Cay Rademacher - The Murderer in Ruins

It took just a few seconds before Anna von Veckinhausen appeared from behind the blanket. Stave got a glimpse of a camp bed and two wooden vegetable crates turned upside down, obviously serving as a stool and table, a trunk, and fixed to the hut wall a little oil painting of a church in winter.

She quickly pulled the blanket behind her to stop him seeing anything else. Maybe she has something she wants to hide, Stave thought. Or maybe she’s just embarrassed by her circumstances. She looked exhausted and not exactly delighted to see him.

‘I just wanted to ask you a few more questions,’ he said.

‘Does your newspaper friend need some more information for one of his stories?’

Before Stave could reply she had disappeared behind the blanket again. For a second or two, the chief inspector was afraid she would just leave him standing there like an awkward schoolboy. What was he to do? He could hardly force her to answer any more questions. At least not unless he requested a formal interview. But he had no real grounds to do so. What would he do if she went and complained to her British officer friends about him? To his relief, she appeared again after a few minutes, in an overcoat and headscarf.

The old man was still standing next to the stove, watching their every move.

‘Shall we go for a walk?’ Anna von Veckinhausen suggested, loud enough for him to hear.

Stave would have preferred to stay where he was, soaking up the heat from the stove, but he nodded, pleased that she was ready to talk to him at all.

They wandered through the ruins as far as the Wandse. Before the war it had been a river, squeezed in here and there, but with grassland or trees on either side, all of which had carved a green line through the eastern side of Hamburg, no more than a few hundred metres wide in places but several kilometres long. You would see children throwing breadcrumbs for ducks, herons perched on the bank, grey and motionless as a sculpture, waiting to spot a fish, butterflies, squirrels turning somersaults in the branches, rustling the leaves, molehills.

Now the Wandse was a strip of grey-black ice, frozen solid. The fish, ducks and herons had all vanished, or had been caught, cooked and eaten. The trees had been chopped down for firewood. All that remained were stumps, with bits of bomb shrapnel embedded in them. The green spaces had vanished under mountains of rubble, dumped there to clear the streets.

‘You told a journalist I saw the rubble murderer,’ Anna von Veckinhausen said accusingly when they had reached what remained of the river.

Relieved to be able to give his left leg a bit of a rest, Stave just shrugged and said, ‘I told him a woman had possibly caught a glimpse of the killer. Kleensch would have found out sooner or later. Better to give him my side of the story than for him to make up his own.’

‘But the rubble murderer now knows that there’s a witness, a female witness. He might even know who it is because he might have seen me too that night.’

‘If he did see you then he would in any case have worked out you would go to the police. And even if he read the piece in the newspaper, he still wouldn’t have your name or know where you lived.’

This time it was Anna von Veckinhausen who shrugged.

‘I had hoped the newspaper story would make the killer nervous,’ the chief inspector admitted. ‘Maybe so nervous that he would go back to the scene of his crime to remove clues or something. That sort of thing happens.’

‘And? Did he?’

Stave shook his head. ‘Maybe he’s not bothered by our investigation. Maybe he feels he has nothing to worry about.’

‘I can imagine,’ Anna von Veckinhausen said, staring at the ice.

‘Have you had somebody watching me?’

‘No. Why do you ask?’

‘I’m your only witness, aren’t I? Don’t you think the murderer might be out there looking for me? To shut me up?’

‘He doesn’t know anything about you. Would you prefer it if we kept an eye on you?’

She smiled briefly for the first time. ‘Maybe not.’

‘Do you feel as if you’re being watched?’

She put her arm across her upper body, in that defensive position Stave had noticed before.

‘Don’t we all?’ she asked.

She walks on, along the river, Stave following alongside. He’s hungry, weary; his leg hurts. He’d like to ask her into a cafe, even if it is only for a cup of thin cabbage soup in a bombed-out building. But he doesn’t dare even suggest the idea. He can’t think of anything else to ask her. Stupid of me even to have come here, he thinks to himself. But it’s nice, so very nice to have the company of a woman again. Even in this cold. Even in this desolate parkland, even if I have to be careful not to walk too close to her, making sure all the time there’s at least half a metre between us. The elegant way she walks, despite the shabby overcoat covering most of her body and the heavy boots on her feet. The strands of long dark hair poking out from under the headscarf, strands she absently pushes back from her eyes, though never quite far enough to stop them falling down again. The vulnerability, when she puts her arm across her breast protectively. The smile she uses so rarely. Stave even thinks he catches a whiff of perfume, which is impossible especially in this cold.

Stop acting like an idiot, he tells himself.

Because he can’t think of anything else, he asks her the same questions once more. She’s happy to answer him. But there are no more contradictions, as far as he can tell. But then there is a part of him that’s happy just to be there next to her, listening to the sound of her voice. At some stage, without discussion, they turn around and head back. It’s getting dark but the frozen river gleams like a silver ribbon.

‘You’re not getting very far with your case,’ Anna von Veckinhausen said. It was a statement, not a question, but not meant in a hostile way.

He smiled, embarrassed. ‘I’ve never come across a case like this before, where we can’t even identify the victims.’

‘You’re surprised?’

He stared at her, suddenly taken aback, and said, ‘Yes.’

She shook her head. ‘You still believe there’s good in people? Despite all this?’ and she waved a hand at the ruins around them.

‘I can’t see what identifying the bodies of four people has to do with believing there’s good in people.’

Anna von Veckinhausen smiled at him, sympathetically, he thought. ‘Take the old man who opened the door to you back at the Nissen hut. Johann Schwarzhuber. A widower, a refugee from Breslau, been in Hamburg eight months, used to be a carpenter, and a party member, now he’s a pensioner with no relatives. I know all of that despite probably never having exchanged more than a few dozens words with him. But what does he know about me?’

‘He didn’t even know your name.’

‘If I failed to return from our walk along the Wandse tonight, Chief Inspector, good old Johannn Schwarzhuber wouldn’t even report me missing. And if a photo of me suddenly appeared on posters around the city, he wouldn’t bother to go to the police to identify me. He would turn his head away and set to looting what little I have in the hut before somebody else did. For the last eight months, all there has been between him and me is a woollen blanket. We have starved and frozen together. But Schwarzhuber wouldn’t give a damn if I was dead. Or the two families with children who also share our hut. He wouldn’t give a damn about them either. Or anyone else on the whole planet. He would help nobody but himself.

‘Hamburg is full of Johann Schwarzhubers, thousands of them crawling about in the ruins, lurking in huts, staring out of frozen windowpanes. I bet you somebody out there knows your four victims, but is thinking, somebody else can take the trouble of going to the police.’