Ostland Read online

  His injury had not, however, prevented him murdering six women. Another half-dozen had somehow survived being battered, stabbed and discarded like broken dolls beside the tracks of the very line on which this train was now travelling, or being left for dead in the gardens and allotments near his suburban home. There had been perhaps thirty further assaults: he’d not kept a precise count.

  This campaign against the female sex had been going on since 1938 – longer than the Führer’s own war – but barely two months had passed since the authorities finally woke up to his murderous existence. Now the full weight of the Berlin police had been brought to bear. Thousands of possible suspects had been interviewed. The trains and stations of the S3 line – the killer’s particular hunting ground – had been flooded with uniformed officers. The authorities had done their best to keep official coverage of the case to a bare minimum, but rumours still swirled through the city. Everyone was talking about the S-Bahn murderer.

  And here he was, at twenty-five minutes before midnight, prowling amongst the passengers as anonymously as death itself while the train moved out of Karlshorst in the southeastern suburbs and headed towards the city centre. There were blackout blinds over the windows and the only light in the carriage came from a single dim blue bulb that provided just enough illumination to enable people to find their way around, but no more than that. The men and women scattered amongst the polished wooden benches were hunched and huddled, shivering in clothes whose meagre wartime fabrics gave scant protection against the winter weather. Stout boots and thick leather soles were fast becoming a thing of the past. Now the people’s footwear was often as cardboard as their food, quite possibly because the same sawdust was used for both. Cold and damp seeped deep into the bones, sapping energy and attentiveness alike. The only time that anyone even marked the killer’s passing was when he opened the connecting door between one carriage and another, letting in a freezing blast of snow-dusted air, provoking a few muttered obscenities before he closed the door and entered the next … and the next … until he finally he found what he was looking for.

  The woman wasn’t particularly young or pretty. She did not conform to any specific character type: this wasn’t a man who sought out only whores, schoolgirls or the elderly as his victims. There was, as we would later discover, one particular quality that this man required from his victims, but even that was secondary to the main thing that interested him about this particular female. She was sitting by herself, alone and unprotected.

  He looked around, checking that he hadn’t missed any other passengers. He tried to control his mounting excitement like a dog owner desperately clinging to the lead of a running hound as his pulse started to hammer, his breathing grew heavier and his cock swelled beneath his rough woollen trousers. His rage was rising along with his lust. He did not see a respectable woman in front of him, just a filthy, germladen infector of men. To him she was the killer, the spreader of death, a criminal who deserved to be punished.

  And punish her he would. He bent his right hand behind him, wrapping his fingers round the length of rubber-wrapped copper telephone cable as thick as his wrist that he’d hidden up the sleeve of his jacket. This was the bludgeon with which he had cracked skulls and ended lives. He was practised in its use and confident in his method. Killing, like anything else, is a skill that improves with repetition, and he’d become very good at what he did.

  He took another few paces down the aisle. There were shoulder-high partitions in pairs beside each set of doors and the killer needed to be sure that no one was concealed on a bench behind one of these partitions.

  The discovery that she really was alone came to him as a great relief. It hadn’t been easy waiting for the perfect moment when he was free to walk the trains; when the cops were looking somewhere else for once; when there was a solitary woman offering herself up as a sacrifice. But here it was. He did not have to hold back any longer. He could satisfy the urges that had been burning in him unassuaged for more than a month since his last killing.

  He stepped towards her and gave a polite cough to signal his presence no more than a couple of metres from where she sat. She looked up and saw him, a man looming over her in a deserted railway carriage in the middle of the night.

  Then she smiled.

  She suspected nothing. She felt completely safe. Quite calmly she pulled off one glove and then the other to make it easier to rummage in her jacket pocket. And that was when he took one long stride towards her and let the length of cable slide down the back of his arm, slipping through his fingers until he gripped it again at the far end. Now he was raising his arm and as she saw what was in his hand the look on her face changed from complacent security to the first wide-eyed tremor of alarm. He twisted his shoulders, gathering his strength. Her mouth opened to scream in terror, but the scream was silenced before it had left her throat as the bludgeon swung down, smashing through the pathetic defence of her upturned arms and crunching into her skull.

  As the bone crumpled beneath the impact of his weapon the killer entered a new, blissful state in which all his senses were heightened. Time slowed down for him so that he was perfectly aware of the effect of every single blow as he brought the telephone cable down again and again. His eyes seemed to cut through the gloom of the half-lit carriage, perceiving every drop of blood spattering from the gaping wound, each strand of hair upon the battered head. He pounded his arm up and down in a vile, destructive parody of masturbation, smashing her long after she’d lost consciousness, even when life itself had left her, until, with a hoarse, ecstatic cry, he achieved his orgasm and the battering finally ceased.

  The killer would have loved to linger a while to savour the pleasure of what he’d done, but there was no time for that. He knew very well how long it took the train to travel between each and every station on the line and he’d spent too long finding his victim to allow himself even the briefest indulgence now. Instead he had to focus on the disposal of her body.

