The Murderer in Ruins Read Online Free PDF

his desk. Both of them still had their winter overcoats on; the temperature in the office was 10°C at most.
    ‘Coffee?’ the police chief asked. ‘Just the usual ersatz stuff, but at least it’s hot.’
    Stave nodded gratefully, and warmed his hands on the enamel cup.
    Breuer nodded at a piece of paper in a filing tray on his desk.
    ‘Last year’s figure,’ he said. ‘In 1946 there were 29 murders, 629 muggings, 21,569 serious thefts and 61,033 everyday thefts. To be more precise: those are the crimes that were reported. On top of that we have rapes, assaults and smuggling in every form. “Poverty crimefigures,” the public prosecutor calls it. And I fear he’s right. I also fear 1947 will be no better, especially not with a winter like this.’
    Stave nodded. A couple of days earlier a police patrol had run across two DPs with black market slaughterhouse meat. The culprits, two former Polish slave labourers, had immediately opened fire with guns. One of the policemen died and the other was still critically ill in hospital. The culprits had been arrested and a British military tribunal had sentenced them to death. They were now waiting for the sentence to be carried out.
    ‘But a naked strangled woman is something we haven’t had recently,’ Breuer continued. He sounded friendly still but added, ‘The word’s going to get around, as if we didn’t have enough to worry about. Freezing apartments, hardly any electricity, starvation rations, coal trains out there stuck in snowdrifts. Or looted the moment they arrive. British officers commandeering the best villa houses in the city and putting up notices saying, “Off limits for Germans!” Every day new refugees pouring into the city, from the eastern zone, from DP camps, freed prisoners-of-war. What are we to do with all of them? We can’t build new houses; in this weather it’s too cold even to stir cement. People are angry.’
    ‘And if they can’t vent that anger on anyone else, then they’ll make it hot as hell for us if we don’t catch the killer,’ Stave finished the thought for him.
    ‘You get my meaning,’ Breuer nodded with satisfaction.
    Stave gave his chief an outline of the case: the young unidentified victim, the lack of witnesses.
    ‘Is Dr Czrisini going to do an autopsy?’ Breuer asked.
    ‘Today.’
    Breuer leant back in his chair and crossed his hands behind his head. For minutes on end he said nothing, but Stave had learned not to be impatient. Eventually the police chief nodded to himself, lit up a Lucky Strike and inhaled the smoke with gusto.
    ‘In Hamburg we have 700 police to deal with crime,’ he said at last, letting the smoke drift from his mouth. ‘Most of them are newto the job, because so many of our former colleagues had the wrong politics.’
    Stave said nothing. Even before 1933 most of the police had been on the far right, and later, Hamburg Gestapo alone employed 200 men. When the British arrived, more than half of them were dismissed straight away. Without the political purge, Breuer would never have got behind the chief’s desk. And Stave’s career wouldn’t have gone anywhere either. Those were facts that did not exactly endear them to their former colleagues, not least because the difference between getting a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ from the British was often a very close-run thing.
    ‘A victim whose name we don’t even know. A naked young woman. A criminal who even now in these difficult times commits an offence not out of necessity, but because he’s driven by some evil urge. A murderer who leaves no traces. And a city that demands we sort it out and quick,’ Breuer said, in an almost dreamy voice. ‘It’s a nasty case, this one, Stave. I can’t put some raw recruits on it and none of the older men are up to it.
    So you’re giving it to me, because nobody likes me, Stave thought to himself. ‘I’ll take it on, boss.’
    ‘Good. Now, do you speak any English?’
    Stave suddenly sat up in his