by David Young
‘No, Herr Director. I was simply comforting Beate. Nothing more. She was crying. I was afraid she would wake up the other girls. I was just doing what any good citizen would.’ I hear Richter tut and sigh behind me. Neumann places his pen down on the table and folds his arms across his stomach.
‘The thing is, Behrendt, that Frau Richter and I have received reports that this has been going on a lot, that you’re in Jugendliche Ewert’s bed virtually every night. Is that correct? Is it some sort of perverted teenage love affair?’ I wonder who’s been snitching. It’s not hard to guess. No doubt it had been Bauer. She and Richter are as thick as thieves.
I try to justify myself. ‘Herr Director, I just –’
Neumann interrupts me with menace in his voice. ‘Is . . . that . . . correct?’
‘Yes, I’ve been in her bed sometimes, comforting her, but it’s not –’
I’m silenced by Richter slapping her hand over my mouth from behind. I try to bite into her flesh, but she wrenches my arm up behind my back until the pain forces me to relent. She puts her mouth right up to my ear. ‘You’re an insolent pig. And now you’ll learn your lesson.’
Neumann bangs his hand down on the table. ‘Stop your insubordination, Jugendliche Behrendt. Bring her here, Frau Richter.’ Richter pulls me by my hair, the unruly red mat of curls that I hate so much, and then forces my body down so that my face is pushed flat against Neumann’s desk. I hear the sound of Neumann unbuckling his belt. Please God no, not that! I’ve heard the stories from the other girls, but please, not me! My thighs clench tightly together, as though the muscles are acting on their own. But then another sound, a swoosh of leather sliding against clothing, and I risk a glance upwards as Neumann draws the belt from around his trousers. He wraps the buckle end three times around his wrist, and then flexes the tongue, a gloating expression on his face.
‘Jugendliche Behrendt,’ says Neumann. ‘You will spend the next three days in the bunker in isolation to teach you the error of your ways.’ I start to sob, alternately crying out and trying to breathe in as Richter forces my face back down on the notepad. ‘After that, you and Ewert will be split up into different dorms. She is a bright girl and obedient. We don’t want unruly elements like you leading her astray. Do you understand?’
I continue to cry. ‘Answer the Herr Director!’ shouts Richter.
‘Do you understand?’ Neumann asks again. He slaps the belt in a whip-like motion on the table, millimetres from my eyes. It snaps like a bullet shot.
‘Yes,’ I sob. ‘Yes I understand.’
He lashes the belt against the table again. The tip whips my nose, sending pain shooting into my head. ‘Prepare her please, Frau Richter.’
I struggle against their hold, but they’re too strong for me. Richter starts to lower my work trousers. ‘No, no!’ I scream. ‘Please don’t. I’m having my –’
Richter silences me by cracking the palm of her hand against my cheek. The sting is nothing compared to my humiliation and shame. I screw my eyes shut and push my face into the table, trying not to let them see.
‘Five lashes!’ shouts Neumann. And then, with his mouth right up against my ear, he hisses: ‘This will teach you. And if you cry or struggle, the punishment will be doubled. Understand, Jugendliche Behrendt?’
I repeat the words of a few moments earlier, between my sobs. ‘Yes, Herr Director. I understand.’
5
February 1975. Day Four.
Mitte, East Berlin.
The chief forensic pathologist’s office at Charité Hospital felt overcrowded to Müller. She’d filed in along with Tilsner and Schmidt, following after Jäger, who – despite what he’d said in the cemetery – seemed determined to take control of proceedings and had for some reason postponed his one-to-one meeting with her. Müller had tried to push for a prompt autopsy, but the Stasi lieutenant colonel hadn’t seen fit to disrupt his weekend, so they were only getting underway now, on the Monday morning.
Jäger gestured to the three officers to stand at the back of the room while he occupied the chair in front of the desk, behind which sat three men in a line: one in civilian clothes, flanked by two in medical overalls.
