A Darker State Read online

  Praise for

  Winner of the CWA Endeavour Historical Dagger Award

  Longlisted for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award

  The Times Crime Book of the Month

  Telegraph Pick of the Week

  ‘Superb. A thrilling Cold War mystery that reminded me of Robert Harris at his best’

  MASON CROSS

  ‘A Darker State is gripping, thrilling and very, very good – David Young’s Karin Müller series goes from strength to strength’

  WILLIAM RYAN

  ‘Deft, assured storytelling, a compelling new detective and a fascinating setting – I was up late to finish it!’

  GILLY MACMILLAN, AUTHOR OF BURNT PAPER SKY

  ‘One of the best reads I’ve had in ages . . . this is a cracking debut’

  DAVID JACKSON, BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF CRY BABY

  ‘Deep and dark, this debut is utterly gripping . . . well observed characters and a corker of an ending. Superb’

  NIKKI OWEN, AUTHOR OF THE SPIDER IN THE CORNER OF THE ROOM

  ‘Chilling’

  DAILY TELEGRAPH

  ‘Extremely engaging’

  SUNDAY EXPRESS

  ‘This fast-paced thriller hooks the readers from the start’

  SUN

  ‘A masterful evocation of the claustrophobic atmosphere of communist era East Germany . . . an intricate, absorbing page-turner’

  DAILY EXPRESS

  ‘Can’t get enough cold-war Germany after Deutschland 83? This is your latest reading companion’

  SHORTLIST

  ‘A promising debut, an astutely considered novel of detection and place, redolent of dread, paranoia and suspicion’

  THE AUSTRALIAN, ARTS

  ‘A self-confessed obsessive, Young’s period detail – what kind of tyre tracks Stasi official’s cars left – is impressive’

  GREG FLEMING, NEW ZEALAND HERALD

  ‘Reminiscent of Fatherland and AD Miller’s Snowdrops, Stasi Child heralds a bold new voice – and character – in historical crime’

  NETGALLEY BOOK OF THE MONTH

  ‘The perfect blend of action, suspense and excitement. This is top notch crime!’

  NORTHERN CRIME

  ‘If you loved Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith, or enjoy the Bernie Gunther series, Stasi Child will be right down your Eastern European alley’

  CRIME FICTION LOVER

  ‘Captures the claustrophobic atmosphere of the communist regime . . . this gripping thriller, with an amazing ending, will have you racing through the pages’

  PICK ME UP

  ‘Young has recreated excellently the fear and paranoia that permeated East German society’

  THE CRIME WARP

  ‘Storytelling doesn’t get much better than this. David Young is a bit of a genius’

  LIZ LOVES BOOKS

  ‘A well observed and exciting crime novel that reads with such fluidity and expertise it was a surprise to find out this was Young’s debut novel’

  BIBLIOMANIAC

  ‘Stasi Child is a great read, perfect for fans of historical crime fiction’

  CRIME THRILLER GIRL

  For Oliver Berlau

  Contents

  Prologue

  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

  Glossary

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Letter from Author

  Extract from Stasi Child

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  December 1976

  Western Poland

  The dog pulled him through the undergrowth of Wyspa Teatralna – the brittle, frozen branches snapping and crackling as the pair advanced. An early winter freeze. Already the river surrounding Theatre Island was thick with ice, from bank to bank, on every side. Kazimierz Wójcik wondered how strong it was. Strong enough to hold a man? A car? A tank? He’d seen it this way before, many times, but not usually until the depths of winter – late January, or early February.

  ‘Śnieżka! Śnieżka!’ he shouted, as he tried to hold the animal back on its lead. But in this bitter cold the dog was in its element. A Siberian sledding dog, its instinct for pulling things had kicked in, and Kazimierz, with his one good arm, didn’t have the strength to fight. Instead he concentrated on holding on and not falling. He didn’t want Śnieżka running down the bank and out onto the ice itself.

  He didn’t want to lose her.

  He’d already lost too much in his life.

  The Germans on the other bank had made sure of that; his withered left arm had been their souvenir gift. Our socialist friends.

  But Kazimierz and other men and women of his age – those that were left – knew differently. They were no friends of Kazimierz or anyone of his generation. The German Szkopy – the castrated rams, as Poles of his vintage liked to call them – had much to answer for.

  The dog stopped suddenly at the top of the riverbank, ears pricked, its white fur puffed out, matching the colour of Kazimierz’s moustache and beard. The old man and his dog, for a moment, were as statuesque as the stone remains of the theatre that gave this area its name. The low hum of machinery from the wool factory on the German side of the river was all that punctured the silence – that and the sound of Kazimierz’s own laboured breathing. Clouds of condensation immediately turned to ice as they hit the tips of his facial hair.

  Śnieżka had seen something. Where the frozen river melded to the gravel shore.

