‘Were there none of the other coal thieves around when the police showed up?’
‘Vanished as fast as fans of the Führer did in 1945. They’ll be looking for another spot to work from.’
‘For the next few days, maybe. They’ll soon be back.’
Stave looked around and waved to one of the uniformed police he’d known for years. If Dönnecke had said anything to anyone, then it was most likely to him. He walked over to his moustachioed colleague and said, ‘I believe there's already a suspect?’
‘We’ve already interviewed three kids,’ he replied. ‘They all did a runner but we caught up with a few of them. We’re familiar enough with the coal thieves. We found them at home with their parents. They all told the same story. One of the wolf children had somehow or other crept up behind Meinke without him noticing when the fast train for Ostende was rattling past. He hit him twice on the head, possibly with an iron bar. Possibly with a police truncheon he’d got hold of somehow There were differences on that point. Either way he ran off immediately after, before Meinke's pals could do anything.’
‘Name?’
The policeman made a vague gesture, suggesting partly helplessness, partly lack of interest. ‘A wolf kid. We have a description. No name. And obviously no address. We’re gong to have to comb through hundreds of damn ruins. And even then there's no guarantee we’ll find him.’
‘Motive?’
‘Probably an argument. These kids are always beating each other up. Sometimes worse. This is not the first murder we’ve had among the coal thieves. And it won’t be the last. They need somebody looking after them.’
‘Yes, I’m sure that's the problem,’ Stave said wearily, and nodded to the policeman as he left.
Early Deaths
Wednesday, 11 June 1947
Grey light from the window. The sun was still below the horizon as Stave woke up with a start. It was his old nightmare, but different this time. He was tumbling through the ruins, his ankle still in good shape, feeling the heat of the blaze on his face. He’d almost reached his wife, when suddenly there in the middle of the flames stood Anna, her arm across her chest in that protective pose she adopted, turning away from him. Karl was sitting on the remnants of a wall singing a children's song. Stave knew the melody but couldn’t make out the words. He still had it running through his head when he woke up. He glanced over at the balcony door which he had left open the previous night because of the heat. Had he screamed so loud he might have woken the neighbours? Maybe they could have heard him down on Ahrensburger Strasse? When he had been out on official business on the empty streets after curfew, he had sometimes heard groans or screams coming from the houses or Nissen huts around. It had simply never occurred to him up until now that he too might play his part in this nocturnal concert. He got to his feet, annoyed with himself, and closed the door, trying to stay as far from it as possible in the hope no one would see him.
He had done well to collect as much water as he could yesterday because there were only drips from the tap. He soaped himself and washed himself down with the water he had collected in the bath. Already it was covered with an oily film. Then he rubbed himself with a rough dry cloth until his skin hurt. Water from one of the jars to make coffee. He made a face. I must make sure I get home on time tonight, he told himself, so I can get to the nearest street pump before it gets dark.
He limped along Ahrensburger Strasse and onwards for at least an hour before he could banish all traces of his nightmare. Now it was Anna and Karl rather than Margarethe. It wasn’t a good turn of events for his dreamland. I can cope with the dead more easily than with the living, he thought to himself, and wondered if that was why he was on the murder squad.
He pulled himself together. There was no proof he got on better with the dead. He still hadn’t found Adolf Winkelmann's killer. If Wilhelm Meinke had been involved, it was too late to do anything about that. Had one of the wolf kids taken revenge for young Win-kelmann? Was that motive enough? Or was Meinke silenced because he knew something? Because Winkelmann's killer would be safer with him out of the way? But if the second killing really was to do with one of the wolf children, then maybe it was the same one responsible for the crime committed down at Blohm & Voss? But what would the killer have been doing there? And why would one of the wolf children have killed him? Because the Hamburg kid with the good black market connections was trying to force his way into the ranks of the wolf children?
