‘You interviewed both of them. What might that be?’
Stave closed his eyes. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘Give me the cases, boss. Dönnecke couldn’t care less who killed these two children. He’ll nail some wolf kid at random for Meinke, and bury the file on the girl because he doesn’t think it's worth his while to go chasing some punter who kills hookers.’
‘You may well be right,’ Breuer replied with a smile, ‘but you on the other hand risk messing up my whole department by going around treading on your colleagues’ toes. They’re sensitive enough, what with dealing with the Tommies. You won’t work flat out to find the wolf kid who killed Meinke because that doesn’t fit with the other two cases. And therefore in the end, after you’ve made a mess of the whole department, you’ll have three unsolved cases on file.’ Cuddel Breuer shook his head energetically. ‘No. You deal with your case. I think one murder is enough to be going on with. Solve it. If – and only if – you come across leads that point directly to a connection with the murder of Meinke or the young prostitute, then I will let you work on that particular case. But only under those circumstances, and even then you’ll have to work with Dönnecke.’
‘Thanks, boss,’ Stave said, and stormed out of the office.
‘Glad to hear about your son,’ Breuer called after him.
The chief inspector stopped in his tracks, turned around and closed the door again. ‘You heard about Karl?’
‘Sometimes even a CID boss finds out a thing or two,’ Breuer replied with a smile. ‘Congratulations, it must be a good feeling to be able to embrace a missing son again, particularly,’ he hesitated, ‘after the tragic loss of your wife.’
Confused and angry. Stave took himself off back to his office, wondering how Breuer had found out about Karl. Did it mean all his other colleagues knew? And was the boss's final remark maybe an oblique hint that word of his relationship with Anna had also got around? Stave wished it was already evening and everyone else had gone home, so he could get on with his investigation on his own.
He told Erna Berg about Karl's return. Just mentioning it casually to see what reaction he’d get. He had meant it just in passing, but when it came to it, he simply blurted it out. His secretary reacted with delight, congratulations, promising to be discreet. Stave cursed to himself: obviously she already knew, and was just play-acting. The whole corridor, probably the entire CID knew. They’ve all been wondering why I haven’t said anything. He went into his office, said, ‘I don’t want to be disturbed,’ realising as he said it, how impolite he sounded.
Concentrate on the case, he told himself, staring at the Win-kelmann file. He would have loved to have the files on the other two cases to line up next to it, because sometimes that was how he spotted connections that otherwise weren’t obvious. Meinke. Had he killed Winkelmann, perhaps in the course of an argument? And one of Winkelmann's friends, some half-crazy wolf kid, had smashed him over the head with an iron bar or truncheon in revenge? Why did somebody feel the need to kill Hildegard Hüllmann? Her murder resembled Winkelmann's. But if Meinke had killed Winkelmann, he couldn’t have killed the young prostitute too, because he was already dead himself by then.
But if the first murder – Winkelmann's – and the third – Hildegard Hüllmann – were both committed by the same perpetrator, then what was the link with that of Meinke?
Stave could have hammered on his desk with anger. Three dead children. In peacetime, for God's sake! He felt consumed by impotent rage, against Cuddel Breuer, against Dönnecke, against the wolf children themselves. Don’t be an idiot, he told himself. It's not one of them who's turning Hamburg into a hell. It's somebody else and it's your job to find him.
Start again. He would act as if the Meinke case didn’t exist. Maybe Beruer and Dönnecke were right. It was a coincidence, carried out by one of the wolf children as the result of an everyday quarrel. If all he had to deal with was murder number one and murder number two, then there was an argument to be followed up: the girl had told Stave she was following her own leads. Where would she start? On the Hansaplatz or at the station, around the black marketeers and smugglers.
It was only a possibility. Nothing to take to Breuer. But enough for him to base his own investigation on.
He called Erna Berg. ‘I’m going down to the station.’
‘Where the dead girl used to hang out? What am I supposed to tell the boss if he comes looking for you?’