It was the man in the civilian suit that spoke first, eyeballing the Stasi officer opposite him. ‘You do realise that this is totally irregular, Oberstleutnant.’ He banged his hand down on a fat grey-covered volume on the desk. ‘The Order on Medical Post Examinations has been in force since 1949. It makes it quite clear that in cases of suspected unnatural death the only officials present at the autopsy should be myself as the Attorney for the Mitte district of the Hauptstadt, together with the chief pathologist and a certified doctor.’
The standoff intrigued Müller. She watched Jäger nod across the desk at the attorney. ‘I’m fully aware of the provisions of the OMPE, Comrade Seiberling,’ he replied evenly.
‘Well, you’ll understand then that the only people I will be allowing into the mortuary room to witness the legal autopsy will be Professor Feuerstein,’ the attorney gestured to the grey-haired man to his left and then mirrored the gesture to his right, ‘and Doctor Wollenburg, who was on duty at the Charité Hospital when the corpse was first brought in and who was the certifying doctor who performed the initial external examination. The only others present will be myself and the mortuary assistant.’
Jäger’s answer came after a moment’s consideration. ‘That’s entirely understandable and would be reasonable enough in normal circumstances,’ said the Stasi lieutenant colonel. ‘However, these are not normal circumstances.’ Müller watched him reach into his inside jacket pocket and draw out an envelope. He opened it, placed the contents on the desk and rotated it for the attorney to read.
‘You’ll see the signature here.’ He reached across the desk and traced his finger under a blue ink scrawl. ‘Comrade Erich Mielke. Colonel General Mielke.’ He smiled convivially at the attorney. ‘I think that will be all the authorisation we will need for me – and my People’s Police colleagues – to attend your autopsy, don’t you agree?’
Seiberling repeatedly flattened out the sheet of paper with the side of his hand, as if stunned that the Minister for State Security had any opinion whatsoever on his autopsy. There was a moment’s silence as he considered his options, but Müller knew he didn’t really have any. ‘I see,’ said the attorney, finally, nodding. ‘Comrade Mielke himself.’ As Jäger had a moment earlier, he ran his finger under the signature, almost reverentially. ‘That is of course a different matter entirely,’ he said, speaking as though to the document rather than Jäger.
‘I’m glad you’re in agreement, Attorney Seiberling. Comrade Müller here,’ he gestured towards Müller, ‘is in charge of the investigation on behalf of the Mitte Kriminalpolizei and she will be present, as will her deputies, as will I.’
The attorney sighed, then Müller watched him rise from his chair, open a beige metal cupboard and take out protective clothes, masks, gloves and shoe covers. He pushed them over the desk towards Jäger.
‘You’d all better put these on, then,’ he said. ‘We’ll start right away.’
Inside the autopsy room, with its pervasive smell of disinfectant, the mortuary assistant brought the girl’s naked body on a wheeled metal trolley from the cooler. Initially, Müller was surprised that the woman was able to lift the body onto the autopsy table without assistance, then noticed her well-muscled forearms. It was something she was glad to see: women at every level supporting the Republic, something that would never happen in the West.
As the detective looked down at the girl, she had to fight not to turn her head away. The face had had some of its lacerations partially repaired and displayed a waxier, paler appearance than when Müller had previously seen it close up, three days earlier in the graveyard. This gave the body a more human touch, but the toothless gums, the empty eye sockets that the dog had presumably attacked first, in its ravenous need for nourishment . . . Müller found herself averting her gaze, concentrating instead on t
he girl’s hands, just as she had three days earlier. Unadulterated white skin, and the pathetic attempts to mimic nail varnish.
Professor Feuerstein clipped a miniature microphone to his apron, and fixed the jack into a small dictation machine which he then slid into his pocket. ‘You will all get my full report in due course, but I will make comments and record them as I progress the autopsy, which I will then review at a later stage. But feel free to interrupt and ask questions.’ Müller found the pathologist’s tone soothing. He seemed less stuffy and rule-bound than Seiberling.
‘Do you have the photographs from the scene?’ he asked Schmidt. The Kriminaltechniker handed over a bundle of cellophane-wrapped black-and-white photographs. Feuerstein and Wollenburg busied themselves pinning them to an adjacent noticeboard. The spread of photographs – images of the girl’s body taken from various angles – reminded Müller of the things that didn’t add up. She found herself thinking about the tyre tracks. The irregular shoeprint patterns in the snow. The apparent intended direction of the girl – on the surface a failed attempt to cross into the East, but one that Müller suspected had been staged.
