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squiggle around the inscription. The line was shaky, as if Koppmeyer had drawn it in the ice with the last ounce of his strength.
    “It was clear to him that his end was near,” the medicus mused. “Old Koppmeyer always had a sense of humor; you’ve got to hand it to him.”
    The hangman bent down and passed his hand over the stone relief of Mary, whose head was surrounded by a radiant halo.
    “One thing surprises me,” he mumbled. “This is a gravestone, isn’t it?”
    Simon nodded. “The whole Saint Lawrence Church is full of them. Why do you ask?”
    “Look around for yourself, you idiot.” The hangman gestured broadly at the interior of the church. “On the other stones you always see images of the deceased—councilmen, judges, rich broads. But this one is no doubt the Virgin Mary. No woman would be so bold as to let herself be depicted with a halo.”
    “Perhaps it was a donation to the church?” Simon thought out loud.
    “ Sic transit —” the hangman mumbled again.
    “ Thus passes the glory of the world, ” Simon interrupted him impatiently. “I know, but what does that have to do with the murder?”
    “It’s possible that it has nothing to do with the murder, but with the hiding place,” Kuisl said suddenly.
    “Hiding place?”
    “Didn’t you tell me the priest spent all last night working in the church?”
    “Yes, but…”
    “Look a little closer at the squiggle,” the hangman mumbled. “Do you notice anything striking?”
    Simon bent down and examined the circle a little more closely. Then it hit him.
    “The circle isn’t complete; it doesn’t go around the entire inscription,” he gasped, “but only around the first two words…”
    “ Sic transit, ” Jakob repeated, grinning. “The learned doctor surely knows what that means.”
    “ This is the way …” Simon murmured absentmindedly. Only then did he get it. “Through…the slab of stone?” he whispered incredulously.
    “First we have to move it aside, of course.” The hangman was already struggling to move Andreas Koppmeyer’s huge frame aside. He grabbed him by the cassock and dragged him behind the altar, several yards away. “This will be his resting place for the time being,” he said. “No point scaring any old woman to death who comes in to say her rosary.” He spat into his hands. “Now let’s get to work.”
    “But the slab…It weighs at least a couple of hundred pounds,” Simon interjected.
    “So what?” Jakob Kuisl had already wrestled the stone from its setting using a carpenter’s nail as a lever. Now he grabbed it with both hands and raised it slowly, inch by inch. Tendons as thick as a man’s fingers protruded from his neck.
    “If a fat priest can lift it, it shouldn’t be so heavy, should it?” he panted.
    With a grinding sound, the massive stone slab crashed down right next to Simon’s feet.
    Magdalena Kuisl knelt in the bloody straw and pressed down on the swollen, bruised abdomen of Frau Hainmiller. The peasant woman screamed in her ear, making her wince. The expectant mother had been screaming for hours now, but it seemed like days to Magdalena. The night before, the hangman’s daughter had come to the Hainmiller household along with the midwife, Martha Stechlin. At first everything seemed to point to a normal birth. The aunts, nieces, cousins, and neighbor women had already spread fresh straw and rushes, put water on the fire, and spread out linens. The air was redolent of smoked mugwort. Josefa Hainmiller, whose head was as red as beetroot, pushed calmly and regularly. It was the farm woman’s sixth child, and up to then, she had always managed without difficulty.
    But now Josefa was losing more and more blood. The bedsheets, pink-hued at first from the broken water, had now taken on the color of a butcher block. But the child simply wouldn’t come. Josefa Hainmiller’s initial whimpers gave way first to sobbing and then to loud screams so that her husband, horrified, kept