The Murderer in Ruins

by Cay Rademacher

  It painted the picture of a retreat.

  The oldest note was from 1 June 1944, almost on the Atlantic coast to the north of Bordeaux. Then there was a line that went north to Normandy. The Allied invasion, Stave thought to himself. Then the line fell back to the east. The last entry was near Strasbourg, towards the end of November 1944.

  As the chief inspector was folding the map up again, the beam fell on a faded official Reich stamp on the rear: an eagle and a swastika, with a few scribbles beneath. Stave was just about to put the map back with the others when he suddenly froze: in the midst of the stamp was writing, the double runes of the SS.

  And underneath, barely legible, a name: ‘Hans Herthge.’ In Maschke’s handwriting.

  Stave was wondering what it might mean when he heard a noise in the corridor outside.

  Footsteps.

  The chief inspector had just seconds to think. Whoever it was would almost certainly walk straight past. But what if they didn’t? What if they found him in here with a torch peering into the desk drawers of one of his colleagues? Should he hide? But where?

  Brazen it out. He closed the drawer, turned off the torch, shoved the map of France and his leather gloves into his overcoat pocket and turned on the desk reading light. If somebody spotted him, then he would act as if he had nothing to hide.

  The footsteps got louder, then stopped. Somebody was standing right outside the door. Stave bent his head over the desk as if he was looking for something.

  The handle was turned. Quietly. Stave looked up. It was public prosecutor Ehrlich.

  The two men stared at one another for a minute, both of them clearly awkward.

  ‘Good evening,’ Stave said, breaking the silence first. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Have I got the wrong floor? I thought this was Inspector Maschke’s office.’

  ‘Spot on, but I fear my colleague has already gone home for the day.’

  ‘And you’ve been transferred to the vice squad?’ The prosecutor looked puzzled.

  Stave used the few moments to make up a story. ‘Tomorrow Maschke is to go round all surgeons who might have carried out an operation like that undergone by the fourth victim. I’ve already sent him out to talk to medical people. The truss, the dentures, you remember? It occurred to me that there might be specialist doctors who deal with hernias in men and abdominal operations in women. If the victims belonged to the same family, that might be a lead. Given that Maschke had already left, I thought I’d look and see if I could find anything. But,’ he nodded at the mess on the desk, ‘I guess I’ll have to wait and ask him tomorrow.’

  Ehrlich looked at him sceptically for a moment, then smiled and said, ‘I understand.’ It didn’t sound as if he understood anything. ‘Then I will also just have to wait to speak to the inspector. Pity.’

  The prosecutor made a little bow, then closed the door behind him. The steps receded down the corridor.

  Stave took a deep breath. Cold sweat ran down the back of his neck. Had Ehrlich swallowed his story? Would he mention this unfortunate meeting to Maschke? At the very least he would now have to mention his idiotic idea about the surgeons to the vice squad man, if only to keep his story consistent.

  He waited a few minutes more, until he was sure that Ehrlich was really gone, put the papers back as they were, wondered if he should replace the map of France but decided in the end to hold on to it. For the time being. Until he had worked out what the ‘Hans Herthge’ business was about.

  He turned off the light, went out into the corridor, and left the dark building as quickly as possible. It was only when he was outside, on the cold and draughty square, that it occurred to Stave that Ehrlich hadn’t told him what he was doing looking for Maschke so late in the day.

  Dark streets. The ruins like ghostly castles. Somewhere the motor of a British jeep growled. A curtain, frozen solid, blown out from a load of fallen tiles, waving back and forth in the wind. Otherwise it was painfully quiet. Over the past few years Stave had got so used to the view of the city in ruins that he hardly noticed it any more. But now, hurrying home, he felt uncomfortable, insecure. Threatened.

  Shadows haunted empty windows. Reflections of half-destroyed walls. Corpses? Or a killer lurking in wait for some nocturnal wanderer? I’m becoming paranoid, the chief inspector told himself, not for the first time.

