Once again, Lüdtke’s reasoning was impeccable. ‘What happened next?’ I asked.

  Lüdtke reached for his cigarette case. ‘Ah well,’ he said, lighting up, ‘the following day Zach and I were summoned to see Bernie Wehner. Nebe and Lobbes were both there too. Even Heydrich was sticking his nose into the case. And that was when things became interesting.’

  6

  Lüdtke had just named four of the most important people in the entire Reich police service. The man he referred to as ‘Bernie’ Wehner ran the Reich Central Office for Capital Crimes. SS-General Arthur Nebe was the head of the Criminal Police. His colleague and great friend Hans Lobbes was head of operations for the Security Police, including the Gestapo and SD. Lobbes was a former head of the Berlin murder squad and a legend to detectives all over the country. His collars included the child-murderer Adolf Seefeldt, alias ‘Uncle Tick-Tock’, who was believed to have killed more than one hundred young boys, and Johann Georg Elser, the subversive who bombed the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich in November 1939 and almost killed the Führer. The one I really wanted to know about, however, was the man who commanded them all.

  ‘What about General Heydrich?’ I asked. ‘Has he made his views clear?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Lüdtke replied. ‘By the time we got to the meeting, Heydrich had already been on the phone to Wehner and Lobbes. He ordered them to solve the case as soon as possible, at all costs. That’s when they decided to put me in charge of the investigation.’

  ‘What a tremendous honour,’ I said.

  Lüdtke gave a rueful smile. ‘If I catch the killer, yes. If I don’t, it might not be quite such a blessing.’

  ‘So what did you do to try and catch him?’

  Lüdtke closed his eyes and ran a hand through his hair, as though the very act of answering the question exhausted him. ‘Everything,’ he said. ‘We began the business of interviewing S-Bahn staff. We put officers on to trains and station platforms. We went through every single case that might have any connection to these ones. There’s been quite an epidemic of sex crimes in the whole area around Rummelsburg, Friedrichsfelde and Karlshorst over the past couple of years, quite apart from the four cases I mentioned to you. So I ordered all the known perverts rounded up and brought in for interrogation. We went hard at them, no messing about. Didn’t get anything useful out of them. But I did come across one interesting report.

  ‘In August last year, a woman was walking through some orchards near Rummelsburg station. A man came up to her and asked her if she wanted to take a walk with him. Only he didn’t exactly ask her politely. So she screamed for help, knowing that her husband and brother-in-law were nearby. They pitched up and really laid into the man, but somehow he managed to get away from them and staggered off into the darkness. They couldn’t see where he’d gone. Do you know what I think?’

  ‘That this attacker was the S-Bahn murderer?’

  ‘That’s certainly a possibility. Suppose he’s been doing this for months, abusing women, gradually becoming bolder and more violent over time. Suddenly it goes wrong and for the first time he is the one who gets hurt. So he nurses his wounds and broods over what has just happened. He decides that he can’t risk being caught in the act again. He must ensure that his victims cannot call for help. And the best way to do that … ’

  ‘Is to kill them,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly. At first, of course, he did not succeed. He’d not perfected his method. But he did not give up. And once he’d succeeded, he acquired a taste for it: a craving, even. The full resources of the Reich’s security apparatus were ranged against one man and yet the killings continued.’

  Lüdtke stabbed a finger at the map on the wall. ‘Sunday 22 December, the early hours of the morning: Elisabeth Büngener, aged thirty, was found by the tracks here, between Friedrichshagen and Rahnsdorf. That location, incidentally, marks the furthest extent of the killer’s range to date. Exactly a week later, 29 December, he’s back on familiar territory. Gertrud Siewert, forty-six, found near Karlshorst. Again, precisely one week goes by and then he kills Hedwig Ebauer, twenty-seven. She’s found near Wuhlheide. Ebauer and Büngener were throttled before being thrown from the train. Siewert was brutally beaten over the head. Whatever the method, it’s always the same man: week after week after week.’

  ‘That was more than a month ago,’ I said. ‘But nothing since then?’

