Stasi Child (31 page)

Müller glared at her deputy. ‘It may help us locate where he died, because it clearly wasn’t in the middle of the forest where the body was found. And that may lead us to Neumann. We’ve accounted for two of the three missing teenagers. Let’s try to find the other while she’s still alive.’

Soon afterwards, Eckstein ushered the four detectives from the mortuary, insisting he needed peace to continue with the rest of the procedure.

Once back at Wernigerode People’s Police headquarters, Müller was informed that Reiniger was trying to get through to her on the police radio. The connection was poor and Reiniger’s voice barely cut through the static.

‘
Oberleutnant
Müller,’ he said, in a formal tone. ‘You and
Unterleutnant
Tilsner must return to Berlin immediately. I never gave you permission to leave the Hauptstadt in any case. Furthermore, I regret to inform you that your husband is having charges brought against him. They include undermining the political or social order of the Republic, exploiting the moral immaturity of a minor for the purposes of intercourse or similar acts and, most seriously, in respect to your current investigation, the –’

The two-way radio that Müller was using in the police station side office crackled and cut to static.

‘
Oberst
Reiniger. Could you repeat that please? I’m afraid the line is very bad.’

‘He is being charged with murder. The murder of the girl found at St Elisabeth’s cemetery. As I believe you now know, that girl has been identified as Beate Ewert, the girl you have seen in compromising photographs of your husband.’

All of a sudden Müller felt breathless, as though she might faint. She found it difficult to believe the photos of Gottfried with Beate were genuine, but she certainly couldn’t accept he was a murderer. And Mathias’s body had been dumped while he was in jail, so clearly he couldn’t be directly responsible for that. What game was Reiniger playing? She wondered if Schmidt had yet been able to analyse the photograph of Gottfried in the sanatorium, the one her husband insisted had been doctored – his last plea to her before they parted in the interrogation room at Hohenschönhausen.

‘Until your divorce is finalised you are still married to a suspect, now charged, in this investigation. So you are being suspended and must return to –’

She remembered Jäger’s pledge to back her. She patted the letter of authority from Mielke she still carried in her inside jacket pocket. It gave her the courage to take a gamble. ‘Hello,
Oberst
Reiniger. I’m unable to hear you. I’m afraid the line has gone again. I haven’t been able to hear any of this conversation.’ In fact, Reiniger’s voice was clearer than at any time in the exchange. He was telling her that the suspension was effective immediately and had been approved at the highest level at Keibelstrasse. Her only defence was in the lie. ‘
Oberst
Reiniger. If you can hear me, I’m afraid I cannot hear you.’ Reiniger kept on repeating what he’d just said, the anger in his voice mounting, but Müller still insisted the reception was too bad, and finally terminated the conversation.

43

Day Fifteen.

Wernigerode, East Germany.

Back at the incident room at the Wernigerode People’s Police headquarters, Müller and Tilsner sat down with Baumann and Vogel to take stock of where they were. Müller didn’t reveal to the others any of her conversation with Reiniger. She ran her hands backwards through her hair, with her elbows resting on the table. They would need to work quickly. If Reiniger had been able to get through on the radio once, he would surely try again – and given what he’d said, would almost certainly order her arrest.

Leaning back in his chair, Tilsner sighed. ‘We need to find Neumann. But if he’s not at the children’s home at Schierke, and if he’s not on Rügen, where do we start?’

Müller picked up a pen, and tapped it on the desk. ‘We must be missing some clue. Either Neumann or someone else has led us here so far. All the evidence in the car, when it had apparently been steam-cleaned . . . it was just too staged. Too easy. He or they want us to find them.’

‘So what do we do?’ asked Tilsner.

The phone rang, and Vogel went to the side of the room to answer it. Müller knew it meant that phone communications had been restored. She ought, therefore, to ring Reiniger back in Berlin. But she wasn’t going to.

‘The phones are back on then?’ she asked.

‘Not exactly,’ said Baumann. ‘Some local lines, yes. But phone lines to Berlin and the rest of the country are still down. There’s some fault with an exchange near Blankenburg.’

He began to spread out a large-scale map of the Brocken area on the table. ‘Maybe the wildcat colony is significant? Most of the sightings have been around here.’ Müller followed his finger to a section of the map where the narrow-gauge railway which led to the Brocken summit swung out to the west.

