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The Wolf Children (Inspector Stave Book 2)

Page 30

by Cay Rademacher


  Stave nodded towards a pile of old ship parts stacked like a wall a little bit to their right. ‘That junk is almost as high as the fence. We could climb over it out of sight of the guard.’

  ‘Just watch you don’t cut yourself on the rusty iron.’

  They tossed their rucksacks over the barrier, then the chief inspector grabbed hold of a chunk of metal and pulled hard on it. ‘It seems stable enough,’ he whispered, despite himself. He pulled himself higher, nearly slipping. His hands were covered in yellowish machine grease. He wiped them on his trousers. And then he was on top. He paused to catch his breath, lying flat on the wall of junk machinery. He could hear the British soldier cursing under his breath somewhere nearby. He hoped the guard wouldn’t look in their direction. He put one foot lower until he could find a foothold in the wall of old iron strong enough to support his weight. Then he tried again to find one lower, but suddenly found himself stuck. He heard a sound like somebody tearing a sheet of paper, and realised it was his own waterproofs. He felt water on his shoulder. It will cost me a fortune on the black market to replace this, he thought. Then at last he was on terra firma, grass-covered cobbles.

  ‘Look, over there!’ MacDonald called to him breathlessly. They ran up to the fence where the lieutenant grabbed one corner and pulled it easily aside.

  ‘We aren’t the first to get in this way,’ Stave noted.

  ‘It's now illegal.’

  They faced a narrow corridor between two almost undamaged sheds. Rain was pouring in mini-waterfalls from broken guttering and they had to keep jumping from left to right to avoid the worst downpours. The damp air still reeked with the sulphurous stench of cordite, the basis of the explosive the British had used to blow up the cranes. The chief inspector peered through a gap between two warehouses at the dark shape of the administration building. There were no lights to be seen. Just a hundred metres to go. They ducked behind a bush, both of them choking with sweat and rainwater. Ahead of them lay a giant grey shadow: the superstructure of the Leland Stanford. Light shone from one or two portholes and the bridge. There was no movement on deck. The flag at the stern fluttered in the gusting wind. The whole thing reminded Stave of a castle at twilight in some grim fairy tale; big, dark, threatening and inaccessible.

  He glanced around. ‘The passage between these two warehouses is the best way to get close to the docks,’ he spluttered. ‘Good cover. If I was a smuggler I would use this to get close and then make a run for it over the remaining few metres to the freighter.’ He put his weight against a wooden door, only to find it closed with an ancient padlock. He cursed.

  MacDonald smiled and brought a large screwdriver out of his rucksack. ‘It did occur to me we might have to deal with a lock or two.’ he said. ‘Actually I was rather afraid the yacht might have been chained up. It wasn’t but it was still a good idea that I brought this monster along.’ He set to work and within thirty seconds the lock was lying in pieces on the rotten wooden floor. The wind immediately blew the door open with a bang against the wall. Stave found a lump of concrete rubble to prop it open. They slipped into the warehouse and then closed the door behind them again, using the concrete to keep it closed. They glanced around: machinery parts, the stink of grease.

  ‘At least it's dry,’ MacDonald noted. He glanced out through the crack in the door and said, ‘So what do we do if and when our friend turns up?’

  ‘We let him go past, then follow him and grab him before he gets to the end of the passage where he could be seen from the freighter. An ambush from the rear.’

  ‘Sounds like you’ve done this before. But what if the smuggler doesn’t come this way? What if he's so self-confident he just walks up to the Leland Stanford without trying to conceal himself?’

  Stave nodded towards a boarded-up window on the far side of the shed. ‘Can you see out of that?’

  ‘Great lookout post,’ said MacDonald who had hurried over to look. ‘I have a clear view and nobody can see me.’

  ‘Could you shoot from there if you had to?’

  The British officer gave him a long, hard look. ‘Of course. But shoot whom?’

  ‘If our friend just walks along the quayside we’ll never catch him if we run after him from here. We’ll have to shoot him to stop him reaching the American freighter.’

  ‘You really want to take him out?’

  ‘I’m thinking about three dead children,’ Stave replied grimly.

