The Wolf Children Read online

  He had to be a communist, Stave reckoned. Since 1945, when the Brits allowed elections to take place again in Hamburg, one in every five shipyard workers had voted for the Communist Party of Germany. It wasn’t hard to understand, he told himself, but out loud he said, ‘You’ve been working here for two years, dismantling the shipyard, but nobody spotted an unexploded bomb lying around?’

  Speck shook his head. ‘Up until 1945, U-boat spare parts were stored in here. Ever since it's been lying empty. It was only by chance that we looked in this morning.’ He hesitated for a moment, glanced round as if he was worried somebody was eavesdropping, and added in a quieter voice: ‘All that machinery over there, we couldn’t just leave it lying there. We wanted to move it in here to ...’ he was looking for the right word, ‘to keep it safe.’ And then added hastily: ‘Until the English come to take it away’

  ‘Absolutely’ Stave said in a sarcastic tone of voice. What the old man meant was that they wanted to keep their tools safe until the day when they could get Blohm & Voss back up and running again. But what business was that of his? And that's when you came across the bomb with the dead body lying on it?’

  ‘We could hardly miss it,’ Speck said, his chapped hands shaking slightly. ‘We were shocked.’

  ‘How close did you get? Did you touch anything?’

  They all shook their heads. ‘Touch an unexploded bomb? I’m not that tired of living yet,’ Speck said. ‘We’re forever coming across them. The bomb disposal people could set up shop here, the number of times we’ve had to call them in.’

  ‘So you didn’t go past the entrance?’ the chief inspector asked, glancing at the door lying open at the narrow end of the hangar, further away from the dead body than the hole in the wall they had been taking cover behind.

  Speck nodded. ‘Maybe a couple of paces, then we turned tail.’

  ‘Did you recognise the boy?’

  They all shook their heads again.

  ‘Could he have been an apprentice? An errand boy?’

  ‘No. We’re not allowed to train any more apprentices. What would we be training them for anyway? And we’ve no need for errand boys.’

  Speck dithered for a moment, until Stave gave him an encouraging nod and handed over another cigarette. Then he said, ‘There are always lads running around here. Orphan kids. Refugees. Displaced persons, as they call them. Urchins with no homes and no parents to take them by the scruff of the neck. They steal anything they can get their hands on. You should know that, in the police.’

  The chief inspector sighed. There were between ten and twelve thousand children living in the ruins of Hamburg. Kids of ten, twelve or fourteen years of age who had been the only ones in their families to survive the hail of bombs or the long trek west from homes they’d been expelled from. They stole coal from the freighters, pinched ration cards, worked as lookouts for black market traders or hung around the station selling themselves for sex in exchange for a couple of cigarettes and a bed for the night. Some of them had even gone so far as to kill.

  ‘When the bomb disposal man has done his job, this man here,’ Stave indicated Kienle, ‘will take photos of the dead body. Afterwards he will pass them around the shipyard, and you need to ask all your workmates to take a look. It might be that somebody will recognise him, might have caught him up to something, chased him off. I need to know who he is, where he lived – or at least where he hung out if he was homeless. What he was doing here, in an empty shipyard hangar with a five-hundred-pound English bomb lying in it.’

  After dismissing the workers with a nod, Stave and his colleagues tiptoed back to their cover next to the crane, where the uniformed police were still sitting motionlessly, dripping with sweat and scarcely daring to breathe.

  ‘Why would the dead boy be lying on top of the bomb?’ he asked Czrisini.

  The pathologist coughed, causing the policemen to start with fright, and shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’ll need to take a closer look at the lad, that is, providing the bomb disposal man does his job well enough.’

  ‘It looks as if the murderer deliberately deposited the body on a live bomb to make our investigation all the harder,’ Stave muttered.

  ‘Or wanted to send us a message,’ Kienle replied.

  The chief inspector turned to him in surprise, and the photographer gave an embarrassed smile. ‘A dead boy lying on an English bomb — maybe the killer wanted to make a point? Tell us something? Or maybe it's a signature of some sort?’

  ‘If that's his signature, then I’d appreciate it if he used a typewriter next time,’ the chief inspector replied.

