The Child (32 page)

‘Do I need a university degree to follow this?’ Borchert was asking.

‘Not at all. It’s really quite simple. Until recently scientists assumed that the human brain possessed a built-in filter. It’s capable of processing innumerable items of information simultaneously, but not all of them are important. At the moment, for instance, your main concern is to listen to me, follow what I’m saying and, at the same time, prevent yourself from slipping off your seat when the ambulance goes round a corner. But it’s totally unimportant to you what examiner’s number is stamped on this medicine chest or whether I’m wearing lace-up shoes.’

‘They’re slip-ons.’

‘Quite so. Your eye has been registering that all the time, but the filter in your brain sifted it out until I drew your attention to it. A good thing, too. Think what it would be like if you counted every leaf on every tree when you walked through a forest. If we were talking together in a café, you’d be unable to fade out the conversations going on at neighbouring tables.’

‘I’d probably wet myself.’

‘You may laugh, but you’re right. Without a filter your brain would be so busy processing an unimaginably vast influx of information, you’d probably be incapable of the simplest bodily functions.’

‘But you just said this filter theory is old hat.’

Simon felt an invisible force propelling him forwards, which meant that he was lying with his head pointing the way they were going and the ambulance had just pulled up.

‘Not exactly,’ said Müller, ‘but there’s a new and very plausible theory based on research into savantism.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Autism is the term you’re probably more familiar with.’

‘
Rain Man?
’

‘Yes, for example. Let me think of the best way of explaining it to a layman.’

Although his eyes were shut, Simon could clearly visualize the medical director thinking hard, the corners of his mouth turned down. It was all Simon could do not to grin.

‘All right, forget about the filter and think of a valve instead.’

‘OK.’

‘Thanks to the brain’s almost limitless ability to store data, there is much evidence to suggest that our first step is to store everything it registers, but only on a subconscious level, and that a biochemical valve prevents our long-term memory from becoming overloaded by releasing only the data we really need.’

‘So everything is filed away in a filing cabinet, but we have a tough job opening the drawers?’

‘That’s one way of putting it.’

‘But what’s all this got to do with Simon’s reincarnation?’

‘That’s quite simple. Ever fallen asleep in front of the television?’

‘All the time. I was watching some boring documentary on burning witches the other night. That did it.’

‘Good. You stored all the information but the valve has prevented you from actively remembering it. However, a specially trained therapist could stimulate your subconscious under hypnosis.’

‘And open the drawer.’

‘Precisely.’

Simon heard a click followed by a faint, irregular scratching sound not far from his right ear. He guessed that the medical director was giving Borchert a graphic illustration of what he meant by drawing a diagram with his ballpoint.

‘In the case of most regressions in which the patient is put into a trance or hypnotized, that’s exactly what happens. People believe their spirit is roaming around in a previous existence. In reality, they’re only recalling something they quite unwittingly stored in one of their brain’s deepest levels of consciousness. If you underwent a regression of that kind, Herr Borchert, it’s possible you would remember that television documentary on the Middle Ages and believe you were a witch being burned at the stake. You would even be able to quote authentic dates and places because you’d been told them by the programme’s presenter.’

‘But I didn’t see any pictures.’

‘Yes, you saw pictures in your own imagination, which are often more vivid than actual impressions. You probably know that from reading books.’

‘Hm, sure, from way back. And that’s called crypto-whatsit?’

Simon sensed that the ambulance was steadily putting on speed. It reminded him of the way Carina had driven to the ruined industrial estate where he’d met his lawyer for the first time.

Robert and Carina. Where are they?

‘Cryptomnesia. That’s the technical term for representing knowledge you’ve subconsciously absorbed from other people as your own. Are you still with me?’

‘Just about. But Simon didn’t fall asleep in front of the television, did he?’

Simon was tempted to blink. He screwed up his eyes. The harder the pressure on his eyeballs, the clearer the picture he’d just been dreaming of.

The door with the number on it. Number 17
.

‘No, not that,’ Müller replied, ‘but something similar. I think you’re aware that we discontinued his radiotherapy a month or so ago?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because of the side effects. He was placed in intensive care with a temperature of forty-one, suffering from pneumonia. Another patient was admitted at the same time.’

