The Child (33 page)

He turned, hesitated and scanned his companions’ faces with an unspoken question in his eyes. They smiled at him encouragingly. Borchert, whose own eyes were strangely moist, was grinning even more broadly than the other two. So Simon stood up and took two paces into the room, which seemed incredibly spacious. Although there was so much else to discover, he couldn’t detach his gaze from the palm trees flanking the doorway. He shut his eyes, afraid that the mirage would have disappeared when he reopened them. But a moment later everything was still there: the sandy beach; the bamboo hut, brown as sugar cane; the ceaseless, muffled roar of the surf; and, a little way off, the smiling young woman with flowers in her hair.

‘Hello Simon,’ said Carina, coming towards him slowly.

He was pervaded from within by a pleasurable sensation of warmth.

‘May I?’ he asked shyly, wondering why his voice sounded so different. And, as the men broke into laughter and applause, he planted one bare foot awkwardly on the creamy white sand, like a young puppy.

Brandmann pressed ‘Play’ again and the frozen image lurched into motion. On the screen, Losensky was overpowered by Engler, who abruptly turned his head.

‘This is the moment when Carina Freitag enters the equation,’ Brandmann explained. ‘Not that she ever appears on camera. Her gun wasn’t loaded, unfortunately.’

‘Or fortunately.’

‘Yes. Depends which way you look at it.’

The screen showed Engler raising his automatic and aiming at an invisible Carina. Then, from behind him, came a muzzle flash. The bullet hit him squarely in the back of the head.

‘Yes,’ said Stern, ‘that’s the way it was.’ He removed his little finger from the cigarette burn in the worn leather sofa and struggled to his feet. Then he started humming.

‘Abba, eh?’ Brandmann smiled. ‘I honestly believe Losensky interpreted it as a divine omen and fired a warning shot in the air when he heard you hum “Money, Money, Money”.’

‘That’s pretty much what I was gambling on. It was only fright that sent me over backwards, not a bullet. I realized I wasn’t hurt, so I knew I mustn’t try to break my fall or he’d know I was still alive. When you come down to it, I beat Engler at his own game. He tricked me by playing dead and it worked for me too. Mind you, it did get me these.’

He pointed to his flesh-coloured cervical collar and the bandage around his head. Although concussed, he had managed to worm his way across the car park and reach the revolver Engler had kicked out of Losensky’s hand. However, if Carina’s intervention hadn’t gained him a few vital seconds, he wouldn’t have had time to raise the gun, take aim and fire.

Stern limped over to the special investigator.

‘I thought you were my enemy all the time, that’s why I confided in your partner instead of you.’

‘That’s understandable.’ Brandmann cleared his throat for the twentieth time at least and flicked the flint wheel of his lighter with a thumb. ‘But Engler wasn’t my partner. Officially I’m a criminal profiler employed by the Federal Police Bureau, but that’s just camouflage. I really work for Internal Affairs. Engler had long been suspected of involvement in criminal activities. There were indications that he owned a clutch of holiday homes in Mallorca and other assets unaffordable on his salary, but no one had guessed the full extent of his activities, least of all me.’

Brandmann’s reproachful expression was presumably aimed at himself.

‘So you weren’t supposed to be investigating my case at all?’

The inspector shook his massive head.

‘Not from the very first, no. We didn’t believe there was any connection between Engler’s corruption and Simon’s dead bodies.’ He cleared his throat and licked his dry lips. ‘Our strategy was to make him nervous by means of my clumsily intrusive interference in his work. If we exerted sufficient pressure and put him off his stroke, we hoped he’d get careless – send an unencrypted email or use an insecure mobile number. Anything that would lead us to his sources of income. But when the Simon Sachs case became more and more convoluted, the chief superintendent thought it wouldn’t do any harm to bring in a man of my experience. So I helped the team out a bit – organized Simon’s lie-detector test, collected witnesses’ statements and assisted Engler in his scene-of-crime work.’

‘And gave Picasso your phone number?’

‘Yes. Your father was given it too, by the way. The two of them were to call me as soon as they spotted anything suspicious. Picasso was neutralized before he could see that the police guard on Simon’s room had been withdrawn. We already know who slipped an overdose of rohypnol into his coffee, by the way.’

