by David Young
‘Well, if your conclusion is she simply died of the cold, that it was misadventure in effect, Dr Siegel, I don’t think I need to waste any more of your time. And I can’t quite understand why we’ve been brought all the way from Berlin, especially in such dangerous conditions.’
‘Quite,’ said the doctor, a smug look of satisfaction on his face.
‘Nevertheless,’ said Müller, ‘until I get clearance from my superiors, I don’t want the body released for burial or cremation.’
The pathologist shrugged. ‘As you wish. Given we don’t know who she is, there isn’t exactly a queue of relatives rushing to lay her to rest anyway.’ He peered quizzically at Jonas Schmidt, who’d moved forward and seemed to be conducting his own examination of the woman’s face, hands and feet. ‘Who are you?’ the doctor asked.
Müller replied on behalf of her forensic scientist. ‘Comrade Schmidt is our team’s Kriminaltechniker, Dr Siegel. Anything interesting to report, Jonas?’
‘No, no,’ said Schmidt, shaking his head, but still doing a careful visual examination of the body. ‘Dr Siegel’s findings look perfectly correct to me.’
Siegel frowned. ‘And why wouldn’t they? I’m not accustomed to having my work checked by police scientists.’
Tilsner laughed. ‘Don’t worry about, Jonas, Herr Doktor. That’s just his way. He means nothing by it.’
Müller wasn’t so sure. Perhaps Schmidt had spotted something out of place or irregular about Siegel’s conclusions. If he had, now wasn’t the time to discuss it.
‘Hauptmann Tilsner’s correct. We won’t take up any more of your time, Dr Siegel,’ said Müller. ‘Thank you for showing us the body.’
*
Once they’d closed the doors to the mortuary room, and were making their way through the hospital back to the car park – where the army personnel carrier should be waiting for them – Müller turned to her two colleagues. She was going to tell them not to discuss any concerns until they were in private. But before she could open her mouth, she saw another member of the medical staff running towards them.
‘Major Müller?’ the woman asked. Müller looked at her nametag. The woman – girl, really – looked impossibly young to be qualified, but her name tag identified her as a doctor by the name of Renate Tritten.
‘Yes.’
‘I’m Dr Siegel’s assistant. I wondered if I could have a quick word with you in private?’
‘Anything you have to say you can say in front of my team. They’re perfectly trustworthy.’ As she said the words, Müller laughed inwardly. Her previous investigation had given the lie to that – in both their cases.
‘That’s not what I meant, really.’ The young woman glanced around. ‘Could you come in this room for a moment?’
Müller frowned momentarily, but nodded her assent. The junior pathologist unlocked the door. It was a tiny storeroom – little more than a cupboard. There wasn’t room for all four of them even if that had been what Müller wanted.
‘I’ll only be a few minutes,’ she said to Schmidt and Tilsner. ‘It’s too tight a squeeze for us all.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Dr Tritten. ‘But yes, it won’t take a moment.’
Tilsner shrugged, while Schmidt muttered an ‘of course, of course’, as the two women disappeared inside, Tritten shutting the door behind her.
‘Sorry,’ said the young woman again. In Müller’s book, she was apologising rather too much. ‘I couldn’t really say this in the mortuary room. But Dr Siegel’s findings aren’t consistent with marks on the body. And I suspect the reason you’ve been sent here is because of me. It’s just I didn’t know who to turn to. I read about one of your cases a couple of years ago. So I rang your office. But I was told you were on leave.’
‘I was. Not any more.’ Reiniger must have been sufficiently impressed by what this young doctor had to say that he’d decided a delegation of Berlin detectives needed to be sent, and for some reason he deemed it necessary to bring her back into the fold. Perhaps her previous dealings with the deputy director of the Jugendwerkhof had been enough to ensure that. ‘No doubt you’re about to tell me why, Dr Tritten.’
‘I found an injection mark on the victim’s body.’
‘And?’
‘Doctor Siegel glossed over my findings. Said they were irrelevant to the cause of death, which he insisted was hypothermia.’