He gave her a conspiratorial smile, feeling in a better mood at last.
‘Tell him I’m working on my case.’
On the way to the station he forced himself to walk slowly. To take deep breaths. Normally a walk in the fresh air cleared his head. But the sun was too hot for him to keep a cool head. He was thirsty. Don’t start looking for revenge, he told himself, you have to keep a sober head. And he wanted to succeed in the case, to have something to show to his son, so that he could be proud of his father.
The air on the station platforms was suffocating: a mix of coal dust and the sweat of the passengers waiting for trains. Stave walked up and down the platforms holding his police ID under the nose of every adolescent girl not in the company of her parents. Scared looks, embarrassment, and a look of horror from girls who realised he was taking them for prostitutes. Stave couldn’t care less.
Twice he was lucky, if that was the right expression under the circumstances. One young hooker had heard of Hildegard Hüllmann but said she hadn’t seen her for several days. He couldn’t get anything more out of her. The other one insisted she had never heard the name before. Lying, he reckoned, but if he arrested her, then Dönnecke would get wind of it and accuse him, correctly, of interfering with his case. He let her go.
He also kept an eye out for boys delivering suitcases to the trains or collecting them. But it was a waste of time. All the coaches were packed and there were hundreds of children toting luggage fighting their way through the crowds. Cuddel Breuer's right, he said to himself, I’m going to work myself to the bone and not solve either case.
Sweaty and tired, he eventually headed back, almost bumping into MacDonald by the entrance to the building.
‘You look as if you’ve just been released from Rommel's Afrika Korps,’ the young British officer called out to him, ‘just after the battle of El Alamein!’
‘Do you have something to say to me?’ Stave croaked back at him.
‘I’m actually here to meet Erna, but now that you mention it you and I could do with a little chat.’ A shadow fell over his face.
‘Let me guess. You’re about to have your first meeting with the divorce judge. Things are getting serious.’
‘So serious I’ve become the brunt of jokes down at the officers’ club.’
‘To your face.’
‘Not yet. But behind my back.’
‘Not all lost yet, then.’
‘Churchill would have approved of your attitude. Shame you were on the wrong side.’
‘I usually am,’ the chief inspector replied.
‘The divorce case begins a week on Thursday’
‘Eight days’ time.’ Stave could guess what was coming next.
They had wandered away from the CID headquarters across Karl Muck Platz as far as the music hall. On the steps in front of the concert hall was an ice cream seller's cart. A few boys were hanging about around it, although Stave noticed they didn’t seem as desperate as usual.
‘Let me buy you one,’ MacDonald said, taking a leather wallet from his trouser pocket. He was astonished to find the ice cream seller waving him away, pointing to a handwritten sign on the side of his cart: ‘Bring your own wrapper.’
‘You have ice cream, but nothing to sell it in?’ Stave asked the man, uncertain whether he found the situation amusing, shocking or just plain stupid.
The sullen old man nodded at the boys and said, ‘Talk to them.’
Stave walked over to them, noticing that the grins on their faces grew wider with every step he took. ‘Paper wrapp
er, please?’ he demanded, with a grin of his own.
‘We’ve heard that before,’ the oldest of the group, maybe fourteen at most, quipped, holding up some green, grey and pink sheets of paper.
‘Those are official forms!’ he burst out.
‘Official permission forms, regulation notices. You can roll them into a cone. Personally I find ice cream tastes best wrapped in a housing certificate.’
‘Don’t get cheeky with me. Where did you steal these from?’
‘We didn’t steal them,’ the oldest boy said. ‘We went down to the city hall this morning and bought them. They cost two pfennigs each.’
‘I bet you’re not going to sell them that cheaply to us,’ MacDonald laughed.
‘Just ten pfennigs apiece, and you get to choose your colour.’
‘Nice business,’ Stave mumbled. If this is the way things are heading then we’re going to have problems.
MacDonald gave the kids a couple of coins, took two sheets of paper, rolled them and had the old man fill them with vanilla ice cream.
