The Murderer in Ruins (6 page)

A few minutes later they were done at Kamsing, no wiser than when they had entered. They wandered back down the Reeperbahn to the David police station where Maschke was already waiting for them. His breath hung in front of him in small white clouds, his nose was blue from the cold and he was rubbing his hands together. Stave suddenly felt sorry for him.

‘Not one person on the Reeperbahn ever laid eyes on our victim. She must have been quite a girl,’ he said.

Maschke’s cynicism irritated Stave. Was he really such a hard case?

Or was there something else at play? The shyness of a grown man still living at home with his mother? Or, like many of his other colleagues who worked on the vice squad, had Maschke developed a protective attitude towards his little ‘street swallows’, as they called them? Was it relief he was hearing in the man’s voice? Relief that the victim wasn’t one of the Reeperbahn girls?

‘Right, it’s back to the office to talk through what we have or haven’t found, then home to Mum for us all,’ the chief inspector said.

S
tave looked out of the office window at Hamburg spread out beneath him, as dark as during the wartime blackout. There were only a few lights here and there to be seen, probably from houses the British had commandeered. Other than that he could make out flickering flames from wood stoves, dangerous enough in themselves in the half-bombed semi-ruin, and the glow of candles. Even his own office in the grey evening gloom was lit by no more than a single dim bulb. Stave looked up at it with some concern: if it were to blow, he had no idea when he’d get a replacement. Probably not until the spring. He sighed and looked at the other two waiting in front of his desk.

Erna Berg was long gone. She’d left Inspector Müller’s report on his desk. Stave flicked through it silently. ‘No surgeon recognises the body,’ he said at length. He was exhausted. ‘Obviously one afternoon wasn’t enough for them to go round all the relevant doctors in the city. They’ll start again tomorrow. It looks as if the victim’s appendix scar isn’t going to give us a lead either, for the moment at least. Nor have we had any missing person reports over the past 24 hours.’

Maschke was drumming on the desk with his nicotine-stained fingers. ‘It would also appear that none of the street girls has gone missing,’ he said.

‘Maybe she was new in Hamburg?’ MacDonald suggested.

‘The ice on the Elbe is a metre thick, the port is closed,’ Stave interjected. ‘Most of the railway lines are covered in ice, the points frozen, snowdrifts everywhere.’

‘The bridges have been bombed, the stations destroyed,’ Maschke snapped. MacDonald paid him no attention.

‘Most of the trains that get through are carrying coal or potatoes, not people, and on the few passenger trains that do get through, returning prisoners-of-war are given priority. It’s not impossible that some woman from somewhere else arrived in the city over the past few days, but it’s extremely unlikely. Particularly a woman in such rude health as our victim.’

‘Maybe somebody drove her here in a car?’ MacDonald mused.

Stave was amazed at the lieutenant’s honesty; he had wondered the same thing himself, but not dared to say it. ‘Indeed,’ he replied. ‘Fuel is rationed, Germans have to carry a book in which they note every journey, and longer trips need special permission. Apart from anything else there are next to no cars or trucks still in working order. That makes it extremely unlikely that any German could have given her a lift. On the other hand it would have been no problem for someone British.’

‘Good point,’ Maschke said.

MacDonald looked unperturbed. ‘I have a photograph of the victim. I’ll pass it round my fellow officers.’

Stave smiled. ‘Thank you. I’m glad to say that what we’ll call the “British angle” isn’t all we have. Let’s assume that our victim is neither a streetwalker, nor a missing daughter of some respectable family, nor a working-class girl, nor a new arrival – then there are only a few alternatives remaining. Perhaps she was a little known secretary working for the city authorities, the occupation forces or in one of the few firms that have reopened for business?’

‘Or she might be a shop assistant in one of the clothing shops,’ Maschke suggested. ‘C&A on Mönckeberg Strasse is open again.’

The chief inspector nodded. ‘What else? Our unknown victim was earning honest money, at least enough to keep her well fed. Then she goes missing but nobody reports the fact to the police. Does that mean she has no friends or relatives here?’ He thought of Erna Berg. ‘Maybe she’s a war widow? Or a refugee who arrived in Hamburg a year or so ago?’ He got to his feet and began pacing up and down. Suddenly he no longer felt so tired. ‘The other possibility is that she has a boyfriend or some other relative who doesn’t want us to come across him, because he himself is the murderer. In most cases murderers and victims already know one another. Maybe we should look for a fiancé? Or an uncle? That’s possible too.’

‘So, what do you suggest?’ MacDonald asked.

