Stave presented his ID, gave her his name.
Frau Hellinger hesitated for a moment, then gave a shy smile and invited him in. Parquet floors, antique dressers, blank spaces on the four walls where once pictures must have hung. Stave realised how the Hellingers had paid for their coal. His host led him to the rear of the house, to a room with a bay window looking out on to a quiet garden. She offered him a wicker chair.
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she asked. Stave nodded gratefully.
‘I hadn’t reckoned on the police calling by,’ she said.
Stave gave a thin smile. ‘Why’s that?’
‘I originally reported my husband as missing at the nearest police station. An officer there took down my details on a form. And I had the impression that that was that.’
‘Which is why you went to the Search Office?’
She nodded, sipping at her tea, her hands shaking ever so slightly.
‘Tell me something about your husband,’ Stave brought out his notebook.
‘My husband is primarily a builder and engineer,’ Frau Hellinger said, with another shy smile. ‘He founded his own company as a young man. Nothing big, you know, but solid. A company that made specialist machines.’
‘What sort of machinery?’
‘Trigonometric calculators. Primarily for U-boats.’
She noticed Stave staring at her blankly, and held up a hand apologetically.
‘It was his own invention. As far as I understand it, U-boat captains have to make complicated calculations before firing a torpedo. They have to work out their own course, and that of the ship they intend to attack, the speed of the ships, the speed of the torpedo, currents, all that sort of thing. My man made calculators that could help them work it all out. The officer would put in some data, turn a few wheels – and there was the result. It was a bit like a calculating machine you get in offices, my husband used to say, but more complicated. He delivered the devices to Blohm amp; Voss and the shipyards installed them in every U-boat that left the port here.’
‘A good business to be in, I imagine,’ said Stave. ‘At least up until May 1945.’
She gave him a pained look. ‘After the…’ she struggled to find a suitable word, ‘…collapse, despite the great problems, my husband managed to keep the firm together.’
‘Most of the ships sunk by U-boats were English. I can’t imagine that the new masters of our city were particularly interested in the welfare of a company that sent half their fleet to the bottom of the ocean.’
Frau Hellinger coughed. ‘Obviously my husband immediately stopped production. Machinery was machinery. That’s what he said. He didn’t care much what he produced – as long as it was complicated enough to keep him interested.’
‘What does the firm make nowadays?’
‘Precision timepieces, time clocks for offices and factories. Timers for automated machinery.’
‘There’s a market for those again?’
‘Of course, lots of firms are trying to get production up and running again, despite all the problems. You’ll even find our clocks hanging on the walls of the British barracks and clubs.’
That’s what it’s like to be a winner, thought Stave, and felt suddenly as if there were a wet leather overcoat weighing down his arms and shoulders. No matter who wins wars: winners do business. They have the bread, literally. They live in villas. The only difference here is that normally they do not vanish without trace.
‘What happened on the thirteenth of January?’
‘I don’t know exactly. The night before we were late going to bed. My husband has always been an early riser; he’s never needed much sleep. He got up at his normal time; I remember that even though I was still half asleep. Then I fell back into a deep sleep and when I woke up it was about 10 a.m. and he was gone.’
‘Gone?’
Frau Hellinger blushed slightly. ‘My husband and I have been married for 30 years, we know each other very well – he often gets up before me, but he never ever leaves the house without saying goodbye. And if he’s going to visit a customer instead of the office, he always tells me.’
‘But on this occasion the house was empty when you got up?’
‘Yes, he had just gone.’
‘Had he taken anything with him? Money, for example?’
Now she was blushing deeply. ‘Not as far as I know. We don’t keep a lot of cash in the house. And no, there are no valuable items missing. At least none that weren’t missing beforehand, if you know what I mean.’
Stave glanced at the bare patches on the walls and nodded, then glanced down at his notebook to read the notes he had made at the Search Office.
‘You stated that he was wearing his winter coat. Navy-blue wool, hat, gloves and scarf.’
‘That was what was missing from the cloakroom. That was what he normally wore in winter.’
‘And his briefcase was missing too.’
‘He took it with him to work every morning.’
‘What did he keep in it?’
Frau Hellinger shrugged her shoulders. ‘Documents, I imagine. I never looked.’
‘Diagrams? Contracts?’
‘I really have no idea.’
Stave wondered if someone involved in the production of trigonometric calculators and complex timepieces had call to use thin lengths of wire. Wire loops. ‘Was the house door locked that morning, when you noticed your husband was missing?’
Frau Hellinger looked surprised. ‘It was closed, but not locked.’
‘Thank you,’ said Stave and closed his notebook.
‘There’s something else.’
He looked up.
She hesitated, taking a deep breath. ‘When I started looking around I found a screwed-up piece of paper on the floor in the cloakroom where his overcoat normally hung. I didn’t notice it at first; I thought it was just something the cleaning lady had missed. But later, when my husband was nowhere to be found and I began to look for clues as to what had happened, I picked it up.’
She opened the drawer of a commode and took out a piece of paper the size of a hand. Squared paper, torn down one side, clearly hastily torn out of a notebook, Stave reckoned. The sort of notebook used by engineers or technicians for doing calculations or drawing sketches.
He took it from her and examined it. The innumerable creases like a net across the hatched page showed how scrunched up it had been. One side was blank, on the other, a single word, scrawled in pencil, in English: ‘Bottleneck.’
She stared at him uncomprehendingly. ‘I can’t speak any English but a friend translated it for me.’
‘The neck of a bottle.’
‘It was obviously thrown aside in haste, but it is definitely my husband’s writing. What on earth does it mean?’
‘I’m wondering that myself,’ Stave said.
The chief inspector took his leave, slowly and in a hurry at the same time. It would have been nice to stay a little longer. Every fibre of his being had enjoyed the warmth inside the villa, the opportunity to take his coat off, sit down and drink some hot tea. He would have liked to close his eyes, fall asleep. On the other hand, he was intrigued by this new discovery. He needed to talk it over with his4 colleagues, exchange ideas, test the plausibility of crazy theories.
He walked quickly, limping, but not even noticing it. Bottleneck. Bottle. Neck. Coincidence. What could it mean? Is Hellinger the killer? But why leave the note? Why an English word? Or was the industry boss just the killer’s accomplice? Or maybe a witness?
All of a sudden Stave stopped. If Hellinger wanted to disappear that morning, would he have dropped the note by accident? Unlikely. But if, as his wife believed, he had scribbled the word in haste, crumpled the note up and dropped it when he was putting his coat on, surely that meant he only had a few moments? And that he wasn’t alone? So who had been with Hellinger in the villa that morning? And did the magnate go willingly with whoever it was? Or was he abducted? That was what his wife seemed to believe. But who would want to abduct him?