The Murderer in Ruins (18 page)

‘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.

One of those cards bore the name of his son.

Stave knew how to get there. He’d been often enough. Down Feld Strasse, then across smaller footpaths through the rubble of city
districts that had been all but wiped out, with not a single house intact, not even a piece of wall in most cases. Where there was a wall, it was covered with posters and pieces of paper, requests for information, orders from the military government, the latest police ‘wanted’ posters. Some of it was his work, but already half ripped down by the gusting icy winds. A burnt-out bus lay in the middle of the ruins with a banner on its roof, declaring ‘Leather Goods’. Stave wondered who on earth would buy something here.

Eventually he got to number 91 Altona Allee on the right-hand side: the local courthouse. It was somehow inevitable that it had survived; a typical palace of justice from the first Kaiser’s day with light-coloured stonework, columns, figureheads and statues along the façade. Undoubtedly they were allegorical figures, but Stave saw them as carved images of missing persons.

The judges had been thrown out. Now it was the workspace for 600 men and women, pale, discreet, hard-working and long since immune to the tragedies of others; 600 trying to discover the fate of 18.5 million.

Outside the imposing building was one of the fat round advertising columns with a huge poster on it, black and white with a red cross in the middle, and many photos of children. Above it the heading: ‘How do I search for and find my nearest and dearest?’ Posters like this kept appearing all over Hamburg, the same every week, but also different: the photos were new. There were 40,000 orphans in Hamburg, many so young they didn’t even know their surnames, let alone their addresses. Their faces, some shy at having their photo taken, some indifferent, cheeky or frightened, seem to stare down at Stave as he walked up the steps and pushed open the heavy door.

The long, dimly lit hallways were narrowed by shelves on both sides filled with wooden drawers filled with record cards. The offices were packed with big tables covered in books: bound lists with dates and photographs, primarily those of soldiers. The tomes of the missing.

The chief inspector resisted the temptation to go over to the row
of drawers marked ‘S’ and get out the record card for ‘Stave, Karl’. What was the point? He went to the office of Andreas Brems, one of the researchers he knew from earlier visits.

Brems looked up and shook his head with a sympathetic expression that was part of the job. Just like an undertaker, Stave thought.

‘Nothing new on your son, Chief Inspector.’

‘I’m here professionally,’ Stave replied, sounding more unpleasant than he had intended.

Brems nodded, neither insulted nor curious, and sat there waiting for the question.

Stave told him about the murders. He gave a thin smile.

‘An Englishman was already here about that. Your men have also brought us the “information wanted” posters,’ he said patiently. ‘Nobody here can remember ever seeing any of the persons on the photos. And without names, there’s nothing more we can do.’

‘What about a date?’

Brems gave him a confused look. ‘We sort our card indexes by first and last names of the missing person. It’s not easy if we don’t have a name. In the case of little children who don’t know their own surname, obviously we use different criteria: estimated age, place they were found, et cetera. One of my colleagues looked through all that material using the details of the murdered girl, but nothing came to light.’

‘Can you tell when somebody made a request for information?’

‘That’s noted on every index card – including when the first request was made. But the cards aren’t sorted chronologically.’

Stave rubbed his neck. ‘Have there been many requests in the last few weeks? I’m only interested in the time frame from the week before the first murder up until today. The 35 days from the beginning of January until now.’

The researcher shook his head in amazement. ‘New missing person reports come to you, not us. The war has been over for nearly two years. Anyone looking for somebody missing from then would have reported the case to us long ago. There are basically two groups
of people who still make new requests, the first being refugees who’ve only just reached the western zones. But as there haven’t been any trains for the past few weeks because of the cold, there have definitely been no new arrivals from the east. On the other hand, we have those who are worried or despairing but who, if you’ll excuse me, don’t trust the police. They turn to us because our requests for information via the Red Cross and the churches can more easily extend beyond the occupation zones. Wives of men who have reason to believe, for example, that their husbands have got to Sweden, or even America.’

