The Murderer in Ruins (20 page)

They almost ran across the windy Rathaus Platz, Anna’s cheeks red from the cold and the effort of walking so fast. Delicious, thought Stave to himself, then turned his eyes to the ground.

The three tramlines intersected in front of the city hall. The lines had been repaired and cleared of debris. The carriages were battered, people everywhere pushing and shoving. Black marketeers with their lackeys pushing their way in with huge, heavy crates of coal or carrots. Weary postmen laden with packages. At least there was no rubbish on board. In the mornings the trams were used for carrying waste out to the dumps on the edge of the city. How else was anyone to get rid of it?

And in between the crates and boxes were the people: black marketeers, office workers, shop workers, all of them going home at the same time because of the electricity cut-off.

Stave clumsily tried to forge a way through for Anna von Veckinhausen, to help her up the step on to the tram. But she was better at it on her own; she did it more often. The carriage was stuffed, stank of wet overcoats, old shoes, sweat, bad breath, cheap tobacco.

The people piling in after them shoved Stave and Anna von Veckinhausen against the window on the far side of the carriage. The chief
inspector fought back with his elbows, without turning round, then gave up and allowed himself to be pushed up against the woman who was going to help him catch the rubble murderer. He gave her an embarrassed smile.

‘Just a couple of stops and then we’ll be back in the fresh air,’ she said.

A shunt, the screech of steel wheels on tracks and a lurch as the tram turned a corner. Blows to the shoulders, the stomach, the weight of the man next to you swaying, a pain in the hand when somebody reached out to grab the same handhold as you. Muttered imprecations, growing louder. Nobody apologised, nobody looked at anybody else.

Stave said nothing. Every word could be dangerous. Nobody knew what the person next to you did in the war. There were cases of people cursing under their breath, then being stabbed by former veterans from the Russian front. Teenagers, who at the age of 15 were enlisted into the Hitler Youth and sent to the front for beating to death somebody who accidentally insulted them. Our society is a wasteland, the chief inspector thinks to himself. We detectives are just clearing up the rubble.

Stave couldn’t bring himself to say anything in the obscene crush. Anything he said would be overheard. You either cursed or shut up. In any case, what would I say to her, he thought to himself.

Fortunately the tram began to empty after the third and fourth stops – both unmarked amidst a wilderness of ruins, dozens of people clambering out. Where were they going, Stave wondered. Only now, when finally it was possible to move, a sweating conductor made his way across to them. Stave handed him a multiple journey ticket he had bought two weeks ago and to date had only used for one journey. Single tickets were no longer being sold: there was not enough paper. Stave rarely used the tram; he used the cash he saved to buy cigarettes he could exchange at the station for information from returning veterans. In any case walking strengthened his bad leg.

‘Two,’ he said to the conductor.

‘Generous,’ Anna von Veckinhausen said.

Good that she hadn’t used his title. If she’d said, ‘Chief Inspector,’ then everyone would have turned to look at him. And that wasn’t a pleasant feeling if you were in a carriage where at least half of those present had been trading on the black market.

‘Do you take the tram often?’ Stave asked needlessly, when there was finally enough space around them that he felt comfortable talking normally.

‘I’ve got used to it since I came to Hamburg.’

‘How did you get around before that?’

She gave him an attentive, slightly amused look. ‘Is that an official question?’

‘Private. You’re not obliged to answer.’

‘In a car. Or a carriage. Preferably on a horse.’

‘The home of a well-to-do family.’

‘A well-to-do home. I know what you’re thinking.’

‘What am I thinking?’

‘You think I come from some landed Junker family east of the Elbe. That it’s people like me who ruined Germany.’

‘Did you?’

She exhaled angrily. ‘We were nationalists, conservatives. But we never voted for Herr Hitler.’

The chief inspector wondered what she meant by ‘we’, but didn’t ask.

‘I get out here,’ Anna von Veckinhausen said, as with screeching brakes the tram came to a halt next to a blackened building façade half its original height.

Stave followed her without asking permission. They took a straight street that led between mountains of rubble, from which here and there remnants of wall protruded, reminding Stave of a long-drawn-out cross on a grave.