Stave gave him a cool smile. ‘I suggest we meet up here again tomorrow. Good evening.’

A
n hour later Stave was standing in his freezing apartment, trying to light the fire. He had fetched three potatoes from his meagre rations in the cellar. They had been frozen and were exuding a sweet-sour slime as they thawed out. He cooked them on his cast-iron stove, along with his last white cabbage. Then he put it all through the mincer, formed the mush into a long loaf-like shape, added salt and fried it. ‘Poor man’s sausage,’ the neighbour who had given him the recipe called it. Even though it took more than an hour to cook on the little stove, Stave didn’t mind. It gave him the illusion at least of eating something nourishing. The other advantage was that cooking stopped him thinking.

Eventually it was time for bed. He lay down on the bed in his pullover and jogging pants, pulled the blankets up and stared at the window where the moonlight cast greenish patterns on the sheet ice.

Stave wanted to think about the dead woman, to weigh up the pros and cons of all the possible theories, to see if there were any leads they had missed. But the image of the unknown victim only brought to mind the image of his own dead wife. And that took him back to that night four years ago, amidst the hail of bombs.

If only I had schnapps, he thought to himself. Then at least I could drink myself to sleep.

H
e faced a wall of flames, red, white and blue, a burning heat on his face, his every breath agonising. All around him beams collapsed, tiles fell from the walls, a thunder louder than machine-gun fire, a stench of burning hair and scorched flesh. Stave was running through rubble, fire all around him, running and running, but stumbling because of his goddamn leg, painfully slow, even though he knew Margarethe was only a few steps away. He could hear her screams. She was calling out to him. And he was stuck somewhere else, amidst scorched walls, and smouldering wood, trying to call out her name, but only coughing and choking from the smoke that forced its way down his throat. And all of a sudden there was no sound from Margarethe, just a terrifying silence.

Stave jerked upright in bed, cold sweat all over his body. Utter darkness, ice on the window panes – yet he could still feel the burning, the fierce glare of the fires, a blaze as high as the apartment building. Goddamn nightmares, he told himself, and wiped his eyes. In reality he had been on duty on the other side of Hamburg that terrible night. He had been trapped in a collapsing building, his limp a perpetual reminder. But it was only several hours after the hail of bombs had stopped that, wounded and in shock from fear, he discovered the ruins of his own house. He had never heard Margarethe’s screams.

There were others who were haunted every night by events they had actually experienced: the fear of death on the front line, in a submarine, cowering in a cellar, sitting in a Gestapo cell. There were
ways of dealing with that, Stave reckoned – maybe now that the war was over, maybe revisiting the scene of the horror. But how could anyone break free of a nightmare based on something they had never witnessed?

Self-pity was no help either, he reflected, clambering out of bed. The sheets crackled as the frost on them broke. I need to get more fuel, he said to himself as he kindled fire in the wood burner.

A
short while later he set out on the long walk to CID headquarters; there was no fuel for the buses. A few tram lines had been patched up and were working again, but only for a few hours each day. I could get used to having Ruge’s taxi service, Stave thought to himself.

But secretly he was grateful for the hour’s walk. He was used to the sight of the rubble, the yellowing posters, the chalk graffiti, the cowed figures on the streets; none of that got him down any more. He enjoyed keeping up a brisk pace. It warmed him up, while at the same time the icy wind kept his head clear. Nothing to worry about, nothing to trouble him – for a whole hour.

By the time he reached the tall building on Karl-Muck-Strasse he was in a good mood. Erna Berg was already waiting for him, a smile on her face, maybe even a little more cheerful than normal.

‘The Herr Lieutenant is waiting for you in your office.’

Maschke was there too, but his secretary had either forgotten that or deliberately not mentioned him. The chief inspector said hello to both of them and sat down, preferring to keep his overcoat on. Erna Berg hurried over, set two mimeographed sheets down in front of him, gave MacDonald a shy glance and disappeared.

‘Doctor Czrisini’s report,’ Stave said. The other two were silent for a moment while he studied it. ‘A few things at least are clear. The date of death was between the eighteenth and twentieth of January, most probably towards the latter. So we may as well take the twentieth as a starting point. Cause of death: strangulation. It seems likely the murderer used a piece of wire. And highly likely he approached his victim from behind and slung the wire around her neck. It doesn’t
look as if she tried to defend herself. Apart from that no other marks or evidence either on or inside the body.’

‘No sign of sexual intercourse?’ Maschke asked.

Stave shook his head. ‘No indication of rape. Nor any traces of sperm or other suggestions of consensual sexual activity shortly before death. Although obviously that possibility cannot be totally excluded.’

