The Murderer in Ruins Read online

  ‘I’m going to type up your statement. If you would wait and read it through and then sign it for me, unless you have anything more to add or changes to make.’

  She nodded, then said, hesitantly, ‘What about my looting? Will you have to mention that?’

  Stave managed a smile. ‘I think we can just say you were walking along the path.’

  He took her to the door and pointed to a seat in the anteroom, ignoring Erna Berg’s inquisitive look. Then he typed up the statement with one hand, pulled the sheet of paper out of the typewriter and read through the text. It wasn’t much, not the type of witness statement that could send someone to the gallows. But then the murderer didn’t know that.

  She’s bait, Stave thought to himself, realising as he did that it weighed on his conscience. Nonetheless, he would ring the journalist and tell him this new development. No names, obviously. No details about her age, or where and what she had seen. Simply that the police had a witness. That would be enough to make the killer nervous. And then he might make a mistake.

  He lifted the receiver and asked to be connected to the editorial section of Die Zeit. He asked the operator at the other end to put him through to Kleensch. There was a click on the line. Seconds ticked by. Hurry up, Stave thought.

  Eventually Kleensch came to the phone.

  ‘There’s been a new development in the rubble murderer case.’

  ‘I see you’re not one for small talk, are you, Chief Inspector,’ the journalist said, laughing so loud that the line echoed.

  But Stave could hear in his voice something that he wanted to hear: the call of the hunt. He could imagine the man reaching for his notebook and pencil, hungry for a news story.

  ‘We are now certain that there is just one killer. A witness saw a figure near one of the crime scenes. A figure in a long coat with its head covered. More details may follow.’

  ‘At which of the crime scenes was this?’

  Stave hesitated. Would he be putting Anna von Veckinhausen in danger if he told him? On the other hand, there was always the possibility that the killer would return to the scene of the crime to eradicate any traces. Hardly a good idea, but sometimes murderers did so. He didn’t have enough men to have all three crime scenes watched, but he could manage one.

  ‘The ruins near Lappenbergs Allee. Where the old man was found.’

  ‘So who is your mysterious witness?’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t release any further details.’

  ‘I understand.’ Silence, save for the crackling of the telephone line.

  Was there somebody else on the line, Stave suddenly wondered. Then he pulled himself together. Nonsense.

  ‘I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you for now.’

  ‘Can I rely on you to keep me posted?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Stave put the receiver down. Let’s wait and see what happens, he thought. Then he looked up at the closed door to his office, and called Anna von Veckinhausen in. His only witness. His bait.

  She read through the statement carefully, the corner of her lip twitching once or twice.

  ‘You’re not exactly a poet, but it’s surprisingly good prose for a policeman.’

  ‘The public prosecutor says the same thing,’ Stave grumbled. ‘Do you recognise your own words?’

  Her answer was a fluid signature at the bottom of the page, followed by the date.

  ‘Can I go now?’ she asked.

  ‘May I accompany you?’

  Stave was surprised by his own words. They had just popped out without him thinking.

  Anna von Veckinhausen gave him a look of astonishment.

  ‘We go the same way,’ he added quickly. ‘I’ve just got a bit further to go, as far as Wandsbek.’

  She smiled briefly. ‘If we hurry we can just catch the last tram,’ she replied.

  Stave got to his feet, grabbed his coat and hat, and held the door open for her. Erna Berg was staring at him in confusion.

  ‘Send someone for me if anything important crops up,’ he told her.

  That was all the explanation he gave her. Stave felt a spring in his step he hadn’t felt for years, even though he knew he was behaving like an idiot and looked like one too.

  They both broke into a quick pace as they left the building. They had to get to Rathaus Platz, where the trams left from, in time to catch the last one. They only ran for a few hours each morning and afternoon, to save electricity. Stave and Anna leaned forwards into the wind, her scarf and headscarf wrapped tight, his collar pulled up high and his hat low over his eyes. There was no time for them to talk. Stave didn’t mind. He was busy enough concentrating on walking without his limp showing.

