The Child (23 page)

The landing came into view. At the top of the stairs stood a terracotta urn containing an artificial fern. It looked bulkier and heavier the closer he got.

Another of his father’s pearls of wisdom popped into his head:
The simplest tricks are often the most effective
. Whether or not his simple plan would succeed depended solely on four little plastic rectangles.

Another two steps.

Cautiously, he put out his hand. Like a wounded man whose tight bandage has been removed after several hours, he felt the blood rush into his fingertips. He would have preferred to use his right hand, but that would have been too noticeable.

One more step.

Now he could see the entire landing. There was no furniture apart from a mahogany side table with a property brochure lying open on it. No window either.
Luckily!

Stern climbed the last stair as gingerly if it were a crumbling ice floe. He fought the urge to look behind him and held his breath, totally focused on the next few seconds. He even faded out the man’s voice, which was singing along with a Verdi aria.

Simon can’t be far away
.

‘Down the passage, third door along on the right. You can hear the party’s in full—’

The woman never finished her sentence. Spine-chilling in its suddenness, the shrill sound of a doorbell echoed around the bare walls.

Stern took advantage of this unexpected interruption to turn the tables in a final act of desperation, simply by hitting the shoulder-height row of light switches at the top of the stairs. That was the couple’s Achilles’ heel: they had deprived him of every potential means of escape, but the shutters also shut out any extraneous light. Once he had hit the switches, the ceiling lights would go out and plunge the entire stairwell into total darkness. He would then be able to pull the urn over and send the woman tumbling down the stairs in its company.

So much for the theory.

In practice, things looked rather different. Stern realized how wrong he was when he flipped the very first switch. Instead of getting darker, the whole of the gloomy upstairs passage was suddenly bathed in light. Instead of putting out the lights, he’d turned on a row of additional overheads.

Which made it easy for the woman behind him to take aim and fire with precision.

There were so many things about the room that Simon found surprising. For a start, the funny noise his trainers made on the shiny floor. When he sat down on the edge of the metal bedstead, he saw in the dim red glow that the whole expanse of parquet was covered with transparent plastic film.

The man removed the key from the door and went over to a black tripod in the corner. Mounted on it was a small digital camera the lens of which was pointing straight at the bed on which Simon had been invited to sit. The man pressed a button and a little red light appeared beside the lens. Then he went over to the only window, which was covered with thick rubber curtains in army green, and turned on a miniature stereo system.

‘Do you like music?’ he asked.

‘It depends,’ Simon whispered, but the man in the dressing gown wasn’t listening in any case. He was swaying in time to the music coming from the CD player. Simon wasn’t sure he liked the song. He’d heard something similar in the matron’s office at the children’s home, and it hadn’t appealed to him.

Meanwhile the man had shut his eyes and was looking dreamy. Simon wanted to get up and go. He’d heard of people like him. A policeman had visited his school one time and showed them pictures of the sort of men they shouldn’t go with, although this one looked quite different somehow.

The music suddenly increased in volume. Simon coughed. Feeling a bit faint, he leaned back against the bedpost until the sensation subsided. As he did so, he noticed a number of medical instruments on a waist-high glass table beside the bed.

What is all this?

He experienced a sudden and quite unjustified pang of fear. This man couldn’t harm him because of tomorrow morning. He would be meeting someone on a bridge at six o’clock. As long as he clung to that thought, he oughtn’t really to feel afraid.

But when he saw the syringes he couldn’t help it.

He’d seen syringes before, but only at the hospital and not as big. Another thing that puzzled him was the strip of silvery metal lying on the green cloth between a scalpel and a little saw. It looked like a miniature cycle chain with clothes pegs at either end.

‘Come over here.’

The man must have been dancing by himself for several minutes, lost to the world. His voice sounded friendly. Simon, who had been resting his eyes, sleepily opened them. He looked away at once. The man had dropped his dressing gown around his ankles and was now wearing nothing but the latex gloves.

‘Come on.’

‘Why?’ asked Simon, thinking of Stern.

