Cay Rademacher - The Murderer in Ruins

‘Time to take the field. You do one half of the customers,’ he indicated a rough line through the middle of the room, ‘and I’ll deal with the rest. Meet you at the door.’

A few minutes later they were done at Kamsing, no wiser than when they had entered. They wandered back down the Reeperbahn to the David police station where Maschke was already waiting for them. His breath hung in front of him in small white clouds, his nose was blue from the cold and he was rubbing his hands together. Stave suddenly felt sorry for him.

‘Not one person on the Reeperbahn ever laid eyes on our victim. She must have been quite a girl,’ he said.

Maschke’s cynicism irritated Stave. Was he really such a hard case?

Or was there something else at play? The shyness of a grown man still living at home with his mother? Or, like many of his other colleagues who worked on the vice squad, had Maschke developed a protective attitude towards his little ‘street swallows’, as they called them? Was it relief he was hearing in the man’s voice? Relief that the victim wasn’t one of the Reeperbahn girls?

‘Right, it’s back to the office to talk through what we have or haven’t found, then home to Mum for us all,’ the chief inspector said.

Stave looked out of the office window at Hamburg spread out beneath him, as dark as during the wartime blackout. There were only a few lights here and there to be seen, probably from houses the British had commandeered. Other than that he could make out flickering flames from wood stoves, dangerous enough in themselves in the half-bombed semi-ruin, and the glow of candles. Even his own office in the grey evening gloom was lit by no more than a single dim bulb. Stave looked up at it with some concern: if it were to blow, he had no idea when he’d get a replacement. Probably not until the spring. He sighed and looked at the other two waiting in front of his desk.

Erna Berg was long gone. She’d left Inspector Muller’s report on his desk. Stave flicked through it silently. ‘No surgeon recognises the body,’ he said at length. He was exhausted. ‘Obviously one afternoon wasn’t enough for them to go round all the relevant doctors in the city. They’ll start again tomorrow. It looks as if the victim’s appendix scar isn’t going to give us a lead either, for the moment at least. Nor have we had any missing person reports over the past 24 hours.’

Maschke was drumming on the desk with his nicotine-stained fingers. ‘It would also appear that none of the street girls has gone missing,’ he said.

‘Maybe she was new in Hamburg?’ MacDonald suggested.

‘The ice on the Elbe is a metre thick, the port is closed,’ Stave interjected. ‘Most of the railway lines are covered in ice, the points frozen, snowdrifts everywhere.’

‘The bridges have been bombed, the stations destroyed,’ Maschke snapped. MacDonald paid him no attention.

‘Most of the trains that get through are carrying coal or potatoes, not people, and on the few passenger trains that do get through, returning prisoners-of-war are given priority. It’s not impossible that some woman from somewhere else arrived in the city over the past few days, but it’s extremely unlikely. Particularly a woman in such rude health as our victim.’

‘Maybe somebody drove her here in a car?’ MacDonald mused.

Stave was amazed at the lieutenant’s honesty; he had wondered the same thing himself, but not dared to say it. ‘Indeed,’ he replied. ‘Fuel is rationed, Germans have to carry a book in which they note every journey, and longer trips need special permission. Apart from anything else there are next to no cars or trucks still in working order. That makes it extremely unlikely that any German could have given her a lift. On the other hand it would have been no problem for someone British.’

‘Good point,’ Maschke said.

MacDonald looked unperturbed. ‘I have a photograph of the victim. I’ll pass it round my fellow officers.’

Stave smiled. ‘Thank you. I’m glad to say that what we’ll call the “British angle” isn’t all we have. Let’s assume that our victim is neither a streetwalker, nor a missing daughter of some respectable family, nor a working-class girl, nor a new arrival – then there are only a few alternatives remaining. Perhaps she was a little known secretary working for the city authorities, the occupation forces or in one of the few firms that have reopened for business?’

‘Or she might be a shop assistant in one of the clothing shops,’ Maschke suggested. ‘C amp;A on Monckeberg Strasse is open again.’

The chief inspector nodded. ‘What else? Our unknown victim was earning honest money, at least enough to keep her well fed. Then she goes missing but nobody reports the fact to the police. Does that mean she has no friends or relatives here?’ He thought of Erna Berg. ‘Maybe she’s a war widow? Or a refugee who arrived in Hamburg a year or so ago?’ He got to his feet and began pacing up and down. Suddenly he no longer felt so tired. ‘The other possibility is that she has a boyfriend or some other relative who doesn’t want us to come across him, because he himself is the murderer. In most cases murderers and victims already know one another. Maybe we should look for a fiance? Or an uncle? That’s possible too.’

‘So, what do you suggest?’ MacDonald asked.

Stave gave him a cool smile. ‘I suggest we meet up here again tomorrow. Good evening.’

An hour later Stave was standing in his freezing apartment, trying to light the fire. He had fetched three potatoes from his meagre rations in the cellar. They had been frozen and were exuding a sweet-sour slime as they thawed out. He cooked them on his cast-iron stove, along with his last white cabbage. Then he put it all through the mincer, formed the mush into a long loaf-like shape, added salt and fried it. ‘Poor man’s sausage,’ the neighbour who had given him the recipe called it. Even though it took more than an hour to cook on the little stove, Stave didn’t mind. It gave him the illusion at least of eating something nourishing. The other advantage was that cooking stopped him thinking.

Eventually it was time for bed. He lay down on the bed in his pullover and jogging pants, pulled the blankets up and stared at the window where the moonlight cast greenish patterns on the sheet ice.

Stave wanted to think about the dead woman, to weigh up the pros and cons of all the possible theories, to see if there were any leads they had missed. But the image of the unknown victim only brought to mind the image of his own dead wife. And that took him back to that night four years ago, amidst the hail of bombs.

If only I had schnapps, he thought to himself. Then at least I could drink myself to sleep.

Tuesday, 21 January 1947

He faced a wall of flames, red, white and blue, a burning heat on his face, his every breath agonising. All around him beams collapsed, tiles fell from the walls, a thunder louder than machine-gun fire, a stench of burning hair and scorched flesh. Stave was running through rubble, fire all around him, running and running, but stumbling because of his goddamn leg, painfully slow, even though he knew Margarethe was only a few steps away. He could hear her screams. She was calling out to him. And he was stuck somewhere else, amidst scorched walls, and smouldering wood, trying to call out her name, but only coughing and choking from the smoke that forced its way down his throat. And all of a sudden there was no sound from Margarethe, just a terrifying silence.

Stave jerked upright in bed, cold sweat all over his body. Utter darkness, ice on the window panes – yet he could still feel the burning, the fierce glare of the fires, a blaze as high as the apartment building. Goddamn nightmares, he told himself, and wiped his eyes. In reality he had been on duty on the other side of Hamburg that terrible night. He had been trapped in a collapsing building, his limp a perpetual reminder. But it was only several hours after the hail of bombs had stopped that, wounded and in shock from fear, he discovered the ruins of his own house. He had never heard Margarethe’s screams.