Not on your life.
But here he was, purely by chance, on his own and as it happened one of Hamburg’s best-known psychologists had his practice right here, on the Jungfernstieg. Professor Walter Burger-Prinz.
Stave walked down the almost pristine, elegant street that led gradually to the glittering ice of the Alster on his right. To his left stood the colonnaded facades of the grand buildings that had survived the firestorms intact. Once again the chief inspector was overcome by a sense of rage at the injustice. Why had all this pomp and grandeur, based on greed and inequality, survived?
He pulled himself together. It was hardly a psychologist’s fault that the British had preferred to wipe out the working-class districts rather than the grand boulevards.
He couldn’t remember the number of the building where the practice was located, but as he walked along slowly he soon came across a large noticeboard with the professor’s name on it. Fifth floor. The chief inspector pushed open a door nearly three metres high. Light-coloured marble and wrought-iron banisters, but no light bulbs left in the chandelier, he was pleased to see. The old-fashioned lift in the centre of the stairwell was out of order, because the electricity was off. Stave slowly began the long climb up the stairs.
When he finally reached the practice anteroom, however, he found himself up to his ankles in thick-piled carpets looking at an English club armchair, a desk and a teak bookshelf, which along with the scent of Earl Grey tea and furniture polish, made Stave, in his worn-out shoes, tatty suit and torn overcoat, feel grubby. Behind the desk sat a female receptionist in her fifties, with hair pulled back tight and wearing a pair of nickel glasses.
‘May I help you?’
But it sounded more like, ‘No dogs or beggars!’
Stave had intended to ask if the professor might see him, just for a few minutes. But the intimidating facade, the endless marble staircase, the heady scent in the air and now this dismissive receptionist had wound him up more than he could take. Angrily, he marched up to her desk and slammed his police ID down in front of her nose.
‘CID. I need to speak to Professor Burger-Prinz. Immediately.’
She recoiled in shock and distress as if nobody had ever spoken to her in that tone before. For a few moments the expression of disgust vanished from her face, then she got to her feet and disappeared behind a leather-upholstered door.
Stave didn’t have long to wait. He was led through the door into another world, a big room with door-height windows looking out on to the Alster, a desk, three armchairs and an actual couch. None of it, however, was really English but it all looked somehow modern, and at the same time strangely old-fashioned, as if it dated back to before the war. Probably from the Bauhaus movement, Stave reckoned. The armchairs were cubes of chrome and black leather, the couch looking as if it had been poured out of the same materials. Probably very comfortable, the chief inspector thought, though on the other hand it looked a bit like the table Dr Czrisini used to dissect corpses on. But then this one was used for dissections too, in a manner of speaking.
The walls were white, a single painting hanging opposite the windows: oblique black streaks on an ochre background. Modern art, Stave supposed. The parquet floor was polished. On a sideboard by the middle window was a sculpture of a sitting man, Asian-looking. Buddha maybe? There were no certificates or diplomas hanging on the walls, no family photo on the desk. No telephone.
Once upon a time Stave had seen a photograph of Sigmund Freud in a book and was subconsciously expecting to see someone who looked like him. Instead the man approaching him looked like something from a recruiting poster for the SS. Professor Burgen-Prinz was about 1.90 metres tall with short blond hair and the most luminous blue eyes Stave had ever seen, the colour of the water in a Norwegian fjord. The chief inspector felt they were looking straight through him.
‘Why do you need to see me so urgently?’ he said in the deep, perfectly modulated voice of a practised public speaker or singer. The psychologist held out his hand and took Stave’s in a firm grip.
Stave felt relieved when Burger-Prinz indicated they should use the armchairs rather than the couch. He apologised for the intrusion, then began to tell him about the victims, the places the bodies had been found, the few leads they had, the medallions with their strange symbols, about the missing person posters and the fact they had elicited no response. Dead people whom nobody missed. Strangulations. Bodies stripped bare. Ruins, charred walls. Thin layers of snow on cement.
The psychologist let him speak without interrupting. He just watched him with those irritating eyes, took no notes, just sat there in his armchair, relaxed and attentive at the same time. Maybe my tale has got to him, Stave thought, at least awakened his professional interest. Or maybe he just knows how to pose.
‘I read the story about this rubble murderer,’ the psychologist said eventually, when Stave dried up. ‘In Die Zeit. And the photos of your victims are everywhere.’
‘Can you see some kind of pattern in it?’ Stave asked. ‘Do the murders tell us anything about the murderer? Something we might have missed? What is there that links murders, apart from the method? I’m desperate for some sort of lead.’
‘That’s everything you know?’
‘That’s everything I know.’
Burger-Prinz frowned. ‘I hope you’re not expecting me to give you an answer just like that to a case that an experienced criminologist such as yourself has been working on in vain?’
‘Maybe you might recognise some sort of pattern,’ Stave said. ‘Maybe in the choice of the places our unknown perpetrator leaves his victims. Or maybe the victims he chooses themselves.’
The psychologist stood up, walked over to his desk, took a city map of Hamburg out of a drawer and studied it. ‘Ruins, working-class districts, three of them east of the Alster, one west. Cellars, lift-shafts, bomb craters. Your killer is content just to hide the bodies. That’s enough for him.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He’s not trying to get rid of them forever. Just for long enough for him not to be caught.’
‘Hardly surprising. All of the victims, possibly except for the last – we’re still waiting for the autopsy report – were killed on the same day, the twentieth of January.’
‘But they might not all have been put where they were found on that day.’
Stave stared at him. ‘You mean somebody kills all these people, then keeps their bodies somewhere and only disposes of them one by one?’
Burger-Prinz gave him an indulgent smile. ‘It’s cold enough. And your unknown perpetrator wouldn’t be the first killer to move bodies around days or weeks after their murder.’
‘You think somebody’s playing a sick joke on us?’
‘Maybe. But there might also be practical reasons for it. He can only carry one body at a time. Maybe he does it every night.’
‘Every night?’ The chief inspector closed his eyes.
‘One way or another, the killer is behaving rationally. He’s thought it out. There is also something in common in each case. The bodies left in the east were all near the main station whereas the one left in the west was near Dammtor station.’
‘You think the murderer chooses his victims in trains? Or at the stations?’
‘Or kills them near a station. Then he hides the bodies in the ruins nearby.’
‘But all of them on one day? Four bodies, two stations? The trains only run during the day. The stations are abandoned from eight in the evening. If our murderer kills someone during the day, how does he manage to move the bodies to the ruins where we found them without being noticed? And if he only hides them at night, how could he have met them earlier at the station? Does he kill them somewhere in the daytime, then wait for hours on end to hide them somewhere in the dark? Doesn’t sound likely.’