The Murderer in Ruins (15 page)

‘But he hasn’t left any two bodies in the same place. Each time he has chosen a new lot of ruins,’ Stave said. ‘You were down at the Street Clearance department. Just how many lots of ruins are there to choose from to hide a corpse?’

The vice squad man shrugged: ‘Hundreds, maybe thousands. There are a couple of posh areas like Blankenese that we can exclude – too little bomb damage – and then there are a few areas like the port: badly bombed but cordoned off by the British, where nobody would get in without being noticed. Apart from that, take your pick in what is the greatest ruined cityscape in Europe.’

‘Maybe the killer wants us to find his victims,’ MacDonald suggested. ‘Maybe he’s challenging us? Trying to provoke us?’

Stave waved the idea away. ‘No point in coming to premature conclusions. Wherever the killer might hide the bodies they’re going to be found sooner or later. How’s he going to make a corpse simply
disappear? Weight it down with a couple of concrete blocks and throw it into the water? Even out on the Elbe the ice is a couple of metres thick. The Alster and the Fleete are frozen solid. Bury it? The ground is frozen hard as iron. Burn it? There’s next to no petrol and or coal in Hamburg, hardly even any wood. In one respect at least this winter is the policeman’s friend – there’s no way for a killer to simply dispose of his victim.’ Stave stretched. ‘Any more witnesses?’

The lieutenant gave a wry smile. ‘Maybe. I have the boy in a car with one of our military police. It’s not quite so cold in the car and there was no need for the lad to see this.’ He nodded towards the stretcher with the body being carried off between a couple of broken walls.

‘Maybe he should,’ Stave muttered, and made a sign to the two men in dark coats to put the stretcher on the ground.

MacDonald barked something in English and a military policeman brought over a skinny boy, almost invisible inside a grown-up’s overcoat that was far too big for him: unkempt brown hair, probably lice-infested, a scabby rash on his neck, missing one of his front teeth.

‘What’s your name?’ Stave asked him, indicating to the British soldier that the boy shouldn’t come too close.

‘Jim Mainke.’

‘Jim?’

‘Wilhelm.’

‘Age?’

‘Sixteen.’

‘Try again. Age?’

‘Fourteen. That is, I’ll be fourteen this summer.’

‘Where do you live?’

Wilhelm Mainke waved a hand somewhere across the ruins.

‘With your parents.’

‘No, thank God,’ the boy replied with a smile. ‘If I did, I’d be in Öjendorf Cemetery.’

The cheeky answer irritated the chief inspector but he kept calm.
‘Do I have to drag everything out of you? Or can you string more than a couple of words together at a time?’

Maine averted his eyes. ‘My father worked at Blohm & Voss,
2
my mother was a housewife. They were both killed by a bombing raid in 1943. I was staying with my grandmother out in the country at the time. I live in a cellar in Rothenburgsort, with a few friends.’

That was more or less what Stave had guessed. There were more than a thousand vagabond orphans on the streets of Hamburg, some whose parents had been killed in the bombing raids, some refugees who’d got separated from their parents. A few of them had joined gangs and were literally fighting for their existence; many survived by collecting lumps of coal, looting amongst the ruins, working for the black marketeers – or sold themselves on the station platforms.’

‘You come here a lot?’

‘Of course. I know my way around the port area. I used to be able to visit my father at the shipyard. I come here looking for coal.’

‘Other kids do the same thing?’

Mains shrugged. ‘You get a few hanging around. Thirty, maybe forty. Not so many right now. Too cold.’

‘And you were out and about here this morning?’

‘Yeah. Until the patrol nabbed me.’

‘Did you see the girl?’

Mainke quickly shook his head. ‘When I got here, the cops were already on the scene. They wouldn’t let me get any closer.’

‘But you know why the police are here?’

The boy nodded. ‘One of the military police told me.’

‘Were you here yesterday too?’

‘No, had to find myself a bite to eat. It’s two, maybe three days since I was last here.’

‘Do you think the girl could have been lying in the lift shaft then and you wouldn’t have noticed her?’

