The Murderer in Ruins

by Cay Rademacher

  He couldn’t remember the number of the building where the practice was located, but as he walked along slowly he soon came across a large noticeboard with the professor’s name on it. Fifth floor. The chief inspector pushed open a door nearly three metres high. Light-coloured marble and wrought-iron banisters, but no light bulbs left in the chandelier, he was pleased to see. The old-fashioned lift in the centre of the stairwell was out of order, because the electricity was off. Stave slowly began the long climb up the stairs.

  When he finally reached the practice anteroom, however, he found himself up to his ankles in thick-piled carpets looking at an English club armchair, a desk and a teak bookshelf, which along with the scent of Earl Grey tea and furniture polish, made Stave, in his worn-out shoes, tatty suit and torn overcoat, feel grubby. Behind the desk sat a female receptionist in her fifties, with hair pulled back tight and wearing a pair of nickel glasses.

  ‘May I help you?’

  But it sounded more like, ‘No dogs or beggars!’

  Stave had intended to ask if the professor might see him, just for a few minutes. But the intimidating façade, the endless marble staircase, the heady scent in the air and now this dismissive receptionist had wound him up more than he could take. Angrily, he marched up to her desk and slammed his police ID down in front of her nose.

  ‘CID. I need to speak to Professor Bürger-Prinz. Immediately.’

  She recoiled in shock and distress as if nobody had ever spoken to her in that tone before. For a few moments the expression of disgust vanished from her face, then she got to her feet and disappeared behind a leather-upholstered door.

  Stave didn’t have long to wait. He was led through the door into another world, a big room with door-height windows looking out on to the Alster, a desk, three armchairs and an actual couch. None of it, however, was really English but it all looked somehow modern, and at the same time strangely old-fashioned, as if it dated back to before the war. Probably from the Bauhaus movement, Stave reckoned. The armchairs were cubes of chrome and black leather, the couch looking as if it had been poured out of the same materials. Probably very comfortable, the chief inspector thought, though on the other hand it looked a bit like the table Dr Czrisini used to dissect corpses on. But then this one was used for dissections too, in a manner of speaking.

  The walls were white, a single painting hanging opposite the windows: oblique black streaks on an ochre background. Modern art, Stave supposed. The parquet floor was polished. On a sideboard by the middle window was a sculpture of a sitting man, Asian-looking. Buddha maybe? There were no certificates or diplomas hanging on the walls, no family photo on the desk. No telephone.

  Once upon a time Stave had seen a photograph of Sigmund Freud in a book and was subconsciously expecting to see someone who looked like him. Instead the man approaching him looked like something from a recruiting poster for the SS. Professor Bürgen-Prinz was about 1.90 metres tall with short blond hair and the most luminous blue eyes Stave had ever seen, the colour of the water in a Norwegian fjord. The chief inspector felt they were looking straight through him.

  ‘Why do you need to see me so urgently?’ he said in the deep, perfectly modulated voice of a practised public speaker or singer. The psychologist held out his hand and took Stave’s in a firm grip.

  Stave felt relieved when Bürger-Prinz indicated they should use the armchairs rather than the couch. He apologised for the intrusion, then began to tell him about the victims, the places the bodies had been found, the few leads they had, the medallions with their strange symbols, about the missing person posters and the fact they had elicited no response. Dead people whom nobody missed. Strangulations. Bodies stripped bare. Ruins, charred walls. Thin layers of snow on cement.

  The psychologist let him speak without interrupting. He just watched him with those irritating eyes, took no notes, just sat there in his armchair, relaxed and attentive at the same time. Maybe my tale has got to him, Stave thought, at least awakened his professional interest. Or maybe he just knows how to pose.

  ‘I read the story about this rubble murderer,’ the psychologist said eventually, when Stave dried up. ‘In Die Zeit. And the photos of your victims are everywhere.’

