Free The Murderer in Ruins by Cay Rademacher

was in collar and tie with an English tweed jacket and razor-sharp pressed trousers. There were no photos of his wife or sons, nothing at all of a personal nature, just filing cabinets and sheets of paper and on a little table next to him a big black typewriter. Stave glanced furtively at Ehrlich’s short, chubby fingers covered with a light down and noticed he wore no wedding ring.
    He no longer wore a wedding ring himself. One night in the summer of 1943 he had thrown it into the Elbe down by the harbour. The water was seductively close and dark … But he had turned onhis heel and gone home, if that’s what you could call the ruins he inhabited. He closed his eyes for a moment.
    ‘I’m very sorry to have kept you waiting,’ Ehrlich said at last, closing the file in front of him. ‘Can I offer you tea?’ he said, in a quiet, cultivated voice.
    Stave gave a timid smile. ‘Thank you, yes.’ And he opened his eyes wide to see a secretary come in with a steaming teapot that smelled wonderful. Real tea, Stave realised, Earl Grey even, rather than nettles with some hot water poured over them.
    Ehrlich poured the tea. ‘I used to drink coffee,’ he piped up, ‘I only got used to tea during my time in England. It is a lot easier to get hold of, especially here in the British occupation zone.’
    ‘Is that why you came back to Hamburg, the chief port in the British zone?’
    ‘Ah, I can see Lieutenant MacDonald has already put you in the picture,’ Ehrlich replied with an amused smile. Stave thought there was something striking about his oversized owl-like eyes, something furtive.
    You idiot, he told himself, typical CID attitude, ready to break into the conversation, take the man by surprise: not exactly the right way to deal with a public prosecutor.
    ‘Thank you for agreeing so readily to our request for an autopsy,’ he said, to change the subject.
    Ehrlich sat back, relaxed: ‘Tell me about the case. I’m all ears.’
    Stave told him what they had found out including the various theories about the victim and her possible attacker.
    ‘A difficult one,’ Ehrlich said at last when the chief inspector had finished.
    ‘The first thing is to find out who the victim is. Otherwise we’re never going to get anywhere,’ Stave admitted.
    ‘So you don’t think it was a robbery-motivated murder, despite sending Maschke off to find files on such incidents even though you know as well as I do that they’ve been burnt in a certain oven.’
    He’s a wily one, thought Stave in surprise. In a mugging, the identity of the victim doesn’t necessarily lead to the perpetrator, ascriminals often attack people they don’t know. Ehrlich must have decided that the victim and her attacker were acquainted and that Stave had an idea.
    ‘I’m simply trying to be efficient,’ he replied.
    ‘Ah, efficiency – a very German characteristic,’ the prosecutor replied, with just the slightest hint of irony.
    ‘A characteristic in criminal work everywhere,’ Stave shot back, regretting that they had got into this game of cat-and-mouse. ‘But you’re right,’ he added, in a conciliatory tone. Maybe he had suddenly come to trust Ehrlich, or maybe it was just the effect of the hot tea. Contrary to his normal habit of presenting prosecutors with no more than hard facts and the most plausible theories, Stave decided that this time he would mention something that was little more than the vaguest suspicion. ‘This crime was not just brutal,’ he ventured, hesitantly, ‘but also particularly efficient. Lethal force, resulting in immediate death. Then the thorough stripping of the body.’
    ‘Cold blooded,’ Ehrlich interjected.
    ‘Indeed. Carefully planned and perfectly executed. Someone capable of that has either had every sense of morality blunted – or is mentally ill but at the same time capable of logical reasoning.’
    ‘After this war and the 12 years of that regime there are more than enough people running around