‘If somebody these days turns to the Search Office as well as the police, that means the missing person has left either no trace or highly enigmatic traces: that the indications are so few and far between that their family don’t believe the police will ever find them. That means that in those circles there’s a chance that I might get some clue as to the identity of our victims if I just work at it hard enough. Or – something I’m not hoping for – I come across the names of other potential victims whose bodies may be still lying out there in the rubble undiscovered. Maybe I’ll find some sort of pattern.’ Stave gave him a meagre smile.

Brems nodded slowly, but then it was as if somebody had turned a light switch on in his head, and all of a sudden he was interested. ‘A colleague of mine works on new requests of that sort. There can’t have been many in the past few weeks. I’ll ask her.’

He rushed out of the room and came back ten minutes later. ‘Just one,’ he said. ‘On the thirteenth of January.’

‘One week before we found the first body.’

Stave took the card from him. Dr Marin Hellinger, born 13 March 1895 in Hamburg-Barmbek, an industrialist, address in Hamburg-Marienthal, reported missing by his wife Hertha. There was a photo, apparently from an old passport: thinning hair, probably grey, nickel-framed glasses, pudgy cheeks, neck bulging out over his collar.

‘Definitely not a refugee or a soldier. Why did you even bother to include him?’ 

Brems coughed: ‘My colleague was bored and she was sympathetic to Frau Hellinger. So she opened a file and sent out enquiries. To England.’

‘England? Anywhere else?’

‘America too, but why just those two I don’t now. Frau Hellinger suggested her husband might be there. Kidnapped possibly.’

‘So why didn’t she go to the police?’

Brems coughed again, but said nothing.

Stave made a note of all the information on the card. Marienthal was a suburb near where he lived. It would do no harm to knock on her door.

‘Thanks,’ he grunted.

‘See you soon, Chief Inspector. We’ll let you know if we hear anything. About your son, I mean.’

B
ack at the office he met with Maschke and MacDonald. Stave let them give their reports first. The vice squad man reported that no ration card had been left unclaimed at any of the distribution offices. MacDonald had had no luck either; the murdered girl had not been registered at any Hamburg school, or at least no teacher recognised her.

‘We need to print yet more posters,’ Stave said wearily. ‘We need to warn people not to go anywhere with strangers. And not to buy any suspicious article of clothing.’

‘What constitutes a “suspicious article of clothing”?’ Maschke asked.

‘No idea. The first bit is a warning to the populace. The second is intended for the killer, to make him nervous, worried about selling his loot, if that is the motive for his murders.’

‘If…’

The two men turned to go. Stave opened his notebook and mentioned his little detour to the Search Office and read them the few details concerning Dr Martin Hellinger.

‘I’m going to pay a visit to his wife.’ 

Maschke turned and stared at him blankly. ‘I can’s see how that’s going to help us,’ he said.

MacDonald had reddened. For a moment Stave thought the missing man’s name had meant something to him. But then he noticed that the Brit had already opened his office door a fraction and was glancing at Erna Berg, who was standing with her back to them sorting out folders on a shelf. Happy and in love, Stave thought, feeling the needle of envy prick his heart. ‘I shall drop by Hellinger’s wife in the morning,’ he told them.

‘Will you need me with you?’ Maschke asked dismissively, making quite clear what he thought of the idea.

‘No,’ the chief inspector answered, not exactly devastated. ‘What about you, Lieutenant?’

MacDonald was still blushing. ‘I’m afraid I have a meeting tomorrow morning.’

A ‘meeting’ with Erna Berg, my secretary and a married woman, Stave thought, but he forced a smile.

‘Very well then. I shall go on my own. Just to dot the “i”s and cross the “t”s.’

S
tave stared out through the iced-up windows of his apartment. It was early morning. There was no point in going into the office, only to come all the way back to Marienthal to speak with the missing man’s wife. On the other hand he could hardly ring her doorbell at 6 a.m. the way the Gestapo used to do. So instead he sat there counting the crystals on the thick ice in the middle of his windowpane, then breathed on it, trying in vain to ignore the cold and the pain in his leg.