  The bomb disposal man made a gesture towards his colleague who was taking cover alongside the police, then took from his pocket a longish object that looked like a steam hammer of some kind, reduced to the size of a man's forearm, and set it on the far end of the bomb, between the stabiliser fins.

  ‘What's he doing now?’ Stave asked, whispering unintentionally.

  ‘It's got a timer fuse, housed at the end of the bomb,’ the disposal team man replied. ‘Shit things. The English dropped more than 100,000 bombs fitted with them, and one in seven didn’t go off. My grandchildren will still live in fear of the things; that's if I live long enough to have grandchildren.’

  He nodded in the direction of the odd piece of equipment his colleague had produced. ‘That's what we call a “rocket clamp”, the only thing that enables you to deal with a timer fuse. In a normal fuse there's a needle that strikes the charge and sets the whole thing off. But with a timer fuse the needle is held back by steel springs, like a bowstring. Between the needle and the charge there's a little celluloid plate. When the bomb hits, the impact releases acetone from a little glass ampule. The chemical gradually eats away the celluloid and as soon as it does, the needle is released – and BOOM!

  ‘The tricky bit about these things is that you can’t see in. It may be that the acetone was never released and the celluloid plate is still intact, or on the other hand it may equally well be that the plate is long gone and the needle could strike at any moment, but has just got stuck somehow Then one cough might well be enough to set it off. On top of all that the way the detonators are fitted means you can’t just unscrew them. Try that and the answer's the same: BOOM!’

  ‘Who on earth would think up something like that?’ Stave mumbled.

  ‘The same boffins who dreamed up the rocket clamp. It's a sort of specialist spanner that means you can get at the detonator and unscrew it. A lot faster at any rate than a human being could. But most importantly, faster than the detonator can react. Any minute now my colleague is going to set off a tiny explosive charge within the clamp and that will yank the detonator out in one go. The centrifugal force within the rotating detonator will squeeze all the mechanical components together for a fraction of a second, meaning that the released needle will be delayed that tiny bit so that it can no longer detonate the bomb, because by then the detonator will already be out. Most of the time, anyway’

  The chief inspector was staring at him disbelievingly: ‘Sounds a bit like Russian Roulette to me.’

  The bomb disposal man shrugged. ‘There's always the possibility that the detonator got screwed in at an angle, in which case even a rocket clamp won’t get it out quickly enough. Then there's always a chance that the explosive charge in the clamp doesn’t go off properly and it's not fast enough. Nobody can be sure about that. When something like that happens, you can’t exactly ask the disposal man what happened afterwards. This is the one occupation where there's no opportunity to learn from your colleague's mistakes or bad luck.’

  The man in the hangar had by now carefully put the rocket clamp over the pointed tail of the bomb. He could be seen taking a deep breath. Then he made a brief movement, so fast the CID man barely noticed it. There was a short, sharp bang, like a gunshot.

  Involuntarily Stave caught his breath, dropped to the ground and put his hands over his ears.

  Nothing happened.

  Eve
r so slowly, he breathed out, noticing that he was shaking and that there was sweat running into his eyes.

  ‘Good,’ said the bomb disposal man next to him. He was already on his feet, stretching his legs. He waved through the hole in the wall to his colleague inside. ‘The detonator is out. The bomb is now just a big steel tube with a few chemicals inside. No longer a direct threat.’ He glanced at Czrisini. ‘But we’ll have to ask you not to smoke when you’re in there. It would be a pity if a spark were to drop through the detonator hole into the bomb.’

  The pathologist looked bleakly into the hangar and seemed paler than ever under his suntan. Nonetheless he took long drags on his Woodbine until it was down to the tiniest of butts, and then carefully extinguished it.

  Stave dusted himself down and said, ‘Let's go and take a look at our corpse.’

  The chief inspector massaged his left leg as if it had gone to sleep from all the crouching. That way his colleagues wouldn’t think anything of him limping over to the bomb — he was ashamed of the injury he had suffered during the fire storm of 1943, even though he wasn’t quite sure why.