  Don’t go falling in love, he told himself; don’t make a fool of yourself. She’s your only witness. Bait, without even knowing it, for an unscrupulous killer, bait that you yourself laid. Or maybe she could even be the murderer herself? You can’t rule that out. You know nothing about her, not even whether or not she’s married. Maybe there’s a husband and children waiting for her in her Nissen hut. Children! What would Karl think, if he ever came back? His home in ruins, his mother dead – and the father he’d fallen out with before the war living with another woman? It was unthinkable.

  They almost ran across the windy Rathaus Platz, Anna’s cheeks red from the cold and the effort of walking so fast. Delicious, thought Stave to himself, then turned his eyes to the ground.

  The three tramlines intersected in front of the city hall. The lines had been repaired and cleared of debris. The carriages were battered, people everywhere pushing and shoving. Black marketeers with their lackeys pushing their way in with huge, heavy crates of coal or carrots. Weary postmen laden with packages. At least there was no rubbish on board. In the mornings the trams were used for carrying waste out to the dumps on the edge of the city. How else was anyone to get rid of it?

  And in between the crates and boxes were the people: black marketeers, office workers, shop workers, all of them going home at the same time because of the electricity cut-off.

  Stave clumsily tried to forge a way through for Anna von Veckinhausen, to help her up the step on to the tram. But she was better at it on her own; she did it more often. The carriage was stuffed, stank of wet overcoats, old shoes, sweat, bad breath, cheap tobacco.

  The people piling in after them shoved Stave and Anna von Veckinhausen against the window on the far side of the carriage. The chief inspector fought back with his elbows, without turning round, then gave up and allowed himself to be pushed up against the woman who was going to help him catch the rubble murderer. He gave her an embarrassed smile.

  ‘Just a couple of stops and then we’ll be back in the fresh air,’ she said.

  A shunt, the screech of steel wheels on tracks and a lurch as the tram turned a corner. Blows to the shoulders, the stomach, the weight of the man next to you swaying, a pain in the hand when somebody reached out to grab the same handhold as you. Muttered imprecations, growing louder. Nobody apologised, nobody looked at anybody else.

  Stave said nothing. Every word could be dangerous. Nobody knew what the person next to you did in the war. There were cases of people cursing under their breath, then being stabbed by former veterans from the Russian front. Teenagers, who at the age of 15 were enlisted into the Hitler Youth and sent to the front for beating to death somebody who accidentally insulted them. Our society is a wasteland, the chief inspector thinks to himself. We detectives are just clearing up the rubble.

  Stave couldn’t bring himself to say anything in the obscene crush. Anything he said would be overheard. You either cursed or shut up. In any case, what would I say to her, he thought to himself.

  Fortunately the tram began to empty after the third and fourth stops – both unmarked amidst a wilderness of ruins, dozens of people clambering out. Where were they going, Stave wondered. Only now, when finally it was possible to move, a sweating conductor made his way across to them. Stave handed him a multiple journey ticket he ha
d bought two weeks ago and to date had only used for one journey. Single tickets were no longer being sold: there was not enough paper. Stave rarely used the tram; he used the cash he saved to buy cigarettes he could exchange at the station for information from returning veterans. In any case walking strengthened his bad leg.

  ‘Two,’ he said to the conductor.

  ‘Generous,’ Anna von Veckinhausen said.

  Good that she hadn’t used his title. If she’d said, ‘Chief Inspector,’ then everyone would have turned to look at him. And that wasn’t a pleasant feeling if you were in a carriage where at least half of those present had been trading on the black market.

  ‘Do you take the tram often?’ Stave asked needlessly, when there was finally enough space around them that he felt comfortable talking normally.

  ‘I’ve got used to it since I came to Hamburg.’

  ‘How did you get around before that?’

  She gave him an attentive, slightly amused look. ‘Is that an official question?’

  ‘Private. You’re not obliged to answer.’

