The Murderer in Ruins (16 page)

The others watched him in silence. Maschke was smoking, Czrisini gave the impression of somebody following an interesting operation and MacDonald looked like a soldier. Erna Berg, a steaming teapot in her hands, had stopped in the doorway and was looking at the map with horror.

‘He’s attacking people everywhere,’ she mumbled.

‘Three times is not yet everywhere,’ Stave contradicted her. ‘In what way could the victims be related?’ he asked, looking at Czrisini.

The pathologist nodded thoughtfully. ‘A grandfather, daughter and her daughter? Possible. It could actually fit with their ages. If we put the first victim, the young woman, at the upper end of the likely age spectrum; I would put her as at most 22. And we put the child at the youngest age, probably six. That would make her a very young mother, with a very old father because he had to be around 70. It is also possible that the first and third victims were actually sisters, two girls about ten years apart. The old man could have been their grandfather. I reckon that is more likely, although not very probable either. But how can you prove it? Up until now I’ve found no distinguishing features, such as birthmarks or the like.’

‘But nor is there anything to suggest they were not related?’

‘No.’

‘Apart from where the bodies were found,’ Maschke intervened, pointing the glowing end of his cigarette at the map. ‘The bodies were found very far apart. If they had been one family, wouldn’t they all have lived together? The child at least would have lived with its mother – or the two sisters would have lived together, if they were sisters, that is.’

‘Or they lived with their grandfather,’ MacDonald said. ‘Like that little Mainke who was taken in by his grandmother.’ 

‘We can’t exclude any possibility,’ Stave said again, scratching his head. ‘Let us assume it is a family. Let us assume they were all killed in the same place. Remember: there is nothing to say they were killed where they were found. Might it not even be possible they were all killed at the same time? And that the murderer deposited the bodies in difference places afterwards. To cover up any clues.’

Czrisini looked thoughtful. ‘It’s so incredibly cold,’ he murmured. ‘It’s hard to make exact estimates to compare with one another. The same time of death is indeed a possibility, and we just found them at different times. I can say that for certain about the old man and young woman. And I’ll soon know more in the case of the child.’

Stave found himself imagining the little body lying on the dissecting table and forced himself to look out of the window instead. Some things just didn’t bear thinking about.

MacDonald sighed. ‘That might mean there are still more bodies lying around somewhere, that we just haven’t found yet. The father, grandmother, brothers or sisters to the child…’

‘I still think it’s more likely that they have nothing to do with one another,’ said Maschke, twirling his lit cigarette dangerously close to the map. ‘They were all out there in the ruins, maybe looking for something, maybe just taking a shortcut. The murderer was lying in wait for them. Where they were found is where they were killed. The medallion is the calling card of a madman.’

‘That would mean that the victims come from three different families and lived in three different places. Then surely somebody would have come forward to identify at least one of them,’ Stave said quietly. ‘It’s simply not possible for so many people to be murdered in the middle of Hamburg without anyone missing any of them.’

‘We don’t know about the child yet,’ Dr Czrisini reminded him.

‘Quite,’ the chief inspector said, nodding. ‘We need to get a new poster printed. You deal with that, Maschke. Get as many printed as possible and include a photo of the medallion on it. Get in touch with the authorities in all the big cites, including those in the east. I want our posters up even in the Soviet zone.’

A telephone in the outer office rang, causing them all to flinch. Erna Berg went to answer it, said a few words and put the receiver down.

‘That was the police in Lübeck,’ she called out to the chief inspector. ‘The mother of the ship watchman has confirmed that her son was staying with her the past two weeks. One of her neighbours saw him too.’

‘Well, I guess that would have been too easy,’ Stave said, and crossed out a line in his notebook.

‘What next?’ MacDonald asked.

‘We still have three hypotheses,’ Stave said. ‘If the killer is a looter who murders people amongst the ruins to steal everything from them, then sooner or later an item will turn up on the black market that we can link to one of the victims. Maybe somebody will finally see a suspicious character lurking in the ruins. Or some spiv or pimp will hear something. It could be that in the next day or two we manage to identify one of the victims. And you never know, we might even catch him in the act. Sooner or later we’ll get him.

‘Hypothesis two: some madman is killing people and leaving this strange medallion as a calling card. In which case, does anyone have any idea how we might get a lead on him?’

‘We urgently need to find out what this cross and two daggers is all about,’ Dr Czrisini replied.