MacDonald coughed, clearly embarrassed. ‘How do you mean?’

Maschke gave a wan smile. ‘In the case of consensual sexual intercourse there would be no obvious wounds. Down there, I mean. And if the lucky lad she’d last let do the business was wearing a French letter, there’d be no trace of sperm either.’

‘That’s one way of putting it,’ Stave muttered. ‘But it is also clear that she’d been lying there for two days at most, meaning the killer hasn’t had that much time to vanish into the woodwork.’

The lieutenant smiled: ‘Given that no ships and only a few trains have left the city, that means he must still be in Hamburg.’

‘Not exactly reassuring for the good folk of our city,’ Maschke added.

‘But it makes our work a bit easier, I hope,’ Stave said, before turning to MacDonald: ‘Have you asked around amongst your fellow officers?’

‘They all took a look when I showed the photo of the strangled woman around at the club,’ the lieutenant replied. ‘But nobody recognised her. The officers have promised to ask their men, but I fear we won’t get much of a response there.’

Maschke snorted dismissively, but said nothing, catching Stave’s warning glance.

‘Keep at it,’ the chief inspector muttered. ‘It’s like surgeons and appendectomies; you can’t be 100 per cent sure of anything until you’ve eliminated all possible alternatives.’

The lieutenant nodded, and smiled again: ‘My pleasure.’

For him this investigation is just a bit of sport, like fox-hunting, Stave thought to himself, but then maybe that’s not such a bad
comparison. He sighed wearily, ‘I need to go and file a report to the public prosecutor. Lieutenant, will you please be so good as to ask around a bit more amongst your comrades-in-arms? At the moment, British soldiers are the only ones who can easily leave Hamburg. And time is pressing.’

MacDonald nodded.

‘And Maschke, perhaps you can make enquiries amongst the street crime department. It might have been a mugging, somebody taking the girl for everything she had on her. These days even underwear fetches a price on the black market. See if they have anything on their files.’

Maschke cleared his throat, embarrassed all of a sudden. ‘You know, Chief Inspector, the files aren’t…’

Stave cursed under his breath. On 20 April 1945, with the British at the gates of the city, the Gestapo had burned all their files, some of them in the crematorium of the Neuengamme concentration camp. In doing so they had not only destroyed the evidence of their own crimes but also documentation relating to large numbers of ordinary criminals. If, prior to 1945, there had been reports of a mugger who was happy to murder using a piece of wire like a garrotte and taking every item from his victim including their underwear, then like as not there would no longer be a file on him.

‘Give it a go, even so,’ he said.

Maschke got to his feet and left, nodding to Stave but ignoring the lieutenant.

MacDonald however had got to his feet too, and casually asked Stave, ‘Which public prosecutor is responsible for this case?’

‘Doctor Ehrlich,’ Stave replied. ‘I’ve not dealt with him before.’

‘I know him – from England.’ The lieutenant gave him a look that was part sympathetic, part amused. ‘You should take care. He’s a tougher nut than he looks and he might not be the greatest fan of the Hamburg police.’

Stave slumped back down on his seat and suggested MacDonald sit down again too: ‘I would be grateful if you could fill me in.’

MacDonald smiled: ‘Just between the two of us?’

‘But of course.’

‘Herr Ehrlich,’ the lieutenant said in a measured tone, ‘joined the Hamburg public prosecutor’s office in 1929. He’s a very cultivated man, well-educated and gifted in music, a collector of modern art, above all the Expressionist movement. And, unfortunately, Jewish.’

The chief inspector closed his eyes. He knew what was coming.

‘In 1933, of course, he was immediately dismissed,’ MacDonald continued in the same dispassionate tone. ‘He got a job as a copy editor for a legal publishing house thanks to his wife – who by the way was Aryan enough to be a Wagnerian opera star. Both their sons were sent to private school in England, to get them out of the line of fire. Then came
Reichskristallnacht.’

Stave nodded. He remembered the night. When the first reports of arson came in he was in the police station at Wandsbek, about to rush out to the nearest synagogue. Then came the order to remain in the building. A very clear order. And he complied. Not exactly the most heroic moment in his life. He had never spoken of it to anyone, not even Margarethe.

‘Ehrlich was arrested on the night of 1 November 1938 and taken to Neuengamme. I can imagine it wasn’t much fun, even though he almost never mentions it. A few weeks later he was released; friends in London had got a British visa for him. He sold off his art collection – for a song, I imagine. He managed to scrape together just enough money to buy his passage to England. His wife was not allowed to go with him; the visa was for him alone. Then war broke out.’