Next to the board, on another table, the girl’s bloodstained clothes and shoes had been taken out of evidence bags and laid out on a plastic sheet.
Feuerstein snapped the protective rubber of his gloves and moved across to the autopsy table. He looked down at the girl’s face, then at the Kriminalpolizei detective. ‘Do you have any further information as to the girl’s identity, Comrade Müller?’
Müller had been holding her breath for moments at a time, trying to keep the stench of disinfectant from her lungs. ‘At present, no,’ she replied. ‘We will in the coming days cross-check against all reports we have of missing girls of a similar age, but so far we’ve only made an initial check of the files.’ Feuerstein nodded.
The mortuary assistant placed a body block under the nape of the girl’s neck, exposing the underside of her chin and pushing her chest upwards. As the autopsy progressed, Feuerstein made regular comments into the dictation machine, and occasionally bounced questions off Wollenburg, questions that always seemed rhetorical. Seiberling, meanwhile, was being ignored. The exchange in the pathologist’s office with Jäger had – Müller surmised – rendered him as good as impotent.
Feuerstein used a magnifying glass to check the body millimetre by millimetre. To Müller’s untrained eye, he appeared to be paying most attention to the eye sockets of the girl’s mutilated face, to her neck and fingernails. The wounds in her back seemed of little interest.
He gestured to Müller and Jäger to look more closely at the neck.
‘Do you see these marks? This abrasion here?’ Feuerstein traced his finger above the girl’s skin, in a slight curve. ‘These are most likely caused when the victim tried to prevent some sort of trauma to her neck. The marks are from her own fingernails as she desperately fought for air. And look here.’ Feuerstein had gently pulled down the girl’s left eyelid, which still remained intact above the ravaged socket. Müller could see a pattern of tiny red spots. Feuerstein pointed to them with his other hand. ‘They are petechiae – minuscule haemorrhages in the skin.’ He pulled the eyelid back again. ‘The eyes, of course, are no longer present. And I will comment on that in my final report. If they had been, I would have expected to find petechiae there too, in the conjunctiva.’ He then gestured to the girl’s neck. ‘You would usually, in these cases, see bruising here as well – but occasionally not, and this is one of those rare occasions.’
Müller was conscious of Schmidt’s belly pressing into her back, the smell of whatever variety of wurst he’d just eaten invading her nostrils.
Suddenly he spoke, a confused note in his voice. ‘So you’re saying she was strangled. And yet there are no obvious marks on her neck, other than from her own fingernails?’
‘Exactly,’ confirmed Feuerstein. ‘If she had been killed with some sort of ligature then there certainly would have been. But I would deduce she was strangled with someone’s forearm. A muscular, but fleshy, forearm – hence the lack of bruising. By the time we have completed the autopsy, I would expect to have found – by X-ray and dissection – fractures to the laryngeal skeleton. In other words, damage consistent with manual strangulation to the cervical spine.’
Müller’s brow tightened in confusion. ‘But what about the wounds to her body?’ she asked, pointing at the photos on the noticeboard that Schmidt had taken at the scene. These clearly showed what looked like bullet wounds, in a regular pattern, across her back. Feuerstein gestured to the mortuary assistant. The woman and pathologist combined to turn the girl’s body over.
‘Yes, there are bullet wounds,’ Feuerstein said. ‘But, Dr Wollenburg, perhaps you can explain to our colleagues why we are certain these were not the cause of death, even before we complete our investigation.’
The blond doctor stared directly at Müller as he began his answer. She dropped her gaze back to the girl’s body, trying to concentrate on what he was saying, rather than his angular good looks.
‘Yes, there are lesions consistent with bullet wounds,’ said Wollenburg. ‘But even when the body was first brought to me, it was obvious that these were inflicted after death. Several hours after, in fact. There’s a lack of haemorrhaging from the wounds. Yes, they were from an automatic, or semi-automatic, weapon. The pattern implies that.’ He moved over to her clothes. ‘There is a significant amount of blood on her outer clothing, but much, much less on the T-shirt she was wearing under her top. In other words, the blood was applied from the outside.’