‘Frederik Losensky.’

‘Exactly. A sixty-seven-year-old journalist. Suspected minor heart attack. Chest pains but fully conscious. He was placed in intensive care for observation.’

‘Don’t tell me: he was in the bed next to Simon’s.’

‘That’s it. As you must have read in the press, Losensky was a serial murderer of paedophiles.’

‘The so-called Avenger.’

‘And a very God-fearing man. Even at that stage he was already in touch with the head of a child-trafficking ring. I think it was no accident that he suffered his heart attack shortly after receiving confirmation that the Dealer wanted to meet him face to face.’

‘And Losensky talked to Simon that night in intensive care?’

‘Not exactly. Simon wasn’t capable of holding a conversation. His temperature was so high, we didn’t expect him to survive. But for all that, or for that very reason, Losensky talked to him.’

‘Like a television presenter?’

‘In a manner of speaking. We suspect that Losensky regarded his proximity to a young, terminally ill child as a divine omen. He had burdened himself with guilt for the sake of children, after all, so he took advantage of that night in intensive care to confess. He told Simon of his murders one by one. Being their author, he could give a vivid and detailed description of them.’

‘He was deranged.’

Borchert coughed. Simon would have done likewise, but he didn’t want to draw attention to himself prematurely. Not before he had understood what the two grown-ups’ conversation had to do with the hotel room in the dream from which he had just emerged.

‘Deranged, yes, but we ourselves might be unbalanced if we’d seen the child cruelty Losensky had. Whatever, Simon unexpectedly recovered and events took their course. On his tenth birthday he was put into a hypnotic trance and underwent regression. It was as if Dr Tiefensee had pricked a certain area of his subconscious with a surgical needle. The memory blister burst and Simon remembered something that had found its way through the fog of his feverish dreams and into his brain a month earlier.’

‘Losensky’s confession.’

‘Logically enough, he didn’t know
how
he had acquired these memories. See what I mean?’

Borchert uttered a bark of laughter. ‘I reckon it’s like finding some cash in an old pair of bell-bottoms and being unable to remember ever wearing the ugly things.’

‘Good example. You find the money and spend it because you’re bound to assume it belongs to you. Simon found a recollection of these terrible murders in his head and was firmly convinced of his own responsibility for them. That’s why he passed the lie-detector test.’

‘But how could he know about the future?’

‘Losensky finished his confession by asking Simon … Here …’

Simon heard the dry rustle of newspaper.

‘It’s in every scandal sheet. They found Losensky’s diary in his bedside cupboard and printed extracts from it.’

Müller proceeded to read aloud:

‘“So I told Simon about my last great plan. I said I was going to carry it out on the
Brücke
at 6 a.m. on November 1st. ‘Simon,’ I said, ‘I’m going to shoot the evil one after he’s handed over the baby, but I’m not sure if I’m doing the right thing. That’s why I’m asking one last favour of you. Very soon, when you enter the presence—’”

‘“—of our Creator, tell him I killed them all with a pure heart.”’

To Müller’s and Borchert’s astonishment, Simon had opened his eyes and completed the last few words of Losensky’s confession.

‘“Ask him if I’m doing wrong. If I am, he must send me a sign and I’ll stop at once.”’

‘You’re awake.’

‘Yes, I have been for quite a while,’ Simon admitted. He cleared his throat, looking sheepish.

Borchert bent over him. ‘So it’s true?’

‘I couldn’t understand everything you’ve been saying, but I can remember the voice. It sounded very … very kind, somehow.’

The ambulance was slowing. Simon made a feeble attempt to sit up.

‘So I didn’t do anything bad?’

‘No, not at all.’ Borchert and Müller spoke almost simultaneously.

‘I didn’t kill anyone?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘But why aren’t Robert and Carina here?’

‘The thing is …’ Müller rested his long, warm fingers on Simon’s forehead. ‘You’ve spent most of the last three days asleep.’

‘And during that time,’ Borchert added, ‘certain things have, well … happened.’

