The Murderer in Ruins Read online

  ‘Who found it?’

  ‘A ship’s watchman, who’d been walking along the canal. Probably looking for coal. You sometimes find bits dropped from a load. Said he was just taking a walk. The report came in about 10.30 a.m.’

  ‘Have you already checked him out?’

  Maschke shrugged. ‘Says he was in Lübeck with his mother up until yesterday. We’re checking that out. If it’s true he can’t be a suspect. If it’s not true then he’s got a problem.’

  Maschke drove the heavy old car carefully down the empty streets, making wide detours around the heaps of rubble, but swerved to the side of the road when faced with oncoming British jeeps, avoiding them as if they were tanks. It was about five kilometres from the station to the spot in Hammerbrook where the body had been found, Stave reckoned. It would have been faster walking than with Maschke driving. But at least he didn’t have to face the icy wind.

  They passed endless rows of charred façades with no windows, like stage sets in some gigantic burnt-out theatre. The steel structures of the elevated railway, its tracks and bridges, bore the scars of bomb impacts; collapsed in places, bent into grotesque sculptures or reduced to tiny red-black lumps by the ocean of flames that had engulfed them.

  The Mercedes rumbled a kilometre or so along Bill Strasse to where a façade that had collapsed on to the street blocked their way. Maschke parked next to the rubble behind a British jeep and the crime scene team’s vehicle.

  As Stave stepped out of the car he almost trod on a wooden cross at the foot of the heap of rubble, nailed together at an angle and with the words ‘To our Mother Meta Krüger 27/28.7.1943’. He imagined she was still lying under the rubble, and turned his face away.

  They had some 200 metres to walk through the rubble, the meterthick ice on the Bille canal glistening to their right. Somewhere or other the wind was being sucked through a burst stovepipe, making a noise like an eerie organ. There was nothing living visible anywhere, not even a rat or a crow. Stave had climbed around a partially intact wall before he came across signs of life: uniformed police and figures in long overcoats with caps pulled down low over their eyes. British military.

  ‘This is it,’ said Maschke, somewhat superfluously.

  ‘Narrow strangulation marks on the throat,’ Dr Czrisini whispered, ‘the lower right arm has an old scar, about two centimetres long. Teeth complete, no signs of undernourishment, about 1.10 metres tall. I would guess six to eight years old.’

  ‘Time of death?’ Stave muttered, trying to keep hold of himself.

  ‘I’ll have a better idea after the autopsy, but she’s been dead at least 12 hours. In this cold she might have lain here even longer.’

  ‘In this cold,’ muttered Stave. ‘Any signs of abuse? Any other harm?’

  ‘Not as far as we can see at present. But we’ll soon know more.’

  ‘And as ever, no means of identification?’

  The photographer and crime scene man came up with something in a bag. ‘We found this next to the body. It might have belonged to her, but it might also just have been lying there.’

  It was a red braided cord about half the length of a finger. The chief inspector shook his head. ‘What is it?’

  ‘You obviously don’t have daughters,’ the photographer said with a weak smile. ‘It may have come from a Spencer, a type of traditional short jacket. The sort of thing a girl her age would be likely to wear.’

  Stave waved one of the uniforms over. ‘Go the nearest police station and call the head of Department S. He needs to send people out to all the black market areas of the city, immediately, and tell them to take into custody any of them selling a traditional girl’s jacket with red cord braid.’

  The officer saluted and clambered off over the rubble.

  Stave looked around him. ‘The girl can’t have lived round here. The closest even half-inhabitable buildings are hundreds of metres away.’

  ‘Which means the killer brought her here,’ Maschke concluded for him.

  ‘Or the kid was here gathering coal and bumped into our killer,’ MacDonald suggested. ‘She wouldn’t be the only child out doing that, it seems.’

  The two detectives gave him a quizzical look. He explained, ‘When the first policemen got here after the body was reported, they grabbed a boy who said he was here looking for coal. No idea whether or not he’d seen the body.’

  Stave nodded. ‘Right, well let’s ask the ship’s watchman the usual questions. And then we need to talk to the boy.’

