Stasi Child by David Young

the way first. Elke!’ Tilsner shouted out into the main office. Student detective Elke Lehmann looked up from her desk. ‘Two coffees, please, for me and Oberleutnant Müller here. Quick as you can. Two sugars for me, one for the Oberleutnant .’ The girl started busying herself with tins and mugs at the side of the room.
    ‘I see you’ve got her well trained, Werner, but she’s supposed to be learning about police work, not making coffee.’
    Tilsner shrugged and smiled at his superior. ‘She’s happy to do what I want.’
    Müller glanced at the side of her deputy’s face as he began unclipping the pages of missing girls from the West German folder. Strong chin, hint of stubble and fierce blue eyes. I bet she is happy to do whatever he wants, thought Müller, then chided herself for the ridiculous flash of jealousy.
    Another train went through the station overhead, and Tilsner swore when the pile of papers he’d taken from the file fell to the floor from the table’s rattle. ‘ Scheisse . Can’t they get us a proper office?’ They collected up the pages and files and moved out together to the outer office. Müller crossed to the long side table, moving the empty coffee cups and textbooks.
    ‘So where do we start?’ asked Tilsner. ‘Height? Hair colour? Eye colour?’
    ‘We don’t know her eye colour. We can’t even check for dental records.’ Tilsner grimaced at her reminder. ‘Let’s take all the pages out, divide them into piles and just work through them like that. We could maybe start with age. We know from the pathologist that she was between thirteen and seventeen years old. Maybe we should add another year’s leeway each side and discount any of the girls under twelve or over eighteen?’
    Tilsner nodded, and they began leafing through the pages of each file, collecting a pile of rejected girls who didn’t meet the age criteria.
    Elke approached with the two cups of coffee. Tilsner took a sip from the one he was offered and recoiled in disgust. ‘Elke, what the hell is that?’ The girl reddened and dropped her gaze.
    Müller sipped from her own cup. It did taste disgusting, but she simply said, ‘Thank you, Elke. Just ignore him. He got out of the wrong side of bed this morning.’ She immediately felt a pang of guilt – his marital bed, the one she had sullied with her presence, clothes on or not. Tilsner grinned at her, as though he knew what she was thinking. Then he pushed his mug to one side and left it there.
    They continued shuffling through the papers until they had been through the whole pile. Evidently teenage girls were the most likely to be reported as missing, because the reject pile was actually smaller than that of those who met their age criteria.
    ‘What next?’ asked Tilsner.
    ‘Height?’ suggested Müller. ‘How tall was she? About a metre and a half?’
    Tilsner got his notebook out of his pocket. ‘Just over. It says here 1 metre 52. That’s what the pathologist put in his report.’
    ‘OK, so she could have grown if she’d been missing a while, and if she was young enough. So we still can’t discount girls who were shorter when they went missing.’
    ‘But we can reject taller ones, because she won’t have shrunk. Everyone over, say, 1 metre 55 for starters.’
    They divided the pile in two, and worked through it, pulling out the papers of any girls over their height limit.
    ‘That’s helped,’ said Tilsner. He fanned out the three reports he had left. ‘How many have you got?’
    She spread them out on the table. ‘Just seven.’
    The details of ten girls to look through. They spread the ten pages out, side by side, along the table. Müller went along flattening each with a sweep of her hand. Then she returned to her own office and brought back two black-and-white photographs of the girl – one taken at the scene where the body had been discovered, and the other from the autopsy report. She took the autopsy photo first, showing the girl’s face