The Murderer in Ruins Read online

  ‘Great,’ said Stave, before he realised what a stupid thing it was to say. He sighed and rubbed his forehead. He could do with an aspirin, he thought, but you had to go to the black market to get those.

  MacDonald finished up for the day. Stave held back his vice squad colleague under the pretext that he wanted further details about what he had found at the Clearance and Rebuilding office.

  ‘What else is there to say?’ Maschke asked, when the Brit had left the room.

  ‘Just routine,’ Stave replied – the phrase that put the wind up every criminal – and not a few police too.

  ‘Is something wrong?’

  Stave could have kicked himself. He forced a smile and then quickly carried on. ‘I’ll get straight to the point, Mashcke. This sort of investigation isn’t exactly your speciality. And you haven’t been at the job all that long.’

  Maschke nodded, only partly mollified.

  Stave pretended to examine Maschke’s notes, but obviously there was nothing of any interest. ‘You graduated from the police academy in 1946?’ he asked, trying to sound as if he was just making small talk. ‘When you were training did you do a stint with each of the city departments? In my day that was compulsory, although obviously we didn’t have the Street Clearance and Rebuilding department back then.’

  Maschke tried to nod and shake his head at the same time, then gave up and said, ‘Yes, I graduated in ’46, but no, I have never seen inside most of the city departments. But I’m not sure it’s any great loss.’

  ‘What did you do before police training college?’ Stave asked, handing him his notebook back. It was a harmless enough question, he thought. But Maschke flinched, as if Stave had made him some immoral proposition. He blushed and there was a nervous tick in his right eye.

  Stave caught his breath. He’d been too direct.

  But a second later Maschke smiled, as if embarrassed, waved his hand in the air and mumbled, ‘What did I do? I was in the armed forces, the navy, on the U-boats. In France. Sent straight to France in 1940, to the U-boat bases on the Atlantic. Out of France in 1944. But in between, trips out of Brest on the U-boat and a month’s leave every now and then. Un temps pas mal, même pour un boche comme moi. At least I managed to polish my school French. I got to know my red wines too, not that that’s much good at the moment.’ He laughed.

  Stave squeezed out a smile. ‘Good work,’ he said, nodding at the notebook. ‘See you soon.’

  He had heard his share of U-boat stories: damp in the close confines of a steel hull, endless patrols in the icy Atlantic. Depth charges that shook the subs from tail to stern. Floating coffins. Most U-boat sailors never came home. All of a sudden he looked at Maschke through different eyes: his constant, nervous smoking. The typical beard of a U-boat man with no means of shaving for weeks on end. His brutal impatience during the interrogation the night before. His superficial cynicism. Living at home with his mother – a sense of security.

  After Maschke left, the chief inspector nonetheless made a call to an old friend in the personnel department, who owed him a favour. At least now he had concrete details about Maschke to go on.

  Five minutes later he slammed down the receiver: it was quite clear that not only had Maschke never been in the Gestapo, he had never worked for any branch of the Hamburg police prior to 1945. He had applied to CID after the war and been signed up for police training college as he said. And, yes, in the papers submitted with his application there was a CV and documents to confirm his service on the U-boats in France. No Gestapo history, no time spent with the ‘special units’ in the east, no hidden years as a concentration camp guard. Maschke was clean.

  On Friday Dr Ehrlich called him in. ‘The raid saw us catch a good few fish in the net,’ the public prosecutor began, politely, sitting back in his chair and putting his hands together over his stomach.

  ‘Unfortunately not the ones we were fishing for,’ the chief inspector replied. Stave wasn’t interested in metaphors; it was time to tackle the main topic.

  ‘I have to say I have no ideas,’ Ehrlich admitted. ‘If I were in your position, Stave, I would have done the same. And I wouldn’t have a clue what to do now.’

  Just what I wanted to hear, the chief inspector thought. ‘We’re following up a couple of leads,’ he said.

  ‘Glad to hear it. I thought you might be waiting for the next murder to see if anything might turn up.’