‘Like what?’ Simon was puzzled. The two grown-ups sounded odd, as if they were keeping something from him.

‘Did I do something wrong? Don’t Robert and Carina like me any more?’

‘Nonsense. Don’t even think it.’

‘Can you really not remember anything?’ asked Borchert.

Simon shook his head. He had woken up numerous times in the last few nights, but only briefly and always on his own.

‘No. What’s wrong?’

The sun seemed suddenly to go down behind the vehicle’s frosted glass windows, and the hollow sound of its diesel engine reminded Simon unpleasantly of the moment when the ugly woman drove her car into the underground garage.

‘We’re there,’ called a voice from the front of the ambulance. Someone got out.

‘Where are Robert and Carina?’ Simon asked again. The rear doors opened.

‘Well,’ said Professor Müller, taking him gently by the hand, ‘I think you’d better hear that from someone else.’

Skewed and devoid of a soundtrack, the black-and-white shots were of cheapest home video quality. The car’s headlights were dazzling the camera, which lent them a resemblance to overexposed ultrasound pictures.

‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ the district attorney had quipped when shown the tape for the first time. Brandmann himself had taken a while to make out the figures of the two men standing in front of the car.

‘There, you can see Losensky draw his gun.’ He cleared his throat and tapped the relevant spot on the screen with the edge of a throwaway lighter.

‘You’re in the light.’

‘Oh, sorry.’ Brandmann stepped out of the projector’s beam. ‘There, look: the old man seems to be hesitating. Now he raises the gun a little, and: bang!’

The muzzle flash left a bright yellow streak on the screen. As if struck by a wrecking ball, Stern went over backwards in the lido car park, hitting his head, and lay motionless.

‘Engler filmed this himself. His camera was lying on the parcel shelf of the car he was hiding in.’

The inspector cleared his throat, as he did after almost every sentence he uttered. He refrained from asking if he could smoke and paused the tape briefly.

‘It would have made perfect visual evidence. An abortive child-trafficking transaction. A pair of scumbags eliminating each other. Engler was a video freak. We assume he simply left the camera running in order to be able to sell the tape as a snuff movie later on. Or for home use, who knows? Of course, we were never meant to see the shots that follow.’

‘Where are you taking me?’

The wheelchair’s footrest left a black mark on the wall as it was manhandled up the stairs from the underground garage. Simon looked over his shoulder at Borchert, who was hauling away at the handles and sweating. ‘You’re due for some rehab,’ he panted.

The ambulance driver, pushing from below, was also breathing somewhat faster as they neared the top.

‘What sort of rehab?’

‘Special treatment for specially difficult cases like you.’

‘But where are we?’

They had reached the top step. Simon looked down at Professor Müller, who was still standing at the foot of the stairs.

‘A private clinic,’ Müller said with a smile.

‘Without a lift? Funny sort of clinic, isn’t it?’

‘You’d best take a look round yourself. Wheeee!’

Simon couldn’t help giggling. All at once it felt like being in a fairground dodgem car. Borchert propelled him violently forwards, then backwards, then spun him on the spot like a top.

‘Please stop,’ he cried between gusts of laughter, but Borchert spun him twice more before pushing him out of the stairwell and along a passage with bare walls.

‘I feel sick,’ he groaned. The wheelchair came to rest at last, unlike the images whirling before his eyes. The faces of Borchert, Müller and the ambulance driver gradually stopped revolving around him.

‘What … what’s
this
?’

Experimentally, Simon felt his head. He always removed his wig and deposited it on his bedside table at night, but no, he wasn’t dreaming. He could distinctly feel the wig beneath his tingling fingers. So the whole scene couldn’t be a dream, much as it looked like one.

‘Well, what do you think?’

Simon’s look of mute amazement was answer enough. Very slowly, as if he’d just taken his medication, he folded up the white hospital blanket on his lap and draped it over the armrest.

He couldn’t have explained why he did this. Perhaps it was just to occupy his trembling hands before the flood of glorious impressions totally paralysed him. Then his face broke into an irrepressible smile and the leaden armour that had seemed to encase his limbs fell away.