Free The Murderer in Ruins by Cay Rademacher Page B

might notice something he had missed. He seemed bright enough, and he had influence.
    Stave dragged himself away from his thoughts. He was back at Eppendorfer Baum, a long way from Karl-Muck-Platz. A snack bar had been set up in a half-ruined building. The upper stories had been hit by a bomb and the remainder of the building stood like a half-eviscerated corpse. Only the ground floor seemed undamaged and somebody had put up a board with the childishly scrawled words ‘Fresh meals’.
    Stave walked into the brightly lit but sadly unheated room and sat down at a table. He did his best to ignore the throbbing in his left ankle. He cast a casual glance around. It was midday and there were a few workers, a few office people, a mother with two children, and sitting on his own in a corner a man with a ‘Russia face’ in anundyed Wehrmacht greatcoat, the empty left sleeve sewn up to the front of it.
    Stave ordered the dish of the day, which cost one Reichsmark: a pickled herring with two thin slices of gherkin and a spoonful of some murky vegetables with no taste. He gobbled it down, only to feel hungrier than before. If only they had coffee. He sighed deeply, paid and left.
     
    B ack at the office MacDonald was waiting for him. Or at least that’s what he said. Stave had the impression that it was not so much the murder investigation that had brought the lieutenant to Karl-Muck-Platz as the chance for a chat with Erna Berg.
    ‘Anything new from the ranks of the British army?’ Stave asked.
    MacDonald gave an apologetic shrug that for a moment made him look like a little boy. ‘Everybody stares wide-eyed when they see the photograph, but there’s no indication that anybody recognises her.’
    ‘Have you got your jeep here?’
    The lieutenant nodded. ‘Are we going on a car chase? Like in the American movies? Should I get us Tommy guns?’
    Reluctantly Stave found himself smiling: ‘We can hide the hardware in a black coffin. We’re going to the cemetery.’
     
    T he chief inspector was relieved that he didn’t have to travel by tram and on foot all the way out to the east of Hamburg. MacDonald drove him there in his boxlike, mud-coloured jeep, parking it right by the main entrance. When they set off the wind was blowing so hard the collapsible windscreen rattled back and forth and cold draughts blew through rips in the canvas top, while the suspension was so hard, every time they bounced over a pothole it was like a blow to the solar plexus. But Stave didn’t mind. He closed his eyes for a moment, massaging the thigh of his bad leg. He had cramp and was in pain.
    ‘An old war wound?’ MacDonald was driving carefully, keeping his eyes on the road, but he must have spotted him out of the corner of his eye.
    Stave felt he’d been somehow caught out. ‘A ceiling beam fell on me; I didn’t get out of the way in time,’ he told him curtly.
    The lieutenant just nodded.
    ‘How is it you speak such good German?’ Stave asked him, trying to steer the conversation away from himself, and because he couldn’t think of anything else to ask. He had to repeat it, louder, to make himself heard over the noise of the engine.
    ‘I learned it at university, Oriel College, Oxford. I was actually studying history but my special subject was Prussia. I did my master’s degree on Bismarck’s attitude towards Great Britain in the years prior to 1870. I even came to Berlin to study some documents.’
    ‘You did all of that before the outbreak of the war? How old are you then?’
    MacDonald laughed. ‘I was a Christmas baby, born on 24 December 1920. I was in Berlin during my first year at university, aged just 18. That was the summer of 1939. I had intended to stay for a few months, but in August it was becoming ever more clear that war was likely, so I upped sticks and left. There are probably a few books of mine gathering dust in a rented room somewhere. Unless, of course, the rented room has been burnt to the ground.’
    ‘Why