MacDonald shrugged almost apologetically. ‘The woman was on her own, desperate, abandoned by her husband and sons. The neighbours avoided her. She couldn’t even give piano lessons any more because nobody wanted to be seen in her company. Back in London Ehrlich was like a caged tiger pacing up and down: he tried everything to bring her over – via Switzerland, the USA, Spain, Portugal. There was no way. Eventually in 1941 he received a message from the
Red Cross that his wife had taken her own life with an overdose of sleeping tablets.

‘By then I had already got to know him. He had found lodgings in Oxford and was lecturing on Roman law. It would be exaggerating to say we had become friends. Nonetheless it was me who got him the job at the public prosecutor’s office here, a few months ago.’

‘You?’ Stave almost blurted out.

MacDonald gave him an ironic smile, and Stave found himself wondering just how much power this young officer wielded.

‘Ehrlich was keen to return to Germany – to help with the reconstruction, to build a democracy, as he put it. So I asked around amongst our people and came up with this. There is a shortage of legal personnel with a clean slate and we’re grateful for every non-Nazi we can find. Not just in the prosecutor’s office but in the police too.’

Stave vaguely recognised it as a compliment. ‘But why on earth Hamburg? Ehrlich must have a lot of scores to settle here. Not exactly the best qualification for a public prosecutor.’

‘On the contrary, an excellent qualification,’ MacDonald replied. ‘Herr Ehrlich is one of the plaintiffs in the Curio House case.’

Stave didn’t need any explanation. Since 5 December 1946 the house on Rothenbaumchaussee had been the setting for the trial of nine men and seven women who as guards at the female concentration camp at Ravensbrück were charged with responsibility for the deaths of thousands.

‘Does he have the time to take on a new case?’

‘He asked to be put in charge of it. Herr Ehrlich is a hard worker.’

After the lieutenant left the room, Stave sat there for a moment, thinking. Why Ehrlich? The Curio House case would give him opportunity enough to bring particularly nasty Nazis to the scaffold. Why would a politically motivated public prosecutor like him be interested in the naked corpse of an unknown woman? It looked like a hard case, for sure, but in no way political. Was it?

In the end he gave up, and got to his feet with a sigh. Maybe what
attracted the prosecutor to the case was nothing personal at all, but just the very mystery attached to it. Then again, maybe he wanted to be in charge of a case the police fell down on, giving him the chance to cashier a few CID men who might have worked rather too closely with the Gestapo but got away without being sacked in 1945.

He was likely to find out soon enough. And Ehrlich was equally likely to find out what Stave had done in 1938 when the synagogues were being plundered. Absolutely nothing.

H
amburg Palace of Justice was a huge Renaissance palace with a bright red façade of light golden sandstone and tall white windows, some of them flanked by twisted columns: a great big nineteenth-century shoebox which, incredibly, managed to escape being hit by a single bomb in two world wars. It was in this fortress that the public prosecutor’s department had their offices.

Stave walked into the building. It was only a few paces across the square from the CID building, past the concert hall and through a neglected little park.

A few minutes later he was sitting on an uncomfortable visitor’s chair. Nervous, feeling like a schoolboy called in to see the headmaster, angry with himself for the way he felt but unable to do anything about it. He glanced around surreptitiously while the man sitting opposite leafed through documents in front of him.

Doctor Albert Ehrlich was a small, bald-headed man, with eyes swimming behind the thick lenses of old-fashioned horn-rimmed spectacles. He was in collar and tie with an English tweed jacket and razor-sharp pressed trousers. There were no photos of his wife or sons, nothing at all of a personal nature, just filing cabinets and sheets of paper and on a little table next to him a big black typewriter. Stave glanced furtively at Ehrlich’s short, chubby fingers covered with a light down and noticed he wore no wedding ring.

He no longer wore a wedding ring himself. One night in the summer of 1943 he had thrown it into the Elbe down by the harbour. The water was seductively close and dark … But he had turned on
his heel and gone home, if that’s what you could call the ruins he inhabited. He closed his eyes for a moment.

‘I’m very sorry to have kept you waiting,’ Ehrlich said at last, closing the file in front of him. ‘Can I offer you tea?’ he said, in a quiet, cultivated voice.

Stave gave a timid smile. ‘Thank you, yes.’ And he opened his eyes wide to see a secretary come in with a steaming teapot that smelled wonderful. Real tea, Stave realised, Earl Grey even, rather than nettles with some hot water poured over them.