Cay Rademacher - The Murderer in Ruins

‘So how do you explain the marks on his wrist?’ asked Maschke. ‘If our killer did him in then and there, no need for him to tie him up or drag him anywhere.’

MacDonald smiled and shrugged. ‘Not the faintest idea, old boy.’

For him all this is just an intellectual puzzle, Stave thought, but he couldn’t bring himself to get angry with the young officer. Yet another reason for winding this case up as soon as possible.

‘We’re not getting anywhere like this,’ he told them. ‘It’s not making sense. We’ll print off 1,000 posters. Stick them up everywhere, particularly at the ration card centres in the area. Find out who didn’t collect his coupons today. Rattle the doors of the local doctors. Maybe somebody was treating him for his leg. Meanwhile I’ll write up a basic report for the files, and then we’ll hit the black market.’

A short while later Stave was sitting alone at his desk, bashing away at the typewriter with two fingers, quick then slow, like a machine gun with an autoloader problem. He glanced over what he had written: ‘The darkness gives a character all of its own to these rubble-strewn districts.’ Stave sat back in surprise. That wasn’t the sort of language he usually used in official reports.

I’m getting emotional, he thought to himself, and wondered what Cuddel Breuer or Chief Public Prosecutor Ehrlich would make of it. Should he change the wording, retype it? Nonsense, if they wanted to consider him some daft romantic, that was up to them. He sighed and slid the report into the registry file.

Then the office began to fill up again. MacDonald was the first to arrive, followed by Maschke who announced that he’d come across a couple of people turning up later at the ration card office, but that none of them recognised the victim either.

There was a knock on the door, a few muttered words of greeting, and the atmosphere in the room began to thicken as first a colleague from the criminal operations team came in, along with another from the missing persons and lost property office, one from the youth liaison department, a representative of the female police, and obviously a man from Department S, which had been set up specially to combat the black market.

Stave gave them a quick briefing about the murders, but noticed almost immediately that word had got around amongst the operations teams. It would be nice if people would share a bit more. ‘If we’re lucky the raid will throw up something that belonged to one of the victims,’ he said. ‘That at least would give us a lead.’

The search team lad, a young, pale-faced man with tired rings around his eyes, gave him a sceptical look. ‘We have no idea who the victims are. We don’t know what might have been stolen off them. Obviously a raid is going to throw up lots of stuff but how are we to know if anything we confiscate might have belonged to an unknown person?’

Stave lifted his hands. ‘People handle all sorts of stuff on the black market. Maybe somebody’s got a set of false teeth for sale? Or a truss? If so, we’d like have a chat with him or her. Maybe we’ll find a few pushers of American cigarettes or homemade hooch. They might have nothing to do with the murderers, but sit them down in the interrogation room and you never know what they might suddenly recall. Maybe they’ll remember somebody else touting the clothes of a young woman one day and those of an old man the next? Maybe they’ll have heard of a medallion with a cross and two daggers on it? I grant you it’s a slim chance, but we need to pick up any lead we can.’

‘Who cares? The black market is the black market. A raid is always worthwhile.’ The head of Department S – once a chubby character, but now shrunken to a shadow of his former self, shivering in a suit too big for him – rubbed his hands with glee. ‘We haven’t done a big job since Christmas. It’s high time we pushed the gentlemen spivs in the hot seat again. Good training for my lads. I suggest we hit Hansaplatz Square. That’s where you find most customers and more stuff for sale than anywhere else.’

Nobody contradicted him.

Stave nodded. If there was one place absolutely made for the black market then it was the Hansaplatz, once a tranquil spot in the St Georg district surrounded by four-storey middle-class apartment blocks. As if by a miracle the buildings had survived the hail of bombs undamaged and the square was only a short walk from the main station. The smugglers and pushers brought their goods from all the occupation zones and even abroad to the station first and foremost. The spivs would hide their stocks of penicillin, cigarettes, coffee and hard spirits in the cheap hotels or rented apartments around the square. On a few occasions the lads from Department S had discovered what were effectively warehouses full of contraband. Piece by piece this contraband would make its way down to the Hansaplatz where every day the good citizens of Hamburg would turn up in search of something or other that was not available on the ration cards.

Nobody who lived in St Georg would ever grass on one of the dealers or their customers, because they lived on the crumbs from the illegal trade: a pound of butter in monthly rent perhaps for somebody who would let a room in their apartment without asking too many questions, a case of Lucky Strikes for a couple of lads who would keep watch, a discount on illicit hooch…

‘When do we start?’ Stave asked.

‘Now, today,’ the man from Department S said. ‘Before anybody gets wind of it. Just give me the time to get my people together. We’ll need about 100 in uniform, a couple of British lorries so we can get our people to St Georg without being noticed. Let’s say, 5 p.m. this afternoon. That’s when you’ve got people coming out of offices and shops, the square will be full and the spivs will all have stocked up. Also it’ll be dusk and they won’t notice us coming until it’s too late.’

‘Good,’ the chief inspector said. ‘I’ll be at the Hansaplatz at 4.30 p.m. to take a look around. Nobody there will notice me. Maybe I’ll spot someone suspicious. Then at 5 p.m. we bag the lot of them and ship them to the police station. I want everyone we grab to be interrogated before the end of the day. And a complete inventory of every article seized.’

Stave’s colleagues filed out of his office, smiles on their faces, whispering to one another. Adrenalin flowing. Eager for the hunt.

It took barely half an hour to walk from the CID HQ to the Hansaplatz. Stave walked across the Lombard Bridge with his coat collar pulled up high and his head down. The Outer Alster on his left was a great blue-white expanse of ice, tinted pink by the pale afternoon sun. Two children were skating in squiggly patterns over the ice, a few couples walking over it uncertainly. Stave made a face. Icy surfaces were always a good excuse to slip and grab hold of one’s partner for support. A certain romance, even when it was 20 degrees below.

The quickest way would have been to go straight to the station, and then turn left towards Hansaplatz, but Stave decided to take a different route. It was true that nobody in the St Georg black market knew him, but he regularly hung around the station, asking about his son. So he took the back streets through St Georg until he came to Brenner Strasse, which would lead him into the Hansaplatz on the opposite side from the station. He passed by the Wurzburger Hof hotel where the lads from Department S last autumn had unearthed several barrels of preserving alcohol stolen from the State Institute for Zoology. The thieves had also taken the glass jars complete with their content: tapeworms, lizards and snakes. The preserving alcohol was palmed off on the black market as home-made ‘double caraway schnapps’ at 500 Reichsmarks per litre. By the time the authorities had got the tip-off and managed to raid the store, almost half of it had gone down the throats of unsuspecting drinkers: 10,000 litres of tapeworm happiness.