Cay Rademacher - The Murderer in Ruins

The lieutenant gave a wry smile. ‘Maybe. I have the boy in a car with one of our military police. It’s not quite so cold in the car and there was no need for the lad to see this.’ He nodded towards the stretcher with the body being carried off between a couple of broken walls.

‘Maybe he should,’ Stave muttered, and made a sign to the two men in dark coats to put the stretcher on the ground.

MacDonald barked something in English and a military policeman brought over a skinny boy, almost invisible inside a grown-up’s overcoat that was far too big for him: unkempt brown hair, probably lice-infested, a scabby rash on his neck, missing one of his front teeth.

‘What’s your name?’ Stave asked him, indicating to the British soldier that the boy shouldn’t come too close.

‘Jim Mainke.’

‘Jim?’

‘Wilhelm.’

‘Age?’

‘Sixteen.’

‘Try again. Age?’

‘Fourteen. That is, I’ll be fourteen this summer.’

‘Where do you live?’

Wilhelm Mainke waved a hand somewhere across the ruins.

‘With your parents.’

‘No, thank God,’ the boy replied with a smile. ‘If I did, I’d be in Ojendorf Cemetery.’

The cheeky answer irritated the chief inspector but he kept calm. ‘Do I have to drag everything out of you? Or can you string more than a couple of words together at a time?’

Maine averted his eyes. ‘My father worked at Blohm amp; Voss,2 my mother was a housewife. They were both killed by a bombing raid in 1943. I was staying with my grandmother out in the country at the time. I live in a cellar in Rothenburgsort, with a few friends.’

That was more or less what Stave had guessed. There were more than a thousand vagabond orphans on the streets of Hamburg, some whose parents had been killed in the bombing raids, some refugees who’d got separated from their parents. A few of them had joined gangs and were literally fighting for their existence; many survived by collecting lumps of coal, looting amongst the ruins, working for the black marketeers – or sold themselves on the station platforms.’

‘You come here a lot?’

‘Of course. I know my way around the port area. I used to be able to visit my father at the shipyard. I come here looking for coal.’

‘Other kids do the same thing?’

Mains shrugged. ‘You get a few hanging around. Thirty, maybe forty. Not so many right now. Too cold.’

‘And you were out and about here this morning?’

‘Yeah. Until the patrol nabbed me.’

‘Did you see the girl?’

Mainke quickly shook his head. ‘When I got here, the cops were already on the scene. They wouldn’t let me get any closer.’

‘But you know why the police are here?’

The boy nodded. ‘One of the military police told me.’

‘Were you here yesterday too?’

‘No, had to find myself a bite to eat. It’s two, maybe three days since I was last here.’

‘Do you think the girl could have been lying in the lift shaft then and you wouldn’t have noticed her?’

The boy moved his head from side to side indifferently. ‘She could have been there for years and I wouldn’t have noticed her. I usually keep to the riverbank. That’s where you find lumps of coal, if you’re lucky. As soon as I find a couple, I’m out of here. Not worth staying around any longer. Not worth wandering around in the ruins, nothing left there.’

‘Apart from a dead girl.’

Jim Mainke went silent.

Stave sighed. ‘I’m sorry about this, but I have to ask you to come with me.’

‘Are you arresting me?’

‘You could say that, but it’s not exactly what I mean at the moment.’

The chief inspector led the boy over to the stretcher, where the two porters were standing having a smoke. The military policeman gave Stave a dirty look and glanced at MacDonald, but dropped it when the lieutenant gave an imperceptible nod.

Stave pulled the blanket back from the head end of the stretcher. ‘Do you recognise this girl?’

Mainke didn’t throw up, didn’t even go pale, just stood there looking at the body. Eventually the chief inspector had had enough and pulled the blanket back over the victim’s unseeing eyes.

‘Never seen her before,’ the boy said.

Stave nodded to the porters for them to take the stretcher away.

‘What’re you going to do with me now?’ Mainke asked. ‘Can I go back to looking for coal?’

‘You’re too young. I can’t just let you loose around here. The policemen will take you to Rauhes House.’ It was a charitable institution where all the orphans picked up by the police were taken in. A former locksmith was in charge and a few volunteers; Christian idealists looked after the boys and girls, delousing them and washing them, patched up scratches and dealt with other minor illnesses, gave them hot soup and a clean bed. Even so, most of the children did a runner within a day or two.

Mainke turned round and walked off behind the military policeman.

‘Where did you get the name Jim from?’ Stave shouted after him.

Maine turned and gave him a real boyish grin. ‘I have an uncle in America. Honest. In New York. I’m going to go to him as soon as big ships start docking in the port again.’

‘Good luck,’ Stave murmured, but Mainke was already too far away to hear him.

‘A witness?’

Stave turned round on hearing his boss’s voice: Cuddel Breuer was standing there facing him.

‘I don’t think so. The boy only got here after the police were already on the scene.’

‘So, anything else?’

Stave almost said, ‘Just the usual,’ but stopped himself in time. He quickly went over what they had found.

‘Do you think the killer is the same?’ Breuer asked.

Stave paused, took a deep breath, then nodded: ‘Yes. Victims two and three have something to do with each other. Members of the same family, I suspect, even though we have no proof as yet. The circumstances are remarkably similar: both strangled with a thin wire, stripped naked, left amidst the rubble. It is even possible the little girl was murdered at the same time as the other two.’

‘A killer wiping out an entire family?’ Breuer looked around. ‘Anything else to do here?’

‘The crime scene man will go over everything again. But there’s nothing more for us to do.’

‘Good. Let’s go back to head office. I’ll give you a lift.’

Stave followed his boss to his old Mercedes. Breuer drove himself. He was a relaxed, self-confident, fast driver. They soon left Maschke in the old patrol car far behind.

‘So, we have a serial killer,’ said Breuer, looking dead ahead through the windscreen.

‘I’m afraid it seems so.’

‘We’re not going to be able to keep this under wraps much longer. The type of killing, the appeals for identification of the victims – sooner or later some journalist will put two and two together and get a story.’

‘And we can’t control what he might write.’

‘Not these days, thank God. That is one of the prices of democracy, made in Great Britain. One way or another we’ve done well, you and me, Stave. But even so, in this one particular case, I almost long for the old days when you could simply tell them what they could print, and what they couldn’t.’

‘Even that wouldn’t help. People talk. There’ll be rumours. I’d prefer a piece in the newspaper, so at least we know where we are.’

‘And where are you?’

Stave shrugged. ‘They can’t write any more than we know. And that’s precious little.’

Breuer, for the first time, turned and looked at him, even though they were turning fast into the square outside headquarters. ‘We have a serial killer, one who attacks people in the ruins, amidst the rubble, or at least that is what people are going to think. But nearly all of Hamburg is in ruins. Worse: the victims are a young woman, an old man and a child. What are people going to make of that? That they’re all members of one unfortunate family? Victims of some domestic drama? Hardly. They are going to believe that anybody is likely to be murdered. That men and women are in danger, and even children. That the killer is someone who can strike almost any citizen in almost any part of the city. That is what they’re going to make of it.’