Read HS04 - Unholy Awakening for Free Online

surface? Why leave the well-cover lying on the grass where it would be noticed? Why not put it back in its place, and hide the secret in the dark below? Had the killer been frightened off before he could finish the deed, or had he left those signs there purposely?
    Down on the canal path, I heard the crunch of wheels, the sound of approaching hooves, the cry of the driver calling for the horse to halt. Knutzen had been quick. The men had arrived. I heard the voice of Schuettler calling to them to enter the garden.
    I stepped back quickly.
    ‘You must excuse me,’ I said.
    ‘For having held me, or for having let me go?’ she murmured.
    ‘I…I must go down. The body will have to be brought to the surface,’ I explained, adding quietly: ‘It might be better if you stay up here for the moment.’
    She nodded her agreement. She seemed distracted as she raised her hands to her hair and began to twist and turn it into a manageable knot, which she fixed in place with the Medusa brooch. ‘Father will call me if he hears them,’ she said. ‘I…I will have to deal with him.’
    I felt abashed, the way one feels when leaving the presence of a person with whom we have shared something important, not knowing if we will see them again. Mentally, I cursed myself. What had got into me? I would have to speak with Emma Rimmele again. There was not one question – not one! – that I had asked the woman.
    I ran quickly down the stairs and out into the garden.
    Four men had returned with Gudjøn Knutzen. One of them had already pulled a black hood over his head and put on a pair of black gloves. With two slits for the eyes, he looked like a highway robber.
    As I came upon them, he was leaning into the mouth of the well. He might have been gazing into the mouth of Hell.
    ‘What if it stops me coming up again?’ he was saying.

Chapter 4
    Frederick the Great had tried to dignify them many years before with the honorary title of ‘sanitation officers’. Despite the royal decree, the inhabitants of Lotingen persisted in calling them ‘ghouls’.
    As I stepped into the garden, I numbered myself as a Lotingener.
    Each man was wrapped in a long black canvas cape and wore black leather boots. On their heads, they wore a sort of cap, which could be rolled down as a hood to cover their faces. With black-gloved hands on the rim of the well, heads bent forward, staring down into the darkness, they might have been waiting for the corpse of Angela Enke to come floating up of its own accord. They looked like huge black crows which had gathered in the hope of plundering rotting flesh.
    They had frightened off the smaller birds, I noticed.
    The Schuettler brothers had automatically relinquished the well, regrouping on the lawn some distance away, as if they might have liked to take them selves off home, remaining in the sunken garden only because I had told them specifically to wait for me there. Knutzen was standing close to them, but not too close.
    One of the ghouls turned to meet me, throwing back his mask.
    ‘What’s all this about, Herr Procurator?’
    It was Egon Tost, the senior officer. Black hair grew thickly on his chin and his cheeks like a parasite herb. Only his brow was free of it. His narrow eyes seemed to be peeping out of a thicket. There was such an air of sly mistrust about him that he seemed less menacing when his hood was down. Whatever I decided to tell him, I knew that he would only believe the half of it. And the other three would follow his lead.
    ‘That man of yours was acting strange,’ said Tost, glancing in the direction of Knutzen. ‘Telling us to get a move on, saying that you had found a corpse, and that it had to be collected right away.’
    ‘It is no more than the truth,’ I said in Knutzen’s defence.
    ‘That wasn’t all he said,’ Tost replied. ‘We met a man along the canal bank. A friend of his. I over heard them talking. He was saying something about strange wounds. Wounds to the