The Murderer in Ruins Read online

  The lieutenant just nodded.

  ‘How is it you speak such good German?’ Stave asked him, trying to steer the conversation away from himself, and because he couldn’t think of anything else to ask. He had to repeat it, louder, to make himself heard over the noise of the engine.

  ‘I learned it at university, Oriel College, Oxford. I was actually studying history but my special subject was Prussia. I did my master’s degree on Bismarck’s attitude towards Great Britain in the years prior to 1870. I even came to Berlin to study some documents.’

  ‘You did all of that before the outbreak of the war? How old are you then?’

  MacDonald laughed. ‘I was a Christmas baby, born on 24 December 1920. I was in Berlin during my first year at university, aged just 18. That was the summer of 1939. I had intended to stay for a few months, but in August it was becoming ever more clear that war was likely, so I upped sticks and left. There are probably a few books of mine gathering dust in a rented room somewhere. Unless, of course, the rented room has been burnt to the ground.’

  ‘Why did you settle on the history of Prussia? A pretty esoteric subject in Oxford, I’d imagine.’

  ‘Esoteric subjects are what Oxford is all about,’ MacDonald replied with a nostalgic smile. Then all of a sudden he turned serious.

  ‘Do you have any idea what it’s like living in a society based on class, Chief Inspector? Earls and dukes, exclusive private schools, London clubs, stiff upper lips, ancestors who came over with William the Conqueror?’

  Stave shook his head, and then, to his own surprise, nodded. ‘Here we had party members, German blood or non-Aryan; you didn’t need to have aristocratic ancestors, but it helped in a big way if you’d been on the 1923 demonstration at the Feldherrnhalle in Munich or at least had joined the party before 1933.’

  ‘But you didn’t join in any of that.’

  ‘I had German blood, nothing I could do about that, but the party? No thanks.’

  MacDonald stared silently ahead. On either side of the street lay slabs of concrete, piles of fallen roof tiles and twisted piping like some surreal sculpture. One four-storey façade stood on its own, with torn curtains flapping in the wind like flags. Then came an area completely cleared of rubble with two dozen Nissen huts standing on it, like corrugated iron pipes cut down the middle: barracks put up by the Brits as emergency housing for the homeless.

  ‘I wasn’t born with a stiff upper lip,’ the lieutenant said eventually. ‘My parents have a junk shop in Lockerbie, a little town in the south of Scotland. But I didn’t want to spend my life in a nowhere. I studied hard and won a scholarship to Oxford. Then I chose German history because I was sure that sooner or later we’d be at war with you again. It was obvious that after the First World War you still held a grudge against us. I said to myself: know your enemy, that way you can be useful to your country.’

  ‘Seems to have worked all right,’ Stave muttered.

  MacDonald smiled. ‘At first I wondered if maybe I shouldn’t have stayed in Berlin that summer of 1939. Hitler looked certain to win. But things worked out differently and so here I am, in Hamburg. You might not believe me, Chief Inspector, but even in the state it’s in now, I prefer this city to the dump I grew up in.’

  ‘You’re right; I don’t believe you,’ Stave replied wearily. ‘Straight ahead, on your right. We’re nearly there. At least I imagine our cemetery is bigger than Lockerbie’s.’

  They stopped by the low, wide entrance gate. Before the war the cemetery had been a big, beautiful park with roads running through it, and even bus stops. Now nearly all the trees and shrubbery had been hacked to the ground for firewood, and many of the graves had gone to ruin because nobody had the strength or energy to look after them, or often because there just wasn’t anybody left.

  Stave and MacDonald strolled along a straight path that led to the centre of Öjendorf Cemetery. There were a lot of fresh graves, the chief inspector noted. Then he noticed a grove, like a little garden within the cemetery, for cremation urns with flowers next to them. There were no recent ones; these days nobody was about to waste expensive fuel on burning dead bodies. In the midst of the garden was a bronze statue of a female mourner, seated. Amazing that hasn’t been stolen yet, Stave thought.

