‘You should just go home,’ Stave said to MacDonald and Erna Berg. ‘There’s nothing more to be done here today.’ He stood there and watched the pair of them until the door to the outer office closed behind them.
The public prosecutor was scratching his bald head when Stave walked in. The office was almost warm. The chief inspector inhaled gratefully the aroma of freshly brewed tea. It felt more like a living room than an office, Stave thought to himself, and wondered if Ehrlich spent every Sunday here.
‘Sorry I had to drag you away from the station,’ Ehrlich said, nodding towards the guest chair. ‘You were looking for your son?’
The chief inspector stared at the prosecutor dumbstruck, as if he’d been caught doing something embarrassing.
Ehrlich waved his arms to say it was of no importance. ‘I was just guessing. I had heard your boy was unaccounted for.’
‘I don’t like that term,’ Stave replied.
‘And yet there is a trace more hope in it than in “missing”. Or just “gone”. Don’t you think?’
‘You also have sons,’ Stave said. The prosecutor might as well know he knew things about other people’s private lives too.
Ehrlich nodded calmly. ‘Two boys. They’re at boarding school. Back there.’
Stave took a second to realise that Ehrlich meant England.
‘They’re teenagers. It’s a difficult age. And the last few years haven’t been easy. I was in exile. They had to endure humiliation here, and then the passing of my wife.’
‘Unaccounted for’ instead of ‘missing’, ‘passing’ instead of ‘suicide’. Stave had read some of the indictments Ehrlich had written and been impressed by his precise, crisp style. But obviously he kept that for indictments, a weapon best kept concealed when dealing with friends. He changed the subject, not wanting any more details of Ehrlich’s personal tragedies, and certainly not willing to give any further details of his own. He gave him a quick rundown on the latest murder.
‘Does this give the case a new dimension?’ Ehrlich asked.
Stave sat staring at the prosecutor in silence, not knowing what to say.
Ehrlich passed the time cleaning his glasses, then said: ‘Men and women being killed is horrible, but it happens all the time. A child, however? Isn’t that the last taboo? A total abnegation of the slightest morality?’
‘If you mean, are we looking for a murderer who is capable of absolutely anything, then the answer is yes, in my opinion. A man devoid of any scruples,’ Stave agreed.
‘Most killers who do away with children are driven by uncontrollable emotions, either sexual lust or despairing mothers lashing out in a fit of anger or revenge. But in this case the murder is so…’
‘…methodical,’ Stave completed the sentence for him. ‘The deed is simply carried out in cold blood, using – if you’ll forgive the expression – a tried and tested formula. Then afterwards all traces are erased.’
‘Remind you of something?’ Ehrlich asked in a quiet voice.
‘The concentration camps,’ Stave answered immediately. ‘The Gestapo. Special Units, SS. Men who killed irrespective of the age or gender of their victims. Systematic murderers who carried out their killings methodically, the corpses either dumped in mass graves or gone up in smoke. Documents that simply disappeared, camps that were emptied before the Allies arrived.’
‘Well, that’s not exactly a lead in itself,’ Ehrlich said pensively, ‘but it just might be the beginning of a lead.’
‘The concentration camp guards are already on trial,’ Stave reminded him, somewhat unnecessarily.
The prosecutor gave him a glance that was part sympathetic, part insulted. ‘A few of them. The ones we caught. Most of the guards who were at Auschwitz even are still running around free. The same goes for most of the Gestapo hit men. And that’s without even mentioning all the former members of the SS.’
‘You think we might be looking for some Nazi thug who’s stayed true to his murderous ideology even after the collapse of the regime and is waging some sort of one-man war?’
‘Maybe. Or someone who wants to dispose of inconvenient witnesses to deeds committed in the past.’
Stave thought for a moment. ‘But how does that help me? I can’t go through the history of everyone in Hamburg to find out what they might have been up to prior to 1945. And even if I could, and unearthed every misdeed, how am I to link that with the murders being committed now? We don’t even know the identity of the victims!’ Stave shook his head. ‘The only way we’re going to find the killer is by finding the names of his victims. When we know who they are, then we can start looking for connections. It may well be that they lead to the death squads of the past. My biggest hope at present is the little girl. She must have gone to school somewhere. There have to be teachers or schoolmates who can identify her. The two adults might have been recluses, but a child is always out and about.’
‘Good thinking,’ said Ehrlich, taking out an embossed sheet of paper with his name at the top, unscrewing the top of a weighty Montblanc fountain pen and writing a few lines on it. Stave watched in silence as he fluidly scrolled his signature beneath.
‘This is a letter of recommendation,’ Ehrlich told him, handing it over. ‘In case the girl might come from a family of DPs or persecuted Jews, then you should first check out Warburg Children’s Health Home in Blankenese. This letter should make it easier for you to gain access. But you will still need a permit from the British.’
‘A children’s home?’
‘A very special children’s home.’
Stave didn’t ask any further questions, nodded, folded the brief carefully in two and put it in his overcoat pocket, regretting that he’d sent MacDonald home early.
‘I’ll go to the lieutenant,’ he announced, ‘while it’s still light. Maybe I can get the necessary paper straight away. Then I can start asking questions at Warburg tomorrow morning.’
He got up and went to the door. As he opened it, the prosecutor called him back.
‘Happy birthday, by the way. I noticed the date in your file.’
‘Thanks,’ Stave murmured, somewhat taken aback. Ehrlich was the first person to congratulate him. On his forty-third birthday.
MacDonald lived in a requisitioned villa in Innocentia Strasse in Harvestehude, ‘Zone A’, an almost undamaged part of the city. The British and American bombing raids had been intended primarily to kill workers, and most of the leafy, well-to-do areas had been unharmed. Probably also, Stave thought to himself, because they realised that after they had won the war they would need somewhere nice for their officers to live.
On his way to Harvestehude the chief inspector found himself walking through Planten un Blomen, once the city’s finest park. As late as 1944 they had been planting rose bushes which ever since had erupted into a blaze of red every summer. In the meantime they had ploughed up the strips of land between the pathways and the rose bushes to sow potatoes. Now the transformed former park was covered with a partial layer of snow, dirty brown here and there, dirty white elsewhere; abandoned.
There were signs on the side streets: ‘Out of Bounds for German Civilians!’, ‘For British Forces Only!’. Freezing British military police stared past him indifferently. The grand villas were perfectly cared for, except for the few make-do stovepipes that occasionally jutted out. The trees along the streets were undamaged. There were tin bins outside the gates. It was calm between the villas, the houses and trees offering shelter from the freezing gusts of wind. Occasionally a military patrol jeep would trundle by over the cobblestones. A few figures sloped from bin to bin, one-legged war veterans, a man with a rucksack holding the hand of a girl of about ten, old people, women with headscarves wrapped tight so that nobody could see their faces and see their shame. They opened the lids of the bins, and rummaged inside for bit of rotten potato, wilted lettuce leaves, apple cores. A young cigarette-butt collector was picking up trodden ends of English cigarettes from the pavement. Nobody spoke, nobody looked up. The military police left them alone.