The Murderer in Ruins (23 page)

Breuer and Stave said nothing as they walked back to the Mercedes. Only when the heavy car doors had closed did Stave dare to open his mouth, as if he was afraid they were listening to him in the city hall.

‘What happens if the victims are never identified?’ he asked. ‘And if we never solve the case? If the killer gets away?’

‘Then you’d better pray for a thaw soon,’ Breuer grumbled, turning the key in the ignition, ‘so we don’t freeze our backsides off when we’re put back into uniform and assigned to traffic duty.’

W
hen Stave, hungry and dejected, finally got back to his office, the anteroom was empty. Erna Berg and MacDonald had gone. But as soon as he entered his own office, he stopped dead. Something was missing. It took him a second to realise what it was.

The murder files were gone.

He hurried over to his desk, certain that he had left them there this morning after Mashcke came in with the news of the fourth murder. He hadn’t put them back in his filing cabinet; he’d just dashed out. Had his secretary been tidying up? It had been ages since she’d done anything of the sort. Nonetheless he pulled open the filing cabinet drawer.

It was empty.

Stave looked round in confusion. Don’t panic, he told himself, pull yourself together.

He looked in the anteroom: no sign of them.

He slumped into his chair, breathing heavily. Had somebody stolen the files? Maschke? He’d been on his way back to HQ when Stave went off to see Bürger-Prinz. MacDonald, who’d been schmoozing with Erna Berg in the anteroom? Or Erna Berg herself, who had looked at the end of her tether? But why would anybody want to get rid of the murder files? 

For a terrible moment, Stave imagined the rubble murderer himself had stolen into his rooms to erase the few traces of his deeds. Absurd, he told himself. Or was it? Somebody was sabotaging the investigation.

What was he to do? Go to Breuer? After the way the mayor had just hauled them over the coals, Breuer would immediately suspend him for incompetence. Ehrlich? The same. I can’t trust anybody, Stave thought. Somebody has it in for me.

He stayed late in the office, going through his notebooks and writing down everything they knew about the four murder cases. He would ask Dr Czrisini to get him copies of the autopsy reports and new copies of the police crime scene photographs. If necessary he could re-interrogate the few witnesses they had. Anna von Veckinhausen. His thoughts turned to her for a moment, but he quickly forced himself to get back to the new development.

When at last he wearily got up from his desk, just before midnight, he knew he could carry on with the investigation, the official investigation into the rubble murderer – and his private investigation into the theft of the files. He would look discreetly for the individual pages, and he would check out the people who up until now he had considered colleagues, even friends.

And he would trust nobody from now on.

I
ce-cold water on his skin and Sunlight soap the colour of clotted bile. Stave was well aware that the Sunlight soap factory in the suburb of Bahrenfeld boiled up bones. Last year he had done an investigation out there, because he suspected a killer had thrown the body of his victim into the vat. He hadn’t been able to prove it, but what did that show?

He scrubbed himself until his skin was burning. He felt he needed to get rid of all the dirt, not just the dirt he could see, but the invisible dirt. And by now it was light enough for him to see his own face in the mirror that hung over the sink. Not that it exactly cheered him up.

Out on the street he was glad not to be in uniform. Nobody recognised him as a policeman. Everywhere he looked he saw the posters: the headline ‘Does anyone recognise these people?’ And then the photographs of four corpses. The text below was, if you read it properly, an obvious plea for someone to identify at least one of them. Cuddel Breuer had given permission for 60,000 of these posters to be printed. It seemed to Stave as if every wall, every advertising column was covered in them. They had been sent out by courier to the police in other cities, even in the Soviet zone.

I’m imagining this, Stave told himself, but it seemed people were walking more quickly, avoiding eye contact more than ever, wrapping themselves ever deeper in their scarves and overcoats. Nobody walked near the ruins. People avoided them as if they carried the plague. People preferred to walk down the middle of the road than in the shelter of an empty façade or a half-collapsed wall. 

In the guts of a bombed-out apartment house somebody had set up a little booth, like an ulcer made out of planks and cardboard. A frozen-solid piece of cloth hung from a line outside it. A cellar window had been built into the front of this makeshift dwelling with torn curtains still twitching from the hand that pulled them to. Somebody is watching me, the chief inspector thought as he passed. Somebody is on the lookout. He felt as if unseen eyes were following him, and turned his head discreetly. There was nobody there. He walked faster, then slowed down, turned abruptly to the right, then took an oblique turn back towards the street he had come from. Nobody. Just the usual bundled figures rushing hither and thither.

You’re driving yourself crazy, he thought.

When he got to the office he briefly hoped for a miracle, that the files would be lying back on his desk, that somebody had made a mistake. A harmless accident.

But the documents were still missing.

Stave wandered down the long corridors to find the police photographer. He couldn’t send Erna Berg as she wasn’t in yet, which was unusual in itself, he noted. He found the photographer in his lab and ordered new copies of the photos of the victims in the rubble murderer case. He paid no attention to the astonished look the request provoked.

