The Murderer in Ruins

by Cay Rademacher

  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.

  Hamburg 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 har
bour. 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.

  Ehrlich poured the tea. ‘I used to drink coffee,’ he piped up, ‘I only got used to tea during my time in England. It is a lot easier to get hold of, especially here in the British occupation zone.’

  ‘Is that why you came back to Hamburg, the chief port in the British zone?’

  ‘Ah, I can see Lieutenant MacDonald has already put you in the picture,’ Ehrlich replied with an amused smile. Stave thought there was something striking about his oversized owl-like eyes, something furtive.

  You idiot, he told himself, typical CID attitude, ready to break into the conversation, take the man by surprise: not exactly the right way to deal with a public prosecutor.

  ‘Thank you for agreeing so readily to our request for an autopsy,’ he said, to change the subject.

  Ehrlich sat back, relaxed: ‘Tell me about the case. I’m all ears.’

  Stave told him what they had found out including the various theories about the victim and her possible attacker.

  ‘A difficult one,’ Ehrlich said at last when the chief inspector had finished.

  ‘The first thing is to find out who the victim is. Otherwise we’re never going to get anywhere,’ Stave admitted.

  ‘So you don’t think it was a robbery-motivated murder, despite sending Maschke off to find files on such incidents even though you know as well as I do that they’ve been burnt in a certain oven.’

  He’s a wily one, thought Stave in surprise. In a mugging, the identity of the victim doesn’t necessarily lead to the perpetrator, as criminals often attack people they don’t know. Ehrlich must have decided that the victim and her attacker were acquainted and that Stave had an idea.

  ‘I’m simply trying to be efficient,’ he replied.

  ‘Ah, efficiency – a very German characteristic,’ the prosecutor replied, with just the slightest hint of irony.

  ‘A characteristic in criminal work everywhere,’ Stave shot back, regretting that they had got into this game of cat-and-mouse. ‘But you’re right,’ he added, in a conciliatory tone. Maybe he had suddenly come to trust Ehrlich, or maybe it was just the effect of the hot tea. Contrary to his normal habit of presenting prosecutors with no more than hard facts and the most plausible theories, Stave decided that this time he would mention something that was little more than the vaguest suspicion. ‘This crime was not just brutal,’ he ventured, hesitantly, ‘but also particularly efficient. Lethal force, resulting in immediate death. Then the thorough stripping of the body.’

  ‘Cold blooded,’ Ehrlich interjected.

  ‘Indeed. Carefully planned and perfectly executed. Someone capable of that has either had every sense of morality blunted – or is mentally ill but at the same time capable of logical reasoning.’

  ‘After this war and the 12 years of that regime there are more than enough people running around Germany whose underdeveloped conscience hasn’t the slightest problem with one death more or less. And we would see most of them as ordinary honest citizens.’

  ‘Even so, it’s not every day here in Hamburg that a young woman gets garrotted, stripped and left lying in the rubble.’

  The prosecutor nodded: ‘Touché. So, what do you really think happened, Chief Inspector?’

  ‘I reckon it was somebody mentally deranged. Somebody who knew the victim or at least had been surreptitiously watching her. Somebody who planned the deed over weeks or even months, and chose the moment to strike.’

  ‘What evidence do you have?’

  ‘Apart from the brutal nature of the attack, none at all.’ Stave didn’t see the point in trying to make the prosecutor think he knew more than he did. ‘In our line of work we often have to deal with mentally unsound people. I’m no expert in this field. If people like that – as I’ve heard said – have a particular modus operandi, there’s none obvious here. But then it’s a bit too early for that.’

  The two of them sat in silence for a while. There was no need to say what both Stave and Ehrlich were thinking: there would be more such murders.

  ‘So what do you intend to do now?’ the prosecutor finally asked, pouring them both more tea.

  The chief inspector nodded in thanks and warmed his hands on the cup, inhaled the aroma, and smiled. Then he pulled out of his coat pocket a roll of paper that still smelled of fresh printer’s ink.

  ‘This is the first copy of a reward poster we intend to put up,’ he said, handing it over the table.

  ‘“A reward of one thousand Reichsmarks”,’ Ehrlich read out in a quiet voice. ‘“Robbery and murder. On Monday, 20 January 1947, an as yet unidentified woman was found dead in Baustrasse, Hamburg. Violent robbery suspected.” Well, you’re not exactly a poet, Chief Inspector.’ Ehrlich examined the photograph of the deceased and read the description.