‘So you’re saying it wasn’t the cold that caused this woman’s death?’ Müller wasn’t about to reveal that she knew who the victim was – at least, not until she felt she could fully trust the junior pathologist.
The woman scrunched up her face. ‘Well, no, I’m not necessarily disagreeing with that. Clearly there is evidence of hypothermia. But the point is the victim had recently been injected – and in a very strange place on her body.’
Müller frowned. The confined nature of their surroundings, with barely room to move, lent a more sinister air to the doctor’s revelations. ‘Where?’
‘She had a silver ring on the index finger of her right hand. It was fairly wide – three millimetres or so. I found the injection mark under that.’
‘So what are you trying to imply?’
‘I’m not trying to imply anything. I’m just saying the woman had – in the hours before her death – been injected with a substance.’
‘To what end?’
‘To render her temporarily paralysed.’
‘So how did she come to be out shopping in the snow?’
The young doctor drew in a long breath. ‘I don’t think she was. I don’t think she can have been. I believe her death from the cold was – in effect – staged.’
Müller felt her frustrations getting the better of her. The doctor seemed to be contradicting herself. ‘Yet you don’t disagree with the findings of hypothermia of Dr Siegel?’
‘No. I agree with them entirely. But it’s why she perished in the cold that is the point. It’s my belief that a drug was administered, she was then dumped – helpless – in this Arctic weather, possibly even buried alive under snow – although that may have been just a natural weather phenomenon. Certainly asphyxia was present. And she’d been drugged – she was unable to save herself.’
‘Even if she’d wanted to?’
‘Oh, she would have wanted to all right. If my suspicions about the drug used are correct, she would have been conscious as she slowly froze to death.’
Müller paused as she let the implications sink in. ‘So you’re saying that she was—’
‘Murdered, Major Müller? Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.’
8
Rügen, East Germany
October 1978
It doesn’t take me long to find out more about Dieter. What’s more problematical is trying to catch his eye again and make him notice me.
With autumn already here, and winter approaching, the camping season is pretty much over. Most of the work now involves cleaning and tidying up, gardening, that sort of thing. My grandmother’s getting on a bit and not as active, so a lot of that’s left to me. But I still have more time on my hands than in the summer.
*
Sabine looks at me as though I’m mad when I suggest going for a walk at Sassnitz harbour.
‘Why? It’s blowing a gale. We’ll get soaked from the spray, and it’s freezing. Plus it takes ages on the bus. Can’t we just hang out at the café? At least it’s warm in there.’
I tell her not to be so miserable.
What I don’t say is the real reason I want to go for a ‘walk’ in Sassnitz. I know that Dieter and his company are doing work reinforcing and rebuilding the harbour wall. It’s high time Sabine and I indulged in a bit of flirting. She’s a good choice as she’s pretty enough to turn heads, but not so pretty as to completely overshadow me. As I think that, I feel a pang of sadness, remembering the girl who was pretty enough to overshadow me – and regularly did. Beate. Mathias only had eyes for her. I can’t say I’m sad he’s gone – in the end, he proved
himself utterly shallow and a traitor. Even before that he was obsessed with Beate and tried to get in the way of our friendship at any opportunity. But Beate herself was a good friend. I can still hear her voice in my head. Her excitement when she was invited to that fancy dress party at the barracks on the top of the Brocken. And I feel a terrible shame that I did nothing to stop her going, even though I had an awful foreboding about how things would turn out.
*
Sabine cheers up once we get to Sassnitz, and the choking diesel fumes of the bus station are replaced by the fresh salty tang of the sea. As we walk along the start of the harbour wall and breathe in, I can taste the tiny droplets of seawater from the spray – I feel it clearing my airways, like I’m breathing life itself. When I’m away from Rügen, it’s what I miss. The fresh air. The smell of the sea. Even at Prora Ost, although we knew we were locked up, by levering myself up and gazing out on the Ostsee, I could imagine that feeling of freedom that the sea can inspire. I know that, not many kilometres away, lies real freedom. Denmark, Sweden. But I’ve tried to get there once, and failed. And the pain of failure was almost worse than never having tried at all. As I skip along hand in hand with Sabine, I know I can’t face that level of fear and disappointment again.