‘Be kind enough to bring me that thing on the bed.’

Simon saw what the man was pointing to. He coughed again, feeling even fainter than before, but he picked up what was lying on the stained mattress, which was devoid of bedclothes.

He got up and walked on wobbly legs to the man, feeling weaker and weaker at every step. His left hand was tingling again. He hoped Stern would come and get him soon.

‘You’re doing fine,’ the man said breathlessly. He paused in the middle of a pirouette, stretched out the arm in which he’d been holding an invisible partner and patted Simon gently on the shoulder. Once, twice, three times. Then he laughed as if he’d cracked a good joke.

‘You’re a nice-looking boy. Did you know that?’

Simon shook his head.

‘Yes, yes, but you could look even nicer.’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘Yes, trust me.’

Simon felt the plastic bag wrenched out of his hand. Then he suddenly couldn’t see a thing. He tried to take a breath but couldn’t, the plastic went concave as he sucked it into his open mouth. Summoning up his last reserves of strength, he reached up and tried to tear the bag off his head, but the man seized his wrists, forced them behind his back and bound them together with something. He tried to scream, but he was too short of breath. All he inhaled was a little tuft of hair from his own wig, which had slipped off his head when the man pulled the plastic bag over it.

‘There,
now
you look really nice,’ Simon heard the naked man purr as he was forcibly dragged back to where he’d just been sitting. On the bed.

‘Much nicer.’

Simon lashed out blindly with his feet. Although they occasionally connected with something soft, he quickly sensed that he was the only one sustaining any real damage.

He was steadily tiring, steadily growing weaker, and his lungs were threatening to burst, so he wasn’t all that surprised by the loud report that abruptly drowned the music.

The man paused when he heard the shot ring out in the passage. Then he grinned and tore off a long strip of duct tape, intending to wind it round the bag and the boy’s neck. Only then would he have both hands free. And he needed them for what he had in mind.

When the shot sounded the world around him exploded. The pain that followed was unbearable, but it didn’t make itself felt where he expected. Stern toppled forwards, cracking his head on the urn, although it was more of a reflex action than a physical necessity. He felt sure he’d been shot in the back and would see the exit wound in his stomach before death came. Instead, deafened, he found himself coughing his guts up. Every choking breath made him feel like he was on fire inside. After what seemed an eternity, and just before he thought he was going blind, he grasped what had happened.

Tear gas
.

The pistol hadn’t been loaded with lethal ammunition. The couple might be paedophiles but they weren’t capable of murder. Either that, or they killed in some other way because a straightforward bullet wouldn’t have enhanced their sexual pleasure.

Stern realized that he was quite wrong when the woman behind him started coughing too.

‘Shit,’ she said, but even that was almost inaudible. Her nose was streaming.

Stern rolled onto his stomach and peered down the stairs. His eyes felt like they’d been bathed in toilet cleaner, but he could just about see the woman a few steps below him. She was doubled up with her fists in her eyes. Like Stern, she hadn’t been wearing a protective mask.

So she didn’t know what the gun was loaded with
, he concluded. The pair of them only acted blasé. They were new to the game. They couldn’t have checked the pistol beforehand, and their premiere had just bombed.

Stern tried to stand. What happened next was as unintended as the cloud of chlorine gas. He lost his footing. Instead of stepping on to the landing, he went tumbling down the stairs.

A shaft of agony went through his back as he collided with the woman on the way down. For the second time in quick succession his head hit something hard, presumably a step, and blood spurted from his nose. As he was glissading down the stairs on his stomach, his left leg suddenly became incandescent with pain: his foot had got caught in the banisters and was supporting his entire weight.

Torn ligaments, severe tendonitis, broken ankle … He was suffering from all three, judging by the intensity of the pain, but he didn’t care. Having gently freed his foot, he could see through a mist of tears that the woman was in a considerably worse state. She wasn’t moving and one of her legs looked unnaturally contorted, as did the rest of her body.

