by David Young
Tilsner placed his file on Müller’s desk, and rotated so she could read the writing on it. The gold-embossed emblem of an eagle – flexing its wings like some unlikely avian bodybuilder – told her all she needed to know. It was from the West.
‘How did you get this?’
‘I didn’t. Oberst Reiniger got it for me.’ Müller tried to hide her annoyance – why had Reiniger given it directly to Tilsner? It should have come to her. Tilsner was unfazed. ‘He’s on the Inter-Berlin police liaison committee or something. It’s his pet project. Willy Brandt started it – part of his reaching out to the East –’ Tilsner rolled his eyes, and smirked.
Müller began leafing through the file. Other than a few more colour photos and better-quality paper, it was remarkably similar to its DDR equivalent. ‘Is this just for West Berlin?’ she asked.
Tilsner walked round Müller’s desk and drew up a chair next to her. She felt his thigh touch hers. She didn’t move her leg away, and found to her annoyance that she could feel the heat rising in her face. ‘No,’ he replied, with a slight smirk. ‘The whole of the Federal Republic.’
Müller placed the two files side by side and squeezed each in turn between her thumb and forefinger. Then turned and looked questioningly at her deputy. He shrugged. ‘Republikflüchtlinge. That’s why the file for one city is as big as the other for a whole country. Although I’m surprised there are so many. I thought there was some sort of agreement where the younger ones got returned to their parents or guardians back here.’
‘Presumably only if that’s what the parents want. Anyway, the Federal Republic is not a country – it’s a fascist anachronism.’
‘Yes, yes, whatever,’ said Tilsner, leafing through the West German file. ‘The question is: is she here?’ He tapped the open western folder. ‘Or here?’ He pointed at the olive-green eastern file. Then he turned and eyeballed Müller. ‘Or do we have no record of her at all?’
‘We’ll just have to go through them all systematically,’ said Müller. ‘Let’s cross-check her physical details with the entries in each file.’
‘I need something to help me along the way first. Elke!’ Tilsner shouted out into the main office. Student detective Elke Lehmann looked up from her desk. ‘Two coffees, please, for me and Oberleutnant Müller here. Quick as you can. Two sugars for me, one for the Oberleutnant.’ The girl started busying herself with tins and mugs at the side of the room.
‘I see you’ve got her well trained, Werner, but she’s supposed to be learning about police work, not making coffee.’
Tilsner shrugged and smiled at his superior. ‘She’s happy to do what I want.’
Müller glanced at the side of her deputy’s face as he began unclipping the pages of missing girls from the West German folder. Strong chin, hint of stubble and fierce blue eyes. I bet she is happy to do whatever he wants, thought Müller, then chided herself for the ridiculous flash of jealousy.
Another train went through the station overhead, and Tilsner swore when the pile of papers he’d taken from the file fell to the floor from the table’s rattle. ‘Scheisse. Can’t they get us a proper office?’ They collected up the pages and files and moved out together to the outer office. Müller crossed to the long side table, moving the empty coffee cups and textbooks.
‘So where do we start?’ asked Tilsner. ‘Height? Hair colour? Eye colour?’
‘We don’t know her eye colour. We can’t even check for dental records.’ Tilsner grimaced at her reminder. ‘Let’s take all the pages out, divide them into piles and just work through them like that. We could maybe start with age. We know from the pathologist that she was between thirteen and seventeen years old. Maybe we should add another year’s leeway each side and discount any of the girls under twelve or over eighteen?’
Tilsner nodded, and they began leafing through the pages of each file, collecting a pile of rejected girls who didn’t meet the age criteria.
Elke approached with the two cups of coffee. Tilsner took a sip from the one he was offered and recoiled in disgust. ‘Elke, what the hell is that?’ The girl reddened and dropped her gaze.
Müller sipped from her own cup. It did taste disgusting, but she simply said, ‘Thank you, Elke. Just ignore him. He got out of the wrong side of bed this morning.’ She immediately felt a pang of guilt – his marital bed, the one she had sullied with her presence, clothes on or not. Tilsner grinned at her, as though he knew what she was thinking. Then he pushed his mug to one side and left it there.
