The blood drained from Paula’s face. She heard a rushing sound in her ears and her vision blurred. Neumann was sitting next to her, in the middle of the rear seat. She grabbed his arm and gasped, ‘Please, tell him to stop the car.’

  A brief argument ensued, Neumann was plainly trying to relay Paula’s request and Poliakov was refusing it. The driver slowed the car, not sure what to do. Though Paula couldn’t understand a word of the Russian in which the two men were shouting at one another, she could detect something else in Poliakov’s voice apart from anger: fear. This was not part of the plan, not allowed for in his orders, and he was patently terrified of giving in to the Germans’ request. But a distressed woman, on the point of fainting, has a certain power in any culture and the car finally pulled into a lay-by. Paula got out and turned back the way they had come, trying to see the memorial. Poliakov immediately tried to follow her but Kraus blocked his way and snarled at Neumann: ‘Tell this shithead Ivan that her father died here, twenty years ago. She just needs a little time …’ Kraus clenched his right fist and held it up by his face. ‘And if she doesn’t get it, he’ll have this to answer to.’

  Neumann took a deep breath, gathered his thoughts and began his negotiation with Poliakov, using a much more conciliatory tone this time.

  Paula paid no attention to any of them. She was just staring back down the road at the distant outlines of the tank traps, trying to make sense of it all. Here, on this banal, nondescript stretch of highway, cutting through a drab suburban town, was where her father had lost his life. His body was somewhere nearby, an anonymous bundle of bones beneath the earth, without even a gravestone to mark its presence. She wanted to look so hard at everything around her that somehow she would absorb it all, take it into her and thereby take her father in as well: give his spirit somewhere warm and loving to inhabit. But it didn’t happen. The cars and trucks kept rumbling by. The sky stayed the same dreary shade of grey. The men by the car talked with increasingly heated voices and waved their arms in her direction. She made a vow to herself that one day she would return to this grim, uninviting spot, and then she walked back towards the men and said to Neumann: ‘You can tell him I’m ready to carry on, now.’

  They reached the fringes of the city itself and the apartment blocks began, just as Lichtenburg had said they would: rank upon rank of identical ten-storey buildings, all plagued with the same instant decrepitude as the airport. When they pulled up at a set of traffic lights not far from a group of half a dozen boiler-suited workers mending a hole in the road, it took Paula a second glance to realize that they were all women: strapping, but not unattractive blondes, watched over by a single scrawny man standing lazily to one side, smoking a cigarette.

  Towards the centre of the city Paula saw much bigger buildings: colleges, government departments and living quarters for the Party elite. All conformed to the same pattern: a squat, foursquare block with a short tower at each corner and a much larger structure rising from the centre of its facade. Here three or four towers of decreasing size would be piled one upon the other like the layers of a wedding cake with a spire at the top. The overall effect was halfway between a crudely muscular version of a medieval cathedral and a shrunken Empire State Building, repeated again and again and again across the city.

  So much was said about the crushing power of Soviet communism that Paula was surprised above all by how dreary and impoverished Moscow seemed. The people wore ancient coats and felt boots that reminded her of her teens: those years before and immediately after the end of the war when she, like everyone else in a defeated nation, was fed on scraps and dressed in rags and tatters. The new, rich, booming West Germany had left those marks of poverty far behind, but these Muscovites seemed trapped in deprivation. Instead of advertising hoardings they had huge political posters, with Party slogans and dour Soviet leaders taking the place of commercial catchphrases and smiling models. There were no bright, colourful shop windows; no enticing displays of pastries in welcoming cafés. When she walked through city streets at home, she always had an eye out for the way other women presented themselves, silently mocking those who had more money than taste, or admiring the lucky few who could afford beautiful clothes and had the figures to carry them off. But there was none of that here. Perhaps the shock of passing her father’s final resting place had made her unduly gloomy, but she felt sure she would have had the same impression whatever her mood: Moscow was simply a city from which all the sensory delight, all the fun, all the pleasure had been knowingly, deliberately removed.

