‘What bastard did that?’ the older one asked. Her accent was broad, and she drawled. From East Prussia, Stave reckoned.
‘That’s what I’d like to know,’ he replied. ‘But I’d also like to know who the victim is.’
‘Never seen her.’
‘What about you?’ Stave asked handing the younger girl the photo.
‘I feel sick,’ she groaned. ‘I feel like throwing up. Take that away from me.’
Stave didn’t move. ‘You can throw up if you like, but only after you’ve told me whether or not you’ve ever seen this young woman.’
‘No,’ she almost screamed, then got to her feet and ran, bent over, to a grubby door to the rear of the room.
MacDonald leapt to his feet. To his horror Stave saw that the Brit had pulled a gun. Damned quick on the draw, he thought to himself, waving at the man to put it away. The lieutenant sat down again with the men, who’d all gone pale and were staring at him in terror.
‘Hildegard’s only been on the game a week,’ the older girl whispered, almost apologetically. ‘Where she comes from, they don’t see stuff like that every day.’
‘But you do?’
She gave a harsh laugh. ‘I came here in a refugee column from Breslau. I’ve seen so many corpses that a photo has no effect on me. Do you think she was a streetwalker?’
Stave had been about to answer gruffly that it was none of her business. But he could hear a kernel of fear underlying the cheekiness in her voice: the fear every street girl had that the next punter will want more than just a quickie round the corner.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked instead.
She hesitated a second, then whispered, ‘Ingrid Domin. As far as most of my customers are concerned, I’m Veronique. It sounds more erotic. French, you know?’ She made a scornful expression.
Stave thought back to the way Maschke had addressed the two street girls earlier. Then he dismissed the thought, tore a leaf from his notebook and scribbled on it: Tel 34 10 00. Extensions 8451-8454, and then his name.
‘Do me a favour: if you hear anything call me. Or come by the office.’ He added the number of his office. ‘Whatever, no matter how hysterical or crazy it might seem, just tell me. Promise?’
She agreed and quickly shoved the piece of paper into her handbag.
The chief inspector got to his feet. ‘I have no idea whether or not this woman was…’ he found himself looking for a suitable word, ‘…whether or not this lady belonged to your trade. Up until a few minutes ago, I had assumed so, but now I’m not so sure, which doesn’t mean that I’m ruling it out. So keep a look out. And talk it over with the other girls.’
‘I’m a tough girl, I can look out for myself,’ she said quietly. And smiled at him again
‘Looks like you’re lucky with the ladies,’ MacDonald said as he came over.
The corner of Stave’s mouth twitched. ‘One of them ran straight out of the room to throw up,’ he reminded the lieutenant.
‘But the other one was a lot nicer to you than the four old boozers over there were to me.’
‘So that was a waste of time too.’
‘Absolutely. Never seen her, though, that said, at least one of them was so drunk he wouldn’t have recognised his own mother.’
‘Happens more often than you might think – that children don’t recognise the corpses of their own mothers,’ Stave replied.
‘What now?’
‘We hit the next joint. Then the one after that, then the one after that…’
‘Good job there aren’t so many left then,’ MacDonald said. ‘Never thought I’d be so grateful to our Air Force comrades for their bombing raids.’
Stave said nothing, just pushed open the door.
An hour and a half later the pair of them walked through the door of Kamsing, the last venue on their list, with nothing to show. They had questioned half a dozen landlords, a few guests, at least 20 street girls, as many pimps and a few black marketeers. But not one of them admitted to knowing the dead woman.
‘Let me buy you one of these dreadful Chinese soups,’ MacDonald said. ‘They probably serve up monkey brains and rats’ tails.’
‘As long as it’s hot,’ Stave muttered gratefully and plonked himself down on a wobbly chair next to a little round table. Then he took a look around.
The restaurant was full, or at least fuller than the other places they’d gone round. Eight well-dressed young men were playing cards – poker – at a large table in an alcove. The notes on the table in front of them were thousand Reichsmark notes.
Bastards, Stave thought to himself, though he was only too well aware that his indignation was mainly fired by envy. Black marketeers gaming away their nights, gold watches on their wrists. His colleague called them the black marketeers’ Iron Cross and had told Stave that they hid ration cards under the collars of their overcoats, and traded jewellery and medicine over the tables, wrapped in newspaper. But not yet, it was too early for that. Anyway, it wasn’t his problem. He slurped at his soup.
‘No idea what they use to spice this,’ MacDonald said between spoonfuls. ‘But it’s at least as warming as a single malt whisky.’
Stave didn’t bother telling the lieutenant that it had been years since he’d tasted even a drop of whisky. ‘Indeed,’ he muttered. At least he felt warm for the first time all day. His mouth was burning and numbed by exotic spices. He felt as if every muscle in his body was unwinding. If I don’t get to my feet, I’m going to fall asleep here and now in front of MacDonald, he thought as he forced himself to stand up.
‘Time to take the field. You do one half of the customers,’ he indicated a rough line through the middle of the room, ‘and I’ll deal with the rest. Meet you at the door.’
A few minutes later they were done at Kamsing, no wiser than when they had entered. They wandered back down the Reeperbahn to the David police station where Maschke was already waiting for them. His breath hung in front of him in small white clouds, his nose was blue from the cold and he was rubbing his hands together. Stave suddenly felt sorry for him.
‘Not one person on the Reeperbahn ever laid eyes on our victim. She must have been quite a girl,’ he said.
Maschke’s cynicism irritated Stave. Was he really such a hard case?
Or was there something else at play? The shyness of a grown man still living at home with his mother? Or, like many of his other colleagues who worked on the vice squad, had Maschke developed a protective attitude towards his little ‘street swallows’, as they called them? Was it relief he was hearing in the man’s voice? Relief that the victim wasn’t one of the Reeperbahn girls?
‘Right, it’s back to the office to talk through what we have or haven’t found, then home to Mum for us all,’ the chief inspector said.
Stave looked out of the office window at Hamburg spread out beneath him, as dark as during the wartime blackout. There were only a few lights here and there to be seen, probably from houses the British had commandeered. Other than that he could make out flickering flames from wood stoves, dangerous enough in themselves in the half-bombed semi-ruin, and the glow of candles. Even his own office in the grey evening gloom was lit by no more than a single dim bulb. Stave looked up at it with some concern: if it were to blow, he had no idea when he’d get a replacement. Probably not until the spring. He sighed and looked at the other two waiting in front of his desk.
Erna Berg was long gone. She’d left Inspector Muller’s report on his desk. Stave flicked through it silently. ‘No surgeon recognises the body,’ he said at length. He was exhausted. ‘Obviously one afternoon wasn’t enough for them to go round all the relevant doctors in the city. They’ll start again tomorrow. It looks as if the victim’s appendix scar isn’t going to give us a lead either, for the moment at least. Nor have we had any missing person reports over the past 24 hours.’
Maschke was drumming on the desk with his nicotine-stained fingers. ‘It would also appear that none of the street girls has gone missing,’ he said.