As the chief inspector was folding the map up again, the beam fell on a faded official Reich stamp on the rear: an eagle and a swastika, with a few scribbles beneath. Stave was just about to put the map back with the others when he suddenly froze: in the midst of the stamp was writing, the double runes of the SS.
And underneath, barely legible, a name: ‘Hans Herthge.’ In Maschke’s handwriting.
Stave was wondering what it might mean when he heard a noise in the corridor outside.
Footsteps.
The chief inspector had just seconds to think. Whoever it was would almost certainly walk straight past. But what if they didn’t? What if they found him in here with a torch peering into the desk drawers of one of his colleagues? Should he hide? But where?
Brazen it out. He closed the drawer, turned off the torch, shoved the map of France and his leather gloves into his overcoat pocket and turned on the desk reading light. If somebody spotted him, then he would act as if he had nothing to hide.
The footsteps got louder, then stopped. Somebody was standing right outside the door. Stave bent his head over the desk as if he was looking for something.
The handle was turned. Quietly. Stave looked up. It was public prosecutor Ehrlich.
The two men stared at one another for a minute, both of them clearly awkward.
‘Good evening,’ Stave said, breaking the silence first. ‘Can I help you?’
‘Have I got the wrong floor? I thought this was Inspector Maschke’s office.’
‘Spot on, but I fear my colleague has already gone home for the day.’
‘And you’ve been transferred to the vice squad?’ The prosecutor looked puzzled.
Stave used the few moments to make up a story. ‘Tomorrow Maschke is to go round all surgeons who might have carried out an operation like that undergone by the fourth victim. I’ve already sent him out to talk to medical people. The truss, the dentures, you remember? It occurred to me that there might be specialist doctors who deal with hernias in men and abdominal operations in women. If the victims belonged to the same family, that might be a lead. Given that Maschke had already left, I thought I’d look and see if I could find anything. But,’ he nodded at the mess on the desk, ‘I guess I’ll have to wait and ask him tomorrow.’
Ehrlich looked at him sceptically for a moment, then smiled and said, ‘I understand.’ It didn’t sound as if he understood anything. ‘Then I will also just have to wait to speak to the inspector. Pity.’
The prosecutor made a little bow, then closed the door behind him. The steps receded down the corridor.
Stave took a deep breath. Cold sweat ran down the back of his neck. Had Ehrlich swallowed his story? Would he mention this unfortunate meeting to Maschke? At the very least he would now have to mention his idiotic idea about the surgeons to the vice squad man, if only to keep his story consistent.
He waited a few minutes more, until he was sure that Ehrlich was really gone, put the papers back as they were, wondered if he should replace the map of France but decided in the end to hold on to it. For the time being. Until he had worked out what the ‘Hans Herthge’ business was about.
He turned off the light, went out into the corridor, and left the dark building as quickly as possible. It was only when he was outside, on the cold and draughty square, that it occurred to Stave that Ehrlich hadn’t told him what he was doing looking for Maschke so late in the day.
Dark streets. The ruins like ghostly castles. Somewhere the motor of a British jeep growled. A curtain, frozen solid, blown out from a load of fallen tiles, waving back and forth in the wind. Otherwise it was painfully quiet. Over the past few years Stave had got so used to the view of the city in ruins that he hardly noticed it any more. But now, hurrying home, he felt uncomfortable, insecure. Threatened.
Shadows haunted empty windows. Reflections of half-destroyed walls. Corpses? Or a killer lurking in wait for some nocturnal wanderer? I’m becoming paranoid, the chief inspector told himself, not for the first time.
He too now walked down the middle of streets, as far as possible from the ruined lots. He felt a tingle down his spine, as if somebody was watching him. Turned on his heel. Nobody there.
But still he felt he was not alone.
He reached for his gun, flicked off the safety on the FN22, began walking faster despite the pain in his left leg. It seemed to take forever.
When at last Stave got to his building, he took the steps two at a time and threw open the door to his apartment. His heart was pounding; he was covered in sweat and panting for breath.
I’m acting like an idiot, like a rookie, he told himself. If somebody had come up to me to ask the time I might have shot them. He waited until his hand stopped trembling then clicked the safety on his FN22 back on. I need to get more sleep, he thought, and I need to get warmed up properly for once. If only this bloody frost would come to an end. But at the same time, that was something else he was afraid of: the smell of stinking corpses thawing.
He got himself dinner: bread that tasted of paper, a thin slice of cheese, water, an old potato that needed heating for an hour on the stove before he could get it down his throat. Then he lay down on his back, waiting for sleep, like a dead man stretched out on a bed, motionless, under a ton of tiredness. Yet something else was weighing on his mind, holding him back from drifting off to dreamland.
Eventually his hand found the radio. The old box gave off a yellowish glow as it warmed up. He hadn’t turned it on in months. In the ‘brown days’ all you got was endless Liszt, and then, ‘The High Command of the Wehrmacht announces…’ The shrill voices of Hitler or Goebbels interspersed with the cries of ‘Heil!’ from the devout in some sports arena, like a storm of hail on a window. Then Wagner. He was so fed up with it all that he preferred not to turn the radio on at all. He knew of colleagues and neighbours who secretly listened to the BBC, but he never dared.
But today there was supposed to be a new station starting up: Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk, Northwest German Radio, run by British officers and young German journalists. A sort of BBC for Germans. Stave had heard about it but not shown much interest, although he had overheard colleagues now and then looking forward to it starting.
But now, as sleep wouldn’t come, he gave it a go. At least it would give the illusion there was somebody else in the room. An announcer, then a whooshing sound, the crackle of static, complete silence and darkness for a few moments when the electricity gave up. And then he was listening to a play. Stave didn’t get the name of the writer, and only half listened to the narrator; he just enjoyed having the sound and the glow of the radio, a splinter of normality.
He heard the story of a man returning from the war, rejected by everybody. Heard the man talking to the Elbe. Odd, he thought, how could anybody talk to the Elbe when it’s under a metre of ice?
And gradually he drifts into a dream in which his son is talking to the Elbe and the waves have somehow taken on the contours of Margarethe. It’s warm, the undamaged apartment buildings shine in the sun. Stave feels sad and lucky at the same time as he glides beyond the dream into the realm of deepest darkness where he sleeps as he has not done for years.
Discovery
Monday, 17 February 1947
Stave had been in his office on the telephone since 7 a.m. His fingertips had turned red from dialling so much and he was now using a pencil. He had tried on Friday to get hold of Maschke. He was desperate to speak to him before Ehrlich so that he could give him his version of their evening encounter in his office. But his efforts had been in vain. He had completely failed to reach his vice squad colleague in any hotel, police station or even hospital in the whole of northern Germany. On several occasions he had reached people who had seen Maschke recently, often just a few hours earlier. It’s as if he was trying to avoid me, Stave thought. But that was absurd.