The Nissen huts stood at a crossing in the shadow of the old flak bunker: tin barracks erected along all four streets. The chief inspector
counted 20 of them, with here and there the yellowy flame of candlelight shining through windows cut in the barrel-like sides, while others just sat there in the dark. The air was filled with the acrid stench of wet wood burning. Blue smoke rose from thin, twisted tin chimneys and gusted amidst the lines strung between the huts and hung with washing, long frozen solid. There was a smell of cabbage soup and wet shoes, and here and there a well wrapped-up figure coming from the tram passed them, pushed open a door in one of the barracks and disappeared.

In those few seconds Stave got a glimpse of the interior; rough wooden tables, a tiny stove in the middle of the hut, made of black cast iron. Clothing or sheets in every colour hung from lines strung across the interior in every direction, either washing or as makeshift walls, so that families could have the minimum of privacy in these barracks with no rooms.

Stave wondered what it must be like for someone who had grown up in a grand mansion now to be living in a communal barracks in the midst of ruins. He wondered if Anna von Veckinhausen was ashamed. Or if she was just lucky still to be alive and have a roof over her head, even if it was made of corrugated iron.

Anna von Veckinhausen walked up to the door of the Nissen hut in the centre of the crossing, a crossing with a completely undamaged advertising column standing in the middle of it. Every day when she left the hut Anna von Veckinhausen would find herself staring at the photos of the murderer’s victims. Maybe that was what led to her changing her statement, Stave thought in a moment of self-satisfaction.

A pair in dyed Wehrmacht greatcoats passed them, pushing a battered pram with a squeaking front axle. It didn’t look as though there was a child in it, more like a lump of wood, the chief inspector thought. That reminded him of his own unheated apartment and then he wondered what it must be like at night in these thin-walled barracks.

Anna von Veckinhausen speeded up her pace.

She wants rid of me, the chief inspector thought, ever so slightly disappointed. She doesn’t want to be seen with me here.

‘Thanks you for accompanying me,’ she said, as she reached the door in the front of the Nissen hut. ‘Do you think I need a bodyguard from now on?’

‘Why do you say that?’ Stave asked.

‘Because the murderer saw me.’

The chief inspector thought back to his conversation with the journalist from
Die Zeit
, and with a feeling of pained guilt turned his eyes up to the grey sky. ‘That is if the figure you saw was the killer. And if this figure did see you then he probably saw no more of you than you saw of him. He didn’t see your face, and certainly doesn’t know your name or address.’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ she replied, but it didn’t sound as if she was convinced. She held out her hand. ‘Good night, Chief Inspector.’

She waited until he had walked off a few paces, before opening the door. Stave didn’t get the chance to look inside. He politely doffed his hat as a mark of farewell but the door had already closed with a tinny clang. He turned round slowly and set off on the long walk to Wandsbek, without limping. There was always the chance that she was watching him from one of the Nissen hut’s tiny windows.

H
e strode along for few hundred metres, trying not to think of Anna von Veckinhausen, or his son, or his wife, but just the case. The goddamn case.

A Hamburg industrialist who had made military equipment for the old regime and the pretty conservative-minded aristocrat from East Prussia – could there be a connection? The word ‘bottleneck’ on a piece of paper, and looted antiques, sold to the Brits. Was there a connection to be made there? A shrouded figure amidst the rubble. A long coat. The smell of tobacco. If he could trust the statement of a single witness. And could he trust Anna von Veckinhausen? Don’t think about her, not now. But then could he trust anybody? MacDonald – in the light of all the leads pointing to the British?
Maschke, after the orphan child had pointed to him, and who was obviously hiding something? Ehrlich, who might well be on a personal vendetta and not really interested in finding the killer at all?

He dragged himself up the staircase to his apartment, no longer trying to hide his limp. The stairwell was dark anyway. He was almost expecting to find Ruge or another uniformed policeman outside his door, with more, almost certainly, bad news. But the landing by his doorway was deserted. Stave unlocked the door, then carefully locked it behind him. He threw himself down on the tatty sofa, still wearing his coat and hat. It was freezing cold. He ought to go into the kitchen to get himself a bite to eat, but he was too exhausted. Anna. Don’t think of her. The chief inspector fell asleep on the sofa, his last thought before slipping into oblivion was astonishment at how weary he really was.