When he got back to his office, Erna Berg was just opening the door, her face pale and puffy, her eyes red, but trying not to let any of it show.

The pangs of love, Stave guessed. If she doesn’t want to talk to me about it, she doesn’t have to. He said ‘Good morning’ in his usual voice as if there was nothing evidently wrong. ‘Please call in Maschke,’ he told her, and with just the slightest hint of reticence, ‘and tell Lieutenant MacDonald to come over at 2 p.m. this afternoon.’

When Maschke got there, the two of them went together to see Dr Czrisini. Stave wanted to be there when the body was cut open. His colleague went pale when he heard where they were going, and said nothing the whole way. 

It took them barely a quarter of an hour, along the embankment, past Dammtor station. If Bürger-Prinz is right, it struck Stave, then I’m walking through the rubble murderer’s patch. White steam from a locomotive rose from the steel and glass ceiling of the station. People in overcoats, their heads covered with anything they could find, hundreds of them, just like everywhere else. I’m hardly the most vulnerable person amongst this lot, Stave told himself. The killer won’t be lurking here waiting for me. He had no hope of spotting a suspect here.

They hurried on, across the wasteland around the university, turned into Neue Raben Strasse, a peaceful district in Rotherham, near the Alster where the pathology institute was located. Stave wondered how many owners of these privileged villas knew there had been corpses strewn all around the district.

A few minutes later the two of them were standing in the brightly lit room next to the dissecting table with the corpse laid out on it. Thawed now. Dr Czrisini greeted Stave, then Maschke, and introduced them to his young, bespectacled assistant who would take notes on the pathologist’s findings during the autopsy.

Stave shook their hands and huddled ever deeper into his overcoat, earning a haughty glance from the assistant. Stave gave him a friendly smile in return. Don’t get your hopes up, I’m not going to fall over. He wasn’t so sure he could say the same about his vice squad colleague. Maschke had barely shaken hands and looked like he might throw up into one of their chrome basins at any moment. Stave was just cold. Even the two doctors were wearing overcoats under their white coats.

Czrisini started with the head, feeling it and examining it before taking up a scalpel and a bone saw. He proceeded methodically, dictating as he went along, much of it stuff Stave already knew. But then he stopped.

‘Small reddish brown dried-up wounds on the left side of the forehead,’ the pathologist said. ‘Bleeding within the skin, the right side of the forehead swollen above the eyelid. Possibly the result of blows to the head.’

So it wasn’t just the old man who’d been beaten before he’d been killed, Stave thought. At least one of the women had tried to defend herself – either that or the killer had been harbouring a deep-seated hatred of her too.

After a bit Czrisini sawed off the top of the skull. A heavy smell filled the room. The assistant glanced discreetly, or so he thought, over at Stave, who gave him a sardonic smile in return.

Maschke, however, gagged, put his right hand over his mouth and dashed for the door, to a scornful look from the assistant. Stave felt like kicking him. People should be glad that not everyone could be so blasé about poking around in corpses.

‘Brain already substantially degraded,’ Czrisini dictated imperturbably. Then he looked at the chief inspector and added, ‘Indicator for a time of death approximately four weeks ago.’

‘The twentieth of January then,’ Stave murmured.

‘Very possibly,’ Czrisini said.

The assistant glanced at the pair of them, clearly wondering how on earth they could have come to such an exact date.

‘Dental plate in the upper jaw,’ said the pathologist. ‘Two artificial molars in the lower jaw, gold. Right lingual bone and both upper laryngeal bones broken,’ Czrisini noted as he began dealing with the throat. ‘Typical in a strangulation case. Almost certainly the cause of death.’

The pathologist slowly made his way down the body, flayed it, and analysed the bones, nerves and internal organs.

‘Substantial partially digested foodstuff in the stomach,’ he noted. The smell did not improve. Czrisini’s assistant glance at Stave again.

‘Any idea what she might have eaten?’ the chief inspector asked.

‘Bread most likely. Or porridge. Enough at least for her not to be hungry.’

Eventually the doctor got to her lower abdomen. Stave came closer out of curiosity.

‘No sign of vaginal injury,’ Czrisini noted. He took up the scalpel again, sliced open the old scar, entering the woman’s body the way a surgeon must once have done.

‘Left fallopian tube missing.’

‘The result of an operation?’

‘Probably. The right-side tube has developed abnormally and the ovary is enlarged.’ He stopped, then cut away some tissue which Stave couldn’t identify as belonging to any organ.

‘There,’ the pathologist said, indicating something red in the ovary which the chief inspector didn’t recognise. ‘Something in the ovary. Saturated with blood. About the size of a cherry.’

Stave felt queasy for the first time. ‘An embryo?’ he wheezed.

‘No, a tumour,’ Czrisini replied.

‘Cancer?’

‘Whether it’s benign or malignant, I can’t tell easily. But it hardly makes any difference, does it?’

The chief inspector had pulled himself to. ‘Could she have had children?’

