The Murderer in Ruins

by Cay Rademacher

  ‘Bring me the dark-haired guy first,’ Stave said again.

  However a few minutes later Stave would find himself in the situation of a poker player who has overestimated the strength of his hand. By a long shot.

  The suspect, sitting bent over and pale on the chair in front of him, had a perfect alibi. He had been ‘organising’ food supplies in another city in the British occupation zone to bring them to Hamburg where people were prepared to pay much higher prices. But he had been spotted and arrested. The police had only found half his wares, but for that he was given two weeks behind bars. One call to his colleagues in Lüneburg told Stave that on the probable night of the murder, the twentieth of January, the man in front of him had indeed been sitting in a nice clean cell, 60 kilometres away from the ruins of Hamburg. Stave had the man led away, and wrote a report for the British judge who would take over the next day.

  ‘Next!’ he called to the policeman waiting outside, despondency clearly audible in his voice.

  Next was a pale student, father reported missing at Stalingrad, mother killed by a bomb. He had 80 cigarettes and 17.40 in Reichsmarks on him. Next: a practised black marketeer with a record as a pimp, with 3,000 Reichsmarks but no contraband. Next: a housewife with a pound of butter. Next: a boy with no contraband, no cigarettes, no money. Stave sent him straight home. Next: an old man trying to palm off two old watches.

  By two in the morning Stave felt as if somebody had driven a Sherman tank over him. Erna Berg brought him a cup of tea, but the world went black again when the hot tea touched his burst lip.

  His eyes watered as during each interrogation he flicked through the CID records of known criminals: their description, fingerprints, distinguishing marks, last known address, front and side-profile photos.

  He was hungry, cold. He felt a great temptation to smash the skull of the next person dragged into the room. It turned out to be Anna von Veckinhausen.

  One look in her dark eyes and he realised she was as angry as him. This could get tricky, the chief inspector thought to himself.

  He decided to be polite, offered her a seat without mentioning that it was not the first time that he had questioned her. Maybe she hoped he wouldn’t recognise her amongst the dozens of others? She, likewise, gave no indication that they had ever met. Impressive self-control, thought Stave, a possible indication of a cold heart.

  He leafed through the record book. No mention of her. Then he glanced at a piece of paper with her details that one of the uniformed police had handed him. Born 1 March 1915, Königsberg. No further information as to her family or when she moved to Hamburg. At least now he understood her accent.

  ‘What were you dealing on the black market?’ he asked her.

  ‘I wasn’t dealing,’ she said angrily. ‘I was just leaving the station and crossing the Hansaplatz when your…’

  ‘Raid,’ Stave genially supplied the word.

  ‘…your “action” began,’ she continued. ‘I already told the officer who arrested me that it was a mistake. But he wouldn’t even listen. Just like the Gestapo.’

  The chief inspector ignored the deliberate provocation, although Anna von Veckinhausen wasn’t totally wrong. He looked down at his documents. ‘We found 537 Reichsmarks on your person,’ he said calmly. ‘Can you tell me what you hoped to buy on the black market with a sum like that?’

  ‘I don’t have to tell you anything at all. My money is my money.’

  ‘I was just wondering if you had sold something just before the raid. Maybe something that a couple of days ago had belonged to a man of about 70?’

  Anna von Veckinhausen looked as if she were about to jump to her feet. But instead she closed her eyes and took a deep breath. ‘I thought you might have forgotten me,’ she mumbled.

  Stave allowed himself a brief smile. ‘I wouldn’t be in this job if I had.’

  ‘I didn’t sell anything on the black market. I really was on my way from the station. You arrested everybody on the Hansaplatz. Ask any one of them.’

  ‘With 537 Reichsmarks on you?’

  ‘With 537 Reichsmarks on me.’

  ‘And you refuse to tell me where you got so much money from or what you intended to do with it?’

  ‘Neither one nor the other has anything whatsoever to do with you.’

  Stave looked down at the paperwork again. It was hard to disprove her story. But on the other hand, just the circumstances of her arrest would be enough for a British judge to lock her up for a couple of days. And what good would that do?

