The Murderer in Ruins (22 page)

‘It would be possible if his victims were on the last train. A train arriving at 5.30 p.m. pulls into a station that is already dark. Very dark. And in this cold already empty. Let’s imagine he killed the old man at Dammtor station, and the three females at the main station. It’s not impossible.’

‘You think he’s an experienced killer?’ 

Bürger-Prinz thought for a moment. ‘Maybe our murderer deliberately chooses weaker victims,’ he mused.

Stave just looked at him blankly.

‘Maybe he picks the person on the train he thinks will be easiest to deal with. A woman. A child. An old man.’

The chief inspector thought of the endless hours he had spent at the station, staring at the incoming carriages, the thousands of people pushing past him. He shook his head. ‘Might have been the case with the girl, even the old man. But it doesn’t work for the two women. There’s no train these days where a woman would be the easiest victim. There are always children on the move, and old people and war wounded.’

Then he hesitated. Something had occurred to him. ‘The old man was the only victim to have been beaten, badly beaten at that, as far as the pathologist could make out. But of the four victims he was in no way the strongest or most mobile. Both women would definitely have been able to put up more of a defence or been able to run away more easily.’

The psychologist smiled. ‘I see what you’re getting at: a family. Somebody has a vicious hatred of one family, possibly even his own. So they all have to die. But the old man, the patriarch, he deserves to suffer the most and so the murderer beats him before strangling him.’

Stave nodded. ‘Obviously it could just be a coincidence. Maybe the murderer wanted to strangle them all without giving them any opportunity to defend themselves. Maybe he creeps up behind them. But in the case of the old man alone, something went wrong, something beyond his control. And so he had to lay into him. But even if we go with that, it’s not chance that…’

‘The beating could be an indicator of violent anger, a desire for revenge, punishment, getting even.’

‘In which case the murderer already knows his victims. He’s killing them for some reason we don’t know. But in one case, he attacks in a particularly violent way.’

‘As a punishment.’

‘An old man, a woman in her mid-thirties, a woman of about twenty and a little girl of eight at most. Who could possibly have something against such a varied group of people? Some driven fanatic who wants to kill all his own family?’

‘If all the victims were related.’

‘Why else are there no missing person reports? Maybe the only relative who might report them missing is the killer himself.’

The psychologist looked out of the window. ‘The old man might be the father of both women, and the grandfather of the little girl, or maybe the grandfather of both her and the younger woman. But was one of the women the mother of the little girl? The older one might have been but you tell me the pathologist doesn’t think she’d ever been pregnant.’

‘She’d had an abdominal operation. We don’t know when. And until the autopsy we won’t know what the operation was for.’

‘If there was a 14-centimetre scar then it’s unlikely there’s too much intact down there,’ the psychologist said.

‘But she still might have been pregnant before the operation.’

‘Okay, if we accept that hypothesis, then we have an old man who could be her father and the grandfather of the child, and another young female relation who just might be the much younger sister of the older woman.’

Stave smiled for the first time since he’d walked through the practice door. ‘Let’s also assume that the means of death and the witness statement suggest that the murderer is male. And let’s assume he is a relative of the victims. Then the main suspect has to be the husband of the older woman and father of the child. That’s who we’re looking for.’

Bürger-Prinz looked at him almost sympathetically. ‘Maybe you’ll find him in the rubble too, frozen to the ground with strangulation marks on his neck.’

The chief inspector inhaled sharply. He had had a vision, in which from now on he would find a corpse in the ruins every day: a girl, a
boy, a woman, a man … and when this eternal winter finally came to an end, bodies that had lain undiscovered for months in cellars would thaw and the stench of corruption would bring the curious. And then the police.

‘If it really is some domestic drama we’re witnessing,’ the psychologist continued calmly, ‘then we’re missing a few characters. A grandmother. Another set of grandparents. The child’s father and presumed husband of the older woman. Maybe more children. Brothers and sisters of the grown-ups. Not to mention more distant relatives. There are a lot of potential victims, or potential killers.’

Stave sighed. ‘You mean, we’re going to find another couple of victims who fit the theory? And that only then can we be sure it is a family thing.’

