The Murderer in Ruins (26 page)

The chief inspector bent down and looked at the map. Exactly at the point she indicated was a pencil mark: ‘10 June ’44.’

O
n the way back Stave drove unusually slowly. Lothar Maschke’s real name was Hans Herthge, and he wasn’t on a U-boat but was a soldier in the Waffen-SS. He was a murderer, jointly responsible for the deaths of more than 600 people.

And we’re getting worked up over four deaths, but then corrected himself: we should be getting worked up – murder is murder. 

What was he to do? He had the testimony of an eight-year-old. Thérèse Dubois promised him the little girl would testify in court, as if Stave might go there and then to the public prosecutor. But what could Ehrlich do? If he was found guilty, Maschke would face the death penalty. But was the testimony of an eight-year-old girl enough to sentence a police officer to death? And could it even be proved that Maschke was Hans Herthge? There was the map, but Stave had stolen it from his colleague’s desk under questionable circumstances. What might a skilled defence lawyer do with that? The likely result was that Maschke would walk free for lack of evidence. And Stave would be a grass. The man who ratted on a colleague. He might as well pick up his hat and coat and leave the force.

I need to talk to Ehrlich, he thought to himself. In confidence. See what we can do. Get more proof. Then all of a sudden he slammed on the brakes, and the car came to a juddering halt.

Ehrlich had been in Maschke’s office that evening. He hadn’t told Stave why he wanted to talk to the vice squad man. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to talk to him. Maybe the public prosecutor wanted to do the same as the chief inspector: to rummage round in Maschke’s desk drawers, but for a different reason. Maybe Ehrlich knew something about Maschke’s dark secret. What was it Thérèse Dubois had said? That Ehrlich was always digging up new cases. That he was out for revenge. Somebody who has a lot of accounts to settle with the Nazis.

Stave stared out of the dirty windscreen. A man pushing a bicycle with bent forks along the pavement stared at him suspiciously, then hurried on his way. The chief inspector ignored him. Who was playing what game here? No wonder Maschke hadn’t wanted to be in the building when they had first come to the children’s home. No wonder that he wasn’t happy with their research into Displaced Persons. He must have been afraid somebody he had nearly killed might recognise him? Any Jew, any refugee who had survived something like that might have recognised him and blown his cover. No wonder Maschke had been so keen to suggest the killer was some
black marketeer. No wonder he had used physical force to try to make the first possible suspect they had come across confess.

Was it Maschke who had stolen the files then? Was there something in them that might have given a clue to his SS past? If so, what was it? A shiver ran down Stave’s spine and he knew it wasn’t because of the cold wind blowing into the car.

His thoughts turned to the public prosecutor. Had Ehrlich ever been interested in the rubble murderer at all? Or had he already had his suspicions about Maschke/Herthge, and was just using the case to lure him into a trap? Had the public prosecutor been poking around late at night in Stave’s own office, like he had attempted to do in Maschke’s? Could it have been Ehrlich who had taken the case files? There again, Stave couldn’t think of any reason to suspect him, any motive, anything he had said or done.

As he was leaving Thérèse Dubois had told him she didn’t think the evidence of an eight-year-old would be enough to convict Maschke. She had said it with a sad smile. ‘It’s easier to kill 600 people in a single day than to bring a murderer to justice,’ were her words.

‘He’ll end up in court, I promise you,’ Stave had replied. ‘I’ll find the proof I need.’

Now he was wondering if that was a promise he could keep.

B
ack at the office he had to drag himself down the corridor, ignoring the pain in his leg and the fact that he was hungry. Erna Berg was just putting down the telephone receiver when he walked in.

‘MacDonald?’

‘He called. He’s on his way here.’

‘Anything else I ought to know about?’

‘No. Nobody called. Nobody’s been in.’

‘No more dead bodies.’

Erna Berg gave a shy little smile and said, ‘May I take the afternoon off? I’d like to go and see the gynaecologist.’

Stave gave her a look. Gynaecologist or abortionist? What do I care, he realised and nodded. ‘Off you go. Doesn’t look like there’ll
be much more to do here today.’ He hesitated for a minute and then added, ‘Good luck,’ but so quietly that she almost certainly didn’t hear him.

