”
Papa leaned forward. “Sister,” he said, “were you the one who dressed her?”
She tilted her head back as if trying to make the tears subside into her eyes. She did not succeed.
“How did you know?” she asked.
“It was clear that someone had done so,” said my father, without going into detail. “It was either you or the murderer.”
She took a deep, shaky breath.
“She was an incredible person,” she said, her voice roughened by the tears. “So much humanity, and so firm a faith. I do not know if she ever doubted her calling, but it did not seem that way. To see her . . . violated in that way . . . I could not . . . I didn’t want anyone else to . . .”
She could not continue. Weeping overcame her, and it was only slowly and with great patience that we succeeded in getting her to tell the rest.
That Mother Filippa had lain naked on her back, her arms and legs spread wide. And the dead male wolf had been placed on top of her, between her thighs, in a grotesque parody of the human act of love.
“I couldn’t . . . You must understand, I could not let . . .”
“Yes,” my father said quietly. “I understand.”
“I am sorry, M’sieur L’Inspecteur, but God’s laws are greater than man’s.”
That was the message Police Inspector Marot received when he wished to gain entrance to Mother Filippa’s cell. So while Marot searched the priory office in the open part of the convent, and my father and the Commissioner looked more closely at the dead wolf, I was given the job of cataloging possessions of the abbess in situ before I packed them in boxes so they might be brought to the inspector, rather than the other way around. I was closely monitored by Sister Agnes, as if the nuns feared that I might somehow harm their abbess further through my prying.
There was not a lot to catalog.
The cell was about three meters long by two and a half meters wide. A window faced a sunny walled courtyard and a colonnade that allowed the nuns to reach the stables without getting their shoes wet even in the rain. In the yard grew a large linden tree with light green buds on the brink of bursting into leaf.
The cell’s walls were whitewashed and without decoration. The narrow bed was made up with white sheets and a gray blanket, just like the beds in the hospital wing. It was still as she had left it, with the blanket thrown to one side and the pillow crumpled between the bed and the wall. I felt a small stab of pain. There was so much living personality in the impatient gesture that had tugged the sheet and the blanket free of the mattress, the hands that had crammed the pillow together, the body whose weight had rested on that mattress, leaving a faint but permanent indentation in the center. The crucifix that hung above the bed was a simple black cross with a white figure of Christ, the suffering suggested more by the lines of the body than by the expression on the face. It did not look as if a professional artist had carved it.
I drew a sketch of the bed for the inspector. Then Sister Agnes and I folded the blankets and sheets together and placed them in the first box. Sister Agnes would have routinely shaken and smoothed out the sheets first, but I stopped her, though without telling her that the inspector would want to examine the sheets for any stains or hair that did not come from the abbess herself.
“When was the last time these were changed?” I asked.
“A few days ago,” said Sister Agnes uncomprehendingly. “Are they dirty?”
“No,” I said, “of course not. Do you know precisely when?”
“I think it was Thursday morning. That is when it is normally done.”
She was beginning to look uneasy. She had a slightly shapeless nose, thick eyelids, and almost no eyelashes, which together with the veil and the habit made her look like something Bruegel might have painted.
“Why do you ask?” she wanted to know.
“For technical reasons,” I said. I lifted the mattress, but, as with Cecile’s bed, there was a disappointing lack of a hidden diary or private letters.
In addition to the bed, the cell was furnished with a washstand, a white-painted chest of drawers, a small writing desk in darkened, unvarnished oak, and a simple wooden stool with the seat woven from rushes, such as might be found in any farm cottage. Above the chest of drawers hung a bookcase with two shelves, and on the inside of the door was a row of hooks. The only luxury in the room was the worn but colorful rag rug beside the bed, which meant that the abbess’s first daily contact with the world did not have to be the cold granite flagstones. When we rolled it up, I noticed several five- to six-centimeter-long grayish-white hairs stuck to the rug’s fibers.
“Did she keep the wolf here at night?” I asked.
“Usually,” said Sister Agnes, and she was overwhelmed by a fresh batch of tears. “Oh no. Oh no.”
