The Murderer in Ruins Page 2

‘The scene of the crime?’

  Ruge blushed. ‘Where the body was found.’

  ‘So, you mean the location of the body,’ Stave corrected him, but trying to do so as gently as possible. All of a sudden he felt his mood lightening, forgetting the cold and the rubble and the ghostly figures drifting along the side of the road. ‘Do you have any idea what we can expect to find?’

  The young policeman nodded eagerly. ‘I was there when the report came in. Children out playing – God knows what they were doing out playing at that time, although I have my suspicions there – but anyway these children came across the body. Female, young, and…’ Ruge blushed again. ‘Well, naked.’

  ‘Naked? At minus 20 degrees. Is that what killed her?’

  The policeman’s face got darker in colour still. ‘We don’t know yet,’ he mumbled.

  A young woman, naked and dead – Stave had a creeping feeling he would be dealing with some dreadful crime. Since CID Chief Breuer put him in charge of a small investigation unit a few months back he’d had several murder cases. But this one seemed different from the usual stabbings amongst black marketeers or jealous scenes caused by soldiers returning from the war.

  Ruge turned left into Landwehr Strasse, and eventually halted by the ruins of the train tracks running across the road. Stave got out and looked around. And shivered. ‘St Mary’s Hospital isn’t far,’ he said. ‘They must have a telephone. We can report in there. After you’ve taken me to the location of the body.’

  Ruge clicked his heels. A young woman dragging a mangled tree stump in a cart behind her gave them a suspicious glance. Stave could see that her fingers were swollen with the cold. When she noticed him looking, she grabbed hold of the cart and hurried off.

  Stave and Ruge clambered over the railway tracks, the stone ballast frozen together in lumps, tracks jutting up like bizarre sculptures. Beyond lay Baustrasse, only recognisable as a boundary line of the gutted, roofless tenement houses, their black walls stretching for hundreds of metres. Even now, so many months on, it still reeked with the bitter stench of burnt wood and fabric.

  Two uniformed policemen, stamping their feet and clapping their hands in the cold, were standing in front of a crooked wall, three storeys high and looking like the slightest cough would bring it tumbling down to crush the policemen.

  Stave didn’t call out to them, just lifted his hand in greeting, as he carefully made his way over the rubble. At least he didn’t have to make an effort to conceal his limp. There was nowhere here that anyone could walk straight.

  One of the two uniforms raised his right hand in a salute, pointing to one side with his left. ‘The body is over there, next to the wall.’

  Stave looked to where he was pointing. ‘Nasty business,’ he muttered.

  The Corpse with No Name

  A young woman. Stave put her at between 18 and 22 years of age, 1.60 metres, mid-blond, medium-length hair. Blue eyes staring into nothingness.

  ‘Pretty,’ murmured Ruge, who had come over to join him.

  Stave stared at the policeman until he squirmed, then turned his gaze back to the corpse. No point in embarrassing his young colleague; the kid was only trying to hide his nerves.

  ‘Go down to the hospital and report in,’ he told him. Then Stave bent down beside the corpse, taking care not to touch it or the rubble on which she was lying, as if spread out on a bed.

  It looks staged, Stave thought instinctively. And yet at the same time she’d been well hidden, behind the wall and a few higher piles of bricks. As far as he could tell, her body appeared to be unmarked, not even a scratch or a bruise, her hands spotless. She didn’t put up a fight, he thought to himself. And those aren’t worker’s hands; this is no rubble clearer, no housemaid, no factory worker.

  His gaze slowly moved down her body. Flat stomach, a line down the right side: an old, well-healed appendectomy scar. Stave pulled out his notebook and wrote it down. The only thing he could see was a mark around her neck, a dark red line on her pale skin, barely three millimetres wide, all the way round her neck at the level of the larynx, more noticeable on the left than the right.

  ‘Looks like she’s been strangled. Perhaps with a narrow cord,’ Stave said to the two shivering uniforms, scribbling his observations down in his notebook. ‘Take a look and see if you can find any wire lying around. Or a cable of some sort.’