  ‘We didn’t carry out this raid to arrest housewives out to buy a few matches. We did it in the hope of laying our hands on something that might have belonged to the murder victim – the murder victim whose body you found.’

  ‘And have you?’

  Stave chose to ignore the question, even though he realised Anna von Veckinhausen wasn’t being sarcastic but really wanted to know, either because she was genuinely interested – or genuinely worried.

  ‘Let me take you back to the afternoon when you found the body. You had been walking down Lappenbergs Allee. You then turned off and walked along the footpath through the ruins to get to Collau Strasse. That was where you found the body, amongst the ruins.’

  ‘Yes,’ she sighed, wearily.

  Stave made a note.

  ‘How long were you with the corpse?’ he asked.

  She gave him a surprised look. ‘You think I said a prayer for the dead or something?’

  ‘I’m asking if you just looked down, realised what you were looking at and immediately ran off. Or if you took a good look around?’

  Anna von Veckinhausen put her right hand on her left shoulder, so that her arm lay across her upper body. Stave wondered if it was out of embarrassment or an instinctive desire for protection.

  ‘I … don’t know,’ she admitted hesitantly. ‘Maybe a few seconds. I saw the body but it took me a bit to realise what I was actually looking at. Then I left. I didn’t run. There was no need to hurry.’

  ‘So you took a long look at the body, but didn’t notice anything in particular about the place where it had been left?’ Stave pressed her.

  ‘I guess you could say that.’

  Stave stared down at his desk. He had a difficult decision to make. But it was the middle of the night and he was hungry, cold and exhausted. His head hurt. Should he keep Anna von Veckinhausen in custody? The 537 Reichsmarks was evidence enough. Or should he let her go? Show lenience, but keep her under observation.

  ‘You can go,’ he said at last, and then to his own surprise, added: ‘Sorry for the inconvenience.’

  She stared at him for a second in disbelief. Then she smiled, said, ‘Thank you,’ and got to her feet. When she reached the door she turned back to him and asked, ‘What happened to your lip?’

  ‘I slipped on the ice,’ Stave replied.

  When the door closed behind her he looked down at his notebook. On the evening when she found the body, Anna von Veckinhausen had claimed she used the footpath to cross from Collau Strasse to Lappenbergs Allee. When Stave had gone over her story, he had deliberately reversed the names. And she had confirmed that she had been going from Lappenbergs Allee to Collau Strasse.

  It was an old Gestapo trick. Maybe she had just been tired. Or so upset by being arrested that she hadn’t been paying attention. But it was also possible that she had told a lie first time and could no longer remember exactly what she had said.

  ‘Next!’ he called to the uniformed policeman outside.

  Two hours later it was finally all over. His back aching, the chief inspector got up from his chair and walked up and down in his office to get the circulation in his injured leg going. Eventually he had worked off the worst of his limp. Then he called in the other officers. The Department S chief looked as fit and fresh as if he had had a good ten hours’ sleep. According to him the raid had revealed a tank of schnapps and half a tonne of penicillin. Also the CID search guy was pleased: they had caught a major racketeer
.

  Maschke and the rest, however, looked tired and unhappy. The only one who still seemed optimistic was MacDonald, and he hadn’t taken part in the raid or sat in on any of the interrogations.

  Why didn’t he just go home hours ago, Stave wondered. ‘Thanks to you all, gentlemen,’ he said, and got to his feet.

  Not one of the items they had confiscated, not one thing any of those arrested had said, had been of the slightest help to the murder investigation. Nothing, zero, zilch! What might we have simply missed, the chief inspector asked himself. He waited until they had all left, then sat back down at his desk and began once more going through his notes and the interrogation reports, one by one, for nearly another hour. If it had been summer at least it would have been light by now, he thought. His eyes hurt. Nothing, except for the one potentially important, but also potentially laughable, contradiction in the statements by Anna von Veckinhausen.

