The Child Read online

  Carina was also feeling cold now. Her lips had begun to tremble.

  ‘I don’t see what you’re getting at.’

  ‘It was Simon’s birthday two days ago, and I wanted to give him a special treat. I mean, he’s only ten but his experience of life and his illness have made him so much more mature than other children of his age. I thought he was old enough.’

  ‘Old enough for what? What did you give him?’ Stern, who had finally abandoned his attempt to open the umbrella, was pointing it at her chest like a gun.

  ‘Simon is afraid of dying, so I arranged a regression for him.’

  ‘A what?’ said Stern, although he had recently seen something about it on television.

  It was, of course, typical of Carina to subscribe to such an esoteric fad. People of all ages seemed to be fascinated by the notion of having been on earth before. This hankering after the supernatural provided fertile soil from which shady therapists could sprout like weeds and charge substantial fees for ‘regressions’: journeys into the antenatal past during which their clients discovered, usually under hypnosis, that they had occupied the throne of France or been burned at the stake six centuries ago.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that. I know what you think of these things. You won’t even read your horoscope.’

  ‘How could you expose a little boy to such mumbo-jumbo?’

  Stern was genuinely horrified. The television programme had warned of the possibility of severe mental damage. Many unstable personalities couldn’t cope when a charlatan persuaded them that their current psychological problems stemmed from some unresolved conflict in a previous existence.

  ‘I only wanted to show him that it isn’t all over – when you die, I mean – and that he mustn’t be sad to have lived for such a short time because life goes on.’

  ‘Tell me you’re joking.’

  She shook her head. ‘I took him to Dr Tiefensee. He’s a qualified psychologist and gives courses at the university. Not a charlatan, whatever you may think.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He hypnotized the boy. Not a great deal happened, actually. Simon couldn’t remember much under hypnosis. He just said he was in a dark cellar and could hear voices. Voices saying nasty things.’

  Stern grimaced with discomfort. The cold creeping up his back was becoming steadily more unpleasant, but that wasn’t his only reason for wanting to get away as soon as possible. Somewhere in the distance a freight train was rumbling past. Carina was whispering now, just as he himself had at the start of their conversation.

  ‘Tiefensee initially failed to rouse Simon from his hypnotic trance. He had fallen into a deep sleep, and when he woke up he told us what he told you just now. He thinks he used to be a murderer.’

  Stern felt an urge to wipe his hands on his hair, but it, too, was wet with rain.

  ‘The whole idea is nonsense, Carina, and you know it. All I’m wondering is, what’s it got to do with me?’

  ‘Simon has a profound sense of right and wrong. He insists on going to the police.’

  ‘That’s right, I do.’

  They both swung round. The boy had stolen up behind them unobserved. The wind was stirring the mass of curls on his forehead. Stern wondered why he had any hair at all. He must surely have had to undergo chemotherapy.

  ‘I’m a murderer, and that’s wrong. I want to turn myself in, but I won’t say a thing unless my lawyer’s present.’

  Carina smiled sadly. ‘He picked that up from television, and you’re the only defence lawyer I know.’

  Stern avoided her eye. Instead, he stared at the muddy ground as if his hand-sewn Oxfords could tell him how to respond to this lunacy.

  ‘Well?’ he heard Simon say.

  ‘Well what?’ Stern raised his head and looked straight at the boy, surprised to see that he was smiling again.

  ‘Are you my lawyer now? I can pay you.’

  Rather awkwardly, Simon fished a little purse out of the pocket of his jeans.

  ‘I’ve got some money, you see.’

  Stern shook his head. Almost imperceptibly at first, then more and more violently.

  ‘I have,’ Simon insisted. ‘Honestly.’

  ‘No,’ said Stern, glaring at Carina now. ‘This is all beside the point, am I right? You didn’t get me out here as a lawyer, did you?’

  Now it was her turn to stare at the ground.

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ she admitted quietly.