  ‘One minute you tell me you don’t suspect it was violent robbery,’ he said. ‘And yet here I am reading it in black and white.’

  ‘I don’t want to get people worried,’ Stave said in justification. ‘And in any case, I don’t think suggesting it might be a mentally disturbed individual is exactly going to help.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If we say we’re looking for a lunatic then hundreds of witnesses will turn up accusing their neighbours, colleagues or anybody who’s got up their noses. That will mean a waste of time and effort, and cause more problems than it solves.’

  ‘You may well be right.’

  ‘We’re going to put up these posters all over town, and wait until somebody who knows the victim turns up.’

  ‘And what do you intend to do in the meantime?’

  ‘I intend to go to the cemetery,’ Stave replied. ‘They’re burying the victim this afternoon in Öjendorf. I’ll stay in the background and see if any mourners turn up.’

  Stave didn’t return directly to his office after the interview. Instead he wandered aimlessly around town. He needed to get his thoughts in order, and that was something he did best while walking. He went through every detail of the case again in his head: what did he know about the victim? Nothing. About the perpetrator? Even less. What else could he do but wait? Wait for a witness to turn up, or at least somebody who could identify the victim from the photograph on the poster. But what if nobody turned up? Maybe he had missed a trick? But if he had, what was it?

  Stave felt under pressure, and he didn’t like that. Under pressure from Cuddel Breuer, and from Ehrlich. He preferred to work on his own. He liked to bring in experts only when necessary: photographers, forensics, pathologists. But what was he supposed to do with Maschke? Not to mention MacDonald. Neither of them were CID people; they were amateurs not professionals. On the other hand, maybe an outsider’s opinion might be useful: it was possible the Brit might notice something he had missed. He seemed bright enough, and he had influence.

  Stave dragged himself away from his thoughts. He was back at Eppendorfer Baum, a long way from Karl-Muck-Platz. A snack bar had been set up in a half-ruined building. The upper stories had been hit by a bomb and the remainder of the building stood like a half-eviscerated corpse. Only the ground floor seemed undamaged and somebody had put up a board with the childishly scrawled words ‘Fresh meals’.

  Stave walked into the brightly lit but sadly unheated room and sat down at a table. He did his best to ignore the throbbing in his left ankle. He cast a casual glance around. It was midday and there were a few workers, a few office people, a mother with two children, and sitting on
his own in a corner a man with a ‘Russia face’ in an undyed Wehrmacht greatcoat, the empty left sleeve sewn up to the front of it.

  Stave ordered the dish of the day, which cost one Reichsmark: a pickled herring with two thin slices of gherkin and a spoonful of some murky vegetables with no taste. He gobbled it down, only to feel hungrier than before. If only they had coffee. He sighed deeply, paid and left.

  Back at the office MacDonald was waiting for him. Or at least that’s what he said. Stave had the impression that it was not so much the murder investigation that had brought the lieutenant to Karl-Muck-Platz as the chance for a chat with Erna Berg.

  ‘Anything new from the ranks of the British army?’ Stave asked.

  MacDonald gave an apologetic shrug that for a moment made him look like a little boy. ‘Everybody stares wide-eyed when they see the photograph, but there’s no indication that anybody recognises her.’

  ‘Have you got your jeep here?’

  The lieutenant nodded. ‘Are we going on a car chase? Like in the American movies? Should I get us Tommy guns?’

  Reluctantly Stave found himself smiling: ‘We can hide the hardware in a black coffin. We’re going to the cemetery.’

  The chief inspector was relieved that he didn’t have to travel by tram and on foot all the way out to the east of Hamburg. MacDonald drove him there in his boxlike, mud-coloured jeep, parking it right by the main entrance. When they set off the wind was blowing so hard the collapsible windscreen rattled back and forth and cold draughts blew through rips in the canvas top, while the suspension was so hard, every time they bounced over a pothole it was like a blow to the solar plexus. But Stave didn’t mind. He closed his eyes for a moment, massaging the thigh of his bad leg. He had cramp and was in pain.

  ‘An old war wound?’ MacDonald was driving carefully, keeping his eyes on the road, but he must have spotted him out of the corner of his eye.

  Stave felt he’d been somehow caught out. ‘A ceiling beam fell on me; I didn’t get out of the way in time,’ he told him curtly.