A hand on his sleeve.
The chief inspector spun round, expecting to see the skinny girl again. But it was Maschke.
‘At last,’ the vice squad officer said, before a smoker’s cough wracked him. ‘I’ve been looking for you for an hour,’ he managed to croak out.
Stave closed his eyes wearily. ‘Not another murder?’
‘Maybe.’
‘What do you mean, maybe? Is it a murder or isn’t it?’
‘It’s a murder but it’s not clear if it’s the killer we’re after.’
‘Why not?’ asked Stave, glancing back at the two ex-POWs, then following Maschke who was already striding forcefully towards the main exit.
‘In this case too, the victim was strangled by a thin wire,’ his colleague said, hesitatingly, ‘but this time it’s a child.’
The patrol car was standing outside the former Deutsches Schauspielhaus theatre, now renamed the Garrison Theatre and reserved for the British. Maschke carefully settled back in the driver’s seat, turned round, glanced in the mirror and then edged the old Mercedes ever so carefully away from the curb. When he saw how nervous Stave looked, he smiled apologetically.
‘I learnt to drive in the Wehrmacht, in one of the VW Kubelwagen bucket-seat jeeps on the broad French allees. They were a lot more basic than this grand old lady. I don’t want to get any dents.’
‘We’re in no hurry,’ Stave replied.
Maschke coughed. ‘We’re going to Hammerbrook. It’s not far. Bill Strasse.’
Stave closed his eyes. In the east of the city again, another working-class district that had been heavily bombed, razed to the ground more than any other part of the city.
‘Nobody lives there any more,’ he muttered.
‘The body was found in the lift shaft of a former mattress factory, 103 Bill Strasse, out by the mouth of the Northern Elbe, at the end of the port.’
‘Who found it?’
‘A ship’s watchman, who’d been walking along the canal. Probably looking for coal. You sometimes find bits dropped from a load. Said he was just taking a walk. The report came in about 10.30 a.m.’
‘Have you already checked him out?’
Maschke shrugged. ‘Says he was in Lubeck with his mother up until yesterday. We’re checking that out. If it’s true he can’t be a suspect. If it’s not true then he’s got a problem.’
Maschke drove the heavy old car carefully down the empty streets, making wide detours around the heaps of rubble, but swerved to the side of the road when faced with oncoming British jeeps, avoiding them as if they were tanks. It was about five kilometres from the station to the spot in Hammerbrook where the body had been found, Stave reckoned. It would have been faster walking than with Maschke driving. But at least he didn’t have to face the icy wind.
They passed endless rows of charred facades with no windows, like stage sets in some gigantic burnt-out theatre. The steel structures of the elevated railway, its tracks and bridges, bore the scars of bomb impacts; collapsed in places, bent into grotesque sculptures or reduced to tiny red-black lumps by the ocean of flames that had engulfed them.
The Mercedes rumbled a kilometre or so along Bill Strasse to where a facade that had collapsed on to the street blocked their way. Maschke parked next to the rubble behind a British jeep and the crime scene team’s vehicle.
As Stave stepped out of the car he almost trod on a wooden cross at the foot of the heap of rubble, nailed together at an angle and with the words ‘To our Mother Meta Kruger 27/28.7.1943’. He imagined she was still lying under the rubble, and turned his face away.
They had some 200 metres to walk through the rubble, the meterthick ice on the Bille canal glistening to their right. Somewhere or other the wind was being sucked through a burst stovepipe, making a noise like an eerie organ. There was nothing living visible anywhere, not even a rat or a crow. Stave had climbed around a partially intact wall before he came across signs of life: uniformed police and figures in long overcoats with caps pulled down low over their eyes. British military.
‘This is it,’ said Maschke, somewhat superfluously.
‘Narrow strangulation marks on the throat,’ Dr Czrisini whispered, ‘the lower right arm has an old scar, about two centimetres long. Teeth complete, no signs of undernourishment, about 1.10 metres tall. I would guess six to eight years old.’
‘Time of death?’ Stave muttered, trying to keep hold of himself.
‘I’ll have a better idea after the autopsy, but she’s been dead at least 12 hours. In this cold she might have lain here even longer.’
‘In this cold,’ muttered Stave. ‘Any signs of abuse? Any other harm?’
‘Not as far as we can see at present. But we’ll soon know more.’
‘And as ever, no means of identification?’
The photographer and crime scene man came up with something in a bag. ‘We found this next to the body. It might have belonged to her, but it might also just have been lying there.’
It was a red braided cord about half the length of a finger. The chief inspector shook his head. ‘What is it?’
‘You obviously don’t have daughters,’ the photographer said with a weak smile. ‘It may have come from a Spencer, a type of traditional short jacket. The sort of thing a girl her age would be likely to wear.’
Stave waved one of the uniforms over. ‘Go the nearest police station and call the head of Department S. He needs to send people out to all the black market areas of the city, immediately, and tell them to take into custody any of them selling a traditional girl’s jacket with red cord braid.’
The officer saluted and clambered off over the rubble.
Stave looked around him. ‘The girl can’t have lived round here. The closest even half-inhabitable buildings are hundreds of metres away.’
‘Which means the killer brought her here,’ Maschke concluded for him.
‘Or the kid was here gathering coal and bumped into our killer,’ MacDonald suggested. ‘She wouldn’t be the only child out doing that, it seems.’
The two detectives gave him a quizzical look. He explained, ‘When the first policemen got here after the body was reported, they grabbed a boy who said he was here looking for coal. No idea whether or not he’d seen the body.’
Stave nodded. ‘Right, well let’s ask the ship’s watchman the usual questions. And then we need to talk to the boy.’
The watchman’s name was Walter Dreimann, 35 years old, thin with a face that suggested he suffered from stomach ulcers. Or maybe he just hadn’t got over the sight of the dead child.
‘You were out looking for coal?’ the chief inspector asked.
‘I was just taking a walk,’ Dreimann replied, in a whiny voice that suggested he was insulted by the idea.
‘Do that often, do you?’
‘Every day. Apart from the last two weeks when I was up in Lubeck visiting my mother. But I already told your colleague that.’
‘But before you went to visit your mother you took a walk along here every day?’ Stave asked, flicking through his notebook.
Dreimann nodded.
‘Right here, in this patch of rubble?’
The watchman replied without thinking about it. ‘It’s part of my usual route.’
‘And when were you last here, before you went off to Lubeck?’
‘Must have been the eighteenth or nineteenth of January.’
‘And the lift shaft was empty that day?’
‘Obviously!’ Dreimann gave him a shocked look. ‘You don’t think I’d have found the body of a dead girl and said nothing!’
‘Did you know the girl?’
‘No.’
‘Are you certain of that? Do you want to take another look at the body?’
Dreimann’s face turned green. ‘I’ve already seen enough.’
Stave forced the ghost of a smile and said, ‘You can go.’
The chief inspector looked around the devastated landscape. The photographer was packing up. Two porters in dark overcoats lifted the thin little frozen body from the lift shaft and laid it on a stretcher. Just like during the war, Stave reflected, particularly in the weeks following each bombing raid when they kept pulling little bodies out of the ruins. But this was supposed to be peacetime, for Christ’s sake.