Stasi Child

by David Young

  Müller eyeballed the officer. ‘I understand what you’re saying, Comrade Leutnant. Nevertheless, I would like to go down the shaft to see for myself.’

  The border guard nodded. ‘You will have to be accompanied by my men, and they will go ahead of you to check for safety. It seems pointless, though. As I say, the tunnel is blocked off. But we’re under instructions to be of assistance to your inquiry, so on your own head be it. Will you be OK with that arm?’ he asked, gesturing towards her sling.

  Müller nodded, then climbed down the shaft after the two border guards chosen to accompany her. Baumann and Vogel followed. Müller negotiated each rung with precision, gripping one side of the ladder with just her right arm, edging down bit by bit, trying to ignore the pain from her injuries.

  The two guards lit up the stone steps with their torches, and after the group of five descended, they turned into the level.

  As the torchlight illuminated the rails, Müller could see the parallel lines of iron disappear into the jumble of rocks that now blocked the mine level. The pile of stone reached from floor to ceiling. Müller moved towards it, but one of the guards held her back.

  ‘It’s not safe further than here, I’m afraid, Comrade Oberleutnant. The tunnel has been reinforced to this point so that we could check it was properly blocked up. It’s a temporary measure. In the coming days we will secure stronger explosives, and blow up the whole shaft and complex. No one will be using this again.’

  Müller’s mind raced. Ackermann and Irma couldn’t have got through here. So if they weren’t here, where the hell had they gone?

  She started to say something, but was shushed by Baumann.

  ‘Listen, Comrade Müller. Did you hear that?’

  The five held their collective breath. The two guards extinguished their torches, perhaps hoping the darkness would concentrate their powers of hearing.

  ‘There!’ whispered Baumann.

  This time Müller heard it. It was very faint, but it was definitely there. A rhythmic thud. Again and again. Then silence. Then it started again. Thud, thud, thud.

  ‘What do you think it is, Hauptmann?’

  ‘I can’t be sure, of course,’ replied Baumann. ‘But my best guess is that’s the sound of someone digging.’

  Müller listened once more. The thudding resumed.

  The border guards still wouldn’t let them near the collapsed rock wall and seemed in no hurry to investigate whatever the digging sounds were. They assured the Kripo officers that they would scale up the urgency of acquiring more powerful explosives, to destroy the whole complex. If anyone was at work in the mine, they would be blown to smithereens.

  The three detectives had no option but to retreat back above ground.

  Müller looked at Baumann in desperation. ‘What can we do now? We’ve got to save that girl somehow.’

  Baumann glanced towards the border guard lieutenant. ‘I don’t think you’re going to be able to persuade him to re-open the tunnel. He’s dead set on simply blowing the whole thing up.’

  Müller nodded. But there had to be something they could do.

  ‘Is it worth looking at that map again?’ asked Vogel.

  She frowned. ‘Which map?’

  ‘Hauptmann Baumann and I managed to get hold of an old map of the mine workings from the local library. That day we came up here trying to find you. It’s more detailed than the one you had.’

  ‘Where is it?’ asked Müller.

  ‘In the Gaz.’ The three of them ran back to the four-wheel drive, parked at the side of the forest track. Vogel retrieved the map, and after wiping the vehicle’s bonnet with his gloves, spread it out on top.

  ‘We’re here,’ he said. ‘By this shaft and mine house. But as you can see, originally there were other shafts leading down to the mine too.’ He pointed at three different circles, dotted throughout the forest.

  ‘How do we know they connect with our mine?’ asked Baumann.

  Vogel flipped the map over. On the reverse side, there were sectional drawings of the mine. ‘Bear in mind this is more than a hundred years old. The border guards most probably will have found all the old shafts and blocked them off to prevent anyone trying to do what Neumann and Ackermann have attempted.’

  ‘To dig under the state border, to the West?’ asked Müller.

  ‘Exactly.’ Vogel started tracing his finger along the tunnels and shafts of the sectional drawing. ‘There are two possible shafts that may link up. One is a hundred metres or so that way.’ Vogel pointed into the forest, downhill towards the border. ‘The other’s about fifty or so metres in the opposite direction, up towards the Brocken.’ The uphill route looked steeper, more treacherous.

