Borrower of the Night

several hundred years old are not generally of interest to criminologists.’

‘Get on with it,’ said Tony, nudging me.

‘The other night I just happened to find myself in Burckhardt’s room.’

‘I knew it,’ said Tony. ‘I knew it . . . We’ll discuss that later. I suppose you tripped and fell and accidentally, not meaning to do any real searching, discovered a secret panel?’

‘I found a box,’ I said haughtily, ‘which contained a quantity of greyish powder. I didn’t think of arsenic at first. The colour put me off, for one thing. I think of arsenic, when I think of it at all, as white. Either the stuff was contaminated by dust and dirt, or it had been coloured, as commercial arsenic is, to keep people from mistaking it for salt or sugar.’

Blankenhagen interrupted.

‘What you found may not be arsenious oxide, the ‘white arsenic’ of popular fiction. Elementary arsenic is grey, metallic in structure. Upon exposure to air it takes on a darker colour and loses its lustre.’

‘You can look at it later, if you want to. It’s not important; most forms of arsenic are intensely toxic. It was not the colour of the powder that alerted me. It was something else altogether.

‘The hidden drawer where I found the box was littered with the bones of dead rats. They had gnawed their way into the box, and – curiosity killed a rat. Defunct rodents aren’t unusual, but it was extraordinary that so many of them should have chosen the hidden drawer as a place in which to die.

‘Dead rats . . . rat poison . . . arsenic . . . the witchcraft-poison complex. I guess that was the way my thoughts ran, but I wasn’t aware of the progression; it just seemed to hit me all at once. And with that came another thought. What if we had been looking at the tragedy of Count Burckhardt and his wife backwards? What if he was not the villain but the victim of a plot?

‘My first reaction was a violent negative. But the more I thought about this new theory, the more things it explained. My assumption of Konstanze’s innocence wasn’t logical. It was based on a number of emotional prejudices which I needn’t go into in detail.’

Tony snickered. I took the golden amulet from my pocket and handed it to him.

‘You weren’t exactly logical about Konstanze either,’ I reminded him. ‘And your emotional prejudices in her favour aren’t hard to understand. Take a look at this. I found it in the box with the arsenic. Then I remembered something you told me when we were discussing the witchcraft cult one time. I think it was the Burning Court affair, under Louis the Fourteenth, that set you off.’

‘Damn my big mouth all to hell and back,’ said Tony calmly. He handed the image to Blankenhagen, who was practically sprawled across my lap in his anxiety to see. ‘Probably of Moorish workmanship – possibly even older. I’ve seen something like it in an ethnological museum. So, when you saw the little frog god, you remembered the theory that the witchcraft cult was a survival of the old prehistoric nature religion.’

‘Right.’

‘Ingenious,’ said Blankenhagen. ‘But there is nothing in the amulet to suggest the countess rather than the count. You found it in his room. Why should he not be the one who worshipped devils?’

‘Where I found it is irrelevant. The countess had the whole castle at her disposal after her husband died, and it would be smart of her to conceal such damning evidence outside her own room. I thought of her; instead of him, because of the suggestion of Eastern design. She came from Spain. The Moors were there for a long time, and cultural traits linger on. That’s weak, though. You’re overlooking the conclusive point.’

‘Bitte?’

‘It was the count who died,’ said Tony.

‘Ach, so.’ Blankenhagen grinned and rubbed his chin. ‘Yes, the symptoms described could well have been those of arsenic poisoning. In fact’ – he looked startled – ‘we know now that they were. But the motive. Why did she kill him?’

‘Maybe he found out about her unorthodox religious beliefs,’ Tony offered. ‘In that day and age it would have been a legitimate motive for murder – although Burckhardt would have called it execution. There’s no reason to suppose he wasn’t a proper son of Holy Church; our theories about his unwillingness to give up the shrine were based on nothing except the necessity to account for behaviour which was otherwise unaccountable.’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘But I suspect Burckhardt had a more personal reason for being annoyed with his wife.

‘Remember the maid’s hysterical story about the Black Man? It sounded like pure fantasy; the records of witchcraft trials are full of similar lies. But stripped of its supernatural interpretations, what did that story amount to? The maid saw a man, cloaked and booted, in travelling costume, sneak into the castle in the dead of night and embrace the countess.’

‘Booted?’ said Blankenhagen dubiously.

‘The wench heard his spurs clicking on the floor. That was what suggested cloven hooves.’

‘Du Gott allmachtig!’

‘In short, what the maid gave us was a description of a midnight rendezvous. The count, as we know, was still in Wurzburg. So the Black Man must have been – ’

‘Nicolas the steward,’ said Tony, with a groan. ‘Oh, my big swollen empty head!’

‘It had to be Nicolas. The Black Man was wearing travelling costume, hence he was not living in the Schloss. Yet he must have been familiar with the place or he couldn’t have entered it and reached the countess’s room without being challenged. Who but the trusted steward would know the secret passages and hidden stairs? And – this is the most ironic thing, I think – Konstanze couldn’t defend herself from the witchcraft charge by telling the truth. Adultery was a serious crime in those days. And there was the little matter of the arsenic.’

‘My God, yes,’ said Tony soberly. ‘She had to kill Burckhardt; sooner or later he was bound to learn about her and Nicolas. He must have found out the night he killed the steward. Then he went after his cheating wife . . . he was trapped, all right. By the time she came to trial, maybe she didn’t care any longer. Her lover was dead . . .’

‘You’re a hopeless romantic,’ I said scathingly. ‘I can’t see our witch-poisoner-murderess wasting away for any man. The witches took drugs, you know; that was how they got their hallucinations of satanic orgies and visits to the Sabbath. The kindest thing you can hope for Konstanze is that she died believing – that in the fire she felt the embrace of her true lord and lover.

‘I shouldn’t have said that,’ I added, clutching at Tony. ‘I keep hearing things out there in the dark, rustling the bushes. Let’s go in.’

‘But wait,’ said Blankenhagen methodically. ‘We have not finished our deductions. You have solved a mystery which no one so much as suspected for hundreds of years; but you have not yet solved the mystery that brought you here. This story is fascinating, but I fail to see its usefulness.’

I wished he hadn’t raised the point. Because, of course, our chemical experiment had not only solved a crime, it had solved the secondary mystery too. Now I knew what had happened to the shrine. There was only one place where it could be. And Tony, whose mind works the way mine does, saw the truth at once.

‘I’ll be damned,’ he exclaimed, bounding to his feet.

He almost was. Something streaked past his arm, chunked into the tree behind him, and hung there quivering.

I snatched at it – Count Burckhardt’s dagger, which I had last seen lying among the dried ribs of the steward.

Tony was staring incredulously at his left arm. His shirt was slit as neatly as if by scissors, and a thin dark trickle darkened the white cloth.

‘That son of a gun tried to kill me!’

‘What an ungrateful ghost,’ I said. ‘Here we are trying to clear Burckhardt’s name, and he throws knives at us. He’s a practical ghost, though. He must have sharpened this thing recently.’

‘Burckhardt, hell. Stop trying to distract me with spooks, Vicky, I’m already way ahead of you. Blankenhagen was in the crypt alone with the bones and the dagger for a good ten minutes. Hey – ’

Blankenhagen was already gone, presumably in pursuit of the knife thrower. With a few well-chosen words, Tony took off after him.

I followed. I wasn’t anxious to stay in that haunted garden alone. As I ran, I wasn’t sure whom Tony was chasing; he surely didn’t think the doctor could throw a knife like a boomerang. Too many people had had access to