  The pair rummaged around sullenly amidst the ruins. At least they were out of his way. He didn’t believe either of them would find anything. There were some dark lines in the hoar frost suggesting something might have been dragged along here, but unfortunately one of the slovenly uniforms had trodden all over them. The murderer probably killed his victim elsewhere and dragged her here.

  ‘Pretty corpse,’ somebody behind him said. The throaty voice of a chain smoker. Stave didn’t need to turn round to know who was standing behind him.

  ‘Good morning, Doctor Czrisini,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘Good of you to come so quickly.’

  Doctor Alfred Czrisini – small, bald, dark eyes large behind his round horn-rimmed spectacles – didn’t bother to take the glowing British Woodbine cigarette from between his blue lips as he spoke. ‘Looks like there wasn’t much need for me to hurry,’ he mumbled. ‘A naked body in this cold – I could have taken another couple of hours.’

  ‘Frozen stiff.’

  ‘Better preserved than in the mortuary. It’s not going to be easy to establish a time of death. Over the past six weeks the temperature has not risen above minus 10. She could have been lying here for days and still look as fresh as a daisy.’

  ‘Fresh as a daisy isn’t exactly how I’d describe her current condition,’ Stave grumbled. He looked around. Baustrasse had once been a working-class district with dozens of tenement buildings, reddish-brown, brick-built, five storeys, well looked after, trees along the street. Artisans, manual workers, tradespeople had lived here. All gone now. Stave could see little more than a landscape of fallen walls, stumps of burnt trees, heaps of rubble. Only one building still stood, on the right, at the end of the street: the yellow-plastered building of the St Matthew Foundation, an orphanage. Preserved from the rain of bombs as if by a miracle.

  ‘Two kids from the home found the body,’ one of the uniforms said, nodding towards building.

  Stave nodded back. ‘Very well. I’ll talk to them shortly. And that, doctor, makes your task in determining time of death a little bit easier. If she’d been lying here for any length of time, the lads from the home would have found her ages ago.’

  He liked the pathologist. The man’s name – pronounced ‘Chisini’ – had made him the brunt of jokes in the years after 1933, mostly threatening references to his Polish origins. Czrisini worked fast. He was a bachelor whose only two passions were corpses and cigarettes.

  ‘Are you thinking the same as I am?’ the doctor asked.

  ‘Rape?’

  Czrisini nodded. ‘Young, pretty, naked and dead. It all fits.’

  Stave shook his head from side to side. ‘At minus 20 degrees even the craziest rapist might get a bit worried about his favourite tool. On the other hand, he could have done the deed somewhere warmer.’ He nodded towards the drag marks. ‘She’s just been laid out here.’

  ‘We’ll only find out more when we’ve got her laid out on my dissection table,’ the pathologist replied cheerfully.

  ‘But not her name,’ Stave muttered to himself. What if the killer didn’t strip her out of murderous lust? But as a cold, calculated decision? A naked woman in the middle of ruins where nobody has lived for years: ‘It’s not going to be easy to identify her.’

  Not long after, the crime-scene officer turned up. He was also the official police photographer; CID didn’t have enough trained specialists. Stave pointed out the drag marks. The photographer bent down over the body. As his flash went off, Stave suddenly saw in his mind’s eye anti-aircraft fire from the roads, the brightly lit, slowly falling parachute flares the first British aircraft used to
mark targets for the bombers coming behind them. He forced his eyelids closed.

  ‘Don’t forget the drag marks,’ he told the man again. The photographer nodded, silently; Stave had sounded angrier than he had intended.

  Finally he had the police bring over the two young lads who had found the body: barely ten years old, pale, blue lips, shivering, and not just from the cold. Orphans. Stave wondered for a moment whether he should play the stern policeman, and quickly decided against it. He leaned down towards them, asked them their names in a friendly voice and told them there was no need to be frightened for being out on the streets so early.

  Five minutes later he knew all there was to know about the case. The pair had lit out before breakfast to look for machine gun or flak cartridges. Every day there were kids out there finding live munition amidst the rubble, but there was no point in warning the two off. Stave could remember his own childhood. He would have done exactly the same thing. And what good would it have done if some adult had told him not to? Instead he asked them if they often came out her looking for things. They both said nothing for a bit, then shook their heads hesitantly: no, this was the first time. None of the other children had ever done it either. The St Matthew Foundation had only just started taking in children again. Stave took the two kids’ names and then sent them back to the orphanage.

