The Child (2 page)

The boy was still smiling when he turned round.

‘I’m Simon. Simon Sachs.’

He held out a slender little hand. Stern hesitated for an instant, then shook it.

‘And I’m Robert Stern.’

‘I know. Carina showed me a photo of you – she keeps it in her handbag. She says you’re the best.’

‘Thanks a lot,’ Stern mumbled rather awkwardly. As far as he could recall, this was the longest conversation he’d had with a child for years. ‘What can I do for you?’ he asked just as awkwardly.

‘I need a lawyer.’

‘I see.’ Stern turned his head and shot an enquiring glance at Carina, who was impassively smoking her cigarette.

Why was she doing this to him? Why had she dragged him out to a demolition site and introduced him to a ten-year-old? She knew how hopeless he was with children and how he had avoided them ever since tragedy had destroyed his marriage and then nearly him.

‘What makes you think you need a lawyer?’ he asked, suppressing his annoyance with an effort. This absurd situation might at least provide an amusing topic of conversation during breaks between court appearances.

He pointed to the plaster on Simon’s neck. ‘Is it because of that? Did someone attack you in the playground?’

‘No, it isn’t that.’

‘What, then?’

‘I’m a murderer.’

‘What?’ Stern had paused before asking the question, firmly convinced that a ten-year-old couldn’t have said that. He kept looking from Simon to Carina and back like a spectator at a tennis match. But only until the boy said it again loud and clear.

‘I need a lawyer. I’m a murderer.’

A dog barked somewhere in the distance. The sound mingled with the incessant hum from the nearby dual carriageway, but Stern was as deaf to it as he was to the raindrops beating an irregular tattoo on the ambulance’s roof.

‘OK, so you think you’ve killed someone,’ he said after another moment’s disconcerted silence.

‘Yes.’

‘May I ask who?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Ah, so you don’t know.’ Stern gave a mirthless laugh. ‘And you probably don’t know how, why or where it happened either, because the whole thing is a silly practical joke, and—’

‘With an axe.’ Simon whispered the words, though for a moment it sounded like he’d shouted them.

‘
What
did you say?’

‘With an axe. A man. I hit him on the head with it. That’s all I can remember. It was a long time ago.’

‘What do you mean, a long time ago?’ Stern blinked nervously. ‘When was it?’

‘The twenty-eighth of October.’

Stern glanced at his watch. ‘That’s today,’ he said, looking mystified. ‘You just said it happened a long time ago, so when was it? Make up your mind.’

He wished he always had such easy witnesses to cross-examine – ten-year-olds who contradicted themselves within a minute of taking the oath. He was soon disabused.

‘You don’t understand.’ Simon shook his head sadly. ‘I killed a man. Right here!’

‘Here?’ Stern repeated. Bewildered, he watched the boy push gently past him, get out of the ambulance and survey his surroundings with interest. As far as Stern could tell, his attention was focused on a derelict shed beside a clump of trees some hundred metres away.

‘Yes,’ Simon said, taking Carina’s hand, ‘this is it. This is where I killed a man. On the twenty-eighth of October. Fifteen years ago.’

Stern climbed out of the ambulance and asked Simon to wait for a moment. Then he grabbed Carina roughly by the wrist and led her behind his car. The rain had eased somewhat, but the day had grown darker, windier and, above all, chillier. Neither she in her thin nurse’s uniform nor he in his dark three-piece suit was suitably dressed for such lousy weather, but unlike him Carina didn’t look cold at all.

‘Quick question,’ he whispered, although Simon was too far away to hear him above the sound of the wind and the dual carriageway’s monotonous, surf-like roar. ‘Which of you is the crazier?’

‘Simon is a patient of mine in Neurology,’ said Carina, as though that explained everything.

‘He might do better in a psychiatric ward,’ Stern hissed. ‘What was all that nonsense about a murder fifteen years ago? Can’t he count, or is he schizophrenic?’

Stern opened the boot with his car key’s remote control and turned on the interior light, dispelling some of the gloom.

‘He has a cerebral tumour.’ Carina demonstrated its size by forming a ring with her thumb and forefinger. ‘They give him a few more weeks. Maybe only days.’