‘If it is a madman, then he won’t necessarily stop killing. Sooner or later we’ll catch him at it,’ Maschke said hopefully.

‘Somebody will catch him,’ Stave replied. ‘But will it be us, or those who’ve taken our jobs?’ He quickly tried to banish that note of pessimism, standing up straight and announcing: ‘Hypothesis three: somebody wiped out a whole family. In that case, there may be no more victims, no more objects and no witnesses. Or we find the bodies of more people who were killed at the same time as our current victims. So we should be looking not for a murderer who has vanished without trace, but for a family that nobody has reported as missing.’

‘Refugees from the east or Displaced Persons,’ MacDonald murmured.

‘Let’s start with the child,’ Stave told them. ‘Maybe we’ll have more luck than with the other two. Perhaps there are carers, teachers, playmates who’ll recognise her. She must have gone to school somewhere. Let’s knock on the doors of schools and homes that house the children of refugees and DPs.’

The phone rang again. Stave, who hadn’t had a call in days, stared in irritation at the black object. His secretary nodded, said something politely and hung up.

‘Department S,’ she said. ‘They’ve sent out plainclothes people to all the black market areas. None of them have come across a Spencer. But they promise to keep their eyes open.’

‘Good,’ Stave replied, even though he was suddenly quite certain that they were never going to find relevant items of clothing popping up on the black market. Somebody was systematically covering their tracks.

‘I’ll get on with the poster then,’ said Maschke, and vanished.

‘I have work to do in the pathology department,’ Dr Czrisini said. ‘The body will need to thaw first. Not that I expect examination of the girl’s body to reveal anything I don’t already know.’ He gave a low bow and left the room.

‘You should just go home,’ Stave said to MacDonald and Erna Berg. ‘There’s nothing more to be done here today.’ He stood there and watched the pair of them until the door to the outer office closed behind them.

T
he public prosecutor was scratching his bald head when Stave walked in. The office was almost warm. The chief inspector inhaled gratefully the aroma of freshly brewed tea. It felt more like a living room than an office, Stave thought to himself, and wondered if Ehrlich spent every Sunday here.

‘Sorry I had to drag you away from the station,’ Ehrlich said, nodding towards the guest chair. ‘You were looking for your son?’ 

The chief inspector stared at the prosecutor dumbstruck, as if he’d been caught doing something embarrassing.

Ehrlich waved his arms to say it was of no importance. ‘I was just guessing. I had heard your boy was unaccounted for.’

‘I don’t like that term,’ Stave replied.

‘And yet there is a trace more hope in it than in “missing”. Or just “gone”. Don’t you think?’

‘You also have sons,’ Stave said. The prosecutor might as well know he knew things about other people’s private lives too.

Ehrlich nodded calmly. ‘Two boys. They’re at boarding school. Back there.’

Stave took a second to realise that Ehrlich meant England.

‘They’re teenagers. It’s a difficult age. And the last few years haven’t been easy. I was in exile. They had to endure humiliation here, and then the passing of my wife.’

‘Unaccounted for’ instead of ‘missing’, ‘passing’ instead of ‘suicide’. Stave had read some of the indictments Ehrlich had written and been impressed by his precise, crisp style. But obviously he kept that for indictments, a weapon best kept concealed when dealing with friends. He changed the subject, not wanting any more details of Ehrlich’s personal tragedies, and certainly not willing to give any further details of his own. He gave him a quick rundown on the latest murder.

‘Does this give the case a new dimension?’ Ehrlich asked.

Stave sat staring at the prosecutor in silence, not knowing what to say.

Ehrlich passed the time cleaning his glasses, then said: ‘Men and women being killed is horrible, but it happens all the time. A child, however? Isn’t that the last taboo? A total abnegation of the slightest morality?’

‘If you mean, are we looking for a murderer who is capable of absolutely anything, then the answer is yes, in my opinion. A man devoid of any scruples,’ Stave agreed.

‘Most killers who do away with children are driven by
uncontrollable emotions, either sexual lust or despairing mothers lashing out in a fit of anger or revenge. But in this case the murder is so…’

‘…methodical,’ Stave completed the sentence for him. ‘The deed is simply carried out in cold blood, using – if you’ll forgive the expression – a tried and tested formula. Then afterwards all traces are erased.’

‘Remind you of something?’ Ehrlich asked in a quiet voice.