  ‘Damn shame they’ve just moved here,’ he said, looking at the pathologist who was watching two porters carry the body off on a stretcher.

  ‘You mean you have nobody to prove that the body was left here only last night. You have to depend on me,’ Dr Czrisini said matter-of-factly, though there was a note of self-satisfaction in his voice.

  Stave shot a questioning look at the scene-of-crime man who was going over the ground in ever widening circles.

  ‘Nothing,’ he replied. ‘No bits of clothing, not even a cigarette butt, no footprints, no fingerprints, and certainly no lengths of wire. But we’ll go over the whole ruined block.’

  At that moment Ruge came clambering over the rubble, a little out of breath. ‘Those goddamn doctors in the hospital…’ he began.

  ‘Spare me the details,’ Stave said, waving whatever the man had to say wearily away. ‘Did you get through or not?’

  ‘Yes, after some lengthy discussion,’ the young policeman said, suppressed anger in his voice.

  ‘And?’

  The policeman looked at him for a moment as if he didn’t know what he meant, then suddenly got it: ‘We – you, I mean – have to report to Herr Breuer as soon as you’re finished here.’

  Stave didn’t reply. Carl – ‘Cuddel’ – Breuer had been appointed CID chief the year before. He was 46 when the British appointed him, young for the job. In the ‘brown days’ under the Nazis, he had been considered a Social Democrat and as a result vanished for part of 1933 into Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp, though he was later left in peace. After his appointment he had cleaned out all the Nazis and insisted on precision and professionalism from all his officers. Stave wondered why Cuddel wanted to see him right at the beginning of an investigation. It wasn’t like him. It must be something important, he thought. But what? Aloud he told Ruge, ‘We’re going to look around here for a bit yet. Then we’ll drive back to headquarters.’

  The chief inspector spun on his heel. Ruins, everywhere he could see. The only other thing, beyond the railway track, several hundred metres away, was the vast concrete cube of Eilbek bunker: a seven-storey-tall monolith with walls up to six metres thick. The Nazis had built nearly seven dozen such bunkers during the war. They had been the only shelter for tens of thousands of people throughout the incessant bombing. They were indestructible, windowless fortresses, emergency accommodation for those whose homes had been bombed, for refugees and others with nowhere to go. Nobody knew for sure how many people lived in them, crammed together in a foul atmosphere of noise, dirt and their own stench.

  ‘Well, nobody will have seen anything from their windows, that’s for sure,’ the young policeman said, following Stave’s glance.

  ‘If I had to live in one of those shitholes,’ the chief inspector growled, ‘I’d only go there to sleep and would spend the rest of the time in the open air, even at these temperatures.’

  Ruge realised what was on the chief inspector’s mind. ‘We could drive most of the way there,’ he said, hardly thrilled by the idea.

  ‘Good,’ Stave said. ‘Let’s go and have a little chat with the bunker people.’

  Back through the rubble, across the train tracks, then along the wasteland of road, driving carefully to avoid the obstacles. It took them nearly a quarter of an hour trundling over the cobbles of little Von-Hein-Strasse, which seemed to be squashed into the earth by the great bulk of the bunker. Stave climbed out of the Mercedes and looked around. Next to the bunker were just ruins, but opposite, miraculously preserved, were two great car repair shops: huge barracks, locked up at present since there were no cars to repair. Behind them was a small park by the side of a stream, thought most of the trees had been burnt down or chopped to stumps by people looking for wood.

  The north-east wind blew in his face. A one-legged man who was swaying on crutches, walking into the wind, vanished into the bunker. Stave followed him. The entry was a little walled-in concrete hut by the side of the great concrete cube. The steel door still had a sign with air-raid warning instructions. Inside there was a steel spiral staircase, and air like that in a U-boat: heavy, muggy, damp. Water ran down the fissures in the concrete. It stank of sweat, disinfectant, damp clothing, coal and mildew.