The boy moved his head from side to side indifferently. ‘She could have been there for years and I wouldn’t have noticed her. I usually keep to the riverbank. That’s where you find lumps of coal, if you’re
lucky. As soon as I find a couple, I’m out of here. Not worth staying around any longer. Not worth wandering around in the ruins, nothing left there.’

‘Apart from a dead girl.’

Jim Mainke went silent.

Stave sighed. ‘I’m sorry about this, but I have to ask you to come with me.’

‘Are you arresting me?’

‘You could say that, but it’s not exactly what I mean at the moment.’

The chief inspector led the boy over to the stretcher, where the two porters were standing having a smoke. The military policeman gave Stave a dirty look and glanced at MacDonald, but dropped it when the lieutenant gave an imperceptible nod.

Stave pulled the blanket back from the head end of the stretcher. ‘Do you recognise this girl?’

Mainke didn’t throw up, didn’t even go pale, just stood there looking at the body. Eventually the chief inspector had had enough and pulled the blanket back over the victim’s unseeing eyes.

‘Never seen her before,’ the boy said.

Stave nodded to the porters for them to take the stretcher away.

‘What’re you going to do with me now?’ Mainke asked. ‘Can I go back to looking for coal?’

‘You’re too young. I can’t just let you loose around here. The policemen will take you to Rauhes House.’ It was a charitable institution where all the orphans picked up by the police were taken in. A former locksmith was in charge and a few volunteers; Christian idealists looked after the boys and girls, delousing them and washing them, patched up scratches and dealt with other minor illnesses, gave them hot soup and a clean bed. Even so, most of the children did a runner within a day or two.

Mainke turned round and walked off behind the military policeman.

‘Where did you get the name Jim from?’ Stave shouted after him.

Maine turned and gave him a real boyish grin. ‘I have an uncle in America. Honest. In New York. I’m going to go to him as soon as big ships start docking in the port again.’

‘Good luck,’ Stave murmured, but Mainke was already too far away to hear him.

‘A
witness?’

Stave turned round on hearing his boss’s voice: Cuddel Breuer was standing there facing him.

‘I don’t think so. The boy only got here after the police were already on the scene.’

‘So, anything else?’

Stave almost said, ‘Just the usual,’ but stopped himself in time. He quickly went over what they had found.

‘Do you think the killer is the same?’ Breuer asked.

Stave paused, took a deep breath, then nodded: ‘Yes. Victims two and three have something to do with each other. Members of the same family, I suspect, even though we have no proof as yet. The circumstances are remarkably similar: both strangled with a thin wire, stripped naked, left amidst the rubble. It is even possible the little girl was murdered at the same time as the other two.’

‘A killer wiping out an entire family?’ Breuer looked around. ‘Anything else to do here?’

‘The crime scene man will go over everything again. But there’s nothing more for us to do.’

‘Good. Let’s go back to head office. I’ll give you a lift.’

Stave followed his boss to his old Mercedes. Breuer drove himself. He was a relaxed, self-confident, fast driver. They soon left Maschke in the old patrol car far behind.

‘So, we have a serial killer,’ said Breuer, looking dead ahead through the windscreen.

‘I’m afraid it seems so.’

‘We’re not going to be able to keep this under wraps much longer. The type of killing, the appeals for identification of the victims
– sooner or later some journalist will put two and two together and get a story.’

‘And we can’t control what he might write.’

‘Not these days, thank God. That is one of the prices of democracy, made in Great Britain. One way or another we’ve done well, you and me, Stave. But even so, in this one particular case, I almost long for the old days when you could simply tell them what they could print, and what they couldn’t.’

‘Even that wouldn’t help. People talk. There’ll be rumours. I’d prefer a piece in the newspaper, so at least we know where we are.’

‘And where are you?’

Stave shrugged. ‘They can’t write any more than we know. And that’s precious little.’

Breuer, for the first time, turned and looked at him, even though they were turning fast into the square outside headquarters. ‘We have a serial killer, one who attacks people in the ruins, amidst the rubble, or at least that is what people are going to think. But nearly all of Hamburg is in ruins. Worse: the victims are a young woman, an old man and a child. What are people going to make of that? That they’re all members of one unfortunate family? Victims of some domestic drama? Hardly. They are going to believe that anybody is likely to be murdered. That men and women are in danger, and even children. That the killer is someone who can strike almost any citizen in almost any part of the city.
That
is what they’re going to make of it.’

