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Authors: Cay Rademacher

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BOOK: The Murderer in Ruins
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Ehrlich poured the tea. ‘I used to drink coffee,’ he piped up, ‘I only got used to tea during my time in England. It is a lot easier to get hold of, especially here in the British occupation zone.’

‘Is that why you came back to Hamburg, the chief port in the British zone?’

‘Ah, I can see Lieutenant MacDonald has already put you in the picture,’ Ehrlich replied with an amused smile. Stave thought there was something striking about his oversized owl-like eyes, something furtive.

You idiot, he told himself, typical CID attitude, ready to break into the conversation, take the man by surprise: not exactly the right way to deal with a public prosecutor.

‘Thank you for agreeing so readily to our request for an autopsy,’ he said, to change the subject.

Ehrlich sat back, relaxed: ‘Tell me about the case. I’m all ears.’

Stave told him what they had found out including the various theories about the victim and her possible attacker.

‘A difficult one,’ Ehrlich said at last when the chief inspector had finished.

‘The first thing is to find out who the victim is. Otherwise we’re never going to get anywhere,’ Stave admitted.

‘So you don’t think it was a robbery-motivated murder, despite sending Maschke off to find files on such incidents even though you know as well as I do that they’ve been burnt in a certain oven.’

He’s a wily one, thought Stave in surprise. In a mugging, the identity of the victim doesn’t necessarily lead to the perpetrator, as
criminals often attack people they don’t know. Ehrlich must have decided that the victim and her attacker were acquainted and that Stave had an idea.

‘I’m simply trying to be efficient,’ he replied.

‘Ah, efficiency – a very German characteristic,’ the prosecutor replied, with just the slightest hint of irony.

‘A characteristic in criminal work everywhere,’ Stave shot back, regretting that they had got into this game of cat-and-mouse. ‘But you’re right,’ he added, in a conciliatory tone. Maybe he had suddenly come to trust Ehrlich, or maybe it was just the effect of the hot tea. Contrary to his normal habit of presenting prosecutors with no more than hard facts and the most plausible theories, Stave decided that this time he would mention something that was little more than the vaguest suspicion. ‘This crime was not just brutal,’ he ventured, hesitantly, ‘but also particularly efficient. Lethal force, resulting in immediate death. Then the thorough stripping of the body.’

‘Cold blooded,’ Ehrlich interjected.

‘Indeed. Carefully planned and perfectly executed. Someone capable of that has either had every sense of morality blunted – or is mentally ill but at the same time capable of logical reasoning.’

‘After this war and the 12 years of that regime there are more than enough people running around Germany whose underdeveloped conscience hasn’t the slightest problem with one death more or less. And we would see most of them as ordinary honest citizens.’

‘Even so, it’s not every day here in Hamburg that a young woman gets garrotted, stripped and left lying in the rubble.’

The prosecutor nodded: ‘
Touché
. So, what do you really think happened, Chief Inspector?’

‘I reckon it was somebody mentally deranged. Somebody who knew the victim or at least had been surreptitiously watching her. Somebody who planned the deed over weeks or even months, and chose the moment to strike.’

‘What evidence do you have?’

‘Apart from the brutal nature of the attack, none at all.’ Stave
didn’t see the point in trying to make the prosecutor think he knew more than he did. ‘In our line of work we often have to deal with mentally unsound people. I’m no expert in this field. If people like that – as I’ve heard said – have a particular modus operandi, there’s none obvious here. But then it’s a bit too early for that.’

The two of them sat in silence for a while. There was no need to say what both Stave and Ehrlich were thinking: there would be more such murders.

‘So what do you intend to do now?’ the prosecutor finally asked, pouring them both more tea.

The chief inspector nodded in thanks and warmed his hands on the cup, inhaled the aroma, and smiled. Then he pulled out of his coat pocket a roll of paper that still smelled of fresh printer’s ink.

‘This is the first copy of a reward poster we intend to put up,’ he said, handing it over the table.

‘“A reward of one thousand Reichsmarks”,’ Ehrlich read out in a quiet voice. ‘“Robbery and murder. On Monday, 20 January 1947, an as yet unidentified woman was found dead in Baustrasse, Hamburg. Violent robbery suspected.” Well, you’re not exactly a poet, Chief Inspector.’ Ehrlich examined the photograph of the deceased and read the description.

