The Murderer in Ruins (24 page)

The three of them talked it over, although actually only two of them said anything. MacDonald just stared blankly out of the window. For Stave the discussion was more or less déjà vu because it was almost identical to the conversation he’d had with the psychologist. Except that this time there was no suggestion that the older of the two women might have been the child’s mother.

‘If this is all based on some domestic thing, then we’re not likely to get any further as to the motives without some sort of lead,’ Maschke concluded. He sounded weary. ‘If somebody got mad at Daddy because he took his toy scooter away and as a result decided to exterminate the entire family, how likely are we to find that out? Or if some perverted old uncle attacks his niece? Or if some long-suffering housewife just decided to bump off all her relations? Any of those could be motive enough, but nobody might know anything about it. We don’t have anything to go on.’

‘Maybe it has something to do with an inheritance,’ Stave suggested. The idea had just occurred to him: ‘Somebody killing off the rest of the family so he alone can inherit? All the victims were well fed, so they weren’t poor. That means there was something worth inheriting. There have always been people willing to murder for
money. These days it might not be greed but need that prompts somebody to speed up their inheritance. A couple of old medallions or paintings to sell on the black market. For some people that could mean the difference between freezing to death or not. Starving or not. Although I don’t think it’s very probable given that the victims were stripped naked. Would somebody killing for an inheritance do that? Still, it’s an avenue worth exploring.’

Maschke thought about it for a moment, then nodded. ‘Okay, but what do we do next?’

‘If we’re writing to all the CID departments in the former Reich, then we should ask them for information about any suspicious inheritance claims. Meanwhile in Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein we should talk to all the registry offices, cemetery administrators and funeral parlours: ask them if anyone matching the descriptions of any of our four victims matches someone reported dead, even under unsuspicious circumstances? Did all the funerals reported actually take place?’

The vice squad man stared at him in astonishment.

‘Maybe somebody kills his wife, reports her death to the registrar, and arranges her funeral. He gets his inheritance, but he doesn’t actually go ahead with the funeral, because he’s afraid somebody will notice the strangulation marks. So he dumps the body in the rubble and doesn’t bother with a funeral. No official will bother to find out if the funeral referred to on the death certificate actually took place. Certainly not the way things are at present. And an undertaker isn’t necessarily going to run to the registrar or police because a funeral is cancelled. He’ll just think the client got a cheaper offer.’

‘I wouldn’t want to be your rich uncle,’ Maschke mumbled.

‘We’ve got two big jobs to do,’ Stave said. ‘We’ve got to put together the letter to go out to all the CID offices, registrars and so forth. That means we’re going to need dozens of copies of the photos, maybe even hundreds. Frau Berg can deal with that.’

He noticed MacDonald wince at her name. But nobody said anything. 

‘And we need to send a letter to all the surgeons who’ve carried out ovarian operations in the last ten years, with photographs of the older woman, both head and abdomen. We need to pay a visit in person to every doctor in a 200-kilometre radius of Hamburg. That will be quicker. You can do that, Maschke.’

‘My lucky day,’ the vice squad man said, though he didn’t seem too unhappy with the task. ‘As long as you don’t ask me to attend another autopsy, I’m your man.’

He’s glad to be out of here, Stave reckoned. Out of the firing line if the rubble murderer causes us any more grief. Maschke had no idea that for all that he seemed to be giving him a task that might be better for his career prospects, the chief inspector had his own reasons.

Stave got to his feet. ‘To work.’

S
tave hung back a few moments after his men had left the office before going out into the anteroom. Maybe MacDonald and Frau Berg would be grateful for a couple of minutes on their own. But when he finally opened the door, his secretary was sitting behind her desk alone. He told her what her needed her do, and she took a note, though her hand was shaking.

It had got to a point where he could no longer pretend not to have noticed anything. ‘Is there something wrong?’ he asked. A second too late, he realised how intimate that sounded. ‘You of course don’t have to tell me anything,’ he added quickly, realising that that sounded even more awkward.

