The Child (9 page)

‘That’s why I left before the police turned up, but it’s only a matter of time before they discover it was me who found the body. I’ve only a short head start, but I want to make the most of it.’

‘To do what?’

Stern drew a deep breath before he replied, and Carina thought she detected a hint of mistrust in his voice as she opened the door to Room 217.

‘I’ve another appointment first. With a friend of yours.’

Carina would normally have asked at once what he meant, but she couldn’t find the words. She knew Simon always watched a repeat of his favourite crime series about now. But the television was burbling away on its own.

His bed was empty.

‘So you want to interrogate him?’

Professor H. J. Müller scrawled his almost illegible signature on a letter to a fellow neurologist, the medical director of a hospital in Mainz, and closed the folder. Then he picked up a silver paperknife and removed a piece of bluish fluff from under his thumbnail.

‘
Interrogate
is definitely the wrong word to use in this context.’ The policeman sitting opposite him cleared his throat. ‘We merely want to ask him a few questions.’

Pull the other one
, thought Müller, eyeing the man who had introduced himself as Inspector Brandmann. What he was proposing would hardly be a normal question and answer session.

‘I really don’t know if I can sanction such a procedure. Is it legally permissible?’

‘Yes, of course.’

Really?
Müller could hardly believe it didn’t require special authorization by the chief of police or, at the very least, a public prosecutor.

‘Where’s your colleague got to?’ Müller consulted the desk diary in front of him. ‘My secretary told me to expect a Herr Dengler.’

‘Engler,’ Brandmann amended. ‘My colleague sends his apologies. He’s detained at another crime scene – one that appears to be directly connected to the present case.’

‘I see.’ The corners of the medical director’s mouth turned down as they always did when he was examining someone. For a brief moment the overweight man in the visitor’s chair in front of his desk had ceased to be a policeman and become a patient. One whom he would seriously advise to diet and undergo a thyroid examination, to judge by the way his Adam’s apple protruded from his throat.

Müller shook his head and replaced the paperknife on his prescription pad.

‘No. My answer is no. I don’t want to subject the patient to unnecessary stress. I presume you’re familiar with his diagnosis?’ Müller folded his slender hands. ‘Simon Sachs is suffering from an S-PNET, a supratentorial primitive neuroectodermal tumour of the cerebrum. This is gradually spreading from the right-hand to the left-hand hemisphere of the brain. In other words, it has already crossed the corpus callosum. Having carried out the biopsy myself after opening the skull, I found the tumour to be inoperable.’

The medical director did his best to smile amiably.

‘Or let me put it in language more intelligible to a layman like yourself: Simon is gravely ill.’

‘Quite,’ said Brandmann. ‘That’s why we want to carry out this test as soon as possible. It will spare him a lot of onerous questioning and us a great deal of time. I was told the boy almost died of pneumonia. Is that correct?’

Aha, so that’s the way the wind blows
.

The boy was their most important witness. They were anxious to question him while they still could. After chemo and radiotherapy had exposed Simon to a potentially fatal bout of pneumonia, Müller had gone against his colleagues’ advice and decided to discontinue aggressive treatment – a measure that, although it might not have prolonged his life, had certainly mitigated his suffering.

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘At present Simon is only taking cortisone for swelling of the brain and carbamazepine as an anticonvulsant. I’ve booked him for a further examination that will help me to decide whether we should recommence radiotherapy after all. However, I fear his prospects are extremely poor.’

The neurologist got up from his desk and went over to a massive lectern near the window.

‘How far have you got with your inquiries? Do you know the identity of the murdered man you found with Simon’s assistance?’

‘Let me put it this way …’ Brandmann twisted his neck like a tortoise as he turned his head in the professor’s direction. ‘If Simon Sachs really has been reincarnated, he did us a great favour in his former life.’

‘The dead man was a criminal, you mean?’

‘Yes, a regular villain named Harald Zucker. He disappeared without trace fifteen years ago. Interpol long suspected him of involvement in some barbaric crimes in South America, but it seems he didn’t skip the country after all.’

‘Zucker, eh?’ Müller leafed absently through some handwritten lecture notes on his reading stand.

