He was likely to find out soon enough. And Ehrlich was equally likely to find out what Stave had done in 1938 when the synagogues were being plundered. Absolutely nothing.
Hamburg Palace of Justice was a huge Renaissance palace with a bright red facade of light golden sandstone and tall white windows, some of them flanked by twisted columns: a great big nineteenth-century shoebox which, incredibly, managed to escape being hit by a single bomb in two world wars. It was in this fortress that the public prosecutor’s department had their offices.
Stave walked into the building. It was only a few paces across the square from the CID building, past the concert hall and through a neglected little park.
A few minutes later he was sitting on an uncomfortable visitor’s chair. Nervous, feeling like a schoolboy called in to see the headmaster, angry with himself for the way he felt but unable to do anything about it. He glanced around surreptitiously while the man sitting opposite leafed through documents in front of him.
Doctor Albert Ehrlich was a small, bald-headed man, with eyes swimming behind the thick lenses of old-fashioned horn-rimmed spectacles. He was in collar and tie with an English tweed jacket and razor-sharp pressed trousers. There were no photos of his wife or sons, nothing at all of a personal nature, just filing cabinets and sheets of paper and on a little table next to him a big black typewriter. Stave glanced furtively at Ehrlich’s short, chubby fingers covered with a light down and noticed he wore no wedding ring.
He no longer wore a wedding ring himself. One night in the summer of 1943 he had thrown it into the Elbe down by the harbour. The water was seductively close and dark … But he had turned on his heel and gone home, if that’s what you could call the ruins he inhabited. He closed his eyes for a moment.
‘I’m very sorry to have kept you waiting,’ Ehrlich said at last, closing the file in front of him. ‘Can I offer you tea?’ he said, in a quiet, cultivated voice.
Stave gave a timid smile. ‘Thank you, yes.’ And he opened his eyes wide to see a secretary come in with a steaming teapot that smelled wonderful. Real tea, Stave realised, Earl Grey even, rather than nettles with some hot water poured over them.
Ehrlich poured the tea. ‘I used to drink coffee,’ he piped up, ‘I only got used to tea during my time in England. It is a lot easier to get hold of, especially here in the British occupation zone.’
‘Is that why you came back to Hamburg, the chief port in the British zone?’
‘Ah, I can see Lieutenant MacDonald has already put you in the picture,’ Ehrlich replied with an amused smile. Stave thought there was something striking about his oversized owl-like eyes, something furtive.
You idiot, he told himself, typical CID attitude, ready to break into the conversation, take the man by surprise: not exactly the right way to deal with a public prosecutor.
‘Thank you for agreeing so readily to our request for an autopsy,’ he said, to change the subject.
Ehrlich sat back, relaxed: ‘Tell me about the case. I’m all ears.’
Stave told him what they had found out including the various theories about the victim and her possible attacker.
‘A difficult one,’ Ehrlich said at last when the chief inspector had finished.
‘The first thing is to find out who the victim is. Otherwise we’re never going to get anywhere,’ Stave admitted.
‘So you don’t think it was a robbery-motivated murder, despite sending Maschke off to find files on such incidents even though you know as well as I do that they’ve been burnt in a certain oven.’
He’s a wily one, thought Stave in surprise. In a mugging, the identity of the victim doesn’t necessarily lead to the perpetrator, as criminals often attack people they don’t know. Ehrlich must have decided that the victim and her attacker were acquainted and that Stave had an idea.
‘I’m simply trying to be efficient,’ he replied.
‘Ah, efficiency – a very German characteristic,’ the prosecutor replied, with just the slightest hint of irony.
‘A characteristic in criminal work everywhere,’ Stave shot back, regretting that they had got into this game of cat-and-mouse. ‘But you’re right,’ he added, in a conciliatory tone. Maybe he had suddenly come to trust Ehrlich, or maybe it was just the effect of the hot tea. Contrary to his normal habit of presenting prosecutors with no more than hard facts and the most plausible theories, Stave decided that this time he would mention something that was little more than the vaguest suspicion. ‘This crime was not just brutal,’ he ventured, hesitantly, ‘but also particularly efficient. Lethal force, resulting in immediate death. Then the thorough stripping of the body.’
‘Cold blooded,’ Ehrlich interjected.
‘Indeed. Carefully planned and perfectly executed. Someone capable of that has either had every sense of morality blunted – or is mentally ill but at the same time capable of logical reasoning.’
‘After this war and the 12 years of that regime there are more than enough people running around Germany whose underdeveloped conscience hasn’t the slightest problem with one death more or less. And we would see most of them as ordinary honest citizens.’
‘Even so, it’s not every day here in Hamburg that a young woman gets garrotted, stripped and left lying in the rubble.’
The prosecutor nodded: ‘Touche. So, what do you really think happened, Chief Inspector?’
‘I reckon it was somebody mentally deranged. Somebody who knew the victim or at least had been surreptitiously watching her. Somebody who planned the deed over weeks or even months, and chose the moment to strike.’
‘What evidence do you have?’
‘Apart from the brutal nature of the attack, none at all.’ Stave didn’t see the point in trying to make the prosecutor think he knew more than he did. ‘In our line of work we often have to deal with mentally unsound people. I’m no expert in this field. If people like that – as I’ve heard said – have a particular modus operandi, there’s none obvious here. But then it’s a bit too early for that.’
The two of them sat in silence for a while. There was no need to say what both Stave and Ehrlich were thinking: there would be more such murders.
‘So what do you intend to do now?’ the prosecutor finally asked, pouring them both more tea.
The chief inspector nodded in thanks and warmed his hands on the cup, inhaled the aroma, and smiled. Then he pulled out of his coat pocket a roll of paper that still smelled of fresh printer’s ink.
‘This is the first copy of a reward poster we intend to put up,’ he said, handing it over the table.
‘“A reward of one thousand Reichsmarks”,’ Ehrlich read out in a quiet voice. ‘“Robbery and murder. On Monday, 20 January 1947, an as yet unidentified woman was found dead in Baustrasse, Hamburg. Violent robbery suspected.” Well, you’re not exactly a poet, Chief Inspector.’ Ehrlich examined the photograph of the deceased and read the description.
‘One minute you tell me you don’t suspect it was violent robbery,’ he said. ‘And yet here I am reading it in black and white.’
‘I don’t want to get people worried,’ Stave said in justification. ‘And in any case, I don’t think suggesting it might be a mentally disturbed individual is exactly going to help.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘If we say we’re looking for a lunatic then hundreds of witnesses will turn up accusing their neighbours, colleagues or anybody who’s got up their noses. That will mean a waste of time and effort, and cause more problems than it solves.’
‘You may well be right.’
‘We’re going to put up these posters all over town, and wait until somebody who knows the victim turns up.’
‘And what do you intend to do in the meantime?’