Stasi Child (30 page)

Beate shouts at suit man: ‘Are you taking us all the way to Irma’s aunt in Fürth?’ Because although our geography of the Federal Republic is not good, we both know that’s the way we’re heading. He just shakes his head, but doesn’t enlighten us further.

At Hanover, we turn onto the A2 and see the signs to West Berlin. Well, that wouldn’t be such a bad place to end up. The words to
Hänschen Klein
run around my head, even though we’ve stopped singing it aloud:

Hänschen klein ging allein

In die weite Welt hinein.

Stock und Hut stehn ihm gut,

Ist gar wohlgemut.

I don’t get as far as the second verse. By then, the motion of the van and the roar of the autobahn have lulled me to sleep.

What wakes me is Beate, tugging at my sleeve. ‘Look,’ she says, pointing at what appears to be a border crossing. I frown. There’s a tense atmosphere inside the van. Suit man is gathering papers together. Dog woman is looking at me vigilantly, but with a set face. Even the dog seems alert, ears pricked, panting next to his mistress.

‘Where are we?’ They don’t answer. I look at Mathias. He gives a sly little smile. ‘Do you know, Mathias?’ He just shrugs.

Something isn’t right, but we’re waved through the crossing. Maybe we’re at the entrance to West Berlin. Beate holds my hand, but this time tightly, nervously.

Then I see the sign: ‘
Herzlich Willkommen in der DDR
.’

I jump to my feet, trying to drag Beate with me, but Mathias is holding her back. I let go and try to open the van door. The dog starts barking, straining at its leash. Suit man is shouting; dog woman is trying to grab me. The other male officer pins me down before I can get the door open. What sort of nightmare is this? ‘Get off me,’ I shout. ‘I don’t want to go back, I won’t go back.’ Dog woman is trying to shush me gently, but the other officer has his hand over my mouth. I try to bite him.

‘
Miststück!
’ he screams, but doesn’t let go.

And then we’re at the DDR checkpoint.
Grenztruppen
rush to the van, handcuffing the three of us. Beate and I are snarling like wildcats.

‘Mathias, do something,’ shouts Beate, hoping he will be her knight in shining armour. But he is strangely subdued. Unresisting. Almost as though he wants to go back. And then I realise. He does! The
Arschloch
. He didn’t want to escape from the DDR. He just wanted to be with her. To keep her, trap her with him, like a butterfly pinned in a frame.

I’m still screaming, trying to kick the border troops, but they put us in arm locks and march us to the checkpoint building. I wrench my head round to look back at the van, and the West German border officers who have betrayed us. I can’t believe it; dog woman seemed so nice. She is crying, shouting at suit man, and then she holds my gaze, and I see her mouth: ‘Sorry.’

The three of us are taken into a room at the side of the checkpoint, and I see the back of a man’s head in a swivel chair, facing away from us.

The chair swivels round, and I hear Beate scream.

But there he is, a manic grin creasing his horrible scarred face, and lifting his black eyepatch slightly out of place.

Director Franz Neumann, of
Jugendwerkhof
Prora Ost.

42

February 1975. Day Fifteen.

Wernigerode, East Germany.

Wernigerode might have been out in the provinces but its police headquarters put Marx-Engels-Platz to shame. The
Kripo
team here were housed in a smart modern block – sharing offices with the rest of the town’s
Volkspolizei
. Baumann and Vogel even had a special room reserved for their inquiry.

Scanning the photographs pinned to one wall, Müller noticed the tyre track patterns. As in Berlin, the
Kriminaltechniker
here had produced a negative image of the tracks found in the snow. Müller felt the hairs stand up on the back of her neck. She waved Tilsner over.

‘Look familiar?’ she asked.

‘
Scheisse
.’

‘Gislaved. I’m almost certain,’ she whispered.

Vogel noticed the two Berlin detectives staring closely at the image. ‘Do you recognise them?’

Müller nodded. ‘They’re from a Swedish tyre. Fitted to Volvos.’

The Wernigerode
Unterleutnant
immediately understood – Müller saw it in the pallor of his youthful face. She was confused. Surely someone couldn’t have hired the wedding limousine from West Berlin again? And brought it all the way here, to the Harz? That would be madness. And how would they have negotiated the narrow forest track? A car perhaps, but not a stretch limousine.

Vogel had ushered Baumann over.

