‘No sign of sexual intercourse?’ Maschke asked.
Stave shook his head. ‘No indication of rape. Nor any traces of sperm or other suggestions of consensual sexual activity shortly before death. Although obviously that possibility cannot be totally excluded.’
MacDonald coughed, clearly embarrassed. ‘How do you mean?’
Maschke gave a wan smile. ‘In the case of consensual sexual intercourse there would be no obvious wounds. Down there, I mean. And if the lucky lad she’d last let do the business was wearing a French letter, there’d be no trace of sperm either.’
‘That’s one way of putting it,’ Stave muttered. ‘But it is also clear that she’d been lying there for two days at most, meaning the killer hasn’t had that much time to vanish into the woodwork.’
The lieutenant smiled: ‘Given that no ships and only a few trains have left the city, that means he must still be in Hamburg.’
‘Not exactly reassuring for the good folk of our city,’ Maschke added.
‘But it makes our work a bit easier, I hope,’ Stave said, before turning to MacDonald: ‘Have you asked around amongst your fellow officers?’
‘They all took a look when I showed the photo of the strangled woman around at the club,’ the lieutenant replied. ‘But nobody recognised her. The officers have promised to ask their men, but I fear we won’t get much of a response there.’
Maschke snorted dismissively, but said nothing, catching Stave’s warning glance.
‘Keep at it,’ the chief inspector muttered. ‘It’s like surgeons and appendectomies; you can’t be 100 per cent sure of anything until you’ve eliminated all possible alternatives.’
The lieutenant nodded, and smiled again: ‘My pleasure.’
For him this investigation is just a bit of sport, like fox-hunting, Stave thought to himself, but then maybe that’s not such a bad comparison. He sighed wearily, ‘I need to go and file a report to the public prosecutor. Lieutenant, will you please be so good as to ask around a bit more amongst your comrades-in-arms? At the moment, British soldiers are the only ones who can easily leave Hamburg. And time is pressing.’
MacDonald nodded.
‘And Maschke, perhaps you can make enquiries amongst the street crime department. It might have been a mugging, somebody taking the girl for everything she had on her. These days even underwear fetches a price on the black market. See if they have anything on their files.’
Maschke cleared his throat, embarrassed all of a sudden. ‘You know, Chief Inspector, the files aren’t…’
Stave cursed under his breath. On 20 April 1945, with the British at the gates of the city, the Gestapo had burned all their files, some of them in the crematorium of the Neuengamme concentration camp. In doing so they had not only destroyed the evidence of their own crimes but also documentation relating to large numbers of ordinary criminals. If, prior to 1945, there had been reports of a mugger who was happy to murder using a piece of wire like a garrotte and taking every item from his victim including their underwear, then like as not there would no longer be a file on him.
‘Give it a go, even so,’ he said.
Maschke got to his feet and left, nodding to Stave but ignoring the lieutenant.
MacDonald however had got to his feet too, and casually asked Stave, ‘Which public prosecutor is responsible for this case?’
‘Doctor Ehrlich,’ Stave replied. ‘I’ve not dealt with him before.’
‘I know him – from England.’ The lieutenant gave him a look that was part sympathetic, part amused. ‘You should take care. He’s a tougher nut than he looks and he might not be the greatest fan of the Hamburg police.’
Stave slumped back down on his seat and suggested MacDonald sit down again too: ‘I would be grateful if you could fill me in.’
MacDonald smiled: ‘Just between the two of us?’
‘But of course.’
‘Herr Ehrlich,’ the lieutenant said in a measured tone, ‘joined the Hamburg public prosecutor’s office in 1929. He’s a very cultivated man, well-educated and gifted in music, a collector of modern art, above all the Expressionist movement. And, unfortunately, Jewish.’
The chief inspector closed his eyes. He knew what was coming.
‘In 1933, of course, he was immediately dismissed,’ MacDonald continued in the same dispassionate tone. ‘He got a job as a copy editor for a legal publishing house thanks to his wife – who by the way was Aryan enough to be a Wagnerian opera star. Both their sons were sent to private school in England, to get them out of the line of fire. Then came Reichskristallnacht.’
Stave nodded. He remembered the night. When the first reports of arson came in he was in the police station at Wandsbek, about to rush out to the nearest synagogue. Then came the order to remain in the building. A very clear order. And he complied. Not exactly the most heroic moment in his life. He had never spoken of it to anyone, not even Margarethe.
‘Ehrlich was arrested on the night of 1 November 1938 and taken to Neuengamme. I can imagine it wasn’t much fun, even though he almost never mentions it. A few weeks later he was released; friends in London had got a British visa for him. He sold off his art collection – for a song, I imagine. He managed to scrape together just enough money to buy his passage to England. His wife was not allowed to go with him; the visa was for him alone. Then war broke out.’
MacDonald shrugged almost apologetically. ‘The woman was on her own, desperate, abandoned by her husband and sons. The neighbours avoided her. She couldn’t even give piano lessons any more because nobody wanted to be seen in her company. Back in London Ehrlich was like a caged tiger pacing up and down: he tried everything to bring her over – via Switzerland, the USA, Spain, Portugal. There was no way. Eventually in 1941 he received a message from the Red Cross that his wife had taken her own life with an overdose of sleeping tablets.
‘By then I had already got to know him. He had found lodgings in Oxford and was lecturing on Roman law. It would be exaggerating to say we had become friends. Nonetheless it was me who got him the job at the public prosecutor’s office here, a few months ago.’
‘You?’ Stave almost blurted out.
MacDonald gave him an ironic smile, and Stave found himself wondering just how much power this young officer wielded.
‘Ehrlich was keen to return to Germany – to help with the reconstruction, to build a democracy, as he put it. So I asked around amongst our people and came up with this. There is a shortage of legal personnel with a clean slate and we’re grateful for every non-Nazi we can find. Not just in the prosecutor’s office but in the police too.’
Stave vaguely recognised it as a compliment. ‘But why on earth Hamburg? Ehrlich must have a lot of scores to settle here. Not exactly the best qualification for a public prosecutor.’
‘On the contrary, an excellent qualification,’ MacDonald replied. ‘Herr Ehrlich is one of the plaintiffs in the Curio House case.’
Stave didn’t need any explanation. Since 5 December 1946 the house on Rothenbaumchaussee had been the setting for the trial of nine men and seven women who as guards at the female concentration camp at Ravensbruck were charged with responsibility for the deaths of thousands.
‘Does he have the time to take on a new case?’
‘He asked to be put in charge of it. Herr Ehrlich is a hard worker.’
After the lieutenant left the room, Stave sat there for a moment, thinking. Why Ehrlich? The Curio House case would give him opportunity enough to bring particularly nasty Nazis to the scaffold. Why would a politically motivated public prosecutor like him be interested in the naked corpse of an unknown woman? It looked like a hard case, for sure, but in no way political. Was it?
In the end he gave up, and got to his feet with a sigh. Maybe what attracted the prosecutor to the case was nothing personal at all, but just the very mystery attached to it. Then again, maybe he wanted to be in charge of a case the police fell down on, giving him the chance to cashier a few CID men who might have worked rather too closely with the Gestapo but got away without being sacked in 1945.