Bürger-Prinz shook his head. ‘When you’ve found your twentieth victim, then we can be reasonably sure that it’s not a family thing. But just a few more victims. A boy or a girl would fit as well as older people of either sex. A man or a woman. Think about it: you might assume a man between 35 and 50 could be the husband and father. A younger man could be the brother or even the husband of the younger woman. You can be sure of one thing. The next body you find will fit the theory. And the next. You’ll still know no more than you know now.’

‘What about the medallion?’

‘Did the killer leave it there as a marker?’

‘I doubt it. Too inconspicuous and not consistent. We’ve found two victims with no medallion, meaning that the killer didn’t leave any marker near them. Or that he left it so discreetly that we didn’t find it. Neither of those fits in with a murderer who leaves a marker with each of his victims. So the medallions must have belonged to the victims. To members of the same family. Maybe a family crest?’

‘Not the crest of any Hamburg family I know,’ the psychologist replied. ‘But then it doesn’t have to be a family crest.’

‘What else?’

‘Maybe some kind of religious symbol. A cross and two daggers, it’s not hard to see a spiritual connection.’ 

‘A sect of some sort? Like the Jehovah’s Witnesses? The old man was circumcised.’

‘Like the Jews. But the Muslims too.’

‘Jews or Muslims would hardly be likely to wear a cross.’

‘So Christians. Maybe all four of them belonged to the same religious community.’

‘But no other member of that community reported them missing? No pastor? No sect leader?’

‘Sects don’t often relish the glare of publicity or the attention of the police. Particularly after the events of recent years.’

Stave thought of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who had been reviled as ‘bible bashers’ and locked up in concentration camps. The past few minutes spent with the psychologist had taught him a lot, more than he had hoped for. But what was he to do with the theories and facts? How could he fit them in with the case? Were any of them even relevant? Or was he just on another dead-end trail?

‘Thank you for your time,’ he said with an air of resignation, and got to his feet.

B
ack at headquarters Stave strolled down the dimly lit corridor to his office but stopped when he reached the door. It was ajar, and he could make out two figures inside: MacDonald and Erna Berg. He made it his business to cough discreetly.

But neither of them turned round. His secretary was sitting at her desk, her face stained with tears. The young Brit was standing to one side behind her, bending over and whispering in her ear.

Stave was pleased that he didn’t have a clue what he might be saying. Nothing to do with me, he told himself. They seemed already to be having a crisis in their relationship even though they’d only been a couple for a few days. Stave decided to leave them to it for the moment and instead of going into his own office, he went along the corridor to see the boss. After all that’s what Cuddel Breuer had told him to do.

Stave went over their findings in his head again, coaxed himself to get on with it and told Breuer about his meeting with Bürger-Prinz. 

‘I have to admit you’re trying everything.’

Stave stood there silently, not sure if it was meant seriously or sarcastically. ‘I’m doing my best.’

‘Tell that to the mayor,’ Breuer said. ‘He wants us to go and see him. He’s not happy.’

S
tave and Breuer took the Mercedes the few hundred metres to the city hall, even though Stave would have preferred to walk. It would have given him time to think.

The city hall with its impressive neo-Renaissance façade and its tall, tapering tower had not been damaged: a monument to the riches of trade and bourgeois pride standing there in a wasteland of rubble. A tram came round a corner and screeched to a stop. Tradesmen and postal workers climbed in. Passers-by rushed past as if they were heading for the nearest air-raid shelter, the sound of the sirens still in their ears.

The chief inspector followed his boss into the imposing building, down corridors half in darkness to the unheated office. Mayor Max Brauer greeted them. A massive, energetic man with a square jaw, grey hair brushed back and bright eyes. Sixty years old. Until 1933 he had been mayor of Altona, the Hamburg suburb that then had independent status, before being kicked out by the Nazis. He left for China then eventually the USA. He had returned a year ago and had been Hamburg’s mayor for the past three months.