  The watchman’s name was Walter Dreimann, 35 years old, thin with a face that suggested he suffered from stomach ulcers. Or maybe he just hadn’t got over the sight of the dead child.

  ‘You were out looking for coal?’ the chief inspector asked.

  ‘I was just taking a walk,’ Dreimann replied, in a whiny voice that suggested he was insulted by the idea.

  ‘Do that often, do you?’

  ‘Every day. Apart from the last two weeks when I was up in Lübeck visiting my mother. But I already told your colleague that.’

  ‘But before you went to visit your mother you took a walk along here every day?’ Stave asked, flicking through his notebook.

  Dreimann nodded.

  ‘Right here, in this patch of rubble?’

  The watchman replied without thinking about it. ‘It’s part of my usual route.’

  ‘And when were you last here, before you went off to Lübeck?’

  ‘Must have been the eighteenth or nineteenth of January.’

  ‘And the lift shaft was empty that day?’

  ‘Obviously!’ Dreimann gave him a shocked look. ‘You don’t think I’d have found the body of a dead girl and said nothing!’

  ‘Did you know the girl?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you certain of that? Do you want to take another look at the body?’

  Dreimann’s face turned green. ‘I’ve already seen enough.’

  Stave forced the ghost of a smile and said, ‘You can go.’

  The chief inspector looked around the devastated landscape. The photographer was packing up. Two porters in dark overcoats lifted the thin little frozen body from the lift shaft and laid it on a stretcher. Just like during the war, Stave reflected, particularly in the weeks following each bombing raid when they kept pulling little bodies out of the ruins. But this was supposed to be peacetime, for Christ’s sake.

  He flinched. Something glinted on the grimy oil-covered floor of the lift shaft, something that must have been uncovered from the oil by the shoes of one of the porters. Something silver.

  ‘Dig that out,’ he said to one of the crime scene men, nodding at the object.

  A minute later the chief inspector was holding in his hand an oily silver medallion. About the size of a small coin, one side smooth and plain. And on the other a cross and two daggers.

  ‘Our murderer makes mistakes,’ he thought to himself.

  ‘People normally wear medallions round their necks,’ MacDonald mused. ‘It would seem that in the case of the last two victims the medallion was ripped off while the murderer was throwing his garrotte around their necks. He took everything from his victims but seems to have missed the little silver medallions.’

  ‘Or placed them there,’ Maschke suggested, ‘as a sort of visiting card.’

  ‘Some sort of nutcase, planting clues for us?’ Stave wiped his brow with his right hand. He was tired. He didn’t want to go along with Maschke’s theory, not least because the last thing he wanted to do was to get inside the head of some deranged killer in an attempt to imagine his next moves. But he reminded himself that he was supposed to be a professional. ‘In that case why didn’t we find a medallion next to the first victim?’

  ‘Maybe the killer is developing his style,’ Maschke replied. ‘Or maybe he did leave a medallion there, and we were just too stupid to find it?’

  Another accusation, Stave thought to himself. If you keep on like this, I’ll have you moved to traffic duty, if it’s t
he last thing I do!

  ‘I think MacDonald’s suggestion is the more likely,’ he said. ‘At least in that case there would be a link between the old man and the child. The two of them were wearing the same medallion. Maybe they belonged to the same family.’

  ‘So what about the young woman?’ Czrisini asked.

  ‘Maybe she was wearing a medallion too but in her case the murderer spotted it and stole it. Or maybe we really were too dim and didn’t find it. I’ll send somebody over to Baustrasse again to search the rubble.’

  ‘If the medallions were ripped off at the time of the attack,’ MacDonald developed his train of thought, ‘then that means the victims were murdered where we found them, or else the medallions wouldn’t have been next to the bodies.’

  ‘But if they’ve deliberately been left by the killer,’ Maschke interjected, ‘it means nothing. He might have strangled them anywhere, and afterwards just sought out somewhere in the rubble he could dump the corpses, and leave them with his parting gift.’

  ‘But he hasn’t left any two bodies in the same place. Each time he has chosen a new lot of ruins,’ Stave said. ‘You were down at the Street Clearance department. Just how many lots of ruins are there to choose from to hide a corpse?’