The pathologist stared long and hard at the corpse’s largely eviscerated abdomen, then at the organs he had removed, lying in the steel receptacles. Then he shook his head.

‘I doubt it. This woman has growths and deformations in her abdomen and probably had for some time. That is probably why the left fallopian tube was removed. The one on the right is also abnormal. And then there’s that tumour in her ovary. In any case there are no indications of a successful birth, no old vaginal scars. No, I would put money on her being childless.’

‘When did this woman have her operation?’

‘Hard to say. The scars are completely healed. Not in the last 12 months. But probably within the last ten years. Before that she would have been exceptionally young for an invasive procedure such as this.’

‘Between 1937 and 1946. In a private surgery?’

Czrisini gave him a surprised look and shook his head. ‘No, if it was all done properly it would have been in a hospital with a surgical ward.’

‘Did many hospitals in the Reich carry out operations of this nature?’

‘In the whole of the Reich? Hundreds.’

‘Pity.’

Stave followed the rest of the autopsy in silence. There was nothing more that might have been of any use to him.

A man who was the only other victim to have been beaten defending himself; a woman who might have been the mother of the child. What had cropped up in Bürger-Prinz’s practice the other day as an elegant family drama hypothesis had been ripped asunder by the pathologist’s scalpel like some rotten internal organ. The woman lying on the dissecting table had never had children. And in all probability, she too had been beaten by the murderer prior to being strangled.

So, what was he left with? Four victims, all probably killed on the same day. Two medallions. The result of the autopsy. This woman was well-to-do. The earring shaped like a starfish. Delicate hands, not those of a manual worker. Nor were those of the old man, or the younger woman. That was too much of a coincidence to be chance, the chief inspector thought. All four victims belonged together.

Did the operation give him any other lead? If the dead woman wasn’t from Hamburg – and nobody here had identified her – then where might the operation have been carried out. In the east? Königsberg? In the decimated capital, Berlin? It could have been anywhere from Flensburg to Garmisch. Who might remember her? Where might the surgeon live – if he was still alive, which in the circumstances was probably unlikely.

‘I’ll send you a report,’ Czrisini said, washing his hands.

‘Please send me copies of the other three autopsies too,’ Stave said, ignoring the stare of the assistant.

‘Sorry I brought you with me,’ he said to Maschke outside the door of the institute. The vice squad man had been leaning against a wall, smoking, his face still pale and the hand holding the Lucky Strike still shaking slightly. ‘I thought you would be interested in this part of working with the murder squad.’

‘I’d prefer to stick with my ladies of the night,’ Maschke said, not sounding in the least sarcastic. 

M
acDonald turned up in Stave’s office at the agreed time. The lieutenant was pale-faced and shifty-looking. He avoided Erna Berg’s eyes. And barely glanced at Stave. He was as nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof.

‘Should I put up a notice saying, “Out of bounds for German civilians”?’ the chief inspector muttered.

MacDonald stared at him in irritation for a second, as if he’d just been wakened from a dream, then shook his head apologetically.

‘We don’t even notice things like that, I’m afraid,’ he said glibly. ‘It’s old colonial tradition. Don’t let it get to you, old boy.’

‘Barriers are still barriers, and I’m no coolie,’ Stave replied.

‘Nonetheless a sign like that is honest and open,’ the lieutenant came back at him, with unexpected seriousness. ‘I can assure you that in England we have worse barriers. Often invisible, retrospective barriers – Oxford, certain clubs, the officers’ lounge. They somehow manage to make people ashamed of their background, their own family, their own name.’

Stave thought of his own, not exactly glorious career in the police. There had been trouble with the Nazis. Had he ever felt ashamed of his own background? Had he ever been shown the door because he had been born into the wrong family? He wondered what secret battles MacDonald had had to fight to get where he was today.

‘I’ve got nothing against your family name,’ he said.

‘You even manage to pronounce it properly,’ the lieutenant said with a smile. Stave smiled too. Does no harm to be up to speed at times, he thought but didn’t say.

Maschke came in. Following the autopsy, Stave had told him to take a break but he seemed to have recovered. We’ll get this done, between the three of us, the inspector thought to himself.

He closed the office door and went over the results of the autopsy. He had sent a photo of the earring to Department S but had had nothing back from them. The other earring had not turned up on the black market yet. An officer had gone round every jeweller in the
city that had reopened. Nothing. And nobody remembered having made anything like it. Stave didn’t mention his visit to Bürger-Prinz the previous day.

‘Anybody got any new ideas?’ he asked at the end.

‘We could send the photos and descriptions of the three adult victims to every CID department in all former parts of the Reich, or at least those where there are CID departments. Maybe one of them is not just a victim, but was also investigated by the police,’ Maschke suggested.

Stave nodded, annoyed with himself. It was a simple idea, he should have thought of it himself. It’s gradually getting on top of me, he thought. At least Maschke was still on the ball. ‘We should assume that they were all members of one family, a well-to-do family and not from Hamburg.’