  ‘Not that we know of. Maybe we’ve scared him off. Or he could just be lying low until he feels safe again.’

  It was now about half past seven in the morning. The office had begun to fill as the rest of Lüdtke’s team made their way in to start the working day. A young detective came through the door to the duty room. In total contrast to the all-pervading air of exhaustion and disillusion, he had a wide-eyed, boyish expression and such an innocent, guileless smile, one might almost take him for a simpleton. He called across to a colleague: ‘Hey, Richter, have you seen that great lump of concrete they’re putting up in the middle of the zoo? It’s going to be the biggest flak-tower the world has ever seen. Forty metres high. Guns all over the place.’

  Richter appeared to be the older of the two men. He had sharp, beaky features, slicked-back black hair and a sardonic twist to his mouth. ‘Hey, Baum, do I look to you like a blind man?’ he replied with heavy sarcasm. ‘Of course I’ve seen the fucking thing.’

  Baum’s enthusiasm wasn’t dented in the slightest. ‘You know what that flak-tower proves? It proves we’re the most civilized nation on earth. Who else would go to such trouble to protect a zoo?’

  ‘Well if they do all that for a bunch of animals,’ said Richter, drily, ‘think how big the flak-towers will be once they start protecting people.’

  Baum was still laughing as he sat down at his desk, directly opposite Richter. It was obvious that they worked as partners, a kind of double-act of village idiot and cynic: the one to lure suspects into a false sense of security, the other to stick in the knife.

  ‘You’d better meet your new colleagues,’ said Lüdtke. He led me over towards Baum and Richter. The two of them got to their feet as they saw us coming. We exchanged ‘Heil Hitler’s, handshakes and brief introductions. There were two other officers in the room. Lüdtke led me to another desk, occupied by a much older officer and said, ‘This is Senior Detective Schmidt.’

  ‘Call me Papa – everyone else does,’ said Schmidt, whose portly frame and flushed red cheeks did indeed give him the air of a genial father-figure.

  Up to now, I’d not detected any suggestion of hostility or even suspicion towards me from the other men. But that changed when Lüdtke brought me to the desk belonging to the only other officer-rank man in the room, Inspector Frei. There was an unmistakable aggression in the way he shouted ‘Heil Hitler!’ and almost punched his arm into the air.

  Frei’s resentment wasn’t hard to explain. He was around forty, a dozen years older than me, and held the rank of Criminal Inspector. For the time being, as long as I was a mere Assistant Commissar, he was still senior to me. But I was on a fast track up the service. So long as I performed my duties satisfactorily, I could expect a swift promotion to Commissar. At that point I would outrank an inspector. So from the moment he met me, Frei knew that I, a much younger man, would soon be his superior.

  ‘Good morning, Inspector,’ I said.

  Frei glared at me for a moment and then sneered: ‘So you’re the new murder-marriage boy, eh? Tell me, should I call you Assistant Commissar Heuser, or would you prefer Frau Lüdtke?’

  The room fell silent. I could feel the tension as the other men waited to see how I’d respond to Frei’s challenge: if I got this wrong I could forget about being accepted by the department. Then it struck me that Frei had done me a great favour. He’d made his hostility far too obvious, far too soon. And the reason he despised me so much was the very same reason I could now afford to retaliate in kind: he had no power to hurt my career.

  ‘You may call me what you wish, Inspector,’ I said, doing my best to make my voice sound a great deal more relaxed than I felt. ‘But if I were you I’d bear one thing in mind: it never pays to be rude to the boss’s wife.’

  Baum burst out laughing. Richter looked at me with his mouth twisted into something close to a grin. Papa Schmidt gave me an approving nod of the head, and even Lüdtke appeared to be suppressing a smile. Frei, on the other hand, looked like he wanted to hit me. Perhaps he would have done, had the urgent trill of a telephone not suddenly interrupted us.

  Richter was the nearest detective. He picked up the receiver, listened for a moment and then looked up. He held the receiver out towards Lüdtke. ‘You need to hear this, Commissar,’ he said.