H
ell, Stave thought to himself, isn’t hot – it’s cold.

When he looked out of his office window he saw houses that had been cleaned automatically, their roofs and north or east gable walls blasted by a wind that had sucked up Arctic ice and used it to sand the tiles and plaster like an invisible plane. In places sheltered from the blast of the wind there were still pockets of sheet ice and layers of powder snow on the guttering, window frames and in the empty door-frames of bombed-out houses. The temperature had been constant since January, but the light had changed: for eight hours a day now there was a blue-shimmering sun in a cloudless sky, bathing the world in an eerie brightness that highlighted even the smallest of details. The cracks in the façade of the Music Hall on the square opposite looked to the chief inspector like a Dürer engraving, each cracked capital on the columns casting grotesque shadows. Yet here I am typing in the dark, Stave mused; it was a bad joke.

Dr Czrisini’s third autopsy report was lying in his in-tray. Assumed date of death: twentieth of January. No other significant details. Stave wondered how many other people had been killed on that day – and when they would find their bodies.

Kleensch had published his article in
Die Zeit
: a measured piece with no absurd speculation, no hysteria, no inflated suggestion of hope – just enough to indicate that the police were making progress. Stave had warned Cuddel Breuer and Ehrlich in advance so they would not feel they were hearing it for the first time from the press.

But apart from that, nothing. 

He had posted men near the Lappenbergs Allee crime scene, a pretty grim job in this cold. And now a few deep-frozen, bored-stiff officers hated him for it, because nobody had turned up. No reaction on the part of the killer, no information from the public, no new leads. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

No news either from Anna von Veckinhausen. Had she seen the article? Was she furious at him? Stave had asked MacDonald to check out her story about the sale of the kitsch painting. It appeared to be true. MacDonald hadn’t exactly identified which of his comrades-in-arms had bought the item of dubious value, but Anna von Veckinhausen was, it turned out, known to many British officers, who appreciated the goods she sold. The lieutenant had let him know in the nicest possible way that many of his superior officers would be extremely unhappy if her supply chain was interrupted. The chief inspector had just nodded and muttered something incomprehensible, but he had got the message.

He wouldn’t be able to threaten Anna von Veckinhausen with charges for her looting or dealings on the black market. Either she cooperated voluntarily or she didn’t. And if she did have something to do with the murders, then he had better have proper evidence before he arrested her.

As for ‘Bottleneck’, MacDonald had got nowhere. And Hellinger, the industrialist, was still missing.

Maschke had gone round all the older, retired doctors – it was his own idea and he had got their numbers from the medical council. He had asked all of them about the victims, the old man in particular. In vain. It had been a good idea though, Stave reckoned. He should have thought of it himself. The vice squad man was getting better and better.

Stave sat and stared at the thin files he had placed carefully next to one another on his desk. Three investigation files. Three murder cases. Three single sheets of paper and a few photos. Could it be that the solution to the case lay in these sparse files? Could he have overlooked something? 

It was exactly midday when his door flew open, and Maschke charged in.

‘Ever heard of knocking first?’ Stave asked.

‘We have a new murder,’ the vice squad man blurted.

‘T
his time, I’ll drive,’ Stave told him in no uncertain terms two minutes later as they climbed into the old Mercedes. ‘What’s the story?’

‘We have a fresh corpse.’

‘Who is it?’

‘A man in a cellar, in Borgfelde, behind the Berliner Tor station. Just been found. It was reported to the local police station around 11.30.’

‘In the east of the city again.’

‘And another heavily bombed area.’

Stave put his foot down, racing down to the Alster and along the Jungfernstieg, pushing the old eight-cylinder as hard as it would go, and blaring his horn when a man in a Wehrmacht greatcoat didn’t get out of the way quickly enough. Maschke’s knuckles were white as he hung on for dear life to the passenger door handle.

‘Don’t worry, the police won’t stop us,’ the chief inspector assured him.

Four bodies: two men, one woman and one little girl. Three of the corpses found in the east of the city, this latest approximately halfway between where the body of the first, the young woman, had been found and where the girl had been found near the canal. Was there a pattern emerging?

‘52 Anckelmann Strasse,’ Maschke only just managed to tell him.