‘One minute you tell me you don’t suspect it was violent robbery,’ he said. ‘And yet here I am reading it in black and white.’

‘I don’t want to get people worried,’ Stave said in justification. ‘And in any case, I don’t think suggesting it might be a mentally disturbed individual is exactly going to help.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘If we say we’re looking for a lunatic then hundreds of witnesses will turn up accusing their neighbours, colleagues or anybody who’s got up their noses. That will mean a waste of time and effort, and cause more problems than it solves.’

‘You may well be right.’

‘We’re going to put up these posters all over town, and wait until somebody who knows the victim turns up.’

‘And what do you intend to do in the meantime?’

‘I intend to go to the cemetery,’ Stave replied. ‘They’re burying the victim this afternoon in Öjendorf. I’ll stay in the background and see if any mourners turn up.’

Stave didn’t return directly to his office after the interview. Instead he wandered aimlessly around town. He needed to get his thoughts in order, and that was something he did best while walking. He went through every detail of the case again in his head: what did he know about the victim? Nothing. About the perpetrator? Even less. What else could he do but wait? Wait for a witness to turn up, or at least somebody who could identify the victim from the photograph on the poster. But what if nobody turned up? Maybe he had missed a trick? But if he had, what was it?

Stave felt under pressure, and he didn’t like that. Under pressure from Cuddel Breuer, and from Ehrlich. He preferred to work on his own. He liked to bring in experts only when necessary: photographers, forensics, pathologists. But what was he supposed to do with Maschke? Not to mention MacDonald. Neither of them were CID people; they were amateurs not professionals. On the other hand, maybe an outsider’s opinion might be useful: it was possible the Brit might notice something he had missed. He seemed bright enough, and he had influence.

Stave dragged himself away from his thoughts. He was back at Eppendorfer Baum, a long way from Karl-Muck-Platz. A snack bar had been set up in a half-ruined building. The upper stories had been hit by a bomb and the remainder of the building stood like a half-eviscerated corpse. Only the ground floor seemed undamaged and somebody had put up a board with the childishly scrawled words ‘Fresh meals’.

Stave walked into the brightly lit but sadly unheated room and sat down at a table. He did his best to ignore the throbbing in his left ankle. He cast a casual glance around. It was midday and there were a few workers, a few office people, a mother with two children, and sitting on his own in a corner a man with a ‘Russia face’ in an
undyed Wehrmacht greatcoat, the empty left sleeve sewn up to the front of it.

Stave ordered the dish of the day, which cost one Reichsmark: a pickled herring with two thin slices of gherkin and a spoonful of some murky vegetables with no taste. He gobbled it down, only to feel hungrier than before. If only they had coffee. He sighed deeply, paid and left.

 

B
ack at the office MacDonald was waiting for him. Or at least that’s what he said. Stave had the impression that it was not so much the murder investigation that had brought the lieutenant to Karl-Muck-Platz as the chance for a chat with Erna Berg.

‘Anything new from the ranks of the British army?’ Stave asked.

MacDonald gave an apologetic shrug that for a moment made him look like a little boy. ‘Everybody stares wide-eyed when they see the photograph, but there’s no indication that anybody recognises her.’

‘Have you got your jeep here?’

The lieutenant nodded. ‘Are we going on a car chase? Like in the American movies? Should I get us Tommy guns?’

Reluctantly Stave found himself smiling: ‘We can hide the hardware in a black coffin. We’re going to the cemetery.’

 

T
he chief inspector was relieved that he didn’t have to travel by tram and on foot all the way out to the east of Hamburg. MacDonald drove him there in his boxlike, mud-coloured jeep, parking it right by the main entrance. When they set off the wind was blowing so hard the collapsible windscreen rattled back and forth and cold draughts blew through rips in the canvas top, while the suspension was so hard, every time they bounced over a pothole it was like a blow to the solar plexus. But Stave didn’t mind. He closed his eyes for a moment, massaging the thigh of his bad leg. He had cramp and was in pain.

‘An old war wound?’ MacDonald was driving carefully, keeping his eyes on the road, but he must have spotted him out of the corner of his eye.

Stave felt he’d been somehow caught out. ‘A ceiling beam fell on me; I didn’t get out of the way in time,’ he told him curtly.