  The statue suddenly made him think of Margarethe, even though there was no facial resemblance to his late wife. He turned away so the lieutenant wouldn’t notice him struggling to maintain his composure. Margarethe was buried in Öjendorf Cemetery but Stave couldn’t face going to visit her grave with the lieutenant. He said nothing and just quickened his pace.

  They arrived in time to see a tired pastor, two coffin bearers, and an open grave. The ground all around was frozen to about a metre below the surface. Stave wondered how they’d managed to dig a hole; with pickaxes rather than spades in all likelihood.

  The pastor mumbled a prayer, holding a black bible in hands that were blue with cold. He was in a hurry. Stave couldn’t make out a word he said. He and the lieutenant remained in the background, discreetly glancing around them. There was nobody else to be seen. The pall-bearers dragged the coffin over to the graveside and laid it on two planks. Then they opened it and the body wrapped in a grey cloth tumbled out as if falling through a trap door and hit the earth with a dull thump. In the silence it was frighteningly loud. The two men put the lid back on the re-usable coffin and carried it off. They would need it again; that saved wood too. The pastor nodded to Stave and MacDonald and walked off.

  ‘We needn’t have bothered,’ the lieutenant murmured, clapping his hands together.

  ‘It was worth a try,’ Stave said. But his voice was muted.

  An Old Man

  Saturday, 25 January 1947

  Stave was sitting in the twilight in his flat, warming his hands on a cup of steaming ersatz coffee, slowly sipping at the bitter liquid. He should really have been up and out long ago, walking the platforms of the main station from early morning, asking for news of his son.

  Karl was their only child. They would have liked more, Margarethe and he, but there had just been the one; the doctors never found out why. Karl would be 19 now, Stave thought to himself. If he was still alive, that was.

  He wished they hadn’t argued back then when Karl volunteered for the front. Youthful idealism. Bravery. Or just because he despised his father? He had to try to find him.

  But on the other hand, Stave was tired. True, he had got out of bed early enough, out of habit, but he’d rearranged the furniture a bit, and chewed on some dry bread with a bit of thin yoghurt. Breakfast and lunch all together. By now it was already past two o’clock in the afternoon and he still hadn’t left the house. He was afraid he would spend yet another weekend searching in vain for his son, afraid of stopping one shabby figure after another to ask in vain if they might know or have seen him, afraid of the empty looks, the shrugs of indifference.

  And then the past week at work had got to him. Nothing. Nothing at all. Nobody had responded to the poster offering a reward, not even the usual crazies who as a rule never missed a chance. It had probably been too cold, even for a nutcase, to go out to the nearest police station. But was it really possible, that a young woman could go missing in the middle of Hamburg without anyone noticing? Even if she had no family, no friends, surely there was a neighbour who would recognise her. Stave knew what it was like in the Hochbunker and the other places where people took refuge. If anyone left, their place was taken immediately, as if they’d never been there. But surely the photograph on the poster would have driven even the most hardened bunker-dweller to go to the police.

  Breuer and Ehrlich had left him to it, but the chief inspector knew they expected him to turn something up. But what? He had no idea. He felt at his wits’ end, frozen cold and most of all would have liked to just curl up under the blanket on his bed.

  So he was almost relieved when there was a knock at the door. He would have to get up to answer it, whoever it was.

  When he opened the
door to Ruge, Stave knew he could no longer hide away from the real world. The young beat policemen stood up straight and took a deep breath, but the chief inspector interrupted whatever he was about to say.

  ‘If you’ve come to report the discovery of another corpse, then come in before you say anything,’ he said quietly. ‘No need to announce it to all and sundry in the stairwell.’

  The young man gave an embarrassed smile, entered the narrow hallway and removed his cap. ‘I’m sorry, Chief Inspector, it always seems to happen when I’m on duty. I hope that doesn’t start to make me a suspect.’

  ‘Don’t count your chickens,’ Stave growled, grabbing his gun, coat, hat and scarf, managing at the same time to offer Ruge a cigarette.

  This time he didn’t hesitate and took it with a nod of thanks.

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Lappenbergs Allee, Eimsbüttel.’

  ‘That’s way over in the west. Why do I have to attend?’

