‘What were you dealing on the black market?’ he asked her.
‘I wasn’t dealing,’ she said angrily. ‘I was just leaving the station and crossing the Hansaplatz when your…’
‘Raid,’ Stave genially supplied the word.
‘…your “action” began,’ she continued. ‘I already told the officer who arrested me that it was a mistake. But he wouldn’t even listen. Just like the Gestapo.’
The chief inspector ignored the deliberate provocation, although Anna von Veckinhausen wasn’t totally wrong. He looked down at his documents. ‘We found 537 Reichsmarks on your person,’ he said calmly. ‘Can you tell me what you hoped to buy on the black market with a sum like that?’
‘I don’t have to tell you anything at all. My money is my money.’
‘I was just wondering if you had sold something just before the raid. Maybe something that a couple of days ago had belonged to a man of about 70?’
Anna von Veckinhausen looked as if she were about to jump to her feet. But instead she closed her eyes and took a deep breath. ‘I thought you might have forgotten me,’ she mumbled.
Stave allowed himself a brief smile. ‘I wouldn’t be in this job if I had.’
‘I didn’t sell anything on the black market. I really was on my way from the station. You arrested everybody on the Hansaplatz. Ask any one of them.’
‘With 537 Reichsmarks on you?’
‘With 537 Reichsmarks on me.’
‘And you refuse to tell me where you got so much money from or what you intended to do with it?’
‘Neither one nor the other has anything whatsoever to do with you.’
Stave looked down at the paperwork again. It was hard to disprove her story. But on the other hand, just the circumstances of her arrest would be enough for a British judge to lock her up for a couple of days. And what good would that do?
‘We didn’t carry out this raid to arrest housewives out to buy a few matches. We did it in the hope of laying our hands on something that might have belonged to the murder victim – the murder victim whose body you found.’
‘And have you?’
Stave chose to ignore the question, even though he realised Anna von Veckinhausen wasn’t being sarcastic but really wanted to know, either because she was genuinely interested – or genuinely worried.
‘Let me take you back to the afternoon when you found the body. You had been walking down Lappenbergs Allee. You then turned off and walked along the footpath through the ruins to get to Collau Strasse. That was where you found the body, amongst the ruins.’
‘Yes,’ she sighed, wearily.
Stave made a note.
‘How long were you with the corpse?’ he asked.
She gave him a surprised look. ‘You think I said a prayer for the dead or something?’
‘I’m asking if you just looked down, realised what you were looking at and immediately ran off. Or if you took a good look around?’
Anna von Veckinhausen put her right hand on her left shoulder, so that her arm lay across her upper body. Stave wondered if it was out of embarrassment or an instinctive desire for protection.
‘I … don’t know,’ she admitted hesitantly. ‘Maybe a few seconds. I saw the body but it took me a bit to realise what I was actually looking at. Then I left. I didn’t run. There was no need to hurry.’
‘So you took a long look at the body, but didn’t notice anything in particular about the place where it had been left?’ Stave pressed her.
‘I guess you could say that.’
Stave stared down at his desk. He had a difficult decision to make. But it was the middle of the night and he was hungry, cold and exhausted. His head hurt. Should he keep Anna von Veckinhausen in custody? The 537 Reichsmarks was evidence enough. Or should he let her go? Show lenience, but keep her under observation.
‘You can go,’ he said at last, and then to his own surprise, added: ‘Sorry for the inconvenience.’
She stared at him for a second in disbelief. Then she smiled, said, ‘Thank you,’ and got to her feet. When she reached the door she turned back to him and asked, ‘What happened to your lip?’
‘I slipped on the ice,’ Stave replied.
When the door closed behind her he looked down at his notebook. On the evening when she found the body, Anna von Veckinhausen had claimed she used the footpath to cross from Collau Strasse to Lappenbergs Allee. When Stave had gone over her story, he had deliberately reversed the names. And she had confirmed that she had been going from Lappenbergs Allee to Collau Strasse.
It was an old Gestapo trick. Maybe she had just been tired. Or so upset by being arrested that she hadn’t been paying attention. But it was also possible that she had told a lie first time and could no longer remember exactly what she had said.
‘Next!’ he called to the uniformed policeman outside.
Two hours later it was finally all over. His back aching, the chief inspector got up from his chair and walked up and down in his office to get the circulation in his injured leg going. Eventually he had worked off the worst of his limp. Then he called in the other officers. The Department S chief looked as fit and fresh as if he had had a good ten hours’ sleep. According to him the raid had revealed a tank of schnapps and half a tonne of penicillin. Also the CID search guy was pleased: they had caught a major racketeer.
Maschke and the rest, however, looked tired and unhappy. The only one who still seemed optimistic was MacDonald, and he hadn’t taken part in the raid or sat in on any of the interrogations.
Why didn’t he just go home hours ago, Stave wondered. ‘Thanks to you all, gentlemen,’ he said, and got to his feet.
Not one of the items they had confiscated, not one thing any of those arrested had said, had been of the slightest help to the murder investigation. Nothing, zero, zilch! What might we have simply missed, the chief inspector asked himself. He waited until they had all left, then sat back down at his desk and began once more going through his notes and the interrogation reports, one by one, for nearly another hour. If it had been summer at least it would have been light by now, he thought. His eyes hurt. Nothing, except for the one potentially important, but also potentially laughable, contradiction in the statements by Anna von Veckinhausen.
Stave wondered if he should just put his head down on his desk for an hour or two. But when he considered the possibility that he might fall into a deep sleep and his colleagues, fresh from a night’s sleep, would find him curled up in a ball on the floor, he decided it was better to go home. He made his way slowly to the main entrance. Then stopped dead.
A shadow.
Stave held his breath and gazed at a massive column in the outer hallway. There was a man crouched down on the other side of it. All Stave could see at first was a leg and a shoulder. He kept still. The unknown figure gradually got to its feet, obviously not having noticed him. Maybe it was just a drunk, sleeping it off accidentally right in front of the CID building. The man staggered a step or two away from the column and walked out on to the square, yellow moonlight falling on his face.
Stave recognised him as one of the young men they had arrested a few hours earlier. He wondered who had interrogated him and let him go. Then he realised something else: the man was not drunk; he had been beaten up. His eye was swollen, his lip cut open, and he was walking with the crippled gait of someone who had been beaten and kicked in the stomach and lower body. A vile thought immediately came to mind: Gestapo. The man had been beaten up during his interrogation. Then he was released purely so that no other officer or British summary court judge would see his injuries. But he had been hurt so badly that he could hardly make it out of the building. It was only now that he had gathered strength enough to stagger away.
Stave followed him, as discreetly as he could.