  The Russians had put Paula and Kraus up at the Leningrad-skaya Hotel, yet another huge building with a wedding-cake tower. Poliakov led them into a cavernous foyer whose high coffered ceiling was supported by marble columns as tall as redwoods and informed them that they had been given rooms three floors apart. Hers was the lower. When the lift doors opened, the entire party – Paula, Kraus, Poliakov, Neumann and a pair of hotel porters – got out and moved en masse towards her room. An old woman was sitting on a wooden chair, strategically positioned so that she could see both the lifts and the staircase. She had a samovar of tea beside her and a notebook on her lap. As they all passed by, Poliakov nodded at her and she began scribbling in her book.

  ‘What’s she doing?’ Paula whispered to Neumann.

  ‘Watching,’ the diplomat replied, in an equally low voice. ‘Everyone who goes in or out of any room will be noted and reported.’ He grinned at her impishly. ‘There’s another woman just like her on every floor of the hotel. So never try to conduct an illicit affair in a Russian hotel. You’ll be found out instantly!’

  For a second she wondered if he somehow knew about her and Kraus. Was he warning her off? Then she spotted the look of slight disappointment on his face. He’d been joking and was hoping for a more enthusiastic response. She smiled at him and said: ‘I’m sorry … I’m just a little tired by the journey.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, his pride satisfied.

  The flight had got into Moscow shortly after two in the afternoon. By the time they were all settled it was past five. Neumann bade them farewell and they were left in Poliakov’s hands. He told them that he would wait in the lobby for an hour while they unpacked, washed and changed: just long enough, Paula realized, for one or both of them to do something potentially incriminating if they thought they were no longer under observation. They might, for example, have decided to make love, but when she and Kraus were finally alone he simply jerked his head in the direction of the old woman, rolled his eyes, put on an exaggeratedly sad face and pretended to slit his throat with his finger. Paula giggled and mouthed a little air-kiss in Kraus’s direction, loving him for making her laugh and shining a brief ray of sunshine through the clouds that had lowered over her for the past few hours.

  At the agreed time, they rejoined Poliakov and were led to a large black Zil limousine that was waiting outside the hotel. Poliakov barked a series of orders to the driver and they set off through Red Square, past the great red-brick walls of the Kremlin, the gaggle of people outside Lenin’s mausoleum and the massed onion domes of St Basil’s Cathedral. After a brief guided tour of central Moscow, they were taken to a performance of Swan Lake at the Bolshoi Ballet. All the colour missing from the rest of the city was suddenly, gloriously, restored in the gold and scarlet interior of the theatre and the gorgeous costumes of the performers. And for all the tragedy of the drama, the luscious passion of Tchaikovsky’s music combined with the beauty of the ballerinas’ movements – their delicate limbs stretching and swaying so gracefully, yet with such absolute precision – to transport her far away from the real world and all its troubles.

  ‘I was watching you even more than the dancers,’ said Kraus as they were leaving. ‘You were as wide-eyed as a little girl and so completely absorbed.’ He leaned his great head down towards hers and murmured: ‘I’ve never seen you look more beautiful.’ She treasured those words all evening, basking in their warmth.

  They moved on to a restaurant where the Chicken Kiev turned out to be better than she’d expected. The men drank vodka and talked about the war. When Poliakov discovered that Kraus had never set foot on Russian soil, but had only ever killed British and Americans, he decided that he was a splendid fellow and made one toast after another, downing a glass with every one. Paula had never seen Kraus the worse for wear, no matter how much he drank, but even he was finding it hard to match a Russian’s capacity for alcohol. She was glad for once that her gender ruled her out of the competition and limited herself to a few glasses of sweet Soviet champagne, another of the occasional treats for the senses that the communist system allowed. As she watched the men lose themselves in alcohol she worried that this might all be part of a plot to render Kraus unconscious and open to blackmail, but when the meal ended and they staggered out towards the waiting Zil limousine, arm-in-arm and singing the Red Flag, she concluded that this was nothing more than a good excuse for a mid-ranking Ministry of Justice official to get very, very drunk at the state’s expense.

