Cay Rademacher - The Murderer in Ruins

Stave got to his feet. ‘That’s all, then,’ he said.

‘Will you find whoever did this?’ Leonore asked.

The chief inspector was taken aback for a moment. Then he saw the urgent look in the girl’s big, earnest eyes.

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I will.’

‘What happens then?’

‘Then the murderer will go to court and be sentenced. There’s no getting away with things like that these days,’ and he indicated his coat pocket with the photo in it.

The girl reached out her hand and said, ‘Good luck.’

Therese Dubois smiled for the first time since they had arrived and led them back to the entrance,

‘What will happen to the children?’ Stave asked, his hand already on the door handle. MacDonald was behind him, and Maschke was striding up and down outside like a caged tiger, watched curiously by a group of boys and girls who had come out of the guest house and were standing under an oak.

‘When they’re healthy enough we’re going to organise transport to Palestine, to their new homeland. It’s easier to fix from here in the British-occupied zone of Germany than anywhere else, because the controls are more lax. One of the ironies of history?’

MacDonald looked as if he’d just choked on a peppercorn.

Stave remembered hearing somewhere that the British had occupied Palestine ever since the end of the First World War. He’d also heard about the fighting between Arabs and Jews and that the British were not allowing any more Jews from Europe to travel to the Middle East. But the Jews, those who’d survived the mass murder, wanted out and would do anything to smuggle themselves on board ships to Palestine. No wonder that the lieutenant looks so uncomfortable, he thought to himself with just a hint of Schadenfreude.

‘Should you come across anything, please let me know.’ He pulled a page from his notebook and gave her his name and telephone number.

‘It must be hard to get things back to normal,’ she said, folding the piece of paper carefully.

The chief inspector wasn’t sure if he’d quite understood her meaning and gave her an inquisitive look.

‘After so many catastrophes,’ she explained. ‘There’s so much to clean up – and I don’t just mean the rubble in the cities. And there aren’t many men like Herr Ehrlich and you.’

‘You know the public prosecutor?’

‘I was a witness in the Curio House trial.’

‘Ehrlich is in charge of this case too.’

‘As if he didn’t have enough on his hands. A man with a mission!’

She accompanied her guests to the jeep. Maschke joined them, smelling of smoke. As he climbed into the jeep Stave noticed that one of the girls standing under the tree was saying something to her companion, nodding at the vice squad man. Then she brought her hand up to her throat and made the quick slashing gesture of somebody cutting a throat.

She knows Maschke, Stave realised with a shock, and not as a friend.

Rather more awkwardly than necessary, he went to the jeep and took Therese Dubois discreetly to one side.

‘Who is that girl?’ he whispered, a fleeting gesture with his right hand indicating the little girl, not worrying whether or not the question would worry the teacher. He had only seconds before Maschke noticed.

She realised that it was important. Hardly moving her lips she whispered, ‘Anouk Magaldi, eight years old, arrived a few weeks ago.’

‘From a camp?’

‘No. She’d been living in France, near Limoges. Her parents, both Jews, were murdered there. We’re also bringing orphans like her to Hamburg because, as I said, it’s easier to organise transport to Palestine from here.’

‘Goodbye then,’ Stave said out loud. ‘Many thanks for all your help.’ And with that he climbed into the jeep.

On the way back Stave stared silently out of the window, uncertain as to whether he knew more than he had known this morning or not. The dead girl was clearly not from the home, and probably not a Jew from one of the camps. So did that mean she was from Hamburg, or a German refugee, or a DP? Which non-Jewish DPs were still living in Germany 19 months after the end of the war? Primarily Russians and Poles who were afraid of the communists and therefore didn’t want to go home. Should he send pictures of the bodies to the Polish and Russian police? How would you do that? And would the former enemies even be bothered about looking for people who preferred to hang about in the ruins of the Reich rather than return home?

I still don’t know anything, he thought. Nothing at all.

Or do I?

Two observations kept coming back to him, dragging him away from the hunt for the triple murderer he was supposed to be pursuing. What was that gesture aimed at Maschke? How did the little girl from the home know the vice squad man? Maybe under the cover of his job he was molesting little girls?

He tried discreetly to glance in the rear-view mirror for a glimpse of his colleague’s face. But the jeep was bouncing along and the mirror shaking; he’d get a distorted view for a second or two and then it was gone.

What about Ehrlich? Therese Dubois called him a ‘man with a mission’. Why was the prosecutor so keen on this case? Maybe it wasn’t anything at all to do with rebuilding democracy, like he said? Maybe this man whose wife had been driven to suicide had some other issue: revenge? Revenge on her old regime tormentors. Maybe this enigmatic case was just a way for him to get back at some National Socialist or other. But how?

‘What now?’

MacDonald’s question gave Stave a start. He hadn’t even noticed they were back at headquarters.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘We’re sending out the posters with the photo of the girl and medallion today. Wait and see if this time somebody turns up. Maschke, go back and have another look at the last location, maybe you’ll find some witnesses. Maybe you’ll come across something we missed. Maybe our colleagues from Department S will turn up something on the black market. Maybe Dr Czrisini will come across a lead in the course of the autopsy.’

He took his leave of both men, climbed wearily up the stairs to his office and opened the door to the anteroom. For some reason it annoyed him to see Erna Berg – he knew her secret, would never betray it, but it annoyed him to see her.

Sitting there alone at his desk, he went over everything. Then he came to a decision. He would continue the search as normal. But he would also make a point of checking up on Ehrlich and Maschke. You never knew.

The next morning Stave’s colleague from Department S rushed into the office, stopped in the doorway and called to him: ‘Nothing to report – no girl’s coat, no truss, no false teeth – we’ve not found anything we can link to the victims. If you want you can come and look at a few dozen winter coats, pairs of stockings or worn-out shoes that we’ve confiscated in raids over the last 48 hours. I have no idea how we might link any of them to one of the victims. We’re still at it. The next raid is going ahead this morning.’

‘Thanks,’ the chief inspector muttered wearily, but by then the door had already closed.

The posters got no response from the public. It seemed nobody knew who the girl was. Nobody recognised the medallion.

Stave nodded awkwardly to Erna Berg, grabbed his coat and said, ‘I’m going over to the Search Office.’

She looked at him in amazement. ‘Lieutenant MacDonald is already there.’

‘I want to hear what they have to say for myself.’

‘Search Office’ was another one of those terms you had to learn to live with. The Red Cross and both churches had merged their documentation and expertise to create perhaps the world’s largest institution dedicated to finding people. They collected every bit of information: record cards, police reports, old Wehrmacht order papers, official registration notices, prisoner lists from the occupying forces and thousands of other documents that might provide information on unaccounted-for soldiers and missing refugees. The number of Wehrmacht soldiers alone, sought after by families who had no idea whether they were living or dead, was three and a half million. Added to that there were 15 million refugees. That amounted to 18.5 million record cards in rows of cardboard boxes that stretched for kilometres, each card with a name, date of birth, last address, last known sighting, and any other potentially relevant information.