‘Even so,’ the prosecutor continued, ‘I shall do everything to ensure the “equality of all before the law”. And do you know why? Because I do not want revenge, I want justice. Because only justice will let us build a better state. Because only justice will banish fear. Because only justice will allow us to raise a generation for whom “normality” will actually be normal again.’
‘Two strangled bodies isn’t exactly normal,’ Stave muttered.
‘Two strangled bodies is not normal; it is tragic, but it is hardly threatening. However, what if two becomes three? Or four? People will start to become afraid. And frightened people look towards a strong man, someone who will clean things up without worrying about collateral damage. And that, Stave, is absolutely the last thing we need. That would sabotage everything I work for here on a daily basis.’
‘It’s what I work for too,’ Stave said wearily.
Ehrlich smiled for the first time. ‘I know that. That’s why I’m speaking openly with you. I don’t want to put pressure on you.’
‘But that’s what you’re doing.’
‘That’s what I’m doing. The circumstances are doing it. We absolutely have to stop these killings. If only it were summer, if the homeless were just starving but not freezing and squatting out there in the darkness at the same time, then murders like this would horrify us but that might be all. But right now, in this miserable, long, destructive winter, the city is on the brink of total collapse. Nothing works properly any more, absolutely nothing. You experience it every day. The camel’s back is already overloaded, if I can put it that way.’
‘And these murders might be the last straw.’
‘That’s what I mean. So as far as I am concerned you have permission to interrogate every single citizen of Hamburg, up to and including the mayor if you have to! Turn over every single stone in the mountains of rubble until you find a lead. Tell me your most absurd suspicions, the most implausible ideas. I have your back, inspector. But find me the killer!’
Stave thought over what the prosecutor had said on his short walk back to HQ. He had the backing of Ehrlich, a public prosecutor with the best of contacts amongst the British. A public prosecutor set on hunting down former secret concentration camp guards and who in most cases demanded the death penalty, which the judges usually passed. You could have worse allies, he thought.
So anxious was he to get back to work that the chief inspector ran down the hallway, barely noticing his limp. He threw open the door to the anteroom without knocking.
‘Frau Berg, please call Inspector Maschke and Lieutenant MacDonald and tell them to come to my office,’ he said, hoping his voice sounded normal.
A few minutes later the two were in his room. Stave gave them a rough summary of his meeting with Dr Ehrlich. ‘We can do whatever we want and we have his full support,’ he said in conclusion.
‘Full support for what precisely?’ Maschke asked.
Stave had been thinking about that for the past two days, ever since the raid on the Hansaplatz. Both the lines of enquiry he now wanted to follow were frankly a pain. One of them was politically delicate to say the least. The second would involve them treading on toes, toes that belonged to important people whose private lives they would need to look into.
‘We’re going to take on the Displaced Persons files, every single one of them.’ He turned to MacDonald and added, ‘Obviously that means we are going to need the agreement of the British authorities.’ That was the politically delicate part. ‘And we are going to investigate every single missing person in Hamburg,’ this to Maschke. ‘That means not just going through the lists of names and ages. We are going to burrow around in each and every case.’ That would mean digging into private lives. Either our two victims are DPs, in which case we will find a link to them in the camps. Or they are natives of Hamburg, in which case somebody somewhere must have realised they’re missing – maybe just one person, and maybe that person has a reason for not coming forward. One way or another we are going to find out who they are.’
MacDonald looked confused. Maschke’s face had gone the same colour of grey that army recruits used to go when they got their orders for the eastern front a few years back.
The Girl with No Name
Saturday, 2 February 1947
His left leg hurt. Since early morning Stave had been plodding up and down the station platforms like a nervous sheepdog. It was now coming up to midday. Every half-hour a train would arrive, pulled by battered steam locomotives belching black sooty clouds, with a whistle and screech of iron wheels on iron rails.
Most of them were either carrying potatoes in from the countryside, open-topped freight trains or standing-room-only trains, former third-class carriages with the seats ripped out in order to squeeze more people in. Men in suits or overalls piled out, young women so weak they could hardly walk, in headscarves, or just old curtains wrapped around their heads and necks to protect them against the lethal wind that blew through the carriages. You could only see their eyes. Some were carrying cardboard boxes in their hands or net shopping bags, ripped rucksacks or bags cobbled together out of strips of torn canvas, people who’d been out foraging in Luneburg or Holstein, buying potatoes. The farmers out there were getting rich. People would offer their last valuables, the family silver, gold coins, stamp collections, old paintings, smuggled Wehrmacht weaponry. They would even beg.
Most came back with just a few pounds of potatoes, some with nothing at all. Several of them were bleeding from ragged wounds to their arms, thighs or buttocks, visible beneath their ripped clothing: some of the farmers got so fed up with the begging, they set dogs on them.
‘Hamsters’ was the popular name for them, but to the police it was officially ‘direct producer-consumer trade’, and it was illegal. It went against the rules of the emergency economy, sabotaged the ration system. British military police and uniformed German police kept watch at stations outside the city, and would occasionally close down the main station to carry out a raid. More than one ‘hamster’ who’d spent two days begging in the countryside and in the end handed over his gold watch for four pounds of potatoes would find himself robbed of them when he got back and thrown into jail.
Stave wasn’t interested in the ‘hamsters’; they weren’t why he was here. He was watching the emaciated figures in Wehrmacht greatcoats. Could his son have become one of these wraiths? Would he even recognise him? The chief inspector watched the returning veterans as they stood there on the platform, still confused, getting their bearings once again. Then he would go up to them, speak to some of them, offer them cigarettes. It was the same ritual every time, the same brief surge of hope, like the effect of a glass of schnapps in the bloodstream. And then the same empty faces, the mumbled regrets, sometimes confused, even crazy, answers. Karl Stave? Never heard of him.
‘Can I help warm you up?’
Stave spun round in surprise. A girl, just 12 years old, Stave reckoned, though her emaciated figure might be deceptive; she might be 14. He shook his head, about to turn round again, then hesitated, put his hand in his pocket and gave the kid two cigarettes.
‘Maybe these’ll do you some good. Keep you out of the hands of a pimp.’
The girl snatched the cigarettes, shouted, ‘Don’t be so fucking sentimental,’ and vanished.
The next train was on platform four, from the Ruhr, not from the east, but Stave didn’t want to miss any of them. There were two former soldiers on the wooden walkway from the platform, and in front of them two British military policemen. With trembling hands the two ex-POWs showed them their release papers. Stave waited until they had been checked.