  ‘In a car. Or a carriage. Preferably on a horse.’

  ‘The home of a well-to-do family.’

  ‘A well-to-do home. I know what you’re thinking.’

  ‘What am I thinking?’

  ‘You think I come from some landed Junker family east of the Elbe. That it’s people like me who ruined Germany.’

  ‘Did you?’

  She exhaled angrily. ‘We were nationalists, conservatives. But we never voted for Herr Hitler.’

  The chief inspector wondered what she meant by ‘we’, but didn’t ask.

  ‘I get out here,’ Anna von Veckinhausen said, as with screeching brakes the tram came to a halt next to a blackened building façade half its original height.

  Stave followed her without asking permission. They took a straight street that led between mountains of rubble, from which here and there remnants of wall protruded, reminding Stave of a long-drawn-out cross on a grave.

  The Nissen huts stood at a crossing in the shadow of the old flak bunker: tin barracks erected along all four streets. The chief inspector counted 20 of them, with here and there the yellowy flame of candlelight shining through windows cut in the barrel-like sides, while others just sat there in the dark. The air was filled with the acrid stench of wet wood burning. Blue smoke rose from thin, twisted tin chimneys and gusted amidst the lines strung between the huts and hung with washing, long frozen solid. There was a smell of cabbage soup and wet shoes, and here and there a well wrapped-up figure coming from the tram passed them, pushed open a door in one of the barracks and disappeared.

  In those few seconds Stave got a glimpse of the interior; rough wooden tables, a tiny stove in the middle of the hut, made of black cast iron. Clothing or sheets in every colour hung from lines strung across the interior in every direction, either washing or as makeshift walls, so that families could have the minimum of privacy in these barracks with no rooms.

  Stave wondered what it must be like for someone who had grown up in a grand mansion now to be living in a communal barracks in the midst of ruins. He wondered if Anna von Veckinhausen was ashamed. Or if she was just lucky still to be alive and have a roof over her head, even if it was made of corrugated iron.

  Anna von Veckinhausen walked up to the door of the Nissen hut in the centre of the crossing, a crossing with a completely undamaged advertising column standing in the middle of it. Every day when she left the hut Anna von Veckinhausen would find herself staring at the photos of the murderer’s victims. Maybe that was what led to her changing her statement, Stave thought in a moment of self-satisfaction.

  A pair in dyed Wehrmacht greatcoats passed them, pushing a battered pram with a squeaking front axle. It didn’t look as though there was a child in it, more like a lump of wood, the chief inspector thought. That reminded him of his own unheated apartment and then he wondered what it must be like at night in these thin-walled barracks.

  Anna von Veckinhausen speeded up her pace.

  She wants rid of me, the chief inspector thought, ever so slightly disappointed. She doesn’t want to be seen with me here.

  ‘Thanks you for accompanying me,’ she said, as she reached the door in the front of the Nissen hut. ‘Do you think I need a bodyguard from now on?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ Stave asked.

  ‘Because the murderer saw me.’

  The chief inspector thought back to his conversation with the journalist from Die Zeit, and with a feeling of pained guilt turned his eyes up to the grey sky. ‘That is if the figure you saw was the killer. And if this figure did see you then he probably saw no more of you than you saw of him. He didn’t see your face, and certainly doesn’t know your name or address.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ she replied, but it didn’t sound as if she was convinced. She held out her hand. ‘Good night, Chief Inspector.’

  She waited until he had walked off a few paces, before opening the door. Stave didn’t get the chance to look inside. He politely doffed his hat as a mark of farewell but the door had already closed with a tinny clang. He turned round slowly and set off on the long walk to Wandsbek, without limping. There was always the chance that she was watching him from one of the Nissen hut’s tiny windows.

  He strode along for few hundred metres, trying not to think of Anna von Veckinhausen, or his son, or his wife, but just the case. The goddamn case.