‘Good God, and it has
those
side effects?’ Stern took an umbrella from the boot.

‘No. I’m to blame.’

‘You?’

He looked up with the brand-new designer brolly in his hand. The way it worked escaped him. He couldn’t even find the button that opened it.

‘I told you, I messed up. The boy is highly intelligent, incredibly sensitive and remarkably well-educated for his age. Which is almost miraculous, if you ask me, considering his background. He was rescued from his anti-social mother’s squalid flat at the age of four – they found him half-starved in the bathtub with a dead rat for company. Then he was put in a home, where he stood out from the rest because he liked reading encyclopedias more than playing with kids of his own age. The supervisor thought it only natural that a child who did so much thinking should have a permanent headache, but then they discovered this thing in his brain. Simon has been a patient on my ward ever since. He doesn’t have a soul to care for him apart from the hospital staff. Well, only me, really.’

Carina was also feeling cold now. Her lips had begun to tremble.

‘I don’t see what you’re getting at.’

‘It was Simon’s birthday two days ago, and I wanted to give him a special treat. I mean, he’s only ten but his experience of life and his illness have made him so much more mature than other children of his age. I thought he was old enough.’

‘Old enough for what? What did you give him?’ Stern, who had finally abandoned his attempt to open the umbrella, was pointing it at her chest like a gun.

‘Simon is afraid of dying, so I arranged a regression for him.’

‘A
what
?’ said Stern, although he had recently seen something about it on television.

It was, of course, typical of Carina to subscribe to such an esoteric fad. People of all ages seemed to be fascinated by the notion of having been on earth before. This hankering after the supernatural provided fertile soil from which shady therapists could sprout like weeds and charge substantial fees for ‘regressions’: journeys into the antenatal past during which their clients discovered, usually under hypnosis, that they had occupied the throne of France or been burned at the stake six centuries ago.

‘Don’t look at me like that. I know what you think of these things. You won’t even read your horoscope.’

‘How could you expose a little boy to such mumbo-jumbo?’

Stern was genuinely horrified. The television programme had warned of the possibility of severe mental damage. Many unstable personalities couldn’t cope when a charlatan persuaded them that their current psychological problems stemmed from some unresolved conflict in a previous existence.

‘I only wanted to show him that it isn’t all over – when you die, I mean – and that he mustn’t be sad to have lived for such a short time because life goes on.’

‘Tell me you’re joking.’

She shook her head. ‘I took him to Dr Tiefensee. He’s a qualified psychologist and gives courses at the university. Not a charlatan, whatever you may think.’

‘What happened?’

‘He hypnotized the boy. Not a great deal happened, actually. Simon couldn’t remember much under hypnosis. He just said he was in a dark cellar and could hear voices. Voices saying nasty things.’

Stern grimaced with discomfort. The cold creeping up his back was becoming steadily more unpleasant, but that wasn’t his only reason for wanting to get away as soon as possible. Somewhere in the distance a freight train was rumbling past. Carina was whispering now, just as he himself had at the start of their conversation.

‘Tiefensee initially failed to rouse Simon from his hypnotic trance. He had fallen into a deep sleep, and when he woke up he told us what he told you just now. He thinks he used to be a murderer.’

Stern felt an urge to wipe his hands on his hair, but it, too, was wet with rain.

‘The whole idea is nonsense, Carina, and you know it. All I’m wondering is, what’s it got to do with me?’

‘Simon has a profound sense of right and wrong. He insists on going to the police.’

‘That’s right, I do.’

They both swung round. The boy had stolen up behind them unobserved. The wind was stirring the mass of curls on his forehead. Stern wondered why he had any hair at all. He must surely have had to undergo chemotherapy.

‘I’m a murderer, and that’s wrong. I want to turn myself in, but I won’t say a thing unless my lawyer’s present.’

Carina smiled sadly. ‘He picked that up from television, and you’re the only defence lawyer I know.’

Stern avoided her eye. Instead, he stared at the muddy ground as if his hand-sewn Oxfords could tell him how to respond to this lunacy.

‘Well?’ he heard Simon say.

‘Well what?’ Stern raised his head and looked straight at the boy, surprised to see that he was smiling again.

‘Are you my lawyer now? I can pay you.’

