The Wolf Children Read online

  ‘I’d like to know that too,’ Stave muttered, closing the box, feeling like he was closing a coffin.

  ‘Any of his personal belongings missing?’ he asked, though he already knew the answer.

  Greta Boesel and Walter Kümmel shook their heads. ‘There's more in there than I would have imagined,’ she said. ‘How should I know if there's anything missing?’

  ‘We’ll take the box with us,’ the chief inspector said. ‘There might be something that could help us.’ Not exactly correct protocol, he thought to himself, but he didn’t feel like declaring the room off limits and hanging around until uniformed police arrived while he went off to get a warrant from a judge and prosecutor. It was getting stuffy in the apartment.

  ‘Help yourself,’ Greta Boesel said indifferently.

  Stave and MacDonald lifted the box between them.

  ‘It doesn’t exactly weigh much,’ MacDonald commented.

  They put their package in the back seat of the Jeep. There was sweat running down Stave's forehead, though it wasn’t as if he’d exerted himself.

  ‘A family in mourning,’ muttered MacDonald when they had driven a few metres down Fuhlsbüttel Strasse.

  ‘I’d like to know what Boesel is carrying in those trucks of hers driving around the occupation zones,’ Stave replied.

  ‘She has to be picking up her cargoes down at the docks.’

  ‘Well she certainly didn’t pick up that sail hanging over the balcony down in the Alps.’

  ‘Sounds as if we’ll be paying another visit to Frau Boesel.’

  The chief inspector gave him a grim nod. ‘When we find out a bit more about exactly when the murder took place, we’ll go back over her alibi. But, really, why on earth would an aunt murder her nephew in an out-of-bounds dockyard and leave his body on an unexploded bomb? I suppose he might have stolen her cigarettes. He has to have got his hands on those Lucky Strikes we found somehow or other. Maybe he did steal them from her and sent her into a blind rage, but what's that got to do with Blohm & Voss?’ Stave nodded towards the ruins all round them and said: ‘It's not as if there aren’t enough places to murder someone without being seen.’

  ‘And in any case the boy was big and strong. And if we are to take the word of her fiancé he’d also trained with professional boxers. Even if he wasn’t very good, he would have been good enough to defend himself against a woman.’

  ‘Kienle didn’t find any cigarette butts in the Blohm & Voss yard. I can hardly imagine Greta Boesel going anywhere without leaving butts in her wake.’ Stave took off his summer hat, ran his fingers through his hair, feeling the sweat drying on his skin. ‘Even so, there are reasons enough to investigate her: her unusual transport business, the load of cigarettes the boy had ... Something there stinks. And another strange thing: who were his friends? Adolf Winkel-mann was essentially a street kid. But which streets? And who did he hang out with? Where did he spend his days when he didn’t turn up at school? And where did he spend his nights when he didn’t come home?’

  ‘The girls who hang out at the station, the other street kids, Displaced Persons – none of them the sort of people you want behind your back.’

  ‘Certainly not the sort of people a fourteen-year-old, however fly he might be, ought to be hanging out with.’

  The stopped outside HQ.

  ‘Are you coming into the office?’ Stave asked. ‘I can invite you for a glass of water. Sorry I have nothing better to offer, but in this heat it helps. And I can also promise to close the door to Frau Berg's office for at least five minutes.’

  ‘Very kind of you. I’ll come and spirit Erna away later, but right now I have a meeting with Governor Berry’

  ‘I imagine he’ll be interested to hear your interim report.’

  ‘He’ll be disappointed to get an interim report at all, rather than hearing that we’ve cleared up the whole business and can close the file. Very disappointed indeed.’

  Stave left the office that evening determined not to think about the dead boy for several hours at least. He went into a flower shop on a side street and bought ten red roses. Passing the Reichsmark notes over the counter, he felt as if he had got a bit of normality back into his life. The roses had bloomed early in the warm spring weather and you could get them anywhere without a ration card, without having to queue up or do a deal on the black market. When had he last bought something frivolous and useless?

