‘I intend to go to the cemetery,’ Stave replied. ‘They’re burying the victim this afternoon in Ojendorf. I’ll stay in the background and see if any mourners turn up.’
Stave didn’t return directly to his office after the interview. Instead he wandered aimlessly around town. He needed to get his thoughts in order, and that was something he did best while walking. He went through every detail of the case again in his head: what did he know about the victim? Nothing. About the perpetrator? Even less. What else could he do but wait? Wait for a witness to turn up, or at least somebody who could identify the victim from the photograph on the poster. But what if nobody turned up? Maybe he had missed a trick? But if he had, what was it?
Stave felt under pressure, and he didn’t like that. Under pressure from Cuddel Breuer, and from Ehrlich. He preferred to work on his own. He liked to bring in experts only when necessary: photographers, forensics, pathologists. But what was he supposed to do with Maschke? Not to mention MacDonald. Neither of them were CID people; they were amateurs not professionals. On the other hand, maybe an outsider’s opinion might be usefuclass="underline" it was possible the Brit might notice something he had missed. He seemed bright enough, and he had influence.
Stave dragged himself away from his thoughts. He was back at Eppendorfer Baum, a long way from Karl-Muck-Platz. A snack bar had been set up in a half-ruined building. The upper stories had been hit by a bomb and the remainder of the building stood like a half-eviscerated corpse. Only the ground floor seemed undamaged and somebody had put up a board with the childishly scrawled words ‘Fresh meals’.
Stave walked into the brightly lit but sadly unheated room and sat down at a table. He did his best to ignore the throbbing in his left ankle. He cast a casual glance around. It was midday and there were a few workers, a few office people, a mother with two children, and sitting on his own in a corner a man with a ‘Russia face’ in an undyed Wehrmacht greatcoat, the empty left sleeve sewn up to the front of it.
Stave ordered the dish of the day, which cost one Reichsmark: a pickled herring with two thin slices of gherkin and a spoonful of some murky vegetables with no taste. He gobbled it down, only to feel hungrier than before. If only they had coffee. He sighed deeply, paid and left.
Back at the office MacDonald was waiting for him. Or at least that’s what he said. Stave had the impression that it was not so much the murder investigation that had brought the lieutenant to Karl-Muck-Platz as the chance for a chat with Erna Berg.
‘Anything new from the ranks of the British army?’ Stave asked.
MacDonald gave an apologetic shrug that for a moment made him look like a little boy. ‘Everybody stares wide-eyed when they see the photograph, but there’s no indication that anybody recognises her.’
‘Have you got your jeep here?’
The lieutenant nodded. ‘Are we going on a car chase? Like in the American movies? Should I get us Tommy guns?’
Reluctantly Stave found himself smiling: ‘We can hide the hardware in a black coffin. We’re going to the cemetery.’
The chief inspector was relieved that he didn’t have to travel by tram and on foot all the way out to the east of Hamburg. MacDonald drove him there in his boxlike, mud-coloured jeep, parking it right by the main entrance. When they set off the wind was blowing so hard the collapsible windscreen rattled back and forth and cold draughts blew through rips in the canvas top, while the suspension was so hard, every time they bounced over a pothole it was like a blow to the solar plexus. But Stave didn’t mind. He closed his eyes for a moment, massaging the thigh of his bad leg. He had cramp and was in pain.
‘An old war wound?’ MacDonald was driving carefully, keeping his eyes on the road, but he must have spotted him out of the corner of his eye.
Stave felt he’d been somehow caught out. ‘A ceiling beam fell on me; I didn’t get out of the way in time,’ he told him curtly.
The lieutenant just nodded.
‘How is it you speak such good German?’ Stave asked him, trying to steer the conversation away from himself, and because he couldn’t think of anything else to ask. He had to repeat it, louder, to make himself heard over the noise of the engine.
‘I learned it at university, Oriel College, Oxford. I was actually studying history but my special subject was Prussia. I did my master’s degree on Bismarck’s attitude towards Great Britain in the years prior to 1870. I even came to Berlin to study some documents.’
‘You did all of that before the outbreak of the war? How old are you then?’
MacDonald laughed. ‘I was a Christmas baby, born on 24 December 1920. I was in Berlin during my first year at university, aged just 18. That was the summer of 1939. I had intended to stay for a few months, but in August it was becoming ever more clear that war was likely, so I upped sticks and left. There are probably a few books of mine gathering dust in a rented room somewhere. Unless, of course, the rented room has been burnt to the ground.’
‘Why did you settle on the history of Prussia? A pretty esoteric subject in Oxford, I’d imagine.’
‘Esoteric subjects are what Oxford is all about,’ MacDonald replied with a nostalgic smile. Then all of a sudden he turned serious.
‘Do you have any idea what it’s like living in a society based on class, Chief Inspector? Earls and dukes, exclusive private schools, London clubs, stiff upper lips, ancestors who came over with William the Conqueror?’
Stave shook his head, and then, to his own surprise, nodded. ‘Here we had party members, German blood or non-Aryan; you didn’t need to have aristocratic ancestors, but it helped in a big way if you’d been on the 1923 demonstration at the Feldherrnhalle in Munich or at least had joined the party before 1933.’
‘But you didn’t join in any of that.’
‘I had German blood, nothing I could do about that, but the party? No thanks.’
MacDonald stared silently ahead. On either side of the street lay slabs of concrete, piles of fallen roof tiles and twisted piping like some surreal sculpture. One four-storey facade stood on its own, with torn curtains flapping in the wind like flags. Then came an area completely cleared of rubble with two dozen Nissen huts standing on it, like corrugated iron pipes cut down the middle: barracks put up by the Brits as emergency housing for the homeless.
‘I wasn’t born with a stiff upper lip,’ the lieutenant said eventually. ‘My parents have a junk shop in Lockerbie, a little town in the south of Scotland. But I didn’t want to spend my life in a nowhere. I studied hard and won a scholarship to Oxford. Then I chose German history because I was sure that sooner or later we’d be at war with you again. It was obvious that after the First World War you still held a grudge against us. I said to myself: know your enemy, that way you can be useful to your country.’
‘Seems to have worked all right,’ Stave muttered.
MacDonald smiled. ‘At first I wondered if maybe I shouldn’t have stayed in Berlin that summer of 1939. Hitler looked certain to win. But things worked out differently and so here I am, in Hamburg. You might not believe me, Chief Inspector, but even in the state it’s in now, I prefer this city to the dump I grew up in.’
‘You’re right; I don’t believe you,’ Stave replied wearily. ‘Straight ahead, on your right. We’re nearly there. At least I imagine our cemetery is bigger than Lockerbie’s.’
They stopped by the low, wide entrance gate. Before the war the cemetery had been a big, beautiful park with roads running through it, and even bus stops. Now nearly all the trees and shrubbery had been hacked to the ground for firewood, and many of the graves had gone to ruin because nobody had the strength or energy to look after them, or often because there just wasn’t anybody left.
Stave and MacDonald strolled along a straight path that led to the centre of Ojendorf Cemetery. There were a lot of fresh graves, the chief inspector noted. Then he noticed a grove, like a little garden within the cemetery, for cremation urns with flowers next to them. There were no recent ones; these days nobody was about to waste expensive fuel on burning dead bodies. In the midst of the garden was a bronze statue of a female mourner, seated. Amazing that hasn’t been stolen yet, Stave thought.