  ‘The victim is naked, Chief Inspector. And it looks like he’s been strangled. But this time it’s an old man.’

  ‘That’s a bit different,’ Stave muttered, pushing open the apartment door. ‘Have Maschke and MacDonald already been informed?’

  ‘Word’s on the way to them now. Herr Breuer wants them all to turn up at the scene. He’s going to be there too.’

  That’ll be fun, Stave thought. By the time they got to the scene, on the far side of the Alster, it would be dark; not exactly the best time of day to carry out a search, not least when the boss is watching.

  Within a few minutes they were on their way, once more in the old Mercedes with the clunking engine. Stave stared out of the window, trying to find a connection between the killings: both were naked, both had been strangled. But why a young woman and then an old man? What was the link? He suddenly felt ill. It was just hunger and the stale air in the car, he told himself, but he realised there was something else: the ghost of fear.

  It was more then 11 kilometres from Wandsbek to Eimsbüttel. Even though Ruge was pushing the Mercedes to the limit, bouncing over potholes and swerving around huge bomb craters, it still took them nearly half an hour. When they finally stopped, Stave was relieved to open the door and climb out. He took deep breaths to get rid of the feeling of nausea in the pit of his stomach, then looked around; this was another working-class district, heavily bombed in the war. The trees along Lappenbergs Allee had either been burnt to the ground or chopped down for firewood. Behind them had been four-storey sandstone apartment blocks, all now destroyed. The previous summer work gangs had gone round pulling down the remaining walls and façades because they were in danger of collapse. Now the area was a bizarre wasteland of rubble and roofing tiles in piles three, five or even ten metres high, with bits of guttering, tangled wiring and ceiling beams protruding from them. Trampled footpaths led here and there between them. The nearest buildings still standing, as far as Stave could make out, were some 150 yards away.

  A jeep screeched to a halt almost immediately behind the Mercedes, so close that for a moment Stave imagined it was going to crash into it. MacDonald climbed out and nodded to them. Better than a military salute, Stave thought.

  ‘Have you ever seen a murder victim before, Lieutenant?’ Stave asked. He wanted to prepare the man in case he keeled over at the sight.

  But MacDonald seemed unflustered. ‘I suppose you could say so: I buried enough bodies during the war. But then again, no, insofar as soldiers obviously see things differently to the way the police do.’

  Stave gave a mirthless smile and nodded in the direction of the pool of light created by two generator-powered spotlights set up between the piles of rubble. They could hear the hum of the generator. ‘I guess it’s over there.’

  They followed a track that led from Lappenbergs Allee around a huge heap of ruins. After barely a dozen paces the track was already out of sight of the main road. They passed another couple of piles of rubble and then a bomb crater about one and a half metres deep filled with ice and a dented petrol canister lying in it.

  The body lay next to it.

  Two uniformed policemen were standing in the flickering glare of the spotlights; another was bending over the generator, while a photographer was setting up his kit. Maschke was walking up and down a little further away, smoking. Doctor Czrisini was taking off his suede gloves and replacing them with long rubber ones.

  ‘Definitely not a sex crime anyway,’ he said, nodding to Stave and at the body.

  ‘Maybe I should recommend you for my job if I get tired of it,’ the chief inspector replied.

  ‘Yeah, we could swap!’ Czrisini said with a laugh.

  They bent down to take a look at the body. It was an old man, 65 to 70 years old, Stave reckoned. A short man, about 1.60 metres, slim, but not undernourished. His hands were not those of a working man. He was lying on his back, as if taking a rest, feet close together, his left hand to one side, open, the other behind his rear end. The body was frozen solid and covered with a fine layer of snow, as if dusted with icing sugar. The pale flesh beneath already showing signs of blood settlement.

  The pathologist looked at the man’s head. He had a full, grey, bushy beard, a large, slightly hooked nose. The eyes were closed. When Stave looked closer he realised they were swollen, as if after a fight.

  ‘There’s blood in both ears,’ Crzisini said in a calm voice. ‘A small wound to the chin, eyes and forehead swollen from blows. The man was beaten either with a blunt object or with fists.’

  ‘Beaten to death?’