After his secretary had left Stave spent the next half-hour on the phone, ringing round hotels and police stations on the Baltic coast, but he couldn’t track down Maschke. He’s probably with some doctor, he thought to himself.

Should he call up Maschke’s personnel file? Maybe he’d find some clue there as to his change of identity. A forged document? Some contradiction in his supposed CV? But what would he tell the personnel department he wanted the file for? That an old acquaintance had made some allegation against him? But why would he want the whole file? Better to leave it where it was. There was nothing for it. Stave would have to go and speak to the public prosecutor. Ehrlich would find it easier to get hold of the files discreetly.

But he felt better nonetheless. I’m getting somewhere, he thought to himself. I just have to deal with this my way. Maschke’s real name is Herthge. That’s a discovery in itself.

There was a knock on his door. It was MacDonald.

‘I’ve finally managed to track down that story Anna von Veckinhausen told you,’ the lieutenant said. ‘On the day in question she did indeed sell a painting to a British officer outside the Garrison Theatre. I’ve even seen it. Best quality German kitsch. Price: 520 Reichsmarks.’ Then he took a deep breath, and said, ‘By the way, where’s your secretary?’ – trying hard and failing to sound casual about it.

‘She’s gone to see a gynaecologist,’ Stave told him.

MacDonald put his head in his hands and began rubbing his temples. For the first time he struck the chief inspector as weary. ‘It seems I don’t have much luck with women,’ he muttered.

‘Frau Berg looks to me as if she’s head over heels in love,’ Stave said stiffly, not really knowing what to say to make the man feel better.

MacDonald smiled. ‘Not exactly the way a married woman is
supposed to be in her situation. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.’ He lapsed into silence.

Stave said nothing, waiting to see what was coming next.

‘Erna is the second woman to have meant something in my life,’ the officer eventually added. ‘The first was a wonderful, clever woman with a real lust for life but unfortunately married to one of my brother officers in the same regiment. The son of a lord. Heir to a stately home, a vast fortune and half a dozen noble titles.’

‘Hardly a fair fight then.’

‘More like a scandal. She might well have chosen me in the end. But then rumours about us began to circulate in the officers’ club.’

‘Those invisible barriers?’ Stave said.

MacDonald gave a thin smile. ‘An aristocratic English lady and a Scottish nobody. It would have been the end of her social life. Mine too. So she went back to her husband. Everything according to the rules.’ The lieutenant waved his hand as if swatting an irritating fly. ‘Good enough reason to volunteer for the front line, don’t you think?’

‘A good reason to stay here,’ Stave told him with a smile. ‘Frau Berg is certainly no aristocrat,’ he said, encouragingly.

Speaking of aristocratic ladies, he thought to himself, time for me to interview a witness or two. Starting with Anna von Veckinhausen.

H
e took the tram, getting off at the stop near the charred wall. The street that still had street lamps. He was glad it was barely 3 p.m. The food shops had already closed so there were no queues outside their doors. Just a few children who’d had lessons in the morning playing out on the street despite the cold. Lots of children were still at school at that time, and their parents were either at work or out somewhere doing deals on the black market. The streets between the ruins were all but empty.

The ideal time to commit a murder, the chief inspector told himself. Why do I always assume they happened in the late afternoon or evening, he wondered. There’d be almost no likelihood of a witness to an early afternoon killing. 

Could that fit in with Anna von Veckinhausen’s story? It was already dusk when she had spotted the figure she mentioned. But by then, Stave reckoned, the old man they had found near Lappenbergs Allee was already dead. The murderer had hidden the body and stripped it. That took time. Maybe the witness had disturbed him, wandering through the rubble as it was getting dark.

The Nissen huts at the crossroads. Empty streets. The barracks, almost in the middle of the city, where Anna von Veckinhausen lived. Or to be more precise, where she had disappeared behind a door the evening he had been with her. He hadn’t been able to see inside. So what now? He couldn’t be sure that she was there. Maybe she was out looking for more antiques somewhere in the rubble? One way or the other, he could hardly ring up in advance to tell her he was coming. There were no telephones in the Nissen huts.