They continued shuffling through the papers until they had been through the whole pile. Evidently teenage girls were the most likely to be reported as missing, because the reject pile was actually smaller than that of those who met their age criteria.
‘What next?’ asked Tilsner.
‘Height?’ suggested Müller. ‘How tall was she? About a metre and a half?’
Tilsner got his notebook out of his pocket. ‘Just over. It says here 1 metre 52. That’s what the pathologist put in his report.’
‘OK, so she could have grown if she’d been missing a while, and if she was young enough. So we still can’t discount girls who were shorter when they went missing.’
‘But we can reject taller ones, because she won’t have shrunk. Everyone over, say, 1 metre 55 for starters.’
They divided the pile in two, and worked through it, pulling out the papers of any girls over their height limit.
‘That’s helped,’ said Tilsner. He fanned out the three reports he had left. ‘How many have you got?’
She spread them out on the table. ‘Just seven.’
The details of ten girls to look through. They spread the ten pages out, side by side, along the table. Müller went along flattening each with a sweep of her hand. Then she returned to her own office and brought back two black-and-white photographs of the girl – one taken at the scene where the body had been discovered, and the other from the autopsy report. She took the autopsy photo first, showing the girl’s face after the pathologist had done his best to repair her injuries; the result didn’t look particularly human. She moved it – left to right – along the table, pausing above the details of each girl and comparing photographs. None looked like even a distant match. She did the same with the photograph taken at the scene. That was more difficult because of the obvious facial injuries. Again nothing.
She sighed and turned to look at Tilsner. Her deputy was staring trance-like at the photos.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
He took the original photo from Müller, the one from the cemetery, and held it – almost reverentially. ‘It’s this picture. It just makes me so sad. It’s how I felt at the cemetery as well. You know –’
‘What?’
‘That she could be Steffi, my daughter, in a few years’ time.’
Müller nodded, not trusting herself to speak. She’d felt the exact same thing at the cemetery and in the autopsy room.
‘Steffi’s six now. A little curly-haired fireball. Full of energy. I can do no wrong in her eyes. But in less than ten years, well . . . she could end up like this.’ Müller could see his eyes moistening, his hand shaking slightly. It wasn’t the Tilsner she thought she knew. His devil-may-care mask had slipped, if only for an instant.
‘You were telling me the other night that family life doesn’t agree with you.’ She laughed, trying to lighten the mood. ‘Or was that just your usual chat-up line?’
Tilsner snorted, and tossed the hair back from his forehead. ‘No. It wasn’t. It’s true. I got married too young, didn’t I? When Koletta fell pregnant. We’d both just turned twenty. That’s no age at all. And then Marius came along straightaway; it just felt we didn’t have the time to live our lives. He’s the same age as this girl. But it’s always the girls, isn’t? Always the girls who end up like this.’
He continued to finger and stare at the photograph. Then his face creased into a frown as he picked up the autopsy photo.
‘Hang on,’ he said, his voice s
uddenly animated.
‘What is it?’
Tilsner put the photo back on the table above girl number six. Then he got some scissors and started cutting round the face of the girl from the autopsy, and then did the same for the report for missing girl number six.
‘I hope you know what you’re doing, destroying evidence like that,’ said Müller.
‘They’re only copies. But look!’
He pointed excitedly at the two photos, placing them side by side, having cut the hair from the picture of each photograph.
‘Don’t you see? It looks like the same girl. Only the hair is different.’ He placed the cut-out faces back in the surrounding frame of hair, making the photos complete again. In the missing report, the girl had a large mass of blonde hair. In the autopsy photo, the hair was dark, short and straight. Müller examined the photos closely. Tilsner was right, up to a point. There was a resemblance, although – given the injuries – she wasn’t as sure that it was the same girl.
‘East or West?’ she asked.
Tilsner picked up the piece of paper and read the address. ‘East,’ he said. ‘Friedrichshain.’ He read the report on the girl. ‘Silke Eisenberg. Suspected of wall jumping – but, as usual, it was the other way, escaping to the West.’
