The Murderer in Ruins Page 9

  ‘It might well be something to do with the black market,’ MacDonald agreed.

  ‘Every damn crime in Hamburg is something to do with the black market,’ Maschke retorted. ‘But we have nothing else to go on. Maybe they were both looters, and one became competition for the other vying for the best patch of rubble to loot. It could be as simple as that.’

  Stave nodded. ‘It’s a possibility. But there are others. We have hundreds of missing person cases in town. It would seem that not one of them corresponds to the young woman, and we won’t know about the old man until tomorrow at the earliest. Perhaps we’ll find some sort of common factor amongst the missing person cases.’

  MacDonald raised an eyebrow. He obviously wasn’t following Stave’s line of thought. ‘What sort of common factor?’ he asked.

  The chief inspector shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea. Maybe we’ll find out that lots of young women have gone missing recently. Or lots of old men. Or that one of our missing person cases was related to a young woman and an old man. What do I know?’

  ‘Sounds like a pretty vague line of inquiry to me,’ the lieutenant said.

  Stave paid him no attention, but he knew he was right. ‘And then there are the DPs, people with no roots here,’ he added. ‘People with nothing more to lose. People who remain unidentified even to the Allied command, people whose movements go unchecked because nobody is interested in them or their business. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that nobody from Hamburg recognised the picture on the poster?’

  ‘But we put the posters up in the DP camps,’ Maschke said. ‘People there live cheek by jowl. Somebody would have recognised the victim. And even if none of the DPs wanted to speak up, either because they are afraid or don’t trust the German authorities, a British overseer would surely have recognised her.’

  Maschke hauled himself to his feet and began pacing up and down. He’s not happy, Stave thought to himself, probably because he’s realised we haven’t a single decent lead, and the only thing we can be relatively certain of is that sex isn’t involved. That means the investigation might have no need of someone from vice and we’ll send him back to his pimps, Stave reckoned, almost feeling sorry for Maschke.

  ‘Right then,’ he said aloud, just for the sake of it, ‘let’s admit we don’t really have a clue, literally, for now at least. Therefore we should take every theory seriously, no matter now vague. I’ll organise a major raid on the black market dealers. This coming Monday. We’ll grab a few dealers off the streets and see what we come up with – maybe a rucksack with one strap missing. Or another medallion with a cross and two daggers. Or a spare truss.’

  The other two laughed.

  ‘You, Lieutenant, will look through the missing persons files. Maybe you’ll find some sort of pattern. Don’t be afraid to come forward with anything that strikes you, no matter how improbable it might seem. You never know. And you, Maschke, go round the dentists. And check in with the Street Clearance and Rebuilding Department up at Heiligengeistfeld; the people there are in charge of everything concerned with clearing the rubble and getting rebuilding under way. If anybody’s heard about turf wars amongst the looters, it’ll be the rubble boys.’

  I may not like you, but I’m keeping you on board, Stave thought inwardly. Maschke gave a smile of relief.

  ‘Good idea,’ the vice squad man said.

  Maschke and MacDonald left the room. Stave nodded to his secretary before closing the door after them and said apologetically, ‘I’m afraid I’m going to need you in a minute.’

  He sat down behind his desk. Time for the bloody paperwork. He opened a new file, for the second murder, and wrote out by hand the details of the corpse’s discovery, then the text for a new poster asking for information. And finally the autopsy request.

  When he finally got to his feet to take the pile of papers out to his secretary, he stopped dead in the doorway. MacDonald was still there, chatting away to Erna Berg. They both fell silent mid-sentence at the sight of him, red with embarrassment, just like a pair of teenagers. This could be entertaining, Stave thought. But at the same time he felt something not unlike a pang of jealousy. Only a pinprick, not a dagger plunged into his heart. But even so. Absurd, he told himself.

  Stave handed his secretary the documents to be typed up, grabbed his hat and coat, muttered a few meaningless phrases and left the room. The minute he closed the door behind him he could hear the conversation resume, as if someone had dropped a record player needle back in the same spinning groove in the vinyl.

