Stasi 77 Read online

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Epilogue

  Maps

  Glossary

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Dedicated to all those forced labourers who lost their

  lives on the ‘death marches’ to and around Gardelegen

  and at the Isenschnibbe barn in April 1945.

  1

  April 1977

  Berlin

  His heart started pounding, and his throat constricting, even before he reached the crossing point.

  Checkpoint C.

  C for Charlie.

  A place where the glitz and decadence of West Berlin gave way to the colourless grey of the East. The contrast was always striking, no matter how often he crossed the border.

  He’d done this journey countless times for work. Always driving – through France, Belgium, West Germany. And then the motorway corridor into West Berlin.

  Each business trip was ostensibly about making money, making connections. Doing deals with the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, with its voracious appetite for foreign hard currency.

  But his real reason for these trips was something quite different. It was to investigate.

  To collect information.

  To identify people.

  And now he knew enough. Now he was ready to begin.

  *

  As the guard checked his papers, a deep wracking cough started, and he couldn’t stop it. His body convulsed like a beached fish. The guard stared hard at him.

  ‘Aussteigen!’

  It was all going to go wrong now, he sensed it. He managed to control the cough – a permanent legacy of a day he wished he could forget, the day that this was all about – but beads of sweat formed on his brow, and his breathing was laboured and panicked. He climbed out of the Citroën, obeying the guard’s gestures and shouts.

  The guard circled the vehicle, opened its gently sloping hatched back, and pulled out the businessman’s leather workbag.

  ‘Open it, please.’

  He flipped the catch. There was nothing in the bag that didn’t match the stated purpose of his visit: all was as it should be, except for the one thing he wanted to be found. But the businessman still felt his face begin to colour up, to feel the guilt, even though he was guilty of nothing. The tension felt like it was intensifying in every sinew in his body, each second causing another twist to course through him.

  The guard pulled out a plastic bottle of colourless liquid. He unscrewed the top, and immediately pulled his head back as he smelt the fumes, almost as though he’d been given a small electric shock.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked, grimacing.

  The businessman didn’t trust his voice to answer, and instead opened his papers, lightly running his finger over the entry which corresponded to the one litre of fire accelerant – approved for temporary import into the Republic as part of his business. The business of fire prevention. The Republic was developing fire resistant materials as an offshoot of its chemicals industry. His job was to test them so that they matched the standards of the West before sealing any import-export deal. In effect, he needed to be a fire-starter, in order to be an effective fire-preventer. It was a career he’d chosen for a reason. Part of that reason was this visit to East Germany via its capital, even though his destination lay hundreds of kilometres back towards the West. It was a circuitous route, designed to deflect attention. He didn’t want some twitchy East German border guard ruining his plan.

  The guard glanced over to his guardhouse, as though he was about to summon a superior. But then his attention turned back to the leather bag. He rummaged around again, and pulled out the multi pack of Gauloises cigarettes the businessman had deliberately left there – he knew it flouted customs regulations.

  Waving the cigarette packets in one hand, and the bottle of liquid in the other, the guard shook his head, a theatrically severe look on his face. It was a young face, an inexperienced face – even though the businessman knew most of these officers in border guard uniforms were actually agents of the Ministry for State Security.

  The Stasi.

  ‘These don’t mix well together,’ said the guard. ‘You might have permission for this . . .’ He waved the bottle around again with one hand. Then the cigarettes with the other, as though he was making secret semaphore signals to his colleagues. ‘But importing these . . .’

  ‘I’m sorry. I must have forgotten to take them out,’ said the businessman. He tried to give a calm, unflustered outward appearance. Inside he was churning up. He needed the guard to want to confiscate the cigarettes, and relish the thought of quietly smoking them, or sharing them with his fellow officers.

  The guard’s semaphore-like waving paused mid-air. This interaction had reached a critical point. The businessman held his breath – his heart tapping a steady drum beat. The guard placed both objects on top of the Citroën’s roof, then glanced at his watch. He shrugged, picked up the bottle and placed it back in the bag, along with the man’s passport and documents. Then he waved the businessman back into the driver’s side, and picked up the cigarette multi pack.

  If he knew the businessman had left them there deliberately – that it was an unofficial ‘trade’ – it didn’t show in his deadpan face. ‘We will be impounding these,’ he said. ‘Importing them is illegal. Do not do it again.’

  He waved the Citroën past, while shouting through the open driver’s window.

  ‘Enjoy your stay in our Socialist Republic, Herr Verbier.’

  2

  July 1977

  Schönefeld Airport, East Berlin

  Touchdown in the Hauptstadt – despite being bumpy – brought an overwhelming sense of relief to Major Karin Müller, the head of the Volkspolizei Serious Crimes Department. Her family holiday had been curtailed by the Telex delivered to her hotel on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast.

  URGENT MESSAGE FOR COMRADE MAJOR KARIN MÜLLER, ROOM 411. RING COMRADE OBERST REINIGER AT THE PEOPLE’S POLICE HQ AT KEIBELSTRASSE, AND PREPARE FOR IMMEDIATE RETURN TO THE HAUPTSTADT.