Stave took the corner into Glockengiesserwall, the Mercedes swerving wildly when one rear wheel hit a roof tile frozen to the road, but he got it back under control.

‘A bit icy in patches,’ Maschke gasped.

‘I’m beginning to enjoy myself.’

Past the main station, then through St Georg. Black marketeers stared in their wake. When they reached Borgfelder Strasse, Stave
put his foot down again. Half a kilometre, dead straight. Nobody around. Then two sharp right turns, and with a screech of brakes he brought the car to a halt.

‘One dead body a day is more than enough,’ Maschke muttered as he opened his door.

Stave climbed out too, leaning briefly against the vehicle’s dented hood. The engine was ticking as it cooled down. For a few moments, Stave held his hands on the hood, enjoying the warmth as it flowed into his veins like a hot liquid.

‘That feels good, doesn’t it?’

‘I’m quite hot enough,’ Maschke answered drily.

The chief inspector looked around; behind them stood the steel supports for the elevated railway, every sixth or seventh twisted and bent, empty façades of burnt-out apartment blocks, four or five storeys high, bombed-out office buildings, half-demolished warehouses. The cobbled street had been partly cleared, but there wasn’t a habitable building for at least 300 metres in any direction.

A pattern, Stave thought to himself, I’m starting to see a pattern.

A uniformed policeman emerged from between two half-height walls to their right, waved and came over. He was extremely young, little more than a kid. Stave had never seen him before. He gave them an almost military salute, looking as if he was about to stand to attention.

‘As you were,’ Stave said, introducing himself and Maschke. The lad had probably fought in the Wehrmacht. There were one or two habits he needed to lose. ‘Where is the man?’

‘It’s a woman, Chief Inspector.’

Stave stared at the young policeman, embarrassing him.

‘Two men found the body. In an unlit cellar. They ran out in panic and reported it to us. They thought it was a male corpse, but they obviously didn’t look close enough. It’s a woman.’

Stave was taken aback for a minute. Two women, an old man, a little girl – did that fit a pattern any better?

The uniform led the way. ‘The building at 52 Anckelmann Strasse
is completely in ruins,’ he explained. ‘We could get to the cellar by going through the ruins, but it’s easier this way.’

He led Stave and Maschke some 50 metres along the street to a neighbouring building, which had only partly collapsed. A reinforced archway there led to several partly collapsed internal yards, through which they made their way back in the other direction.

Stave stopped outside the remains of a commercial storeroom. ‘The Hanseatic Mica Import Company’ was written in faded black letters against a red background. Someone was clambering though the ruins of number 52 Anckelmann Strasse. Dr Czrisini. The two detectives acknowledged the pathologist; the uniformed policeman nodded towards an entrance to a cellar.

‘Watch the steps,’ he warned them. ‘They’re loose.’

‘No door,’ Stave remarked as they walked down the fragile steps. Not much light. He took out his notebook and wrote down a description of the external aspect of the scene. The uniform fiddled with an old torch until finally it produced a weak yellow beam of light. A few other people appeared at the foot of the stairs. Stave could only make out their dirty shoes and the hems of long overcoats. He stared as if into a dark cave.

A room with a cement floor, a few fallen roof tiles, plaster fallen from the walls, a second room, dark because no light from the stairwell reached it. Plaster dust here too, but no rubble, no furniture.

Just a corpse.

Aged about 35, Stave reckoned, maybe a little younger. She was lying on the ground, naked. Frozen to the cement. There were blue-red blood settlement marks all over her body. Her mouth was slightly open, as were her eyes, her right hand on the floor, the left over her navel, fingers bent slightly. Without saying a word, Stave took the torch from the young policeman and shone it directly on the victim. The policeman looked as if he were about to be sick.

‘You can wait outside,’ the chief inspector told him.

Dr Czrisini took a large flashlight out of his doctor’s bag. It was brighter. He touched the woman’s face with a gloved hand. ‘Thin,
long face. Well nourished though,’ he muttered. ‘Dark brown eyelashes, dyed, plucked eyebrows. Possibly remnants of face powder on her cheeks. Medium-blond hair, probably bleached. Ear lobes pierced. Nothing in the left ear. In the right…’ he hesitated, then felt with his hand round the back of the head, pulled at her hair a bit. ‘…right earring came loose, but caught in her hair.’ The pathologist handed Stave an earring.