‘Perhaps she could have gone there, but then attempted to return?’ suggested Müller.
‘Well, anything’s possible – if pigs had wings,’ replied Tilsner in a deadpan voice.
Müller sat down on a chair next to the table, exhausted, even though it was still early in the day. Checking out this girl’s home address was all they had to go on. It wasn’t much, but at least it was a start.
7
Day Five.
Friedrichshain, East Berlin.
As Müller and Tilsner arrived at the Eisenberg family’s apartment block in Friedrichshain, Müller found herself wanting to shield her ears from the furious clanging and crashing of building noise. The dust and smell of new cement and render made her want to cover her mouth and nose, reminding her of her childhood and the post-war rebuilding of destroyed homes. They picked their way to the block mentioned in the missing persons’ file, careful to stay on the wooden duckboard – the only way of safely negotiating the mess of mud and melted snow between the two buildings.
Opposite the Eisenbergs’ block, another concrete high-rise was emerging from the ground, seemingly expanding upwards metre by metre as Müller watched. It reminded her of her nephew’s Pebe toy set: the gift she’d given him at the family Christmas at her mother’s guesthouse in Thuringia the year before last. He’d constructed a modernist high-rise from the interlocking plastic bricks in just a few hours, while the adults digested their festive lunch. Now here, grown-up workers from the workers’ and peasants’ state were building the socialist dream in its full-scale form. But while that filled Müller with hope for her country’s future, the memory of the Christmas gift was a source of guilt. This year, she hadn’t been back to the family home in Oberhof – the Republic’s answer to St Moritz – and she knew her mother, sister and brother would feel she’d let them down. Müller had claimed she was too busy with work, but –
She stopped the thought, and hung back as Tilsner rang the entryphone buzzer. He jabbed on the button repeatedly, shouting into the mouthpiece to no avail.
He turned towards Müller and shrugged in exasperation, then tried pulling on the locked front door.
‘A few months old but knackered already.’
Just then, above the construction din from the opposite block, Müller simultaneously heard and felt footsteps on the wooden duckboard behind her. An elderly lady approached – weighed down by shopping bags – the timber slats wobbling under her shoes. The woman pushed away wisps of pure white hair from her lined and leathered forehead, tucking them under the red-and-white polka-dot scarf that was wrapped tightly round her head.
‘Are you from the neighbourhood committee?’ she asked Müller. ‘This is what I was talking about.’ The woman gestured at the muddy mess underfoot. ‘It’s no good building us new apartments but not sorting out the roads and footpaths. If I fell off, I’d probably drown in that mud. Still, at least you’re here now.’
Müller withdrew her Kripo identification and showed it to the woman. ‘Oberleutnant Müller. Kriminalpolizei Mitte. We need to get into this apartment block. Do you live here? The entry system doesn’t seem to be working.’ Müller pointed to where Tilsner was still pulling at the door and jabbing buttons at random.
‘Nothing works properly here,’ said the woman. ‘That’s what I said in my written complaint. I can let you in, but will you try to make sure they do something about it in return?’
‘It’s not the job of the criminal police to respond to petitions, I’m afraid, Citizen –’
‘Keppler. The name’s Keppler.’ She shuffled towards the door with her bags, placed them down on the muddied wooden boards and then fumbled in her pocket for the door key. ‘Who is it you’re looking for anyway, dear?’
‘The Eisenberg family. Flat 412.’
‘Ah yes. Same floor as me.’
‘You know them, then?’ asked Müller.
‘I do. And I could give you some interesting information.’
Müller eyeballed the woman with what she hoped was her best stern expression. ‘Then you should. Withholding information from the People’s Police –’
‘. . . is a very serious matter. I know that, officer. I hope, in return, you might mention the terrible state of the footpaths.’ She waited for some response from Müller, but the detective continued to fix her with a glare. Eventually the woman continued without any assurance in return. ‘Something fishy is going on there if you ask me. She’s kept herself very private since her daughter disappeared, and her husband . . . well you probably know all about him anyway. But she’ll be in, there’s that at least. She never goes out these days.’