  The pathologist shook his head. ‘I’ll only know for sure after the autopsy, but I reckon the beating was just to waken him. He may have been knocked down, might have lost consciousness.’ He indicated the body’s left hand. ‘Abrasions. It would seem he tried to defend himself, at first at least. Then he gave up. Do you see the fine line around his throat? He’s been strangled, with a wire loop, I’d say.’

  Stave closed his eyes. ‘The man was attacked either front on or from one side, beaten to the ground with a hail of blows and then when he could no longer defend himself, strangled. He had probably lost consciousness by then.’

  Crzisini pointed to a rectangular iron bar as long as his forearm, lying in the dirt near the head of the corpse. ‘The dark colour on that iron bar is probably blood.’

  ‘The murder weapon, then?’

  ‘Maybe. But it might just have been lying there and blood spattered on it when he fell.’

  Stave wished it were still daylight. Apart from anything the flickering of the spotlight was hurting his eyes; there were shadows dancing everywhere amidst the ruins, and the drone of the generator made his head ache.

  They waited until the photographer had taken the first few pictures, then Czrisini bent down and touched the body carefully, opening his eyelids. ‘Blue eyes,’ he noted. Using both hands he pulled the man’s lower jaw down. ‘No teeth. I assume he had dentures.’

  Systematically, he examined the rest of the body from head to toe. ‘Small wart on the left hip,’ he noted. ‘Signs of a hernia, enlarged scrotum. Normally that would require a truss, and it would still cause problems walking.’

  Stave looked silently over at the edge of the bomb crater. There was a dark-brown polished bamboo walking stick lying there, with a carved handle, covered in a layer of snow as fine as that covering the body.

  ‘That might have been his walking stick,’ he mumbled.

  The flickering light briefly caught a metal button lying next to the body. When they finally got the corpse on to a stretcher, they found a leather strap under the body, like that of a rucksack.

  Then Stave noticed something small and shiny on the ground just about where the dead man’s shoulder had been. He bent down and picked it up. It was a medallion, made of silver, no bigger than a tiny coin, on a thin, broken chain, also made of silver.

  ‘The killer must have missed that when he stripped him,’ Czrisini suggested.

  Stave stared at the tiny circle in
his gloved fist, took it closer to the spotlight, silently cursing the flicker. The reverse of the medallion was plain, polished smooth by long contact with the wearer’s skin. But the front bore a cross, standing on a sort of jagged hill, maybe a cliff even, and at an angle on either side two other objects that Stave thought at first might also be crosses.

  The pathologist came over, pointed to the two objects and said, ‘Those are daggers.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Longer than a knife, shorter than a sword. Classic, elongated, slightly oval blade shape.’

  ‘That means the blades of both daggers are pointed towards the cross.’

  ‘Curious, isn’t it? Never seen anything like it.’

  Stave stared at the medallion. Czrisini was right, he thought to himself. Daggers and a cross. What was that all about? He slid the object into a paper bag. A clue, he thought. Finally, a first clue. The only question was, what did it mean? ‘How long do you reckon he’s been lying here?’

  The pathologist shrugged. ‘At least a day, going by the settlement of blood in the body, maybe longer. It’s hard to be certain with these Siberian temperatures.’

  ‘The same length of time as the body found in Baustrasse?’

  Czrisini looked him in the eyes for a moment and said, ‘It is possible that they may have been killed around the same time.’

  ‘What do you think, Lieutenant?’ Stave asked, as Czrisini made a pained face, removing his clammy rubber gloves.

  MacDonald had been watching them silently from a discreet distance. ‘The poor sod’s making his way through the ruins, where the murderer is lurking in wait for him. He comes out, beats him to the ground, strangles him and strips him.’

  Stave scratched his head. ‘Would an old man wearing a truss and using a walking stick take an uneven path like this?’

  The lieutenant smiled in acknowledgement of Stave’s point. ‘In his position I would feel safer on the cleared streets. So you reckon he was going down Lappenbergs Allee, his attacker beat him to the ground there, then dragged the defenceless man over here, where nobody would see him, to finish him off?’