  Lüdtke went over to the phone. He gave his name and listened to what the caller had to say. He muttered, ‘I see,’ and gestured to Richter to pass him a notebook and pen. He jammed the receiver between his shoulder and jaw, opened the book and then spoke into the phone. ‘Where, exactly, did you say it was?’ For the next minute or so he was all attention, writing notes of what he was being told. His only words were terse, simple questions: ‘And this was when? … What time? … Who else?’

  As Lüdtke spoke, the detectives got up from their seats and drew closer to him, as did I, until we were drawn up in a rough semicircle by the desk. Lüdtke put the telephone down. We all knew what was coming next.

  ‘He’s killed another woman. She’s on the line between Rummelsburg Depot and Karlshorst. Someone get hold of Dr Weimann. I want him there as soon as possible. We need a photographer, a sketch artist and an ambulance crew. Also, make sure that all S-Bahn traffic in the area is halted immediately and tell them to cut the power. I don’t want any of us getting fried on the line.’

  Lüdtke pulled out a cigarette, lit it and took his customary deep lungful of smoke. As he exhaled he looked around, his eyes settling briefly on every one of us before he finally said, ‘Let’s go and see what this bastard’s done now.’

  7

  Koblenz Prison and Ramstein Air Base, West Germany: 21 July 1960

  Paula Siebert picked up a copy of Der Spiegel at the station in Stuttgart, just before she got on her train to Koblenz. There was a picture of John F. Kennedy on the cover and a lengthy profile inside, marking his nomination as the Democratic candidate in the forthcoming US election. She’d seem some of his acceptance speech on the TV news, this idealistic, almost boyish figure talking about the creation of a New Frontier. Kennedy was only forty-three years old, an entirely different generation to the current president, Eisenhower, and a full forty years younger than Konrad Adenauer, Chancellor of Germany: ‘The Old Man’ as everyone called him. His beautiful young wife Jackie was pregnant and staying at home during the campaign under doctor’s orders, but the way she wore the latest Paris fashions with such a youthful, American elan was the talk of the glossy magazines. Even Paula, who was trying so hard to escape the confines of a traditional woman’s life, couldn’t help wondering how she could acquire some of that Jackie magic.

  There were signs of change everywhere. The Russians and Americans were racing to put a man into space, using rockets that could just as easily destroy the whole world with nuclear bombs. But they weren’t quite out of the shadows of the past. Both sides had employed German scientists to design their missiles with technology developed in the Nazi years. And here Paula was, taking a train back into that same darkness, uncovering crimes that had long been forgotten, disinterring victims long dead.

  At the prison she was greeted by the governor, who seemed disappointed, even a little offended, that Kraus had sent a deputy, and a female one at that, to interview his star prisoner. ‘Of course, I’m sure you understand that Dr Heuser is not at all like our normal inmates,’ he said. ‘He is a man of achievement, of culture. I must say, it is a great pleasure to have someone in my charge with whom I can have an intelligent conversation.’

  Paula wondered whether the governor would have had such a high opinion of Heuser if he’d been familiar with the evidence that she and her colleagues had been compiling over the past two years. It depressed her to think that the answer might just be ‘Yes.’

  ‘One of my men will take you to the room where the interview will be conducted,’ the governor said, escorting her from his office and entrusting her to a guard. They walked through the kind of bleak, infinitely depressing prison warren that had become very familiar to Paula over the past twelve months as the net had widened and more men been caught in it. The roll-call of their names had become engraved on her memory: Dalheimer, Feder, Harder, Kaul, Merbach, Oswald, Schlegel, Stark, von Toll and Wilke. So now they had a total of eleven defendants in all – ‘like our very own football team,’ Florian Wessel had joked – all of whom had been arrested and were now being held in a variety of different jails.

  The guard held open the door to the interview room and Paula walked in. She was pleased to see that Heuser looked diminished by his year in prison. The harsh fluorescent light of the interview room did nothing to flatter him as he sat in his suit and tie on the far side of a bare wooden table. The formality of his dress struck her as faintly pathetic, a desperate attempt to cling on to a status that had long since deserted him. He must have lost a lot of weight, for the suit hung loosely on his frame and all the plump, smooth self-satisfaction had gone from his cheeks, which were drawn and slightly saggy around the jaw. His skin had the grey pallor of a man whose life is lived almost entirely within his cell; his eyes were lined and bloodshot; and his hair had become sparse and colourless around the temples.

