by David Young
Drescher stopped when she reached a doorway. The light coming around the frame suggested that the door led outside. The body itself had been removed, but an approximate chalk outline of its position had been marked on the floor, one arm apparently stretched out, reaching in desperation for the fresh air outside. Reaching in vain.
‘What a way to go,’ sighed Müller. She turned to Tilsner, who’d hung back slightly. His face was creased in a severe frown. ‘Any thoughts, Werner?’
Tilsner looked momentarily startled. ‘What?’
‘Thoughts, theories, hunches? You know. It’s what we do. We are supposed to be detectives after all.’
‘Sorry. It’s just shaken me a bit. It must have been a desperate situation for him.’
It wasn’t unusual for detectives at murder scenes to react like this. Müller had been guilty of it plenty of times herself. But it was unlike Tilsner. Normally he was laidback, unflustered – and if anything, it was his insouciance which riled her.
‘What is this place exactly, anyway, Elke?’ asked Müller.
‘Nowadays?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s Sachsenburg-Werke. A state-owned cotton-spinning mill. In fact there’s been a cotton mill here since the mid-1800s, and before that there was a flour mill. It was ideally positioned to get power from the fast-flowing river.’
‘I wonder if our Party official had somehow crossed swords with someone at the mill?’ mused Müller.
‘Maybe. I can check that out,’ replied Drescher. ‘As far as I know, he had no particular link. But, as I said earlier, he was a high-up. Number Two in the Party in Karl-Marx-Stadt. I’ll give you all we’ve got on him. Of course, the Ministry for State Security may know more.’
‘Have they been in touch with you yet?’
‘No. Well . . . not as far as I know. Not through official channels.’
Tilsner had been deep in silent contemplation, but now he spoke. ‘And this place. You say it’s always been a mill . . . at least in recent history?’
‘Yes . . . well, except in the 1930s. There were a few problems in the twenties: a fire destroyed the spinning mill, and then the Depression hit. One firm went into bankruptcy and another issued new shares, but then the new company faced liquidation in 1930, and by 1933 the building was empty.’
‘But operations started again?’ asked Müller. She was impressed by the thoroughness of Drescher’s research. The young woman could go far. Müller’s position wasn’t that senior, but as the most senior female in the Kriminalpolizei, it could be under threat. It didn’t worry her. The prestige and responsibility of a leading role wasn’t something she coveted. Major was about as high as she would go and probably higher than she’d wanted to go.
‘Yes. In 1938.’
‘And the war didn’t shut things down?’ asked Müller.
‘No. There was some bomb damage. But production continued.’
‘In private ownership?’ asked Tilsner.
‘Yes. Until 1952. And then it was taken over by the state.’
State nationalisation. She’d come across that before. Of course, it was for the greater good of the Republic and its workers. But for those whose property was confiscated, it still created resentment, to put it mildly. Even though he’d become a leading Party official, could the dead man have borne some grudge against the factory and its nationalisation, and started the fire himself? Perhaps his wrists had been burnt as he set the fire. But in such a regular pattern? That didn’t make sense. Perhaps, if this was a murder, the victim had been in some way responsible for the appropriation of the once private company? Was this a revenge killing by someone whose capitalist enterprise had been taken over for the good of the people of the Republic?
‘What else do we know about the victim?’ asked Müller.
‘His name was Comrade Martin Ronnebach. He was married, with no children.’
‘Did he live here in Sachsenburg?’
‘No. Karl-Marx-Stadt. In an apartment with his wife on a relatively new estate. But the apartment is no different to that of many other workers’ apartments. He didn’t receive any special privileges in terms of housing.’
‘We wouldn’t expect him to,’ said Tilsner, eyeballing Müller as he did. They both knew she had received special privileges – a larger than usual apartment, just off Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin, the trade-off for accepting her promotion to head up their new Serious Crimes Unit.
Müller ignored his pointed look.