We count the waves as they hit the harbour wall, each one shaking it with a thunderous slap. It seems amazing that something so apparently solid can appear to shake beneath our feet. After the sixth wave, we know from the saying about the seventh that the really big one is next. It doesn’t always work, of course, but this time it does. It crashes over the wall; we brace ourselves into the spray and wind. But even so I find myself winded. I stagger slightly then fight to regain my balance, my hair and my anorak soaking wet. It’s good that there’s another, higher wall behind us, otherwise I fear we’ll be swept over into the harbour.
Sabine shouts in my ear. ‘We ought to move to the other side, the sheltered side! It seems to be getting rougher!’
I’d wanted to show some bravado in front of Dieter and his colleagues, working away at the end by the lighthouse, just before the open sea. But it feels too dangerous. I nod, and at the next set of steps, we climb up and over to the wider, more sheltered pathway on the leeward side of the sea and wind.
When we get nearer the end of the wall, towards the harbour mouth, a People’s Army soldier steps in front of our path.
‘Papers,’ he orders.
You need a special resident’s permit at some coastal towns, although not here on Rügen, so I don’t really understand what he wants.
I dig my regular ID card from my bag and thrust it under his nose. He’s an earnest-seeming specimen, who looks as though he’d be more at home in a university science lab.
He peers down his bespectacled nose. Then gets out a handkerchief and wipes the spray from his glasses. ‘That’s not what I mean. You need special permission to go to the end of the harbour while the building work is being carried out. Do you have that?’
Sabine smiles at him. ‘Do we really need that? Can’t you just let us through? We’re only going for a walk.’
He suddenly becomes alert, as though sensing some sort of trap set by his superiors to test his assiduousness. Standing erect, he brings his feet together with a snap. ‘No. It is forbidden to go any further without special permission. Please go back the way you came.’
I roll my eyes. There’s no real reason we shouldn’t go further. It’s not as though the wall is crumbling into the sea. It’s just being repaired and improved before the winter. But I can see this one is determined to play everything by the rules.
‘Fine,’ I say. ‘We’ll sit here then. You can’t stop us doing that.’
For a moment he looks as though he might try to. He turns and walks a few metres away and leaves us to sit on a bench. Once he realises we’re not planning to go any further, I climb up on the bench, and look over towards Dieter. We’re close enough that I can make him out, with his Mediterranean olive skin, and dark hair which has separated into damp rats’ tails, and is plastered to his head. But can he see us?
I put two fingers to my mouth, and whistle towards them. Dieter turns, but so does the guard. I wave but I’m not sure he’s seen me, knows who I am, or really cares. After all, the only other time he’s seen me was when he and his group were teasing Laurenz and me for kissing in public.
The guard’s hovering. ‘I thought I ordered you to go back the way you came.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘You just said we couldn’t go any further without a permit.’
‘Well, I’m telling you now. Start walking back to the other end of the harbour wall and don’t cause any more trouble.’
I’m tempted to refuse just to wind him up, but I can see him admiring Sabine from behind his glasses. Maybe that’s the way to deal with him. I get closer to her and whisper in her ear.
‘He’s taken a shine to you. Ask him what time the construction gang usually knock off and where they go after that.’
Sabine looks at me dubiously, but friendship trumps her caution.
She poses the question.
The guard sighs. ‘Look, I’ll tell you, but then I want you to do as I say, and go back to the other end of the harbour wall. Otherwise one of my superiors will take it out on me for not doing my job properly.’
Sabine smiles coquettishly. ‘OK, deal.’
He looks at his army-issue watch. ‘They usually knock off when it starts to get dark. So about 1730 or so. Some of them hang around the bar on the port afterwards – the others just go on the army transport back to Prora.’