  He too now walked down the middle of streets, as far as possible from the ruined lots. He felt a tingle down his spine, as if somebody was watching him. Turned on his heel. Nobody there.

  But still he felt he was not alone.

  He reached for his gun, flicked off the safety on the FN22, began walking faster despite the pain in his left leg. It seemed to take forever.

  When at last Stave got to his building, he took the steps two at a time and threw open the door to his apartment. His heart was pounding; he was covered in sweat and panting for breath.

  I’m acting like an idiot, like a rookie, he told himself. If somebody had come up to me to ask the time I might have shot them. He waited until his hand stopped trembling then clicked the safety on his FN22 back on. I need to get more sleep, he thought, and I need to get warmed up properly for once. If only this bloody frost would come to an end. But at the same time, that was something else he was afraid of: the smell of stinking corpses thawing.

  He got himself dinner: bread that tasted of paper, a thin slice of cheese, water, an old potato that needed heating for an hour on the stove before he could get it down his throat. Then he lay down on his back, waiting for sleep, like a dead man stretched out on a bed, motionless, under a ton of tiredness. Yet something else was weighing on his mind, holding him back from drifting off to dreamland.

  Eventually his hand found the radio. The old box gave off a yellowish glow as it warmed up. He hadn’t turned it on in months. In the ‘brown days’ all you got was endless Liszt, and then, ‘The High Command of the Wehrmacht announces…’ The shrill voices of Hitler or Goebbels interspersed with the cries of ‘Heil!’ from the devout in some sports arena, like a storm of hail on a window. Then Wagner. He was so fed up with it all that he preferred not to turn the radio on at all. He knew of colleagues and neighbours who secretly listened to the BBC, but he never dared.

  But today there was supposed to be a new station starting up: Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk, Northwest German Radio, run by British officers and young German journalists. A sort of BBC for Germans. Stave had heard about it but not shown much interest, although he had overheard colleagues now and then looking forward to it starting.

  But now, as sleep wouldn’t come, he gave it a go. At least it would give the illusion there was somebody else in the room. An announcer, then a whooshing sound, the crackle of static, complete silence and darkness for a few moments when the electricity gave up. And then he was listening to a play. Stave didn’t get the name of the writer, and only half listened to the narrator; he just enjoyed having the sound and the glow of the radio, a splinter of normality.

  He heard the story of a man returning from the war, rejected by everybody. Heard the man talking to the Elbe. Odd, he thought, how could anybody talk to the Elbe when it’s under a metre of ice?

  And gradually he drifts into a dream in which his son is talking to the Elbe and the waves have somehow taken on the contours of Margarethe. It’s warm, the undamaged apartment buildings shine in the sun. Stave feels sad and lucky at the same time as he glides beyond the dream into the realm of deepest darkness where he sleeps as he has not done for years.

  Discovery

  Monday, 17 February 1947

  Stave had been in his office on the telephone since 7 a.m. His fingertips had turned red from dialling so much and he was now using a pencil. He had tried on Friday to get hold of Maschke. He was desperate to speak to him before Ehrlich so that he could give him his version of their evening encounter in his office. But his efforts had been in vain. He had completely failed to reach his vice squad colleague in any hotel, police station or even hospital in the wh
ole of northern Germany. On several occasions he had reached people who had seen Maschke recently, often just a few hours earlier. It’s as if he was trying to avoid me, Stave thought. But that was absurd.

  He had spent the weekend at the station – which gave him lots of time to think things over. The longer this awful winter lasted the less coal there was to deliver. And more and more locomotives were out of action due to burst pipes or frozen boilers. By now there were fewer trains in a day than there used to be in an hour.