Gradually the grey day dawned. At long last he got to his feet. If he walked slowly he wouldn’t be there before 8 a.m. – and in this weather nobody was still asleep by then.

Marienthal was a Shangri-la, a district of villas in the east of Hamburg only a few hundred paces from the rental block Stave lived in. The Allies had never attacked Marienthal; only the rare stray bomb had landed there.

Stave wondered along Ahrensburg Strasse towards the centre of the district. Grey light, passers-by who avoided one another. Nobody glanced at anybody else. Nobody walked next to the ruins even though they sometimes provided shelter from the icy wind.

He stopped by an advertising column to examine his department’s handiwork: a ‘wanted’ poster, put up early that morning. ‘5,000 Reichsmarks Reward!’ And the photos of the three victims. The words beneath read: ‘A murderer is at large. A monster in human form.’ Then there was a description of the victims and where they were found. ‘Has nobody missed any of these people? Can people simply disappear in
this city without family, friends or acquaintances caring?’ Did I really write that, Stave wondered. I must have been tired.

There was a tiny park by the edge of the road, scarcely bigger than a domestic garden: cobblestoned paths, trees and bushes hacked down to stumps, the skeletons of two benches, their wooden seats long since stolen.

Stave turned into Eichtal Strasse, townhouses on other side, two stories, with a loft and a gable wall facing the street. Every house was that little bit different: some faced in red brick, others with white or yellow plasterwork, or covered with ivy. Chestnut trees and beeches grew from amongst the cobbles, some chopped down, some still standing. His footsteps sounded loud on the stone. Five hundred metres away, Margarethe had been burned to death. And yet here everything was still as it ever was.

A small untended front garden under a layer of dirty hoar frost. Behind it a villa. A few dirty streaks on the white plaster, one window knocked askew. Otherwise in good condition. A thin, blackish grey trail of smoke from the chimney, the bitter but oh-so-sweet stink of glowing coal. All of a sudden Stave was in a hurry to get indoors.

The doorbell made no sound, so he knocked. It took a while, but eventually the door opened. A wave of warm air washed out, causing the chief inspector to shiver involuntarily. A woman in her fifties, grey streaks in her long dark hair, a soft face, brown doe eyes, in an elegant if somewhat worn housecoat.

Stave presented his ID, gave her his name.

Frau Hellinger hesitated for a moment, then gave a shy smile and invited him in. Parquet floors, antique dressers, blank spaces on the four walls where once pictures must have hung. Stave realised how the Hellingers had paid for their coal. His host led him to the rear of the house, to a room with a bay window looking out on to a quiet garden. She offered him a wicker chair.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she asked. Stave nodded gratefully.

‘I hadn’t reckoned on the police calling by,’ she said.

Stave gave a thin smile. ‘Why’s that?’

‘I originally reported my husband as missing at the nearest police station. An officer there took down my details on a form. And I had the impression that that was that.’

‘Which is why you went to the Search Office?’

She nodded, sipping at her tea, her hands shaking ever so slightly.

‘Tell me something about your husband,’ Stave brought out his notebook.

‘My husband is primarily a builder and engineer,’ Frau Hellinger said, with another shy smile. ‘He founded his own company as a young man. Nothing big, you know, but solid. A company that made specialist machines.’

‘What sort of machinery?’

‘Trigonometric calculators. Primarily for U-boats.’

She noticed Stave staring at her blankly, and held up a hand apologetically.

‘It was his own invention. As far as I understand it, U-boat captains have to make complicated calculations before firing a torpedo. They have to work out their own course, and that of the ship they intend to attack, the speed of the ships, the speed of the torpedo, currents, all that sort of thing. My man made calculators that could help them work it all out. The officer would put in some data, turn a few wheels – and there was the result. It was a bit like a calculating machine you get in offices, my husband used to say, but more complicated. He delivered the devices to Blohm & Voss and the shipyards installed them in every U-boat that left the port here.’

