The Child (7 page)

‘I imagined a lovely beach,’ said Simon. ‘I was having a party with some friends, and we were all eating ices.’

‘What happened then?’

‘I got very tired. At some stage the doctor asked if I could see a big electrical switch.’

Simon’s eyelids were fluttering, and Stern was afraid he might pass out again, purely as a result of recounting his memories. But the boy hadn’t coughed yet, and he knew from Carina that, ever since his pneumonia, coughing had always preceded an epileptic fit or a spell of unconsciousness.

‘So I looked for a switch in my head. The kind you turn lights on and off with.’

‘Did you succeed?’

‘Yes, it took a while, but then I saw one. It was kind of spooky, because I had my eyes shut.’

Stern knew what was coming next. To manipulate patients, the therapist had to deactivate their consciousness. Switching off the mind with the aid of an imaginary light switch was a favourite method. After that, parapsychologists could talk a patient into believing things at their leisure. All that puzzled Stern was what motive Tiefensee could have had. Why Simon? Why a terminally ill boy with an inoperable tumour? And why hadn’t Carina taken all this in? She might be a little scatty and believe in supernatural phenomena, but she would never have permitted a child to be abused in this way, least of all one that was a patient in her care.

‘At first I couldn’t do it – I couldn’t keep the switch down,’ Simon went on quietly. ‘It kept clicking up again. It was funny, but Dr Tiefensee gave me some sticky tape.’

‘Really?’

‘No, not really. Only in my imagination. He told me to imagine taping the switch down, and it really worked. It stayed down and I got into a lift.’

Stern said nothing for fear of distracting the boy, because now came the regression proper: the descent into his subconscious.

‘Inside the lift was a brass plate with a lot of buttons on it. It was up to me which one I chose, so I pressed the one marked 11. There was a jerk and the lift set off. It went down a very long way. When the doors finally opened I got out and saw …’

… the world before I was born
, Stern amplified in his head. It surprised him when Simon completed the sentence quite differently.

‘… nothing. I couldn’t see a thing. Just total darkness.’

The dreamy look in Simon’s eyes had disappeared. He had a drink of his apple juice. As he replaced the carton on the tray on his bedside table, his T-shirt rode up. Stern froze inwardly. For an instant he had glimpsed an elongated birthmark just above the boy’s hip bone.

The scars of the reincarnated!
he thought involuntarily. This skin blemish bore no resemblance to those of Felix or the boy on the DVD, but it reminded him inescapably of the article on Ian Stevenson he had read that very morning. The late professor and senior psychiatrist at the University of Virginia was one of the few reincarnation researchers whose case studies were seriously discussed by reputable scientists. Stevenson had believed that moles and birthmarks were like spiritual maps indicating where people had been injured in previous lives. The Canadian parapsychologist had amassed hundreds of medical records and autopsy reports and found them to contain striking similarities to the skin defects of allegedly reincarnated children.

Stern strove to concentrate on what Simon was saying. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘How did you know about the murdered man’s body if you didn’t see it while you were with Dr Tiefensee?’

‘Well, I did see something, but not until I woke up. Carina said I’d been asleep for two hours. I remember how sad I felt. It was my birthday, and all at once it was nearly over. It was already dark outside.’

‘And these unpleasant memories came back to you when you woke up?’

‘Not right away. Only when I was sitting in the car and Carina asked me how it had gone. That was when I told her. About the pictures, I mean.’

‘What pictures?’

‘The ones in my head. I only see them very dimly. In the dark. It’s like when I’m dreaming just before I wake up. Know what I mean?’

‘Yes, maybe.’ Stern did know what the boy meant, but his own daydreams were nowhere near as morbid. Except when he thought of Felix.

Simon turned his head and stared thoughtfully out of the window. Stern thought at first that he had lost interest in their conversation and expected him to fish a computer game out of the bedside cabinet at any minute. But then he saw that the boy’s lips were moving silently. He was obviously searching for the right words to describe his impressions.