The lieutenant just nodded.

‘How is it you speak such good German?’ Stave asked him, trying to steer the conversation away from himself, and because he couldn’t think of anything else to ask. He had to repeat it, louder, to make himself heard over the noise of the engine.

‘I learned it at university, Oriel College, Oxford. I was actually studying history but my special subject was Prussia. I did my master’s degree on Bismarck’s attitude towards Great Britain in the years prior to 1870. I even came to Berlin to study some documents.’

‘You did all of that before the outbreak of the war? How old are you then?’

MacDonald laughed. ‘I was a Christmas baby, born on 24 December 1920. I was in Berlin during my first year at university, aged just 18. That was the summer of 1939. I had intended to stay for a few months, but in August it was becoming ever more clear that war was likely, so I upped sticks and left. There are probably a few books of mine gathering dust in a rented room somewhere. Unless, of course, the rented room has been burnt to the ground.’

‘Why did you settle on the history of Prussia? A pretty esoteric subject in Oxford, I’d imagine.’

‘Esoteric subjects are what Oxford is all about,’ MacDonald replied with a nostalgic smile. Then all of a sudden he turned serious.

‘Do you have any idea what it’s like living in a society based on class, Chief Inspector? Earls and dukes, exclusive private schools, London clubs, stiff upper lips, ancestors who came over with William the Conqueror?’

Stave shook his head, and then, to his own surprise, nodded. ‘Here we had party members, German blood or non-Aryan; you didn’t need to have aristocratic ancestors, but it helped in a big way if you’d been on the 1923 demonstration at the Feldherrnhalle in Munich or at least had joined the party before 1933.’

‘But you didn’t join in any of that.’

‘I had German blood, nothing I could do about that, but the party? No thanks.’

MacDonald stared silently ahead. On either side of the street lay slabs of concrete, piles of fallen roof tiles and twisted piping like some surreal sculpture. One four-storey façade stood on its own, with torn curtains flapping in the wind like flags. Then came an area completely cleared of rubble with two dozen Nissen huts standing on it, like corrugated iron pipes cut down the middle: barracks put up by the Brits as emergency housing for the homeless.

‘I wasn’t born with a stiff upper lip,’ the lieutenant said eventually. ‘My parents have a junk shop in Lockerbie, a little town in the south of Scotland. But I didn’t want to spend my life in a nowhere. I studied hard and won a scholarship to Oxford. Then I chose German history because I was sure that sooner or later we’d be at war with you again. It was obvious that after the First World War you still held a grudge against us. I said to myself: know your enemy, that way you can be useful to your country.’

‘Seems to have worked all right,’ Stave muttered.

MacDonald smiled. ‘At first I wondered if maybe I shouldn’t have stayed in Berlin that summer of 1939. Hitler looked certain to win. But things worked out differently and so here I am, in Hamburg. You might not believe me, Chief Inspector, but even in the state it’s in now, I prefer this city to the dump I grew up in.’

‘You’re right; I don’t believe you,’ Stave replied wearily. ‘Straight ahead, on your right. We’re nearly there. At least I imagine our cemetery is bigger than Lockerbie’s.’

 

T
hey stopped by the low, wide entrance gate. Before the war the cemetery had been a big, beautiful park with roads running through it, and even bus stops. Now nearly all the trees and shrubbery had been hacked to the ground for firewood, and many of the graves had gone to ruin because nobody had the strength or energy to look after them, or often because there just wasn’t anybody left.

Stave and MacDonald strolled along a straight path that led to the
centre of Öjendorf Cemetery. There were a lot of fresh graves, the chief inspector noted. Then he noticed a grove, like a little garden within the cemetery, for cremation urns with flowers next to them. There were no recent ones; these days nobody was about to waste expensive fuel on burning dead bodies. In the midst of the garden was a bronze statue of a female mourner, seated. Amazing that hasn’t been stolen yet, Stave thought.

The statue suddenly made him think of Margarethe, even though there was no facial resemblance to his late wife. He turned away so the lieutenant wouldn’t notice him struggling to maintain his composure. Margarethe was buried in Öjendorf Cemetery but Stave couldn’t face going to visit her grave with the lieutenant. He said nothing and just quickened his pace.

BOOK: The Murderer in Ruins
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