  Her initial feeling had been one of anger at the premature ending of a long-planned
family holiday, and that she’d had to leave her twin toddlers, Jannika and Johannes, in their great-grandmother Helga’s care, fit and healthy though she was. But that anger had been swept aside as soon as she had reached Burgas airport, where it had been replaced by a fear, a terror, of flying.

  Müller had gripped the armrests so tightly during the majority of the two-and-a-half hour flight that she had to flex her fingers now to try to free the tension in her upper body. It wasn’t the irrational fear of something happening to the aeroplane that afflicted many others. Hers was well grounded, partly as a result of her fear of heights, but also the fact that she’d witnessed first hand the horrific aftermath of the 1972 Königs Wusterhausen air disaster. Plane crashes – even accidental ones – were the remit of the K – the Kriminalpolizei. One of her jobs as a young Unterleutnant had been informing the relatives of the more than 150 people who’d perished when the Ilyushin plane broke up in mid-air after an on-board fire. That had been an Ilyushin Il-62 taking holidaymakers to Burgas and was exactly the same model of plane on exactly the same route she’d just flown, albeit in the opposite direction. For much of this flight, she’d been unable to push the images out of her head of the blackened, broken wreckage of the plane in the middle of the woods just a few kilometres south of this airport. It had been Germany’s worst-ever air disaster.

  *

  When she’d rung Reiniger, he’d been less than forthcoming about exactly why her holiday had had to be curtailed, other than to inform her that her deputy – Hauptmann Werner Tilsner – would be meeting her here at the airport, and then they’d both be travelling south to the scene of an apparent crime. The body of a middle-aged male had been found in a factory near Karl-Marx-Stadt in suspicious circumstances. That was pretty much all she knew. But for Reiniger to send the Serious Crimes Department – effectively her, Tilsner, and their forensic scientist Jonas Schmidt – then there had to be something more behind it. Tilsner would be briefing her fully on the two-and-a-half-hour drive south.

  She knew she was lucky, though. Her grandmother would face a forty-eight-hour train trip back to Berlin with two sixteen month olds. A nightmare. Müller had got off lightly.

  *

  ‘I see you’ve got the usual holidaymaker’s souvenir.’

  Müller furrowed her brow.

  ‘The tomato face,’ laughed Tilsner. Then he flicked his eyes towards the sky. ‘You didn’t need go away for that, though. It’s been hot enough here. I wouldn’t have thought you were too thrilled to be called back.’

  ‘No. I hope this is all worth it. Reiniger wouldn’t tell me very much over the phone.’ She climbed into the Wartburg, as Tilsner held open the passenger door in a mock-chivalrous manner.

  ‘Surely getting our teeth into any case must be better than what we’ve been doing for the past few months?’ said Tilsner, getting into the driver’s side. ‘The job has become like a pair of dead trousers. Other than that Eisenhüttenstadt case, we’ve just been acting like administrative assistants, overseeing the cases of other murder squads without actually getting our hands dirty. As you know, I’d much rather be getting dirty hands than shuffling paper and pushing pens.’ He turned the Wartburg’s ignition key and the car fired up in its usual half-choked way. Because of the heat, Müller had rolled down her window as soon as she got in, and the fumes immediately hit the back of her throat.

  ‘All I’ve been told,’ she said, ‘is that a middle-aged man was found dead overnight in a factory in suspicious circumstances, somewhere near Karl-Marx-Stadt. On the face of it, it’s not exciting enough to pull me away from my holiday.’ Her statement was almost a question, but no answer was immediately forthcoming from her deputy. She turned towards him, studying his chiselled jaw in profile. For an instant, she wondered who – if anyone – he was currently involved with. His wife, Koletta, had called time on their relationship months ago thanks to his constant philandering that had – on a couple of occasions – found Müller in his bed. A mistake she didn’t want to make again, despite how attractive she found him, and how much she was missing male attention now that her spare time was spent with the twins. When the chiselled jaw still failed to move, she began to feel annoyed.

  ‘Comrade Hauptmann, are you going to provide me with an answer?’

  ‘I wasn’t aware you’d asked a question, Comrade Major,’ said Tilsner, manoeuvring the car into the lane for the autobahn towards Dresden and Cottbus.

  Müller gave a long sigh. ‘Quit the games, Werner. And tell me everything you know. Now.’

  *

  On the banks of the Zschopau river, the site itself was grey, high-walled and slightly forbidding – a fabric-spinning factory next to Sachsenburg castle, near the town of Frankenburg, to the north-east of Karl-Marx-Stadt. Müller felt a frisson of excitement, tempered by wariness. There was an incongruous contrast between the decaying, decrepit-looking factory and its picturesque surroundings. The river itself cascaded in a man-made waterfall over a weir, alongside timber-framed buildings, overlooked by the majestic white-walled castle, high on a wooded promontory. The view was almost like the scene from a fairy tale picture book. If Müller ever got the chance to catch up on her curtailed holiday with Helga and the twins, they could do a lot worse than spend it around here.

