Cay Rademacher - The Murderer in Ruins

At the end of Karoline Strasse a frozen policeman was directing traffic with sharp, abrupt gestures: jeeps, British lorries, two hardy civilians battling their way against the icy wind blowing down the street. MacDonald drove slightly nervously towards him. Then a misfire from the undercarriage caused the policeman to jump. MacDonald, spying his reaction in the rear-view mirror, gave a smile of satisfaction. Three minutes later they had arrived.

Stave was astonished to find Erna Berg already waiting for them in his office with something resembling tea poured out. He picked up the warm cup gratefully and inhaled the aroma. Nettles, he guessed. But at least it was hot.

‘What are you doing in here?’ he asked her.

‘Herr Breuer told me there would be work for me today,’ she said. ‘I can take a day off in lieu, sometime when it’s quieter.’

You’ll be waiting a long time, Stave thought to himself grimly. ‘Okay then,’ he said, when they’d all found seats in his little room. ‘So who exactly are we looking for?’

‘Not a sex killer, anyhow,’ MacDonald said.

‘Well then, that just leaves some 900,000 possible suspects in Hamburg.’ Stave leant back and stared at the ceiling as if imagining a ‘wanted’ poster materialising.

‘Let’s start from the beginning again,’ he said, sounding as if he was talking to himself rather than to the others. ‘We have no real clues. What possible connection could there be between a young woman in Eilbek and an old man in Eimsbuttel? A lady of the night and her pimp? Our friends from the Reeperbahn don’t recognise the girl so there’s nothing to indicate that that’s the case. What else could link them? Some place they met? Some common history?’

Nobody said anything. They all knew Stave wanted to answer his own question.

‘The black market, obviously,’ he eventually announced.

It was illegal but omnipresent. Men and women standing around on street corners or in city squares, wandering up and down, faces hidden beneath hats and collars pulled up high. Whispers, gestures. Where else could you get stuff that wasn’t on the ration cards – a radio maybe, a pair of women’s shoes, a pound of butter, homebrewed hooch? In exchange for a wad of 100-Reichsmark notes or some cigarettes. There were raids all the time, but there was nothing to be done about the black market. In the previous year alone the police had confiscated more than 1,000 tons of food, 10,000 litres of wine and 4,800 doses of morphine from army stockpiles, stolen penicillin, even horses and cars.

For many citizens of Hamburg there was something sleazy, something degrading about it all. Standing around on street corners like a hooker. Getting paid next to nothing for some family heirloom salvaged from the rubble, just a few cigarettes for a valuable antique, but 1,000 Reichsmarks for a couple of pounds of butter. Touts and fences were called ‘crust stealers’, just as their like had been back when the Nazis were in charge. But then again, when your shoes fell apart and you couldn’t find another pair anywhere on the rations, what else was there to do but hang out with the shady street corner characters?

Everybody in Hamburg ended up on the black market one way or another, rich and poor, old and young. Any piece of merchandise might be swapped for any other; any link between two people was possible, however absurd it might otherwise seem. And there was big money too to be paid for lost treasures or things people simply couldn’t get by without. There were things worth killing for, not least because nobody dealing on the black market would go to the police.

‘It might well be something to do with the black market,’ MacDonald agreed.

‘Every damn crime in Hamburg is something to do with the black market,’ Maschke retorted. ‘But we have nothing else to go on. Maybe they were both looters, and one became competition for the other vying for the best patch of rubble to loot. It could be as simple as that.’

Stave nodded. ‘It’s a possibility. But there are others. We have hundreds of missing person cases in town. It would seem that not one of them corresponds to the young woman, and we won’t know about the old man until tomorrow at the earliest. Perhaps we’ll find some sort of common factor amongst the missing person cases.’

MacDonald raised an eyebrow. He obviously wasn’t following Stave’s line of thought. ‘What sort of common factor?’ he asked.

The chief inspector shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea. Maybe we’ll find out that lots of young women have gone missing recently. Or lots of old men. Or that one of our missing person cases was related to a young woman and an old man. What do I know?’

‘Sounds like a pretty vague line of inquiry to me,’ the lieutenant said.

Stave paid him no attention, but he knew he was right. ‘And then there are the DPs, people with no roots here,’ he added. ‘People with nothing more to lose. People who remain unidentified even to the Allied command, people whose movements go unchecked because nobody is interested in them or their business. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that nobody from Hamburg recognised the picture on the poster?’

‘But we put the posters up in the DP camps,’ Maschke said. ‘People there live cheek by jowl. Somebody would have recognised the victim. And even if none of the DPs wanted to speak up, either because they are afraid or don’t trust the German authorities, a British overseer would surely have recognised her.’

Maschke hauled himself to his feet and began pacing up and down. He’s not happy, Stave thought to himself, probably because he’s realised we haven’t a single decent lead, and the only thing we can be relatively certain of is that sex isn’t involved. That means the investigation might have no need of someone from vice and we’ll send him back to his pimps, Stave reckoned, almost feeling sorry for Maschke.

‘Right then,’ he said aloud, just for the sake of it, ‘let’s admit we don’t really have a clue, literally, for now at least. Therefore we should take every theory seriously, no matter now vague. I’ll organise a major raid on the black market dealers. This coming Monday. We’ll grab a few dealers off the streets and see what we come up with – maybe a rucksack with one strap missing. Or another medallion with a cross and two daggers. Or a spare truss.’

The other two laughed.

‘You, Lieutenant, will look through the missing persons files. Maybe you’ll find some sort of pattern. Don’t be afraid to come forward with anything that strikes you, no matter how improbable it might seem. You never know. And you, Maschke, go round the dentists. And check in with the Street Clearance and Rebuilding Department up at Heiligengeistfeld; the people there are in charge of everything concerned with clearing the rubble and getting rebuilding under way. If anybody’s heard about turf wars amongst the looters, it’ll be the rubble boys.’

I may not like you, but I’m keeping you on board, Stave thought inwardly. Maschke gave a smile of relief.

‘Good idea,’ the vice squad man said.

Maschke and MacDonald left the room. Stave nodded to his secretary before closing the door after them and said apologetically, ‘I’m afraid I’m going to need you in a minute.’

He sat down behind his desk. Time for the bloody paperwork. He opened a new file, for the second murder, and wrote out by hand the details of the corpse’s discovery, then the text for a new poster asking for information. And finally the autopsy request.

When he finally got to his feet to take the pile of papers out to his secretary, he stopped dead in the doorway. MacDonald was still there, chatting away to Erna Berg. They both fell silent mid-sentence at the sight of him, red with embarrassment, just like a pair of teenagers. This could be entertaining, Stave thought. But at the same time he felt something not unlike a pang of jealousy. Only a pinprick, not a dagger plunged into his heart. But even so. Absurd, he told himself.