The Child (4 page)

‘OK, perhaps I would have got him to talk in the end if that’s what we’d been aiming at. All I ask myself is, what’s the point of all this?’

‘Angry men make mistakes,’ said Hertzlich. ‘Besides, we needed Stern to experience mood swings in order to evaluate his optical reflexes.’

Optical reflex analysis. Eye-tracking. Pupillometry
. New-fangled crap, all of it. For the past week, the bleak interview room had been wired for experimental purposes. One of three concealed cameras was focused on the faces of those being questioned. In theory, guilty parties gave themselves away by increased blinking, pupillary contractions and changes in angle of vision. In practice, Engler accepted that these were significant but believed that an experienced interrogator had no need of any technological refinements to tell when someone was lying.

‘We can only pray that Stern never discovers we were filming him secretly.’ Engler pointed to the wall behind him. ‘He’s one of the ablest lawyers in the city.’

‘And a potential murderer,’ said Hertzlich.

‘You don’t believe that yourself.’ Engler swallowed, trying briefly to remember if there was a late-night chemist on his route home. He badly needed some kind of spray to anaesthetize his throat. ‘The man’s got an IQ higher than Mount Everest. He wouldn’t be stupid enough to lead us to the remains of a man he’d murdered himself.’

‘It could be a clever ploy.’

The chief superintendent raised his heavy tinted glasses a few centimetres and massaged the marks they’d left on the bridge of his shiny nose. Engler couldn’t recall ever having looked straight into his boss’s eyes. It was rumoured in the building that he even went to bed in those monstrous shades.

‘Or perhaps he’s simply flipped,’ Hertzlich mused aloud in Brandmann’s direction. ‘At all events, his story of the reincarnated boy doesn’t sound very kosher to me.’

‘He does make an emotionally unstable impression,’ the psychological profiler agreed.

Engler rolled his eyes. ’I’ll say it again: we’re wasting our time on the wrong man.’

Hertzlich turned to him with an air of surprise. ‘I thought you disliked him.’

‘I do. Stern may be an arsehole, but he’s no murderer.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘Twenty-three years’ experience. I’ve got a nose for these things.’

‘And we can all see and hear how well it’s functioning.’

Hertzlich was the only one who laughed at his little joke, and Engler had to concede that Brandmann hadn’t yet crawled all the way up the chief superintendent’s fundamental orifice. He did not, unfortunately, get to explain why he considered Robert Stern incapable of slaughtering a man with an axe because he was suddenly afflicted with another torrential nosebleed. His paper handkerchief turned crimson and he was once more compelled to tilt his head back.

‘Oh not again …’

Hertzlich eyed him suspiciously. ‘Earlier on I thought these nosebleeds were part of the show. Are you up to heading this investigation?’

‘Yes, yes, it’s only a slight cold. No problem.’

Engler tore two clean strips off his handkerchief, rolled them into balls and plugged his nostrils with them.

‘I’m fine.’

‘Excellent. Then round up your team and come to my office in ten minutes.’

Engler glanced at the clock and groaned inwardly. It was a quarter to eleven. Quite apart from his own state of health, Charlie urgently needed his walkies. The poor dog had been shut up in his cramped little flat for over ten hours.

‘Don’t look like that, Engler, it won’t take long. Read the file, then you’ll understand why I want you to keep after Stern and give him a hard time.’

Engler took the folder from the table.

‘Why?’ he called after Hertzlich, who was just leaving the interview room. ‘What’s in it?

‘The name of an old acquaintance.’

Hertzlich turned.

‘We know who the dead man is.’

Stern was greeted by a mournful voice on the answerphone in his hall when he came home shortly after 11 p.m. the following night. Carina had tried to contact him several times in the previous twenty-four hours but had left only one message. She had also been interviewed, and that morning the hospital’s medical director had suspended her until further notice.

‘Simon is doing well. He’s asking for you. But I’m afraid you now have two clients in need of a lawyer,’ she said in a weary attempt to be humorous. ‘Can they really charge me with kidnapping because I took Simon out of the hospital?’ She gave a nervous laugh before hanging up.