Erna Berg made a brave effort at a smile, then collapsed in tears. Stave stood there next to her, embarrassed as he watched the tears roll down her cheeks behind hands covering her eyes, ending in a puddle on the desk. He took out his handkerchief to wipe her face, but then decided that would be even more embarrassingly intimate, and instead just used it to wipe the desk. For what seemed like an eternity he stood there agonising, not knowing what to do, terrified that at any moment somebody would open the door and come in. 

Eventually his secretary calmed down, took the handkerchief from his hand and wiped her eyes, sniffling.

‘I can hardly give this back to you like this,’ she mumbled, putting it in her pocket. ‘I’ll wash it and iron it and bring it back tomorrow.’

‘Keep it,’ Stave said.

‘One thing less to worry about. I’m sorry for making a scene.’

‘Take the rest of the day off.’

She glanced up at him in horror. ‘Right now I’m better off here than at home.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I’m sure you’ve got wind of…’

‘MacDonald?’

‘James – Lieutenant MacDonald warned me that you were on to us.’

‘You haven’t done anything for me to be on to.’

‘Thanks for the well-meant lie, but Herr MacDonald and I have become close over the past few weeks.’

‘It’s not a crime.’

‘If you’re a married woman, expecting a child and suddenly your husband turns up, now of all times, it’s pretty close.’

Stave sat down on the visitor’s chair in front of the desk. ‘Turbulent times,’ he mumbled.

‘The thing is, I thought I was a widow. My husband was reported missing. No news, nothing to indicate he was still alive. You know how it is.’ She blushed fiercely and turned her eyes to the floor. ‘Then Lieutenant MacDonald arrives in your office. We talked together. We are both lonely, single, one thing led to another. It was never part of the plan that I would get pregnant so quickly. But we want the child. We’ve been dreaming of a future together. Including my son. Herr MacDonald wants to adopt him. We want to move to England, at some stage. To get away from all the rubble here.’ She put her hands to her eyes. ‘And then, two days ago, there’s a knock on the door. I thought it was James. I was surprised, I opened the door and – there’s my husband, standing there. A pale shadow of his former self. With just one leg. And that look in his eyes, lost, helpless and yet at the same time somehow brutal.’

She burst into tears again. Stave waited until she had recovered, relieved that she wasn’t looking at him. His whole body was wracked with anger and envy. Envy that the husband she thought lost forever had returned, while there was still no trace of his son. And anger that she wasn’t even pleased by the fact.

‘Does your husband have any idea about your…’ he tried to find a suitable word, but couldn’t and ended up using the rather lame, ‘…little difficulty?’

She shook her head. ‘For the time being James and I are not seeing one another outside work. It’s been a shock for him too. But I can’t keep my condition a secret forever. It’s not as if I can pretend it’s my husband’s baby. I can’t. You understand that.’

S
tave understood only too well. A man who had left one of his legs somewhere in Russia and had returned to his young wife. A wife who looks at him with horror when he knocks on her door. A wife who pulls away from him in bed at night as if he had the plague. He wondered if even his little son didn’t dare go near the man with the disability?

‘What are you going to do?’

She pulled herself together all of a sudden, forced a smile. ‘First of all, I’m going to deal with all these letters, Chief Inspector.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Stave said, getting to his feet. ‘Obviously it’s none of my business.’

S
tave stood looking at the city map with the four red tacks. Three in the east, one in the west. The three crime scenes east of the Alster were barely 15 minutes’ walk apart. But from there to Lappenbergs Allee was at least an hour on foot.

That means the killer had access to a car or a truck.

Stave thought about what that meant. It meant that the killer had to be one of the very few Germans who were allowed to drive. Or that he was British. On the other hand, motor vehicles were anything but inconspicuous. And none of the places where the bodies had been found were directly accessible by a vehicle – which meant
that the bodies would have to be carried from the vehicle on the street to the spot where they were found. Hardly possible for that not to be noticed during the day. And at night, a vehicle of any sort would have been all the more noticeable because the British hardly ever drove at night and it was expressly forbidden for Germans.

Goddamnit, thought Stave. How come nothing fits? Every time some little detail messes up the theory. He thought back to the last autopsy. Why would a killer apparently so greedy that he even steals underclothes ignore a woman’s gold teeth? Gold would buy you anything you wanted on the black market.