  The following day they got down to work. Poliakov, who seemed remarkably unaffected by the excesses of the night before, took them from the hotel to a virtually identical ministerial building. There they were greeted by the head archivist, a woman introduced as Dr Sofinskaya, who led them to a meeting room where a number of large ring-bound folders lay stacked on a large table.

  ‘These files were all seized when the Red Army liberated Minsk in July 1944,’ said Poliakov. Last night’s bonhomie had faded from his voice as he continued: ‘They were found in the SS headquarters and detail the many vile, unforgivable atrocities inflicted by the Nazi fascists on the Russian people. I will leave you now, but Dr Sofinskaya will remain to assist you. I hope you find what you need.’

  Kraus and Paula divided up the files and began to work through them. Many of the papers were of no relevance to the forthcoming trial, but every so often Paula came across something that might prove useful and handed it to Sofinskaya to be duplicated. The documents provided absolute proof, if any were needed, that terrible crimes had been committed. Here were office memoranda, written orders, field reports from junior squad-leaders, correspondence with Berlin and detailed train timetables. Yet all of this was dry, impersonal data. Heuser was mentioned in one or two documents, and some even linked him tenuously with the crimes he was accused of, but jurors, and even judges, need their emotions as well as their intellects to be stirred if a criminal case is to be won, and there was, as yet, nothing here to signal what kind of a man they were really dealing with, or to paint the full horror of what he and his co-defendants had done.

  Paula was beginning to fear that the trip might turn out to be less of a breakthrough than they had hoped when she found a memo, sent from Heuser to a senior official in the local Reichsbahn office, one Saturday morning in May 1942, at the start of the Whitsun holiday weekend. At first, as she skimmed through the contents, only half-reading them, it seemed as inconsequential as all the other papers: just a four-point summary of the agreement made at a meeting between one of Heuser’s men and the railway official’s team. A delivery was due to be made that weekend, and the Reichsbahn had clearly been unwilling to alter their timetable. On the other hand, Heuser’s people were adamant that they could not deal with the goods until the end of the holiday weekend. In the end a working compromise had settled the immediate problem, and procedures had been agreed that would prevent its recurrence. The memo ended with the sort of honeyed words that signal peace – however temporary – in any bureaucratic conflict: ‘With my special thanks for your consideration and understanding in this matter, Dr Georg Heuser.’

  ‘Ha! Even his signature is a lie,’ Paula thought to herself. And then something nagged at her, a single word in the sentence that followed the third bullet-point. She went back to the top of the letter and read it again. Then, as a feeling of physical sickness rose in her stomach at the sight of those poisonous words, she went through it a third time. She read slowly, deliberately, considering the full implications of exactly what Heuser had written and, even more importantly, what he’d left off the page. For hidden between the lines of this everyday piece of office correspondence was a story of suffering that was almost too terrible for her to contemplate, let alone comprehend. Here was a callous, institutionalized indifference to the most fundamental principles of human decency that was clearly taken for granted by both the sender and recipients of the memorandum.

  Paula’s personal distress at the reawakened memory of her father’s death now vanished from her mind. Her entire concentration was focused on this letter, and now her initial moral outrage was giving way to a hard-nosed legal calculation about its value as a trial document.

  She pushed the pieces of paper a few centimetres away from her and raised her eyes. ‘Come here,’ she said to Kraus. ‘I’ve found something that you really need to see.’

  21

  Berlin: July – October 1941

  On the morning of 4 July I was in the squad-room when a call was put through from the front desk. Biene took it and then came over to me, since I was the only detective around at that moment. ‘There’s a man downstairs who says he used to work at Rummelsburg station. He thinks he might have information about the S-Bahn case,’ she said. ‘Do you want me to go and get him? I can have them tell him to put a statement in writing, if you’d prefer.’

  At this point there was no straw so flimsy that any of us would not grab at it.

  ‘I’ll hear what he has to say. Take him to the interview room.’

  ‘I’m on my way,’ said Biene.