There was a knock and the door opened before he could say ‘Come in’. The first to enter was the male nurse everyone in the hospital called Picasso, although Müller could detect nothing artistic about his uncouth exterior. Picasso’s right hand rested on the shoulder of a little boy, and was gently propelling him into the office.

‘Hello Simon.’ Brandmann heaved his bulk out of the visitor’s chair and greeted the boy with the familiarity of an old acquaintance. Simon just nodded shyly. He was wearing pale-blue jeans with patch pockets, a cord jacket and a pair of brand-new white trainers. The headphones of an MP3 player dangled from his neck.

Müller came out from behind his lectern. ‘How are you feeling today?’

The boy looked quite well, but that could have been down to his wig, which tended to distract attention from his pallor.

‘Pretty good. A bit tired, that’s all.’

‘Fine.’ While speaking to Simon, Müller drew himself up in an attempt to offset the inspector’s obvious height advantage. ‘This gentleman is from the police. He would like to ask you some questions about what happened the day before yesterday. To be more precise, he wants to carry out a test on you, and I’m not sure if I should ask you to undergo it.’

‘What sort of test?’

Brandmann cleared his throat and took great care to give the boy a disarming smile.

‘Simon, do you know what a lie detector is?’

The Hackescher Markt district of Berlin seldom had a parking space when you needed one, so Borchert simply double-parked his four-wheel drive when they reached their destination in Rosenthaler Strasse. Stern had spent the drive from Moabit to the city centre making various phone calls, among them one to Information. This had yielded several entries for Dr Johann Tiefensee. To his surprise, Tiefensee proved to be a psychiatrist as well as a psychologist; in other words, a qualified medical man. He was even, it seemed, a lecturer in medical hypnosis at Humboldt University.

‘Just a moment, Robert.’

Stern, in the act of undoing his seat belt, felt Borchert’s hand close on his wrist like a vice.

‘You may be able to kid that girl Carina, but I’m not buying it.’

Stern tried to free his hand but failed. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Why are you playing the gravedigger? The defence lawyer I know only sets foot outside his house for a fee, he certainly doesn’t work for mentally disturbed children. No, let me have my say.’

Stern’s arm had gone numb, Borchert was squeezing his wrist so hard. He seemed quite unaware of the drivers tooting him as they drove past.

‘I’m not an idiot. Lawyers like you don’t skedaddle from the police for no reason, so tell me why we didn’t wait at the haulage depot.’

‘I didn’t want any aggro with Engler, that’s all.’

‘Bullshit. You’ll get aggro in spades if old Giesbach spills the beans. So what’s going on?’

Stern looked through the tinted window on the passenger side. The street was busy, the wide pavement teeming with people. It was only late October, but the window of the Café an der Ecke was already sporting a Santa Claus.

‘You’re right,’ he said with a sigh. Allowed to move his hand at last, he reached inside his jacket. Borchert raised his eyebrows when the DVD was held under his nose. ‘This was among my mail yesterday.’

‘What’s on it?’

In lieu of a reply, Stern inserted the disc in the CD player and the little satnav screen lit up.

‘See for yourself.’

He shut his eyes and waited for the sinister voice to ooze from the car’s speakers like poison gas. Instead all he heard was a faint hiss.

‘Is this your idea of a joke, Robert?’

Mystified, Stern opened his eyes and peered at the screen, which was flecked with red.

‘I don’t understand.’ He pressed a button, hurriedly withdrew the DVD from the player and examined it for scratches from every angle. ‘It must have got damaged. It was all there last night.’

Or were those signs of wear not an optical illusion after all?

‘What was all there?’ Borchert asked.

‘Everything. The disguised voice, the neonatal ward …’ Stern felt feverish, overwhelmed by a rising tide of panic. ‘The shots of Felix’s death. And that child who looked as if he could be my son.’

Seeing the incomprehension on Andi Borchert’s face, he began at the beginning and told him, as best he could, about the shocking images that had confronted him last night.

‘That’s why I can’t go to the police. He said he’d kill the twins, so I’ll have to find out on my own how Simon knows about the murders. I’ve got four days left,’ Stern concluded, feeling thoroughly ridiculous all of a sudden. If anyone had tried to sell him such a fantastic yarn two days ago, he would have laughed them to scorn and sent them off with an earful.