‘What do you mean, applied?’ asked Müller.
‘Well, to put it another way: faked. Very clumsily faked, so I would guess it was something that was done in a hurry. It is a bloodstain. But we’ve tested it – it’s not human. The pattern is inconsistent with a bullet wound, and inconsistent with having seeped, flowed or pumped from within her body. It was thrown on her top later. The blood is from an animal – we believe it’s feline.’
Seiberling, who’d been standing quietly in the background, now moved forward and addressed Jäger, who’d been listening to the explanations by the pathologist and doctor without comment. ‘So you see, Oberstleutnant Jäger, it doesn’t look like she was shot from the West while trying to get into the East at all. That story in Neues Deutschland was obviously wrong. I don’t think there is any requirement for you four to be here for the remainder of the autopsy.’
Jäger himself said nothing for a moment; Müller found the silence unnerving. When he did finally reply, it was in the same quiet, measured voice he’d used throughout his exchanges with the attorney. ‘I don’t think we should jump to any conclusions, Comrade Seiberling.’ He turned to Müller and held her gaze. ‘I’m sure that Oberleutnant Müller will examine all the evidence in her usual thorough fashion, and will arrive at the correct conclusion.’ There was no real menace in his tone, yet Müller understood it as a veiled threat. Then Jäger turned back towards Seiberling. ‘And you’re right, of course. We can leave now confident that you will provide us with a full and detailed report. But please don’t suggest to us what our conclusions will be. That’s not really your job, is it?’
He then reached across the girl’s body on the mortuary table and tapped Professor Feuerstein’s miniature dictation apparatus. ‘You’ll make sure you send me a copy of the recording of your autopsy notes, won’t you, Feuerstein? And our other conversations.’ Feuerstein clicked the machine off, and Müller watched Seiberling’s face fall as he realised his verbal sparring with Jäger was all recorded on it.
The pathologist smiled. ‘Of course, Comrade Oberstleutnant. Of course.’
6
Day Five.
East Berlin.
An S-bahn train rattled overhead. In the temporary offices of the Mitte Murder Commission – shoehorned into a railway arch below Marx-Engels-Platz station – Müller watched the contents of her overflowing in-tray battle gravity as it shook with the vibrations. She lifted
a folder off the top of the pile, opened it and began turning the pages.
On each page there was the picture of a girl, first name, family name, address, date of birth, height, hair colour, eyes, shape of nose, comments about teeth and then details about other distinguishing marks. She’d been through the entire file at the weekend, and now here she was, starting her day doing the exact same thing again. They had to be seen to be doing something – and perhaps there was a detail she’d missed. The trouble was that all these girls were missing from the Hauptstadt and neighbouring Bezirke, and none of them seemed to match with the girl whose mutilated face she’d last seen on the mortuary table of Charité Hospital. And, if the official explanation for the case was correct, the girl wouldn’t be found in the missing files of the Republic in any case, because she’d come, allegedly, from the West to the East. Müller sighed, and banged the olive-green folder shut.
‘Werner!’ she shouted through the side office door. ‘Come here a moment.’
Through the dividing window, she watched her deputy stretch at his desk in the main office, pick up a file of his own and then lope towards her, as though deadlines were something to which Unterleutnant Werner Tilsner didn’t have to adhere. All very well for him, the handsome bastard, thought Müller. But he wouldn’t have Stasi Oberstleutnant Jäger or police Oberst Reiniger breathing down his neck and wanting answers every five minutes.
‘What can I do for you, Comrade Müller?’
Müller felt herself blush at Tilsner’s sham subservience. ‘Karin. Just call me Karin when it’s us two. Or boss if you insist. I’ve told you that enough times.’
‘Of course, Comrade Karin.’
‘And you can cut that out too. What’s that you’re holding?’ Müller pointed at the forest-green file embossed with gold lettering that Tilsner carried in his left hand.
‘Missing girls.’
Müller frowned, and tapped her own differently shaded green file. ‘But I’ve already got that file here.’
