‘And I volunteer,’ Maschke said with a trace of resignation, ‘to go round dozens of white coats, all the dentists we can find that is, to stick the photos under their noses and see if anyone remembers fitting him out with dentures.’
‘Good idea,’ said Stave, impressed, with a tired smile. ‘Right now I need to talk to the lad who came across the corpse.’
‘It’s not a lad, Chief Inspector, it’s a lady. A lady looter to be exact.’
The uniformed policeman brought over a figure who had all this time been waiting behind one of the heaps of rubble, under guard, apparently, since another policeman Stave had not noticed before was with her. Stave took a good look at her when she came into the circle of light surrounding the body. She was slim, almost as tall as him. She pushed back the hood of a heavy English wool coat, which once upon a time had cost somebody a lot of money, but was now so threadbare it looked as if you could pull it apart with your fingers. Stave saw a thin, almost almond-shaped face, dark eyes, long black hair. Early thirties, he guessed, and would have been well-to-do at some stage. Her hands were not those of a manual labourer.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked her.
‘Anna von Veckinhausen.’
She had a gentle voice, Stave thought to himself. But it was a voice filled with the self-confidence that only comes with having had social status and money from earliest childhood. It sounded like a violin slightly out of tune playing in a grand orchestra, a wrong note, the sound of nervousness. Or fear.
‘You found the body?’
‘Yes.’
Stave cleared his throat. He could feel Maschke, MacDonald, the doctor and the uniformed police watching him. This could be tough.
He decided to take a friendly tone. He introduced himself, took a step to one side, her following him, so as to be a little further from the others.
‘Please tell me exactly how it happened,’ he asked her.
Anna von Veckinhausen hesitated for a minute. Stave waited, thinking to himself, she’s trying to decide what to tell me.
‘I was on Collau Strasse and used the path through the ruins as a short cut to get to Lappenbergs Allee.’
Stave got his notebook out of his pocket, awkwardly, taking time over it, time for the witness to think her story through, but time for him too, time to think what to make of her. She was a looter, according to one of the uniforms. It was hard for the police to judge figures wandering around in the ruins. They might be former inhabitants looking for things they had lost. Or workmen tearing down dangerous walls or gathering valuable metal for the city. Or just passersby taking a shortcut. Or indeed looters, looking for wood, metal, bits of furniture, anything that might be of use. Nearly everyone in Hamburg had ‘sorted out their own way’ of getting hold of the things they might need from time to time. Stave only had to think of the wood he used in his little stove. But if you were caught you went straight to a British tribunaclass="underline" an English judge, an interpreter, a stenographer, a few cold questions, a quick sentence and then it was on to the next one. Forty cigarettes from Allied stock would get you 21 days behind bars. A worker who took three pigs’ feet thrown away as unusable from a cold store could get 30 days. Looters found rummaging around in the rubble could get between 50 and 60 days.
He decided not to press the looting charge at the moment. ‘Then what happened?’ he asked.
The witness gave him a brief smile of relief. Then she looked serious and rubbed her elegant hands together, as if she were washing them with soap. Like a nurse disinfecting her hands, Stave thought. Or perhaps a doctor.
She hesitated, looking for the right words: ‘I came across the body by accident. I immediately hurried to Lappenbergs Allee and asked my way to the nearest police station.’
‘Asked your way?’
‘Yes.’ Anna von Veckinhausen stared at him. ‘I asked one person after another until I found someone who could tell me how to get to the nearest police station.’
Stave still couldn’t get used to the new self-confidence women had these days. A few years ago it would have been unthinkable for a woman – a lady like this in particular – to come across a dead body and react the way she had. In the old days a woman would have screamed or fainted. It was probably because the war had turned women into the family breadwinners; trading on the black market, foraging, manual labour – women could do it all just as well as men. Better even. But they paid a high price, and not just tiredness and exhaustion. Many marriages broke up when the men came back from the war, sometimes after years of absence, to find their wives could get by in this new world of ruins and black markets better than they could. Stave shot a discreet glance again at Anna von Veckinhausen’s hands: she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.
‘That would have been Station 22,’ Stave said. ‘If you didn’t know it, I guess that means you don’t live around here.’
The witness hesitated for a few second. ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘I live in one of the Nissen huts along the Eilbek canal.’
Stave made a note of the address. A looter who had decided to check out a new area, he decided. But he said nothing. He found Anna von Veckinhausen imposing, even a little intimidating. Such self-assurance. She came from another world. There was just the trace of an accent in her voice, but where did it come from? Obviously not from Hamburg or the north of the country. Maybe somewhere in the east? ‘So, you found the body, ran down Lappenbergs Allee to the police station. Have you witnesses to that?’
She gave him a confused look and said nothing.
‘The people you asked for directions to the police station – do you know who they were? Did you take a note of their names?’
‘What do you mean?’ she said indignantly, but still in a quiet voice. ‘Are you treating me as a suspect?’
Stave smiled, though he knew that right now the grimace on his face would be taken the wrong way. ‘Just routine,’ he said.
She threw her head back and looked him in the eye. Challengingly. ‘They were just anonymous figures. Men with hats and their collars turned up, women with headscarves and hats. All of them hurrying along in the cold. I didn’t get any names and couldn’t even tell you what they looked like.’
Stave made another note in his book. ‘And what about before, when you found the body? Did you touch it?’
‘What sort of questions are you asking me? I come across a naked man’s body, what do you think I might have touched?’
‘You knew straight away he was dead?’
‘I’ve seen a few corpses lying in the snow, if that’s what you mean. I could tell immediately…’
Stave didn’t ask when and where she’d seen corpses lying in the snow. ‘Do you know how he died?’
Anna von Veckinhausen shook her head. ‘No? How did he?’
The chief inspector ignored her question, just made another note. His fingers had turned to ice. He found it hard to write, the words barely legible. He knew that he was making the witness nervous. But then she should be nervous, he told himself. ‘Did you notice anything else? Anything about the body? Anything lying near it?’
She shook her head. She’s bitterly cold too, Stave thought.
‘And what about immediately before you found it? When you didn’t know what you were about to come across in the ruins? Did you see anything suspicious, anything along the path? A person? A noise?’
‘No. Nothing.’
Quick answer. Too quick. Suddenly Stave was certain there was something she was hiding from him. Should he take her into head office for questioning? Maybe threaten her with a looting charge? He hesitated. His experience was that most of the time witnesses told what they knew. Sometimes you just had to give them a bit of time and they would turn up at the police station and add to their statement. And if it turned out that Anna von Veckinhausen wasn’t one of those he could always interrogate her again. That meant see her again.