‘Do you think those kids and that charming old man are in cahoots?’ the lieutenant asked after they had walked on a few paces.
Stave shook his head. ‘The old boy is just annoyed because he didn’t think of it. He can’t exactly chase them away or he’d ruin his own business. But they’re not doing him any favours, because all his customers have to give them money before they can buy from him so they’ve less left to spend on ice cream. Clever lads.’
‘Cleverer than I am,’ MacDonald added. His brief high spirits had vanished again.
‘You’ve got another eight days. I’m sure you’ll think of something. After all, you do have connections.’
MacDonald shot him a brief glance, then shook his head. ‘First rule with us is not to cause a fuss. A messy divorce is the last thing my superiors want. They’d be happier if I defected to the Russians.’
‘Well, you’re going to have to go through with it. Unless the divorce goes ahead, there's no way you’ll be able to take Erna Berg back to England with you. And there’ll be a doubt over the status of the child you’re going to have.’
‘Thank you for putting it so neatly. I know there's no way I can avoid the divorce case. I just want it to come to a satisfactory conclusion.’
‘You mean you want to present your superior officers with a result impressive enough for them to overlook the whole business?’
‘Yes. I can’t stop the divorce being messy and unpleasant, but, ideally, I could ensure it doesn’t affect my future with Erna. There's really only one way I’m going to be able to marry her without being posted elsewhere because of the scandal, and that's to solve the Blohm & Voss murder case. Then we’ll all be happy’
‘You mean, providing we solve it within the next eight days.’
‘If it takes, any longer, old boy,’ MacDonald said with a wry smile, ‘then your report will be my one-way ticket to Jerusalem.’
‘Palestine?’
‘The next war: Arabs against Jews. They hate each other and both of them hate the British even more. Not exactly much chance of me taking up with one of the natives out there. There's a much higher chance of taking a bullet or shrapnel from a bomb. Still at least that would simplify the divorce procedure.’
‘Eight days is a long time, a lot can happen,’ Stave replied. ‘Thanks for the ice cream.’
That evening Stave couldn’t stand sitting alone in his apartment for too long. He headed out for the allotments in Berne, just to see where Karl was living. It took him three quarters of an hour to get there. At times he took short cuts through seas of ruins that had once been apartment blocks, and occasionally found himself climbing over heaps of rubble, sending rats scurrying away from him. There were areas of long grass, bushes, a couple of birch tree saplings growing amid the rubble, sparrows, blackbirds. He came across a two-storey building where the façade had fallen away, the roof blown off and the windows shattered, leaving the upper floors still standing between the side walls, like some gigantic dolls’ house. Inside, protected from rain and frost, but inaccessible to looters, stood a chest of drawers, with an oil painting hanging at an angle on the wall, and, almost obscene in its undamaged isolation, a gleaming white toilet.
Stave thought Anna might be interested in the painting, and wondered what she was up to. Maybe she was wandering around the ruins too, in the hours before curfew, checking out piles of bricks with her trained eye, looking out for wooden picture frames, for rooms hidden behind piles of stone and rubble. She had told him that those, if you could find them, were the best places to discover antiques and undamaged artworks. A family bible, a grandfather clock, a fine tea cup of Dresden china, which somehow had survived a bombing raid that had laid waste to an entire suburb of the city. He wondered if she would risk her life to get hold of that oil painting, climbing up into a building that could collapse at any minute to get her hands on a little treasure? He wondered how many times she had already risked her life for something similar.
He got to the little river that Karl had said led upstream to the allotment colony. It was reduced to barely a trickle. The cracked ground was mostly dry, baked hard by the sun. Stave was thirsty, but the stench from the water put him off. Then he came to a wooden door that had once been painted green, the entrance to a path, with a notice on it ‘Allotment Club 1904’.