‘The tyre tracks,’ he said. ‘They’re from a Volvo. Do you understand what that means, Comrade Baumann?’ Baumann had a blank look on his face. ‘It’s almost certainly from a car assigned to a government official.’

‘
Verdammt!
’ exclaimed Baumann.

‘Or a Stasi official,’ added Vogel.

‘Did your
Kriminaltechniker
measure the wheelbase?’ asked Tilsner.

Vogel leafed through his notebook. ‘I’m not sure. But he was categorical it was from a saloon car. Quite a large saloon, but definitely a saloon. And he was adamant he’d never seen that tyre pattern before.’

Tilsner nodded thoughtfully.

Baumann slumped down in a chair. ‘I could tell this one was going to be trouble. If it had been a hundred metres or so further west we could have left it to the border troops. Now it looks like we’ll have to inform the Stasi. Usually they leave us to our own devices, which – to be honest – is how I prefer it.’ He eyeballed Müller. ‘Is that why this Stasi
Oberstleutnant
is involved? He’s faxed through a photograph of this Neumann fellow. Most of the phones are down due to the snow, but the fax is still working.’

‘Can you bring it to me?’ she asked.

Baumann walked over to a desk, opened the top drawer and picked out two pieces of paper.

The first was the faxed photograph, and as he handed it to Müller, she immediately felt a sense of dread come over her. She wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it was the black patch over Neumann’s left eye, or the scar that ran down his cheek. He certainly looked capable of the killings, but Müller knew that looks were almost always deceptive.

Something else nagged her about the poor-quality faxed photo – a sense of familiarity, although she was certain she’d never met the man before.

Baumann coughed. Müller looked up, and saw him proffering the second faxed sheet. She took it.

It was a terse note, telegram-style, faxed from notepaper headed with the Ministry for State Security emblem, addressed to her.

Went to basement at Charité with mother. Confirmed as B.E. Good luck with the investigation. KJ.

Less than two lines of text, and just two initials instead of her name.
B.E.
After days without a proper face, without a name, the dead girl in the cemetery suddenly had one; the one Müller had suspected ever since the visit to
Jugendwerkhof
Prora Ost: Beate Ewert, Irma Behrendt’s best friend. Beate, the one who’d found life so unbearable in the youth workhouse. As Baumann and Vogel looked on quizzically, she handed the note to Tilsner. Her deputy shook his head, a grim expression on his face, and then gave it back to her. As Müller held the note between her fingers, she stared at her unpainted nails. And tried to picture Beate. In her last happy moments. Colouring in her nails with a black felt-tip pen.

If the circumstances of the Harz killing gave Müller and Tilsner a sense of déjà vu, that was heightened still further two hours later in the mortuary at Wernigerode Hospital. The pathologist, one Dr Eckstein, looked as ancient as his surroundings and tools, white hair sprouting from his ears and nostrils. To Müller, he looked like he’d probably done the exact same job in the Nazi era, possibly even in the Weimar Republic.

His actual findings were remarkably similar, and so was the rigmarole they had to go through to get a ringside seat for the autopsy. Once again, the provisions of the Order on Medical Post Examinations were haughtily quoted, but here, Baumann’s local connections seemed to hold sway. When the
Hauptmann
explained that the Berlin detectives might be able to shed some light on the difficult case, Eckstein agreed to allow all four detectives to witness his examination of the body.

Just as Feuerstein had in Berlin, Eckstein demonstrated why the bullet wounds had almost certainly been inflicted post mortem.

Müller nodded. ‘Our killing in Berlin was exactly the same, Comrade Eckstein.’

The pathologist looked slightly taken aback, but then went on to explain how blood had been applied to the body and clothes from the outside, only he’d already gone one step further in analysing the blood from the clothes.

‘I could tell straight away something didn’t look right, so I tested the blood from the T-shirt before we started the autopsy.’

‘And?’ asked Müller.

‘And it’s from an animal,’ said Eckstein.

‘Same story in Berlin again, Doctor,’ said Tilsner. Müller noticed the sharp looks from Baumann and Vogel. Clearly they weren’t best pleased that the Berlin detectives had withheld information from them.

Eckstein gave a heavy sigh. ‘I can see it’s going to take quite a bit to impress you city types. However, that’s not the whole story.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Tilsner.