  He shook the hand of the bomb disposal man, who introduced himself as Walter Mai. He was a gaunt man of indeterminate age with glasses and receding hair. He might have been in his mid-thirties or just turned sixty.

  ‘Your hands aren’t even damp,’ Stave remarked.

  ‘I don’t mind this heat,’ Mai replied calmly, with a thin smile. ‘I love this job, but the sight of a dead kid is distracting and I don’t like being distracted.’ Then he gave Stave a serious look and touched his fingers to his cap in farewell, adding: ‘I’d be grateful if you could let me know who this lad was, and who did this to him.’

  ‘I’ll be in touch. But it’ll take longer than it took you to disarm this bomb.’

  ‘I can see it's likely to be a complex job too,’ the disposal expert replied, without the slightest trace of irony in his voice. Then he nodded to his colleague and the pair disappeared into the building.

  The team entered the hangar but took only a few paces, letting Kienle approach the body alone to take his photographs. Every time his flash went off it made Stave flinch nervously. Then Kienle spread white powder all over the area to look for fingerprints. But he shook his head. No such luck. To finish up he took a few more photographs of the dusty concrete floor all around, then called his colleagues over.

  Kienle indicated the grey dust that lay like a carpet on the floor around the bomb. ‘There hasn’t been anyone here for ages. Those footsteps belong to the bomb disposal man,’ he said, nodding at the tracks circling the bomb.

  ‘I could have worked that out for myself,’ Stave muttered.

  Kienle gave him an indulgent smile. ‘The boy and his killer came that way,’ he said, pointing to the traces of footprints coming from a small door at the back of the hall that the CID man hadn’t noticed, maybe an old emergency exit. ‘Two sets of footprints.’

  ‘Means just one killer,’ Stave mused aloud. ‘The other footsteps are noticeably smaller. We’ll check, of course, but I’m pretty sure those belong to the boy.’ He nodded at the boy's plimsolls, an old but well-preserved pair that would have been fashionable a decade earlier.

  ‘Unfortunately the other footsteps have been messed about a lot. There's hardly anything much to be made out between the doorway and the bomb, and the bomb disposal man trampled all over most of them, and set his bag down on them.’

  ‘He had other things on his mind.’

  ‘It’ll still be hard to get anything much from them.’

  ‘But they are obviously larger.’

  Kienle nodded. ‘One man, I’d say. Doesn’t look as if there are tracks of two people or more. There are lots of footprints in the dust around the walls of the hangar. Either the boy or his killer walked up and down over there or, of course, they could belong to the workers who spotted the body Or somebody else altogether. In any case, it's hardly likely we’ll be able to identify them.’

  Stave looked at the ground. ‘It seems as if the boy walked around the bomb. I can see his footsteps all round it, but his killer walked directly from that door to the bomb.’

  ‘Coldblooded,’ Ruge, the uniformed officer, mumbled.

  ‘You find that about child-killers,’ Stave said back to him, tetchily.

  ‘But it's particularly true of our unknown perpetrator in this case,’ the pathologist said. ‘He's a lot more callous than your ordinary murdering thug.’

  Stave looked down at the corpse and tried to force himself not to think of the deceased as a child. He was maybe fourteen years of age: thin, but not undernourished, wiry, deeply suntanned but with bad scratches on his arms. Brown eyes, long, brown, matted hair. Old canvas shoes, shorts, probably from an old Hitler Youth uniform, but dyed dark green, an improvised belt made from a bit of hemp rope. A collarless shirt, much too wide, the way the shipyard workers wore them, dirty, with a tear down the back.

  The boy was lying with his back against the bomb, as if he were leaning on it, his open eyes staring up at the hold in the roof where the thing had crashed through. His backside was on the concrete floor, his legs stretched out in front of him. His arms were at an angle, the left resting on the stabiliser fin of the bomb, the other lying in his lap.

  The chief inspector bent down closer to the victim: ‘Index and middle finger yellow,’ he muttered, pulling out his notebook and making a note.

  ‘Traces of tobacco. He's young to be a chain smoker,’ Crizisini added. ‘Even I was older than that when I started.’

  It was only now that Stave took a look at the wound: a big reddish-brown patch covered the boy's chest as far as his stomach, leaving a crust of dried blood on the bomb, too, and spatters on the ground.