  He cradled the roses carefully, the way he’d cradle a small child, inhaling their perfume as he walked quickly down the street. Before long he was outside the Garrison Theatre next to the main station. It had previously been the Deutsches Schauspielhaus and when he could afford it he and Margarethe had bought tickets towards the rear. Nowadays British officers came here to listen to jazz and watch Noel Coward comedies performed by theatre companies from London with names that sounded like they’d been founded in the Middle Ages. There were warning placards outside the main entrance proclaiming ‘Out of Bounds for German Civilians’.

  He had arranged to meet Anna here and just the thought of her brought a smile to his face. He would never refer to her as his fiancée, certainly not after the comedy he’d witnessed this afternoon. Would she one day be his wife? He still knew next to nothing about her. They had only been a couple for a few months. He knew she was originally from Königsberg, that she had family there, parents at least and maybe other relatives. But also that none of them had reached the west. Or even whether or not they were still alive? Maybe one day she would tell him about her family. And then maybe he would wish she hadn’t.

  Yesterday she had revealed, partly in passing, and with some embarrassment, that today, 30 May, was her birthday. I won’t forget that, Stave had told himself: I’m good with dates. There was no sign of her as yet: he had got there too early.

  And then he caught sight of her: slim, with long dark hair and almond-shaped eyes, wearing an old but elegant dress, and with a worn little leather case in one hand. She could easily have been taken for a passenger on her way to catch a train. But Stave smiled knowingly to himself and retreated a few steps into the shadow of the station entrance. He knew that brisk, sprightly gait wasn’t a mark of self-confidence or the fact she was in a hurry: it was a reflection of her nervousness.

  She was about to do a bit of small – but illegal – business.

  Anna was right in front of the theatre now, her skirt brushing against the placard with the harsh English warning. An elderly, bespectacled British officer emerged from the theatre and took a few steps over to Anna. The pair exchanged a few words. She moved from one foot to the other and glanced around. She might as well have had a placard of her own around her neck declaring ‘Illegal Business in Process,’ Stave thought to himself. An old member of the East Prussian upper class doing black market business in Hamburg, it just didn’t work. Stave was amazed that Anna hadn’t been arrested more often by some of his colleagues. She looted the city's ruins for bits of jewellery, old paintings, antique books, bits of furniture, watches, and then restored them as best she could and sold them on to officers in the occupation forces. They paid her ludicrously low prices in Reichsmarks which they could get in thick wads in exchange for a few of their pound notes, or gave her cigarettes or chocolate they got rations for. But for Germans these were riches; Anna had been living on deals like this for a good two years now.

  She opened her case and took out a little clock, the sort that might have stood on someone's mantelpiece, with a dark wooden and brass surround about the length of her forearm, and a large dial. The captain nodded and Anna put it back in the case and handed it to him. He took out a wad of Reichsmarks and handed them to her, before turning round and going back into the Garrison Theatre. Anna took a deep breath.

  ‘Police, CID,’ Stave said, just loud enough to hear as he emerged from the shadow.

  She jumped, spun around and then smiled in relief when she saw him, a look of affection on her face.

  Stave handed the roses to her: ‘Happy
Birthday.’

  She hugged him, gave him a kiss, embarrassing him out here on the street. One of his colleagues might have seen them. She beamed and said, ‘The first birthday present I’ve had in three years.’

  Stave wondered who had given her the last one, back in 1944, but quickly dismissed the thought. He whispered in her ear, ‘I have another one for you: the Schulzes downstairs have gone off to their allotment shed.’

  ‘You mean you have no neighbours this evening?’

  ‘No tonight.’

  She took his arm. ‘Seems it's my lucky day.’

  ‘We might even get a bit of a breeze this evening. We could open the balcony door and cool down.’

  ‘We might need to,’ she replied, staring him in the eye.

  Stave could feel himself blush. ‘Good bit of business?’ he asked, just to change the subject.

  ‘Four hundred Reichsmarks.’

  The chief inspector clicked his tongue: ‘That’ll buy two pounds of butter on the black market, more or less.’