  It was Saturday evening. Once upon a time he would have been on his way home with Margarethe and the boy after a paddle steamer trip up the Alster or a long walk along the banks of the Elbe. They would have sent Karl off to bed – knowing perfectly well that as soon as his parents had left the room he would have turned the light back on and immersed himself in some crime novel. Then Margarethe and he would have gone out, to a restaurant maybe, or the cinema. And then later…

  What a load of sentimental nonsense, Stave told himself. I must be getting old. Or I’ve got maudlin from seeing too many dead bodies of late. He wandered around town at random, through Rotherbaum and Harvestehude, districts that had hardly been scratched, pleasant urban villas, peaceful and calm. There were some streets where you wouldn’t even have believed there had ever been a war – that was, if you ignored the British jeeps parked in the driveways. The driveways of villas that had been commandeered.

  Still, the thought suddenly struck him that the rich had it good. Then he told himself there was no point in replacing one daft line of thought with another.

  He must have been wandering about like that for half an hour or so before he found himself on Hoheluft Chaussee with his back to the partly demolished elevated railway station, though there had been no trains running for months now.

  Stave shivered. The Hoheluft Chausee was a four-lane dual carriageway but the buildings on either side were not particularly striking. Stave picked up speed along the pavement. He had a goal now. The Capitol. It was a cinema he and Margarethe used to go to. It had survived undamaged and had re-opened. There was no electricity for the elevated railway, but there was for the cinema. People had to prioritise.

  He almost ran the 300 metres from the stop to the Capitol. There was no neon lighting, just a poster he could hardly make out in the dark. But the cashier’s office was lit up. He bought a ticket and went in without even asking what film was showing. Who cares; all that mattered was that inside he could warm up. And kill time.

  First up was The World in Film: the weekly news, pictures from Moscow and London. Stave let them wash over him. A British warship in some port or other, India maybe, Stalin in uniform. Stave was gradually thawing out. Suddenly, right at the end, there were images of children, nameless unidentified refugee children who had been picked up in Hamburg. The authorities put their photos on the screen in the hope of getting in touch with their parents or other relatives. Four different unidentified children every day. What must it be like to nip into some cinema and suddenly find a photo up on the big screen of your own child, a child you’d maybe long ago given up for dead? A chill ran down Stave’s spine. And at the same time he found himself absurdly wishing Karl might appear on the screen.

  The main film was 17 Grosse Freiheit, a 1944 musical set on the street of the same name in Hamburg. Starring Hans Albers and Ilse Werner. Just like in the old days. Stave dozed off.

  It was late by the time the lights went up again, flickering as ever. Most people were in a hurry to get out. Stave glanced at his watch: it was just before 11 p.m. It would be midnight soon, after which nobody was allowed to leave their home before 4.30 a.m. The English word ‘curfew’ had entered current usage in German.

  Purely out of routine Stave fumbled in his jacket pocket to check he had his papers, including the police ID that allowed him to be out on the streets during the hours of curfew. They were all there. They always were. So he had no need to hurry. He slowly put on his overcoat, wrapped h
is scarf around his neck and pulled his collar up high, then put on his hat, pulling the brim low on his forehead, and finally his tight leather gloves. He had a long walk ahead of him to the other side of the Alster. But he could take his time.

  He wondered if the lieutenant had had a pleasant evening. With Erna Berg perhaps? He liked MacDonald. There were people in Hamburg, young lads, some of them fresh out of POW camps, who would mug British soldiers on dark street corners, out of ‘national pride’ as they called it. But they didn’t dare do anything worse.

  Stave didn’t hate the occupying army, even though it had been an English bomb that had taken his wife from him. He felt more ashamed of the crimes committed by the Nazi regime and in a perverse sort of way was relieved that both his city and his life lay in ruins. It was just punishment of a sort. And now maybe it was time for a fresh start.

