The Murderer in Ruins Read Online Free PDF Page A

much for the place, even though they appreciated the fact that it was mostly undamaged. Windows that closed properly were a rarity in Hamburg these days. Stave liked the building because it was the exact opposite of the great neo-baroque concert hall opposite – as if the crime squad wanted to demonstrate police strength and order in the face of light-hearted frivolity.
    Stave said a curt goodbye to Ruge and climbed out of theMercedes. The building was fronted by a portico with ten mighty square columns. Blue, white and yellow lacquered tiles formed a pattern on the ceiling, a little hidden touch of colour in a grey city. The entrance hall was also decorated with coats of arms and allegorical figures in ceramic, including a three-metre-high bronze elephant that not even the Nazi raw-material requisitioners had dared touch. The crime squad lads nicknamed him ‘Anton’. Above the door the figure of a young woman held a gold, brown, blue and white model of a cog, the famous flat-bottomed trading ship of Hamburg and the Hanseatic League. Some of the officers called her the ‘Seaman’s Bride’, unless they were in a bad mood and she became the ‘Harbour Whore’.
    Stave had no idea what the figure had originally been meant to symbolise. He walked through the double doors of the headquarters, big enough for a sailing ship to pass through. Then he limped up the stairs with their red, brown and white pattern marked out in endless little tiles that, every time he walked up them, reminded him of the skin of some giant snake.
    Eventually he reached the sixth floor, and room 602. His office.
    In the anteroom, half hidden behind a great black typewriter, Erna Berg, his secretary, was sitting on a chair that looked as if it might collapse at any moment. Stave said hello to her, forcing himself to smile. No need to pass his bad humour to anybody else, just because he’d seen a naked corpse first thing in the morning. He liked Erna Berg. She was blond, blue-eyed, optimistic and slightly plump. God only knows how she keeps so much flesh on her ribs with the food rations, Stave thought.
    She was always full of energy, despite being a war widow. Back in 1939 she had married one of the soldiers being rushed to the front; a son arrived soon after. Her husband had been missing since 1945 and comrades returning from the war had told her he had been killed in action. But as it had not been formally confirmed that she was a widow, she got no widows’ pension. Stave knew that the bare minimum wage she got from the police wasn’t enough to keep herand her son and that she had to deal on the black market from time to time. He turned a blind eye.
    ‘The boss wants to see you,’ she said with a wink. ‘I heard about the body,’ she added in a whisper.
    ‘Word soon gets around,’ Stave grunted. ‘Open a new file. “Unknown murder victim, Baustrasse.” I’ll write up the report later. And put an autopsy request in to the public prosecutor’s office. Dr Czrisini knows all about it.’
    His secretary looked away. ‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to spell that for me,’ she groaned. ‘I can never remember his name.’
    Stave wrote the pathologist’s name down on a piece of paper and looked in vain for a free space on her tiny desk to set it down, eventually pinning it to the wall behind her desk. ‘I’m with the boss if anybody asks,’ he said, closing the door behind him.
    A few minutes later he was standing in the office of the chief of Hamburg police. Cuddel Breuer was an average-sized man with a round face, thinning hair and a pleasant smile. He could have been taken for a genial, deferential post-office clerk from the provinces. And more than a few police officers – and criminals – had made that mistake on first meeting.
    Breuer had sharp, quick eyes and shoulders far too wide for an ordinary person. While Stave admired his boss, he was wary of him.
    ‘Sit down, Stave,’ Breuer said, nodding at a wooden chair before