‘That’s very near to the border defences, isn’t it? Is the public allowed there?’

‘Only with special permission,’ said Baumann. ‘But for the local farm workers and foresters that’s not so difficult to obtain.’

‘And what about the Brocken itself? Isn’t that heavily patrolled?’ asked Tilsner.

Baumann nodded. ‘That’s correct, Comrade Tilsner. There’s a company of border troops barracked in the railway station at the summit.’

The three detectives looked up from the map as Vogel returned to the table. ‘That was the forensic pathologist, Dr Eckstein, on the phone.’

‘And?’ asked Baumann.

‘He’s managed to analyse the grit from the boy’s head wound under a microscope. Says it might help us. Apparently it’s
Bleiglanz
.’

Baumann shrugged. ‘That means nothing to me, Comrade Vogel.’

‘It didn’t to me,
Hauptmann
, to be honest.’ Vogel looked down at his notebook. ‘But Dr Eckstein explained it’s lead sulphite or galena. It’s the ore you get lead from, but silver deposits are often found in the same vicinity.’

Müller rubbed her forehead. ‘And why does he think that might help us?’

‘Well, as you could probably tell, Comrade Müller, the good doctor’s been around the block a few times. He says in the old days there used to be silver mines dotted throughout the Harz. A lot of the area’s wealth came from silver mining.’

The four detectives looked back at the map, searching around the Brocken area to see if there were any marks signalling an old mineshaft, anywhere where Neumann might be holding Irma Behrendt.

Tilsner suddenly tapped the map.

‘There. Heinrichshöhle. Right near the Brocken summit. That’s a cave!’

Baumann put his reading glasses on to examine the map more closely. ‘No, Comrade Tilsner,’ he snorted. ‘Take another look. It’s Heinrichs-
höhe
not
höhle
. That’s a mountain, not a cave.’ Müller smirked as she saw Tilsner’s face redden.

Lifting the map towards her slightly, she pointed out two small black rectangles a couple of kilometres east of the Brocken summit.

‘What are they?’ she asked Baumann.

‘They look like ski huts. They provide shelter to anyone trapped up there when conditions turn nasty – like now.’

‘It’s worth investigating those, isn’t it?’

Baumann shrugged. ‘We could, but we’re dealing with an area surrounding the summit of . . . what? Twenty square kilometres? Maybe more. And anyway it’s getting late, the road beyond Schierke hasn’t been ploughed yet, but it may have been by tomorrow morning. I suggest you go back to your lodgings and get a meal and some sleep, and then meet again here first thing tomorrow morning.’

Tilsner seemed subdued during their meal at the guesthouse, perhaps embarrassed by his
höhe
/
höhle
slip in front of the others. They barely said a word as they sipped their soup, other than Tilsner suggesting it might actually be better for her to try to contact Jäger again. But then Jäger didn’t know that – officially – they were once again off the case. Worse than that, Müller was supposed to be suspended. By tomorrow, no doubt Reiniger would have sent someone to arrest her.

Before finishing his main course, her deputy announced he was off to bed for an early night. There were no other guests in the restaurant, so Müller was left alone with her thoughts. She’d hoped by now she might have heard something positive from Jäger about Gottfried. Instead, the communication from Reiniger seemed to be pointing the other way: that things were getting worse for her husband, not better. The accusations against him were preposterous, but the best way of disproving them was to find the real killer. Somewhere near here were Neumann and the one remaining teenager from Rügen, Irma.

As soon as the phone line to Berlin was once again operational, Müller vowed to ring Schmidt, and see if he’d got anywhere in his examination of the incriminating photographs. That’s if she got the chance before Reiniger ordered her arrest.

Before going up to her room, she visited the wooden-panelled sitting room. The bookshelf in the corner, below the portrait of Erich Honecker, contained several books on the Harz area, but what Müller was looking for was a map. A map on a larger scale than the one at the police office, with more detail.

She found the maps on the bottom shelf, piled horizontally; they were being used as a bookend. Müller leafed through them until she found what she wanted: a folded sheet of yellowing paper, with a forest-green and black front cover.
Harz Wanderkarte für Wernigerode und Umgebung
. She sat down in an armchair next to the coffee table, and spread the map out carefully. The paper was brittle, and Müller suspected the map dated back to the Nazi era, possibly before. There was no border barrier marked in the valley to the west of the Harz’s highest peak.
It was illegal to have this, surely?
In Berlin, this would have meant confiscation, possible arrest. Here in the mountains, they seemed to do things differently.

