‘May I accompany you?’
Stave was surprised by his own words. They had just popped out without him thinking.
Anna von Veckinhausen gave him a look of astonishment.
‘We go the same way,’ he added quickly. ‘I’ve just got a bit further to go, as far as Wandsbek.’
She smiled briefly. ‘If we hurry we can just catch the last tram,’ she replied.
Stave got to his feet, grabbed his coat and hat, and held the door open for her. Erna Berg was staring at him in confusion.
‘Send someone for me if anything important crops up,’ he told her.
That was all the explanation he gave her. Stave felt a spring in his step he hadn’t felt for years, even though he knew he was behaving like an idiot and looked like one too.
They both broke into a quick pace as they left the building. They had to get to Rathaus Platz, where the trams left from, in time to catch the last one. They only ran for a few hours each morning and afternoon, to save electricity. Stave and Anna leaned forwards into the wind, her scarf and headscarf wrapped tight, his collar pulled up high and his hat low over his eyes. There was no time for them to talk. Stave didn’t mind. He was busy enough concentrating on walking without his limp showing.
Don’t go falling in love, he told himself; don’t make a fool of yourself. She’s your only witness. Bait, without even knowing it, for an unscrupulous killer, bait that you yourself laid. Or maybe she could even be the murderer herself? You can’t rule that out. You know nothing about her, not even whether or not she’s married. Maybe there’s a husband and children waiting for her in her Nissen hut. Children! What would Karl think, if he ever came back? His home in ruins, his mother dead – and the father he’d fallen out with before the war living with another woman? It was unthinkable.
They almost ran across the windy Rathaus Platz, Anna’s cheeks red from the cold and the effort of walking so fast. Delicious, thought Stave to himself, then turned his eyes to the ground.
The three tramlines intersected in front of the city hall. The lines had been repaired and cleared of debris. The carriages were battered, people everywhere pushing and shoving. Black marketeers with their lackeys pushing their way in with huge, heavy crates of coal or carrots. Weary postmen laden with packages. At least there was no rubbish on board. In the mornings the trams were used for carrying waste out to the dumps on the edge of the city. How else was anyone to get rid of it?
And in between the crates and boxes were the people: black marketeers, office workers, shop workers, all of them going home at the same time because of the electricity cut-off.
Stave clumsily tried to forge a way through for Anna von Veckinhausen, to help her up the step on to the tram. But she was better at it on her own; she did it more often. The carriage was stuffed, stank of wet overcoats, old shoes, sweat, bad breath, cheap tobacco.
The people piling in after them shoved Stave and Anna von Veckinhausen against the window on the far side of the carriage. The chief inspector fought back with his elbows, without turning round, then gave up and allowed himself to be pushed up against the woman who was going to help him catch the rubble murderer. He gave her an embarrassed smile.
‘Just a couple of stops and then we’ll be back in the fresh air,’ she said.
A shunt, the screech of steel wheels on tracks and a lurch as the tram turned a corner. Blows to the shoulders, the stomach, the weight of the man next to you swaying, a pain in the hand when somebody reached out to grab the same handhold as you. Muttered imprecations, growing louder. Nobody apologised, nobody looked at anybody else.
Stave said nothing. Every word could be dangerous. Nobody knew what the person next to you did in the war. There were cases of people cursing under their breath, then being stabbed by former veterans from the Russian front. Teenagers, who at the age of 15 were enlisted into the Hitler Youth and sent to the front for beating to death somebody who accidentally insulted them. Our society is a wasteland, the chief inspector thinks to himself. We detectives are just clearing up the rubble.
Stave couldn’t bring himself to say anything in the obscene crush. Anything he said would be overheard. You either cursed or shut up. In any case, what would I say to her, he thought to himself.
Fortunately the tram began to empty after the third and fourth stops – both unmarked amidst a wilderness of ruins, dozens of people clambering out. Where were they going, Stave wondered. Only now, when finally it was possible to move, a sweating conductor made his way across to them. Stave handed him a multiple journey ticket he had bought two weeks ago and to date had only used for one journey. Single tickets were no longer being sold: there was not enough paper. Stave rarely used the tram; he used the cash he saved to buy cigarettes he could exchange at the station for information from returning veterans. In any case walking strengthened his bad leg.
‘Two,’ he said to the conductor.
‘Generous,’ Anna von Veckinhausen said.
Good that she hadn’t used his title. If she’d said, ‘Chief Inspector,’ then everyone would have turned to look at him. And that wasn’t a pleasant feeling if you were in a carriage where at least half of those present had been trading on the black market.
‘Do you take the tram often?’ Stave asked needlessly, when there was finally enough space around them that he felt comfortable talking normally.
‘I’ve got used to it since I came to Hamburg.’
‘How did you get around before that?’
She gave him an attentive, slightly amused look. ‘Is that an official question?’
‘Private. You’re not obliged to answer.’
‘In a car. Or a carriage. Preferably on a horse.’
‘The home of a well-to-do family.’
‘A well-to-do home. I know what you’re thinking.’
‘What am I thinking?’
‘You think I come from some landed Junker family east of the Elbe. That it’s people like me who ruined Germany.’
‘Did you?’
She exhaled angrily. ‘We were nationalists, conservatives. But we never voted for Herr Hitler.’
The chief inspector wondered what she meant by ‘we’, but didn’t ask.
‘I get out here,’ Anna von Veckinhausen said, as with screeching brakes the tram came to a halt next to a blackened building facade half its original height.
Stave followed her without asking permission. They took a straight street that led between mountains of rubble, from which here and there remnants of wall protruded, reminding Stave of a long-drawn-out cross on a grave.
The Nissen huts stood at a crossing in the shadow of the old flak bunker: tin barracks erected along all four streets. The chief inspector counted 20 of them, with here and there the yellowy flame of candlelight shining through windows cut in the barrel-like sides, while others just sat there in the dark. The air was filled with the acrid stench of wet wood burning. Blue smoke rose from thin, twisted tin chimneys and gusted amidst the lines strung between the huts and hung with washing, long frozen solid. There was a smell of cabbage soup and wet shoes, and here and there a well wrapped-up figure coming from the tram passed them, pushed open a door in one of the barracks and disappeared.
In those few seconds Stave got a glimpse of the interior; rough wooden tables, a tiny stove in the middle of the hut, made of black cast iron. Clothing or sheets in every colour hung from lines strung across the interior in every direction, either washing or as makeshift walls, so that families could have the minimum of privacy in these barracks with no rooms.
Stave wondered what it must be like for someone who had grown up in a grand mansion now to be living in a communal barracks in the midst of ruins. He wondered if Anna von Veckinhausen was ashamed. Or if she was just lucky still to be alive and have a roof over her head, even if it was made of corrugated iron.
Anna von Veckinhausen walked up to the door of the Nissen hut in the centre of the crossing, a crossing with a completely undamaged advertising column standing in the middle of it. Every day when she left the hut Anna von Veckinhausen would find herself staring at the photos of the murderer’s victims. Maybe that was what led to her changing her statement, Stave thought in a moment of self-satisfaction.