The Murderer in Ruins

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Still half asleep, Chief Inspector Frank Stave reached an arm out across the bed towards his wife, then remembered that she had burned to death in a fire storm three and a half years ago. He balled his hand into a fist, hurled back the blanket and let the ice-cold air banish the last shades of his nightmare.

A grey dawn light filtered through the threadbare damask curtains he had salvaged from the rubble of the house next door. For the last five weeks he had secured them to the window frames every evening with a few drawing pins he got hold of on the black market. The windowpanes were as thin as newspaper and even encrusted with ice on the inside. Stave was afraid that one of these days the glass would crack under the weight of the ice. Even the thought was absurd: these windows had been shaken by the shock waves from countless exploding bombs without shattering.

The blanket was frozen against the wall in places. In the dim early morning light the layer of hoar frost on the walls was so thick they looked as if they were covered with a layer of calloused skin. All that remained underneath was a few strips of wallpaper that might have been fashionable in 1930, stained plaster and in places just the bare wall itself: black and red brickwork and pale grey mortar.

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