The chief inspector looked at it closely, a pearl on a gold hanger. ‘Unusual shape,’ he mumbled. ‘The gold worked into the shape of a starfish with the pearl in the middle.’

‘I can’t tell you anything about that,’ Czrisini replied. ‘Jewellery isn’t exactly my specialty.’

The pathologist raised the corpse’s eyelids. ‘Grey-blue eyes.’ Then he pulled her jaw open and shone the light into her mouth. ‘Upper plate with two false teeth: the right inner incisor and the first right molar, and on the right two gold-filled molars.’

He began to examine her from the head down. ‘Frozen solid. Rigor mortis not evident. Strangulation marks on the throat, reddish brown, two centimetres wide at the front and to the left. To the right and rear, three to five millimetres. Well looked-after fingernails, with red nail polish, the tips finished with a nail pencil. Pale bands on her left wrist and ring finger. Presumably traces of a watch and ring. Long surgical scar, some 14 centimetres long, from her navel to pubic mound. Probably from an abdominal operation. Well healed. Scar tissue.’

‘No evidence in the dust on the cellar floor of the body having been dragged,’ Stave added. ‘No dirt on the body. Highly unlikely that she was killed here.’

‘She was killed somewhere else and brought here post mortem,’ Maschke said. ‘To hide the body.’

‘Maybe perhaps to undress and rob her without being disturbed,’ the chief inspector added. ‘One way or another, the killer must have come down those loose steps and left her here, carrying a torch at the same time.’ 

‘Obviously a strong man,’ the pathologist said.

‘But was it planned beforehand?’ Maschke interjected. ‘Did he know about this cellar and decide in advance this would be a good place to hide the body? Or did he just look for the nearest hiding place after the murder and come across this place by chance?’

‘He would have needed a torch.’ Stave scratched his head. ‘That suggests it was pre-planned. Unless of course he always carries one. Or else he knows the area so well that he could find his way to this cellar in the dark.’

‘I’m wondering where she came from,’ the pathologist mused.

‘She was obviously well-to-do, possibly rich,’ Stave said. ‘Gold teeth, gold earrings, a watch, a ring, nail polish. Can’t remember when I last saw a woman with a manicure.’

‘The nail polish is too expensive, too modest and too well-applied for a lady of the night,’ Maschke added. ‘This was a proper lady.’

‘And she almost certainly didn’t live behind the station in Borgfelde,’ Stave remarked, almost cheerfully. ‘Winterhude maybe? Or Blankenese? Definitely a better part of town than here. Somewhere that survived undamaged. A neighbourhood that’s still intact, which means somebody must know her.’

Czrisini pointed to her left ring finger then to her abdomen. ‘Probably married too. In which case there’s a husband. But with a scar like that, I doubt she’d have had children. On the other hand this could help the investigation. Operations like that are a lot less common than appendectomies or dental work. There has to be a surgeon or gynaecologist who remembers carrying it out.’

‘Can we estimate a time of death?’

‘Not here and now. I’ll thaw the body out back at the institute. We’ll know more once we’ve cut her open. I expect the brain will have started to rot.’

Stave’s sudden moment of euphoria evaporated. ‘So you think the body may have been here for some time?’

The pathologist nodded. ‘For more than a day or two at least.’

It’s unbelievable, Stave thought. A rich woman, with a husband,
neighbours; if this woman was murdered days ago then surely somebody would have missed her by now. But he couldn’t remember a single report over the past week or so that would fit the victim. I need a breath of fresh air, he thought.

‘We’d better talk to the men who found her,’ Stave said. ‘Dr Czrisini, your people can take the corpse as soon as the photographer has done his work.’

A
ugust Hoffmann and his workman Heinrich Scharfenort were scrap metal dealers, both pale-faced and around Stave’s age.

‘You found the victim?’ The chief inspector had deliberately chosen a neutral expression.

Even so Hoffmann gave him a guilty look. ‘We really thought it was a man. I’ve only just heard that it’s a woman down there.’

‘The main thing is that you reported it,’ Stave replied. ‘Tell me what happened.’