‘This is Kommissar Gunther, from the Alex,’ said Becker.
‘Herr and Frau Ganz,’ I said, ‘I’m afraid you must prepare yourselves for the worst possible news. We found the body of your daughter Liza early this morning. I’m very sorry.’ Becker nodded solemnly.
‘Yes,’ said Ganz. ‘Yes, I thought so.’
‘Naturally there will have to be an identification,’ I told him. ‘It needn’t be right away. Perhaps later on, when you’ve had a chance to draw yourselves together.’ I waited for Frau Ganz to dissolve, but for the moment at least she seemed inclined to remain solid. Was it because she was a nurse, and rather more immune to suffering and pain? Even her own? ‘May we sit down?’
‘Yes, please do,’ said Ganz.
I told Becker to go and make some coffee for us all. He went with some alacrity, eager to be out of the grief-stricken atmosphere, if only for a moment or two.
‘Where did you find her?’ said Ganz.
It wasn’t the sort of question I felt comfortable answering. How do you tell two parents that their daughter’s naked body was found inside a tower of car tyres in a disused garage on Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse? I gave him the sanitized version, which included no more than the location of the garage. At this there occurred a very definite exchange of looks.
Ganz sat with his hand on his wife’s knee. She herself was quiet, vacant even, and perhaps less in need of Becker’s coffee than I was.
‘Have you any idea who might have killed her?’ he said.
‘We’re working on a number of possibilities, sir,’ I said, finding the old police platitudes coming back to me once again. ‘We’re doing everything we can, believe me.’
Ganz’s frown deepened. He shook his head angrily. ‘What I fail to understand is why there has been nothing in the newspapers.’
‘It’s important that we prevent any copy-cat killings,’ I said. ‘It often happens in this sort of case.’
‘Isn’t it also important that you stop any more girls from being murdered?’ said Frau Ganz. Her look was one of exasperation. ‘Well, it’s true, isn’t it? Other girls have been murdered. That’s what people are saying. You may be able to keep it out of the papers, but you can’t stop people from talking.’
‘There have been propaganda drives warning girls to be on their guard,’ I said.
‘Well, they obviously didn’t do any good, did they?’ said Ganz. ‘Liza was an intelligent girl, Kommissar. Not the kind to do anything stupid. So this killer must be clever too. And the way I see it, the only way to put girls properly on their guard is to print the story, in all its horror. To scare them.’
‘You may be right, sir,’ I said unhappily, ‘but it’s not up to me. I’m only obeying orders.’ That was the typically German excuse for everything these days, and I felt ashamed using it.
Becker put his head round the kitchen door.
‘Could I have a word, sir?’
It was my turn to be glad to leave the room.
‘What’s the matter?’ I said bitterly. ‘Forgotten how to boil a kettle?’
He handed me a newspaper cutting, from the Beobachter. ‘Take a look at this, sir. I found it in the drawer here.’
It was an advertisement for a ‘Rolf Vogelmann, Private Investigator, Missing Persons a Speciality’, the same advertisement that Bruno Stahlecker had used to plague me with.
Becker pointed to the date at the top of the cutting: ‘3 October,’ he said. ‘Four days after Liza Ganz disappeared.’
‘It wouldn’t be the first time that people got tired waiting for the police to come up with something,’ I said. ‘After all, that’s how I used to make a comparatively honest living.’
Becker collected some cups and saucers and put them on to a tray with the coffee pot. ‘Do you suppose that they might have used him, sir?’
‘I don’t see any harm in asking.’
Ganz was unrepentant, the sort of client I wouldn’t have minded working for myself.
‘As I said, Kommissar, there was nothing in the newspapers about our daughter, and we saw your colleague here only twice. So as time passed we wondered just what efforts were being made to find our daughter. It’s the not knowing that gets to you. We thought that if we hired Herr Vogelmann then at least we could be sure that someone was doing his best to try and find her. I don’t mean to be rude, Kommissar, but that’s the way it was.’
I sipped my coffee and shook my head.
‘I quite understand,’ I said. ‘I’d probably have done the same thing myself. I just wish this Vogelmann had been able to find her.’
You had to admire them, I thought. They could probably ill-afford the services of a private investigator and yet they had still gone ahead and hired one. It might even have cost them whatever savings they had.
When we had finished our coffee and were leaving I suggested that a police car might come round and bring Herr Ganz down to the Alex to identify the body early the following morning.
‘Thank you for your kindness, Kommissar,’ said Frau Ganz, attempting a smile. ‘Everyone’s been so kind.’
Her husband nodded his agreement. Hovering by the open door, he was obviously keen to see the back of us.
‘Herr Vogelmann wouldn’t take any money from us. And now you’re arranging a car for my husband. I can’t tell you how much we appreciate it.’
I squeezed her hand sympathetically, and then we left.
In the pharmacy downstairs I bought some powders and swallowed one in the car. Becker looked at me with disgust.
‘Christ, I don’t know how you can do that,’ he said, shuddering.
‘It works faster that way. And after what we just went through I can’t say that I notice the taste much. I hate giving bad news.’ I swept my mouth with my tongue for the residue. ‘Well? What did you make of that? Get the same hunch as before?’
‘Yes. He was giving her all sorts of meaningful little looks.’
‘So were you, for that matter,’ I said, shaking my head in wonder.
Becker grinned broadly. ‘She wasn’t bad, was she?’
‘I suppose you’re going to tell me what she’d be like in bed, right?’
‘More your type I’d have thought, sir.’
‘Oh? What makes you say that?’
‘You know, the type that responds to kindness.’
I laughed, despite my headache. ‘More than she responds to bad news. There we are with our big feet and long faces and all she can do is look like she was in the middle of her period.’
‘She’s a nurse. They’re used to handling bad news.’
‘That crossed my mind, but I think she’d done her crying already, and quite recently. What about Irma Hanke’s mother? Did she cry?’
‘God, no. As hard as Jew Suss that one. Maybe she did sniff a little when I first showed up. But they were giving off the same sort of atmosphere as the Ganzes.’
I looked at my watch. ‘I think we need a drink, don’t you?’
We drove to the Cafe Kerkau, on Alexanderstrasse. With sixty billiard tables, it was where a lot of bulls from the Alex went to relax when they came off duty.
I bought a couple of beers and carried them over to a table where Becker was practising a few shots.
‘Do you play?’ he said.
‘Are you stretching me out? This used to be my sitting-room.’ I picked up a stick and watched Becker shoot the cue ball. It hit the red, banked off the cushion and hit the other white ball square.
‘Care for a little bet?’
‘Not after that shot. You’ve got a lot to learn about working a line. Now if you’d missed it–’
‘Lucky shot, that’s all,’ Becker insisted. He bent down and cued a wild one which missed by half a metre.