Was he just stripping them to cover his tracks? But if he wasn’t killing them to rob them, if he didn’t rape them, if he had no family grudge against them, why on earth did he kill them in the first place?

Stave was so angry he could have bashed his head against the wall. Angry with the murderer, but even more so with himself, and with his colleagues who weren’t helping, and who were either obsessed with their own private dramas, or even sabotaging his efforts.

By now it was gone 6 p.m. The anteroom was empty, the corridor was deserted. Right, thought Stave, if I can’t get anywhere with the main task, maybe I should investigate the other one. The private one.

H
e left his room and went quietly along the dimly lit corridor, glancing cautiously in the other offices where the doors were open. It was a quiet evening. Stave reached the stairwell, went down two floors and stopped. Up until that point, anybody who might have seen him would have thought he was just going home. But from here on he was in foreign territory. The chief inspector took a deep breath and entered the realm of the vice squad.

There was a corridor with offices on either side, just like upstairs in the homicide department. There were no lights on anywhere. Stave hurried down the corridor in the dark, taking stock of the nameplates on the doors.

Police Inspector Lothar Maschke. 

He glanced around, then tried the door handle.

Not locked.

Stave slipped through the door silently and closed it behind him. His heart was pounding. He had never done anything forbidden in all his life, and yet here he was, breaking into a colleague’s office.

He took his torch from his pocket, turned it on and looked round. There was no anteroom, just one tiny office. It looked messy, piles of reports and police mug shots, notebooks, empty Lucky Strike packets all over the desk. An overflowing ashtray. A chair carelessly pushed back from the desk rather than neatly tucked in. On the wall, held up with four rusty tacks at a bit of an angle, was a map of Hamburg with the places where the bodies were found marked with pencil crosses. On another wall was Maschke’s police academy diploma. That wasn’t straight either.

Stave walked over to the desk, taking care not to touch anything. A framed photo of a serious-looking elderly woman. The chief inspector recalled that his colleague still lived at home with his mother. Apart from that there was nothing personal. Just the pile of stuff on the desk, copies of the missing person posters, the autopsy reports, the police photographs, lists of surgeons and dentists.

But not the missing files.

Stave pulled on thin black leather gloves, then began sorting through the paper, taking care to leave it exactly as it had been. You never knew if the mess might be deliberate.

Nothing.

The desk drawers next. There were two on either side. Top left: cigarettes, lighters. Stave raised his eyebrows. A lot of them for somebody on a police salary. Either his colleague sent half his pay literally up in smoke or he had sources a detective ought not to.

The lower drawer was deep and contained index cards with photos. Stave pulled one out and studied it. It showed police mug shots, with names next to them. Notes on the other side, in Maschke’s handwriting.

‘Street name: Lena or the Dane.’

‘Carries knife on each ankle.’

‘Willy Warncke’s girl (Fat Willy).’

‘Yvonne Delluc. Has family here.’

‘Note: Isabelle is favourite with British officers. Don’t go hard on her.’

‘Arrested 5.1.47 black marketing, one pair nylon stockings, 20 cigarettes.’

The chief inspector flicked through the pile. Whores. Pimps. Whores. Pimps. No punters. Astonishing how many of his targets Maschke had categorised in his brief time with the vice squad.

The index cards were in no recognisable order, but Stave reckoned Maschke would know where each was. There’s definitely some sort of order in this apparent chaos, he thought to himself.

Right upper drawer: pencils, a broken sharpener, notebooks with pages torn out. There were one or two that were full but that Maschke clearly intended to use again. Next to them a couple of rubbers and two bent paperclips, a few rusty tacks and flakes of tobacco.

Lower right drawer as deep as that on the left: a dozen or so scraps of paper, mostly scrunched up, another three notebooks. Stave shone the pale milk beam from his torch in and glanced over the scraps of paper. Columns of figures. The pieces of paper were covered in scribbled numbers. Sometimes there were just a few on one sheet, sometimes there were lots. The notebooks were also stuffed with numbers. Telephone numbers? Safe combinations? There was nothing to give a clue as to what they meant. No names, not even a single letter.