  With a sigh, Stern tossed the unopened umbrella back into the boot of the car. Pushing a briefcase aside, he opened the first-aid locker and removed a torch. He checked the beam by shining it on the tumbledown shed Simon had indicated earlier.

  ‘All right, let’s get this over with.’

  He patted Simon’s head with his free hand, unable to believe that he was really saying this to a ten-year-old boy:

  ‘Show me exactly where you say you killed this man.’

  3

  Simon led them around the back of the shed. A two-storey building must have occupied the site many years ago, but it had been destroyed by fire. All that now jutted into the overcast evening sky were isolated sections of soot-stained brickwork resembling mutilated hands.

  ‘You see? There’s nothing here.’

  Stern played the beam of his torch slowly over the ruins.

  ‘But it must be somewhere here,’ said Simon. He might have been talking about a lost glove, not a dead body. He too had come armed with a light source: a little plastic rod that emitted a fluorescent glow when you bent it.

  ‘From his box of magic tricks,’ Carina had explained to Stern. The boy had evidently been given some normal birthday presents as well as the regression.

  ‘I think it was down there,’ Simon said excitedly, stepping forward.

  Following the direction of his outstretched arm, Stern shone his torch at the old stairwell. They could see only the entrance to the cellar now.

  ‘We can’t go down there, it’s too dangerous.’

  ‘Why not?’ the boy demanded, scrambling over a pile of loose bricks.

  ‘Stay here, sweetheart, it could all cave in.’ Carina sounded uncharacteristically anxious. During her brief affair with Robert Stern she’d been the soul of exuberance, almost as if she were trying to compensate for his permanent melancholy with a superabundance of joie de vivre. Now she was agitated, as if Simon were behaving like a disobedient dog let off the leash. He plodded on.

  ‘Look, we can get down there!’ he cried suddenly. The other two were still protesting when his curly head disappeared behind a reinforced concrete pillar.

  ‘Simon!’ called Carina. Stern blundered after them across the rubble-strewn floor, nearly twisting his ankle a couple of times and tearing his trousers on a rusty piece of wire. By the time he reached the entrance to the cellar, the boy had made his way down some twenty charred wooden stairs and turned a corner.

  ‘Come out of there at once!’ Stern shouted, immediately cursing his ill-considered choice of words. The memory triggered by them was worse than anything that could happen to him here, he realized.

  Come out of there, darling, please! I can help you …

  That wasn’t the only lie he’d called to Sophie through the locked bathroom door. In vain. They’d tried everything for four long years – every technique and form of treatment – until at last they received the longed-for phone call from the fertility clinic. Positive. Pregnant. On that day, over a decade ago, it seemed to him that a higher power had totally reoriented the compass needle of his life. It had suddenly pointed to happiness in its purest form, but only, alas, for as long as it took him to transform the ceiling of the new nursery into a night sky with stick-on fluorescent stars and go shopping for baby clothes with Sophie. Felix never wore them. He was cremated in the sleepsuit the nurses had dressed him in.

  ‘Simon?’ Carina called the boy’s name so loudly, it jolted him out of his dark reverie.

  Simon’s muffled voice came drifting up from below. �
�I think there’s something here!’

  Stern swore. He tested the first step with his foot. ‘It’s no use, I’ll have to go down there.’

  Those words, too, reminded him of the worst moment in his life. The moment when Sophie took refuge in the patients’ bathroom with their dead baby in her arms and wouldn’t give it up. ‘Sudden infant death syndrome’ was the diagnosis she refused to accept. Two days after giving birth.

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ said Carina.

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ Stern took another cautious step. The stairs had supported Simon. He would have to see whether they could support more than twice the boy’s weight. ‘We’ve only got one torch and someone’ll have to call for help if we aren’t back in a couple of minutes.’

  The rotten treads creaked at every step like the rigging of a ship. Stern wasn’t sure if his sense of balance was playing tricks, but the stairs seemed to sway more violently the lower he got.