‘And they might be right,’ Stave mumbled.

‘That doesn’t exactly make the job any easier. Your job, I might add. Enjoy your Sunday, Chief Inspector.’

Stave climbed out, nodded, closed the heavy Mercedes door and watched as the car moved off.

‘Enjoy your Sunday,’ he muttered, than went into the office. It didn’t look as if he was going to have time today to hang out at the station looking for his son.

H
e didn’t even manage to get as far as his office without being stopped. A shadow emerged from between the columns by the doorway to the building: a young man, freshly shaven, bright, with notebook and pencil in hands that were still blue from the cold.

‘Ludwig Kleensch, from
Die Zeit,
’ he introduced himself. ‘Can I have a word?’

Stave had to make up his mind quickly. Should he just ignore the journalist? Or would he speak to him. The British had allowed daily and weekly newspapers to start up. Most were run by political parties and were local Hamburg-only papers.
Die Welt
was unaffiliated to any party and was available throughout the British zone, as was
Die Zeit,
the weekly that was the first to be licensed by the British authorities. But in this winter even the daily newspapers only had four to six pages and were published just twice a week. There was too little paper, even the yellowish, unrefined stuff reminiscent of old cheap drawing paper for children, but thinner.

The chief inspector did his calculations. Today was Sunday; between now and Thursday when
Die Zeit
came out he would be left in peace, at least as long as Kleensch was the only journalist already in on the story.

‘Very well,’ he said, trying in vain to manage a smile as he held the door open for the journalist. ‘At least in my office your hands won’t drop off from the cold.’

Kleensch nodded, grateful and surprised to be treated so cordially.

‘I want to talk to you about the rubble murderer,’ Kleensch said when they were upstairs.

‘The “rubble murderer”?’

‘That’s what I intend to call him. It has a ring to it. Or would you prefer the Hamburg Strangler?’

Stave didn’t bother to answer, nor did he bother to ask how the journalist already knew so much, even the fact that he was the one running the case. He thought about the crammed newspaper pages, which had to carry official notices, wedding and death notices and news from all round the world. Kleensch wouldn’t have much space.
Maybe the readers wouldn’t even notice his story. After 12 years of Nazi censorship nobody believed anything they read in the newspapers any more.

As if he’d read Stave’s mind, Kleensch leaned towards him and said, in a rather threatening tone of voice, ‘I’ve already told the editor it’s a big story.’

The chief inspector nodded resignedly, then gave the journalist a straightforward account of the case, handed him copies of the posters requesting information about the victims and told him what the CID had done so far. He only kept to himself what he planned to do next. He felt it might sound a bit pathetic.

‘Will there be more murders?’ Kleensch asked, scribbling so intensely he didn’t even look up from his notepad.

What a stupid question, Stave thought to himself and then realised that it was a trap. If he said, ‘We can’t exclude that possibility,’ the journalist would quote him on it, and that wouldn’t sound good. Instead he said, ‘We hope to have our hands on the killer within the next few days.’

Kleensch smiled, half in disappointment, half in recognition of what the inspector had done. He left Stave a card, printed on the same grubby paper as the newspapers themselves. ‘If anything should turn up, I’d be grateful if you’d give me a call. I don’t want to get anything wrong.’

The journalist shook his hand, opened the door and nearly walked straight into Dr Crzisini. He stared at him curiously, as if about to ask a question, then thought the better of it and left.

T
he pathologist came in, followed a few moments later by Maschke. Stave wondered if he’d been lurking somewhere out of sight until the journalist had gone down the stairs. Then behind him MacDonald and Erna Berg appeared. Stave wondered who had asked her, but said nothing.

‘I’ll make tea,’ she said with a smile.

Stave rummaged around in his desk until he found his large-scale
city map and unfolded it carefully. It was a post-war version, hatched grey and red where the bombed areas were. And there were a lot of them. Stave used tacks to put the map up on one wall of the office, then stuck three red-topped pins into the bombed areas, marking the places where the bodies had been found.