  ‘A good enough price for an old clock I only had to polish up a bit. The thing still worked perfectly. Amazing really! I found it in Rothenburgsort. A whole house had collapsed, four or five storeys it must have been. Looked as if it had burnt down. The snow, rain and heat of the past two years hadn’t done too much damage. I cleared away a few bricks and found the clock in the middle of the rubble, as if somebody had deliberately left it there. Even the key to wind it up was on a hook in the casing. I put it in, turned it and the thing started ticking, just sitting there in the rubble. So loudly in fact, that I grabbed it and made off as quick as I could. But I’ll go back and take another look around.’

  ‘One of these days somebody's going to spot you and arrest you.’

  She laughed: ‘Oh, I have good contacts in the police!’ Then she said, ‘Let's not take the tram. We can walk to your place. I enjoy linking arms with you and feeling the sun on my face. It makes me glad to be still alive.’

  With Anna on his arm, Stave felt as if the city was suddenly a brighter place. He became aware of the elder bushes by the side of the street and among the piles of rubble, white and pale yellow patches of blossom amid the grey and brown of the city, a note of fragrance, the noisy street urchins running past them, heading for a dip in one of the city's outdoor pools, or maybe just in the canals that flowed into the Alster, two girls sharing an ice cream, taking turns to have a lick, slowly, their eyes closed as they did. An old couple walking along, hand in hand like teenagers in love.

  Stave felt he could shout aloud with happiness, but at the same time he choked up with sadness when he thought of all those who had not survived to see this spring. And then he corrected himself: it was not sadness, it was guilt. Guilt that he had made it through to see the joys of peace. What had he done to merit such happiness? He knew the answer to that one, had brooded on it time and again ever since a bomb dropped by a British aircraft had taken his wife while he had survived. He had done nothing to merit survival: it had been blind luck, an accident of fate, or maybe just a wicked joke by the angel of death that took the lives of tens of thousands only to let the odd individual escape.

  At least make the best of it, he told himself. It wasn’t just him: there was also his son, Karl, and the killer he was now hunting. There was more than enough for him to do, to atone for his luck: not least arresting a child-killer.

  Stave had sworn to himself he would not bend his lover's ear on her birthday, of all days, with true crime stories, but suddenly it all came tumbling out. For an hour, as they strolled along together, he told her the story of Adolf Winkelmann, the unexploded bomb, Greta Boesel and her fiancé, cigarette packets hidden beneath underwear and bare walls without a single family photograph.

  ‘It happens: people can lose it all,’ Anna von Veckinhausen replied without meeting his eyes.

  Stave was suddenly overcome by embarrassment, realising that he had never seen a photograph of any member of her family. ‘I wasn’t trying to make a point,’ he stuttered.

  She turned and smiled at him: ‘Sometimes people can win too,’ she said.

  Eventually they reached the building on Ahrensburger Strasse where Stave had his apartment on the fourth floor. He had tried to do it up a bit since he had met Anna. He had scraped away patches of peeling wallpaper one Saturday, and gone off to the black market to get some oil paint, war material, probably stolen from one of the docks, from what was written on the tin. White, the colour they used to paint steamer ships. And bright yellow, probably for warning signs. He had mixed the two to give a pale yellow, which he used to paint the bare walls. He had ended up with a few blotches here and there and it wasn’t exactly uniform in shade, but at least his apartment now felt brighter, and also felt nearly twice as large, particularly in the summer sunlight.

  Anna had liked it. She had laughed when she first saw the flowers he had displayed in a jam jar on the window sill, and on her next visit brought him a white porcelain vase she had found on one of her looting expeditions.

  This time she complimented him on what he had done on the balcony, then went into his tiny kitchen and fired up his little camp stove. He had got hold of some commercially produced sausages from the butcher's, not exactly delicatessen produce: they contained 10 per cent whale meat and 5 per cent bone meal, at least officially – there was probably more of each. He had also got some sausage broth, the water in which they had been cooked. That was cheap, even if there was a bit of fat floating in it. Add a couple of watery potatoes, a couple of leeks and some nettles for flavour, a couple of the semolina dumplings people called ‘cement blocks’, a bit of crumbly bread made with wheat, barley, corn and chalk dust, and to drink: water, albeit in a pair of champagne glasses Anna had found in the rubble.