‘A good business to be in, I imagine,’ said Stave. ‘At least up until May 1945.’

She gave him a pained look. ‘After the…’ she struggled to find a suitable word, ‘…collapse, despite the great problems, my husband managed to keep the firm together.’

‘Most of the ships sunk by U-boats were English. I can’t imagine that the new masters of our city were particularly interested in the welfare of a company that sent half their fleet to the bottom of the ocean.’

Frau Hellinger coughed. ‘Obviously my husband immediately
stopped production. Machinery was machinery. That’s what he said. He didn’t care much what he produced – as long as it was complicated enough to keep him interested.’

‘What does the firm make nowadays?’

‘Precision timepieces, time clocks for offices and factories. Timers for automated machinery.’

‘There’s a market for those again?’

‘Of course, lots of firms are trying to get production up and running again, despite all the problems. You’ll even find our clocks hanging on the walls of the British barracks and clubs.’

That’s what it’s like to be a winner, thought Stave, and felt suddenly as if there were a wet leather overcoat weighing down his arms and shoulders. No matter who wins wars: winners do business. They have the bread, literally. They live in villas. The only difference here is that normally they do not vanish without trace.

‘What happened on the thirteenth of January?’

‘I don’t know exactly. The night before we were late going to bed. My husband has always been an early riser; he’s never needed much sleep. He got up at his normal time; I remember that even though I was still half asleep. Then I fell back into a deep sleep and when I woke up it was about 10 a.m. and he was gone.’

‘Gone?’

Frau Hellinger blushed slightly. ‘My husband and I have been married for 30 years, we know each other very well – he often gets up before me, but he never ever leaves the house without saying goodbye. And if he’s going to visit a customer instead of the office, he always tells me.’

‘But on this occasion the house was empty when you got up?’

‘Yes, he had just gone.’

‘Had he taken anything with him? Money, for example?’

Now she was blushing deeply. ‘Not as far as I know. We don’t keep a lot of cash in the house. And no, there are no valuable items missing. At least none that weren’t missing beforehand, if you know what I mean.’ 

Stave glanced at the bare patches on the walls and nodded, then glanced down at his notebook to read the notes he had made at the Search Office.

‘You stated that he was wearing his winter coat. Navy-blue wool, hat, gloves and scarf.’

‘That was what was missing from the cloakroom. That was what he normally wore in winter.’

‘And his briefcase was missing too.’

‘He took it with him to work every morning.’

‘What did he keep in it?’

Frau Hellinger shrugged her shoulders. ‘Documents, I imagine. I never looked.’

‘Diagrams? Contracts?’

‘I really have no idea.’

Stave wondered if someone involved in the production of trigonometric calculators and complex timepieces had call to use thin lengths of wire. Wire loops. ‘Was the house door locked that morning, when you noticed your husband was missing?’

Frau Hellinger looked surprised. ‘It was closed, but not locked.’

‘Thank you,’ said Stave and closed his notebook.

‘There’s something else.’

He looked up.

She hesitated, taking a deep breath. ‘When I started looking around I found a screwed-up piece of paper on the floor in the cloakroom where his overcoat normally hung. I didn’t notice it at first; I thought it was just something the cleaning lady had missed. But later, when my husband was nowhere to be found and I began to look for clues as to what had happened, I picked it up.’

She opened the drawer of a commode and took out a piece of paper the size of a hand. Squared paper, torn down one side, clearly hastily torn out of a notebook, Stave reckoned. The sort of notebook used by engineers or technicians for doing calculations or drawing sketches.

He took it from her and examined it. The innumerable creases
like a net across the hatched page showed how scrunched up it had been. One side was blank, on the other, a single word, scrawled in pencil, in English: ‘Bottleneck.’

She stared at him uncomprehendingly. ‘I can’t speak any English but a friend translated it for me.’

‘The neck of a bottle.’

‘It was obviously thrown aside in haste, but it is definitely my husband’s writing. What on earth does it mean?’

‘I’m wondering that myself,’ Stave said.