  ‘Simon?’ He must have called the boy’s name at least five times, but the only response was a metallic clang some distance away. It sounded like someone hitting a central heating pipe with a spanner.

  Before long he was standing at the foot of the stairs. He looked around with his heart pounding. It was now so dark outside, he couldn’t even make out Carina’s silhouette at the top of the stairwell. He shone his torch over the underground chamber on his right. Two passages led off it, both ankle-deep in stagnant water.

  Incredible of the boy to venture into this industrial swamp of his own free will.

  Stern opted for the left-hand passage because the other was obstructed by an overturned fuse box.

  ‘Where are you?’ he called. The water closed around his ankles like an icy hand.

  Simon still didn’t answer, but at least he made a sign of life: he coughed. The sound came from not far away but beyond the range of Stern’s torch.

  I’m going to catch my death, he thought. He could feel his trouser legs absorbing the moisture like blotting paper. Just as he made out a wooden partition some ten metres away, his mobile rang.

  ‘Where’s he got to?’ Carina called. She sounded almost hysterical.

  ‘Not sure. He’s in the next passage, I think.’

  ‘What’s he been saying?’

  ‘Nothing. He’s coughing.’

  ‘Oh my God, get him out of there!’ Her voice broke with agitation.

  ‘What do you think I’m trying to do?’

  ‘You don’t understand. The tumour. That’s what happens!’

  ‘What do you mean? What happens?’

  He heard Simon cough again. Closer at hand this time.

  ‘Bronchial spasms are a prelude to unconsciousness. He could pass out at any minute!’ Carina was shouting so loudly, her voice reached him direct as well as over the phone.

  And he’ll fall face down in the water and suffocate. Like …

  Stern set off at a run. In his mounting panic he failed to see the beam sagging down from the ceiling, so black and charred as to be almost invisible. He hit his head on it, but the shock was even worse than the pain. Thinking he’d been attacked, he threw up his arms defensively. By the time he realized his mistake it was too late. The torch flickered underwater for another two seconds, then died where he’d dropped it.

  ‘Damnation!’ He felt for the wall with his right hand and groped his way along step by step, trying not to lose his bearings in the darkness. That was the least of his worries, however, because he hadn’t changed direction. What concerned him far more was that Simon had not made another sound, not even a cough.

  ‘Hey, are you still there?’ he shouted. His ears clicked suddenly, and he had to ease the pressure on his eardrums by swallowing several times, like an airline passenger coming in to land. Then he heard another faint cough. Ahead of him. Beyond the wooden partition and around the corner. He had to get there – had to get to Simon in the side passage. Although slowed by the water, he was still going fast enough to trigger a disastrous chain reaction.

  ‘Simon? Can you hear … Heeelp!’

  The last word was uttered as he fell. His foot had caught in an old telephone cable that had formed a sort of poacher’s snare in the stinking, stagnant water. He clutched at the wall beside him in an attempt to stop himself falling, only to break two fingernails on the damp mortar as he pitched forwards.

  He must have reached the end of the underground passage, he realized, because he didn’t fall headlong into water. Instead, his outstretched hands were brought up short by an expanse of plywood or a door. With a groan – like, but far louder than the one caused by his foot on the first stair – it gave way beneath him. Panic-stricken, he saw himself plummeting down an old mine shaft or bottomless pit. Then his fall was brutally checked by solid, hard-packed mud. The only favourable part of this new situation was that the water hadn’t reached this corner of the cellar. On the other hand, unidentifiable objects dislodged from the ceiling and walls were falling on him.

  Oh my God … Stern hardly dared touch the sizeable, roundish object that had just landed in his lap. His initial, nightmarish certainty was that, if he did run his hands over it, they would touch blue lips and a bloated face: the face of his dead son Felix.