I drew the bookcase and noted how the books were arranged before I began to take them down, page through them rapidly, and put them in the box. Some of them were of course religious—The Confessions of Saint Augustine, several lives of the saints, an unusually worn prayer book with the inscription “To Louise-Clemente on the occasion of her confirmation on April 7, 1871.” But there were works on botany as well, a book about cultivating roses, one about insects and butterflies, a bulky work about Kaspar Hauser, and a more curious one, Peter Stumpp, the Werewolf of Bedburg. It stopped me for a moment because the title page featured a bizarre medieval woodcut. In the foreground a man crept around on all fours with an infant in his mouth, which he apparently was planning to devour, while the landscape behind him was marked by torn-off body parts and disemboweled bodies. An overall scene of human horror and panic.
I paged through the book a little before I put it into the box, but all I got out of it were sentence fragments such as “. . . in an unnatural relationship with his own daughter” and “. . . so possessed by the devil that he, when he wanted, could take the shape of a wild animal . . . ,” which did not make me much wiser as to why someone like Mother Filippa had possessed such a work.
It was less unexpected to encounter works by Voltaire and Rousseau; Émile, ou de l’éducation looked as if it had been especially diligently read. But it was another book, a ragged, stained edition of Shockheaded Peter, which made my heart jump. Not because of the contents or the drawings, even though I had been terrified by them as a child, but because of the carefully printed name on the inside of the jacket. The letters leaned haphazardly in opposite directions and were obviously written by a childish hand. The name was Louise-Clemente Oblonski.
“What was Mother Filippa’s name before she became a nun?” I asked Sister Agnes.
“I don’t know,” she said. “That is precisely why we change names—to leave the secular world behind.”
“Is there anyone here who knows?”
“There probably is.” It was clear that she found my probing unpleasant and inappropriate. “If you must know, it is probably best to speak with Sister Bernadette. She has been here the longest, and she was the convent’s archivist until her sight started to fail.”
I wanted to rush out to find Sister Bernadette right away, but I controlled myself. Inspector Marot had given me
an assignment that required orderliness and care, and he expected me to conclude it as quickly as possible.
Unsurprisingly, the dresser contained mostly clothing, but also, hidden in the bottom drawer under an apron, was a box of dried dates. I could not help smiling. It was so innocent a vice, and I was glad she had had it.
The washstand also had a drawer and a little cabinet. It was here Mother Filippa kept the few toiletries she had found necessary to own. A comb, a small bar of soap, a bottle of mouthwash, a nail file, a pair of clean, freshly folded towels and washcloths, as well as some crocheted hygiene pads that somehow took me by surprise. But of course nuns would also menstruate; the body did not stop ovulating just because the woman in question had decided to refrain from reproducing.
If in fact Mother Filippa had not reproduced . . . because I could not help but wonder whether she was Louise-Clemente Oblonski, and whether poor, parentless Emile Oblonski perhaps was not so parentless after all. That would at least explain her desire to protect and defend him.
I was just about to close the washstand drawer when the bottom of it caught my eye. It was covered by a sheet of faded and worn shelf paper in flowered pastels, carefully fastened with two upholstery tacks in each corner. But the pattern was not worn consistently. When you looked closely, there was something like the outline of a rectangle, almost corresponding to the drawer’s dimensions, but slightly smaller.
I used the nail file to work the tacks loose. Hidden under the paper was a yellowed newspaper—the front page of Varonne Soir dated seven years earlier, April 24, 1887. The main story, which filled the entire front page, was the Schnaebelé Affair, and the newspaper’s editor banged the war drums in a peculiarly halfhearted way. On the one hand he demanded that Bismarck be “held accountable for his treasonous and brutal behavior toward a French citizen,” if necessary by the French army “saber in hand”—an army that was naturally ready to give the Prussians a good trashing. On the other hand, the editor pointed out, it was necessary to behave with dignity and consideration and leave no diplomatic effort untried. One sensed through the veil of rhetoric that he knew that the costs of a war would fall heavily on border districts like Varonne.