T
he chief inspector took his leave, slowly and in a hurry at the same time. It would have been nice to stay a little longer. Every fibre of his being had enjoyed the warmth inside the villa, the opportunity to take his coat off, sit down and drink some hot tea. He would have liked to close his eyes, fall asleep. On the other hand, he was intrigued by this new discovery. He needed to talk it over with his4 colleagues, exchange ideas, test the plausibility of crazy theories.

He walked quickly, limping, but not even noticing it. Bottleneck. Bottle. Neck. Coincidence. What could it mean? Is Hellinger the killer? But why leave the note? Why an English word? Or was the industry boss just the killer’s accomplice? Or maybe a witness?

All of a sudden Stave stopped. If Hellinger wanted to disappear that morning, would he have dropped the note by accident? Unlikely. But if, as his wife believed, he had scribbled the word in haste, crumpled the note up and dropped it when he was putting his coat on, surely that meant he only had a few moments? And that he wasn’t alone? So who had been with Hellinger in the villa that morning? And did the magnate go willingly with whoever it was? Or was he abducted? That was what his wife seemed to believe. But who would want to abduct him?

By the time he got to his office Stave was still lost in thought. He sat down at his desk and looked again at the piece of paper that he had managed to persuade Frau Hellinger to give him, though she
had been reluctant to do so. Perhaps she thought it might be the last link she would have with her husband, the chief inspector reflected. She might well be right.

‘Drum up MacDonald and Maschke for me,’ he shouted to his secretary through the closed door.

He caught the smell of cold tobacco before the door even opened. Maschke came in. A few minutes later MacDonald also arrived.

He gave both men a quick summary of what he had been up to. Maschke thought long and hard and then nodded appreciatively. MacDonald just stared at him attentively. Stave returned the look.

‘Bottleneck,’ he said at last. ‘That’s what’s on the piece of paper. Just that.’ He showed it to him.

The lieutenant looked pale. ‘What could it mean?’ he whispered.

The chief inspector held up his hands. ‘It means you’re going to have to ask around amongst your colleagues again. It might have something to do with our murderer. Then again maybe not, but in any case the disappearance of Hellinger is odd. And this is the only lead we have. An English lead.’

MacDonald let his head drop so that they could no longer see his face. Difficult to make out what it meant, Stave thought to himself. Was he ashamed because the clue pointed to one of his compatriots? Or was it anger at a German policeman accusing an Englishman?

MacDonald looked up, his face expressing agreement. ‘You’re right, Chief Inspector. An English lead. I’ll get on to it.’

The Briton was just getting to his feet when there was a knock on the door. It was Erna Berg, who gave him a quick smile before turning to Stave.

‘There’s a lady here who wants to speak to you.’

‘Who is it?’

‘An Anna von Veckinhausen. She says you know her.’

S
tave ignored the curious glances from MacDonald and Maschke and nodded goodbye to them. The vice squad man squeezed past the dark-haired woman outside without saying a word. MacDonald was
more polite, waited for her to come in, greeted her and then closed the door behind him.

At last, thought Stave. He indicated the chair on the other side of his desk. Involuntarily he glanced at her hands and noticed a bare patch on the ring finger of her right hand. A missing wedding ring? Divorced? Widowed? Or was it nothing to do with a ring at all? Maybe it was a healed wound made by a loop of wire she’d been holding in her hands? I’m getting paranoid, the inspector realised.

Her almond-shaped eyes were watching him carefully. Maybe she regrets having come here, Stave wondered. He let her take her time.

Anna von Veckinhausen sat down on the chair opposite him, her right arm folded diagonally across her chest, her hand on her left shoulder. The same defensive pose. Then she forced a smile.

‘You know why I’m here.’

‘I have my suspicions.’

‘I didn’t tell you everything.’

‘When I first questioned you, you told me you took the path through the rubble to get from Collau Strasse to Lappenbergs Allee. The second time you told me you had been going along Lappenbergs Allee and took the path to get to Collau Strasse, the opposite of what you said the first time.’