The journalist shook his hand, opened the door and nearly walked straight into Dr Crzisini. He stared at him curiously, as if about to ask a question, then thought the better of it and left.
The pathologist came in, followed a few moments later by Maschke. Stave wondered if he’d been lurking somewhere out of sight until the journalist had gone down the stairs. Then behind him MacDonald and Erna Berg appeared. Stave wondered who had asked her, but said nothing.
‘I’ll make tea,’ she said with a smile.
Stave rummaged around in his desk until he found his large-scale city map and unfolded it carefully. It was a post-war version, hatched grey and red where the bombed areas were. And there were a lot of them. Stave used tacks to put the map up on one wall of the office, then stuck three red-topped pins into the bombed areas, marking the places where the bodies had been found.
The others watched him in silence. Maschke was smoking, Czrisini gave the impression of somebody following an interesting operation and MacDonald looked like a soldier. Erna Berg, a steaming teapot in her hands, had stopped in the doorway and was looking at the map with horror.
‘He’s attacking people everywhere,’ she mumbled.
‘Three times is not yet everywhere,’ Stave contradicted her. ‘In what way could the victims be related?’ he asked, looking at Czrisini.
The pathologist nodded thoughtfully. ‘A grandfather, daughter and her daughter? Possible. It could actually fit with their ages. If we put the first victim, the young woman, at the upper end of the likely age spectrum; I would put her as at most 22. And we put the child at the youngest age, probably six. That would make her a very young mother, with a very old father because he had to be around 70. It is also possible that the first and third victims were actually sisters, two girls about ten years apart. The old man could have been their grandfather. I reckon that is more likely, although not very probable either. But how can you prove it? Up until now I’ve found no distinguishing features, such as birthmarks or the like.’
‘But nor is there anything to suggest they were not related?’
‘No.’
‘Apart from where the bodies were found,’ Maschke intervened, pointing the glowing end of his cigarette at the map. ‘The bodies were found very far apart. If they had been one family, wouldn’t they all have lived together? The child at least would have lived with its mother – or the two sisters would have lived together, if they were sisters, that is.’
‘Or they lived with their grandfather,’ MacDonald said. ‘Like that little Mainke who was taken in by his grandmother.’
‘We can’t exclude any possibility,’ Stave said again, scratching his head. ‘Let us assume it is a family. Let us assume they were all killed in the same place. Remember: there is nothing to say they were killed where they were found. Might it not even be possible they were all killed at the same time? And that the murderer deposited the bodies in difference places afterwards. To cover up any clues.’
Czrisini looked thoughtful. ‘It’s so incredibly cold,’ he murmured. ‘It’s hard to make exact estimates to compare with one another. The same time of death is indeed a possibility, and we just found them at different times. I can say that for certain about the old man and young woman. And I’ll soon know more in the case of the child.’
Stave found himself imagining the little body lying on the dissecting table and forced himself to look out of the window instead. Some things just didn’t bear thinking about.
MacDonald sighed. ‘That might mean there are still more bodies lying around somewhere, that we just haven’t found yet. The father, grandmother, brothers or sisters to the child…’
‘I still think it’s more likely that they have nothing to do with one another,’ said Maschke, twirling his lit cigarette dangerously close to the map. ‘They were all out there in the ruins, maybe looking for something, maybe just taking a shortcut. The murderer was lying in wait for them. Where they were found is where they were killed. The medallion is the calling card of a madman.’
‘That would mean that the victims come from three different families and lived in three different places. Then surely somebody would have come forward to identify at least one of them,’ Stave said quietly. ‘It’s simply not possible for so many people to be murdered in the middle of Hamburg without anyone missing any of them.’
‘We don’t know about the child yet,’ Dr Czrisini reminded him.
‘Quite,’ the chief inspector said, nodding. ‘We need to get a new poster printed. You deal with that, Maschke. Get as many printed as possible and include a photo of the medallion on it. Get in touch with the authorities in all the big cites, including those in the east. I want our posters up even in the Soviet zone.’
A telephone in the outer office rang, causing them all to flinch. Erna Berg went to answer it, said a few words and put the receiver down.
‘That was the police in Lubeck,’ she called out to the chief inspector. ‘The mother of the ship watchman has confirmed that her son was staying with her the past two weeks. One of her neighbours saw him too.’
‘Well, I guess that would have been too easy,’ Stave said, and crossed out a line in his notebook.
‘What next?’ MacDonald asked.
‘We still have three hypotheses,’ Stave said. ‘If the killer is a looter who murders people amongst the ruins to steal everything from them, then sooner or later an item will turn up on the black market that we can link to one of the victims. Maybe somebody will finally see a suspicious character lurking in the ruins. Or some spiv or pimp will hear something. It could be that in the next day or two we manage to identify one of the victims. And you never know, we might even catch him in the act. Sooner or later we’ll get him.
‘Hypothesis two: some madman is killing people and leaving this strange medallion as a calling card. In which case, does anyone have any idea how we might get a lead on him?’
‘We urgently need to find out what this cross and two daggers is all about,’ Dr Czrisini replied.
‘If it is a madman, then he won’t necessarily stop killing. Sooner or later we’ll catch him at it,’ Maschke said hopefully.
‘Somebody will catch him,’ Stave replied. ‘But will it be us, or those who’ve taken our jobs?’ He quickly tried to banish that note of pessimism, standing up straight and announcing: ‘Hypothesis three: somebody wiped out a whole family. In that case, there may be no more victims, no more objects and no witnesses. Or we find the bodies of more people who were killed at the same time as our current victims. So we should be looking not for a murderer who has vanished without trace, but for a family that nobody has reported as missing.’
‘Refugees from the east or Displaced Persons,’ MacDonald murmured.
‘Let’s start with the child,’ Stave told them. ‘Maybe we’ll have more luck than with the other two. Perhaps there are carers, teachers, playmates who’ll recognise her. She must have gone to school somewhere. Let’s knock on the doors of schools and homes that house the children of refugees and DPs.’
The phone rang again. Stave, who hadn’t had a call in days, stared in irritation at the black object. His secretary nodded, said something politely and hung up.
‘Department S,’ she said. ‘They’ve sent out plainclothes people to all the black market areas. None of them have come across a Spencer. But they promise to keep their eyes open.’
‘Good,’ Stave replied, even though he was suddenly quite certain that they were never going to find relevant items of clothing popping up on the black market. Somebody was systematically covering their tracks.
‘I’ll get on with the poster then,’ said Maschke, and vanished.
‘I have work to do in the pathology department,’ Dr Czrisini said. ‘The body will need to thaw first. Not that I expect examination of the girl’s body to reveal anything I don’t already know.’ He gave a low bow and left the room.