  ‘We don’t even know for sure if both murders were committed by the same killer.’

  ‘But you’re working on that assumption?’

  Stave said nothing.

  Ehrlich waved a hand wearily towards the window. He had long-fingered hands, Stave noticed, pianists’ hands.

  ‘I suspect that the perpetrator you are looking for is 30 or younger,’ the prosecutor said.

  ‘In that case you know more than I do.’

  Ehrlich took his horn-rimmed glasses off, and began cleaning them. He probably can’t recognise me without them, Stave thought.

  ‘A 30-year-old,’ the prosecutor began, ‘would have been born in the turnip winter of 1916/17, the year of serious famine in the last war. That was followed by revolution and then counter-revolution. The failed right-wing putsch in Berlin; hyperinflation with your thousand Reichsmark notes being carried around in laundry baskets; the unemployment of the 1929 Depression; the street fighting between the Storm Troops and the Red Front from 1930 onwards; the Nazi terror; the war; bomber raids; concentration camps; occupation, and now this winter. What you and I still think of as normality hasn’t existed for the last 30 years. Normality has become violence, suffering, death. That is why I think someone who can strangle a young woman and an old man with apparently methodical indifference has to be someone who has never known anything but violence in his life. That makes him 30 years old, or younger.’

  ‘I can’t exactly subpoena every young person in Hamburg,’ Stave mumbled. ‘And not every 30-year-old is a killer.’

  ‘If you include soldiers, Gestapo men, party functionaries, concentration camp guards and senior officials in the old regime in that group, then I’m afraid I must contradict you. Seen like that most young people are guilty.’

  ‘And a lot of older people too. That is hardly a help.’

  ‘Are you aware of my oath of office?’ Ehrlich asked him.

  Stave shook his head, confused.

  ‘I swear, by God the Almighty, to apply and carry out the law of Germany with justice and mercy towards everyone irrespective of religion, race, urging or political conviction, to the advantage of none and disadvantage of none; that I shall follow the laws of Germany and the legislation of the military government according to the word and intent, and that I shall at all times do my best to respect the equality of all before the law. So help me, God.

  ‘The equality of all before the law, Stave. Have you any idea how many officials the British-controlled Committee for Denazification scrutinised in Hamburg alone? More than 66,000. And how many were dismissed because of their Nazi past? 8,800. Do you know where Jews who survived the concentration camps have to sign up when, in their weakened state, they are entitled to apply for larger rations?’

  ‘At the police station.’

  ‘Exactly. At the police station, sometimes in the same building, even in the exact same offices where the Gestapo used to sit. And who do you think is sometimes still sitting in those offices?’

  The prosecutor paused for a moment, then said: ‘The police separates concentration camp survivors into three groups. Group 1A: party political offenders. In other words, Social Democrats and Communists. Interesting, isn’t it, that the police still use the term “offenders”? Then there is Group 1B: other political offenders. And finally 1C: criminals and anti-social elements. Which group, would you suggest, do the Jews come under?

  ‘Anyone who can survive all this humiliation gets a special ration from the Red Cross: a loaf of bread, a tin of meat, five Reichsmarks for a meal in a public canteen, and eight weeks of e
xtra coupons on their ration cards. That’s it. Because the doctors of Hamburg’s Medical Council have decreed, and I quote, that “the general state of health and nourishment of a concentration camp inmate is satisfactory”.’

  Ehrlich’s face had gone red, his hand was no longer waving out the window but clasped around his teacup, his knuckles so white that Stave was afraid the porcelain might shatter at any moment.

  ‘Even so,’ the prosecutor continued, ‘I shall do everything to ensure the “equality of all before the law”. And do you know why? Because I do not want revenge, I want justice. Because only justice will let us build a better state. Because only justice will banish fear. Because only justice will allow us to raise a generation for whom “normality” will actually be normal again.’

  ‘Two strangled bodies isn’t exactly normal,’ Stave muttered.

