‘What else is there to say?’ Maschke asked, when the Brit had left the room.
‘Just routine,’ Stave replied – the phrase that put the wind up every criminal – and not a few police too.
‘Is something wrong?’
Stave could have kicked himself. He forced a smile and then quickly carried on. ‘I’ll get straight to the point, Mashcke. This sort of investigation isn’t exactly your speciality. And you haven’t been at the job all that long.’
Maschke nodded, only partly mollified.
Stave pretended to examine Maschke’s notes, but obviously there was nothing of any interest. ‘You graduated from the police academy in 1946?’ he asked, trying to sound as if he was just making small talk. ‘When you were training did you do a stint with each of the city departments? In my day that was compulsory, although obviously we didn’t have the Street Clearance and Rebuilding department back then.’
Maschke tried to nod and shake his head at the same time, then gave up and said, ‘Yes, I graduated in ’46, but no, I have never seen inside most of the city departments. But I’m not sure it’s any great loss.’
‘What did you do before police training college?’ Stave asked, handing him his notebook back. It was a harmless enough question, he thought. But Maschke flinched, as if Stave had made him some immoral proposition. He blushed and there was a nervous tick in his right eye.
Stave caught his breath. He’d been too direct.
But a second later Maschke smiled, as if embarrassed, waved his hand in the air and mumbled, ‘What did I do? I was in the armed forces, the navy, on the U-boats. In France. Sent straight to France in 1940, to the U-boat bases on the Atlantic. Out of France in 1944. But in between, trips out of Brest on the U-boat and a month’s leave every now and then. Un temps pas mal, meme pour un boche comme moi. At least I managed to polish my school French. I got to know my red wines too, not that that’s much good at the moment.’ He laughed.
Stave squeezed out a smile. ‘Good work,’ he said, nodding at the notebook. ‘See you soon.’
He had heard his share of U-boat stories: damp in the close confines of a steel hull, endless patrols in the icy Atlantic. Depth charges that shook the subs from tail to stern. Floating coffins. Most U-boat sailors never came home. All of a sudden he looked at Maschke through different eyes: his constant, nervous smoking. The typical beard of a U-boat man with no means of shaving for weeks on end. His brutal impatience during the interrogation the night before. His superficial cynicism. Living at home with his mother – a sense of security.
After Maschke left, the chief inspector nonetheless made a call to an old friend in the personnel department, who owed him a favour. At least now he had concrete details about Maschke to go on.
Five minutes later he slammed down the receiver: it was quite clear that not only had Maschke never been in the Gestapo, he had never worked for any branch of the Hamburg police prior to 1945. He had applied to CID after the war and been signed up for police training college as he said. And, yes, in the papers submitted with his application there was a CV and documents to confirm his service on the U-boats in France. No Gestapo history, no time spent with the ‘special units’ in the east, no hidden years as a concentration camp guard. Maschke was clean.
On Friday Dr Ehrlich called him in. ‘The raid saw us catch a good few fish in the net,’ the public prosecutor began, politely, sitting back in his chair and putting his hands together over his stomach.
‘Unfortunately not the ones we were fishing for,’ the chief inspector replied. Stave wasn’t interested in metaphors; it was time to tackle the main topic.
‘I have to say I have no ideas,’ Ehrlich admitted. ‘If I were in your position, Stave, I would have done the same. And I wouldn’t have a clue what to do now.’
Just what I wanted to hear, the chief inspector thought. ‘We’re following up a couple of leads,’ he said.
‘Glad to hear it. I thought you might be waiting for the next murder to see if anything might turn up.’
‘We don’t even know for sure if both murders were committed by the same killer.’
‘But you’re working on that assumption?’
Stave said nothing.
Ehrlich waved a hand wearily towards the window. He had long-fingered hands, Stave noticed, pianists’ hands.
‘I suspect that the perpetrator you are looking for is 30 or younger,’ the prosecutor said.
‘In that case you know more than I do.’
Ehrlich took his horn-rimmed glasses off, and began cleaning them. He probably can’t recognise me without them, Stave thought.
‘A 30-year-old,’ the prosecutor began, ‘would have been born in the turnip winter of 1916/17, the year of serious famine in the last war. That was followed by revolution and then counter-revolution. The failed right-wing putsch in Berlin; hyperinflation with your thousand Reichsmark notes being carried around in laundry baskets; the unemployment of the 1929 Depression; the street fighting between the Storm Troops and the Red Front from 1930 onwards; the Nazi terror; the war; bomber raids; concentration camps; occupation, and now this winter. What you and I still think of as normality hasn’t existed for the last 30 years. Normality has become violence, suffering, death. That is why I think someone who can strangle a young woman and an old man with apparently methodical indifference has to be someone who has never known anything but violence in his life. That makes him 30 years old, or younger.’
‘I can’t exactly subpoena every young person in Hamburg,’ Stave mumbled. ‘And not every 30-year-old is a killer.’
‘If you include soldiers, Gestapo men, party functionaries, concentration camp guards and senior officials in the old regime in that group, then I’m afraid I must contradict you. Seen like that most young people are guilty.’
‘And a lot of older people too. That is hardly a help.’
‘Are you aware of my oath of office?’ Ehrlich asked him.
Stave shook his head, confused.
‘I swear, by God the Almighty, to apply and carry out the law of Germany with justice and mercy towards everyone irrespective of religion, race, urging or political conviction, to the advantage of none and disadvantage of none; that I shall follow the laws of Germany and the legislation of the military government according to the word and intent, and that I shall at all times do my best to respect the equality of all before the law. So help me, God.
‘The equality of all before the law, Stave. Have you any idea how many officials the British-controlled Committee for Denazification scrutinised in Hamburg alone? More than 66,000. And how many were dismissed because of their Nazi past? 8,800. Do you know where Jews who survived the concentration camps have to sign up when, in their weakened state, they are entitled to apply for larger rations?’
‘At the police station.’
‘Exactly. At the police station, sometimes in the same building, even in the exact same offices where the Gestapo used to sit. And who do you think is sometimes still sitting in those offices?’
The prosecutor paused for a moment, then said: ‘The police separates concentration camp survivors into three groups. Group 1A: party political offenders. In other words, Social Democrats and Communists. Interesting, isn’t it, that the police still use the term “offenders”? Then there is Group 1B: other political offenders. And finally 1C: criminals and anti-social elements. Which group, would you suggest, do the Jews come under?
‘Anyone who can survive all this humiliation gets a special ration from the Red Cross: a loaf of bread, a tin of meat, five Reichsmarks for a meal in a public canteen, and eight weeks of extra coupons on their ration cards. That’s it. Because the doctors of Hamburg’s Medical Council have decreed, and I quote, that “the general state of health and nourishment of a concentration camp inmate is satisfactory”.’
Ehrlich’s face had gone red, his hand was no longer waving out the window but clasped around his teacup, his knuckles so white that Stave was afraid the porcelain might shatter at any moment.