  He placed his weapon on the seat close to where the woman was lolling, head down, battered skull exposed, devoid of any sign of life. Her gloves had fallen on to the carriage floor, so he picked them up and stuffed them into one of his trouser pockets. Then he pulled the woman from her seat on to the floor and reached down to grab the back of the jacket. His intention was to drag her along the floor to the nearest set of doors. But the jacket was made from a heavy, pre-war woollen fabric, lined with satin and belted at the waist, and all he succeeded in doing was pulling it away from her body so that it bunched under her armpits, forced her arms over her head and ended up in a cumbersome tangle, half-on and half-off. Meanwhile her body had barely moved five centimetres.

  The killer cursed under his breath, beginning to worry now as the next station drew ever closer. His arrogant composure was fraying badly, giving way to a much more familiar mood of simmering resentment: once again the world was against him.

  He wasn’t beaten yet, though. He pulled the jacket right off and threw it towards the nearest doors on the left-hand side of the carriage. Now the woman was much easier to handle and it was only a matter of seconds before he’d pulled her to the doors. He dropped her beside the coat as casually as if he were back on the farm, dumping a sack of chicken feed in the barn. The thud of her head and shoulders against the linoleum and the grotesquely distorted expression on her upturned face – one eye wide open, yet sightless; the other barely distinguishable amidst the bloody pulp of her ravaged skull – did not register with him at all.

  Bracing himself against the piercing gale, the killer pulled on the door handle and heaved the woman’s body out into the night. The gloves and coat followed in quick succession. His task complete, he closed the door again, heaved a sigh of relief, took off his cap and passed a hand over his sweaty brow. He walked back to where the woman had been sitting and picked up the bloodstained cable, which he stuffed back up his sleeve. The next stop was Rummelsburg Depot. When the train arrived he got off and made his way down the deserted platform. No one boarded the carriage he’d just left. No one noticed him as he made his way out. In the blue half-light of the carriage no one spotted any traces of blood against the dark red floor.

  The S-Bahn murderer had just struck for the seventh time. And I meanwhile was lying in bed, trying and miserably failing to get some sleep.

  3

  Why is it that the young, who have so much time ahead of them, are in so much more of a hurry than the old? I was a little over two weeks away from my twenty-eighth birthday, an age that seems absurdly youthful and immature to me now. I was about to begin my life as a police detective and had every reason to look forward to a successful, fulfilling career. Yet the excitement with which I anticipated all that my future held in store was mixed not just with a natural anxiety that I might somehow fail to do as well as I’d hoped and others expected of me but also a fear that I was already falling behind. Twenty-eight! My God, that was almost half my life already over. I was practically an old man. And here I was only just getting started.

  What fools we are. How little we appreciate the gifts that are bestowed upon us. Only later, in retrospect, do we look back with the hindsight of all the decades that are lost for ever and rue the opportunities we once had and the other, better life we might have led. Not that I was entirely blind to my good fortune. Though my mind was turning over as fast and fruitlessly as a racing car’s engine that screams its loudest just as it stands stationary on the start-line, I was still bright enough to know that any other police officer my age would happily have taken my place.

  I was due to report to police headquarters at 06.00 to meet my new boss Wilhelm Lüdtke, head of the Berlin murder squad. He had solved more murder cases than any other detective in the Reich, and I’d been assigned to be his right-hand man – a young Watson, you might say, to his Sherlock Holmes. This apprenticeship of a young detective to a master of the craft was known in the department as a Mordehe or murder-marriage. It was a plum assignment and the honour was made still greater by the fact that I’d be joining Lüdtke midway through the hunt for the infamous S-Bahn murderer – the greatest, yet most intractable case of his career.

  Like anyone else in my position, I wanted to make the best possible impression on the man who held my future prospects in the palm of his hand. For that I had to be properly rested and on the best possible form. Yet my nervous energy would not allow it, and all I could manage were two or three hours of fitful, semi-conscious dozing, disturbed by lurid dreams and interrupted by long, fretful stretches of wakefulness.

  Of course, I’d already made my preparations. My shoes had been polished until I could see my reflection in their toecaps. My best winter suit had been cleaned and pressed. My shirt was crisply starched, my underclothes freshly laundered. Whatever other shortcomings he might observe, Lüdtke would find no fault with my appearance or cleanliness.

  I was then, as I still am, a perfectionist. It is a trait that was drummed into me by my father. No teacher ever had to correct the grammar or spelling in any piece of homework that I presented: father had already done so and ensured that, in the event of any mistake, I’d written out the right answer ten times over. I thus learned early in life that there is no point in doing anything unless one does it to the absolute best of one’s ability, and I was filled with ambition and determination to succeed.

  Just a few days earlier I’d graduated top of my class at the Security Police Leaders’ School at Berlin-Charlottenburg, following a training period that had lasted just two years instead of the customary three. The small pile of personal items on my bedside table now contained not just my wallet, my watch and my identity papers, but also the bronze warrant disc that declared me to be an officer of the Criminal Police, the plainclothes investigative branch of the police service, known to one and all as the Kripo.