  The vice squad man shrugged: ‘Hundreds, maybe thousands. There are a couple of posh areas like Blankenese that we can exclude – too little bomb damage – and then there are a few areas like the port: badly bombed but cordoned off by the British, where nobody would get in without being noticed. Apart from that, take your pick in what is the greatest ruined cityscape in Europe.’

  ‘Maybe the killer wants us to find his victims,’ MacDonald suggested. ‘Maybe he’s challenging us? Trying to provoke us?’

  Stave waved the idea away. ‘No point in coming to premature conclusions. Wherever the killer might hide the bodies they’re going to be found sooner or later. How’s he going to make a corpse simply disappear? Weight it down with a couple of concrete blocks and throw it into the water? Even out on the Elbe the ice is a couple of metres thick. The Alster and the Fleete are frozen solid. Bury it? The ground is frozen hard as iron. Burn it? There’s next to no petrol and or coal in Hamburg, hardly even any wood. In one respect at least this winter is the policeman’s friend – there’s no way for a killer to simply dispose of his victim.’ Stave stretched. ‘Any more witnesses?’

  The lieutenant gave a wry smile. ‘Maybe. I have the boy in a car with one of our military police. It’s not quite so cold in the car and there was no need for the lad to see this.’ He nodded towards the stretcher with the body being carried off between a couple of broken walls.

  ‘Maybe he should,’ Stave muttered, and made a sign to the two men in dark coats to put the stretcher on the ground.

  MacDonald barked something in English and a military policeman brought over a skinny boy, almost invisible inside a grown-up’s overcoat that was far too big for him: unkempt brown hair, probably lice-infested, a scabby rash on his neck, missing one of his front teeth.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Stave asked him, indicating to the British soldier that the boy shouldn’t come too close.

  ‘Jim Mainke.’

  ‘Jim?’

  ‘Wilhelm.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Sixteen.’

  ‘Try again. Age?’

  ‘Fourteen. That is, I’ll be fourteen this summer.’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  Wilhelm Mainke waved a hand somewhere across the ruins.

  ‘With your parents.’

  ‘No, thank God,’ the boy replied with a smile. ‘If I did, I’d be in Öjendorf Cemetery.’

  The cheeky answer irritated the chief inspector but he kept calm. ‘Do I have to drag everything out of you? Or can you string more than a couple of words together at a time?’

  Maine averted his eyes. ‘My father worked at Blohm & Voss,2 my mother was a housewife. They were both killed by a bombing raid in 1943. I was staying with my grandmother out in the country at the time. I live in a cellar in Rothenburgsort, with a few friends.’

  That was more or less what Stave had guessed. There were more than a thousand vagabond orphans on the streets of Hamburg, some whose parents had been killed in the bombing raids, some refugees who’d got separated from their parents. A few of them had joined gangs and were literally fighting for their existence; many survived by collecting lumps of coal, looting amongst the ruins, working for the black marketeers – or sold themselves on the station platforms.’

  ‘You come here a lot?’

  ‘Of course. I know my way around the port area. I used to be able to visit my father at the shipyard. I come here looking for coal.’

  ‘Other kids do the same thing?’

  Mains shrugged. ‘You get a few hanging around. Thirty, maybe forty. Not so many right now. Too cold.’

  ‘And you were out and about here this morning?’

  ‘Yeah. Until the patrol nabbed me.’

  ‘Did you see the girl?’

  Mainke quickly shook his head. ‘When I got here, the cops were already on the scene. They wouldn’t let me get any closer.’

  ‘But you know why the police are here?’

  The boy nodded. ‘One of the military police told me.’

  ‘Were you here yesterday too?’

  ‘No, had to find myself a bite to eat. It’s two, maybe three days since I was last here.’

  ‘Do you think the girl could have been lying in the lift shaft then and you wouldn’t have noticed her?’

  The boy moved his head from side to side indifferently. ‘She could have been there for years and I wouldn’t have noticed her. I usually keep to the riverbank. That’s where you find lumps of coal, if you’re lucky. As soon as I find a couple, I’m out of here. Not worth staying around any longer. Not worth wandering around in the ruins, nothing left there.’

  ‘Apart from a dead girl.’

  Jim Mainke went silent.