Looking around the room, she spotted what she wanted on the mantelpiece: a magnifying glass. She rose to retrieve it, and used the convex lens to enlarge the detail of the map. She concentrated on the Brocken, and the area that Baumann had pointed to. It took her a couple of minutes before she saw it, hidden in the forest, just a few hundred metres from where she knew the border ran: a circle, possibly just a millimetre in diameter, with a solid black rectangle alongside.

She looked at the map’s key, tracing her finger down it, feeling her breath coming in short, sharp bursts.

Near the bottom, she found a small black circle with a white centre. She knew what it would say alongside, and she was correct.
Stillgelegten Schacht
. Disused shaft.

44

March 1975. Day Sixteen.

Wernigerode, East Germany.

Müller found herself regularly waking and going over the case in her head throughout the night. If Neumann had dumped Mathias’s body near the state border just beyond Elend, if it was he who’d daubed the boy’s T-shirt with wildcat blood, then surely he still had to be in the area. The subalpine seedling pointed to the Brocken. The lead ore in Mathias’s head wound did, too. What perplexed her, though, was why one teenager’s body had been dumped in the Hauptstadt, the other left here in the Harz. It made little sense.

Throwing the heavy duvet aside, Müller got up, walked along the landing and went to the toilet. She didn’t do it particularly quietly or subtly, banging the toilet lid down after herself. Maybe she wanted him to hear. Maybe she wanted another early-hours encounter in the washroom.

As she wiped her hands on the towel after washing them, she heard his footsteps on the creaking floorboards of the landing. She could hear his breathing behind her. Then warm air on her ear.

‘Couldn’t sleep again?’ Tilsner whispered. Then his teeth nibbled her earlobe, she felt his strong arms envelope her and she backed against his growing erection. She felt him lifting the back of the nightdress, his fingers in the waistband of the western knickers she’d kept from the West Berlin assignment. Easing them down. She grabbed his wrists to stop him, and turned.

She raised her index finger, and put it to his lips, rubbing it up and down fractionally to feel the resistance of his stubble. ‘Not here,’ she whispered. ‘My room.’

An early breakfast found them smirking at each other. Müller felt no shame, and it surprised her. As far as the authorities were concerned, she was a single woman now – her husband an enemy of the state, a pervert and a murderer. But although she’d just been unfaithful, she wasn’t prepared to completely give up on Gottfried just yet.

So what about Werner Tilsner? She looked up as he stuffed a piece of
Brötchen
into his handsome mouth. He was married with kids. Should she feel guilt about that? But he was the one who’d made the marriage vows to Koletta, not her, and she hadn’t exactly had to do much seducing.

Tilsner took a last sip of coffee, and wiped his mouth with his napkin. ‘Ready, beautiful?’

She nodded. ‘But it’s Karin, or boss to you, please.
Unterleutnant
.’

Kitted out in the warmest clothes they could find, Müller and Tilsner made their way in the Wartburg to Wernigerode police headquarters. At the entrance to the car park, Vogel stood smoking a cigarette, as though waiting for them.

Tilsner wound the window down. Vogel blew the smoke out to the side, then leant his head into the car.

‘A little warning,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t come in here if I were you. And today’s joint reconnaissance exercise up the Brocken is off.’

‘Why’s that?’ asked Tilsner, frowning.

Müller saw Vogel flick his eyes towards her.

‘
Oberleutnant
Müller here. The Stasi have asked us to detain her.’

‘What?’ shouted Tilsner. ‘But we’re investigating this case on the highest authority, of the Stasi. Show him, Karin.’

Müller reached into her jacket pocket and withdrew the letter of authority, signed by Mielke. Tilsner handed it to Vogel.

The young officer shrugged. ‘I don’t understand; this appears genuine. Can I take it to show Comrade Baumann?’

Müller stretched her hand out for the document to be returned. ‘No, I’m afraid not, Comrade Vogel. But once we’re back later today you can take a photocopy.’ She grabbed the letter, refolded it and placed it carefully back in her pocket.