  Stave wondered if he should just put his head down on his desk for an hour or two. But when he considered the possibility that he might fall into a deep sleep and his colleagues, fresh from a night’s sleep, would find him curled up in a ball on the floor, he decided it was better to go home. He made his way slowly to the main entrance. Then stopped dead.

  A shadow.

  Stave held his breath and gazed at a massive column in the outer hallway. There was a man crouched down on the other side of it. All Stave could see at first was a leg and a shoulder. He kept still. The unknown figure gradually got to its feet, obviously not having noticed him. Maybe it was just a drunk, sleeping it off accidentally right in front of the CID building. The man staggered a step or two away from the column and walked out on to the square, yellow moonlight falling on his face.

  Stave recognised him as one of the young men they had arrested a few hours earlier. He wondered who had interrogated him and let him go. Then he realised something else: the man was not drunk; he had been beaten up. His eye was swollen, his lip cut open, and he was walking with the crippled gait of someone who had been beaten and kicked in the stomach and lower body. A vile thought immediately came to mind: Gestapo. The man had been beaten up during his interrogation. Then he was released purely so that no other officer or British summary court judge would see his injuries. But he had been hurt so badly that he could hardly make it out of the building. It was only now that he had gathered strength enough to stagger away.

  Stave followed him, as discreetly as he could.

  The unknown man staggered down Holstenwall, then turned right at Millerntor, finally getting as far as the warren of tiny streets north of the Reeperbahn, to a half-destroyed rental block, with bits of cardboard next to the doorbells giving the names and birth dates of recently moved-in homeless. The man stopped, still bent over, then leaned down and scraped a handful of snow together to wipe his face. Trying to make himself presentable before his mother sees him, Stave thought to himself. The young man fumbled in the pocket of an overcoat that was way too big for him, his hands numb with cold and possibly also with bruises. When eventually he managed to find the key, Stave quickly approached him.

  ‘CID,’ he said in a low voice. No need to wake the neighbours.

  The man turned round, an expression of horror on his face. ‘What do you want now?’

  He was barely 20 years old, Stave reckoned. Undernourished. Perhaps this was the first time in his life he had been badly beaten. On the other hand: who knew what he might have done in the war?

  ‘Who did this to you?’ Stave asked, indicating his swollen eyelid. He was too tired to beat about the bush. Also he was counting on the young man being afraid. Ask a simple question and he might get a simple answer.

  ‘A policeman,’ the lad said. ‘While I was being interrogated.’

  Stave closed his eyes and cursed under his breath. ‘Which one?’

  ‘Inspector Maschke.’

  Why am I not surprised? Stave asked himself angrily.

  ‘Why did he treat you like that?’

  The young man stared at him as if he’d asked a stupid question. ‘Maybe your colleague learnt his trade with the Gestapo,’ he said at last.

  Stave offered the lad a cigarette. A few more questions and he had got the basic facts. His name was Karl Trotzauer, 19, resident in St Pauli district, unemployed and caught on the black market with a bottle of schnapps and an oil painting of a farmhouse in a gold-painted frame. But you didn’t beat people up for being in possession of a bottle of schnapps and a piece of kitsch. Apparently Maschke had also asked where he had been on the night of the twentieth of January. And Trotzauer, with no idea what he was on about, had told him he had been over at his aunt’s house in Eimsbüttel and had then come home via Lappenbergs Allee.

  ‘That’s when he started hitting me,’ he said, pointing to his swollen eye. ‘No warning, no shouting, just laying into me with his fists and kicking me. I thought I was going to die.’

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘When I came to my senses he asked me how I had killed the old man.’

  ‘The old man?’

  ‘I had no idea what he was talking about. It was only after he had beaten me some more that I realised he was on about a murder victim. Gradually it dawned on me that he wanted me to confess to killing some old man.’

  ‘And did you?’

  Trotzauer glowered at him. ‘It hurt like hell but I’m not stupid. Obviously I didn’t confess because there was nothing to confess to. I didn’t kill any old man. I told Maschke that, again and again. In between his blows. Eventually he let me go, promising that he would get me in the end.’

