Cay Rademacher - The Murderer in Ruins

The pathologist came over, pointed to the two objects and said, ‘Those are daggers.’

‘Are you sure?’ ‘Longer than a knife, shorter than a sword. Classic, elongated, slightly oval blade shape.’

‘That means the blades of both daggers are pointed towards the cross.’

‘Curious, isn’t it? Never seen anything like it.’

Stave stared at the medallion. Czrisini was right, he thought to himself. Daggers and a cross. What was that all about? He slid the object into a paper bag. A clue, he thought. Finally, a first clue. The only question was, what did it mean? ‘How long do you reckon he’s been lying here?’

The pathologist shrugged. ‘At least a day, going by the settlement of blood in the body, maybe longer. It’s hard to be certain with these Siberian temperatures.’

‘The same length of time as the body found in Baustrasse?’

Czrisini looked him in the eyes for a moment and said, ‘It is possible that they may have been killed around the same time.’

‘What do you think, Lieutenant?’ Stave asked, as Czrisini made a pained face, removing his clammy rubber gloves.

MacDonald had been watching them silently from a discreet distance. ‘The poor sod’s making his way through the ruins, where the murderer is lurking in wait for him. He comes out, beats him to the ground, strangles him and strips him.’

Stave scratched his head. ‘Would an old man wearing a truss and using a walking stick take an uneven path like this?’

The lieutenant smiled in acknowledgement of Stave’s point. ‘In his position I would feel safer on the cleared streets. So you reckon he was going down Lappenbergs Allee, his attacker beat him to the ground there, then dragged the defenceless man over here, where nobody would see him, to finish him off?’

‘Maybe,’ Stave replied bluntly. He was thinking of the young woman they had found on Baustrasse. ‘Let’s imagine for a moment that we’re dealing with the same killer as in the case earlier in the week. Just supposing, for now, because certain things suggest otherwise; a young woman in one case, an old man in the other. In the first case there was no indication she put up any resistance; in the latter everything points to the victim fighting back. What links them is the thin strangulation mark around the neck.’

Maschke came over and added, ‘Plus the fact that they were both found amidst the rubble. Naked. In both cases in a former working-class district that had been flattened by bombing. Maybe the killer knows his way around these parts.’

Stave nodded. ‘Maybe, but one case in the east of the city, the other in the west. They’re more than ten kilometres apart. You think he might have lived for a bit in Eilbek, and also in Eimsbuttel? It’s not impossible. But it’s also possible that he chose these ruined, uninhabited districts because he knows there are unlikely to be any witnesses. It’s also possible that he kills his victims somewhere else altogether and just dumps the bodies in places he’s unlikely to be seen.’

‘Don’t the walking stick, button, medallion and leather strap suggest that the man was robbed and murdered here?’ MacDonald asked.

‘Sure, they suggest that,’ Stave replied, ‘but they don’t prove it. They might just have been lying here next to the body. These bombed districts are full of bits and pieces of people’s belongings lying all over the place. But you’re right: these objects may well be clues. Perhaps somebody will come forward to identify them. I’ll have photos taken of the medallion. We’ll put Inspector Muller on to it, maybe he can find out what the cross and daggers is all about.’

‘And I volunteer,’ Maschke said with a trace of resignation, ‘to go round dozens of white coats, all the dentists we can find that is, to stick the photos under their noses and see if anyone remembers fitting him out with dentures.’

‘Good idea,’ said Stave, impressed, with a tired smile. ‘Right now I need to talk to the lad who came across the corpse.’

‘It’s not a lad, Chief Inspector, it’s a lady. A lady looter to be exact.’

The uniformed policeman brought over a figure who had all this time been waiting behind one of the heaps of rubble, under guard, apparently, since another policeman Stave had not noticed before was with her. Stave took a good look at her when she came into the circle of light surrounding the body. She was slim, almost as tall as him. She pushed back the hood of a heavy English wool coat, which once upon a time had cost somebody a lot of money, but was now so threadbare it looked as if you could pull it apart with your fingers. Stave saw a thin, almost almond-shaped face, dark eyes, long black hair. Early thirties, he guessed, and would have been well-to-do at some stage. Her hands were not those of a manual labourer.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked her.

‘Anna von Veckinhausen.’

She had a gentle voice, Stave thought to himself. But it was a voice filled with the self-confidence that only comes with having had social status and money from earliest childhood. It sounded like a violin slightly out of tune playing in a grand orchestra, a wrong note, the sound of nervousness. Or fear.

‘You found the body?’

‘Yes.’

Stave cleared his throat. He could feel Maschke, MacDonald, the doctor and the uniformed police watching him. This could be tough.

He decided to take a friendly tone. He introduced himself, took a step to one side, her following him, so as to be a little further from the others.

‘Please tell me exactly how it happened,’ he asked her.

Anna von Veckinhausen hesitated for a minute. Stave waited, thinking to himself, she’s trying to decide what to tell me.

‘I was on Collau Strasse and used the path through the ruins as a short cut to get to Lappenbergs Allee.’

Stave got his notebook out of his pocket, awkwardly, taking time over it, time for the witness to think her story through, but time for him too, time to think what to make of her. She was a looter, according to one of the uniforms. It was hard for the police to judge figures wandering around in the ruins. They might be former inhabitants looking for things they had lost. Or workmen tearing down dangerous walls or gathering valuable metal for the city. Or just passersby taking a shortcut. Or indeed looters, looking for wood, metal, bits of furniture, anything that might be of use. Nearly everyone in Hamburg had ‘sorted out their own way’ of getting hold of the things they might need from time to time. Stave only had to think of the wood he used in his little stove. But if you were caught you went straight to a British tribunal: an English judge, an interpreter, a stenographer, a few cold questions, a quick sentence and then it was on to the next one. Forty cigarettes from Allied stock would get you 21 days behind bars. A worker who took three pigs’ feet thrown away as unusable from a cold store could get 30 days. Looters found rummaging around in the rubble could get between 50 and 60 days.

He decided not to press the looting charge at the moment. ‘Then what happened?’ he asked.

The witness gave him a brief smile of relief. Then she looked serious and rubbed her elegant hands together, as if she were washing them with soap. Like a nurse disinfecting her hands, Stave thought. Or perhaps a doctor.

She hesitated, looking for the right words: ‘I came across the body by accident. I immediately hurried to Lappenbergs Allee and asked my way to the nearest police station.’

‘Asked your way?’

‘Yes.’ Anna von Veckinhausen stared at him. ‘I asked one person after another until I found someone who could tell me how to get to the nearest police station.’

Stave still couldn’t get used to the new self-confidence women had these days. A few years ago it would have been unthinkable for a woman – a lady like this in particular – to come across a dead body and react the way she had. In the old days a woman would have screamed or fainted. It was probably because the war had turned women into the family breadwinners; trading on the black market, foraging, manual labour – women could do it all just as well as men. Better even. But they paid a high price, and not just tiredness and exhaustion. Many marriages broke up when the men came back from the war, sometimes after years of absence, to find their wives could get by in this new world of ruins and black markets better than they could. Stave shot a discreet glance again at Anna von Veckinhausen’s hands: she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.