  Baumann dived into the four-wheel drive, and brought three torches out. He handed one to Müller. ‘Have you got your gun?’ She nodded. ‘Then I think it’s best you and Vogel take one of the shafts; I’ll try the other. You’ve only got one good arm. Vogel here will be able to help you.’ The Unterleutnant smiled at Müller.

  ‘Should we ask the border guards to come with us?’

  Baumann shook his head. ‘They weren’t exactly helpful down the main shaft, were they? If there is a way in, we don’t want them stopping us.’ The three of them studied the map and sectional diagram one last time, trying to memorise potential routes, then set off in opposite directions: Baumann uphill, Müller and Vogel towards the downhill shaft.

  Müller had to cling onto the junior officer with her good arm as they negotiated the rocks, snow and tree trunks. They clambered from tree to tree, gradually making their way down the slope to where the shaft ought to be. At first they didn’t spot it, then Müller pointed to a low, circular wall, with a rusting grille on top.

  ‘It looks like it’s been sealed,’ she said.

  Vogel gave the grille a tug. It moved slightly, but didn’t give way. He picked up a rock, and crashed it down on one side of the grille. Then, squeezing between a tree and the shaft top to gain leverage, he pulled once more. A groan and crash and it came away in his hands, throwing him backwards.

  Switching on her torch, Müller shone it down the shaft. ‘There’s a ladder,’ she said, then reached down and pulled at it with her uninjured arm. ‘Seems secure.’

  Vogel gently moved her aside. ‘I’d better go first, Oberleutnant, then I can help you if you get into trouble.’

  Müller wasn’t sure how far down they climbed into the blackness. The shaft was freezing cold with a dank, fetid atmosphere. Vogel descended more quickly than her, until she realised from the motion of his torch that he’d reached the bottom.

  Once Müller caught up with him, she saw they had a choice of two passageways to crawl down. Vogel trained the torch beam down one of the tunnels. ‘This way,’ he whispered. ‘At least, I hope so.’

  First it was the sounds she heard: the ‘thud, thud, thud’ from the other side of the rockfall, only now the sound was sharper, louder, echoing down the level they were crawling through. They turned their torches off as a precaution. As Vogel turned a corner, she saw a new flicker of light. Then their level opened out to head height. They stretched for the first time for several minutes, Müller rubbing her left arm. As they moved further towards the thudding sound, the light grew stronger. The tunnel they were in reached a junction. Vogel stopped, peered his head round the corner and then immediately drew it back. She saw the silhouette of his arm beckon her. Then he whispered in her ear.

  ‘They’re at the end there. About twenty metres away.’

  As he pulled back, Müller moved ahead of him, flattening herself against the end of the wall of their tunnel, right at the junction with the main level. Then she edged her head to the side slightly, so that her left eye could see down to where the pair worked. It was the flaming shock of Irma’s hair she saw first, then, alongside, Ackermann’s bald pate shining in the torchlight.

  She drew out her Makarov and released the safety catch. Behind her, she could hear Vogel doing the same.

  Simultane
ously, she saw another flash of light, from the tunnel on the other side of the main level. But Ackermann and Irma, busy side by side, hadn’t noticed. The light grew stronger, then Ackermann heard something, turned and picked up his gun, aiming it towards the tunnel from where Müller assumed Baumann was about to emerge.

  ‘Careful, he’s seen you,’ she shouted.

  Ackermann swivelled, aiming the gun towards her.

  ‘Drop the weapon, Comrade Ackermann!’ shouted Baumann. ‘You’re under arrest, suspected of the abduction and murder of Beate Ewert.’

  Ackermann started to lower his gun arm, but as Baumann stepped out, Müller saw him turn and raise it again. A twin flash of light and then a double crack of gunfire, as she and Vogel raced down the tunnel, pistols aloft. Baumann was hit and fell, and in the confusion as Ackermann turned his aim towards Müller, she saw the glint of steel, a dull thud and anguished cry as Irma used all her force to crack her shovel blade against Ackermann’s head. The Stasi general slumped forward, blood welling from his head wound.