Stern raised his eyebrows.

‘The police guard himself, an accomplice of Engler’s. According to his statement, Herr Stern, you overpowered him. Too bad he didn’t know of Engler’s death at the time he was interviewed.’ Brandmann couldn’t hide a smile. ‘The whole thing was meticulously planned. I reckon Engler thought he was fireproof after all those years of leading a double life. He lured you, Carina, Simon and even his own prospective murderer to the lido car park – right under the eyes of the police.’

‘Where were you all the time?’ Stern’s question sounded rather more abrupt than he intended. ‘If it was your job to keep an eye on Engler, why didn’t you get wind of his last major operation?’

Brandmann cleared his throat and made an apologetic gesture.

‘Chief Superintendent Hertzlich withdrew me when the situation escalated. I was only there to investigate financial irregularities, as I told you. From that time on, my work was temporarily suspended so as not to interfere with further investigations. I was already packing my bags.’

‘And now? What happens now? What about Engler’s associates? Somebody must have been helping him, surely?’

Brandmann gave an affirmative grunt after each question, his Adam’s apple jerking up and down.

‘Yes, worse luck. Losensky had considerably thinned the ranks of his psychopathic associates in recent years, but Engler was always able to replace them in short order. As head of the murder squad he was well-placed, after all. Nevertheless, we’ve confiscated a mass of material that should help to smash the remainder of his gang. Hard disks, files, tapes, DVDs – not forgetting Engler’s car. The boot was crammed with the latest video technology …’

Stern was reminded of how Engler had filmed himself and Brandmann at the animal cemetery. He had thought the pictures were live, but they’d merely been played after the event. A cheap trick like the performance at Tiefensee’s practice.

‘The only nice thing we found when we searched Engler’s home was his dog. Charlie the Labrador will be living with me from now on.’ Brandmann chuckled.

‘Didn’t you discover anything else?’ Stern asked hesitantly.

‘Not what you’re alluding to, no. To be honest, I wouldn’t get your hopes up too much in that respect.’

Stern’s heart raced. At the same time, the left-hand side of his body went numb as if someone had sprayed it with coolant from the inside. He had almost been expecting the news, but having his worst fears confirmed at first hand was something else.

‘We’re still evaluating the evidence, but so far we haven’t found anything that points to your son. No documents, no photos or films of him, either as an infant or more recently. As for the baby depository theory …’ Brandmann ahemmed. To judge by his husky voice, he really did have a lump in his throat. ‘Well, we’re naturally following up that lead and checking hospitals nationwide to see if such an eventuality might be possible. To date, however, we haven’t turned up anything that would corroborate what Engler told you.’

Naturally
.

Stern put all his weight on his right-hand crutch and drove it into the cellar’s concrete floor as hard as he could. With his free hand he felt for the crumpled envelope in his hip pocket. Engler’s parting gift to him had been a photo of the ten-year-old boy in the act of blowing out his birthday candles. Written across the cake in capital letters were the words APRIL FOOL!

So he’d been hoodwinked on that score too. He blinked as if something had flown into his eye. It might sometime transpire how Engler had got hold of the CCTV footage and managed to manipulate it so convincingly. It might even prove possible to find the birthday child whose features had been modified to resemble his own with the aid of some kind of ultra-modern picture-processing software. The boy’s whole figure might be a bogus, computer-generated illusion.

Stern relaxed his furious grip on the photo when he heard the blood roaring in his ears. None of this altered the fact that the video of that ten-year-old boy had been simply a cheap trick. Felix was dead and always had been. He was glad he’d never shared his irrational hopes with Sophie.

‘We shall follow up every possible lead and check to see if your son—’ Brandmann broke off and stared at the ceiling. Muffled reggae music was drifting down into the cellar from upstairs.

‘What’s that?’ he asked in surprise.

‘That? That’s our cue.’

Stern hobbled to the door.

‘Thanks a lot for showing me the tape, but I’m afraid I must now ask you to remove your shoes.’

‘Why on earth?’ Brandmann looked as if Stern had tipped a glass of iced water over his crotch.