Stern pressed 7 twice to delete the message. He would call her back tomorrow, Saturday, if at all. He really wanted nothing more to do with the whole business. He had enough on his plate already.

Clamping the mail under his arm, he went into the living room without removing his overcoat. He surveyed the room after turning on the overhead light. It looked as if a well-organized gang of thieves had turned up with a van and driven off with all the decent furniture and anything of value. He stood there without moving for a moment longer, then turned off the light again. Its unforgiving glare reminded him of the bleak room in which Engler and Brandmann had questioned him last night. After all that had happened in the past week, the sight of his neglected home was more tolerable in semi-darkness.

Stern’s footsteps on the cherrywood parquet re-echoed from the bare walls as he made his way over to the sofa past an overturned chair and a desiccated pot plant. No bookshelves or curtains, cupboards or carpets, just an unshaded silver-grey lamp standing askew beside the sofa. Even if it had been on, it wouldn’t have illuminated the cavernous room properly because three of its four bulbs were missing. What usually functioned as Stern’s light source was the decrepit old valve TV in front of the empty fireplace.

He sat down on the sofa, picked up the remote control and shut his eyes as the screen filled with snow and white noise.

Ten years
, he thought. He ran his hand over the bare expanse of rough leather beside him, feeling for the burn hole the sparkler had made at that New Year’s party. Sophie had been laughing so much she’d dropped it. Over ten years ago. She was two weeks late at the time.

Unlike him, Sophie had managed to escape from herself after Felix’s death by taking refuge in a second marriage. It had produced two children to date – twins. The little girls were surely the only reason why Sophie hadn’t drowned in her own depression.

Unlike me
.

Stern severed the skein of memory by opening his eyes again. He removed the cork from the neck of the half-empty bottle of red wine that had been languishing on the floor for days. It tasted horrible, but it fulfilled its function. He never expected visitors, so there was nothing in the fridge. Even if one of his colleagues did turn up unannounced, he wouldn’t let them in.

There was a good reason why he regularly employed a security firm to fit all his doors and windows with the latest burglar-proofing devices. He was well aware that the technicians thought him crazy because there was nothing worth stealing.

But he wasn’t afraid of burglars, only of observers: of people who might see through his carefully constructed façade of expensive suits, shiny cars and smart offices with a view of the Brandenburg Gate. If they did, they would discern the empty husk that was Robert Stern’s soul.

He took another swig from the bottle, clumsily spilling some wine on his white shirt. As he looked down wearily at the spreading stain, he was involuntarily reminded of the birthmark. Sophie had been the first to notice it on the baby’s shoulder when holding him in her arms, freshly bathed and denuded of the warm blanket in which he’d been wrapped immediately after his birth. They’d been worried at first that it might be a malignant skin condition, but the doctors had reassured them. ‘It looks like a map of Italy,’ said Sophie, laughing as she rubbed Felix with baby oil, and they’d made a solemn resolution to spend their first family holiday in Venice. In the event, they got no further than the woodland cemetery where the urn was buried.

Stern put the wine bottle down and went through his mail. Two flyers, a parking ticket and a statement from his bank. The most personal item was a DVD from his Internet library. He no longer patronized the video library at weekends now you could get films sent by post. He opened the cardboard envelope without looking at the title. He’d probably seen the film already. He made a point of ordering pictures that didn’t feature children and had a minimum of sex, so his selections were pretty limited.

Having inserted the DVD, he removed his jacket and tossed it carelessly on the floor before slumping back against the cushions. He was dog-tired, so he wouldn’t last more than a few minutes before falling asleep on the sofa as he so often did at weekends. Luckily there would be no one around to find him still there in the morning. No family, No friends. Not even a housekeeper.

He picked up the bottle again, pressed ‘Play’ and waited for the ridiculous, unfast-forwardable warning notice that threatened you with imprisonment if you illegally copied the ensuing film. Instead the image jumped several times like a badly exposed holiday video. Stern frowned and sat up. He had suddenly recognized the scene, and it jolted him out of his stupor. From one moment to the next, everything around him seemed to dissolve. He was unaware of the wine bottle escaping from his grasp and emptying the rest of its contents over his shirt. At a stroke every external stimulus had faded out. Only he and the television remained. Stern himself had changed, too. He was no longer looking at a television screen but through a dusty window into a room he’d never wanted to enter again in his life. When the camera zoomed in, he was afraid he’d lost his mind. A heartbeat later, he felt sure he had.