Then Tilsner turned back to Drescher, and frowned. ‘Let’s go back to your history of the mill. It still leaves some missing years, doesn’t it? In the 1930s.’
‘Ah yes, of course. I assumed you knew about that,’ said Drescher.
‘Knew about what?’ said Tilsner.
‘The camp. From 1933 to 1938 this was Schutzhaftlager Sachsenburg. A Nazi concentration camp.’
Müller glanced at her deputy. She’d already realised this was going to prove another ‘difficult’ case. From the look on Tilsner’s face, that had just registered with him too. The question was how difficult. And how much interference were they likely to face from other agencies.
Especially the Ministry for State Security.
The Stasi.
3
October 1943
Kohnstein mountain, near Nordhausen
I’m not a religious man. But if I was – and if I’d done some of the things that have been done to me and my compatriots and fellow prisoners – then I might imagine, one day, entering Hell.
Today, I no longer need to imagine.
For I have arrived.
The giant wooden door shuts behind us, and we’re engulfed in darkness. But we’re shoved on and on, even though most of us are too exhausted to lift one foot in front of the other. Marcellin and I try to look out for Grégoire; we know he’s weaker than we are. On the tunnel floor, we have to watch out for cables, beams, lumps of rock in pools of stagnant water. Our wooden soles slip and slide on the muddy damp slime. Occasionally, an acetylene lamp gives out a weak light, and I can see the silhouettes of fellow prisoners up ahead. They are hunched, broken, desperate.
We are three brothers. Myself, Marcellin and Grégoire. But we don’t talk to each other. No one talks. No one dares to. No one except the Kapos or their SS overseers, barking out orders. It’s the Kapos who are the most dangerous. Kameradschaftpolizei. That’s supposed to be their full name. With the first syllable and third-to-last of the full German name forming the abbreviation. I don’t know why I’m thinking about this. I’d rather remember living in Loix, sipping a pastis in the village square, or cycling along the sea wall. The smell of the salt marshes, and the rotting seaweed. I try to keep those memories alive, but each day it’s harder. The pictures fade. The pictures that I want to draw, to paint. I know that if I manage to prevent my meagre supplies of pencils and paper from being confiscated, that I will be drawing this instead.
This Hell. Staffed by collaborationist Kapos.
The comrade police force. Ha! They are pigs. Criminal pigs. I’d had my fill of them at Buchenwald. But they are here too.
The tunnel we’re stumbling through suddenly opens out into a bigger cavernous space. It’s another tunnel, perhaps three or four times as high and wide. And then at right angles, there are a series of smaller passages or halls hewn from the rock.
We’re pushed towards one of these. Dirty, half-stuffed mattresses lay in piles on one side. Amid blows and shouts, we scrabble to claim the best of them. And then we lay them out, over the sharp stones, the stagnant puddles, the muddy floor, and try to sleep.
Exhausted after our transit from Buchenwald, I try to lose myself in dreams. Of Loix, pastis, the salt marshes, puncturing my bicycle, eating oysters raw from their shells, freshly stolen from the oyster farm. I try to remember warm, sunny days, when a soft breeze would blow from the direction of Ars-en-Ré, and how, at its most ferocious, the sea could swallow our little island whole, but at its calmest, the waves would gently
lap at the harbour wall like a cat carefully licking the last drops of milk from its bowl. Marie-Ange and I would sit on the wall, our feet dangling over the drop. I would try to summon up the courage to tell her that I loved her, that I wanted to be with her always. But I never did. I was frightened that simply doing so would dissolve my devil-may-care, piratical image. And I was worried that in telling her this, I would lose whatever it was that attracted such a beautiful creature to me in the first place.
I dream of the warmth of her body hugging me, and try to draw some comfort from that memory. Because down here it’s so very, very cold. A damp, dripping cold. A cold to rot your bones.
