Stasi Child by David Young Read Free Book Online

spread of photographs – images of the girl’s body taken from various angles – reminded Müller of the things that didn’t add up. She found herself thinking about the tyre tracks. The irregular shoeprint patterns in the snow. The apparent intended direction of the girl – on the surface a failed attempt to cross into the East, but one that Müller suspected had been staged.
    Next to the board, on another table, the girl’s bloodstained clothes and shoes had been taken out of evidence bags and laid out on a plastic sheet.
    Feuerstein snapped the protective rubber of his gloves and moved across to the autopsy table. He looked down at the girl’s face, then at the Kriminalpolizei detective. ‘Do you have any further information as to the girl’s identity, Comrade Müller?’
    Müller had been holding her breath for moments at a time, trying to keep the stench of disinfectant from her lungs. ‘At present, no,’ she replied. ‘We will in the coming days cross-check against all reports we have of missing girls of a similar age, but so far we’ve only made an initial check of the files.’ Feuerstein nodded.
    The mortuary assistant placed a body block under the nape of the girl’s neck, exposing the underside of her chin and pushing her chest upwards. As the autopsy progressed, Feuerstein made regular comments into the dictation machine, and occasionally bounced questions off Wollenburg, questions that always seemed rhetorical. Seiberling, meanwhile, was being ignored. The exchange in the pathologist’s office with Jäger had – Müller surmised – rendered him as good as impotent.
    Feuerstein used a magnifying glass to check the body millimetre by millimetre. To Müller’s untrained eye, he appeared to be paying most attention to the eye sockets of the girl’s mutilated face, to her neck and fingernails. The wounds in her back seemed of little interest.
    He gestured to Müller and Jäger to look more closely at the neck.
    ‘Do you see these marks? This abrasion here?’ Feuerstein traced his finger above the girl’s skin, in a slight curve. ‘These are most likely caused when the victim tried to prevent some sort of trauma to her neck. The marks are from her own fingernails as she desperately fought for air. And look here.’ Feuerstein had gently pulled down the girl’s left eyelid, which still remained intact above the ravaged socket. Müller could see a pattern of tiny red spots. Feuerstein pointed to them with his other hand. ‘They are petechiae – minuscule haemorrhages in the skin.’ He pulled the eyelid back again. ‘The eyes, of course, are no longer present. And I will comment on that in my final report. If they had been, I would have expected to find petechiae there too, in the conjunctiva.’ He then gestured to the girl’s neck. ‘You would usually, in these cases, see bruising here as well – but occasionally not, and this is one of those rare occasions.’
    Müller was conscious of Schmidt’s belly pressing into her back, the smell of whatever variety of wurst he’d just eaten invading her nostrils.
    Suddenly he spoke, a confused note in his voice. ‘So you’re saying she was strangled. And yet there are no obvious marks on her neck, other than from her own fingernails?’
    ‘Exactly,’ confirmed Feuerstein. ‘If she had been killed with some sort of ligature then there certainly would have been. But I would deduce she was strangled with someone’s forearm. A muscular, but fleshy, forearm – hence the lack of bruising. By the time we have completed the autopsy, I would expect to have found – by X-ray and dissection – fractures to the laryngeal skeleton. In other words, damage consistent with manual strangulation to the cervical spine.’
    Müller’s brow tightened in confusion. ‘But what about the wounds to her body?’ she asked, pointing at the photos on the noticeboard that Schmidt had taken at the scene. These clearly showed what looked like bullet wounds, in a