  It made Stave think back to what he would have eaten on a hot day like this when he was a child: chilled soup made from sour cherries with cinnamon, soup made from fresh berries with apple and bread dumplings. It would be a while before he could taste things like that again.

  He took their scant dinner out on to the balcony. ‘You’re a miracle worker,’ Anna exclaimed. It took him a minute or two to work out she wasn’t being sarcastic.

  They chatted about this and that, nothing in particular, toasted one another as if there really was champagne in their glasses, and made the most of every sip, every bite. The sun was setting on the horizon, casting a red glow over the houses, over the ruins, as if there was still one last incendiary bomb burning somewhere out there.

  ‘I have one more little surprise,’ Stave said, disappearing back into the kitchen. He came back with a bar of American chocolate.

  Anna glanced back and forth at Stave and the chocolate bar, which he was holding out on a cushion as if it were a piece of valuable jewellery. ‘Chief Inspector!’ she gasped. ‘I am shocked. This has to have been acquired illegally.’

  ‘Not at all, the most legal source you can imagine: Dr Ehrlich, the public prosecutor has good contacts in England.’

  ‘And you have a good contact in the public prosecutor,’ she replied with a smile.

  Later they lay together in bed, naked and exhausted from the exertions of their lovemaking. Anna sighed in her sleep. Stave took her gently in his arms, then turned his head to look out the open window. There was not a breath of air to be felt. Hamburg at night was still as dark as it had been during the blackout. But it was no longer as quiet as it used to be in those dark days. He could hear a woman laughing, music from a gramophone, a waltz, faint, a bit wobbly — the record must have got bent by heat. The cry of stray cats, in lust or anger, the squeaking of a rat, the bellowing of some drunk. Stave tried to make it out: it sounded a bit like the Nazi Horst Wessel anthem. Was it all coming from other people's open windows? Or were people no longer obeying the British curfew that forbade them going out on the streets after midnight?

  He stroked Anna's shoulder softly. What would happen when his son came back from the POW camp in Russia? Or when another Veckinhausen
family member from the east turned up? When things got back to what used to be normal? When they might once again have clean apartments to live in? When they would have cold berry soup again? Maybe this small moment of happiness was as good as it would ever get, the one moment in all the chaos when something that ought to be impossible was possible, and that at any time could be blown away?

  Just be happy you’re still alive, he told himself. Be happy Anna is lying next to you, and that Karl came through the war alive. Just be happy.

  He kept staring out of the window, remembering the nightmares he used to have, in which he saw his wife Margarethe burning to death, horribly. He would wake up, soaked in sweat, sometimes screaming aloud. He had never told Anna about them, and didn’t want to scare her by letting something like that happen again. Instead he forced himself to lie there with eyes wide open, listening to the sounds of the night until the ruins outside began to reflect the first grey light of dawn.

  * Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe.

  * The Nazi organisation for younger children aged 6-10.

  Home and Work

  Saturday, 31 May 1947

  They took breakfast together on the balcony. It all seemed incredibly normal, even if the coffee was bitter and made from chicory and they had just watery Quark yoghurt to spread on their bread.

  ‘You look tired,’ Anna said considerately.

  ‘My face always looks like a rumpled overcoat first thing in the morning,’ Stave replied off-handedly. ‘That's not going to change until we get real coffee again.’

  ‘I’ve heard they’re going to increase our food rations.’

  ‘Just rumours.’

  ‘It's been two years since the war ended. I’ve got myself an apartment. Out of a Nissen hut and into a basement. Another two years and maybe I’ll have an allotment garden shed!’

  ‘Maybe you’ll have your country estate back,’ Stave ventured, immediately biting his tongue for being so nosy about her past.