Stern pulled himself up by the banister. He winced when he tried to stand on his left foot, so he hopped up the stairs on his good leg. His mucous membranes seemed to be dissolving, they were smarting so much.

Third door along on the right
, the woman had said. Her directions were superfluous. In his present condition he could only be guided by his ears.
La Traviata
was still blaring through one of the massive oak doors. Stern rattled the handle.

Locked
.

It took an instant for him to make up his mind. Ignoring the vicious pain caused seemingly by nails being driven into his left leg at every step, he hurried back to the urn. It was filled with heavy white pebbles, not soil. He could scarcely lift it, so he dragged it behind him along the passage. At the door he heaved the urn into the air, heedless of his creaking spine, and hurled it at the lock two-handed. It snapped off the handle and dented the lock. Stern charged the yielding oak panel with his shoulder. Once, twice. At last, drunk with pain, he staggered into the room.

The scene before him was worse than anything he’d ever seen, reducing his whole being to a single unspoken cry:
Too late!

He saw the man first. Naked, bathed in sweat and paralysed with fear. His erection, subsiding only slowly, seemed to have numbed his reflexes completely. He shielded his face with his arms, but that was all.

Looking at the bed, Stern saw the faceless figure that was Simon lying motionless on the stained mattress with his hands bound behind his back and a cheap supermarket bag over his head.

‘I can explain everything …’ the man began. Blinded by tears, rage and pain, Stern limped swiftly over to the camera, gripped the tripod like a baseball bat, and shattered his jaw, sending the man over backwards, and the stereo rig to the floor.
La Traviata
died just as Stern made a dive for the bed and tore an airhole in the bag over Simon’s head.

He felt like shouting aloud – with boundless relief. He had made one mistake after another, but at least he hadn’t lost Simon. The boy was coughing and gasping like a shipwreck survivor newly plucked from the sea. He just couldn’t stop, but to Stern the whistling intakes of breath with which he was sucking oxygen back into his lungs sounded better than any symphony.

‘I’m so, so sorry,’ he blurted out. Simon was sitting up on the bed now. Stern had torn off the rest of the bag and was holding the boy’s head between his hands, careful not to bring him into contact with his grimy, bloodstained chest.

‘It’s …’ Simon wheezed, ‘it’s all right.’ He started coughing again and sniffed. Stern drew back a little. The cloud of tear gas had been contained by the stairwell, fortunately, but he was afraid that enough of it might be clinging to his hair to place an additional strain on the boy’s breathing.

Unable to speak for coughing, Simon put out his arm and pointed to something. Stern turned in time to see the man with the shattered jaw making for the door.

‘Stay here!’ he yelled. He snatched up the tripod – the camera had already come adrift – and sideswiped him on the shin with it. The man doubled up and collapsed just short of the doorway, bellowing in agony.

‘Don’t move or you’ll end up dead like that crazy wife of yours.’

Stern bent over the man, who was choking by now on his own cries of pain, and showed him the scalpel he’d taken from the side table. He felt like driving the end of the tripod into the man’s foot or snapping off the scalpel blade under his fingernails, but he couldn’t do that to Simon. The boy had witnessed enough violence. Worse still, he had
experienced
it. Thanks to him, Stern, he was going to need psychological therapy.

‘Look, we can work this out,’ the man mumbled, curled up on the floor in front of Stern. His expression had undergone a complete change not just attributable to the rearrangement of his teeth. ‘I’ve got money.
Your
money. As agreed.’

‘Shut up. I don’t want any money.’

‘What, then? Why
are
you here?’

‘Simon, please look away,’ said Stern, raising the tripod again. The man brought his knees up to his chin and buried his bloodstained face in his hands.

‘No, please don’t,’ he begged. ‘I’ll do anything you want. Please.’

Stern let him tremble awhile in expectation of another blow. Then he asked, ‘Where’s the mobile?’

‘What?’

‘Your goddamned mobile. Where is it?’

‘There.’ The man pointed to the dressing gown lying beside the bed. Stern stepped back and picked it up.

‘In the pocket. The right-hand pocket.’