Stern opened the door and the Caribbean strains increased in volume.

‘Because that concludes the official part of the proceedings and I want to keep a longstanding promise.’

‘There you are!’

Laughing, Simon plodded towards Stern across the man-made beach. A dozen operatives from an events agency had spent the previous night spreading fine sand all over the living-room floor. That done, the walls were quickly decorated with tropical motifs and a host of artificial palm trees, banana fronds and torches distributed around the dunes. Even the hearth was filled with driftwood and now resembled a campfire
à la
Robinson Crusoe. What really put the finishing touch to the island scenery, however, was a genuine bamboo beach bar. Installed behind it, Andi Borchert was busy mixing non-alcoholic cocktails.

Stern experienced a sudden urge to run away, to head in the direction his dark thoughts were trying to propel him – to go anywhere, as long as it was away from this place he no longer recognized as his home. Not because of the coral sand and the palm trees, but because it was filled with sounds he had banished from it for years: laughter, music, happy voices. Looking around, he saw Simon, Carina, Borchert, Brandmann, Professor Müller – even his father. Familiar faces all, and all belonging to people whom he himself had invited but now found somehow disconnected from.

And then, as Simon drew nearer and his urge to flee became almost irresistible, a change came over him. It was as if the boy were carrying an invisible torch that lit up his surroundings. Stern realized only now how much he had missed him.

When Simon was standing in front of him at last, smiling with a sincerity of which most grown-ups are incapable, he understood for the first time why Carina had summoned him to that derelict industrial estate. The boy had never really needed his help. It was the other way round.

‘Thank you so much,’ Simon said, and his laughter momentarily silenced the nagging questions in Stern’s mind.

‘Thanks, this is really cool!’

At the touch of his soft hand, Stern had a vague feeling that the answers he’d been seeking in the last few days weren’t crucial at all. As the boy led him to the beach bar, he saw for the first time what his open but unseeing eyes had ignored until now: Simon, Carina, the twins, himself. They had all survived. No longer tormented by inexplicable, murderous fantasies, the boy at his side could laugh, eat an ice, dance the lambada and enjoy this moment, even though the thing running riot in his head was far more destructive than any bad thoughts.

If he can do it, so – perhaps – can I
, Stern told himself.
Not for ever, not for long, but maybe for today. For now. For this moment
.

Leaning against the bar, he nodded first at Borchert and then at Carina, pleased that his friends understood him without the need for words – and that they treated him to one of the ices he’d promised Simon.

The party went on for two hours or more. They lit the campfire, improvised a beach barbecue, and ended by dancing. Once the excitement had passed its zenith and subsided a little, Stern joined Simon and Carina, who abruptly fell silent when he sat down beside them on the sand.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘what have you been talking about behind my back?’

‘Nothing,’ Simon replied with a mischievous grin. ‘It was just that I couldn’t believe this is really your house.’

‘Yes, Carina’s right for once.’

‘You actually live here?’

‘When I don’t have to sleep in a camper van, yes.’

Stern smiled at Carina, who smiled back just as broadly.

‘But where’s all your furniture?’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ Carina said with a laugh. She knew only too well that Stern’s home had never been more comfortably furnished than it was right now. She got up and went over to the bar for something to drink. Stern watched her go, his eyes lingering on the dainty little footprints she left behind in the soft sand.

‘Listen,’ he said to Simon, who had stretched out on the sand beside him and was gazing up at the net filled with genuine coconuts that had been suspended there in place of a chandelier. ‘Professor Müller just told me he may try radiotherapy again. Those CT scan pictures of the brain can be deceptive sometimes. Tomorrow he wants to check how far the tumour really has grown into the other half of your brain, and then—’

He broke off.

‘Simon?’

‘Yes?’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I … I don’t know.’

Simon had sat up and was staring at his left foot. He looked as dismayed as Stern himself.

‘Carina?’ Stern called, getting to his feet. ‘Don’t worry, it’s only a touch of epilepsy,’ he said, more to himself than the boy. The tremor in Simon’s foot had transmitted itself to his leg, but it looked different from the twitching Stern had witnessed before. Although it hadn’t yet spread to his body, it looked considerably more ominous.