  Stave sighed. ‘I’m sorry about this, but I have to ask you to come with me.’

  ‘Are you arresting me?’

  ‘You could say that, but it’s not exactly what I mean at the moment.’

  The chief inspector led the boy over to the stretcher, where the two porters were standing having a smoke. The military policeman gave Stave a dirty look and glanced at MacDonald, but dropped it when the lieutenant gave an imperceptible nod.

  Stave pulled the blanket back from the head end of the stretcher. ‘Do you recognise this girl?’

  Mainke didn’t throw up, didn’t even go pale, just stood there looking at the body. Eventually the chief inspector had had enough and pulled the blanket back over the victim’s unseeing eyes.

  ‘Never seen her before,’ the boy said.

  Stave nodded to the porters for them to take the stretcher away.

  ‘What’re you going to do with me now?’ Mainke asked. ‘Can I go back to looking for coal?’

  ‘You’re too young. I can’t just let you loose around here. The policemen will take you to Rauhes House.’ It was a charitable institution where all the orphans picked up by the police were taken in. A former locksmith was in charge and a few volunteers; Christian idealists looked after the boys and girls, delousing them and washing them, patched up scratches and dealt with other minor illnesses, gave them hot soup and a clean bed. Even so, most of the children did a runner within a day or two.

  Mainke turned round and walked off behind the military policeman.

  ‘Where did you get the name Jim from?’ Stave shouted after him.

  Maine turned and gave him a real boyish grin. ‘I have an uncle in America. Honest. In New York. I’m going to go to him as soon as big ships start docking in the port again.’

  ‘Good luck,’ Stave murmured, but Mainke was already too far away to hear him.

  ‘A witness?’

  Stave turned round on hearing his boss’s voice: Cuddel Breuer was standing there facing him.

  ‘I don’t think so. The boy
only got here after the police were already on the scene.’

  ‘So, anything else?’

  Stave almost said, ‘Just the usual,’ but stopped himself in time. He quickly went over what they had found.

  ‘Do you think the killer is the same?’ Breuer asked.

  Stave paused, took a deep breath, then nodded: ‘Yes. Victims two and three have something to do with each other. Members of the same family, I suspect, even though we have no proof as yet. The circumstances are remarkably similar: both strangled with a thin wire, stripped naked, left amidst the rubble. It is even possible the little girl was murdered at the same time as the other two.’

  ‘A killer wiping out an entire family?’ Breuer looked around. ‘Anything else to do here?’

  ‘The crime scene man will go over everything again. But there’s nothing more for us to do.’

  ‘Good. Let’s go back to head office. I’ll give you a lift.’

  Stave followed his boss to his old Mercedes. Breuer drove himself. He was a relaxed, self-confident, fast driver. They soon left Maschke in the old patrol car far behind.

  ‘So, we have a serial killer,’ said Breuer, looking dead ahead through the windscreen.

  ‘I’m afraid it seems so.’

  ‘We’re not going to be able to keep this under wraps much longer. The type of killing, the appeals for identification of the victims – sooner or later some journalist will put two and two together and get a story.’

  ‘And we can’t control what he might write.’

  ‘Not these days, thank God. That is one of the prices of democracy, made in Great Britain. One way or another we’ve done well, you and me, Stave. But even so, in this one particular case, I almost long for the old days when you could simply tell them what they could print, and what they couldn’t.’

  ‘Even that wouldn’t help. People talk. There’ll be rumours. I’d prefer a piece in the newspaper, so at least we know where we are.’

  ‘And where are you?’

  Stave shrugged. ‘They can’t write any more than we know. And that’s precious little.’

  Breuer, for the first time, turned and looked at him, even though they were turning fast into the square outside headquarters. ‘We have a serial killer, one who attacks people in the ruins, amidst the rubble, or at least that is what people are going to think. But nearly all of Hamburg is in ruins. Worse: the victims are a young woman, an old man and a child. What are people going to make of that? That they’re all members of one unfortunate family? Victims of some domestic drama? Hardly. They are going to believe that anybody is likely to be murdered. That men and women are in danger, and even children. That the killer is someone who can strike almost any citizen in almost any part of the city. That is what they’re going to make of it.’