  My newly acquired status of Assistant Criminal Commissar wasn’t my only qualification. In July 1936 I passed my first law exams at the Higher Regional Court in Berlin, and put myself on the road to becoming a full Doctor of Law. By then, I was already in the process of developing my curriculum vitae to give myself the best possible chance of standing out from my contemporaries. In 1934, a year before such service became compulsory, I volunteered for the Reich Work Service, the organization through which young men were recruited to undertake essential labour for the state. In 1935 I spent the first of three summers training as a reserve sergeant and officer candidate in the Luftwaffe. You will gather, I hope, that self-advancement wasn’t my only concern. I wanted to serve my Fatherland too, a desire that arose directly from the circumstances in which I’d grown up.

  I was born on 27 February 1913. By the time I was eighteen months old Germany was at war. I was, of course, far too young to have any real awareness of that first great global conflict. I remember going off to kindergarten, at the age of four or five, with a stomach still empty after little more than a small lump of black bread for my breakfast, knowing that hunger would spend all day nagging and gnawing away at my insides. But I did not understand that the reason I was so famished was that our enemies were blockading Germany and rations were becoming ever more meagre.

  Then came the shock that greeted the news of our unconditional surrender. Every grown-up I encountered seemed to be possessed by a stupefied indignation that such a capitulation should have occurred. Again and again people asked one another how such a thing could have been possible when not a single enemy soldier had so much as set foot upon the Fatherland. Constantly I heard talk of betrayal, stabs in the back and evil conspiracies against us. The precise content of what people said was incomprehensible to me, but the emotions behind the words – the anger, intensity, humiliation and helplessness – were deeply affecting and disturbing.

  One recollection from that period comes from what I now suppose must have been January 1919, just a couple of months after the Armistice. My mother, Margarete, had taken me with her as she scoured the barren shops in search of something for our supper. Suddenly there was a series of sharp, explosive reports. Thinking they came from firecrackers, I squealed with excitement. I pulled my hand from hers and made to run towards the noise. My mother screamed, grabbed me with a roughness I’d never before known from her and swept me up in her arms, scolding me furiously for being so naughty. Not knowing what I’d done wrong, shocked by the strength of my mother’s reaction and frightened by the panic-stricken terror I could sense in her, I burst out crying and was wailing in her ear as she ran pell-mell to the nearest open door. It led into a rough, workingmen’s bar, the kind of place that my mother would never normally have dreamed of entering. But there she was, and plenty of other respectable housewives with her: all of them equally possessed by a fear for which I could see no obvious reason. I looked around, my curiosity outweighing my tears, fascinated by the shabbily dressed ruffians clasping glasses of beer, the heavy pall of cigarette smoke in the air and the nervous chatter of the womenfolk as they discussed what was happening and debated what to do next. We stayed in that bar for what seemed like an age. After a while, the men and women began to mingle, their spirits suddenly much higher. I remember my mother laughing with an unfamiliar, uninhibited exuberance. When we left it was already dark. My mother returned home with her shopping bag still empty and I was sent to bed with no more than bread and margarine for my supper.

  I need hardly say that the sound that had so alarmed my mother was gunfire. The Bolsheviks of the Spartacus League had taken to the streets of Berlin, hoping to bring the workers out in a general strike and provoke a revolution. In those days my father, Albert Heuser, was a respectable businessman. Even now I can close my eyes and I am back in our apartment in Lichtenberg, pressing my ear to the dining-room door, listening to him and his guests compete to see who could summon up the most furious denunciation of the Commies, the Bolshies and the Reds. I had no idea who these red people were, or what precisely they had done to make all the grown-ups so angry. I just knew that they were very wicked indeed.

  And then there were the Jews. I was familiar with their race from my Sunday school classes. They were the people who had demanded the death of our Saviour. Now they seemed to be responsible for many of the ills that beset the country. The bankers who controlled the world’s money were Jews, but so too were the bankers’ greatest opponents, the leaders of the Spartacists and Bolshies who wanted money itself done away with. My father was never an overt anti-Semite, but he did not seem to disagree when others suggested that if one looked hard enough at any of the problems besetting Germany, the hand of the Jew could always be seen at work behind them.

  To a small boy, of course, what matters above all is his family. On this score I have no complaints. My parents were no better or worse than anyone else’s, I got on perfectly well with my sister and was happy enough at school. Yet I grew up under the shadow of defeat. We Germans had been forced to confess to our guilt for the war itself, as if our supposed aggression were the sole reason for that terrible conflagration. We were crippled by the burden of paying reparations, though we too had suffered a terrible loss of treasure and young blood. And then, when there simply was no money left to pay the victorious extortionists, we had to watch as the French retaliated by marching into the Rhineland, taking the opportunity of our impotence to kick, punch and humiliate innocent Germans in the street, even beating them with sticks – in public! – defying the populace to fight back.

  The madness of hyperinflation struck when I was only ten. The economics of it all meant nothing to me. I just knew that when the baker wrote out the price for a loaf of bread, it had more zeros than I could count. Things became so crazy that I once made a castle for my toy soldiers out of blocks of worthless Deutschmarks and complained vehemently as my mother took them away to feed the fire. The banknotes were worth less than lumps of coal. I quite literally saw my country’s finances go up in flames.