Cay Rademacher - The Murderer in Ruins

‘As far as the Eilbek bunker.’

‘Then I knew where she lived and who she lived with. The next day, when I saw her heading out for the black market again, I dragged her into the ruins and strangled her. I stripped her so that nobody could identify her. I burnt her clothes later in my stove at home. You could have raided the black marketeers as often as you liked and still found nothing, Chief Inspector.’ Despite his agony, he grinned scornfully.

‘Then I drove back to the bunker, in the CID Mercedes. I borrowed it quite legitimately. Unfortunately only the other woman and the girl were there. It wasn’t difficult to invent a pretext to get them into the car. Then I tied them up, drove down a side street and silenced them forever. Just as I had with Yvonne Delluc. But beforehand I had to beat the woman until she told me where the old man was. He’d gone looting in the ruins on the other side of the Alster.’

‘Why didn’t you hide the two bodies in the same place?’

‘I didn’t want them to be found too quickly,’ Herthge gasped. ‘I didn’t want to be disturbed for a couple of hours,’ he managed to say. ‘Then I went looking for the old man. It was getting dark by the time I found him. The rest was easy.’

‘Easy,’ Stave repeated with disgust. He thought for a moment, then asked, ‘Why did you try to kill me? You must have known that it was too late. Whether you killed me or not didn’t matter. They’ve put out a warrant for your arrest. Why didn’t you go into hiding?’

Herthge gave a mirthless laugh. His breath was failing. By now the blood had formed a large pool all around his body and was still oozing from between his fingers.

‘I wasn’t sure,’ he wheezed. ‘Only guessed you had me in your sights. I thought the only one who posed a threat to me was the other witness, that woman who caught a glimpse of me in Lappenbergs Allee.’

‘Anna von Veckinhausen.’

‘It wasn’t exactly hard to find out that it was her who had given you that bit of information. It was in the files. Wasn’t hard either to find out where she lived. I thought that if I got her out of the way, then there would be no more witnesses. I was lying in wait for her.’

‘Today?’

‘Yes. But she was never alone. As you know only too well.’

Stave imagined Herthge following them, to the Kunsthalle, along the Alster, to the flophouse where he had made love to Anna. Imagined him sneaking after them through the rubble. It made him feel sick. He had to make an effort not to kick the dying man.

‘And because you couldn’t get your hands on your real target, you went for me instead.’

‘I was angry that you’d got in the way. I wasn’t thinking straight. Everybody makes a mistake.’

Herthge’s breathing was fading fast. His legs no longer trembled. He was lying in a pool of blood.

‘I’m cold,’ he whispered.

‘Hell’s a cold place,’ Stave said, then got to his feet, turned around and left.

A few hundred metres away, in an almost undamaged apartment block, lights glimmered behind boarded-up windows – candles, low-wattage light bulbs. Some of the windows were open. There was the sound of voices and gramophone music. Chief Inspector Frank Stave took one last look at the cellar where Herthge lay dying. He stood there for a long time, looking at the ruins, which in the merciful moonlight looked almost majestic. Then, in the shadow of a scarred and fractured wall, he limped away.