  But then, gradually, the darkness began to lift. He blinked, and it took him a moment or two to realize where the light was coming from. Not until she was standing right beside him did he see that it was Carina, whose mobile phone’s greenish display was dimly illuminating the underground chamber into which he’d blundered.

  He saw the scream before he heard it. Carina opened her mouth, but there was an instant’s silence before her piercing cry reverberated around the cellar’s concrete walls.

  Stern shut his eyes. Then, summoning up all his courage, he looked down at himself.

  And almost vomited.

  The head in his lap was attached, like the knob on the end of a curtain rod, to a partially skeletonized body. With a mixture of disbelief, disgust and utter horror, Stern registered the gaping cleft the axe had made in the victim’s skull.

  4

  Tears welled up in Inspector Martin Engler’s eyes faster than he could blink them away. He groaned with his mouth shut, tilted his head back, and groped blindly around the interview room’s table until he found what he was looking for. At the last moment he tore open the pack, fished out a paper handkerchief and clamped it to his nose.

  Aacheeoo!

  ‘Sorry.’ The homicide detective blew his nose, and Stern wondered whether he hadn’t uttered an almost imperceptible ‘Arsehole!’ as he sneezed.

  That would have figured. Having secured acquittals for several of Engler’s personal collars, Stern wasn’t exactly one of the inspector’s closest friends.

  ‘Ahem.’

  The policeman seated beside Engler had cleared his throat. Stern glanced at him. An overweight individual with an enormous Adam’s apple jutting from beneath his double chin, he had introduced himself, on entering the windowless interview room, as Thomas Brandmann. No rank, no clue to his function. He hadn’t uttered another word, just emitted a guttural grunt every five minutes. Stern didn’t know what to make of him. Unlike Engler, who after over twenty years’ service was almost part of the murder squad’s furniture, this man mountain had never crossed his path before. His manner could have signified that he was heading the investigation. Or the exact opposite.

  Engler held up a packet of aspirins. ‘Like one too? You look as if you could use one.’

  ‘No thanks.’ Stern instinctively fingered the painful, throbbing lump on his forehead. His brains were still scrambled after that fall in the cellar, and he resented the fact that, bloodshot eyes and runny nose apart, the inspector made a livelier impression than he did. Sessions on a sunbed and jogging in the woods were more beneficial than long nights at the computer in an office.

  ‘Right, then I’ll summarize.’

  Engler picked up his notebook. Stern couldn’t hide a grin when Brandmann, who still hadn’t uttered a wor
d, cleared his throat again.

  ‘You discovered the body around five-thirty this afternoon. A boy, Simon Sachs, led you to the spot, accompanied by Carina Freitag, a hospital nurse. The said boy is ten years old and suffering from a cerebral tumour. He is currently’ – Engler turned over a page – ‘undergoing treatment in the neurological ward of the Seehaus Clinic. He claims to have murdered the man himself in a previous life.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Stern, ‘fifteen years ago. I haven’t been counting, but I reckon I must have told you that a dozen times already.’

  ‘Possibly, but—’

  Engler broke off in mid-sentence. To Stern’s surprise he tilted his head back again and compressed his nostrils between his thumb and forefinger.

  ‘Take no notice,’ he said in a Donald Duck voice. ‘Goddamned nosebleed. Always happens when I get a cold.’

  ‘You shouldn’t take aspirins, then.’

  ‘Thins the blood, I know. But where were we?’ Engler was still addressing the drab grey ceiling. ‘Ah yes … You may well have spouted this crazy yarn a dozen times, and each time I’ve wondered whether I ought to submit you to a drugs test.’

  ‘Feel free. If you want to violate a few more of my rights, be my guest.’ Stern held out an imaginary tray on his upturned palms. ‘I don’t get much fun out of life these days, but taking you and your outfit to court would certainly make an amusing change.’

  ‘Please don’t upset yourself, Herr Stern.’

  Stern gave a start. Amazing, he thought. Engler’s hulking great companion can speak after all.