‘Thanks,’ smiles Sabine. ‘See you around.’
I’m not sure if I’m imagining it or not, but as we walk towards the port office as agreed, Sabine’s face seems to have coloured slightly and she looks to have an extra spring in her step.
*
We wait in the bar at the other end of the harbour until half-five comes around. The barmaid’s eyeing us suspiciously – wondering why we’ve both been nursing two small Vita Colas for more than an hour. She looks like she’s about to say something and come over, when there’s shouting at the door, and a group of the construction soldiers come in. At the back of the group, I see Dieter, and my heart starts banging in my chest. I try to stay calm, but I can feel myself going red.
They’re talking loudly to each other, laughing and joking. It looks like they’re going to ignore us, so as Dieter goes past, I deliberately flick a beer mat to the floor, then lean in front of him to reach it, so he can’t help but stumble into me.
‘Whoops,’ he says. ‘Careful.’
‘Sorry,’ I say, sitting up again and smiling. At least I have a reason now for looking embarrassed. ‘Oh, it’s you again,’ I continue, acting surprised.
‘Ha!’ he says. ‘Little Miss Cinema-goer.’ Then he looks around ostentatiously. ‘Isn’t your boyfriend chaperoning you today?’
I shrug. ‘I don’t have a boyfriend.’
He snorts. ‘What, so you were just snogging a total stranger the other night?’ I know I’ve caught my fish now. If he wasn’t interested, he wouldn’t have remembered.
‘No, he was my boyfriend. He’s not any more.’ As I say this, I can feel Sabine is about to interrupt, because this is news to her – and would be to Laurenz, too, if I’d actually told him. Out of Dieter’s vision, I give her a sharp kick under the table.
He pulls a sarcastic face, as though to say ‘how fascinating’. Feigning disinterest, he goes to join his friends at the bar.
‘What’s all that about?’ hisses Sabine.
‘Shush,’ I say. ‘Have you got a pen?’
She looks at me with disapproval, as though I’m a naughty schoolkid. But she digs in her handbag and pulls a ballpoint out all the same.
I grab it, write my name and the campsite’s phone number on the beer mat, jump up and walk towards the bar. One of Dieter’s friends nudges him as I approach. I can feel myself blushing like mad now, and sweat pooling in my armpits. I hope the Republic’s
finest deodorant is doing its job for once.
Dieter turns. I hand him the beer mat.
‘We’re from Sellin, the other side of Binz. If you’re ever out that way, give me a call.’
I turn away and rush back towards Sabine before he can reply, and without saying anything grab my anorak and beckon her with my eyes. I want to go. I’ve done what I set out to do. If he’s torn the mat up, or is laughing about it with his mates, I don’t want to know.
Just seeing him again, being close to him, talking to him . . . it’s like it’s lit a fire inside me.
Sabine’s looking at me as though I’ve got dog shit on my shoes, but I’ve got to run away. Put some distance between me and him and leave things to fate.
9
Binz, Island of Rügen, East Germany
Later on 30 December 1978
The anger Müller felt when she received the summons to meet him almost gave her a blood pressure headache. She put her hand to her temple, feeling the pounding underneath. How dare they mess me around like this?
She’d wanted to discuss the case with Tilsner and Schmidt, filling them in on what the young assistant pathologist had told her. Instead, she’d had to hitch another lift with an army personnel carrier from the hospital in Bergen. It was on its way back to Prora, suspending operations for the day as night had now fallen, even though it was not yet 5 p.m. But Jäger had ‘suggested’ she meet him in a bar off the esplanade in Binz. The army driver dropped her in the centre of the town. With much of the power cut off, the streets had a ghostly, deserted feel. Müller had an idea what it would look like in daylight: the same white clapboard and veranda Bäderarchitektur which had been prevalent in the next town along the coast, Sellin, where they’d stayed nearly four years earlier on the case that had originally brought them to Rügen. But the buildings were in shadow. Dim, flickering candlelight was evident in a few windows – or brighter lights in premises with access to emergency generators.