  ‘Two strangled bodies is not normal; it is tragic, but it is hardly threatening. However, what if two becomes three? Or four? People will start to become afraid. And frightened people look towards a strong man, someone who will clean things up without worrying about collateral damage. And that, Stave, is absolutely the last thing we need. That would sabotage everything I work for here on a daily basis.’

  ‘It’s what I work for too,’ Stave said wearily.

  Ehrlich smiled for the first time. ‘I know that. That’s why I’m speaking openly with you. I don’t want to put pressure on you.’

  ‘But that’s what you’re doing.’

  ‘That’s what I’m doing. The circumstances are doing it. We absolutely have to stop these killings. If only it were summer, if the homeless were just starving but not freezing and squatting out there in the darkness at the same time, then murders like this would horrify us but that might be all. But right now, in this miserable, long, destructive winter, the city is on the brink of total collapse. Nothing works properly any more, absolutely nothing. You experience it every day. The camel’s back is already overloaded, if I can put it that way.’

  ‘And these murders might be the last straw.’

  ‘That’s what I mean. So as far as I am concerned you have permission to interrogate every single citizen of Hamburg, up to and including the mayor if you have to! Turn over every single stone in the mountains of rubble until you find a lead. Tell me your most absurd suspicions, the most implausible ideas. I have your back, inspector. But find me the killer!’

  Stave thought over what the prosecutor had said on his short walk back to HQ. He had the backing of Ehrlich, a public prosecutor with the best of contacts amongst the British. A public prosecutor set on hunting down former secret concentration camp guards and who in most cases demanded the death penalty, which the judges usually passed. You could have worse allies, he thought.

  So anxious was he to get back to work that the chief inspector ran down the hallway, barely noticing his limp. He threw open the door to the anteroom without knocking.

  ‘Frau Berg, please call Inspector Maschke and Lieutenant MacDonald and tell them to come to my office,’ he said, hoping his voice sounded normal.

  A few minutes later the two were in his room. Stave gave them a rough summary of his meeting with Dr Ehrlich. ‘We can do whatever we want and we have his full support,’ he said in conclusion.

  ‘Full support for what precisely?’ Maschke asked.

  Stave had been thinking about that for the past two days, ever since the raid on the Hansaplatz. Both the lines of enquiry he now wanted to follow were frankly a pain. One of them was politically delicate to say the least. The second would involve them treading on toes, toes that belonged to important people whose private lives they would need to look into.

  ‘We’re going to take on the Displaced Persons files, every single one of them.’ He turned to MacDonald and added, ‘Obviously that means we are going to need the agreement of the British authorities.’ That was the politically delicate part. ‘And we are going to investigate every single missing person in Hamburg,’ this to Maschke. ‘That means not just going through the lists of names and ages. We are going to burrow around in each and every case.’ That would mean digging into private lives. Either our two victims are DPs, in which case we will find a link to them in the camps. Or they are natives of Hamburg, in which case somebody somewhere must have realised they’re missing – maybe just one person, and maybe that person has a reason for not coming forward. One way or another we are going to find out who they are.’

  MacDonald looked confused. Maschke’s face had gone the same colour of grey that army recruits used to go when they got their orders for the eastern front a few years back.

  The Girl with No Name

  Saturday, 2 February 1947

  His left leg hurt. Since early morning Stave had been plodding up and down the station platforms like a nervous sheepdog. It was now coming up to midday. Every half-hour a train would arrive, pulled by battered steam locomotives belching black sooty clouds, with a whistle and screech of iron wheels on iron rails.

  Most of them were either carrying potatoes in from the countryside, open-topped freight trains or standing-room-only trains, former third-class carriages with the seats ripped out in order to squeeze more people in. Men in suits or overalls piled out, young women so weak they could hardly walk, in headscarves, or just old curtains wrapped around their heads and necks to protect them against the lethal wind that blew through the carriages. You could only see their eyes. Some were carrying cardboard boxes in their hands or net shopping bags, ripped rucksacks or bags cobbled together out of strips of torn canvas, people who’d been out foraging in Lüneburg or Holstein, buying potatoes. The farmers out there were getting rich. People would offer their last valuables, the family silver, gold coins, stamp collections, old paintings, smuggled Wehrmacht weaponry. They would even beg.