Stave knew him slightly, because in December 1946 he had worked on a knife-fight between Altona black marketeers and had been going round looking for witnesses at the scene, Palmaille, the broad promenade along the bank of the Elbe. It had been a Sunday morning and he was ringing doorbells. Number 49 had a nameplate that said ‘Attic Apartment: Brauer’, but it was a common name and he thought nothing of it. It had been a bit of shock when he found himself face-to-face with the mayor.

He recognised Stave again and shook his hand with a firm grip. ‘Please excuse the fact that there’s no heating,’ the mayor said. He had his own overcoat on, but didn’t seem to be frozen through. 

Cuddel Breuer left it to Stave to bring him up to date with the state of affairs.

‘We need to do something,’ Brauer said after listening to Stave’s report. ‘Show we mean business.’

Cuddel Breuer nodded. Stave made do with staring expressionlessly into space.

‘In all my years I have never experienced a winter as hard as this,’ the mayor went on. ‘Nobody has any idea when the frost will end. In another week? Or another month? Even two? How are we to get through this winter? Even in the best of times it would have been an enormous challenge. We have burst water pipes all over the city, electricity pylons falling down, coal ships that can’t get into port, unusable country roads, I hardly need tell you. But in these extraordinary conditions…’

I hear what you’re saying, Stave thought. You’ve just been mayor for three months. People have expectations. The chief inspector would have liked to help Brauer, he had voted for him in November 1946. But what was he to do? He felt like a failure and just stood there in silence.

‘We’ll get some more posters printed, warning people to be careful,’ Cuddel Breuer said in his place.

‘We’ve put as many officers on the case as we can,’ Stave said, finally opening his mouth. ‘The British are cooperating. We’ve gone down more avenues than in any other case since the collapse, even sending out requests to the Soviet zone. And we still don’t even know the identity of the victims. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

The mayor nodded understandingly, smiled even, but remained persistent. ‘Obviously we can’t just go out and make an arrest, I know that. But I read the newspapers. And I hear what the ordinary people are saying. They write me letters. There’s whispering going on, even amongst the city officials.

‘Everybody is afraid, everybody is asking who the victims are – and who the murderer is. Everybody has their own theory, everybody suspects everybody else. There are nasty rumours going round.
It’s as if all the misery, the deprivation and humiliations are stoking up a hatred that’s looking for something to focus on. And this faceless murderer is becoming that focus. As long as it remains as cold as this and there is no arrest, that hate and anger will grow. Sooner or later people are going to accuse the police and the whole administration of incompetence. And sooner or later somebody is going to say what I am sure some people are already thinking, that things didn’t used to be like this – under Adolf. I cannot sit here doing nothing while some crazy killer creates a situation where people start to get nostalgic for the Nazis!’

Stave had already heard the same story in one shape or form from Breuer, from public prosecutor Ehrlich, from MacDonald; even Kleensch from
Die Zeit
had said something of the sort. He stared at the mayor, who looked back at them still with a smile on his face, but the chief inspector realised that he was faced with something else here: an ultimatum. Either they produced something or the mayor himself would take over if only so as not to appear helpless. Stave got the message that what mattered was not necessarily catching the killer but at least making sure that the headlines on the story improved, or, better still, disappeared altogether. As long as people calmed down. As long as they forgot about it.

‘I assume these posters have already been printed?’ Brauer asked.

For the first time since Stave had known him, Cuddel Breuer looked embarrassed. ‘We consider it necessary to try once more to find out the victims’ identities. And to warn the public.’

‘Go ahead, but Stave has told me that he has no great hopes that putting these grim photos up on advertising hoardings all round the city will help in their identification. I suggest that if there are no results this time, in future you conduct your investigation more discreetly.’

‘With no headlines. I get the message,’ Stave said.

Brauer gave a sad smile. ‘My concerns are no longer limited to a few burst water pipes. The hospitals are stretched beyond capacity; they’re seeing pulmonary infections, starvation, oedema, frostbite. Every day more people than our lunatic has killed are dying. Seen
from a purely statistical point of view, he’s a much more minor problem. But psychologically, it’s another story. I cannot have this killer become a symbol of our failure. That is all I’m asking of you.’