I still don’t know anything, he thought. Nothing at all.
Or do I?
Two observations kept coming back to him, dragging him away from the hunt for the triple murderer he was supposed to be pursuing. What was that gesture aimed at Maschke? How did the little girl from the home know the vice squad man? Maybe under the cover of his job he was molesting little girls?
He tried discreetly to glance in the rear-view mirror for a glimpse of his colleague’s face. But the jeep was bouncing along and the mirror shaking; he’d get a distorted view for a second or two and then it was gone.
What about Ehrlich? Therese Dubois called him a ‘man with a mission’. Why was the prosecutor so keen on this case? Maybe it wasn’t anything at all to do with rebuilding democracy, like he said? Maybe this man whose wife had been driven to suicide had some other issue: revenge? Revenge on her old regime tormentors. Maybe this enigmatic case was just a way for him to get back at some National Socialist or other. But how?
‘What now?’
MacDonald’s question gave Stave a start. He hadn’t even noticed they were back at headquarters.
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘We’re sending out the posters with the photo of the girl and medallion today. Wait and see if this time somebody turns up. Maschke, go back and have another look at the last location, maybe you’ll find some witnesses. Maybe you’ll come across something we missed. Maybe our colleagues from Department S will turn up something on the black market. Maybe Dr Czrisini will come across a lead in the course of the autopsy.’
He took his leave of both men, climbed wearily up the stairs to his office and opened the door to the anteroom. For some reason it annoyed him to see Erna Berg – he knew her secret, would never betray it, but it annoyed him to see her.
Sitting there alone at his desk, he went over everything. Then he came to a decision. He would continue the search as normal. But he would also make a point of checking up on Ehrlich and Maschke. You never knew.
The next morning Stave’s colleague from Department S rushed into the office, stopped in the doorway and called to him: ‘Nothing to report – no girl’s coat, no truss, no false teeth – we’ve not found anything we can link to the victims. If you want you can come and look at a few dozen winter coats, pairs of stockings or worn-out shoes that we’ve confiscated in raids over the last 48 hours. I have no idea how we might link any of them to one of the victims. We’re still at it. The next raid is going ahead this morning.’
‘Thanks,’ the chief inspector muttered wearily, but by then the door had already closed.
The posters got no response from the public. It seemed nobody knew who the girl was. Nobody recognised the medallion.
Stave nodded awkwardly to Erna Berg, grabbed his coat and said, ‘I’m going over to the Search Office.’
She looked at him in amazement. ‘Lieutenant MacDonald is already there.’
‘I want to hear what they have to say for myself.’
‘Search Office’ was another one of those terms you had to learn to live with. The Red Cross and both churches had merged their documentation and expertise to create perhaps the world’s largest institution dedicated to finding people. They collected every bit of information: record cards, police reports, old Wehrmacht order papers, official registration notices, prisoner lists from the occupying forces and thousands of other documents that might provide information on unaccounted-for soldiers and missing refugees. The number of Wehrmacht soldiers alone, sought after by families who had no idea whether they were living or dead, was three and a half million. Added to that there were 15 million refugees. That amounted to 18.5 million record cards in rows of cardboard boxes that stretched for kilometres, each card with a name, date of birth, last address, last known sighting, and any other potentially relevant information.
One of those cards bore the name of his son.
Stave knew how to get there. He’d been often enough. Down Feld Strasse, then across smaller footpaths through the rubble of city districts that had been all but wiped out, with not a single house intact, not even a piece of wall in most cases. Where there was a wall, it was covered with posters and pieces of paper, requests for information, orders from the military government, the latest police ‘wanted’ posters. Some of it was his work, but already half ripped down by the gusting icy winds. A burnt-out bus lay in the middle of the ruins with a banner on its roof, declaring ‘Leather Goods’. Stave wondered who on earth would buy something here.
Eventually he got to number 91 Altona Allee on the right-hand side: the local courthouse. It was somehow inevitable that it had survived; a typical palace of justice from the first Kaiser’s day with light-coloured stonework, columns, figureheads and statues along the facade. Undoubtedly they were allegorical figures, but Stave saw them as carved images of missing persons.
The judges had been thrown out. Now it was the workspace for 600 men and women, pale, discreet, hard-working and long since immune to the tragedies of others; 600 trying to discover the fate of 18.5 million.
Outside the imposing building was one of the fat round advertising columns with a huge poster on it, black and white with a red cross in the middle, and many photos of children. Above it the heading: ‘How do I search for and find my nearest and dearest?’ Posters like this kept appearing all over Hamburg, the same every week, but also different: the photos were new. There were 40,000 orphans in Hamburg, many so young they didn’t even know their surnames, let alone their addresses. Their faces, some shy at having their photo taken, some indifferent, cheeky or frightened, seem to stare down at Stave as he walked up the steps and pushed open the heavy door.
The long, dimly lit hallways were narrowed by shelves on both sides filled with wooden drawers filled with record cards. The offices were packed with big tables covered in books: bound lists with dates and photographs, primarily those of soldiers. The tomes of the missing.
The chief inspector resisted the temptation to go over to the row of drawers marked ‘S’ and get out the record card for ‘Stave, Karl’. What was the point? He went to the office of Andreas Brems, one of the researchers he knew from earlier visits.
Brems looked up and shook his head with a sympathetic expression that was part of the job. Just like an undertaker, Stave thought.
‘Nothing new on your son, Chief Inspector.’
‘I’m here professionally,’ Stave replied, sounding more unpleasant than he had intended.
Brems nodded, neither insulted nor curious, and sat there waiting for the question.
Stave told him about the murders. He gave a thin smile.
‘An Englishman was already here about that. Your men have also brought us the “information wanted” posters,’ he said patiently. ‘Nobody here can remember ever seeing any of the persons on the photos. And without names, there’s nothing more we can do.’
‘What about a date?’
Brems gave him a confused look. ‘We sort our card indexes by first and last names of the missing person. It’s not easy if we don’t have a name. In the case of little children who don’t know their own surname, obviously we use different criteria: estimated age, place they were found, et cetera. One of my colleagues looked through all that material using the details of the murdered girl, but nothing came to light.’
‘Can you tell when somebody made a request for information?’
‘That’s noted on every index card – including when the first request was made. But the cards aren’t sorted chronologically.’
Stave rubbed his neck. ‘Have there been many requests in the last few weeks? I’m only interested in the time frame from the week before the first murder up until today. The 35 days from the beginning of January until now.’
The researcher shook his head in amazement. ‘New missing person reports come to you, not us. The war has been over for nearly two years. Anyone looking for somebody missing from then would have reported the case to us long ago. There are basically two groups of people who still make new requests, the first being refugees who’ve only just reached the western zones. But as there haven’t been any trains for the past few weeks because of the cold, there have definitely been no new arrivals from the east. On the other hand, we have those who are worried or despairing but who, if you’ll excuse me, don’t trust the police. They turn to us because our requests for information via the Red Cross and the churches can more easily extend beyond the occupation zones. Wives of men who have reason to believe, for example, that their husbands have got to Sweden, or even America.’