Stave tried to work out a way to get involved in the Meinke investigation. Cäsar Dönnecke was sixty years old, had lived through the days of the Kaiser, the Weimar Republic, the Nazis, the British occupation — he was part of the furniture. He had been careful enough or wise enough not to join the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Even so the British had gone through his file in detail in 1945 and even suspended him for a few weeks. But afterwards Cäsar Dönnecke had been resurrected from the fallen and reinstalled in his old job. He wasn’t exactly somebody Stave could give orders to. Nor was he one of those likely to do a favour for Stave, who had never needed to be investigated by the British.
But one way or another there was a connection between Adolf Winkelmann and Wilhelm Meinke, one that he alone knew about: Hildegard Hüllmann. I’m going to have to ask the young hooker a few more questions, he realised. She is part of the case.
Beneath her suntanned cheeks, Erna Berg was pale. Stave wondered how a pregnant woman managed to feed herself and her unborn child on the near starvation rations they were issued. I should have brought her something, he thought, feeling self-conscious.
‘Do you know if Dönnecke is about?’ he asked her.
‘That old warhorse? He was with Cuddel Breuer this morning. Didn’t look quite as happy when he came out as he did beforehand.’ She gave a little laugh, then slapped her hand across her mouth, shocked by her own behaviour. ‘Did you want to speak to him? About the dead boy? You knew him.’
One of these days one of the big wheelers and dealers on the black market was going to pay Erna Berg a salary. For the price of a couple of cartons of cigarettes – tiny slice of the profits, the chief inspector thought to himself- they would get wind of everything that went on up and down the corridors of the CID headquarters. The same cigarettes would allow his secretary to buy milk powder and a good lawyer for her divorce case. It was a good thing she was so incorruptible. ‘I guess I’d better saddle up and find the old warhorse,’ he said, nodding genially.
Two minutes later he was in Dönnecke's office, down at the other end of the corridor. He had family photos on his desk, certificates on the wall. It looked just as it always had done, except that there was no longer a photo of the Führer on the wall. Cäsar Dönnecke had a red face, with a ring of grey hair around the edges of his massive skull, like a laurel wreath. He had hands like coal shovels, a double chin, and a belly. There were a thousand rumours about how he must manage to fill it on a regular basis in these days of scanty supplies. But nobody really knew.
Dönnecke glanced up from his desk, where he had an open copy of Die Welt. He smelled like an old man. ‘My morning read is a ritual and rituals are not meant to be disturbed, Stave, not without a very good reason.’
‘My reason is Wilhelm Meinke.’
‘That vagabond?’ Dönnecke looked him up and down with his deep-set brown eyes. Clever eyes, Stave thought, alert. Dönnecke was one of those who let everyone know that even under the Third Reich, the police had only done their duty. For Dönnecke ‘duty’ had meant going down to the cellar with the Gestapo for their interrogations. What he had done while he was down there, nobody knew.
‘Meinke was a witness in my case.’
‘Bad luck, colleague. Now he belongs to me, at least what's left of him does.’
‘The one thing might be connected to the other.’
‘You want to take over my case?’
‘I want information. I want leads to follow’
‘Forget it, Stave. Your kid was stabbed to death d
own at the shipyard. Whoever did it is your problem. Mine was hit over the head by another vagabond like himself, as if he were a disobedient dog. I have witnesses and I have a description of the killer. We’re after him and sooner or later we’ll find him. I’ll interrogate him and afterwards I’ll hand him over in cuffs to the public prosecutor. Then — and only then — will you get a glimpse of my files.’
‘What was the motive?’
Dönnecke raised his hands and let them fall with a heavy thump to his desk. ‘A sack of coal? Three Lucky Strikes? A pallet to sleep on in an anti-aircraft bunker? An amenable widow? There's no law and order among these kids. They turn on one another like wild animals at the slightest provocation. The “wolf children” are the worst. Nomen ist omen: they are what they’re called. The way things are going, they’ll wipe themselves out. The boss gave me another case from the same background this morning. We don’t have enough officers. If the British weren’t so
‘Who?’ Stave interrupted. He realised his voice sounded cold.
Dönnecke gave a chilling laugh. ‘An acquaintance of yours, I believe. She was picked up last night. Another of these wolf children. A little hooker down at the station.’
