‘When the photographer has finished his portrait, tell him I want a couple of shots of the trunk with the lid closed. What’s more I want the prints ready by the time the left-luggage staff turns up. It’ll be something to help refresh their memories. The professor here will be taking the trunk back to the Alex as soon as the snaps are done.’
‘What about the girl’s family, sir? It is Irma Hanke, isn’t it?’
‘They’ll need to make a formal identification, of course, but not until the professor’s had his way with her. Maybe even smartened her up a bit for her mother?’
‘I’m not a mortician, Bernie,’ he said coolly.
‘Come on. I’ve seen you sew up a bag of minced beef before now.’
‘Very well,’ Illmann sighed. ‘I’ll see what I can do. I shall need most of the day, however. Possibly until tomorrow.’
‘Have as long as you like, but I want to tell them the news this evening, so see if at least you can nail her head back on to her shoulders by then will you?’
Deubel yawned loudly.
‘All right, inspector, you’ve passed the audition. The role of the tired man in need of his bed is yours. God knows you’ve worked hard enough for it. As soon as Becker and Korsch turn up you can go home. But I want you to set up an identity parade later on this morning. See if the men who work in this office can’t remember our Sudeten friend.’
‘Right, sir,’ he said, already more alert now that his going home was imminent.
‘What’s the name of that desk sergeant? The one who took the anonymous call.’
‘Gollner.’
‘Not old Tanker Gollner?’
‘Yes, sir. You’ll find him at the police barracks, sir. Apparently he said he’d wait for us there as he’d been pissed around by Kripo before and didn’t want to have to sit around all night waiting for us to show up.’
‘Same old Tanker,’ I smiled. ‘Right, I’d best not keep him waiting, had I?’
‘What shall I tell Korsch and Becker to do when they arrive?’ Deubel asked.
‘Get Korsch to go through the rest of the junk in this place. See if we might not have been left any other kind gifts.’
Illmann cleared his throat. ‘It might be an idea if one of them were present to observe the autopsy,’ he said.
‘Becker can help you. He seems to enjoy being around the female body. Not to mention his excellent qualifications in the matter of violent death. Just don’t leave him alone with your cadaver, Professor. He’s just liable to shoot her or fuck her, depending on the way he’s feeling.’
Kleine Alexander Strasse ran north-east towards Horst Wessel Platz and was where the police barracks for those stationed at the nearby Alex was situated. It was a big building, with small apartments for married men and senior officers, and single rooms for the rest.
Despite the fact that he was no longer married, Wachmeister Fritz ‘Tanker’ Gollner had a small one-bedroom apartment at the back of the barracks on the third floor, in recognition of his long and distinguished service record.
A well-tended window box was the apartment’s only concession to homeliness, the walls being bare of anything except a couple of photographs in which Gollner was being decorated. He waved me to the room’s solitary armchair and sat himself on the edge of the neatly made bed.
‘Heard you was back,’ he said quietly. Leaning forwards he pulled out a crate from under the bed. ‘Beer?’
‘Thanks.’
He nodded reflectively as he pushed off the bottle-tops with his bare thumbs.
‘And it’s Kommissar now, I hear. Resigns as an inspector. Reincarnated as a Kommissar. Makes you believe in fucking magic, doesn’t it? If I didn’t know you better I’d say you were in somebody’s pocket.’
‘Aren’t we all? In one way or another.’
‘Not me. And unless you’ve changed, not you either.’ He swigged his beer thoughtfully.
Tanker was an East Fresian from Emsland where, it is said, brains are as rare as fur on fish. While he may not have been able to spell Wittgenstein, let alone explain his philosophy, Tanker was a good policeman, one of the old school of uniformed bulls, the firm but fair sort, enforcing the law with a friendly box on the ear for young rowdies, and less inclined to arrest a man and haul him off to the cells than give him an effective and administratively simple bedtime-story with his encyclopaedia-sized fist. It was said of Tanker that he was the toughest bull in Orpo and, looking at him sitting opposite me now, in his shirt sleeves, his great belt creaking under the weight of his even greater belly, I didn’t find this hard to believe. Certainly time had stood still with his prognathous features — somewhere around one million years BC. Tanker could not have looked less civilized than if he had been wearing the skin of a sabre-toothed tiger.
I found my cigarettes and offered him one. He shook his head and took out his pipe.
‘If you ask me,’ I said, ‘we’re every one of us in the back pocket of Hitler’s trousers. And he means to slide down a mountain on his arse.’
Tanker sucked at the bowl of his pipe and started to fill it with tobacco. When he’d finished he smiled and raised his bottle.
‘Then here’s to stones under the fucking snow.’
He belched loudly and lit his pipe. The clouds of pungent smoke that rolled towards me like Baltic fog reminded me of Bruno. It even smelt like the same foul mixture that he had smoked.
‘You knew Bruno Stahlecker, didn’t you, Tanker?’
He nodded, still drawing on the pipe. Through clenched teeth, he said: ‘That I did. I heard about what happened. Bruno was a good man.’ He removed the pipe from his leathery old mouth and surveyed the progress of his smoke. ‘Knew him quite well, really. We were both in the infantry together. Saw a fair bit of action, too. Of course, he wasn’t much more than a spit of a lad then, but it never seemed to bother him much, the fighting I mean. He was a brave one.’
‘The funeral was last Thursday.’
‘I’d have gone too if I could have got the time.’ He thought for a moment. ‘But it was all the way down in Zehlendorf. Too far.’ He finished his beer and opened another two bottles. ‘Still, they got the piece of shit who killed him I hear, so that’s all right then.’
‘Yes, it certainly looks like it,’ I said. ‘Tell me about this telephone call tonight. What time was this?’
‘Just before midnight, sir. Fellow asks for the duty sergeant. You’re speaking to him, I says. Listen carefully, he says. The missing girl, Irma Hanke, he says, is to be found in a large blue-leather trunk in the left-luggage at Zoo Bahnhof. Who’s this, I asks, but he’d hung up.’
‘Can you describe his voice?’
‘I’d say it was an educated sort of voice, sir. And used to giving an order and having it carried out. Rather like an officer.’ He shook his large head. ‘Couldn’t tell you how old, though.’
‘Any accent?’
‘Just the trace of Bavarian.’
‘You sure about that?’
‘My late wife was from Nuremberg, sir. I’m sure.’
‘And how would you describe his tone? Agitated? Disturbed at all?’
‘He didn’t sound like a spinner, if that’s what you mean, sir. He was as cool as the piss out of a frozen eskimo. As I said, just like an officer.’
‘And he asked to speak to the duty sergeant?’
‘Those were his actual words, sir.’
‘Any background noise? Traffic? Music? That sort of thing?’
‘Nothing at all.’
‘What did you do then? After the call.’
‘I telephoned the operator at the Central Telephone Office on Französische Strasse. She traced the number to a public telephone box outside Bahnhof West Kreuz. I sent a squad car round there to seal it off until a team from 5D could get down there and have it checked out for piano players.’