Cay Rademacher - The Murderer in Ruins

‘Back to HQ,’ he ordered the teams. ‘It’s going to be a long night. I wouldn’t mind if somebody brought a pound of the coffee lying around here with them so we could all have a decent cup.’ But of course, nobody touched the confiscated goods. They were all honest German officials. And besides, there were a couple of British occupation troops watching them.

Back at head office Stave, Maschke and a couple of the other CID men took charge of the interrogation rooms. The uniformed police would bring the prisoners from the overcrowded holding cells.

‘Bring me the dark-haired guy first,’ Stave said again.

However a few minutes later Stave would find himself in the situation of a poker player who has overestimated the strength of his hand. By a long shot.

The suspect, sitting bent over and pale on the chair in front of him, had a perfect alibi. He had been ‘organising’ food supplies in another city in the British occupation zone to bring them to Hamburg where people were prepared to pay much higher prices. But he had been spotted and arrested. The police had only found half his wares, but for that he was given two weeks behind bars. One call to his colleagues in Luneburg told Stave that on the probable night of the murder, the twentieth of January, the man in front of him had indeed been sitting in a nice clean cell, 60 kilometres away from the ruins of Hamburg. Stave had the man led away, and wrote a report for the British judge who would take over the next day.

‘Next!’ he called to the policeman waiting outside, despondency clearly audible in his voice.

Next was a pale student, father reported missing at Stalingrad, mother killed by a bomb. He had 80 cigarettes and 17.40 in Reichsmarks on him. Next: a practised black marketeer with a record as a pimp, with 3,000 Reichsmarks but no contraband. Next: a housewife with a pound of butter. Next: a boy with no contraband, no cigarettes, no money. Stave sent him straight home. Next: an old man trying to palm off two old watches.

By two in the morning Stave felt as if somebody had driven a Sherman tank over him. Erna Berg brought him a cup of tea, but the world went black again when the hot tea touched his burst lip.

His eyes watered as during each interrogation he flicked through the CID records of known criminals: their description, fingerprints, distinguishing marks, last known address, front and side-profile photos.

He was hungry, cold. He felt a great temptation to smash the skull of the next person dragged into the room. It turned out to be Anna von Veckinhausen.

One look in her dark eyes and he realised she was as angry as him. This could get tricky, the chief inspector thought to himself.

He decided to be polite, offered her a seat without mentioning that it was not the first time that he had questioned her. Maybe she hoped he wouldn’t recognise her amongst the dozens of others? She, likewise, gave no indication that they had ever met. Impressive self-control, thought Stave, a possible indication of a cold heart.

He leafed through the record book. No mention of her. Then he glanced at a piece of paper with her details that one of the uniformed police had handed him. Born 1 March 1915, Konigsberg. No further information as to her family or when she moved to Hamburg. At least now he understood her accent.

‘What were you dealing on the black market?’ he asked her.

‘I wasn’t dealing,’ she said angrily. ‘I was just leaving the station and crossing the Hansaplatz when your…’

‘Raid,’ Stave genially supplied the word.

‘…your “action” began,’ she continued. ‘I already told the officer who arrested me that it was a mistake. But he wouldn’t even listen. Just like the Gestapo.’

The chief inspector ignored the deliberate provocation, although Anna von Veckinhausen wasn’t totally wrong. He looked down at his documents. ‘We found 537 Reichsmarks on your person,’ he said calmly. ‘Can you tell me what you hoped to buy on the black market with a sum like that?’

‘I don’t have to tell you anything at all. My money is my money.’

‘I was just wondering if you had sold something just before the raid. Maybe something that a couple of days ago had belonged to a man of about 70?’

Anna von Veckinhausen looked as if she were about to jump to her feet. But instead she closed her eyes and took a deep breath. ‘I thought you might have forgotten me,’ she mumbled.

Stave allowed himself a brief smile. ‘I wouldn’t be in this job if I had.’

‘I didn’t sell anything on the black market. I really was on my way from the station. You arrested everybody on the Hansaplatz. Ask any one of them.’

‘With 537 Reichsmarks on you?’

‘With 537 Reichsmarks on me.’

‘And you refuse to tell me where you got so much money from or what you intended to do with it?’

‘Neither one nor the other has anything whatsoever to do with you.’

Stave looked down at the paperwork again. It was hard to disprove her story. But on the other hand, just the circumstances of her arrest would be enough for a British judge to lock her up for a couple of days. And what good would that do?

‘We didn’t carry out this raid to arrest housewives out to buy a few matches. We did it in the hope of laying our hands on something that might have belonged to the murder victim – the murder victim whose body you found.’

‘And have you?’

Stave chose to ignore the question, even though he realised Anna von Veckinhausen wasn’t being sarcastic but really wanted to know, either because she was genuinely interested – or genuinely worried.

‘Let me take you back to the afternoon when you found the body. You had been walking down Lappenbergs Allee. You then turned off and walked along the footpath through the ruins to get to Collau Strasse. That was where you found the body, amongst the ruins.’

‘Yes,’ she sighed, wearily.

Stave made a note.

‘How long were you with the corpse?’ he asked.

She gave him a surprised look. ‘You think I said a prayer for the dead or something?’

‘I’m asking if you just looked down, realised what you were looking at and immediately ran off. Or if you took a good look around?’

Anna von Veckinhausen put her right hand on her left shoulder, so that her arm lay across her upper body. Stave wondered if it was out of embarrassment or an instinctive desire for protection.

‘I … don’t know,’ she admitted hesitantly. ‘Maybe a few seconds. I saw the body but it took me a bit to realise what I was actually looking at. Then I left. I didn’t run. There was no need to hurry.’

‘So you took a long look at the body, but didn’t notice anything in particular about the place where it had been left?’ Stave pressed her.

‘I guess you could say that.’

Stave stared down at his desk. He had a difficult decision to make. But it was the middle of the night and he was hungry, cold and exhausted. His head hurt. Should he keep Anna von Veckinhausen in custody? The 537 Reichsmarks was evidence enough. Or should he let her go? Show lenience, but keep her under observation.

‘You can go,’ he said at last, and then to his own surprise, added: ‘Sorry for the inconvenience.’

She stared at him for a second in disbelief. Then she smiled, said, ‘Thank you,’ and got to her feet. When she reached the door she turned back to him and asked, ‘What happened to your lip?’

‘I slipped on the ice,’ Stave replied.

When the door closed behind her he looked down at his notebook. On the evening when she found the body, Anna von Veckinhausen had claimed she used the footpath to cross from Collau Strasse to Lappenbergs Allee. When Stave had gone over her story, he had deliberately reversed the names. And she had confirmed that she had been going from Lappenbergs Allee to Collau Strasse.