The Dark Monk Read Free Page B

face.
    “What a shame,” she lamented, “that any man must go that way, let alone the pastor. But I always told him not to gorge himself like that!”
    The sexton nodded and kept kneading his hat. “He overdid it with the doughnuts,” he mumbled. “He left only two. And it finally caught up with him here while he was praying.”
    “The doughnuts…” Simon frowned. His fears had been confirmed—at least in part, except that the pastor was not sick, but dead.
    “But why is he lying here and not in his bed?” he asked, more to himself than to the two of them standing there.
    “As I said, he probably wanted to pray before he met his maker,” Gedler mumbled.
    “In this weather?” Simon shook his head skeptically. “Can I have a look around the rectory?”
    The sexton shrugged and turned around to leave for the neighboring building with the maid, who was still sobbing. Magda had left the door open, so the snow had drifted into the main room and crunched under Simon’s feet. On a table by the hearth stood a bowl with two greasy, glistening doughnuts. They looked delicious—brown, about the size of a palm, and coated with a thick layer of honey. Despite the recent encounter with the deceased, which was not exactly appetizing, Simon’s mouth watered. He remembered that he had not yet had breakfast. For a moment he was tempted to try one, then thought better of it. This was a death vigil, not a funeral reception.
    Standing at the pastor’s bedside, the Schongau medicus retraced in his mind the pastor’s last steps.
    “He must have gotten up and gone over into the kitchen to get a drink of water. This is where he collapsed,” he said, pointing to fragments of the mug and the sticky traces of vomit. The small room reeked of gastric acid and curdled milk.
    “But why then, in God’s name, did he go out to the church?” he mumbled. Suddenly, he had a hunch and turned to the sexton.
    “What was the pastor doing last night?”
    “He…he was in the church. Till late at night,” Gedler added.
    The housekeeper nodded. “He even took along a jug of wine and a loaf of bread. He thought he would be there a while. When I went to bed, he was still over there. I woke up again shortly before midnight, and I saw a light burning over there.”
    Simon interrupted: “Just before midnight? What is a pastor doing at that time of night in an ice-cold church?”
    “He…he thought he had to have another look at the renovation of the choir vault,” the sexton said. “It seemed in the last two weeks that the pastor was acting a bit strange. He was always over in the church, even in this cold!”
    “The good man never left things for others to do,” Magda interrupted. “A bear of a man. He knew his way around with a hammer and chisel like no one else.”
    Simon thought about that a while. The previous night had been the coldest in a long time. It was not for nothing that the workmen had stopped their work on the church now, in January. If anyone took up a hammer and chisel on such a night, there had to be a damned good reason to do so.
    Without wasting any more time on the housekeeper or the sexton, Simon hurried back to the church. The pastor was still lying there on the ground, just as he had been when they had left. Only now did Simon notice that the corpse lay directly over a tombstone with a relief of a woman who looked like the Virgin Mary. The words of an inscription circled her head like a halo.
    Sic transit gloria mundi.
     
    “ Thus passes the glory of the world …” Simon mumbled. “So true.” He had often seen this inscription on gravestones. As far back as early Rome, it was the custom for a slave to whisper these words to a victorious general on his triumphal march through the city. Nothing of this world lasts forever…
    It almost seemed as if the pastor, in a final gesture, had been pointing to the inscription with his right hand. Simon sighed. Had Andreas Koppmeyer really fallen victim here to the