  Outside the factory, a couple of uniformed officers on guard pointed to the meeting room where the body had been found.

  Müller was surprised to see a female police officer in plain clothes apparently directing proceedings outside the room. Female detectives weren’t that uncommon, though when Müller had been promoted to lead a murder squad she had been the only woman in charge of one, as far as she knew, in the whole Republic. The surprise was that both Tilsner and she knew the young woman. It was Elke Drescher, who they’d last encountered as a student detective in the Hauptstadt, helping them in the office on the graveyard girl case more than two years earlier. A coincidence, perhaps, but the Republic was a small country. In Müller’s experience, coincidences were all too common.

  Drescher herself showed no surprise at the appearance of her old boss. ‘Comrade Major. It’s good to see you again. I just wish it was in happier circumstances. And Comrade Hauptmann Tilsner too, I see.’

  ‘Have they made you head of a murder squad already, Elke?’ said Tilsner. ‘If so, I hope you’re better at that than you were at making coffee in the old Marx-Engels-Platz office.’

  ‘Ha! I don’t think even I could ruin a cup of the new Kaffee Mix.’

  ‘You’re not wrong there,’ laughed Müller’s deputy. ‘It tastes shit even when it’s made properly.’

  Müller couldn’t disagree with Tilsner’s assertion. The new ersatz coffee was the government’s solution to the coffee price crisis. The problem was it tasted vile, with only fifty per cent of its weight made up of real coffee and the rest consisting of substitutes such as chicory. The Republic’s citizens hadn’t been slow in letting their feelings be known.

  ‘Exactly, Comrade Hauptmann. You’ve got it in one. Anyway, I’m sure you and Comrade Müller haven’t come all this way to discuss my coffee-making skills. And no, I’m not the head of the murder squad. I’m his deputy. But he’s been off ill for a couple of weeks, and it doesn’t look like he’s coming back to work soon. So I’m in charge technically, but I’m still an Unterleutnant. That may be why they’ve brought in back-up from Berlin.’

  Maybe, thought Müller. But equally, if Unterleutnant Elke Drescher was trusted enough to take charge – even on a temporary basis – then she must have been considered capable. There had to be some other reason Reiniger had despatched them here. And it certainly wasn’t to discuss the coffee crisis. ‘So, Elke. We need you to bring us up to speed,’ said Müller.

  ‘Of course. You’d better put these on first.’ Drescher handed each of the Berlin detectives a pair of protective gloves.

  When they entered the building, Müller’s nostrils were immediately hit by a strong residual smell of burning. Drescher noticed her sniffing the stifling at
mosphere. ‘We won’t know till the autopsy,’ she said, ‘but it looks like the victim was overcome by smoke inhalation.’

  ‘And just explain to me who exactly the victim is, or was,’ asked Müller. Already, her internal antennae were sensing that there was something different about this case.

  ‘He was a leading local Party official, from Karl-Marx-Stadt.’

  A leading local Party official? Why hadn’t this been handed straight to the Ministry for State Security, thought Müller. Why were they allowing her team to become involved? She kept her thoughts silent.

  Tilsner frowned, posing the same question out loud, but for a different reason. He let out an elongated sigh. ‘If his death was simply caused by a fire, why have we been brought here?’

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ replied Drescher. ‘But for someone to die in a fire, in an enclosed space like this, you’d expect the victim to have burns. The only place he has burns are on his wrists.’

  ‘His wrists?’ echoed Müller. Already the apparently complicated, political nature of this case had taken a new twist.

  ‘Yes. It’s odd, isn’t it?’

  Müller nodded. Why would the victim only have burn marks around his wrists? Had he been tortured? If so, by whom? And why? For the moment, although these questions raced around her head, she was content to allow Drescher to continue her account.

  ‘The seat of the fire was in the centre of the room.’ She gestured with her arm. Müller’s eyeline followed, scanning the space; a scorched, blackened area, about two metres in diameter. Some of the wooden beams above were slightly charred – but it wasn’t a huge conflagration. ‘Your forensic scientist has already bagged up the remains of the combustible material and is testing it in the lab as we speak,’ said Drescher.

  Kriminaltechniker Jonas Schmidt. In that initial phone call from the hotel in Bulgaria – after she’d responded to the Telex message – Reiniger had already told Müller that Schmidt had travelled on ahead to Karl-Marx-Stadt by train, before Müller and Tilsner had even set off from Schönefeld.

  ‘And then the body was found here.’ Drescher strode across the room, with Tilsner’s eyes watching her carefully with the same animalistic hunger Müller had seen when she’d been a student detective in the Hauptstadt. Maybe, Müller admitted, she was jealous that he never seemed to look at her in that way these days, now her thirtieth birthday was consigned to history. Still, men like Tilsner would never be able to jump over their own shadows – it just wasn’t in their nature.