  ‘Looks like a stab wound,’ the pathologist said, ‘although I won’t know for sure until I get his shirt off, but look at this.’ He was pointing at parts of the shirt. ‘There are little bubbles in the blood, bodily fluids, secretions: suggests that either his stomach or throat were injured.’

  ‘There's a lot of blood in general. This is obviously where he was killed,’ Stave noted.

  Czirsini nodded agreement. ‘That's what I mean by “particularly coldblooded”: a murderer who can stab his victim to death on an unexploded bomb. It's a miracle a boy fighting for his life didn’t accidentally set off the detonator.’

  ‘Let's not come to hasty conclusions,’ the chief inspector told him. ‘It could have been that our killer was in such a panic that he couldn’t care less about the risk. Or he hadn’t originally planned to stab the boy. Maybe they only met up here, next to the bomb, got into an argument and he pulled the knife out without thinking.’

  Czrisini pointed at the boy's hands. ‘No sign of injury. No sign of a struggle. The boy looks like a vagabond. Strong, too. He would have fought back if he’d known that somebody was about to stab him. Suggests there wasn’t a fight.’

  ‘Anything else strike you?’

  ‘It would appear the killer is left-handed.’ The pathologist indicated the fan-shaped bloodstains on the bomb. ‘You can still see the way the blood sprayed. If we assume that our killer was standing in front of his victim, then the blow with the knife or other sharp instrument would have come from the left.’

  Stave pulled on thin black gloves and began to search the boy's trouser pockets and his shirt. No money, no papers, neither of which surprised him. Just a screwdriver with a wooden handle and sharpened point in the right-hand pocket of his shorts.

  Stave whistled appreciatively looking at it. ‘A weapon.’

  ‘Unlikely to be the murder weapon. But we’ll soon check that out,’ Czrisini said, coughing. He looked in urgent need of a cigarette. He hands were shaking and he was glancing around impatiently

  ‘He’ll be all yours in a minute, doctor. We’ll take the boy away and I’ll hand in the paperwork for the autopsy to Public Prosecutor Ehrlich.’ Stave bent down once more and pulled a packet of Lucky Strike from the boy's belt. Worth a for
tune in times like these. The pathologist stared at them longingly.

  ‘You’re not putting one of these between your lips,’ the chief inspector warned him off. ‘They could be evidence.’

  ‘I doubt very much some teacher gave him those for doing his homework well,’ Czrisini said quietly.

  ‘A weapon, cigarettes. I wonder what a lad like this was doing in a Blohm & Voss hangar?’ Stave said.

  ‘Especially one that's empty except for an unexploded bomb.’

  ‘Empty now. But maybe there was something here that's gone now. A deserted part of an old shipyard would make a good place to hide something, especially when the English have declared it off-limits and only workers with special passes are allowed in, legally that is. And here we have an apparently empty hangar, of interest to nobody, with an unexploded bomb clearly visible so that anybody passing by would give it a wide berth. If I had something I wanted to hide this would not be a bad place.’

  ‘Providing you were tired enough of living to risk going near an unexploded bomb.’ The pathologist shook his head and pointed to the ground. ‘Footprints but no sign of a box or anything else that might have been here.’

  Stave replied by pointing at the walls. ‘There are hooks and nails you could hang something from all over the place. Maybe that's why there are so many footprints over there. It might be connected.’

  ‘So why did the kid end up in the middle? Well away from any of the walls?’ Czrisini coughed again. ‘I need a Woodbine. Let's go outside, and then I’ll tell you what I think.’

  Stave followed the pathologist. Outside the air shimmered in the heat and the tiles on the walls of the hangars glowed as if they had just come out of an oven. Stave's tongue felt furry and his throat hoarse. The uniformed police looked in a bad way.

  ‘Kienle, take a look around,’ the chief inspector ordered. The he posted Ruge and the other young officers around the barracks, where at least they would get a little bit of a breeze from the Elbe. ‘The hearse will be here soon,’ he said to cheer them up. ‘Then we can all go home.’ There was no sign of any of the workers.