They followed a track that led from Lappenbergs Allee around a huge heap of ruins. After barely a dozen paces the track was already out of sight of the main road. They passed another couple of piles of rubble and then a bomb crater about one and a half metres deep filled with ice and a dented petrol canister lying in it.
The body lay next to it.
Two uniformed policemen were standing in the flickering glare of the spotlights; another was bending over the generator, while a photographer was setting up his kit. Maschke was walking up and down a little further away, smoking. Doctor Czrisini was taking off his suede gloves and replacing them with long rubber ones.
‘Definitely not a sex crime anyway,’ he said, nodding to Stave and at the body.
‘Maybe I should recommend you for my job if I get tired of it,’ the chief inspector replied.
‘Yeah, we could swap!’ Czrisini said with a laugh.
They bent down to take a look at the body. It was an old man, 65 to 70 years old, Stave reckoned. A short man, about 1.60 metres, slim, but not undernourished. His hands were not those of a working man. He was lying on his back, as if taking a rest, feet close together, his left hand to one side, open, the other behind his rear end. The body was frozen solid and covered with a fine layer of snow, as if dusted with icing sugar. The pale flesh beneath already showing signs of blood settlement.
The pathologist looked at the man’s head. He had a full, grey, bushy beard, a large, slightly hooked nose. The eyes were closed. When Stave looked closer he realised they were swollen, as if after a fight.
‘There’s blood in both ears,’ Crzisini said in a calm voice. ‘A small wound to the chin, eyes and forehead swollen from blows. The man was beaten either with a blunt object or with fists.’
‘Beaten to death?’
The pathologist shook his head. ‘I’ll only know for sure after the autopsy, but I reckon the beating was just to waken him. He may have been knocked down, might have lost consciousness.’ He indicated the body’s left hand. ‘Abrasions. It would seem he tried to defend himself, at first at least. Then he gave up. Do you see the fine line around his throat? He’s been strangled, with a wire loop, I’d say.’
Stave closed his eyes. ‘The man was attacked either front on or from one side, beaten to the ground with a hail of blows and then when he could no longer defend himself, strangled. He had probably lost consciousness by then.’
Crzisini pointed to a rectangular iron bar as long as his forearm, lying in the dirt near the head of the corpse. ‘The dark colour on that iron bar is probably blood.’
‘The murder weapon, then?’
‘Maybe. But it might just have been lying there and blood spattered on it when he fell.’
Stave wished it were still daylight. Apart from anything the flickering of the spotlight was hurting his eyes; there were shadows dancing everywhere amidst the ruins, and the drone of the generator made his head ache.
They waited until the photographer had taken the first few pictures, then Czrisini bent down and touched the body carefully, opening his eyelids. ‘Blue eyes,’ he noted. Using both hands he pulled the man’s lower jaw down. ‘No teeth. I assume he had dentures.’
Systematically, he examined the rest of the body from head to toe. ‘Small wart on the left hip,’ he noted. ‘Signs of a hernia, enlarged scrotum. Normally that would require a truss, and it would still cause problems walking.’
Stave looked silently over at the edge of the bomb crater. There was a dark-brown polished bamboo walking stick lying there, with a carved handle, covered in a layer of snow as fine as that covering the body.
‘That might have been his walking stick,’ he mumbled.
The flickering light briefly caught a metal button lying next to the body. When they finally got the corpse on to a stretcher, they found a leather strap under the body, like that of a rucksack.
Then Stave noticed something small and shiny on the ground just about where the dead man’s shoulder had been. He bent down and picked it up. It was a medallion, made of silver, no bigger than a tiny coin, on a thin, broken chain, also made of silver.
‘The killer must have missed that when he stripped him,’ Czrisini suggested.
Stave stared at the tiny circle in his gloved fist, took it closer to the spotlight, silently cursing the flicker. The reverse of the medallion was plain, polished smooth by long contact with the wearer’s skin. But the front bore a cross, standing on a sort of jagged hill, maybe a cliff even, and at an angle on either side two other objects that Stave thought at first might also be crosses.
The pathologist came over, pointed to the two objects and said, ‘Those are daggers.’
‘Are you sure?’ ‘Longer than a knife, shorter than a sword. Classic, elongated, slightly oval blade shape.’
‘That means the blades of both daggers are pointed towards the cross.’
‘Curious, isn’t it? Never seen anything like it.’
Stave stared at the medallion. Czrisini was right, he thought to himself. Daggers and a cross. What was that all about? He slid the object into a paper bag. A clue, he thought. Finally, a first clue. The only question was, what did it mean? ‘How long do you reckon he’s been lying here?’
The pathologist shrugged. ‘At least a day, going by the settlement of blood in the body, maybe longer. It’s hard to be certain with these Siberian temperatures.’
‘The same length of time as the body found in Baustrasse?’
Czrisini looked him in the eyes for a moment and said, ‘It is possible that they may have been killed around the same time.’
‘What do you think, Lieutenant?’ Stave asked, as Czrisini made a pained face, removing his clammy rubber gloves.
MacDonald had been watching them silently from a discreet distance. ‘The poor sod’s making his way through the ruins, where the murderer is lurking in wait for him. He comes out, beats him to the ground, strangles him and strips him.’
Stave scratched his head. ‘Would an old man wearing a truss and using a walking stick take an uneven path like this?’
The lieutenant smiled in acknowledgement of Stave’s point. ‘In his position I would feel safer on the cleared streets. So you reckon he was going down Lappenbergs Allee, his attacker beat him to the ground there, then dragged the defenceless man over here, where nobody would see him, to finish him off?’
‘Maybe,’ Stave replied bluntly. He was thinking of the young woman they had found on Baustrasse. ‘Let’s imagine for a moment that we’re dealing with the same killer as in the case earlier in the week. Just supposing, for now, because certain things suggest otherwise; a young woman in one case, an old man in the other. In the first case there was no indication she put up any resistance; in the latter everything points to the victim fighting back. What links them is the thin strangulation mark around the neck.’
Maschke came over and added, ‘Plus the fact that they were both found amidst the rubble. Naked. In both cases in a former working-class district that had been flattened by bombing. Maybe the killer knows his way around these parts.’
Stave nodded. ‘Maybe, but one case in the east of the city, the other in the west. They’re more than ten kilometres apart. You think he might have lived for a bit in Eilbek, and also in Eimsbuttel? It’s not impossible. But it’s also possible that he chose these ruined, uninhabited districts because he knows there are unlikely to be any witnesses. It’s also possible that he kills his victims somewhere else altogether and just dumps the bodies in places he’s unlikely to be seen.’
‘Don’t the walking stick, button, medallion and leather strap suggest that the man was robbed and murdered here?’ MacDonald asked.
‘Sure, they suggest that,’ Stave replied, ‘but they don’t prove it. They might just have been lying here next to the body. These bombed districts are full of bits and pieces of people’s belongings lying all over the place. But you’re right: these objects may well be clues. Perhaps somebody will come forward to identify them. I’ll have photos taken of the medallion. We’ll put Inspector Muller on to it, maybe he can find out what the cross and daggers is all about.’