  ‘And I’m thinking of Palestine and a pregnant woman,’ MacDonald replied, pulling his heavy military revolver out of his rucksack. Stave reached for his FN22.

  Stave watched from the crack in the door. Neither of them said a word. Every now and then he would glance over at MacDonald who would shake his head in return. Stave pulled his handcuffs out of his rucksack and put them in his trouser pocket. Outside the rain had turned the world monochrome: the buildings were grey and so were the bushes, the sky. The light itself was grey. Dusk had come and gone without a hint of a sunset, as if some mysterious hand had simply turned out one weak light after another. The rain drummed on the slate roof. Stave wondered if they would be able to make out anything at all in this weather in the middle of the night. He was shivering. He wondered if he would be able to shoot straight. That was if his gun would even work. Every clap of thunder made him jump. Every flash of lightning blinded him for several seconds -seconds in which he feared the figure they lay in wait for would flash by unnoticed.

  After one uncomfortably close lightning bolt he forced himself to open his weary eyes wide; he held his breath and waved at MacDonald, who dashed over to him.

  ‘There's somebody coming down the gangplank,’ he whispered.

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Yes’.

  ‘Unlucky for him.’

  It was a man, his face concealed by the dark. Walking briskly, above average height. Was he a hunchback? Then the CID man realised he was looking at a man with a waterproof cape and a hood, the hump on his back was almost certainly a rucksack. A big one.

  He nodded to MacDonald. All he could see in the darkness of the shed was the British officer's two eyes. Three steps. Two steps. One.

  The chief inspector threw open the door, leapt out into the passageway, raised his weapon and shouted, ‘Police! Stop.’

  Then the world exploded.

  A bolt of lightning hit the radio mast of the Leland Stanford. Simultaneously a clap of thunder deafened them. Stave stood there frozen by the blinding light, MacDonald to his right in the doorway of the warehouse, in front of him the man in the waterproof cape. His heart began to beat again. He started to say something, but a fist hit his chin.

  The lightning exploded again, only this time it was inside his head. Pain. Then more pain as he fell back and his head hit the cobbles. The walls of the warehouse spun around him. This guy's fast, Stave thought to himself as he tried to pull himself back to his feet. But his knees had turned to rubber. He still had his gun in his right hand, but it was shaking. He heard words, in English, then a shot.

  ‘He's getting away!’ It was MacDonald's voice.

  Stave pulled himself up by leaning against the warehouse's rough brick wall, shook the cobwebs out of his head, dismissed the taste of blood in his mouth. After him! But which way? The quayside in front of the freighter was empty. All the lights on board the American freighter had gone out following the lightning strike. Stave could hear voices coming from the ship. He turned away, looked in the other direction. Two shapes, already far away. The villain was running back the way he had come, MacDonald running after him.

  He hit me with his left fist, Stave realised. A left-hander.

  He began running too.

  Stave spat blood from his mouth as he chased them. He knew that with his crippled ankle he could hardly run very fast, but the training he had undergone to try to reduce as much as possible the impact of his injury had given him stamina. The British officer was sixty, maybe seventy metres ahead of him, Stave reckoned, and there was at least the sa
me again to the man they were pursuing.

  At one point he slipped on the wet cobbles, but stayed upright and ran on. The alleyway seemed endless, then they came out into the open. Heaps of rubble. A railway freight carriage lay on its side by the tracks. Bushes. The CID man stopped, looked around. Another flash of lightning. Two men picked out in the blinding light. He raised his gun, hesitated. Don’t do anything stupid, he told himself. MacDonald was somewhere in between him and his unknown target. Keep going. The man in the cape was running over the rubble, MacDonald after him. Stave, further behind them, chose his route along paths with less hindrance. Second by second he was reducing their lead.

  Then came the fence. With one fluid movement their unknown criminal bent down and passed through it as if the metal wire was only an illusion. It took MacDonald a few seconds to get through, losing him time. Stave bent down as he approached and found he could simply push his way through as if sweeping aside a heavy curtain.

  The man was now running parallel to the Elbe on their left. They passed the ruins of some workers’ houses, the only ones that had ever been built in this part of the harbour. Ahead of them lay that familiar cube of stone, the entrance to the Elbe Tunnel, a heap of history from the day of the Kaiser, all but undamaged.