  ‘Where is Kraus?’ Heuser asked, sounding just as irritable as the governor.

  ‘Dr Kraus is engaged in other matters today,’ she said. ‘He asked me to take his place. My name is Siebert. Today I want to examine the years that led to your appointment as a Criminal Commissar in the Rhineland-Pfalz police.’

  ‘As you wish, Fräulein Siebert, though I cannot see what significance any of that has to the false allegations that have been made against me.’

  ‘My correct title is Dr Siebert, Herr Heuser.’

  ‘And it’s Dr Heuser, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘We’ll come to that in a moment.’ Paula watched the flicker of surprise in Heuser’s eyes and his momentary frown as he realized he’d been played. She knew he’d be wondering what exactly she meant by ‘We’ll come to that’. How much did she know? Heuser was a man who liked always to be in control of any interaction. Well, so did Paula Siebert.

  She set out her papers on the table in front of her: an aide-memoire she had prepared that summarized the known information about Heuser’s activities, a large legal notepad and two pens, for it was always possible that one pen might cease to function.

  Paula began: ‘So, where were you when the war came to an end?’

  ‘Commanding a small battle group in Krems, on the Danube, west of Vienna, fighting the Russians.’

  ‘And you were taken prisoner?’

  ‘Oh no, anything but that,’ Heuser replied. ‘We all knew we’d be dead men in the Russians’ hands. So I thought, I’m a plainclothes policeman. I know about undercover work. Why don’t I just go undercover now? I put on civilian clothes and headed west, trying to reach the American sector.’

  ‘Are you saying that you deserted your men?’

  ‘No,’ said Heuser, without any hint of apology or guilt. ‘By that point it was total chaos, millions of people on the move – soldiers, refugees, people of every nationality. I just lost myself in the crowd, and if my men could do that too, good luck to them.’

  ‘And you reached the Americans?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Paula looked at her notes. ‘So here’s the first thing I don’t understand … All the Allied forces arrested SS officers as a matter of course. The British and Americans interned them for at least three years after the end of hostilities. But there’s no record of your internment. Why not?’

  ‘Because I wasn’t ever interned. When I reached the American lines I told them I was an officer in the Luftwaffe. So, I admit it, I told a lie. But it wasn’t an absolute lie. After all, as I’m sure you know, I’d spent three summers training with the Luftwaffe before the war and had been a candidate for officer rank. It was hardly the worst deception.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t just a question of confusing one military unit with another, was it? If you had been correctly identified, the consequences for you might have been much worse than a few years’ internment.’

  ‘I don’t see why.’

  ‘Yes you do. You see exactly why …’ Paula’s mother had always taught her that in order to establish dominance over a dog one must look it directly in the eye and hold the gaze until it backed down. And that was what she did now, keeping her eyes on Heuser, an intent, expressionless stare until she could see he was discomfited before she went on. ‘Tell me where you went next.’

  Heuser seemed relieved by the question.

  ‘Ahh … to Goslar, in the northern Harz mountains. My sister had been evacuated there, so I went to stay with her. That’s where I met my wife, Edith – she was Edith Kruger then. Anyway, we seemed to hit it off; we were married in October ’45 and we’ve been together ever since. No children, unfortunately. I think Edith regrets that very much, but it was not to be. There’s no point dwelling on disappointments, don’t you agree? Count your blessings.’

  ‘Blessings? You?’

  ‘Absolutely. When I think of all the things that might have happened to me, all the fine young men I knew who lost their lives, or suffered terrible wounds, not to mention the ones that survived but could never quite fit back into civilian life, why of course I feel blessed.’

  Paula was disgusted by his shamelessness. She wanted to shout, ‘You have no right to compare yourself to all the good men and women who died!’ But that was not her job in this room, on this occasion, so she calmly went on. ‘About that civilian life … yours was difficult for a few years, was it not?’