  Stave spent his time wandering up and down deserted platforms, if only to keep the cold from getting to his leg. He was worried because he had convinced himself that Ehrlich had wanted to talk to Maschke about him. Or that Maschke had unexpectedly come back for the weekend and gone into his office. Stave imagined Maschke coming into the room that appeared to be in such mess, maybe just to pick up a packet of cigarettes, and discovering that one particular piece of paper amidst the pile on his desk was not at the oblique angle he had left it. Then he imagined Maschke checking out the whole desktop and working out that his carefully arranged chaos had been disturbed. He would know that it had been thoroughly searched because he would open the lower right desk drawer, go through his maps and realise that one of them was missing. Then Ehrlich would call…

  And when he wasn’t thinking about Maschke, then his troubled thoughts would revolve around the rubble murderer. What if he was here at the station too, also looking out for someone? What if the murderer came across Stave’s son before he did, found him clambering off a train exhausted and emaciated? A weakened veteran returning from the war would be easy prey. A beat officer would ring Stave up and say, ‘We’ve got another body.’ He would go out to some ruined lot and find the body of a naked young man … approach it and then be horrified to recognise it.

  The chief inspector had paced the vast station concourse aimlessly like a caged tiger, unsettled, angry. When the last train had spluttered out of the station in the evening he was exhausted, as always, frozen, disappointed and yet at the same time somehow relieved that nothing had happened. That another weekend had gone by uneventfully.

  Suddenly Stave flinched as the phone rang. He grabbed the receiver.

  ‘Maschke here.’

  He heard crackling, swooping sounds, as if his colleague was calling from the North Pole.

  ‘I’ve been trying to get through to you for an hour. What’s going on? It’s constantly engaged.’

  Stave did his best not to allow any sign of relief into his voice.

  ‘Had a few calls to make,’ he replied. ‘Nothing important. How about you?’

  Maschke was calling from Travemünde, cursing the hoteliers as racketeers. Five hundred Reichsmarks per night for a room with a sea view. Breakfast with real coffee, marmalade, a bottle of whisky at night for 800 Reichsmarks.

  ‘The hotel is full,’ he shouted over the crackling line. ‘It’s just that the clientele has changed.’

  ‘It sounds like business people on expenses, like it used to be.’ Stave couldn’t resist a tinge of Schadenfreude. Cynical old Maschke who hunted down pimps and hookers but deep down couldn’t stop believing that people were basically good.

  Or then again? He remembered the map of France with the SS stamp and the name Hans Herthge.

  Should I just call him ‘Herthge’ in the middle of the call and see how he reacts, Stave wondered, but quickly jettisoned the idea. He would have too much to explain if he did. Instead he told Maschke to check out surgeons who had carried out both hernia and ovarian operations. He chose his words carefully, kept it vague, didn’t say expressly that he’d been in Maschke’s office the previous evening, but at least if he should find out from Ehrlich then he would be able to say that he’d mentioned the idea to him on the phone.

  His vice squad colleague said nothing for a moment or two. Was he suspicious? Then he answered, ‘Okay, I’ll try that.’

  Despite the crackling on the line Stave thought there was a sceptical tone to his voice. ‘Hernias and ovarian operations. So far I’ve covered Hamburg to the Baltic coast. Now I’ll take it as far as the Danish border. Then from the North Sea south. It’ll take days. So far I’ve talked to some 20 surgeons. You wouldn’t believe how many blokes muck about with women’s down-under bits. But nobody admits to dealings with the woman we’re talking about. And I asked every doctor I’ve spoken to if they thought she could have children after an operation like that, and they all said it was highly unlikely.’

  ‘What about our other victims?’

  ‘I’ve shown every doctor I’ve visited every damn police photograph of every victim, the old guy, the younger woman, the kid. It would appear that not one of our victims ever went to a doctor. They all seem to have been remarkably healthy. None of them can ever have suffered anything more than a sore throat.’

  ‘Check in with headquarters every two days, even if you don’t come up with anything. But be thorough. And check out older, retired doctors. I’d prefer you wasted an extra day rather than took an hour too few.’

  At least that’s got Maschke out of my hair, he thought as put the receiver down.