  ‘Can you see some kind of pattern in it?’ Stave asked. ‘Do the murders tell us anything about the murderer? Something we might have missed? What is there that links murders, apart from the method? I’m desperate for some sort of lead.’

  ‘That’s everything you know?’

  ‘That’s everything I know.’

  Bürger-Prinz frowned. ‘I hope you’re not expecting me to give you an answer just like that to a case that an experienced criminologist such as yourself has been working on in vain?’

  ‘Maybe you might recognise some sort of pattern,’ Stave said. ‘Maybe in the choice of the places our unknown perpetrator leaves his victims. Or maybe the victims he chooses themselves.’

  The psychologist stood up, walked over to his desk, took a city map of Hamburg out of a drawer and studied it. ‘Ruins, working-class districts, three of them east of the Alster, one west. Cellars, lift-shafts, bomb craters. Your killer is content just to hide the bodies. That’s enough for him.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He’s not trying to get rid of them forever. Just for long enough for him not to be caught.’

  ‘Hardly surprising. All of the victims, possibly except for the last – we’re still waiting for the autopsy report – were killed on the same day, the twentieth of January.’

  ‘But they might not all have been put where they were found on that day.’

  Stave stared at him. ‘You mean somebody kills all these people, then keeps their bodies somewhere and only disposes of them one by one?’

  Bürger-Prinz gave him an indulgent smile. ‘It’s cold enough. And your unknown perpetrator wouldn’t be the first killer to move bodies around days or weeks after their murder.’

  ‘You think somebody’s playing a sick joke on us?’

  ‘Maybe. But there might also be practical reasons for it. He can only carry one body at a time. Maybe he does it every night.’

  ‘Every night?’ The chief inspector closed his eyes.

  ‘One way or another, the killer is behaving rationally. He’s thought it out. There is also something in common in each case. The bodies left in the east were all near the main station whereas the one left in the west was near Dammtor station.’

  ‘You think the murderer chooses his victims in trains? Or at the stations?’

  ‘Or kills them near a station. Then he hides the bodies in the ruins nearby.’

  ‘But all of them on one day? Four bodies, two stations? The trains only run during the day. The stations are abandoned from eight in the evening. If our murderer kills someone during the day, how does he manage to move the bodies to the ruins where we found them without being noticed? And if he only hides them at night, how could he have met them earlier at the station? Does he kill them somewhere in the daytime, then wait for hours on end to hide them somewhere in the dark? Doesn’t sound likely.’

  ‘It would be possible if his victims were on the last train. A train arriving at 5.30 p.m. pulls into a station that is already dark. Very dark. And in this cold already empty. Let’s imagine he killed the old man at Dammtor station, and the three females at the main station. It’s not impossible.’

  ‘You think he’s an experienced killer?’

  Bürger-Prinz thought for a moment. ‘Maybe our murderer deliberately chooses weaker victims,’ he mused.

  Stave just looked at him blankly.

  ‘Maybe he picks the person on the train he thinks will be easiest to deal with. A woman. A child. An old man.’

  The chief inspector thought of the endless hours he had spent at the station, staring at the incoming carriages, the thousands of people pushing past him. He shook his head. ‘Might have been the case with the girl, even the old man. But it doesn’t work for the two women. There’s no train these days wh
ere a woman would be the easiest victim. There are always children on the move, and old people and war wounded.’

  Then he hesitated. Something had occurred to him. ‘The old man was the only victim to have been beaten, badly beaten at that, as far as the pathologist could make out. But of the four victims he was in no way the strongest or most mobile. Both women would definitely have been able to put up more of a defence or been able to run away more easily.’

  The psychologist smiled. ‘I see what you’re getting at: a family. Somebody has a vicious hatred of one family, possibly even his own. So they all have to die. But the old man, the patriarch, he deserves to suffer the most and so the murderer beats him before strangling him.’

