HS01 - Critique of Criminal Reason Read Online Free Page A

Koch’s head had fallen forward on his chest, his face half-hidden in the folds of his cloak, and he let out a rattling snore. For a moment, I toyed with the idea of waking him up. Instead, I turned to the second fascicle.
    First, I glanced at the date written at the foot of the fourth page. This report had also been compiled recently, on 23 January 1804, to be exact, a week before, and almost four months after the murder, which did not say much for the efficiency of the local authorities. Had the second killing prompted them to review the first? It seemed a most irregular way of going about things. The name of the second victim was Paula-Anne Brunner. And there went my first hypothesis! I had formed the notion that there must be something banal at the heart of the matter, something so simple that it had been overlooked. After all, there was nothing startling about gambling debts and violent litigation in a low tavern between men who diced and drank more than was good for them. But Prussian women, as a rule, don’t drink in public or play at dice. Especially in Königsberg, which is renowned for its moral Pietism.
    ‘ On 22 September 1803 ,’ I read, ‘ the corpse of Paula-Anne Brunner (née Schobart) was found in the public gardens in Neumannstrasse .’
    An Austrian cavalry officer, Herr Colonel Viktor Rodiansky, a registered mercenary in the Prussian army, was strolling there while awaiting a lady whom he refuses to name. He arrived in the public gardens at four o’clock when he knew that a large part of the citizenry would be attending the funeral ceremony of the late-departed and much-lamented Superintendent Brunswig in the Cathedral. Colonel Rodiansky reports that the evening was neither excessively cold nor wet, but there was a sea mist which reduced visibility to a maximum of six or seven yards. The inclement weather exactly suited his purposes, he said. Strolling up and down, smoking a cigar as the appointed hour approached, Colonel Rodiansky spotted a woman kneeling beside a wooden bench, and was not a little put out by her unwelcome presence in that place. At that moment, the lady for whom he had been waiting arrived, and Colonel Rodiansky’s attention was distracted from the kneeling woman. He thought little of the fact that she was kneeling in a public park, attributing her position to the fact that she was praying for the soul of Superintendent Brunswig, like many another of her townswomen, though, for some reason, prevented from adding her voice to the others in the Cathedral .
    Colonel Rodiansky’s lady friend was more perturbed at finding a third party present at the meeting, and looked often in the direction of the kneeling woman, hoping that she would finish her prayer and remove her person from the park. At last, wondering if the woman had been taken ill or had had a mishap, the pair drew close. They realised that the praying woman was actually a kneeling corpse, and the police were called by Colonel Rodiansky, who had first taken measures to protect the anonymity of his mistress by sending her home .
    The report was signed by the same two officers who had written up the report of the first murder, Lublinsky and Kopka.
    I sat back against the leather seat. The second account was rich in detail, almost literary, but as with the first, there were missing elements far too obvious to escape my attention. No mention was made of how the victim had been killed. Nor of the weapon that had been used.
    I turned again to Koch. He was still asleep, his head jolting uncomfortably up and down with the unpredictable lurching of the carriage on the muddy, potholed road. His hat had fallen onto his knees and his wig had now slipped down over his right ear. I closed my own eyes and let myself be rocked by the motion of the vehicle, trying to get the picture clear in my mind. How had these people died? What purpose had been served by killing them? And why had two officers with considerable investigative experience (as