  As he strode briskly down the road to keep warm, his thoughts turned from MacDonald to Maschke. He knew no more about him than he did about the British lieutenant. And he found him a lot less likeable. Why though? Stave didn’t like the vice squad man’s attitude: his cynicism, his sarcasm, his sour grapes, his lack of respect for other people. Maybe that was the way you turned out when you had to deal with prostitutes, pimps and madams every day, he thought to himself. And when you still lived at home with your mother.

  If things go on like this, the thought suddenly struck Stave, who knows where they’ll transfer me to? Immediately he revisited his instinctive disdain for the vice squad man. He had two murders and not one lead. Everybody was expecting him to deliver results: Ehrlich, Breuer, the mayor even. He was expecting it of himself, goddamnit. I’m no rookie in this business, he told himself.

  And there was one other thing nagging at him: what if this was just the beginning of something? If it proved to be a genuine serial killer at work? If again and again they kept finding out there in the ruins the naked bodies of strangled nameless people? If the murders continued until the killer finally made a mistake and they found him? But what if he didn’t make a mistake? Ever? What do I do next, Stave asked himself.

  His thoughts turned to Anna von Veckinhausen. What had she been holding back from him? If she was holding anything back at all, that was. Did she have something to do with the murders? Had she seen something? Stave decided to interview her again, and soon. And that had nothing at all to do with the fact that she was pretty and secretive or that it was Saturday evening and he was on his way home from the cinema.

  On his own.

  All of a sudden he spun round. There was nobody to be seen. Obviously. It was almost midnight. He shivered: it was minus 20°C at least and freezing gusts of wind blew into his face, shredding his skin. A yellow half-moon shone down from a clear starry sky. The street lights were out, the streets themselves gloomy canyons, the mountains of rubble in total darkness, moonlight peeping through the empty windows of bombed-out buildings. Side streets blocked off with temporary barriers because at any moment a bombed-out building could collapse. It was silent. No sound of distant traffic, no human voices, no crackling radio, no late evening birdsong. Nothing. Nix.

  Stave stopped for a moment and cocked his ear. Somewhere in the ruins he heard a soft crunch. A sigh. A stone rattling to the ground. The rhythmic creaking of a door to an empty building swinging in the wind, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. The quiet patter of rats’ feet as they darted amongst the fallen timber, squeaking to one another.

  I’m getting paranoid, Stave thought to himself, but picked up speed, walking down the middle of the road now, as far as possible from the darkness and ruins on either side. He felt in his pocket for his FN22, the cold, oily feel of the metal suddenly reassuring.

  When he finally got home he flopped on to the bed, too exhausted even to take off his clothes, too exhausted to be hungry. Too exhausted to think of Margarethe, or their son.

  The Black Market

  Minus 36 degrees Celsius. The moment Stave walked out of the building the wind hit him in the face like a fist. He pulled his woollen scarf up over his face, and with his left hand in its thick glove rubbed his nose to stop it freezing. The air was so dry every breath hurt.

  Before even going to the office Stave hurried down to the Food Ration Card Distribution Centre. Even the name was demeaning. He had to pick up his own coupons for the coming month, then hurry off to the shops to see what he could get with them. Soap would be a result. Each adult was only allowed 250 grams for four weeks. But as it was too cold and heating fuel was too expensive to take a bath or a shower, most of Hamburg’s residents stank like soldiers returning from the front: of sweat, dirt, old clothing and dry skin. Stave hated feeling dirty and both used the soap and took a shower whenever he could, even if he had to stand there shivering. He wouldn’t turn his nose up at coffee either, but there was not much chance of that.

  Start your text here…Stave joined the queue outside the distribution centre. It moved quickly. Most food and clothing had only been available on rations since 1939. The Brits simply changed the name of the Reich Ministry for Nutrition and told the officials who worked there to get on with it. And like most officials they took the bureaucratic procedure to extremes. There were currently 67 different food ration coupons in circulation: two for milk, two for flour, one for eggs, three daily-use coupons, 14 entitlement coupons, two coupons for potatoes, 21 coupons for use by different classes of consumers and 22 supplementary coupons. That was not counting the special coupons. If you needed to get your shoes re-heeled, you had to have a shoe repair coupon.