  Stave nodded. ‘Obviously it could just be a coincidence. Maybe the murderer wanted to strangle them all without giving them any opportunity to defend themselves. Maybe he creeps up behind them. But in the case of the old man alone, something went wrong, something beyond his control. And so he had to lay into him. But even if we go with that, it’s not chance that…’

  ‘The beating could be an indicator of violent anger, a desire for revenge, punishment, getting even.’

  ‘In which case the murderer already knows his victims. He’s killing them for some reason we don’t know. But in one case, he attacks in a particularly violent way.’

  ‘As a punishment.’

  ‘An old man, a woman in her mid-thirties, a woman of about twenty and a little girl of eight at most. Who could possibly have something against such a varied group of people? Some driven fanatic who wants to kill all his own family?’

  ‘If all the victims were related.’

  ‘Why else are there no missing person reports? Maybe the only relative who might report them missing is the killer himself.’

  The psychologist looked out of the window. ‘The old man might be the father of both women, and the grandfather of the little girl, or maybe the grandfather of both her and the younger woman. But was one of the women the mother of the little girl? The older one might have been but you tell me the pathologist doesn’t think she’d ever been pregnant.’

  ‘She’d had an abdominal operation. We don’t know when. And until the autopsy we won’t know what the operation was for.’

  ‘If there was a 14-centimetre scar then it’s unlikely there’s too much intact down there,’ the psychologist said.

  ‘But she still might have been pregnant before the operation.’

  ‘Okay, if we accept that hypothesis, then we have an old man who could be her father and the grandfather of the child, and another young female relation who just might be the much younger sister of the older woman.’

  Stave smiled for the first time since he’d walked through the practice door. ‘Let’s also assume that the means of death and the witness statement suggest that the murderer is male. And let’s assume he is a relative of the victims. Then the main suspect has to be the husband of the older woman and father of the child. That’s who we’re looking for.’

  Bürger-Prinz looked at him almost sympathetically. ‘Maybe you’ll find him in the rubble too, frozen to the ground with strangulation marks on his neck.’

  The chief inspector inhaled sharply. He had had a vision, in which from now on he would find a corpse in the ruins every day: a girl, a boy, a woman, a man … and when this eternal winter finally came to an end, bodies that had lain undiscovered for months in cellars would thaw and the stench of corruption would bring the curious. And then the police.

  ‘If it really is some domestic drama we’re witnessing,’ the psychologist continued calmly, ‘then we’re missing a few characters. A grandmother. Another set of grandparents. The child’s father and presumed husband of the older woman. Maybe more children. Brothers and sisters of the grown-ups. Not to mention more distant relatives. There are a lot of potential victims, or potential killers.’

  Stave sighed. ‘You mean, we’re going to find another couple of victims who fit the theory? And that only then can we be sure it is a family thing.’

  Bürger-Prinz shook his head. ‘When you’ve found your twentieth victim, then we can be reasonably sure that it’s not a family thing. But just a few more victims. A boy or a girl would fit as well as older people of either sex. A man or a woman. Think about it: you might assume a man between 35 and 50 could be the husband and father. A younger man could be the brother or even the husband of the younger woman. You can be sure of one thing. The next body you find will fit the theory. And the next. You’ll still know no more than you know now.’

  ‘What about the medallion?’

  ‘Did the killer leave it there as a marker?’

  ‘I doubt it. Too inconspicuous and not consistent. We’ve found two victims with no medallion, meaning that the killer didn’t leave any marker near them. Or that he left it so discreetly that we didn’t find it. Neither of those fits in with a murderer who leaves a marker with each of his victims. So the medallions must have belonged to the victims. To members of the same family. Maybe a family crest?’

  ‘Not the crest of any Hamburg family I know,’ the psychologist replied. ‘But then it doesn’t have to be a family crest.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Maybe some kind of religious symbol. A cross and two daggers, it’s not hard to see a spiritual connection.’

  ‘A sect of some sort? Like the Jehovah’s Witnesses? The old man was circumcised.’

  ‘Like the Jews. But the Muslims too.’

  ‘Jews or Muslims would hardly be likely to wear a cross.’