  Kazimierz’s eyes followed the dog’s gaze, past his own frost-coated moustache, to something that was dark, matted. His eyes weren’t as good as they used to be, when he’d worked as a watchmaker in Leszno before the war, right on the old border. Before he’d been resettled here on the new border, more than a hundred kilometres further west. By that time, with his withered left arm, watchmaking was a thing of the past.

  The object looked almost like a fur coat. Perhaps I could dry it and sell it, thought Kazimierz. But it was piled in a lump, and the man felt nausea sweep over him as it dawned on him what – in all probability – lay under the coat.

  A body.

  An unmoving, dead body.

  Kazimierz tried to pull Śnieżka back. He
didn’t want any trouble. They’d just forget what they’d seen. It was safer that way.

  Keep your head down; keep out of trouble. That’s how Kazimierz had survived all these years, and he wasn’t about to change.

  But the dog had different ideas.

  She started dragging her master down the bank, giving him no option but to follow, stumbling as he went, frantically trying to keep hold of the lead.

  Kazimierz finally had to let go to avoid falling, and he started shouting the dog’s name again.

  But Śnieżka stopped dead as soon as she reached the bundle of fur.

  Stopped dead and began howling.

  A terrible keening wail of terror or lament. And Kazimierz knew his hopes of keeping this quiet had evaporated in an instant.

  Finally, the old man’s eyes and brain registered what the bundle was.

  It wasn’t a body, it was several bodies. Rats.

  Contorted, fused together in a mass of brown hair, tipped with hoar frost. And what really made Kazimierz shudder were the tails.

  Tens, scores of lifeless tails, each attached to its own bundle of fur.

  1

  September 1976

  Strausberger Platz, East Berlin

  The cool September breeze fanned People’s Police Oberleutnant Karin Müller’s lightly tanned face, and she had to fight to keep her blond hair from flying into her eyes as she looked down at her watch for the third time that minute. Already five past the hour and no sign of her boss, Oberst Reiniger, despite his exhortations that she should arrive on time.

  She didn’t feel much like an ‘Oberleutnant’ at the moment. In fact, though it had been a few short months since the end of her last case, down in Halle-Neustadt rather than here in the Hauptstadt, she’d almost forgotten what it was like being a police officer, never mind the head of a murder squad. For several weeks now she’d been playing the part of a full-time, stay-at-home mother – something that was rare in their small republic, where babies were despatched to crèches almost as soon as they were born, with mothers quickly back in the workplace.

  Now, standing here, at the northern exit to Strausberger Platz U-bahn station, she felt a terrible longing for the twin babies she’d left behind. An almost physical tugging at her heart. She had a horrible feeling, too, that whatever Reiniger wanted, it wasn’t going to turn out well for her new-found family life. Her little miracles – Jannika and Johannes. The babies she’d been told – year after year, by doctor after doctor – that she’d never be able to have.

  Swallowing, she held her hand up to her brow and peered eastwards along Karl-Marx-Allee, marvelling at its grandeur. Yes, the Republic wasn’t perfect. The methods of the Ministry for State Security that she’d encountered in her previous investigation into the reform school teenagers, and then the search in Halle-Neustadt for the missing children, had left her feeling uneasy about being so aligned to the state. But this magnificent avenue – with its beautifully tiled, wedding-cake-style buildings lining each side – was testament to all that was good about the socialist system. In Paris, to live in apartments like these would cost a king’s ransom. Here, those higher up in the Party might get priority, but there were ordinary workers too. The rubble women, for example. Those who had heroically cleared tonnes and tonnes of debris from the ruins of Berlin after the war to help build a new Hauptstadt, they had been given priority to get these apartments. Tenement palaces, they were called, and Müller could see why.

  She swivelled on her heels to look the other way, back towards central Berlin and the TV tower, and beyond that the Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier. Past the glorious fountain in the centre of Strausberger Platz, the wind whipping up the water and dispersing it into a fine mist across the square. She breathed in the damp air and let the microscopic spray settle on her face. Where the sun hit the water you could see miniature rainbows forming. Never quite a complete arch, coming and going as the flow pulsed from the pumps.

  Now, through one of the rainbows, she saw an overweight, middle-aged man approaching. Head down, walking a bit like a penguin. Every now and then brushing water droplets from his epaulettes, as much – no doubt – to draw attention to his rank as to actually wipe them. That was always her deputy Werner Tilsner’s theory about Reiniger anyway. Unterleutnant Werner Tilsner found the People’s Police colonel pompous and dull. Müller on the other hand rather liked him, and as he drew close her face widened into a broad smile.

  ‘Karin, you’re looking well,’ he said, smiling equally broadly as he pumped her outstretched hand. ‘Clearly motherhood suits you.’