  By now there was a constant rattle of keys on the typewriter in the outer office. Frau Berg had arrived.

  ‘How are you?’ Stave asked her, unnecessarily. She looked as if she hadn’t slept for three days.

  ‘Fine,’ she lied. The clatter of the typewriter got louder.

  ‘Get me a few more folders for my in-tray. I need to sort the files out.’ Stave was just floating a theory.

  But Erna Berg just nodded.

  The word ‘files’ didn’t seem to make her nervous. Of all his colleagues she had had the best opportunity to steal the murder files. But she had no obvious motive. She didn’t react at all to the word. It was always possible, of course, that she was just a good actress. But in that case wouldn’t she have done a better job in covering up the business with her husband and MacDonald?

  ‘Anything else I can do for you?’ she looked up at him.

  Stave realised that he had been staring at her, reddened, and shook his head. Then he thought again. ‘Yes, ask MacDonald to come in.’

  She managed the faintest of smiles, then said, ‘I’d love to but the lieutenant has disappeared.’

  ‘Disappeared?’

  ‘Gone. Vanished without trace. Nobody at his office can tell me where he is. I’ve been ringing regularly, and not just on business. Sometimes he disappears for a few hours, but sometimes for a day or more. And then suddenly James is back again. I have no idea what he’s up to these days. Maybe he has another woman.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ the chief inspector said, although in reality he didn’t know MacDonald well enough to say anything of the sort.

  ‘Keep trying.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me. I’ll let you know as soon as I get hold of him. ‘

  Stave went back into his office. Maschke was out of the way. MacDonald had disappeared. Erna Berg was preoccupied with her own problems. Cuddel Breuer and Ehrlich weren’t on his heels – a weekend without finding a fresh victim had given him breathing space, a stay of execution before they started on at him again.

  I’ll go through everything all over again, on my own, thoroughly, he told himself. I shall interview all the most important witnesses once again. ‘Check with the transport department if there’s a car available,’ he told his secretary.

  ‘For the whole day?’

  ‘Half a day. Or just an hour or two, if that’s all they can let me have.’

  ‘Where’s is it to go to?’

  ‘Out. On the trail of a murderer.’ He didn’t know what else to say.

  Half an hour later, Stave screeched the old Mercedes round a tight corner on to the Elbe embankment. He’d wondered for a moment or two if he should have called first to tell them he was coming, but in the end decided against it. If they turned him away from the Warburg Children’s Health Home then he could play it by the book and get MacDonald to help him if necessary, if he s
howed up again, that was. He wondered for a moment or two why MacDonald had gone missing, and if perhaps Erna Berg’s suspicions were justified.

  He had to stop at the gates of the Warburg building. They were locked and there was nobody around. Stave rang the bell. Eventually a teenager appeared on the other side and said, ‘What do you want?’

  Stave automatically began to fish in his overcoat pocket for his police ID, then changed his mind and simply gave his name, without mentioning any rank, and added, ‘I need to speak to Madame Dubois.’

  The boy disappeared. A minute passed. Then another. The chief inspector began to worry that he’d made a mistake. But eventually the slender figure of the villa’s warden appeared, opened the gate and waved him in.

  ‘It’s a shame you haven’t found your murderer yet,’ Thérèse Dubois said.

  ‘What makes you think I haven’t already arrested him?’

  ‘If you had, would you be here?’

  Stave followed her into the villa’s winter garden, wondering how much he ought to tell her.

  ‘I’m not here about the rubble murderer,’ he said, sitting down.

  ‘Another investigation?’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know yet. It’s early days.’

  ‘And you need my help?’

  ‘I need a little girl’s help.’

  Thérèse Dubois smiled. A knowing smile, Stave reckoned.

  ‘Anouk Magaldi. You asked me her name when you were last here. I wondered why, and wondered when you would come back and tell me.’

  ‘Can I have a word with her?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She seemed to know one of my colleagues. It was as if she recognised him.’

  Thérèse Dubois looked at him silently.