‘And what about Silke, the daughter?’
‘Well they’ve reported her missing, haven’t they? Look, posters everywhere.’ The woman gestured with her eyes to the wall of the lobby, and Müller saw the exact same photo from the file, this time as the centrepiece of a missing person’s poster, offering a 1,000-mark reward. ‘They’re making out she’s been abducted or something, but it’s obvious where she’s gone.’
‘Where?’ asked Tilsner.
‘Where do they all go? To the West, of course. Watch all their western TV programmes and get silly ideas. She was always a bad one.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Müller.
The woman leant down to pick up her shopping bags. ‘I’ll tell you on the way up,’ she said. ‘Can your young man give me a hand with these? There’s no point him pressing those buttons, because the lift doesn’t work either.’
The three of them laboriously climbed the four floors, with Tilsner taking both her shopping bags. On the way, in between regular stops to get her breath back, Frau Keppler extolled her theory that Silke Eisenberg had been mixing with the wrong sorts. Having sex with boys. Then men. And then with money changing hands. Frau Keppler’s view was that she’d simply crossed the Wall to earn more money in the West’s lucrative red-light districts. She divulged the information in an ever-quieter voice. By the time they were at the fourth level she was virtually whispering into Müller’s ear, between regular rasping intakes of air.
‘You do realise what you’re alleging, Citizen Keppler? Republikflucht is a very serious crime,’ said Müller, matching the elderly woman’s whisper. ‘Republikflucht and alleged prostitution.’
The woman gestured with her eyes to the door to apartment 412. ‘You’ll see, dear,’ she whispered. Tilsner handed her the shopping bags. ‘Thank you, young man,’ she said, this time at full volume.
As Frau Keppler retreated down the corridor towards her own flat, humming a tune as she went, Müller rang the Eisenbergs’ bell.
The door opened a few centimetres, and half of a woman’s face appeared, bisected by a security
chain which prevented the door opening fully. ‘Who is it?’
Müller held up her Kripo ID. ‘Kriminalpolizei. We’re here about Silke.’
The woman made no initial move to undo the chain or open the door further. ‘What about Silke? She’s not here.’
Müller sighed. ‘We know that, Citizen Eisenberg, but we may have some information about her. Could you let us in, please? This is a criminal investigation.’
Now it was the woman’s turn to sigh. A strange reaction, thought Müller, unless what the old woman had alleged was true. The chain jangled as Frau Eisenberg freed it, and Müller and Tilsner stepped into the brightly painted hallway of the flat. The woman looked out of place amongst its neatness. Mousy hair, unwashed greasy housecoat and, more importantly, a look in her eyes that didn’t suggest she was expecting to receive some bad news about her daughter.
Müller held out her hand. ‘Oberleutnant Müller, Kriminalpolizei Mitte. And this is Unterleutnant Tilsner.’
The woman wiped her hand on the back of her housecoat, before accepting Müller’s handshake. ‘Marietta Eisenberg. I’m Silke’s mother.’
‘And where’s her dad?’ asked Tilsner.
The woman snorted. ‘You should know more about that than me.’
‘What do you mean, Frau Eisenberg?’ asked Müller.
‘I mean I don’t know where he is. He was arrested three months ago, just before Silke went missing, but I don’t know where he’s been taken. You lot won’t tell me anything.’
Müller looked quizzically at Tilsner. He shrugged. ‘We don’t know anything about that, Citizen Eisenberg,’ she said. ‘And if he’d been arrested by the Volkspolizei we would know, I can assure you.’
‘It wasn’t the police who took him. It was the Stasi.’ Müller frowned. Perhaps they should have checked in with Jäger before coming here.
‘Well then, I’m sure they had good reason.’ It was a little cruel, but Marietta Eisenberg had rubbed her up the wrong way. ‘I’m sorry for what’s happened to your husband. But we’re here to talk about Silke – can we sit down?’
