‘Maybe she was new in Hamburg?’ MacDonald suggested.
‘The ice on the Elbe is a metre thick, the port is closed,’ Stave interjected. ‘Most of the railway lines are covered in ice, the points frozen, snowdrifts everywhere.’
‘The bridges have been bombed, the stations destroyed,’ Maschke snapped. MacDonald paid him no attention.
‘Most of the trains that get through are carrying coal or potatoes, not people, and on the few passenger trains that do get through, returning prisoners-of-war are given priority. It’s not impossible that some woman from somewhere else arrived in the city over the past few days, but it’s extremely unlikely. Particularly a woman in such rude health as our victim.’
‘Maybe somebody drove her here in a car?’ MacDonald mused.
Stave was amazed at the lieutenant’s honesty; he had wondered the same thing himself, but not dared to say it. ‘Indeed,’ he replied. ‘Fuel is rationed, Germans have to carry a book in which they note every journey, and longer trips need special permission. Apart from anything else there are next to no cars or trucks still in working order. That makes it extremely unlikely that any German could have given her a lift. On the other hand it would have been no problem for someone British.’
‘Good point,’ Maschke said.
MacDonald looked unperturbed. ‘I have a photograph of the victim. I’ll pass it round my fellow officers.’
Stave smiled. ‘Thank you. I’m glad to say that what we’ll call the “British angle” isn’t all we have. Let’s assume that our victim is neither a streetwalker, nor a missing daughter of some respectable family, nor a working-class girl, nor a new arrival – then there are only a few alternatives remaining. Perhaps she was a little known secretary working for the city authorities, the occupation forces or in one of the few firms that have reopened for business?’
‘Or she might be a shop assistant in one of the clothing shops,’ Maschke suggested. ‘C amp;A on Monckeberg Strasse is open again.’
The chief inspector nodded. ‘What else? Our unknown victim was earning honest money, at least enough to keep her well fed. Then she goes missing but nobody reports the fact to the police. Does that mean she has no friends or relatives here?’ He thought of Erna Berg. ‘Maybe she’s a war widow? Or a refugee who arrived in Hamburg a year or so ago?’ He got to his feet and began pacing up and down. Suddenly he no longer felt so tired. ‘The other possibility is that she has a boyfriend or some other relative who doesn’t want us to come across him, because he himself is the murderer. In most cases murderers and victims already know one another. Maybe we should look for a fiance? Or an uncle? That’s possible too.’
‘So, what do you suggest?’ MacDonald asked.
Stave gave him a cool smile. ‘I suggest we meet up here again tomorrow. Good evening.’
An hour later Stave was standing in his freezing apartment, trying to light the fire. He had fetched three potatoes from his meagre rations in the cellar. They had been frozen and were exuding a sweet-sour slime as they thawed out. He cooked them on his cast-iron stove, along with his last white cabbage. Then he put it all through the mincer, formed the mush into a long loaf-like shape, added salt and fried it. ‘Poor man’s sausage,’ the neighbour who had given him the recipe called it. Even though it took more than an hour to cook on the little stove, Stave didn’t mind. It gave him the illusion at least of eating something nourishing. The other advantage was that cooking stopped him thinking.
Eventually it was time for bed. He lay down on the bed in his pullover and jogging pants, pulled the blankets up and stared at the window where the moonlight cast greenish patterns on the sheet ice.
Stave wanted to think about the dead woman, to weigh up the pros and cons of all the possible theories, to see if there were any leads they had missed. But the image of the unknown victim only brought to mind the image of his own dead wife. And that took him back to that night four years ago, amidst the hail of bombs.
If only I had schnapps, he thought to himself. Then at least I could drink myself to sleep.
Frozen Earth
Tuesday, 21 January 1947
He faced a wall of flames, red, white and blue, a burning heat on his face, his every breath agonising. All around him beams collapsed, tiles fell from the walls, a thunder louder than machine-gun fire, a stench of burning hair and scorched flesh. Stave was running through rubble, fire all around him, running and running, but stumbling because of his goddamn leg, painfully slow, even though he knew Margarethe was only a few steps away. He could hear her screams. She was calling out to him. And he was stuck somewhere else, amidst scorched walls, and smouldering wood, trying to call out her name, but only coughing and choking from the smoke that forced its way down his throat. And all of a sudden there was no sound from Margarethe, just a terrifying silence.
Stave jerked upright in bed, cold sweat all over his body. Utter darkness, ice on the window panes – yet he could still feel the burning, the fierce glare of the fires, a blaze as high as the apartment building. Goddamn nightmares, he told himself, and wiped his eyes. In reality he had been on duty on the other side of Hamburg that terrible night. He had been trapped in a collapsing building, his limp a perpetual reminder. But it was only several hours after the hail of bombs had stopped that, wounded and in shock from fear, he discovered the ruins of his own house. He had never heard Margarethe’s screams.
There were others who were haunted every night by events they had actually experienced: the fear of death on the front line, in a submarine, cowering in a cellar, sitting in a Gestapo cell. There were ways of dealing with that, Stave reckoned – maybe now that the war was over, maybe revisiting the scene of the horror. But how could anyone break free of a nightmare based on something they had never witnessed?
Self-pity was no help either, he reflected, clambering out of bed. The sheets crackled as the frost on them broke. I need to get more fuel, he said to himself as he kindled fire in the wood burner.
A short while later he set out on the long walk to CID headquarters; there was no fuel for the buses. A few tram lines had been patched up and were working again, but only for a few hours each day. I could get used to having Ruge’s taxi service, Stave thought to himself.
But secretly he was grateful for the hour’s walk. He was used to the sight of the rubble, the yellowing posters, the chalk graffiti, the cowed figures on the streets; none of that got him down any more. He enjoyed keeping up a brisk pace. It warmed him up, while at the same time the icy wind kept his head clear. Nothing to worry about, nothing to trouble him – for a whole hour.
By the time he reached the tall building on Karl-Muck-Strasse he was in a good mood. Erna Berg was already waiting for him, a smile on her face, maybe even a little more cheerful than normal.
‘The Herr Lieutenant is waiting for you in your office.’
Maschke was there too, but his secretary had either forgotten that or deliberately not mentioned him. The chief inspector said hello to both of them and sat down, preferring to keep his overcoat on. Erna Berg hurried over, set two mimeographed sheets down in front of him, gave MacDonald a shy glance and disappeared.
‘Doctor Czrisini’s report,’ Stave said. The other two were silent for a moment while he studied it. ‘A few things at least are clear. The date of death was between the eighteenth and twentieth of January, most probably towards the latter. So we may as well take the twentieth as a starting point. Cause of death: strangulation. It seems likely the murderer used a piece of wire. And highly likely he approached his victim from behind and slung the wire around her neck. It doesn’t look as if she tried to defend herself. Apart from that no other marks or evidence either on or inside the body.’