The greenish image of the neonatal ward freeze-framed just as the distorted voice uttered its opening words:

‘Do you believe in a life after death, Herr Stern?’

Although it was coming from the loudspeakers, the metallic voice possessed such weird immediacy that Stern was fleetingly tempted to turn round and see if its owner was standing just behind him, clothed in flesh and blood.

After a moment’s shocked immobility he slid off the soda and crawled towards the television on his hands and knees. Incredulous, he touched the electrostatically charged screen and ran his fingers over the digital time-and-date line like a blind man reading Braille.

But even without that information he would have been in no doubt as to when and where the film had been made: ten years ago, in the hospital where Felix had come rosy-cheeked into the world and left it only forty-eight hours later, blue-lipped and cold.

Stern’s fingers groped their way to the centre of the screen, where his newborn son was lying in a perspex cocoon surrounded by several other babies in cots.
And Felix was alive!
He was waving his puny little arms as if trying to touch the cloud mobile that Sophie and Robert Stern had made for him out of cotton-wool balls, long before his birth, and suspended above his cot.

‘Do you believe in the transmigration of souls? In reincarnation?’

Stern shrank away from the television set as though the ghost of his son had just addressed him personally. The blurred image of the infant in the pale-blue sleepsuit had monopolized his senses to such an extent he’d almost forgotten about the voice.

‘You have no idea what you’ve got yourself involved in, have you?’

He shook his head like a man in a trance, as if he could genuinely communicate with the anonymous speaker whose voice resembled that of a glottic cancer patient condemned to speak through a throat microphone.

‘Unfortunately, I cannot reveal my identity for reasons that will soon become apparent to you. That’s why I considered this the most sensible way of getting in touch. You’ve transformed your home into a fortress, Herr Stern. With one exception: your mailbox. I trust you won’t resent my having disrupted your Friday night ritual by substituting this DVD. Believe me, though, what you are about to see will prove far more gripping than the wild-life documentary you actually ordered.’

A tear detached itself from Stern’s eye as he continued to stare at Felix.

‘However, I must now ask you to concentrate with particular intensity.’

As the camera zoomed in on the baby’s face, Stern felt he’d been kicked in the stomach.

Who filmed this? And why?

An instant later he was beyond formulating any more questions in his mind. He wanted to turn away and dash to the bathroom – to bring up his meagre lunch and all his memories with it – but an invisible vice held him fast. So he was compelled to endure the sight of the grainy images that showed his son opening his eyes. Wide, staring and incredulous, they seemed to convey a presentiment that his tiny body would soon lose all its vital functions. Felix gasped for breath, started to tremble, looked as if he had choked on far too big a morsel, and suddenly turned blue.

At this point Stern couldn’t stop himself any longer. He vomited on the parquet floor. A few moments later, when he turned back and stared at the screen with one trembling hand over his mouth, it was all over. His son was gazing at the camera with eyes blank and lips parted. The whole of the neonatal ward was once more in shot: four cots with four occupants, but one of them unbearably still.

‘I’m very sorry. I realize that these last pictures of Felix must be very distressing for you.’

The grating voice was as sharp as a razor blade.

‘But it was unavoidable, Herr Stern. I’ve something important to tell you, and I want you to take me seriously. I assume I can now rely on having gained your full attention?’

Robert Stern felt he would never regain the ability to think clearly. It was a while before he grasped that the mist before his eyes came from the tears streaming down his cheeks. The merciless voice had evidently allowed for this.

Did it really happen? Did I really just witness the last few seconds of my son’s short life?

He felt like getting up, ripping the DVD from the player and hurling the television out of the window, but he was too traumatized to lift a finger. The only movement of which his body was still capable took place without his volition: his legs were trembling uncontrollably.