Stave stormed out of the office, strode angrily down the corridor. He went into his office and grabbed his hat from its hook. ‘I’m with Dr Czrisini at the pathology lab,’ he called out to Erna Berg.
Dönnecke had also left his office and was standing in the corridor, his legs astride, waving his newspaper like a fan. ‘That's my case too, damn it!’ he yelled after Stave.
A quarter of an hour later Stave was standing next to the autopsy table in the pathology lab. Daylight fell through the tall windows, reflecting on the white tiles, the stainless steel, the air filled with the heady stench of blood, urine, intestines and excrement. On one of the three dissection tables lay the body of Hildegard Hüllmann. Stave wouldn’t have recognised the young prostitute, if Dr Czrisini hadn’t dropped an organ that Stave didn’t recognise into a steel bowl and then called him over, at which point he spotted the name card attached to one toe.
‘This isn’t your case,’ he said.
‘That's beginning to sound familiar,’ Stave said, forcing himself to look at the body. Her skull lay open, the top neatly sawn off, her brain lying in a bowl next to her blood-covered head, her face thankfully unrecognisable. Her skinny chest had been cut open as had her abdomen.
‘We’ll sew her back up afterwards,’ the pathologist assured him.
‘I don’t think there will be anybody turning up to say goodbye over the open coffin.’
‘Except for yourself, maybe?’
The chief inspector thought back to the card he had given her with his telephone number on it and her cheeky answer that she would make her own inquiries. This girl's death is on my conscience, he thought grimly. I should have looked after her. ‘She was a witness in my case concerning the murdered boy left on the bomb.’
‘That fits,’ Czrisini said.
Stave stared at him. ‘What fits?’
‘You’re a bit late. You should have been here before I began work.’
‘A stab wound, to the right side of her chest, an indication that the killer was left-handed.’
‘Exactly. But in this case she was stabbed three times. Two of the blows seriously damaged her lungs; the blade must have been long enough to slice into both of them. The third blow shattered one of her ribs, so it didn’t go quite so deep. The victim choked to death on her own blood, more than two litres of it in her chest cavity. From the temperature of the body, I estimate death to have occurred about twelve hours ago.’
‘Middle of the night.’
‘Either just before or just after curfew.’ Stave stared at the girl's hands, which the pathologist hadn’t touched. They were dirty, with a nasty rash on her left hand, but no sign of wounds. ‘She would have fought back if she knew she was being attacked.’
‘That doesn’t mean she knew her attacker, or at least not that she knew him well.’
The chief inspector nodded. ‘Indeed, could have been one of her customers.’
‘Given the business she was in, she necessarily had to let her customers get close to her.’
‘Any positive indications in that direction?’
‘No sperm in the area of her vagina or rear. Or in her mouth. Nonetheless, Chief Inspector Dönnecke thinks it has to have been one of her clients.’
‘Where and when was she found?’
‘We heard in the early hours of the morning. I’d only just finished with another body.’ Czrisini shrugged his shoulders resignedly. ‘She was found by a barkeeper who’d finished for the evening and was on his way home. He reported it at the next police station where he had to be treated for shock. The blood that hadn’t flooded her lungs was all over the street and the walls of a building nearby.’ Czrisini shook his head, unmoved by any sentimentality. ‘She was lying outside the door of a house shared by several families in Rostock Strasse, near the main station.’
‘And even nearer to the Hansaplatz,’ Stave muttered. ‘Anything else?’
Czrisini turned away, bent over into a lengthy spell of coughing, then wiped his mouth with a paper tissue. There were beads of sweat on his head when he stood upright again. Stave noticed a few spots of blood on the tissue. The pathologist saw him looking and quickly crumpled up the tissue and threw it into a basket full of removed organs.
‘I need a cigarette,’ he coughed, and waved to a young man in a white coat filling out forms at a metal-topped table in the corner of the room. ‘My assistant here can deal with the rest. Sewing the body up again, I mean.’