  Now I’ve got you, Stave told himself, doing his utmost to run faster. His heart was pounding, he was gasping for breath. But the tunnel was a trap: there was no way their unknown quarry could get through the iron grid that closed it off. He would run up to it, shake it, realise that it was locked and by then it would be too late. Just a hundred metres until he reached it. Fifty. Then he was there.

  But he wasn’t rattling the gate. He was reaching for something.

  ‘The bastard has a key,’ Stave shouted. How on earth could he have managed that? There was no better way of getting past the British guards on the dockyard. The smuggler could let himself into the Elbe Tunnel at night and simply stroll over to the docks while the patrol boats sailed back and forth above his head. ‘Shoot!’ he cried, with the last of his breath, ‘Shoot, for God's sake!’

  But MacDonald couldn’t hear him. He ran faster and faster, gesticulating wildly. The gate was open now. The man ran into the tunnel. If he locks it from the other side, we’ve lost him, Stave realised. Coughing and spluttering, he came to a halt, raised his gun, his left arm supporting his right to steady his aim. And fired. The FN22 roared in his ears. MacDonald, the professional solider, threw himself to the ground. Stave fired again, and again. Their quarry ran off. But he had left the gate open.

  The chief inspector caught up with the lieutenant who was pulling himself to his feet.

  ‘I didn’t hit you?’ Stave coughed.

  ‘You’re a lousy shot,’ the lieutenant, unharmed, replied.

  In front of them was the great stone slab and the iron gate of the Elbe Tunnel.

  Stale air. Yellow emergency lighting. The thing was a vast shaft of brown-tiled walls and pigeon droppings, the disturbed birds cooing and flapping in every direction. In the middle, among a forest of steel beams, was a lift big enough to take cars. The cabin itself was down in the depths. Stave listened out. On one side a staircase wound down the wall of the shaft in a giant double ‘Z’, a narrow steel structure with wooden steps. He could feel the reverberation of heavy footsteps: their quarry was running down it.

  The chief inspector charged down after him, painfully aware that one false step and he would break his neck. Suddenly he stopped, thinking — where was MacDonald? The British officer had been left way behind. He looked back and could just make out a figure huddled against the tiles.

  ‘What's the matter?’ Stave asked, worried that he had, after all, hit his friend with one of his hasty shots.

  ‘I get vertigo,’ the lieutenant just about managed to say.

  Stave would have burst out laughing had the situation not been so desperate. ‘Close your eyes, and keep going down,’ he said, turning back and resuming his descent.

  Concrete. The bottom of the shaft. In front of him a passage barely wider than a single car. It was like a Christmas Stollen buried under thousands of tonnes of earth and above it the Elbe. Tiny white tiles on the curved walls, every so often with pale green depictions of fish, crabs and seashells. The glimmer of the emergency lighting seemed to bring the underwater world to life.

  Far in the distance Stave could just make out a shape, and the sound of steps, running.

  Even so he took the few seconds it required to take off his raincoat. He could breathe more easily without it clinging to him. The man he was chasing was still wearing his rain cape, and at the other end he would have to climb up with it on. Stave set off in pursuit.

  White tiles, green fish, white tiles. He took deep breaths, rhythmically, kept his eyes in front. The gap was not getting any bigger but it was still too far for a handgun. He passed the mark on the wall that indicated the maximum depth of the tunnel. Onwards he ran, ever onwards. He could hear steps behind him too now. MacDonald, at last!

  Their quarry disappeared into darkness at the far end of the tunnel where next to the wooden door of the lift the steps that led upwards began. The metal staircase resounded with the weight of the man's steps. Seconds later Stave reached the first step where he had to stop for breath, coughing and spluttering.

  He stared upwards, into a giant cylinder that ended in the copy of the Roman Pantheon that stood near the landing stages. The thing had windows the size of those in a cathedral, so large that even now a tiny glimmer of grey light filtered through. The curved walls were decorated with brown relief portraits of the most important engineers who had worked on the vast project. Shaded images of severe-looking men in frock coats and high collars, looking down almost scornfully on all those who passed beneath them, their current visitors in particular. The steps climbed upwards in the familiar ‘Z’. More than a hundred of them, many more.

