The Pale Criminal (16 page)

Deubel’s sergeant, a burly fellow with less neck than a hipflask and a chest like a sandbag, arrived with a notebook and pencil, and sat a little way apart from Illmann and me, sucking a sweet, his legs crossed almost nonchalantly, apparently undisturbed at the sight which lay before us.

Illmann looked appraisingly at him for a moment and then nodded, before beginning to describe what he saw.

‘An adolescent female,’ he said solemnly, ‘about sixteen years of age, naked, and lying inside a large trunk of quality manufacture. The body is covered partially with a length of brown cretonne, and the feet are bound with a piece of rope.’ He spoke slowly, with pauses between the phrases in order to allow the sergeant’s handwriting to keep pace with him.

‘Pulling the fabric away from the body reveals the head almost completely severed from the torso. The body itself shows signs of advancing decomposition, consistent with it having been in the trunk for at least four to five weeks. The hands show no signs of defence wounds, and I’m wrapping them for further examination of the fingers in the laboratory, although since she clearly bit her nails I expect I’ll be wasting my time.’ He took two thick paper bags out of his case and I helped him secure them over the dead girl’s hands.

‘Hallo, what’s this? Do my eyes deceive me, or is this a bloodstained blouse which I see before me?’

‘It looks like her BdM uniform,’ I said, watching him pick up first the blouse, and then a navy skirt.

‘How extraordinarily thoughtful of our friend to send us her laundry. And just when I thought he was becoming just a little bit predictable. First an anonymous telephone call to the Alex, and now this. Remind me to consult my diary and check that it’s not my birthday.’

Something else caught my eye, and I leant forward and picked the small square piece of card out of the trunk.

‘Irma Hanke’s identity card,’ I said.

‘Well that saves me the trouble, I suppose.’ Illmann turned his head towards the sergeant. ‘The trunk also contained the dead girl’s clothing and her identity card,’ he dictated.

Inside the card was a smudge of blood.

‘Could that be a fingermark, do you think?’ I asked him.

He took the card out of my hand and looked carefully at the mark. ‘Yes, it could. But I don’t see the relevance. An actual fingerprint would be a different story. That would answer a lot of our prayers.’

I shook my head. ‘It’s not an answer. It’s a question. Why would a psycho bother to look at his victim’s identity? I mean, the blood indicates that she was probably already dead, assuming it’s hers. So why does our man feel obliged to find out her name?’

‘Perhaps in order that he might name her in his anonymous call to the Alex?’

‘Yes, but then why wait several weeks before making the call? Doesn’t that strike you as strange?’

‘You have a point there, Bernie.’ He bagged the identity card and placed it carefully in his case, before looking back into the trunk. ‘And what have we here?’ He lifted up a small but heavy-looking sack and glanced inside. ‘How’s this for strange?’ He held it open for my inspection. It was the empty toothpaste tubes that Irma Hanke had been collecting for the Reich Economy Programme. ‘Our killer does seem to have thought of everything.’

‘It’s almost as if the bastard were defying us to catch him. He gives us everything. Think how smug he’ll be if we still can’t nail him.’

Illmann dictated some more notes to the sergeant and then pronounced that he was finished with the preliminary scene-of-crime investigation, and that it was now the photographer’s turn. Pulling our gloves off we moved away from the trunk and found that the station-master had provided coffee. It was hot and strong and I needed it to take away the taste of death that was coating my tongue. Illmann rolled a couple of cigarettes and handed me one. The rich tobacco tasted like barbecued nectar.

‘Where does this leave your crazy Czech?’ he said. ‘The one who thinks he’s a cavalry officer.’

‘It seems that he really was a cavalry officer,’ I said. ‘Got a bit shell-shocked on the Eastern Front and never quite recovered. All the same, he’s no hop and skip, and frankly, unless I get some hard evidence I’m not confident of making anything stick to him. And I’m not about to send anyone up on an Alexanderplatz-style confession. Not that he’s saying anything, mind. He’s been questioned the whole weekend and still maintains his innocence. I’ll see if somebody from the left-luggage office here can identify him as the coat that left the trunk, but if not then I’ll have to let him go.’

‘I imagine that will upset your sensitive inspector,’ chuckled Illmann. ‘The one with the daughter. From what he was saying to me earlier, he was quite sure that it was only a matter of time before you had a case against him.’