  Most came back with just a few pounds of potatoes, some with nothing at all. Several of them were bleeding from ragged wounds to their arms, thighs or buttocks, visible beneath their ripped clothing: some of the farmers got so fed up with the begging, they set dogs on them.

  ‘Hamsters’ was the popular name for them, but to the police it was officially ‘direct producer-consumer trade’, and it was illegal. It went against the rules of the emergency economy, sabotaged the ration system. British military police and uniformed German police kept watch at stations outside the city, and would occasionally close down the main station to carry out a raid. More than one ‘hamster’ who’d spent two days begging in the countryside and in the end handed over his gold watch for four pounds of potatoes would find himself robbed of them when he got back and thrown into jail.

  Stave wasn’t interested in the ‘hamsters’; they weren’t why he was here. He was watching the emaciated figures in Wehrmacht greatcoats. Could his son have become one of these wraiths? Would he even recognise him? The chief inspector watched the returning veterans as they stood there on the platform, still confused, getting their bearings once again. Then he would go up to them, speak to some of them, offer them cigarettes. It was the same ritual every time, the same brief surge of hope, like the effect of a glass of schnapps in the bloodstream. And then the same empty faces, the mumbled regrets, sometimes confused, even crazy, answers. Karl Stave? Never heard of him.

  ‘Can I help warm you up?’

  Stave spun round in surprise. A girl, just 12 years old, Stave reckoned, though her emaciated figure might be deceptive; she might be 14. He shook his head, about to turn round again, then hesitated, put his hand in his pocket and gave the kid two cigarettes.

  ‘Maybe these’ll do you some good. Keep you out of the hands of a pimp.’

  The girl snatched the cigarettes, shouted, ‘Don’t be so fucking sentimental,’ and vanished.

  The next train was on platform four, from the Ruhr, not from the east, but Stave didn’t want to miss any of them. There were two former soldiers on the wooden walkway from the platform, and in front of them two British military policemen. With trembling hands the two ex-POWs showed them their release p
apers. Stave waited until they had been checked.

  A hand on his sleeve.

  The chief inspector spun round, expecting to see the skinny girl again. But it was Maschke.

  ‘At last,’ the vice squad officer said, before a smoker’s cough wracked him. ‘I’ve been looking for you for an hour,’ he managed to croak out.

  Stave closed his eyes wearily. ‘Not another murder?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘What do you mean, maybe? Is it a murder or isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s a murder but it’s not clear if it’s the killer we’re after.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Stave, glancing back at the two ex-POWs, then following Maschke who was already striding forcefully towards the main exit.

  ‘In this case too, the victim was strangled by a thin wire,’ his colleague said, hesitatingly, ‘but this time it’s a child.’

  The patrol car was standing outside the former Deutsches Schauspielhaus theatre, now renamed the Garrison Theatre and reserved for the British. Maschke carefully settled back in the driver’s seat, turned round, glanced in the mirror and then edged the old Mercedes ever so carefully away from the curb. When he saw how nervous Stave looked, he smiled apologetically.

  ‘I learnt to drive in the Wehrmacht, in one of the VW Kübelwagen bucket-seat jeeps on the broad French allées. They were a lot more basic than this grand old lady. I don’t want to get any dents.’

  ‘We’re in no hurry,’ Stave replied.

  Maschke coughed. ‘We’re going to Hammerbrook. It’s not far. Bill Strasse.’

  Stave closed his eyes. In the east of the city again, another working-class district that had been heavily bombed, razed to the ground more than any other part of the city.

  ‘Nobody lives there any more,’ he muttered.

  ‘The body was found in the lift shaft of a former mattress factory, 103 Bill Strasse, out by the mouth of the Northern Elbe, at the end of the port.’