Magdalena stopped short. The tub directly next to her was still filled with water, and dark spots spattered the ground in front of it. She bent down to run her finger along the floor, and in the light cast by the lantern she could see her fingertip was red.
“So this is where my aunt and uncle were murdered.” She wiped the sticky substance on her skirt. “Right in the bathtub, just as my father said. Look, you can still see the drops there.”
Slowly she approached a far window that overlooked the back courtyard and motioned to Simon. By the light of his lantern he could see a bloody handprint on the windowsill.
It was the handprint of a man of about medium build, certainly not of Jakob Kuisl, who had what were probably the biggest hands Simon had ever seen in his life.
The medicus shrugged. “The print could be from one of the guards who removed the corpses.”
“What, out the back window?” snapped Magdalena. “Nonsense! The murderer entered the house back here, killed the two of them, and escaped again the same way. The size of the handprint proves it wasn’t my father!”
“Nobody will believe that in court,” Simon said, resuming his inspection of the room. By now his curiosity had gotten the better of his fear. He pointed to a door hidden at first glance behind one of the niches. “This seems to lead somewhere.”
He pressed the door handle and found himself standing in a room with a brick oven. Stained copper kettles as big as slaughterhouse vats were arranged on the oven, and alongside it wood was piled high enough to burn a witch. A narrow stairway led to the second floor through a ceiling black with soot.
“The heating chamber,” Magdalena said with an appreciative nod. “Aunt Lisbeth didn’t exaggerate when she wrote my father that their bathhouse was one of the largest in the city. With all this hot water, the entire Regensburg city council could probably splash around in the tubs all day long, all of them at once. Look.” She pointed to a circle of stones in the floor that surrounded a hole. A chain passed through the hole, allowing a damp wooden bucket to draw water from a well below. “Their very own well!” The hangman’s daughter sighed. “What I wouldn’t give to have something like that at home in Schongau. We’d never have to haul buckets up from the river again!”
She took a yard-long stick from the woodpile, wrapped it with brushwood, and fashioned a torch to illuminate the dark space below. Meanwhile, Simon ventured up to the second story, where he found two additional rooms. In one, apparently the Hofmanns’ bedroom, stood a large bed and an open chest. Peering inside, Simon realized someone had already rifled through it. An empty folder lay on top of tattered linens along with a crumpled set of Hofmann’s Sunday best. The medicus assumed the folder had once contained the bathhouse owner’s official papers, which the guards had seized as evidence.
Now Simon turned to the other room, and what he saw from the doorway stopped him in his tracks. It looked as if some evil spirit had wreaked havoc there. Over the fragrant reed-covered floor bouquets of dried herbs had been scattered and trampled. Shards of glass littered the floor, too, apparently broken cupping glasses. To his left, one shelf had been overturned and another held only a single bronze mortar; everything else had been hastily knocked to the floor. By the dim light of his lantern Simon saw a hopeless mess of torn parchments, tattered book bindings, leather purses ripped at the seams, and heaps of pills crushed to powder-all strewn across an enormous oak table that spanned the width of the room.
The medicus picked up a pill and sniffed the powder. It smelled strongly of alum and resin. Clearly this was Andreas Hofmann’s treatment room. As bathhouse operator, he also tended to his patrons’ little aches and pains.
Simon frowned. Why in God’s name would the guards have made this mess? Had they been looking for something?
Or had someone else come back here after they’d left?
He picked up a tattered book from the floor and leafed through it, a conventional herbarium depicting various kinds of grain. The pages with illustrations of rye, wheat, and oats were dog-eared and marked with red ink.
“Simon, come quick! I’ve found something!”
Magdalena’s stifled cry roused Simon from his thoughts. He put the book aside and hurried downstairs, where the hangman’s daughter was standing hip-deep in the well, pointing down excitedly.
“See for yourself! There are iron rungs built into the wall leading down! And I hardly believe my uncle was climbing down the well to fetch water. There must be something else down here.” She continued climbing downward until she disappeared into the darkness.
“Upstairs I found-” Simon began, but Magdalena interrupted him with an astonished cry.
“I was right! There’s an entrance here just a few rungs farther down. Hurry and come down!”
Queasy, Simon climbed down after her, arriving in just a few feet at a hole in the wall the size of a wagon wheel. He stumbled through, into a low chamber roughcast in white limestone. Inside, barrels, crates, and moldy sacks stood along the walls. Magdalena was already at work ripping open a number of them by the dim light of the lantern. She wore a disappointed look as she held up a few dried apples for him to see.
“Damn! The cellar is nothing more than a storage room!” she said with disappointment.
Simon thrust his stiletto into one of the barrels and stuck his finger inside. He tasted sweet, heavy red wine.
“Malvasia,” he said, smacking his lips. “And not bad. At home only the fine burgomasters get stuff like this. Perhaps we should take a little keg for ourselves…”
“Idiot!” Magdalena cursed. “We’re here to help my father, not to get drunk!”
“That’s a pity,” Simon replied, shining his lantern around the room. In one corner he saw that rats had helped themselves to a bag of flour, as a faint white trail led along the wall to where other bags of ground meal were stacked-basic gray linen sacks cinched with black cord. Stooping down, the medicus ran his finger through the dust. He stopped short. The powder was light blue in color and had a sickly sweet odor. He suspected the meal had already begun to mold in the dampness down here.
Simon followed the trail of dust until he came to a place along the wall where a sack had been torn open lengthwise. A half-dozen dead rats were lying on a mountain of flour, their bellies distended. Evidently the rodents had gorged themselves to death. As Simon nudged one of the cadavers with his shoe, he noticed footprints in the flour.
The footprints came to an abrupt halt in front of the wall. One of them-
All of a sudden he was startled by a rumbling from the room directly above them. The medicus ran to the hole where they’d entered the room and looked up. The darkness at the mouth of the well looked blacker to him now than before. He heard a splash, as if someone was filling one of the large kettles with water.
“What’s going on up there?” Magdalena whispered, letting the apples fall to the ground.
“We’ll find out soon enough,” Simon replied, scrambling up the rungs of the ladder.
When his head struck something hard above him, his worst suspicions were confirmed. Someone had covered the mouth of the well with one of the large kettles from the boiler chamber and was now filling it with water.
Desperately Simon pushed against the copper base, but the kettle was already so full that it wouldn’t budge, and they could hear the sound of ever more water pouring into the massive container. The sound of water pouring finally stopped, only to be followed by a crackling and wisps of smoke that penetrated the gaps between the kettle and the walls of the well.
“Fire!” Simon cried. “Someone pushed the boiler over the hole and lit the wood! Help! Somebody help us!” He pounded desperately against the bottom of the kettle, though he knew no one could hear them up above.