‘Almost certainly. He views the Czech’s conviction for statutory rape as the best reason why I should let him take the fellow into a quiet cell and tap dance all over him.’

‘So strenuous, these modern police methods. Wherever do they find the energy?’

‘That’s all they find energy for. This is well past Deubel’s bedtime, as he’s already reminded me. Some of these bulls think they’re working banking hours.’ I waved him over. ‘Have you ever noticed how most of Berlin’s crimes seem to happen during the day?’

‘Surely you’re forgetting the early-morning knock-up from your friendly neighbourhood Gestapo man.’

‘You never get anyone more senior than a Kriminalassistent doing the A1 Red Tabs. And only then if it’s someone important.’

I turned to face Deubel, who was doing his best to act dog-tired and ready for a hospital bed.

‘When the photographer has finished his portrait, tell him I want a couple of shots of the trunk with the lid closed. What’s more I want the prints ready by the time the left-luggage staff turns up. It’ll be something to help refresh their memories. The professor here will be taking the trunk back to the Alex as soon as the snaps are done.’

‘What about the girl’s family, sir? It is Irma Hanke, isn’t it?’

‘They’ll need to make a formal identification, of course, but not until the professor’s had his way with her. Maybe even smartened her up a bit for her mother?’

‘I’m not a mortician, Bernie,’ he said coolly.

‘Come on. I’ve seen you sew up a bag of minced beef before now.’

‘Very well,’ Illmann sighed. ‘I’ll see what I can do. I shall need most of the day, however. Possibly until tomorrow.’

‘Have as long as you like, but I want to tell them the news this evening, so see if at least you can nail her head back on to her shoulders by then will you?’

Deubel yawned loudly.

‘All right, inspector, you’ve passed the audition. The role of the tired man in need of his bed is yours. God knows you’ve worked hard enough for it. As soon as Becker and Korsch turn up you can go home. But I want you to set up an identity parade later on this morning. See if the men who work in this office can’t remember our Sudeten friend.’

‘Right, sir,’ he said, already more alert now that his going home was imminent.

‘What’s the name of that desk sergeant? The one who took the anonymous call.’

‘Gollner.’

‘Not old Tanker Gollner?’

‘Yes, sir. You’ll find him at the police barracks, sir. Apparently he said he’d wait for us there as he’d been pissed around by Kripo before and didn’t want to have to sit around all night waiting for us to show up.’

‘Same old Tanker,’ I smiled. ‘Right, I’d best not keep him waiting, had I?’

‘What shall I tell Korsch and Becker to do when they arrive?’ Deubel asked.

‘Get Korsch to go through the rest of the junk in this place. See if we might not have been left any other kind gifts.’

Illmann cleared his throat. ‘It might be an idea if one of them were present to observe the autopsy,’ he said.

‘Becker can help you. He seems to enjoy being around the female body. Not to mention his excellent qualifications in the matter of violent death. Just don’t leave him alone with your cadaver, Professor. He’s just liable to shoot her or fuck her, depending on the way he’s feeling.’

Kleine Alexander Strasse ran north-east towards Horst Wessel Platz and was where the police barracks for those stationed at the nearby Alex was situated. It was a big building, with small apartments for married men and senior officers, and single rooms for the rest.

Despite the fact that he was no longer married, Wachmeister Fritz ‘Tanker’ Gollner had a small one-bedroom apartment at the back of the barracks on the third floor, in recognition of his long and distinguished service record.

A well-tended window box was the apartment’s only concession to homeliness, the walls being bare of anything except a couple of photographs in which Gollner was being decorated. He waved me to the room’s solitary armchair and sat himself on the edge of the neatly made bed.

‘Heard you was back,’ he said quietly. Leaning forwards he pulled out a crate from under the bed. ‘Beer?’

‘Thanks.’

He nodded reflectively as he pushed off the bottle-tops with his bare thumbs.

‘And it’s Kommissar now, I hear. Resigns as an inspector. Reincarnated as a Kommissar. Makes you believe in fucking magic, doesn’t it? If I didn’t know you better I’d say you were in somebody’s pocket.’

‘Aren’t we all? In one way or another.’