  The stairs led into the core of the bunker. Up one floor to where a Roman numeral in dirty oil paint on a steel door marked the first level. Stave looked at the scribbled paint line, the pale, melted paint that in the light of a naked 15-watt bulb looked like scarred human tissue. Beyond the door lay a labyrinth of walls made of rough wooden boards, with which the inhabitants separated off their tiny ‘apartments’, each of which housed four, six or even more people. There were jackets and wet raincoats hanging on nails. Somewhere in the distance a child cried inconsolably.

  ‘I’ll take this floor, you take the next one up,’ he told Ruge. ‘After that, we’ll take it in turns until we’ve been through the whole bunker. Ask them all if they noticed anything near where the body was found. Anything, no matter how trivial. And don’t ask them just about the past 24 hours; ask about the last few days. It’s possible the body was lying there a while. If anybody refuses to talk, put pressure on them. A lot of these bunker people don’t like talking to anyone, let alone the police.’

  Ruge grinned, clicked his heels and put his right hand on his truncheon. Stave noticed, but didn’t say anything. He was far too weary to start playing nursemaid to overzealous uniformed coppers.

  Stave knocked on the wooden boards of the first of the ‘apartments’ that in reality were more like rabbit hutches. No reply. He pulled aside a dirty piece of cloth hung there to cover the entrance. Inside was a Wehrmacht stretcher that served as a bed, supported by two wooden fruit boxes; dirty clothing lay on the floor and on the wall was a school leaving certificate, the paper yellow and torn. On a sheet on the stretcher lay an emaciated young man, snoring. Stave shook his shoulder. The boy groaned and turned to face the wall, without opening his eyes. He stank of home-made hooch, obviously drunk. Stave gave him a punch on the shoulder but he didn’t react. Just grunted. There was no point.

  He tried the next hutch. Empty. Then the next. He rapped on the bare board.

  ‘If you’re looking for somewhere to kip, try next door,’ a hoarse voice cried out. ‘There’s nobody in there any more. But don’t let the warden catch you, and don’t make any noise.’

  ‘Police, crime squad,’ Stave replied, and pulled aside an old heavy overcoat that covered the door. It was an oilskin, probably a sailor’s.

  Against the wall opposite stood a pair of rusty bunk beds without mattresses. On the lower bed was a rumpled blanket and an old rucksack obviously used as a pillow. T
he bed above was missing the metal webbing a mattress would normally lie on. Instead there were a couple of boards set across the frame as a sort of shelf, with an old seaman’s duffel bag stuffed so full that at any moment Stave thought the board it lay on would give way and empty its contents on to the bed below. In front of the bunks stood an ancient armchair, ripped fabric of an indeterminate colour, the back covered in soot. Obviously looted from some bombed house.

  On the armchair squatted a man whom Stave initially would have put at around 70 years old. Then he took a closer look and changed his mind: maybe 50. Iron-grey hair, unwashed for weeks. Greasy strands that reached down to his shoulders. A white halo of dandruff on his shoulders, like snow against his thick, navy-blue, woollen sailor’s jumper. Dark trousers and heavy, iron-heeled working boots. A man who once must have been big and strong. His muscles, still impressive, could be seen beneath his slack wrinkled skin. He had blue eyes, bushy eyebrows and a scar as wide as a finger that ran from the left corner of his mouth across his cheek as far as his neck behind one ear. Despite the cold his sleeves were rolled up, revealing blue tattoos on his forearms: an anchor, a naked woman, a word that Stave couldn’t read. A seaman run aground, the chief inspector thought. He put one hand on the grip of his gun while he pulled out his police ID with the other.

  ‘Anton Thuman,’ the man said, without getting up. There was nowhere else to sit, except on the lower bunk bed, which Stave did not fancy. So he stayed standing as he told the man that the naked body of a woman had been found nearby.

  ‘What’s that got to do with me?’ Thuman interrupted him before he could finish.

  ‘Were you out on Baustrasse during the past couple of days? Or near Landwehr Station? Did you see anything suspicious?’

  ‘I hardly ever go out. Too cold. I’m sort of hibernating here in this bunker. As soon as the port is open and the English let proper ships come in again, I’m out of here. Until then I’m just squatting in this dump trying to move as little as possible.’