  ‘Off you go,’ Stave said.

  On the long way back the chief inspector had plenty of time to reflect. On one occasion he had to stop to show his CID pass to a British patrol. Other than that, he saw nobody. It was as if Hamburg was deserted, the streets ruined and ripped apart, the shops stripped bare, the bombed-out railway stations all abandoned by the inhabitants, all of them gone somewhere else to build a new and better city.

  Had Maschke been in the Gestapo? He was supposed to be relatively fresh out of police training college, so he couldn’t have been there since before 1945. Nor could Stave imagine his big, gawky, chain-smoking colleague who still lived with his mother getting up at five in the morning to kick down the door of some Jew or other.

  But even if Maschke had been in the Gestapo: why would he want to beat up some low-life black marketeer? Over-enthusiasm? Just because somebody had been in the area around the supposed time of the murder was no reason to beat him up. Why would Maschke want to make a suspect of a 19-year-old on practically no evidence? Why would he want to beat a confession out of him when he almost certainly had nothing to do with the real murderer?

  The truth is I know nothing at all about Maschke, Stave thought to himself when he finally reached his own front door. Maybe it’s time I looked into that. Tomorrow. After a few hours’ sleep.

  The following afternoon Stave had the first opportunity to find the answers to a few questions – and almost completely screwed up.

  They were discussing the case in his office. He was staring at the snowflake patterns on the ice on his window, glinting like cold stars, while MacDonald was going over their next steps. The lieutenant was leafing through yellow pages looking at names, descriptions and dates of birth. Hundreds of them as far as Stave could see.

  ‘This is a copy of the Hamburg missing persons list,’ MacDonald said. ‘I’ve gone through all the names – and there is no one there who fits either of our two victims. There are, of course, young women and old men, but their descriptions do not match either of the two. Nor can I find any pattern in the lists. Missing men, women and children. People unaccounted for since the bombings, people lost amongst the stream of refugees fleeing the east, or just gone missing because that is the way things are after a war. There are cases of husbands or wives reported missing, relatives and friends, employees reported missing by their firms or offices. If any of them should have ended up amidst t
he rubble with strangulation marks on their throat, I have no idea how we should find out their names from what we have here.’ MacDonald folded the list up and put it in his uniform jacket pocket. Then he raised his hands in apology.

  ‘Same thing here,’ said Maschke, his tone of voice sounding as if it made him furious not to have found something the Brit had missed. ‘No dentist ever examined this old boy’s choppers, and no doctor ever examined him down below.’

  MacDonald gave him a querying look and he smirked.

  ‘I mean his rupture was never treated by any hospital or dear old family doctor in Hamburg, that’s pretty much for certain.’

  ‘Maybe he was treated by a doctor who didn’t survive the war?’ Stave suggested.

  ‘I went round to the Street Clearance and Rebuilding office too,’ Maschke continued, flicking open a grubby notebook. ‘Did you know that in Hamburg more than 250,000 apartments and houses were destroyed by bombs? As well as 3,500 offices, 277 schools, 24 hospitals, 58 churches, and that altogether there are 43 million cubic metres of rubble. The rubble boys are pretty proud of their statistics department.’

  ‘That’ll keep them in work for the next 20 years,’ Stave said morosely. ‘But what’s it got to do with looters?’

  ‘It just shows that there’s a lot of opportunity. But the rubble boys say there are no turf wars between gangs looting treasures from the ruins. At least not at the moment. Since it’s been so cold, the stones, concrete slabs and all the dirt around have been frozen solid so that it’s hardly worth it for the professionals to go out hunting for booty. They’re waiting for the thaw. At present there are only amateurs out there amongst the ruins, looking for a metre of stovepipe, an oven plate or firewood. Too few of them to get into each other’s way. Fewer looters out there than there were a couple of months ago, and almost no incidents of fighting between looters. Whatever happened to the girl and the old man, it almost certainly had nothing to do with looting.’