  A Hamburg industrialist who had made military equipment for the old regime and the pretty conservative-minded aristocrat from East Prussia – could there be a connection? The word ‘bottleneck’ on a piece of paper, and looted antiques, sold to the Brits. Was there a connection to be made there? A shrouded figure amidst the rubble. A long coat. The smell of tobacco. If he could trust the statement of a single witness. And could he trust Anna von Veckinhausen? Don’t think about her, not now. But then could he trust anybody? MacDonald – in the light of all the leads pointing to the British? Maschke, after the orphan child had pointed to him, and who was obviously hiding something? Ehrlich, who might well be on a personal vendetta and not really interested in finding the killer at all?

  He dragged himself up the staircase to his apartment, no longer trying to hide his limp. The stairwell was dark anyway. He was almost expecting to find Ruge or another uniformed policeman outside his door, with more, almost certainly, bad news. But the landing by his doorway was deserted. Stave unlocked the door, then carefully locked it behind him. He threw himself down on the tatty sofa, still wearing his coat and hat. It was freezing cold. He ought to go into the kitchen to get himself a bite to eat, but he was too exhausted. Anna. Don’t think of her. The chief inspector fell asleep on the sofa, his last thought before slipping into oblivion was astonishment at how weary he really was.

  Number Four

  Wednesday, 12 February 1947

  Hell, Stave thought to himself, isn’t hot – it’s cold.

  When he looked out of his office window he saw houses that had been cleaned automatically, their roofs and north or east gable walls blasted by a wind that had sucked up Arctic ice and used it to sand the tiles and plaster like an invisible plane. In places sheltered from the blast of the wind there were still pockets of sheet ice and layers of powder snow on the guttering, window frames and in the empty door-frames of bombed-out houses. The temperature had been constant since January, but the light had changed: for eight hours a day now there was a blue-shimmering sun in a cloudless sky, bathing the world in an eerie brightness that highlighted even the smallest of details. The cracks in the façade of the Music Hall on the square opposite looked to the chief inspector like a Dürer engraving, each cracked capital on the columns casting grotesque shadows. Yet here I am typing in the dark, Stave mused; it was a bad joke.

  Dr Czrisini’s third autopsy report was lying in his in-tray. Assumed date of death: twentieth of January. No other significant details. Stave wondered how many other people had been killed on that day – and w
hen they would find their bodies.

  Kleensch had published his article in Die Zeit: a measured piece with no absurd speculation, no hysteria, no inflated suggestion of hope – just enough to indicate that the police were making progress. Stave had warned Cuddel Breuer and Ehrlich in advance so they would not feel they were hearing it for the first time from the press.

  But apart from that, nothing.

  He had posted men near the Lappenbergs Allee crime scene, a pretty grim job in this cold. And now a few deep-frozen, bored-stiff officers hated him for it, because nobody had turned up. No reaction on the part of the killer, no information from the public, no new leads. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  No news either from Anna von Veckinhausen. Had she seen the article? Was she furious at him? Stave had asked MacDonald to check out her story about the sale of the kitsch painting. It appeared to be true. MacDonald hadn’t exactly identified which of his comrades-in-arms had bought the item of dubious value, but Anna von Veckinhausen was, it turned out, known to many British officers, who appreciated the goods she sold. The lieutenant had let him know in the nicest possible way that many of his superior officers would be extremely unhappy if her supply chain was interrupted. The chief inspector had just nodded and muttered something incomprehensible, but he had got the message.

  He wouldn’t be able to threaten Anna von Veckinhausen with charges for her looting or dealings on the black market. Either she cooperated voluntarily or she didn’t. And if she did have something to do with the murders, then he had better have proper evidence before he arrested her.

  As for ‘Bottleneck’, MacDonald had got nowhere. And Hellinger, the industrialist, was still missing.

  Maschke had gone round all the older, retired doctors – it was his own idea and he had got their numbers from the medical council. He had asked all of them about the victims, the old man in particular. In vain. It had been a good idea though, Stave reckoned. He should have thought of it himself. The vice squad man was getting better and better.