Silence.
The chief inspector collapsed to the ground in the moonlight, pulled the loop of wire from around his neck, took a deep breath. In, out, in. His heart was pounding, his hands trembling. But his brain was working.
The rubble murderer.
Stave pulled himself up, stumbled towards the spot between two remnants of walls, half his height, where he had last glimpsed the figure. There was a spot of something on the ground. Stave bent down. Blood. I hit him, he gloated. He looked around, but all he could see were two fields of ruins, a mess of rubble, steel beams, tangled cables, shards of glass, nothing resembling a pathway.
But there was another drop of blood.
He’s climbed over the rubble, Stave told himself. He followed the trail of blood, quietly cursing his wounded leg. He put the shoes back in his coat pocket, but kept the gun in his right hand. The magazine was empty, but the gun itself was a weapon, hard enough to smash down on somebody’s head. Two tiles gave way beneath his feet, clattering down the pile of rubble, sending up a cloud of cement dust. His eyes watered.
Behind the two ruined street blocks was the remains of a bombed house which would have housed three or four families, 30 metres high, all the external walls charred, the window openings empty, no roof, no internal floors remaining. Just heaps of rubble. There was a sign next to the entrance where a door hung at an angle from just the upper hinge. ‘No entry. Liable to collapse.’
But the trail of blood led inside.
I’ve got you, Stave thought, wading carefully through the doorway into the burnt-out building.
Darkness. The moonlight came in only through the gaping windows. Everywhere there were shadows and pitch-black areas. Stave held his breath. Heard nothing.
Or then again? Steps, scraping, as if someone were dragging something along. A wounded leg? A heavy burden? The chief inspector listened out. Somewhere in this ruin, the murderer was on the move. Stave felt in his overcoat pocket for his torch. Not there. Today of all days, he hadn’t brought it with him. Because he didn’t think he would be finding any more bodies in the rubble, because at last it was spring, and the evenings were getting light. Damnably negligent. He looked around him trying to make out details in the darkness. The building had no roof, no internal walls. Where could his attacker hide? Think. What do you know about the rubble murderer? He always hid his victims as deep as possible: a cellar, a bomb crater, the bottom of a lift shaft.
A cellar.
Stave ventured further in. The walls, towering above him, seemed to be trembling. It’s your imagination, he told himself. Don’t let yourself go crazy. He heard a cracking noise, somewhere amidst the piles of stone. Mortar fell to the ground behind his back. He heard a step, a second, then more. Somewhere towards the centre of the ruin. More steps, coming closer this time. He raised the gun.
There. A staircase. Leading down to the cellar. Everything above ground had been bombed to pieces. But the stairs, half hidden under the rubble, led down. The cellar might be undamaged. Now Stave thought he could hear someone breathing heavily, wheezing. Someone in pain, wounded.
Pitch darkness. Stave used his left hand to feel his way forwards, the FN22 still raised in his right. A corridor. Narrow, but possibly very long. He could feel a draught, could taste cement dust on his lips, splinters of wood. He reached out with his hand and felt: a support pillar, wedged in between the ground and the ceiling, an emergency support from the bombing raids. Slave workers were sent in by the local Gauleiter after the ‘All Clear’ was sounded to prop up cellars and walls with wooden beams. The idea was to keep larger ruins from collapsing so that the rubble could be cleared and allow access for the fire service.
He edged forwards a few paces further. The corridor took a turn. He could see light up ahead: a hole in the ceiling where silvery moonlight fell through on to the ground. And on the ground he glimpsed a figure, curled up in pain.
Lothar Maschke/Hans Herthge.
Stave moved towards him, cautiously. The man who had once been his colleague was lying on his side, his right hand pressed against his stomach. Blood was oozing between his fingers, spreading out over the tiled floor like oil. His left hand clenched the dust. His legs trembled.
A shot to the stomach, Stave told himself. He must be suffering like hell. He’ll die. The chief inspector came closer, bent down carefully, still holding his gun in his hand.
Herthge’s face glistened with sweat. His eyes were open wide.
‘Can you hear me?’ Stave asked.
‘You won’t give me any peace, will you?’ Herthge wheezed between his teeth. ‘You want to watch me croak.’
‘It’s not a pretty sight,’ Stave replied. He had no sympathy for the murderer. In fact he was still afraid of him, even now, seeing him lying there in his own blood. Perhaps he hated him too, though Stave tried not to think about that. Professional curiosity came first: find out all he could about the killings, before it’s too late.
‘Tell me what I need to know,’ he suggested to Herthge. ‘Then I’ll go, leave you here to die on your own. I’ll send a few of my colleagues, but for your sake, I’ll make sure they don’t get here until after you’re dead. On the other hand, if you don’t talk to me now, I’m going to stay here and watch you die. Even if it takes hours.’
‘Best deal I’ve ever been offered,’ Herthge whispered, making a gruesome grimace.
‘How did you bump into Yvonne Delluc?’
‘I thought she was a streetwalker: young, well dressed, threw French words around,’ the dying man gasped. ‘She wasn’t in my files, so I stopped her and checked her out.’ He gasped for breath, beads of sweat glistening on his brow. ‘In fact she was only going out to deal on the black market, to hack something or other. I didn’t recognise her from Oradour. But she recognised me. Immediately began screaming at me, calling me a murderer and threatened to have me arrested. Happily she was only speaking French and nobody in the street understood.’
‘So you strangled her then and there.’
Herthge pressed his lips together. His face was so pale now that Stave feared he might die before he told him everything. ‘No,’ he groaned. ‘I didn’t know how she got here, and if there might be any others in Hamburg. I denied everything, told her that she was making a mistake. Eventually I managed to persuade her. Then I let her go, but followed her discreetly.’
‘As far as the Eilbek bunker.’
‘Then I knew where she lived and who she lived with. The next day, when I saw her heading out for the black market again, I dragged her into the ruins and strangled her. I stripped her so that nobody could identify her. I burnt her clothes later in my stove at home. You could have raided the black marketeers as often as you liked and still found nothing, Chief Inspector.’ Despite his agony, he grinned scornfully.
‘Then I drove back to the bunker, in the CID Mercedes. I borrowed it quite legitimately. Unfortunately only the other woman and the girl were there. It wasn’t difficult to invent a pretext to get them into the car. Then I tied them up, drove down a side street and silenced them forever. Just as I had with Yvonne Delluc. But beforehand I had to beat the woman until she told me where the old man was. He’d gone looting in the ruins on the other side of the Alster.’
‘Why didn’t you hide the two bodies in the same place?’
‘I didn’t want them to be found too quickly,’ Herthge gasped. ‘I didn’t want to be disturbed for a couple of hours,’ he managed to say. ‘Then I went looking for the old man. It was getting dark by the time I found him. The rest was easy.’
‘Easy,’ Stave repeated with disgust. He thought for a moment, then asked, ‘Why did you try to kill me? You must have known that it was too late. Whether you killed me or not didn’t matter. They’ve put out a warrant for your arrest. Why didn’t you go into hiding?’