The Murderer in Ruins

by Cay Rademacher

  ‘I recognise your man with the red hair. He stops every woman who might be wearing a trace of lipstick because he can’t tell the difference between an elegant young lady and a streetwalker. One of these days he’s going to arrest the mayor’s daughter. But I don’t know you, nor your English companion.’

  Stave didn’t bother showing them his ID, or telling them his name, but just pulled out the photograph. The older girl was moved, but the younger one went pale and held up a hand to her mouth in shock.

  ‘What bastard did that?’ the older one asked. Her accent was broad, and she drawled. From East Prussia, Stave reckoned.

  ‘That’s what I’d like to know,’ he replied. ‘But I’d also like to know who the victim is.’

  ‘Never seen her.’

  ‘What about you?’ Stave asked handing the younger girl the photo.

  ‘I feel sick,’ she groaned. ‘I feel like throwing up. Take that away from me.’

  Stave didn’t move. ‘You can throw up if you like, but only after you’ve told me whether or not you’ve ever seen this young woman.’

  ‘No,’ she almost screamed, then got to her feet and ran, bent over, to a grubby door to the rear of the room.

  MacDonald leapt to his feet. To his horror Stave saw that the Brit had pulled a gun. Damned quick on the draw, he thought to himself, waving at the man to put it away. The lieutenant sat down again with the men, who’d all gone pale and were staring at him in terror.

  ‘Hildegard’s only been on the game a week,’ the older girl whispered, almost apologetically. ‘Where she comes from, they don’t see stuff like that every day.’

  ‘But you do?’

  She gave a harsh laugh. ‘I came here in a refugee column from Breslau. I’ve seen so many corpses that a photo has no effect on me. Do you think she was a streetwalker?’

  Stave had been about to answer gruffly that it was none of her business. But he could hear a kernel of fear underlying the cheekiness in her voice: the fear every street girl had that the next punter will want more than just a quickie round the corner.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked instead.

  She hesitated a second, then whispered, ‘Ingrid Domin. As far as most of my customers are concerned, I’m Véronique. It sounds more erotic. French, you know?’ She made a scornful expression.

  Stave thought back to the way Maschke had addressed the two street girls earlier. Then he dismissed the thought, tore a leaf from his notebook and scribbled on it: Tel 34 10 00. Extensions 8451–8454, and then his name.

  ‘Do me a favour: if you hear anything call me. Or come by the office.’ He added the number of his office. ‘Whatever, no matter how hysterical or crazy it might seem, just tell me. Promise?’

  She agreed and quickly shoved the piece of paper into her handbag.

  The chief inspector got to his feet. ‘I have no idea whether or not this woman was…’ he found himself looking for a suitable word, ‘…whether or not this lady belonged to your trade. Up until a few minutes ago, I had assumed so, but now I’m not so sure, which doesn’t mean that I’m ruling it out. So keep a look out. And talk it over with the other girls.’

  ‘I’m a tough girl, I can look out for myself,’ she said quietly. And smiled at him again

  ‘Looks like you’re lucky with the ladies,’ MacDonald said as he came over.

  The corner of Stave’s mouth twitched. ‘One of them ran straight out of the room to throw up,’ he reminded the lieutenant.

  ‘But the other one was a lot nicer to you than the four old boozers over there were to me.’

  ‘So that was a waste of time too.’

  ‘Absolutely. Never seen her, though, that said, at least one of them was so drunk he wouldn’t have recognised his own mother.’

  ‘Happens more often than you might think – that children don’t recognise the corpses of their own mothers,’ Stave replied.

  ‘What now?’

  ‘We hit the next joint. Then the one after that, then the one after that…’

  ‘Good job there aren’t so many left then,’ MacDonald said. ‘Never thought I’d be so grateful to our Air Force comrades for their bombing raids.’

  Stave said nothing, just pushed open the door.

  An hour and a half later the pair of them walked through the door of Kamsing, the last venue on their list, with nothing to show. They had questioned half a dozen landlords, a few guests, at least 20 street girls, as many pimps and a few black marketeers. But not one of them admitted to knowing the dead woman.

  ‘Let me buy you one of these dreadful Chinese soups,’ MacDonald said. ‘They probably serve up monkey brains and rats’ tails.’

  ‘As long as it’s hot,’ Stave muttered gratefully and plonked himself down on a wobbly chair next to a little round table. Then he took a look around.

  The restaurant was full, or at least fuller than the other places they’d gone round. Eight well-dressed young men were playing cards – poker – at a large table in an alcove. The notes on the table in front of them were thousand Reichsmark notes.

  Bastards, Stave thought to himself, though he was only too well aware that his indignation was mainly fired by envy. Black marketeers gaming away their nights, gold watches on their wrists. His colleague called them the black marketeers’ Iron Cross and had told Stave that they hid ration cards under the collars of their overcoats, and traded jewellery and medicine over the tables, wrapped in newspaper. But not yet, it was too early for that. Anyway, it wasn’t his problem. He slurped at his soup.

  ‘No idea what they use to spice this,’ MacDonald said between spoonfuls. ‘But it’s at least as warming as a single malt whisky.’

  Stave didn’t bother telling the lieutenant that it had been years since he’d tasted even a drop of whisky. ‘Indeed,’ he muttered. At least he felt warm for the first time all day. His mouth was burning and numbed by exotic spices. He felt as if every muscle in his body was unwinding. If I don’t get to my feet, I’m going to fall asleep here and now in front of MacDonald, he thought as he forced himself to stand up.

  ‘Time to take the field. You do one half of the customers,’ he indicated a rough line through the middle of the room, ‘and I’ll deal with the rest. Meet you at the door.’

  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.

  Stave 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 i
t 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.’

  An 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.

  Frozen Earth

  Tuesday, 21 January 1947

  He 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 piec
e 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.’