‘Once, back in the children’s home,’ he began quietly, ‘the light bulb in the cellar had to be changed. We were all scared of going down there, so we drew matches and I lost. It was really spooky. The bare bulb was hanging from the ceiling on a length of flex. It looked like a tennis ball, all yellow and furry with dust and cobwebs. And it made clicking noises like Jonas – that’s a friend of mine. He can crack his knuckles really loudly. It sounded just like that. The light went on and off, and each time it sounded the way Jonas does when he cracks his knuckles. Or used to until some grown-up told him he should stop because he’d wind up with gout and rheumatism.’

Stern asked no questions and simply let the boy run on. Looking down at his own hands, he saw that he’d unconsciously clasped them together like a man at prayer.

‘The bulb was flickering and clicking away when I got down to the cellar. On, off, on. Sometimes it was light for a little, then dark. But even when the light came on I couldn’t see much, the bulb was just too dirty. I knew, of course, that sheets and towels were hung up to dry on one side of the cellar, and on the other side were the baskets with our jeans and T-shirts in them. But the light was flickering even worse than I was trembling, and I was scared someone was hiding behind the sheets, ready to grab me. I was much younger then, and I nearly did it in my pants.’

Stern raised his eyebrows and nodded at the same time. For one thing because he could empathize with Simon’s fear; for another because he was beginning to see what the boy was getting at.

‘And is it like that now? With the pictures you see?’

‘Yes. When I remember myself in my previous life, it’s like that day at the children’s home. I’m back in the cellar and the dirty bulb is flickering.’

Click. Click
.

‘That’s why I only see outlines, shadows. Everything’s blurred … But the light seems to be getting brighter every night.’

‘You mean you can remember things better when you wake up?’

‘Yes. Like yesterday I began to wonder if I’d really killed the man at all. With the axe, I mean. But this morning it was quite clear again. Just like that number.’

Click
.

‘What number?’

‘The 6. It’s only painted on it.’

‘Painted on what?’

Click. Click
.

‘A door. A metal door. It’s near some water.’

Stern suddenly longed for something to drink. There was an unpleasant taste in his mouth and he wanted to rinse it away. That and the terrible presentiment Simon’s words were giving rise to.

‘What happened there?’ he asked without meaning to.

What happened behind the door numbered 6?

A man started whistling and footsteps went by in the passage outside, but Stern’s brain filtered out these acoustic distractions until only Simon’s voice remained. The voice that was describing the death throes of a man he claimed to have murdered twelve years ago.

Two years before he was born.

Stern fervently hoped that someone would interrupt them and spare him from having to listen to every last detail. For instance, the serrated knife with which the victim had managed to wound his assailant before he died. Roughly in the same part of his body as Simon’s milk-chocolate birthmark.

He looked desperately at the door, but it remained shut. No doctor or nurse interrupted Simon’s terrible story, which he recounted in an almost dispassionate tone. His big eyes were closed again.

‘Do you remember the address?’ Stern asked breathlessly when the boy had finished at last. He could scarcely hear himself speak, the blood was pounding so loudly in his ears.

‘I’m not sure. Yes, perhaps.’

Simon said only one more word, but it was enough to bring Stern’s whole body out in goose pimples. He knew the place. He had sometimes gone walking there. With Sophie. During her pregnancy.

‘No, I don’t have a search warrant. I’m not a policeman either.’

Stern wondered whether the yob with the unwashed hair and the ring in his nose had ever been to school. An expanse of pink gum showed beneath his short upper lip. That, combined with a very pronounced overbite, endowed him with the semblance of a permanent grin.

‘Then you can’t,’ Sly mumbled, propping his legs on the desk. He had proudly introduced himself by that ludicrous pseudonym a few minutes ago, when Stern entered the little office on the ground floor of the haulage company’s headquarters.

‘What do you want with Number 6 anyway? I don’t think we rent out the single-figure garages any more.’

Simon had preserved only a fragmentary recollection of the address back at the hospital, but his reference to Spree Garages had been quite enough. Stern knew the dilapidated warehouses beside the canal in the Alt-Moabit district. The headquarters of the long-established Berlin firm was a sandstone-coloured brick building overlooking the water. Just behind it were the garages used by some customers as storage space for furniture, electrical appliances and other junk. Trade wasn’t as good now that immigrant labourers were prepared to dispose of old washing machines for two euros fifty an hour, so the owners hadn’t troubled to renovate the place.