Outside, he sucked greedily on his Woodbine, smiling contentedly, until a thought occurred to him. ‘There is something else, even if it's not obviously relevant to the case.’
‘I’ll decide that.’
‘The kid was pregnant. Very early stages, scarcely more than a cluster of cells in her womb. Quite probably she herself had no idea.’
Stave suddenly felt sick, almost asked the pathologist for a cigarette.
‘It might not have been the first time,’ Czrisini added, without noticing that Stave had to hold on to the wall for support. ‘There are indications of a possible abortion. Very primitively carried out, but that's hardly surprising. Risk of the job.’
‘Risk of the job indeed, just like premature death caused by a brutal attack,’ the chief inspector replied.
‘She's not the first streetwalker to end up like that, and she won’t be the last.’
Stave closed his eyes and thought for a moment. ‘Did you also do the autopsy on Meinke?’
‘Your other witness? This could be the link between them: they both knew you. You aren’t the killer, by any chance?’ He coughed again.
‘Don’t tell Cuddel Breuer.’
‘Or Dönnecke. He's not exactly a fan of yours.’
‘Officially, I’m not here.’
‘I’m as silent as a tomb.’
Stave gave a weak smile, remembering the scene in the hallway back at CID headquarters. ‘Dönnecke knows I’m here unofficially.’
‘He could lodge a complaint against you with the Tommies,’ Czri-sini said, lighting up another cigarette from the stub of his Woodbine. ‘I had Meinke in here a few hours earlier, on the very same table,’ he went on. ‘Took all night: trauma to the brain and skull, as suspected. Bone fractures, splinters in the brain, everything you could ask for. Bleeding in the brain. With injuries like that it's harder to draw conclusions than with stab wounds. But if I was forced to make a guess, I would say his attacker used the right hand rather than the left. And despite having a blunt instrument of some sort in his hand, he was smaller than his victim. That fits in with Dönnecke's suspicions and the testimony of the witnesses that the killer was a wolf child.’
‘A right-handed child, whereas in the case of Winkelmann and Hildegard we’re dealing with a left-hander.’
And more likely an adult than a child. I couldn’
t swear to that in court, but it would fit: the height of the chest wounds, the force of the stabbing.’
‘It couldn’t be that simple,’ Stave sighed.
‘The answer is no.’ Cuddel Breuer said the moment Stave entered his office.
‘Two dead witnesses in the space of twelve hours, that's hardly a coincidence,’ the chief inspector replied. He ignored his boss's suggestion that he take a seat.
Breuer stared at him. ‘Of course it could be a coincidence,’ he said at last. An unfortunate coincidence, but a coincidence nonetheless. It's not the first time two teenagers have been murdered in Hamburg in the course of a single day.’
‘These two were children.’
‘A street urchin and petty criminal who stole coal, and a hooker who worked down at the station. Their age doesn’t come into it. What matters is their lifestyle. They weren’t living the lives of children.’ He raised his massive hands ‘I wish these boys and girls lived in a different world too. But times are what they are. Just because two crimes were committed at roughly the same time, does not mean they are connected.’
‘That's not what I was taught.’
‘That was before the war, and all the mess we’re in now. I think these two murders actually prove we’re dealing with different issues.’
‘In that case you must know more than I do.’
‘No sarcasm, Stave. It doesn’t suit you and doesn’t do you any favours.’ Breuer sat up straight in his seat and began to count on his hairy fingers: ‘First of all: two victims, both of whom led what we can call “irregular” lives. Meinke was killed in the afternoon, Hüllmann that night. How could a single killer have found and killed both of them in such a short space of time? Secondly: the killer with Meinke's death on his conscience was seen – we have a description of the suspect. Vague, I grant you, but enough to suggest the murder has nothing to do with that of Winkelmann. In third place: if two killers with the same motive struck in two different places, that would indicate some form of larger organisation at work, and your investigation of the Winkelmann case has not given the slightest evidence of any such thing. And fourth: what is the hypothetical motive? Why these two children?’
The Wolf Children (Inspector Stave Book 2) Page 20