The Murderer in Ruins by Cay Rademacher Page A

entered. They wandered back down the Reeperbahn to the David police station where Maschke was already waiting for them. His breath hung in front of him in small white clouds, his nose was blue from the cold and he was rubbing his hands together. Stave suddenly felt sorry for him.
    ‘Not one person on the Reeperbahn ever laid eyes on our victim. She must have been quite a girl,’ he said.
    Maschke’s cynicism irritated Stave. Was he really such a hard case?
    Or was there something else at play? The shyness of a grown man still living at home with his mother? Or, like many of his other colleagues who worked on the vice squad, had Maschke developed a protective attitude towards his little ‘street swallows’, as they called them? Was it relief he was hearing in the man’s voice? Relief that the victim wasn’t one of the Reeperbahn girls?
    ‘Right, it’s back to the office to talk through what we have or haven’t found, then home to Mum for us all,’ the chief inspector said.
     
    S tave looked out of the office window at Hamburg spread out beneath him, as dark as during the wartime blackout. There were only a few lights here and there to be seen, probably from houses the British had commandeered. Other than that he could make out flickering flames from wood stoves, dangerous enough in themselves in the half-bombed semi-ruin, and the glow of candles. Even his own office in the grey evening gloom was lit by no more than a single dim bulb. Stave looked up at it with some concern: if it were to blow, he had no idea when he’d get a replacement. Probably not until the spring. He sighed and looked at the other two waiting in front of his desk.
    Erna Berg was long gone. She’d left Inspector Müller’s report on his desk. Stave flicked through it silently. ‘No surgeon recognises the body,’ he said at length. He was exhausted. ‘Obviously one afternoon wasn’t enough for them to go round all the relevant doctors in the city. They’ll start again tomorrow. It looks as if the victim’s appendix scar isn’t going to give us a lead either, for the moment at least. Nor have we had any missing person reports over the past 24 hours.’
    Maschke was drumming on the desk with his nicotine-stained fingers. ‘It would also appear that none of the street girls has gone missing,’ he said.
    ‘Maybe she was new in Hamburg?’ MacDonald suggested.
    ‘The ice on the Elbe is a metre thick, the port is closed,’ Stave interjected. ‘Most of the railway lines are covered in ice, the points frozen, snowdrifts everywhere.’
    ‘The bridges have been bombed, the stations destroyed,’ Maschke snapped. MacDonald paid him no attention.
    ‘Most of the trains that get through are carrying coal or potatoes, not people, and on the few passenger trains that do get through, returning prisoners-of-war are given priority. It’s not impossible that some woman from somewhere else arrived in the city over the past few days, but it’s extremely unlikely. Particularly a woman in such rude health as our victim.’
    ‘Maybe somebody drove her here in a car?’ MacDonald mused.
    Stave was amazed at the lieutenant’s honesty; he had wondered the same thing himself, but not dared to say it. ‘Indeed,’ he replied. ‘Fuel is rationed, Germans have to carry a book in which they note every journey, and longer trips need special permission. Apart from anything else there are next to no cars or trucks still in working order. That makes it extremely unlikely that any German could have given her a lift. On the other hand it would have been no problem for someone British.’
    ‘Good point,’ Maschke said.
    MacDonald looked unperturbed. ‘I have a photograph of the victim. I’ll pass it round my fellow officers.’
    Stave smiled. ‘Thank you. I’m glad to say that what we’ll call the “British angle” isn’t all we have. Let’s assume that our victim is neither a streetwalker, nor a missing daughter of some respectable family, nor a