  Müller shouted: ‘No, Irma!’ But the girl continued to rain blows down on the Stasi general’s skull, the same repetitive rhythm he’d forced her to use in his futile attempt to dig an escape route. Müller forgot about the pain in her bad arm as she grabbed the girl. The teenager dropped the shovel, and clung to the detective, sobbing in her arms. Müller had wanted Ackermann alive. To face proper justice. But as his body twitched in its death throes, she knew that wasn’t going to happen.

  She swung her torch back down the level, to where Vogel cradled Baumann’s oversized head. Müller almost couldn’t believe what she was seeing in the dim torchlight. Baumann had seemed larger than life, solid, dependable. But as Vogel looked up into her eyes, his own glistened in the torch beam. He slowly shook his head. His Hauptmann – the mountain detective who looked more like a farmer – had investigated his last case.

  58

  Day Twenty.

  East Berlin.

  On her return to Berlin, Müller was immediately summoned to a meeting with Jäger at the Märchenbrunnen. She tried to suggest an alternative venue to avoid the reminders of her and Gottfried, but Jäger would have none of it.

  He was sitting in his usual place, in front of the still-closed fountains. But the scene looked different, less magical: most of the snow had melted.

  ‘How’s your arm?’ he asked, glancing at it.

  ‘Getting there. But I feel utterly exhausted.’

  ‘You’ve been through a lot.’

  Müller thought of Baumann’s body, lying in the mine, killed by a senior member of Jäger’s own Ministry for State Security. She pictured Beate’s mutilated body at the cemetery, at the start of this strange investigation. Yes, she’d been through a lot, but she’d got off lightly.

  ‘How’s Tilsner? Can I go and see him?’

  ‘If you wish, of course. But he’s on a life support system at Charité Hospital. He won’t realise you’re there. They don’t know if he’ll pull through or not.’

  ‘What about Ackermann? Will there be an official explanation of his death? Do we know that he was our killer?’

  Jäger rubbed his chin, staring out into the distance, as though he hadn’t heard her.

  ‘Oberstleutnant Jäger?’ Müller prompted, as he continued his silence.

  Finally, Jäger sighed, and got to his feet. He held his hand out to Müller to help her up.

  ‘Come,’ he said. ‘I will show you something.’

  Jäger drove north through the outskirts of the Hauptstadt, and kept driving, still in a northerly direction through the surrounding Brandenburg forest. The darkness of the trees almost reminded her of the Harz, except here the terrain was flatter. Müller wasn’t sure where they were going – wondered if perhaps they were going as far as Rügen and the Ostsee coast – but after about forty minutes, Jäger turned off the main road.

  At a barrier, he showed his pass and was waved through. They were in some luxury complex in the centre of the forest, with streets laid out in a regular pattern and low-rise cream-coloured buildings with red-tiled roofs. All the surrounding lawns and bushes were carefully manicured. It was like something Müller had never seen before – a total contrast to the historic towns of the Harz, although those too were surrounded by trees on all sides.

  ‘I can see you’re impressed, Karin. Ordinary citizens of the Republic don’t often get a chance to visit here. Consider yourself honoured.’ He smiled at her.

  He pulled the car up outside one of the buildings, and Müller could see the grounds were closed off with red-and-white tape, with People’s Army soldiers standing guard. Jäger opened the door for her, showed his pass to the soldiers, and they went inside. The house itself was modern, functional. It was a little how Müller imagined people in the United States of America must live. What was this place, and why had Jäger brought her here? She began to feel slightly alarmed.

  Jäger guided her into one of the rooms.

  ‘This was Horst Ackermann’s study,’ he said. ‘It will now be reallocated, of course.’ He gestured for her to sit on a chair in the corner, while he took the leather swivel seat at the desk; he then turned towards her and held her gaze.

  ‘I owe you an explanation. And I’m sure you want to know for certain that our killer has been disposed of. He has.’ Jäger handed her a copy of Neues Deutschland.

  She started to read the front-page story. The headline alone was enough to tell her what Jäger wanted her to know.

  GENOSSE ACKERMANN KILLED IN CAR CRASH

  She didn’t even bother to read the rest. ‘So no mention of what he did to that poor girl?’