Borchert took the DVD from him without comment and turned on the interior light. Thanks to the perpetual drizzle, it was as misty as a Turkish bath outside.

‘I believe you,’ he said at length, handing back the silver disc.

’Really?’

‘I mean, I believe you when you say there was something on it last night. This thing is an EZ-D.’

‘A what?’

‘A throw-away DVD. Only a prototype existed when I was in the film business. It’s got a special polycarbonate coating that reacts to oxygen. Take it out of the recorder after playing it, and light and oxygen render it useless. It was really developed for video libraries, so people didn’t have to return a film after renting it.’

‘OK, that proves it. But what am I supposed to do with a throw-away DVD? There was information on it I’m not meant to pass on.’

‘Robert, don’t get me wrong, but …’ Borchert scratched his hairless head. ‘First we find that stiff and now you’re being blackmailed by some unknown man who claims your son is still alive. Could this voice exist only in your head?’

Looking at Borchert’s flushed cheeks, Stern realized that the question was fully justified.

Perhaps Felix’s death really had robbed him of his reason ten years after the event. That must be it. Every objective fact clearly indicated that Felix was dead, yet the cruel voice on the DVD and Simon’s memories had, with merciless precision, revealed something deep inside him – something he himself had never dreamed about until now: a definite receptivity to supernatural phenomena. He was shocked to admit that the absence of any rational explanation didn’t matter to him as long as some higher power enabled him to see his son again. Borchert was right.

He was genuinely on the verge of cracking up. He put his hand on Borchert’s shoulder, his eyes filling with tears.

‘Know something? I only held him in my arms three times.’ Stern couldn’t have explained why he’d said that. ‘And the last time he was dead.’

The words came pouring out, beyond his control.

‘Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, even now, with the smell of him in my nostrils. Felix’s body was cold by the time Sophie finally let go of him, but he still smelled the way he did the morning I held him for the first time and rubbed him with baby lotion.’

‘And now you seriously want to find out if he …’

Stern could tell how hard Borchert found it to get the word out.

‘… if he’s been
reincarnated
?’

‘Yes. No.’ Stern sniffed. ’I don’t know, Andi, but I’ve got to admit I can’t find a rational explanation for the resemblance.’

He told Borchert about the birthmark on the boy blowing out the candles on his birthday cake.

‘It’s just where Felix had one. On the shoulder, and that’s very rare. They’re mostly on the face or neck. It’s much bigger now, of course, but the weirdest thing is its shape. It looks like a boot.’

‘And Felix …’ Borchert hesitated. ‘I mean, the baby you buried. Did he also have a birthmark like that?’

‘Yes, I saw it myself. Before he died and afterwards.’

Stern closed his eyes as if hoping to shut out the memories. What he failed to shut out were the neonatal ward and the metal autopsy table on which his son was lying.

‘I’m sorry.’ Nervously, he ran a hand over his brow. After a second’s hesitation he got out of the car. ‘I’ll quite understand if you don’t believe me and want nothing more to do with this.’

He slammed the passenger door and made for the entrance to the building without waiting for Borchert to reply.

A brief glance at the discreet nameplate on the wrought-iron gate told him that he’d come to the right address. He was about to ring the bell when he noticed the chock that prevented the gate from closing. Uncertain whether he would need a key for the lift, a feature of many Berlin apartment houses, he set off up the stairs. It took him a while to reach the top floor. He leaned against the worn banisters, breathing hard, then froze in alarm. It wasn’t his poor condition that concerned him, but the door to Dr Tiefensee’s practice.

It was wide open.

‘Feeling all right, Simon?’ Professor Müller asked, keeping the intercom’s talk button depressed. He looked through the plate glass window into the adjoining room, where the snow-white MRI scanner was located. Clad only in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, Simon was lying inside the tube they’d slid him into, like a loaf ready for baking. This was the fifth time in two years he’d had to undergo the half-hour procedure. Unfortunately, the previous magnetic resonance shots of his brain had revealed nothing but a rampant growth of cells inside the skull. Today, for a change, his tumour would not be the object of investigation.