The chief inspector knocked on the door. It sounded as if he was banging an empty oil drum. An old man with no teeth opened the door instantly, as if he’d been lurking behind it waiting for him. His shirt was stained and he smelled of onions. Stave’s stomach rumbled.

The chief inspector gave his name, but didn’t mention any police rank, or show him his ID. He didn’t want to embarrass Anna von Veckinhausen by revealing that he was a policemen. He asked for her by name.

‘Never heard the name before,’ the old man grumbled, giving him a suspicious look.

Had Stave’s witness been leading him on? Maybe she didn’t live here after all? He gave the old man a description of her.

‘Oh, her,’ he replied, stepping back to let Stave in.

He walked in. How long had this old boy been living in the same Nissen hut as Anna von Veckinhuasen without even knowing her name?

The cast-iron stove in the centre of the hut, smaller than a beer barrel, was burning, orange flames glowing through the rips in the ragged sheet hanging inside the door. There was a smell of rust in
the stale air. The Nissen hut wasn’t much larger than a weekend allotment shed. Within seconds Stave’s face was glowing from the warmth of the stove, but his back, which faced the outside wall was still cold. If that stove were to go out, everybody in here would freeze, he thought. He wondered briefly if they took turns at night to tend the fire. Like people did back in the Stone Age.

Grey Wehrmacht blankets hanging from wires divided the Nissen hut into four separate areas, centred on the stove in the middle. The old man walked past the stove to the rear left partition and shouted out ‘Visitor’ as if he was on a parade ground.

It took just a few seconds before Anna von Veckinhausen appeared from behind the blanket. Stave got a glimpse of a camp bed and two wooden vegetable crates turned upside down, obviously serving as a stool and table, a trunk, and fixed to the hut wall a little oil painting of a church in winter.

She quickly pulled the blanket behind her to stop him seeing anything else. Maybe she has something she wants to hide, Stave thought. Or maybe she’s just embarrassed by her circumstances. She looked exhausted and not exactly delighted to see him.

‘I just wanted to ask you a few more questions,’ he said.

‘Does your newspaper friend need some more information for one of his stories?’

Before Stave could reply she had disappeared behind the blanket again. For a second or two, the chief inspector was afraid she would just leave him standing there like an awkward schoolboy. What was he to do? He could hardly force her to answer any more questions. At least not unless he requested a formal interview. But he had no real grounds to do so. What would he do if she went and complained to her British officer friends about him? To his relief, she appeared again after a few minutes, in an overcoat and headscarf.

The old man was still standing next to the stove, watching their every move.

‘Shall we go for a walk?’ Anna von Veckinhausen suggested, loud enough for him to hear.

Stave would have preferred to stay where he was, soaking up the heat from the stove, but he nodded, pleased that she was ready to talk to him at all.

They wandered through the ruins as far as the Wandse. Before the war it had been a river, squeezed in here and there, but with grassland or trees on either side, all of which had carved a green line through the eastern side of Hamburg, no more than a few hundred metres wide in places but several kilometres long. You would see children throwing breadcrumbs for ducks, herons perched on the bank, grey and motionless as a sculpture, waiting to spot a fish, butterflies, squirrels turning somersaults in the branches, rustling the leaves, molehills.

Now the Wandse was a strip of grey-black ice, frozen solid. The fish, ducks and herons had all vanished, or had been caught, cooked and eaten. The trees had been chopped down for firewood. All that remained were stumps, with bits of bomb shrapnel embedded in them. The green spaces had vanished under mountains of rubble, dumped there to clear the streets.

‘You told a journalist I saw the rubble murderer,’ Anna von Veckinhausen said accusingly when they had reached what remained of the river.

Relieved to be able to give his left leg a bit of a rest, Stave just shrugged and said, ‘I told him a woman had possibly caught a glimpse of the killer. Kleensch would have found out sooner or later. Better to give him my side of the story than for him to make up his own.’

‘But the rubble murderer now knows that there’s a witness, a female witness. He might even know who it is because he might have seen me too that night.’

‘If he did see you then he would in any case have worked out you would go to the police. And even if he read the piece in the newspaper, he still wouldn’t have your name or know where you lived.’