The Hangman's Daughter

Simon froze. The deed of donation! However it was only the first page, the rest had been torn off very neatly. He quickly looked through the documents on the table and checked the floor. Nothing. Someone had taken the document from the closet, read it, and taken away the part that was important to him—probably a sketch of the property. He did not seem to have had much time however, in any case not enough to return the document to the drawer. The thief had quickly shoved the piece of paper under the stack of the other documents on the table…and had returned to the council meeting.

Simon shuddered. If someone stole this document, it could only be someone who knew about the key behind the tile. That meant Johann Lechner himself…or one of the four burgomasters.

Simon swallowed hard. He noticed that his hand, still holding the document, was trembling slightly. What had the patrician Jakob Schreevogl told him earlier about the meeting?

Burgomaster Semer denies that the soldiers had met someone upstairs in his rooms.

Could the first burgomaster himself be involved in this thing with the children? Simon’s heart beat faster. He remembered how Semer had questioned him a few days ago in his own inn and had finally advised him not to continue investigating the case. And wasn’t it also Semer who had always spoken against the construction of the leper house, purely in the interest of the town, as he said? Because after all, lepers before the gates of a trading town really didn’t look good? But what if Semer wanted to delay the construction work only because he suspected that a treasure was hidden on that piece of land? A treasure he had heard about from his close friend, Ferdinand Schreevogl, a member of the inner circle of aldermen, just shortly before his death?

Simon’s thoughts were racing. The devil, the dead children, the witches’ marks, the abduction of Magdalena, the missing hangman, a burgomaster as the puppet master of a monstrous murder conspiracy…All these were racing through his mind. He tried to bring some order to the chaos raging in his mind. What was most important now was to free Magdalena, and to do that he had to find the children’s hiding place. But someone had entered this room before him and had stolen the plan of that parcel! All he was left with was a first page on which the main facts of the donation had been inscribed. Desperately Simon looked down at the piece of paper with its Latin words. Quickly he translated them:

Parcel belonging to Ferdinand Schreevogl, bequeathed to the Schongau Church on September 4, 1658, parcel size: 200 by 300 paces; moreover, five acres of woods and a well (dried up).

Dried up?

Simon stared at the small words at the very bottom of the document: dried up.

The physician slapped his forehead. Then he put the piece of parchment under his shirt and ran out of the stuffy room. Hastily he locked the small door and returned the key to the niche behind the tile. A few seconds later he reached the entrance of the Ballenhaus downstairs. The two bailiffs had disappeared. Most likely they had gone back to the inn to fetch more medicine. Without paying any heed to whether anyone noticed him, Simon left the Ballenhaus and ran across the market square.

But from a window on the other side of the square, someone was indeed observing him. When the man had seen enough he pulled the curtain shut and returned to his desk. Next to a glass of wine and a piece of steaming meat pie was a torn-off piece of parchment. The man’s hands trembled as he drank, and wine dripped onto the document. The red drops spread slowly across the document, leaving spots that looked like blood seeping out across it.

The hangman lay on a bed of moss, smoked his pipe, and blinked into the last rays of the afternoon sun. From a distance he could hear the voices of the guards at the building site. The workmen had already gone home at noon because of the May Day celebrations the next day. Now the two bailiffs assigned to guard duty were loafing around, sitting on the chapel wall, and throwing dice. Occasionally Jakob Kuisl could hear the sound of their laughter. The guards had pulled worse duty in their days.

Now a new sound was added to the others, a rustling of twigs coming from the left. Kuisl extinguished his pipe, jumped to his feet, and disappeared in a matter of seconds in the underbrush. When Simon tiptoed past him he reached for his ankle and pulled him down with a quick tug. Simon hit the ground with a soft cry and felt for his knife. The hangman’s face appeared, grinning, between the branches.

“Boo!”

Simon dropped the knife.