‘As I say, I could tell from the shape of the cells under the microscope that the blood was from an animal, not a human. A cat, in fact. And then I managed to run some tests using isoenzyme analysis of the red blood cells.’

Müller could see the pathologist was enjoying bamboozling them with science, and drawing out his moment of drama. ‘What I’m trying to say,’ continued Eckstein, ‘is that the blood is from a very special moggy:
Felis silvestris
, the European wildcat. And this was a particularly pure beast; its forebears hadn’t been fraternising with any local village cats.’

‘What does that mean?’ asked Müller.

‘It means the blood was obtained from an animal in a relatively remote location.’

Baumann stepped forward at this point, turning to Müller. ‘The Brocken. A colony resides there on the slopes. We’re often getting ramblers claiming they’ve sighted a leopard or a lion.’

‘They must be pretty short-sighted,’ joked Tilsner. ‘Anyway, I thought the Brocken was a restricted zone.’

‘It is,’ agreed Baumann. ‘And the main colony of cats is thought to be inside that zone, but occasionally one or two stray outside.’

Müller nodded thoughtfully. More evidence pointing to the highest mountain in the Harz, but hardly conclusive.

The mortuary assistant tried to pass the pathologist a saw to begin opening the body cavity, but Eckstein waved him away and continued to discuss the case. ‘Do we know who the victim is?’

‘We’re not certain, but we have a good idea,’ replied Müller. It wasn’t the entire truth. The receipt of the faxed note from Jäger had removed what little doubt Müller had left as to the boy’s identity. She retrieved her briefcase from a chair at the back of the room and pulled out some pieces of paper. ‘These are the dental records from a
Jugendwerkhof
on the island of Rügen. If the boy is who we think he is, they should be a match.’ Out of the corner of her eye she could see Baumann and Vogel frowning. More information she should already have passed to them.

Eckstein studied the sheets. Then, with his hands protected by rubber gloves, he eased open the boy’s jaw and asked the assistant to angle a spotlight to highlight the inside of the buccal cavity. Unlike the girl in Berlin, his teeth were still intact. ‘I’ll take a full cast of the teeth later, but from a superficial examination I’d say you have the right boy.’ He waved Müller forwards. ‘See here, this gap in the lower dentures. On the right-hand side of his jaw, or left as you’re looking.’ Eckstein was rubbing his finger on the empty gum. ‘Two teeth are missing: the second premolar, and the first molar.’

‘That’s nothing to do with the cause of death, then?’ asked Müller.

‘No, no,
Oberleutnant
. I should think perhaps he was involved in a fight a year or two ago, something like that. The teeth became cracked and rotten as a result.’ He let the mouth close, and picked up the dental records again. ‘The reason isn’t given here, but the missing teeth are. So you can be fairly certain you have the right boy. What’s his name?’

‘Mathias Gellman. Aged fifteen at the time he disappeared. Now sixteen,’ said Tilsner.

Eckstein nodded, then began examining the rest of the exterior of Mathias’s naked, mutilated body. As he dictated his observations to his assistant, Eckstein said something which left all four detectives bemused.

‘Your case in Berlin. I assume it was murder?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ replied Müller. She felt a small flutter in her stomach.

‘Well, I can tell you this isn’t, at least I don’t think so. Even before I begin any incisions I can tell you that it looks as though this boy died as the result of a fall. Of course, he may have been pushed, but there’s no bruising consistent with a struggle.’

He began pointing to lesions on Mathias’s torso and limbs, and finally to one on his forehead. ‘This is probably what did for him. He’s hit his head on a hard stone surface at the end of a fall of some three to four metres I’d say, so perhaps just one flight of stairs. I won’t be able to confirm this until I have opened the skull, but I don’t think you all need to stay for that. It’s not a spectator sport I’d recommend.’

‘So he died from a blow to the head? Couldn’t it have been from a blunt instrument?
After
he was pushed downstairs?’ asked Müller.

Eckstein shook his head. ‘The head injury is not consistent with that,
Oberleutnant
. This appears to me to be a fairly simple case of craniocerebral trauma after a fall down stairs. Albeit the stairs were stone stairs. And that he hit his head on a hard, angular rock at the bottom of his fall. I managed to retrieve some grit fragments from the wound. I will analyse them and give you the results later.’

‘What will that tell us?’ asked Tilsner.