Behind it was a tall, thorny green hedge, gravel pathways, wire netting on fences made of planks, marking out a sort of chessboard pattern. Miniature fields planted in precise rows with potatoes, lettuce, cabbage, carrots, green beans growing up trestles, tobacco plants, all shaded by saplings of cherry, pear and apple trees. Each little square had a shed, in most cases about as big as a room, three of them had a brand new one, built with brick walls, proper little houses, with a door, windows, a gable and shingle roof, even properly plastered, but half the size of what people used to put up before the war. These however were the little castles of those who’d done relatively well out of the peace, who’d come into a small fortune. It used to be forbidden to erect dwellings you could live in all year round on the allotments, but today it didn’t matter as long as the citizens of Hamburg had a roof over their heads. There were no more incorruptible city council officials coming round to scare people away.
Stave hoped Karl was in one of these proper little houses, but on knocking on a few doors, soon realised otherwise. A grumpy, suspicious man he’d woken up in the third house he’d tried, showed him the way to go. It was the very last allotment, bordered on the left by the stream, on the right by a neighbour's allotment and beyond by the scrubland that surrounded the entire colony At the very edge of the allotment was a shed, though hardly worthy of the name: a little cube made of planks painted with white oil paint, a skewed door but no windows, and a roof made of dented corrugated iron with a rusty stovepipe protruding from it. In front on a terrace of sorts, made up of some sheets of metal salvaged from a ruin and laid out on the ground, was a wooden table and two chairs. All around were tobacco plants in full bloom, but no vegetables or fruit as far as Stave could see.
His son was on his knees weeding between two flourishing tobacco plants with leaves as long as his arm. His torso was reddened by the sun and covered in sweat. How thin he is, Stave thought to himself, holding up a hand in greeting.
‘Heil Hitler!’ Karl responded. Then, when he saw the expression on his father's face, added: ‘It was only a joke.’
‘A joke that can land you in jail these days!’
‘Have you come to arrest me?’
Here we go again, thought Stave, and in what he hoped was a conciliatory tone added: ‘I’ve only come to see how you’re getting on.’
Karl got to his feet and, with a gesture Stave was surprised to recognise as proudly proprietorial, waved his arms to display his little parcel of land. ‘May I introduce you to the original plantation of what will come to be known as the global brand “Karl Stave Classic”, mild and smooth, and only half the price
of John Player's.’
‘You’re really intending to make cigarettes?’
Karl laughed. ‘We’re in Germany. It isn’t possible. The tax man has already been round.’
‘Tax man?’
‘You can lay waste to the entire country and annihilate the Wehrmacht, but the German Inland Revenue will always survive. An inspector has just left, you might have bumped into him. You should have arrested him. Made up any pretext you liked and tossed him into the cellar.’
Stave ignored the remark. ‘What was a tax man from the revenue after here?’
‘They’re investigating every single allotment holder in the city. You’re not allowed even to profit from your own allotment, in case they lose out on revenue from tobacco tax. You have to hand it all over and they give you two Reichsmarks for every kilo of tobacco leaves, and you get a ration card back for half of what you’ve handed over. Not bad business for the tax men, if you ask me, who take half of it without even having to crawl about on their knees between the damnably fragile plants.’
‘So why don’t you plant something else? Potatoes, for example?’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll still have enough for myself
‘But you can’t eat tobacco.’
‘These green leaves are banknotes growing out of the soil. And in any case it's not that easy to get anything to grow here.’ Karl vanished behind the hut for a moment and came back with an old spade. ‘Here, try digging with that.’
Stave took the spade, somewhat puzzled, found a clear patch of earth and rammed the spade into the ground. At first it was easy because the soil had been dried by the sun to the extent that it was powdery. Then, when he pushed the spade a little further he hit something solid. ‘Feels like concrete,’ he said, wondering if somehow the Nazis might have built a bunker underneath the allotment colony.
His son shook his head. ‘Ice. The ground got so cold during the last winter that, despite the heat of the last few weeks, everything more than forty centimetres deep is still frozen solid. Try planting something that needs deep roots and the plant will just wither and die.’
The Wolf Children Page 21