‘The concentration camps,’ Stave answered immediately. ‘The Gestapo. Special Units, SS. Men who killed irrespective of the age or gender of their victims. Systematic murderers who carried out their killings methodically, the corpses either dumped in mass graves or gone up in smoke. Documents that simply disappeared, camps that were emptied before the Allies arrived.’

‘Well, that’s not exactly a lead in itself,’ Ehrlich said pensively, ‘but it just might be the beginning of a lead.’

‘The concentration camp guards are already on trial,’ Stave reminded him, somewhat unnecessarily.

The prosecutor gave him a glance that was part sympathetic, part insulted. ‘A few of them. The ones we caught. Most of the guards who were at Auschwitz even are still running around free. The same goes for most of the Gestapo hit men. And that’s without even mentioning all the former members of the SS.’

‘You think we might be looking for some Nazi thug who’s stayed true to his murderous ideology even after the collapse of the regime and is waging some sort of one-man war?’

‘Maybe. Or someone who wants to dispose of inconvenient witnesses to deeds committed in the past.’

Stave thought for a moment. ‘But how does that help me? I can’t go through the history of everyone in Hamburg to find out what they might have been up to prior to 1945. And even if I could, and unearthed every misdeed, how am I to link that with the murders being committed now? We don’t even know the identity of the victims!’ Stave shook his head. ‘The only way we’re going to find the
killer is by finding the names of his victims. When we know who they are, then we can start looking for connections. It may well be that they lead to the death squads of the past. My biggest hope at present is the little girl. She must have gone to school somewhere. There have to be teachers or schoolmates who can identify her. The two adults might have been recluses, but a child is always out and about.’

‘Good thinking,’ said Ehrlich, taking out an embossed sheet of paper with his name at the top, unscrewing the top of a weighty Montblanc fountain pen and writing a few lines on it. Stave watched in silence as he fluidly scrolled his signature beneath.

‘This is a letter of recommendation,’ Ehrlich told him, handing it over. ‘In case the girl might come from a family of DPs or persecuted Jews, then you should first check out Warburg Children’s Health Home in Blankenese. This letter should make it easier for you to gain access. But you will still need a permit from the British.’

‘A children’s home?’

‘A very special children’s home.’

Stave didn’t ask any further questions, nodded, folded the brief carefully in two and put it in his overcoat pocket, regretting that he’d sent MacDonald home early.

‘I’ll go to the lieutenant,’ he announced, ‘while it’s still light. Maybe I can get the necessary paper straight away. Then I can start asking questions at Warburg tomorrow morning.’

He got up and went to the door. As he opened it, the prosecutor called him back.

‘Happy birthday, by the way. I noticed the date in your file.’

‘Thanks,’ Stave murmured, somewhat taken aback. Ehrlich was the first person to congratulate him. On his forty-third birthday.

M
acDonald lived in a requisitioned villa in Innocentia Strasse in Harvestehude, ‘Zone A’, an almost undamaged part of the city. The British and American bombing raids had been intended primarily to kill workers, and most of the leafy, well-to-do areas had been
unharmed. Probably also, Stave thought to himself, because they realised that after they had won the war they would need somewhere nice for their officers to live.

On his way to Harvestehude the chief inspector found himself walking through Planten un Blomen, once the city’s finest park. As late as 1944 they had been planting rose bushes which ever since had erupted into a blaze of red every summer. In the meantime they had ploughed up the strips of land between the pathways and the rose bushes to sow potatoes. Now the transformed former park was covered with a partial layer of snow, dirty brown here and there, dirty white elsewhere; abandoned.

There were signs on the side streets: ‘Out of Bounds for German Civilians!’, ‘For British Forces Only!’. Freezing British military police stared past him indifferently. The grand villas were perfectly cared for, except for the few make-do stovepipes that occasionally jutted out. The trees along the streets were undamaged. There were tin bins outside the gates. It was calm between the villas, the houses and trees offering shelter from the freezing gusts of wind. Occasionally a military patrol jeep would trundle by over the cobblestones. A few figures sloped from bin to bin, one-legged war veterans, a man with a rucksack holding the hand of a girl of about ten, old people, women with headscarves wrapped tight so that nobody could see their faces and see their shame. They opened the lids of the bins, and rummaged inside for bit of rotten potato, wilted lettuce leaves, apple cores. A young cigarette-butt collector was picking up trodden ends of English cigarettes from the pavement. Nobody spoke, nobody looked up. The military police left them alone.