  The chief inspector took two steps at a time, his lungs burning, a veil falling over his eyes. It was not just his injured ankle that was hurting, but his calves and thighs. He was thirsty. His pulse was pounding so hard in his ears he could no longer hear. But he could still feel the reverberations from the steps above him.

  Two steps, two more steps. Take a breath. The higher he got, the better he could see. The distance between them was less now. Should he try to shoot up the staircase, between the steps? Too dangerous. Ricochet. Keep going.

  A curse from up above. Only a few steps to go. The entrance with the locked door was set back into the walls of the vast structure, leaving a short distance to cover between the top of the steps and the portal that led out into the open. The man ahead of him was pulling at the door, obviously exhausted, his hands shaking wildly. Then the door swung open.

  Stave raised his FN22 and fired.

  The boom of the shot sounded as if a great drum had been hit on both sides with the flat of a giant hand. A scream. The figure ahead of him dropped a bunch of keys, grabbed his right knee and fell to the ground.

  The chief inspector was upon him, pulled out his handcuffs and clicked the metal closed on the man's wrists. There was blood on the ground, blood on the man's thigh just above the knee. Stave pulled back the hood on the man's rain cape.

  ‘No more thoughts of America for you,’ he coughed out.

  Walter Kümmel. The boxing promoter lay at Stave's feet, his face ashen and soaked with sweat. ‘What do you think this is, the Wild West?’ he said with a brave but failed attempt at a smile despite his obvious pain. ‘Giving me a taste before I set off?’

  ‘You’re not going anywhere, except to hell.’ The chief inspector ripped a strip of Kümmel's trousers to make a temporary bandage for his wound. ‘I’m arresting you on a charge of smuggling, and also for the murder of Adolf Winkelmann, Hildegard Hüllmann and Wilhelm Meinke.’

  Kümmel shook his head. ‘I’m not going to let you get away with that. You have no proof

  At that moment MacDonald stumbled up the final few steps, his face pale but his revo
lver in his hand. ‘Pity about those upcoming boxing bouts.’ The lieutenant glanced down at the wounded leg. ‘The bullet's still in there. He won’t die. But he's never going to forget it either.’

  Stave's heart was pounding. He felt dizzy. Concentrate, he told himself. Kümmel is every bit as exhausted as you are, and he's in pain, bleeding and in shock from the arrested. If you’re going to pull one over on him, now's the time. Bluff him. ‘Capital crime means an English court,’ he coughed out. ‘Murder attracts the death penalty. Your only chance of saving your neck is to confess.’

  It was a lie, and against all the regulations. All the evidence Stave had put together wouldn’t even amount to enough to bring charges, let alone get a ‘guilty’ verdict. For the merest moment, the lieutenant shot him a questioning look, then he got the message. ‘Ten years,’ he said, still breathing hard. ‘Then, according to English law, you can appeal for parole. You’ve made a lot of influential friends with your boxing bouts. Maybe someone will put in a good word for you? But if you’re destined for the scaffold, there’ll be nobody standing up for you.’

  Kümmel closed his eyes. Stave was afraid he was about to lose consciousness. But then he opened his eyelids and gave a resigned nod. ‘Sounds like a deal I can’t refuse,’ he said.

  ‘You did murder Adolf Winkelmann?’ the chief inspector continued.

  ‘Yes. Let's just call it a bit of necessary business. The boy left me no alternative.’

  Stave took a deep breath, but tried not to show his relief. ‘He was damaging your smuggling business?’

  ‘The boy was an incorrigible thief. He stole tickets to my boxing matches and palmed them off on the black market. He stole cigarettes around the house. And some time during the spring he began to sell recording tapes off his own bat. He was crazy about jazz. He wanted to record the concerts out at Moorweide and the music played in the British officers’ clubs.

  ‘I caught him in the shed at Blohm & Voss. He was sitting on an unexploded bomb rummaging around in a sack full of tapes I had hidden there. Tough as nails, these war kids.’

 

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