4
July 1977
Karl-Marx-Stadt, East Germany
Müller drank in her surroundings as they followed the local police in a convoy through the newly built streets of the city. She felt a sense of pride in its functional modernity. The regular-planned blocks were unusually built with a slight curve in the centre. Window after window reflected the strong July sun like a glittering array of precious gems. All these buildings had been rebuilt by the Republic after the terrible destruction wrought on it by the Anglo-American bombing in the war. This bombing had been an attempt to undermine the production base of the future Soviet zone. Dresden had paid a higher price, but the factories of this city had been regular targets too. It spoke volumes of the workers of this small republic that they had revitalised it to such an extent. In the distance, chimneys belched out smoke like giant perpendicular cigarettes – helping the factories to meet targets, factories that were another beating heart of the Republic’s industrial might. This one, she knew, contributed around a fifth of the country’s industrial production.
The giant sculpture of the man who lent his name to the city came in to view. She’d seen the Karl Marx monument often enough in photographs and magazines. But here it seemed to take on new meaning – the huge granite head surveying the socialist republic his ideas had helped to inspire, a severe expression on his face. Would he have approved of this tiny, imperfect country, built on ideals? Müller hoped so. Even if her many brushes with the feared Ministry for State Security often made her question whether this really was a model society. But she worked for the state too. She was part of the same machine.
After they passed the monument, she turned and looked back. It was an almost Pavlovian reaction rather than a desire to take a second look. She still expected to see Stasi agents, it was now almost ingrained in her psyche. She glanced over her shoulder to check that no one was tailing the Wartburg. There was nothing obvious to see, but she felt the electric tingle of a shiver down her spine. As she glanced at her tanned forearms jutting from her summer blouse, she saw what she felt: the tiny hair muscles had contracted into bumps – the hairs themselves standing on end.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Tilsner, breaking the silence with a thin smile. ‘There’s no one following us. I’ve been keeping a lookout too.’
*
The Volkspolizei headquarters seemed to be one of the few structures here to have survived the bombs and bulldozers – it looked to Müller like it dated from the Nazi period, or possibly Weimar Germany before that, with its neo-Baroque architectural details. It had a forbidding feel that did nothing to dispel Müller’s unease – an unease which she hoped was irrational. But it was the more obvious unease of Tilsner that concerned her.
‘You seem about as keen on being involved in this inquiry as I was at being summoned back from holiday. There’s nothing wrong, is there? Nothing I need to know about?’
He found a parking space and turned off the ignition. Then he held her gaze with another smile. ‘It’s nothing to do with the inquiry, and don’t worry, I’m fine. Just a bit of new girlfriend trouble back in Berlin. I thought things would be simpler once Koletta and I had finally parted ways.’ He gave a rueful laugh, and slapped the steering wheel. ‘Let’s just say the cherries in the neighbour’s garden don’t always taste sweeter. If I’m called away with messages from Berlin, you know what it’s about.’
Behind the smile and the laugh and the ice-blue eyes that Müller had once found so attractive, there was a vacant, far-away look. Maybe he was regretting finally ending it with the mother of his teenage children.
*
Drescher had arranged a meeting with various Kriminalpolizei and uniform officers to bring Müller and Tilsner up to speed. Müller smiled at Jonas Schmidt – who’d torn himself away from the local police’s forensics lab to attend. She received a warm smile back: it was heart-warming to see the Kriminaltechniker putting the previous year’s troubles behind him. He had struggled to come to terms with his son’s sexuality and temporary disappearance. The three of them had arranged themselves in a semi circle facing Drescher, who in turn was standing in front of a notice board that was liberally covered in police photos from the scene. Müller found herself having to look away from some of them. Tilsner seemed to be doing the same.
‘Thanks for coming here, Comrades,’ said Drescher. ‘I’m delighted to be able to introduce you to Comrade Major Karin Müller and Comrade Hauptmann Werner Tilsner of the Serious Crimes Department in Berlin. They’ve been asked to oversee this case. I’m sure we welcome any help we can get, and you’ve already met their team’s forensic scientist, Kriminaltechniker Jonas Schmidt.’ She glanced across and nodded at Schmidt. ‘I’m going to give a short summary of the case for the benefit of our comrades from the Hauptstadt, and then if anyone has any questions for Major Müller about her team’s role I’m sure she’ll be happy to answer them.’