  Jäger shook his head. ‘Nor what Irma did to him. That would not reflect very well on the Ministry for State Security. But we can be sure he was the killer and the rapist. Forensic teams have found Beate Ewert’s fingerprints in this house. Fibres from her clothing, even some scraps of the black witch’s cape she wore to the fancy-dress party on the Brocken. They obviously came back here afterwards.’

  ‘And she believed that by going to the party, by cooperating with Ackermann, he would finally get her out of the Jugendwerkhof ?’

  Jäger shrugged. ‘Maybe. With all the players except Irma being dead, we’re never going to find out. We found the acid used to disguise her identity. We’ve found pliers with dental remains on, presumably used to pull her teeth out. And we found these.’ Jäger swivelled the chair back towards the desk, picked up a brown envelope and then turned again and handed it to Müller. She opened it and shook out its contents. Photographic negatives. She held them up to the light of the window.

  ‘They’re the original surveillance photographs from the sanatorium at the Rügen youth workhouse. Ackermann and Pawlitzki, working together, seem to have used them to mock up the photographs of your husband. We found both their fingerprints on them.’

  Müller replaced the negatives, then handed the envelope back to the Stasi lieutenant colonel. She didn’t want them. It was part of her history now. A part she wanted to forget.

  ‘What about the Volvo limousine? I still don’t understand why that was used?’

  ‘We’re not sure who dumped the body. We think it was Neumann – or Pawlitzki if you prefer – using Ackermann’s limo. Ackermann had an identical one to the one at the West Berlin hire place; he would use it on visits to the western sector. Visiting prostitutes – though why he needed to go to the West to do that, I don’t know. There’s plenty this side of the barrier, including – by the way – Beate Ewert’s mother. That’s how her daughter ended up in the Jugendwerkhof system. Her mother was considered an unsuitable role model. Anyway, Ackermann regularly swapped the two cars round. We’re not sure why. We don’t even know if the hire company ever realised which car was which.’

  Müller frowned. ‘But if he could do all that, why did he and Neumann need to dig the tunnel in the mine? He could have simply defected at any stage.’

  ‘The tunnel must have been their last resort. One he
had to use when he finally realised we were onto him, and when we’d sealed the Republic’s borders. That was why the initial investigation had to be headed by you, a People’s Police detective, rather than anyone in the Stasi. We didn’t want him to realise he was being investigated by members of his own Ministry.’

  ‘And what about all the convenient geographical clues?’ asked Müller.

  Jäger shrugged. ‘I don’t really understand that myself. All I know is that they fitted in with the rumours we’d heard about illicit activity on the part of Ackermann: the parties involving underage girls on Rügen. We knew three of them had gone missing. The rumours reached another of the Ministry’s deputy heads: Markus Wolf, head of the Main Intelligence Directorate. He decided the bad apple at the top of the pile had to be removed – but, as I said, we couldn’t have Stasi agents investigating Stasi generals.’

  Müller frowned. ‘Maybe what Pawlitzki claimed about the clues was the case, then?’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘That he wanted to lure me there. That he knew I would be investigating the case.’

  Picking up a pen, Jäger seemed to make a note of what she was saying. Unless he was just doodling on the pad. She couldn’t quite see. ‘That’s possible, I suppose. You were the Mitte murder squad head.’

  ‘Were?’ asked Müller, alarmed.

  ‘We may have a new role for you,’ said Jäger, twirling round on the seat like a young boy with a new discovery.

  ‘I don’t want a new role.’

  He smiled at her. ‘Don’t reject it out of hand. I’ll let you know more about it in due course.’

  There was something else left unanswered, which Müller needed to know. ‘What will happen to Irma?’

  Jäger gave a long sigh, then clicked the end of the pen and placed it down. ‘She will have to return to the Jugendwerkhof. ’

  ‘No!’ interrupted Müller. ‘She’s not going back there. I won’t allow it.’

  Her outburst seemed to leave Jäger unperturbed. ‘I don’t see that you have any choice in the matter,’ he said. ‘She is under the care of the Ministry of Education, not the Volkspolizei. She is very fortunate not to be facing a murder charge.’