Rather awkwardly, Simon fished a little purse out of the pocket of his jeans.

‘I’ve got some money, you see.’

Stern shook his head. Almost imperceptibly at first, then more and more violently.

‘I have,’ Simon insisted. ‘Honestly.’

‘No,’ said Stern, glaring at Carina now. ‘This is all beside the point, am I right? You didn’t get me out here as a lawyer, did you?’

Now it was her turn to stare at the ground.

‘No, I didn’t,’ she admitted quietly.

With a sigh, Stern tossed the unopened umbrella back into the boot of the car. Pushing a briefcase aside, he opened the first-aid locker and removed a torch. He checked the beam by shining it on the tumbledown shed Simon had indicated earlier.

‘All right, let’s get this over with.’

He patted Simon’s head with his free hand, unable to believe that he was really saying this to a ten-year-old boy:

‘Show me exactly where you say you killed this man.’

Simon led them around the back of the shed. A two-storey building must have occupied the site many years ago, but it had been destroyed by fire. All that now jutted into the overcast evening sky were isolated sections of soot-stained brickwork resembling mutilated hands.

‘You see? There’s nothing here.’

Stern played the beam of his torch slowly over the ruins.

‘But it must be somewhere here,’ said Simon. He might have been talking about a lost glove, not a dead body. He too had come armed with a light source: a little plastic rod that emitted a fluorescent glow when you bent it.

‘From his box of magic tricks,’ Carina had explained to Stern. The boy had evidently been given some normal birthday presents as well as the regression.

‘I think it was down there,’ Simon said excitedly, stepping forward.

Following the direction of his outstretched arm, Stern shone his torch at the old stairwell. They could see only the entrance to the cellar now.

‘We can’t go down there, it’s too dangerous.’

‘Why not?’ the boy demanded, scrambling over a pile of loose bricks.

‘Stay here, sweetheart, it could all cave in.’ Carina sounded uncharacteristically anxious. During her brief affair with Robert Stern she’d been the soul of exuberance, almost as if she were trying to compensate for his permanent melancholy with a superabundance of
joie de vivre
. Now she was agitated, as if Simon were behaving like a disobedient dog let off the leash. He plodded on.

‘Look, we can get down there!’ he cried suddenly. The other two were still protesting when his curly head disappeared behind a reinforced concrete pillar.

‘Simon!’ called Carina. Stern blundered after them across the rubble-strewn floor, nearly twisting his ankle a couple of times and tearing his trousers on a rusty piece of wire. By the time he reached the entrance to the cellar, the boy had made his way down some twenty charred wooden stairs and turned a corner.

‘Come out of there at once!’ Stern shouted, immediately cursing his ill-considered choice of words. The memory triggered by them was worse than anything that could happen to him here, he realized.

Come out of there, darling, please! I can help you …

That wasn’t the only lie he’d called to Sophie through the locked bathroom door. In vain. They’d tried everything for four long years – every technique and form of treatment – until at last they received the longed-for phone call from the fertility clinic. Positive. Pregnant. On that day, over a decade ago, it seemed to him that a higher power had totally reoriented the compass needle of his life. It had suddenly pointed to happiness in its purest form, but only, alas, for as long as it took him to transform the ceiling of the new nursery into a night sky with stick-on fluorescent stars and go shopping for baby clothes with Sophie. Felix never wore them. He was cremated in the sleepsuit the nurses had dressed him in.

‘Simon?’ Carina called the boy’s name so loudly, it jolted him out of his dark reverie.

Simon’s muffled voice came drifting up from below. ‘I think there’s something here!’

Stern swore. He tested the first step with his foot. ‘It’s no use, I’ll have to go down there.’

Those words, too, reminded him of the worst moment in his life. The moment when Sophie took refuge in the patients’ bathroom with their dead baby in her arms and wouldn’t give it up. ‘Sudden infant death syndrome’ was the diagnosis she refused to accept. Two days after giving birth.

‘I’m coming with you,’ said Carina.

‘Don’t be silly.’ Stern took another cautious step. The stairs had supported Simon. He would have to see whether they could support more than twice the boy’s weight. ‘We’ve only got one torch and someone’ll have to call for help if we aren’t back in a couple of minutes.’