Müller had a fleeting thought that perhaps she should be the one leading this meeting. But Drescher appeared to be taking things in her stride. She cut a very different figure to the trainee detective from more than two years ago. She was now a confident professional.
Drescher turned towards the police photograph of the victim, discovered at the scene. This time, Müller had no choice but to look at the photo, shocking though it was.
‘As most of you know, this is Comrade Martin Ronnebach, deputy chairman of the Socialist Unity Party here in Karl-Marx-Stadt. We won’t know the exact cause of death until the results of this afternoon’s autopsy, but some things are clear from the position of the body and the crime scene. Comrade Ronnebach appears to have died from smoke inhalation – that was the pathologist’s view from the initial examination of the scene. But this was no accidental death.’
‘How can you be so certain?’ asked Müller, aware of the scrutiny of the other officers as she posed the question. Despite asking this, she knew that had it been thought an accident, there was no way she, Tilsner and Schmidt would have been despatched from Berlin.
‘Sorry, perhaps I should have phrased that differently,’ said Drescher. ‘Our initial conclusions are that this was no accident.’ She pointed to each of the victim’s wrists in the photographs. ‘See the discolouration? The pathologist’s view at the scene was that these are burn marks.’
‘I think we’d expect to see burns,’ interrupted Müller, ‘even if the fire started accidentally. But I agree it’s very odd that the only burns are around the wrist, and in such a defined pattern. I was thinking about that on the way here. To me, the only logical conclusion is that he must have been restrained, using material that caught fire more easily than his clothing. Synthetic rope, something like that.’ Müller could sense Drescher was frustrated by her interruption. ‘Sorry, Comrade Drescher. You were probably going to say exactly that!’
Drescher shrugged. ‘Well, the pathologist’s view was that the victim had deliberately burned his own wrists. But perhaps that fits in with your theory too. If he was restrained in some way, maybe he deliberately tried to burn through the restraints in his desperation. Anyway, it seems that the fire itself was relatively small – constructed to give out the maximum amount of smoke, but not intended to ignite into a large conflagration. It was almost like the sort of fire beekeepers might set to smoke their bees. Although there, the effect is to calm the bees. He
re, it was the opposite. We believe this fire was set to terrify Herr Ronnebach, and not necessarily to kill him. Jonas, you said you had some information to corroborate this?’
‘Yes, Comrade Unterleutnant Drescher. At least to lend weight to the theory that the fire was set deliberately. The material we recovered also indicates that this was a smouldering fire, designed to maximise the amount of smoke, while producing minimal flames. The pattern of burning, and the presence of hydrocarbon residues – indicated both by laboratory investigations, and sniffer dogs used at the initial scene – tell their own story. This fire was set deliberately.’
Tilsner had been maintaining his quasi-monastic silence. But now he raised his hand to speak.
‘Comrade Hauptmann?’ said Drescher.
‘You say the fire was set deliberately, Jonas,’ said Tilsner. ‘That may be so, but how do we know Comrade Ronnebach was the intended victim? How do we know there was an intended victim? Could it have been an elaborate suicide?’
‘Surely the burn marks on his body answer that?’ said Drescher. She tapped the crime scene photograph of the victim, pointing to each wrist in turn. ‘The pathologist’s findings support what Major Müller is suggesting – that material had been lashed round the victim’s wrists. This is something that would be hard to do yourself. It looks as though he tried to burn the material off in desperation to free himself. He managed to locate the door to the outside through all the smoke. But it was locked. All the doors to the room had been locked from the outside.’
‘And there was something else we found,’ said Schmidt. ‘Fingernail marks on the inside of the door. From Comrade Ronnebach’s vain attempts to scrabble his way out as his life ebbed away.’