  ‘So Christians. Maybe all four of them belonged to the same religious community.’

  ‘But no other member of that community reported them missing? No pastor? No sect leader?’

  ‘Sects don’t often relish the glare of publicity or the attention of the police. Particularly after the events of recent years.’

  Stave thought of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who had been reviled as ‘bible bashers’ and locked up in concentration camps. The past few minutes spent with the psychologist had taught him a lot, more than he had hoped for. But what was he to do with the theories and facts? How could he fit them in with the case? Were any of them even relevant? Or was he just on another dead-end trail?

  ‘Thank you for your time,’ he said with an air of resignation, and got to his feet.

  Back at headquarters Stave strolled down the dimly lit corridor to his office but stopped when he reached the door. It was ajar, and he could make out two figures inside: MacDonald and Erna Berg. He made it his business to cough discreetly.

  But neither of them turned round. His secretary was sitting at her desk, her face stained with tears. The young Brit was standing to one side behind her, bending over and whispering in her ear.

  Stave was pleased that he didn’t have a clue what he might be saying. Nothing to do with me, he told himself. They seemed already to be having a crisis in their relationship even though they’d only been a couple for a few days. Stave decided to leave them to it for the moment and instead of going into his own office, he went along the corridor to see the boss. After all that’s what Cuddel Breuer had told him to do.

  Stave went over their findings in his head again, coaxed himself to get on with it and told Breuer about his meeting with Bürger-Prinz.

  ‘I have to admit you’re trying everything.’

  Stave stood there silently, not sure if it was meant seriously or sarcastically. ‘I’m doing my best.’

  ‘Tell that to the mayor,’ Breuer said. ‘He wants us to go and see him. He’s not happy.’

  Stave and Breuer took the Mercedes the few hundred metres to the city hall, even though Stave would have preferred to walk. It would have given him time to think.

  The city hall with its impressive neo-Renaissance façade and its tall, tapering tower had not been damaged: a monument to the riches of trade and bourgeois pride standing there in a wasteland of rubble. A tram came round a corner and screeched to a stop. Tradesmen and postal workers climbed in. Pas
sers-by rushed past as if they were heading for the nearest air-raid shelter, the sound of the sirens still in their ears.

  The chief inspector followed his boss into the imposing building, down corridors half in darkness to the unheated office. Mayor Max Brauer greeted them. A massive, energetic man with a square jaw, grey hair brushed back and bright eyes. Sixty years old. Until 1933 he had been mayor of Altona, the Hamburg suburb that then had independent status, before being kicked out by the Nazis. He left for China then eventually the USA. He had returned a year ago and had been Hamburg’s mayor for the past three months.

  Stave knew him slightly, because in December 1946 he had worked on a knife-fight between Altona black marketeers and had been going round looking for witnesses at the scene, Palmaille, the broad promenade along the bank of the Elbe. It had been a Sunday morning and he was ringing doorbells. Number 49 had a nameplate that said ‘Attic Apartment: Brauer’, but it was a common name and he thought nothing of it. It had been a bit of shock when he found himself face-to-face with the mayor.

  He recognised Stave again and shook his hand with a firm grip. ‘Please excuse the fact that there’s no heating,’ the mayor said. He had his own overcoat on, but didn’t seem to be frozen through.

  Cuddel Breuer left it to Stave to bring him up to date with the state of affairs.

  ‘We need to do something,’ Brauer said after listening to Stave’s report. ‘Show we mean business.’

  Cuddel Breuer nodded. Stave made do with staring expressionlessly into space.

  ‘In all my years I have never experienced a winter as hard as this,’ the mayor went on. ‘Nobody has any idea when the frost will end. In another week? Or another month? Even two? How are we to get through this winter? Even in the best of times it would have been an enormous challenge. We have burst water pipes all over the city, electricity pylons falling down, coal ships that can’t get into port, unusable country roads, I hardly need tell you. But in these extraordinary conditions…’