‘Baustrasse, in Eilbek,’ the uniform answered. ‘It’s…’
‘…near Landwehr railway station. I know it.’ Stave’s mood was darkening. ‘There’s not a single house still standing in Eilbek. What are those idiots thinking? How do they expect us to report in? By carrier pigeon?’
Ruge cleared his throat. ‘I regret to inform you, Chief Inspector, that we will not even be able to drive as far as Baustrasse.’
‘We won’t?’
‘Too much rubble. We’ll have to walk the last few hundred metres.’
‘Great,’ Stave muttered. ‘Let’s hope we don’t tread on an unexploded bomb.’
‘There have been lots of people hanging round the scene of the crime of late. There’s nothing left to blow up there.’
‘The scene of the crime?’
Ruge blushed. ‘Where the body was found.’
‘So, you mean the location of the body,’ Stave corrected him, but trying to do so as gently as possible. All of a sudden he felt his mood lightening, forgetting the cold and the rubble and the ghostly figures drifting along the side of the road. ‘Do you have any idea what we can expect to find?’
The young policeman nodded eagerly. ‘I was there when the report came in. Children out playing – God knows what they were doing out playing at that time, although I have my suspicions there – but anyway these children came across the body. Female, young, and…’ Ruge blushed again. ‘Well, naked.’
‘Naked? At minus 20 degrees. Is that what killed her?’
The policeman’s face got darker in colour still. ‘We don’t know yet,’ he mumbled.
A young woman, naked and dead – Stave had a creeping feeling he would be dealing with some dreadful crime. Since CID Chief Breuer put him in charge of a small investigation unit a few months back he’d had several murder cases. But this one seemed different from the usual stabbings amongst black marketeers or jealous scenes caused by soldiers returning from the war.
Ruge turned left into Landwehr Strasse, and eventually halted by the ruins of the train tracks running across the road. Stave got out and looked around. And shivered. ‘St Mary’s Hospital isn’t far,’ he said. ‘They must have a telephone. We can report in there. After you’ve taken me to the location of the body.’
Ruge clicked his heels. A young woman dragging a mangled tree stump in a cart behind her gave them a suspicious glance. Stave could see that her fingers were swollen with the cold. When she noticed him looking, she grabbed hold of the cart and hurried off.
Stave and Ruge clambered over the railway tracks, the stone ballast frozen together in lumps, tracks jutting up like bizarre sculptures. Beyond lay Baustrasse, only recognisable as a boundary line of the gutted, roofless tenement houses, their black walls stretching for hundreds of metres. Even now, so many months on, it still reeked with the bitter stench of burnt wood and fabric.
Two uniformed policemen, stamping their feet and clapping their hands in the cold, were standing in front of a crooked wall, three storeys high and looking like the slightest cough would bring it tumbling down to crush the policemen.
Stave didn’t call out to them, just lifted his hand in greeting, as he carefully made his way over the rubble. At least he didn’t have to make an effort to conceal his limp. There was nowhere here that anyone could walk straight.
One of the two uniforms raised his right hand in a salute, pointing to one side with his left. ‘The body is over there, next to the wall.’
Stave looked to where he was pointing. ‘Nasty business,’ he muttered.
The Corpse with No Name
A young woman. Stave put her at between 18 and 22 years of age, 1.60 metres, mid-blond, medium-length hair. Blue eyes staring into nothingness.
‘Pretty,’ murmured Ruge, who had come over to join him.
Stave stared at the policeman until he squirmed, then turned his gaze back to the corpse. No point in embarrassing his young colleague; the kid was only trying to hide his nerves.
‘Go down to the hospital and report in,’ he told him. Then Stave bent down beside the corpse, taking care not to touch it or the rubble on which she was lying, as if spread out on a bed.
It looks staged, Stave thought instinctively. And yet at the same time she’d been well hidden, behind the wall and a few higher piles of bricks. As far as he could tell, her body appeared to be unmarked, not even a scratch or a bruise, her hands spotless. She didn’t put up a fight, he thought to himself. And those aren’t worker’s hands; this is no rubble clearer, no housemaid, no factory worker.
His gaze slowly moved down her body. Flat stomach, a line down the right side: an old, well-healed appendectomy scar. Stave pulled out his notebook and wrote it down. The only thing he could see was a mark around her neck, a dark red line on her pale skin, barely three millimetres wide, all the way round her neck at the level of the larynx, more noticeable on the left than the right.
‘Looks like she’s been strangled. Perhaps with a narrow cord,’ Stave said to the two shivering uniforms, scribbling his observations down in his notebook. ‘Take a look and see if you can find any wire lying around. Or a cable of some sort.’
The pair rummaged around sullenly amidst the ruins. At least they were out of his way. He didn’t believe either of them would find anything. There were some dark lines in the hoar frost suggesting something might have been dragged along here, but unfortunately one of the slovenly uniforms had trodden all over them. The murderer probably killed his victim elsewhere and dragged her here.
‘Pretty corpse,’ somebody behind him said. The throaty voice of a chain smoker. Stave didn’t need to turn round to know who was standing behind him.
‘Good morning, Doctor Czrisini,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘Good of you to come so quickly.’
Doctor Alfred Czrisini – small, bald, dark eyes large behind his round horn-rimmed spectacles – didn’t bother to take the glowing British Woodbine cigarette from between his blue lips as he spoke. ‘Looks like there wasn’t much need for me to hurry,’ he mumbled. ‘A naked body in this cold – I could have taken another couple of hours.’
‘Frozen stiff.’
‘Better preserved than in the mortuary. It’s not going to be easy to establish a time of death. Over the past six weeks the temperature has not risen above minus 10. She could have been lying here for days and still look as fresh as a daisy.’
‘Fresh as a daisy isn’t exactly how I’d describe her current condition,’ Stave grumbled. He looked around. Baustrasse had once been a working-class district with dozens of tenement buildings, reddish-brown, brick-built, five storeys, well looked after, trees along the street. Artisans, manual workers, tradespeople had lived here. All gone now. Stave could see little more than a landscape of fallen walls, stumps of burnt trees, heaps of rubble. Only one building still stood, on the right, at the end of the street: the yellow-plastered building of the St Matthew Foundation, an orphanage. Preserved from the rain of bombs as if by a miracle.
‘Two kids from the home found the body,’ one of the uniforms said, nodding towards building.
Stave nodded back. ‘Very well. I’ll talk to them shortly. And that, doctor, makes your task in determining time of death a little bit easier. If she’d been lying here for any length of time, the lads from the home would have found her ages ago.’
He liked the pathologist. The man’s name – pronounced ‘Chisini’ – had made him the brunt of jokes in the years after 1933, mostly threatening references to his Polish origins. Czrisini worked fast. He was a bachelor whose only two passions were corpses and cigarettes.
‘Are you thinking the same as I am?’ the doctor asked.
‘Rape?’
Czrisini nodded. ‘Young, pretty, naked and dead. It all fits.’
Stave shook his head from side to side. ‘At minus 20 degrees even the craziest rapist might get a bit worried about his favourite tool. On the other hand, he could have done the deed somewhere warmer.’ He nodded towards the drag marks. ‘She’s just been laid out here.’