  If only I could eat the coupons, at least then I wouldn’t be hungry, Stave thought to himself as he grabbed hold of his grey sheet of perforated paper. He was classed as a normal consumer with no supplementary entitlements. His coupons allowed him to claim 1.7kg of grey bread that tasted of sawdust, seven-eighths of a litre of milk that looked like blue-white dishwater, 2.5kg of turnips (because there were no more potatoes), 15g of a yellowy substance that was supposed to be cheese, 100g fat, 200g sugar, 100g sticky ersatz jam, 125g soya flakes. And that was his lot.

  Come to think of it, it was a miracle that more people had not thought of strangling the next person they met in the street and stealing every last stitch from their backs.

  Then it was time for the next queue: outside a half bombed-out house with a ground-floor shop, above the door of which someone had scribbled ‘Dairy Goods’ with chalk on the cracked walls. When he finally got to the front the shop owner – surprisingly fat for the times – handed him the miserable slices of cheese on a piece of grubby paper.

  ‘Milk’s gone already,’ she told him curtly.

  ‘When’s the next delivery?’ Stave asked wearily.

  ‘Tomorrow maybe. Or maybe the next day.’

  Stave left the shop without saying goodbye. That’s one ration for the birds, he thought to himself. Thank God I don’t have any kids in the house any more. And then he realised what he had almost said and hurried away, as if somebody might have heard him.

  When he had done the rest of his errands and taken his scanty haul back home, Stave went to the office. There was no rush; on the last Monday of the month everybody was busy getting their ration entitlements. Erna Berg was the only one there already. Stave wondered if she’d managed to get milk for her kid, but didn’t dare ask.

  Inspector Müller had left a note for him. ‘No luck with the symbol on the medallion. Still working on it.’

  Stave wondered if he was, or whether he had just chucked the photo of the medallion into the bin.

  The post-mortem report was on his desk. There was almost nothing new in Dr Czrisini’s report except that on the left wrist of the corpse he had found traces of fine red lines, like that around the neck, and also that the old man was circumcised.

  A few minutes later Maschke and MacDonald came into the office. Maschke’s face was red and there was a thin layer of hoar frost and snow on his overcoat.

  ‘I went back out to where the body was found yesterday,’ h
e said. ‘A couple of uniforms had been there at dawn and searched through the rubble, but they didn’t find anything more than we did the night before.’

  Stave showed them the report and told them about the red lines around one wrist, and the fact that the man was circumcised.

  ‘A Jew?’ MacDonald asked.

  ‘With a medallion around his neck with a cross on it?’ Stave shook his head. ‘Doesn’t seem likely.’

  ‘I doubt it too,’ Maschke agreed. ‘Over at the vice squad whenever we raid a brothel, we usually have to haul a few punters out of the beds; you wouldn’t believe how many blokes I’ve seen in their birthday suits nor how many of them are circumcised. Good churchgoers and probably even one or two party members.’

  ‘My thinking is,’ Stave resumed, ‘that the old boy was just walking along Collau Strasse, slowly – he was lame after all. The street is narrow because of all the rubble heaps which spread out across the pavement on to the road. The killer is lying in wait where the footpath between the rubble meets Collau Strasse. He knocks his victim to the ground, slings the wire around the unconscious man’s throat and drags him off the street into the ruins.’

  ‘A bit like certain species of spiders,’ MacDonald interjected.

  Maschke gave him an irritated glance. Stave ignored both of them.

  ‘So, attacked from behind, felled, dragged off – all of that in just a few seconds. Then amidst the piles of rubble where the killer can be fairly sure that nobody is going to surprise him he has more time to do the deed. He strangles the old man with the piece of wire, then strips him naked, but misses the walking stick, the piece of leather and the medallion.’