‘Not me. And unless you’ve changed, not you either.’ He swigged his beer thoughtfully.

Tanker was an East Fresian from Emsland where, it is said, brains are as rare as fur on fish. While he may not have been able to spell Wittgenstein, let alone explain his philosophy, Tanker was a good policeman, one of the old school of uniformed bulls, the firm but fair sort, enforcing the law with a friendly box on the ear for young rowdies, and less inclined to arrest a man and haul him off to the cells than give him an effective and administratively simple bedtime-story with his encyclopaedia-sized fist. It was said of Tanker that he was the toughest bull in Orpo and, looking at him sitting opposite me now, in his shirt sleeves, his great belt creaking under the weight of his even greater belly, I didn’t find this hard to believe. Certainly time had stood still with his prognathous features — somewhere around one million years BC. Tanker could not have looked less civilized than if he had been wearing the skin of a sabre-toothed tiger.

I found my cigarettes and offered him one. He shook his head and took out his pipe.

‘If you ask me,’ I said, ‘we’re every one of us in the back pocket of Hitler’s trousers. And he means to slide down a mountain on his arse.’

Tanker sucked at the bowl of his pipe and started to fill it with tobacco. When he’d finished he smiled and raised his bottle.

‘Then here’s to stones under the fucking snow.’

He belched loudly and lit his pipe. The clouds of pungent smoke that rolled towards me like Baltic fog reminded me of Bruno. It even smelt like the same foul mixture that he had smoked.

‘You knew Bruno Stahlecker, didn’t you, Tanker?’

He nodded, still drawing on the pipe. Through clenched teeth, he said: ‘That I did. I heard about what happened. Bruno was a good man.’ He removed the pipe from his leathery old mouth and surveyed the progress of his smoke. ‘Knew him quite well, really. We were both in the infantry together. Saw a fair bit of action, too. Of course, he wasn’t much more than a spit of a lad then, but it never seemed to bother him much, the fighting I mean. He was a brave one.’

‘The funeral was last Thursday.’

‘I’d have gone too if I could have got the time.’ He thought for a moment. ‘But it was all the way down in Zehlendorf. Too far.’ He finished his beer and opened another two bottles. ‘Still, they got the piece of shit who killed him I hear, so that’s all right then.’

‘Yes, it certainly looks like it,’ I said. ‘Tell me about this telephone call tonight. What time was this?’

‘Just before midnight, sir. Fellow asks for the duty sergeant. You’re speaking to him, I says. Listen carefully, he says. The missing girl, Irma Hanke, he says, is to be found in a large blue-leather trunk in the left-luggage at Zoo Bahnhof. Who’s this, I asks, but he’d hung up.’

‘Can you describe his voice?’

‘I’d say it was an educated sort of voice, sir. And used to giving an order and having it carried out. Rather like an officer.’ He shook his large head. ‘Couldn’t tell you how old, though.’

‘Any accent?’

‘Just the trace of Bavarian.’

‘You sure about that?’

‘My late wife was from Nuremberg, sir. I’m sure.’

‘And how would you describe his tone? Agitated? Disturbed at all?’

‘He didn’t sound like a spinner, if that’s what you mean, sir. He was as cool as the piss out of a frozen eskimo. As I said, just like an officer.’

‘And he asked to speak to the duty sergeant?’

‘Those were his actual words, sir.’

‘Any background noise? Traffic? Music? That sort of thing?’

‘Nothing at all.’

‘What did you do then? After the call.’

‘I telephoned the operator at the Central Telephone Office on Französische Strasse. She traced the number to a public telephone box outside Bahnhof West Kreuz. I sent a squad car round there to seal it off until a team from 5D could get down there and have it checked out for piano players.’

‘Good man. And then you called Deubel?’

‘Yes, sir.’

I nodded and started on my second bottle of beer.

‘I take it Orpo knows what this is all about?’

‘Von der Schulenberg had all the Hauptmanns into the briefing-room at the start of last week. They passed on to us what a lot of the men already suspected. That there was another Gormann on the streets of Berlin. Most of the lads figure that’s why you’re back on the force. Most of the civils we’ve got now couldn’t detect coal on a slag heap. But that Gormann case. Well, it was a good piece of work.’

‘Thanks, Tanker.’