  A few minutes later she led a scrawny grey-haired man with a face battered by an outdoor life and a diet of cigarettes and cheap schnapps into the interview room. He was carrying a shapeless brown hat, clutched tightly in his fingers, and wore a tatty black suit whose fabric was shiny with decades of wear. His name, he said, was Helmut Schwibs.

  ‘I cleaned the platforms at Rummelsburg, see?’ he told me. ‘Forty-eight years on the S-Bahn, man and boy I was, through the last war and this one. I’m retired now, mind – turned sixty-five in April, and that was it.’

  ‘So what is it you want to tell us, Herr Schwibs?’

  ‘Well, it’s about this feller used to work at Rummelsburg.’

  ‘What was his name?’

  ‘That’s just it, I can’t remember. I mean, I know the name, it’s on the tip of my tongue. Just slipped my mind, is all.’

  ‘I see. And what did he do, this unnamed man?’

  ‘He climbed over the fence, didn’t he.’

  I sighed to myself. Had it really come to this? Were we really so desperate that I was wasting time on a foolish old man with a story that made no sense about a man he couldn’t remember?

  ‘I don’t know if he climbed the fence,’ I said, trying to summon up the patience to finish the interview, instead of just throwing Schwibs out on his ear, there and then. ‘That’s what I’m hoping you’ll tell me. What fence are we talking about?’

  ‘The fence on the side of the track, of course. That’s what he jumped over. I asked him what he was doing, bunking off in the middle of a shift, and he said he had this woman and he was going to see her.’

  A bell in the back of my mind started ringing, telling me to start taking this man seriously. I cannot say why, but I had a strong, instinctive feeling that Schwibs was talking about the killer.

  ‘This man of yours, did he go over the fence at night or in the daytime?’

  Schwibs thought for a moment. ‘I’m pretty certain it was night … yeah, that’s right, it must’ve been, ’cos I only saw him on account of there was a signal lamp and so I could see there was someone there. You know, by the fence.’

  ‘How many times did you see this happen?’

  ‘I dunno … two or three. I couldn’t rightly say.’

  My next question was a long shot: ‘Can you remember exactly when these times were?’

  Schwibs scratched his silver head with grimy fingernails. ‘Nah, not really. I don’t keep a diary or nothing like that. It was winter though, I reckon.’

  ‘A name, Herr Schwibs … It really would help us a lot if you could give us a name.’

  He grunted. He looked around the room, almost as if he were hoping that the name had magically been written on one of the walls, or even the ceiling. He scratched his head again and then used the back of the same hand to wipe his nose on the way down. Then he shook his head. ‘No, sorry, gone completely. Tell you what though, if I remember, I’ll let you know.’

  Great God almighty! I came within a whisker of losing my temper, but managed to restrain myself to force out a terse, ‘Thank you, Herr Schwibs, we will look forward to that. You may leave now.’

  I watched him depart, being led by Biene back down to the entrance. Yet again, there had been the slightest flicker of hope that the killer might finally be emerging from the thick fog of confusion and ignorance that surrounded this case, and yet again he’d disappeared before we could get a good look at his face. He seemed to be mocking us: now you see me, now you don’t. All I wanted, more than anything else, was the chance to grab him before he vanished again; to put my hand on his shoulder, feel his physical presence beneath my hand and tell him: ‘You’re coming with us.’

  The next two days were occupied with Lüdtke’s eight suspects. We questioned them. We spoke to their wives, their workmates, their bosses and their known associates. And then we let them go. There was simply no reason to keep them. In seven cases they had alibis, backed up by witnesses that stood up to all our attempts to disprove them. The only man who could not account for his whereabouts at the time of the latest murder was called Paul Ogorzow. I took his statement. He told me that he’d been working late and his wife had been asleep when he’d come home, so she couldn’t confirm that he was lying in bed beside her during the crucial hours between midnight and two. But as any defence lawyer would point out, that only proved that Ogorzow was a thoughtful husband who made sure not to wake his wife. And there was little in any of our other evidence to justify making him a suspect.