The grimy office stank of cigarette smoke and public lavatories, probably thanks to the air freshener Sly had suspended from the overhead light to save himself the trouble of airing the place regularly. No wonder the closed blinds were coated with mildew from window sill to ceiling. Stern couldn’t understand why anyone would have wanted to shut out the little light there was on such a dark and rainy autumn day.

He trotted out the story he’d come up with on the drive from the hospital. ‘I’m an executor in search of the heirs to what could be a substantial estate. We think Garage Number 6 may contain clues of potential use to us.’

While speaking he had opened his wallet and extracted two fifty-euro notes. Sly took his legs off the desk. His imbecilic grin widened.

‘I wouldn’t risk my job for a hundred smackers,’ he said with feigned self-righteousness.

‘You bet you would.’

Stern turned to look at the man who had just come panting into the office. He put his money away.

‘Christ, this place stinks like a Turkish brothel.’

The sweating, bald-headed newcomer looked like an ambulant Buddha. A thirty-two-inch widescreen TV would have fitted on Andreas Borchert’s back without overlapping his shoulders.

‘Who the fuck are you?’ Sly demanded, jumping to his feet. The grin had been wiped off his face like chalk off a blackboard.

‘Please don’t disturb yourself. You’re welcome to remain seated.’

Borchert unceremoniously thrust the man back on his chair and went over to a key board hanging on the wall beside a poster-sized street map of Berlin.

‘Which one is it, Robert?’

‘Number 6.’ Stern wondered if it had been wise to call his former client and enlist his help. He was familiar with Andi Borchert’s arbitrary problem-solving methods. Two years ago Borchert had been a producer of cheap ‘adult entertainment’, yucky hard-core porn that had made him a small fortune until the day when one of his ‘actresses’ was brutally raped on set. Everything pointed to Borchert’s guilt until Stern managed to convince the court otherwise. After his acquittal, Borchert had got off with a suspended sentence for seeking out the real culprit and beating him into a speechless pulp. Secured once again by Stern’s skilful courtroom tactics, this much-reduced penalty had unintentionally gained him Andi Borchert’s undying friendship.

‘Try calling the cops,’ Borchert growled in Sly’s direction as he took the relevant key from the board, ‘and you and I will go for a little ride together, understand?’

Stern couldn’t suppress a smile when his ex-client simply strode out of the office without waiting for a submissive nod from the clerk. He caught him up and trudged across the stretch of open ground that led to the garages.

‘OK, once more for the benefit of someone with no school-leaver’s certificate.’

Borchert didn’t seem to mind treading in a puddle every other step in his white boxing boots. His propensity to sweat at the least physical exertion had earned him several nicknames including ‘Mr Sumo’. Borchert knew them all, not that anyone had ever used them in his presence.

‘All I gathered on the phone was, you need help because a boy of ten has murdered a man.’

‘More than one, actually.’ Stern told him the incredible story as they made their way across the haulage company’s yard, speaking faster and faster the more sceptical his ex-client’s expression became. They paused for a moment beside a rusty skip. A black cat was just climbing into it.

‘What? Fifteen years ago in a previous life? You’re pulling my leg!’

‘You think I’d have asked for your help if I had any choice?’ Stern brushed his damp hair back and gestured to Borchert to accompany him to the garages.

‘Martin Engler has been on the case since I found that body two days ago. You know, the inspector who was after your blood.’

‘I remember the bastard.’

‘And he remembers how I wrecked his nice, open-and-shut case.’

When investigating Andi Borchert, Engler had omitted to look at his medical history. The big man had suffered since adolescence from partial erectile dysfunction. To put it in the vernacular, he was almost impotent and could only get it up, if at all, on home territory and after lengthy foreplay. Ergo, he couldn’t have raped the girl.

Borchert was eternally grateful to Stern, not only for getting him off but for ensuring that the trial was held in camera. A porn film producer who couldn’t get it up would have been a public laughing stock. Although none of the spicy details leaked out, thanks to Stern, Borchert had turned his back on film-making and now ran several successful nightclubs in Berlin and the surrounding area.