  ‘I’m not so sure about that, Comrade Oberst,’ laughed Müller. ‘You heard on the phone last night. It’s a bit chaotic in the apartment at the moment.’ Reiniger had rung her apartment police hotline in the midst of domestic chaos, a crying fit from both babies. The one-bedroom flat was overcrowded too: Müller, her hospital doctor boyfriend Emil Wollenburg, the twins themselves and, there to look after them, her newly discovered grandmother, Helga.

  Reiniger waved his arm, as though by doing so it would magic her problems away. ‘We’ll have to see what we can do about your living conditions. I may have a possible solution. And sorry I was a little late. You know how it is. I had a meeting at the Café Moskau and thought I may as well walk after that. Actually, the person I was meeting asked after you.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ Müller was pleased she hadn’t been totally forgotten by her People’s Police colleagues during her maternity leave. ‘Who was that?’

  ‘Someone who – if you accept my little proposal – you may be seeing a lot more of again.’

  There was something in Reiniger’s smirking face that immediately made Müller wary. Seeing a lot more of again. The implication being it would happen, whether she wanted it to or not.

  Müller was aware that her face must have fallen, even though she’d tried to keep a neutral expression. But the next words from Reiniger’s mouth came as no surprise.

  ‘It was your old Ministry for State Security contact, Oberst Jäger.’

  Jäger. The Stasi colonel with the suave good looks of a West German TV presenter.

  A manipulator. A string-puller. A man to fear.

  *

  Reiniger seemed in no hurry to get down to business. Instead, lunch – sitting outside the restaurant on the northern semi-circle of the Platz – was spent discussing the children, with Reiniger swapping tales about his first taste of fatherhood years earlier, and his recent reacquaintance after becoming a grandfather just the previous year.

  In fact, the conversation was so convivial Müller had almost forgotten the sense of dread she’d felt earlier, when she heard Jäger’s name again. Not that the Stasi officer was someone she hated. She was ambivalent. Some of his methods, and those of the agency he worked for, were ruthless, cruel, underhand. But it was Jäger who had traced her grandmother, Helga – allowing Müller to feel a sense of belonging, at last, after years of feeling like the odd one out in her adoptive family back in the forested, low mountains of Thuringia. And perhaps if Jäger were to re-enter her working life again, she might, this time, persuade him to try to find information about her natural father, who – as far as she knew – had been a victorious Soviet soldier who had got her teenage mother pregnant with her in the dying days of the war, or very shortly after.

  Finally Reiniger belched, sending the fumes of his meal and accompanying smell of wheat beer across the table into Müller’s face. She pretended not to notice. Then he wiped the linen napkin across his mouth, spat on it, and then repeated the action, examining the resulting red-brown sauce deposits with a curious look of satisfaction.

  ‘So, I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did, Karin?’

  ‘Certainly, Comrade Oberst. It’s not often I get the chance to eat at a restaurant as fine as this.’

  ‘Good. Good. On to the next part of our little outing, then. You don’t have to rush back, do you?’

  ‘Not at all.’ Müller recalled Jannika and Johannes’s whin
ing from the previous night, and the way Helga had managed to calm them. Her grandmother was more than capable of looking after them on her own.

  ‘All right, then. Let’s get our coats. We’re going to see something that I think you’ll like.’

  *

  Reiniger used a key to enter the lobby of an apartment block just to the side of one of the four high towers that dominated each corner of Strausberger Platz. Everything was bright, white, clean – it had nothing in common with her crumbling block on Schönhauser Allee.

  The lift accelerated them upwards in a smooth glide to the floor – the sixth – that Reiniger selected from the bank of brass buttons surrounded by glowing green neon. When they exited, the floor and architectural detailing had the same feeling of opulence. If it was polished concrete rather than actual marble or white stone, the designers had done an excellent job of camouflage. Müller suspected that at least some of this was the real thing, even though she knew the stone-effect exterior along the whole of the Allee was achieved by the clever use of ceramic tiles.

  Reiniger’s key ring jangled like a child’s percussion triangle as he pulled it from his pocket and fitted one of the keys into a heavy oak door. He opened it and beckoned Müller to follow, still not revealing what the purpose of his little tour actually was.

  Once inside, he gave another of his sweeping arm gestures around the expansive hallway – big enough, Müller noted, to have a dining table. The one here looked like it was antique. The apartment probably belonged to some high-up Party apparatchik. But if so, why was Müller being given a guided tour?

  ‘What do you think? Impressive, isn’t it?’

  ‘It certainly is, Comrade Oberst.’ Müller would usually have dropped the repetitive honorifics by now, even with a senior officer, but she knew Reiniger appreciated being reminded of his high rank as often as possible. She wasn’t going to disappoint him.

  ‘Take a look around. This is a three-bedroomed apartment. Highly unusual. And, of course, very much sought after. I think perhaps they knocked two together.’