The Child (3 page)

The rotten treads creaked at every step like the rigging of a ship. Stern wasn’t sure if his sense of balance was playing tricks, but the stairs seemed to sway more violently the lower he got.

‘Simon?’ He must have called the boy’s name at least five times, but the only response was a metallic clang some distance away. It sounded like someone hitting a central heating pipe with a spanner.

Before long he was standing at the foot of the stairs. He looked around with his heart pounding. It was now so dark outside, he couldn’t even make out Carina’s silhouette at the top of the stairwell. He shone his torch over the underground chamber on his right. Two passages led off it, both ankle-deep in stagnant water.

Incredible of the boy to venture into this industrial swamp of his own free will
.

Stern opted for the left-hand passage because the other was obstructed by an overturned fuse box.

‘Where are you?’ he called. The water closed around his ankles like an icy hand.

Simon still didn’t answer, but at least he made a sign of life: he coughed. The sound came from not far away but beyond the range of Stern’s torch.

I’m going to catch my death
, he thought. He could feel his trouser legs absorbing the moisture like blotting paper. Just as he made out a wooden partition some ten metres away, his mobile rang.

‘Where’s he got to?’ Carina called. She sounded almost hysterical.

‘Not sure. He’s in the next passage, I think.’

‘What’s he been saying?’

‘Nothing. He’s coughing.’

‘Oh my God, get him out of there!’ Her voice broke with agitation.

‘What do you think I’m trying to do?’

‘You don’t understand. The tumour. That’s what happens!’

‘What do you mean? What happens?’

He heard Simon cough again. Closer at hand this time.

‘Bronchial spasms are a prelude to unconsciousness. He could pass out at any minute!’ Carina was shouting so loudly, her voice reached him direct as well as over the phone.

And he’ll fall face down in the water and suffocate. Like …

Stern set off at a run. In his mounting panic he failed to see the beam sagging down from the ceiling, so black and charred as to be almost invisible. He hit his head on it, but the shock was even worse than the pain. Thinking he’d been attacked, he threw up his arms defensively. By the time he realized his mistake it was too late. The torch flickered underwater for another two seconds, then died where he’d dropped it.

‘Damnation!’ He felt for the wall with his right hand and groped his way along step by step, trying not to lose his bearings in the darkness. That was the least of his worries, however, because he hadn’t changed direction. What concerned him far more was that Simon had not made another sound, not even a cough.

‘Hey, are you still there?’ he shouted. His ears clicked suddenly, and he had to ease the pressure on his eardrums by swallowing several times, like an airline passenger coming in to land. Then he heard another faint cough. Ahead of him. Beyond the wooden partition and around the corner. He had to get there – had to get to Simon in the side passage. Although slowed by the water, he was still going fast enough to trigger a disastrous chain reaction.

‘Simon? Can you hear … Heeelp!’

The last word was uttered as he fell. His foot had caught in an old telephone cable that had formed a sort of poacher’s snare in the stinking, stagnant water. He clutched at the wall beside him in an attempt to stop himself falling, only to break two fingernails on the damp mortar as he pitched forwards.

He must have reached the end of the underground passage, he realized, because he didn’t fall headlong into water. Instead, his outstretched hands were brought up short by an expanse of plywood or a door. With a groan – like, but far louder than the one caused by his foot on the first stair – it gave way beneath him. Panic-stricken, he saw himself plummeting down an old mine shaft or bottomless pit. Then his fall was brutally checked by solid, hard-packed mud. The only favourable part of this new situation was that the water hadn’t reached this corner of the cellar. On the other hand, unidentifiable objects dislodged from the ceiling and walls were falling on him.

Oh my God …
Stern hardly dared touch the sizeable, roundish object that had just landed in his lap. His initial, nightmarish certainty was that, if he did run his hands over it, they would touch blue lips and a bloated face: the face of his dead son Felix.

But then, gradually, the darkness began to lift. He blinked, and it took him a moment or two to realize where the light was coming from. Not until she was standing right beside him did he see that it was Carina, whose mobile phone’s greenish display was dimly illuminating the underground chamber into which he’d blundered.

He saw the scream before he heard it. Carina opened her mouth, but there was an instant’s silence before her piercing cry reverberated around the cellar’s concrete walls.

Stern shut his eyes. Then, summoning up all his courage, he looked down at himself.

And almost vomited.

The head in his lap was attached, like the knob on the end of a curtain rod, to a partially skeletonized body. With a mixture of disbelief, disgust and utter horror, Stern registered the gaping cleft the axe had made in the victim’s skull.

Tears welled up in Inspector Martin Engler’s eyes faster than he could blink them away. He groaned with his mouth shut, tilted his head back, and groped blindly around the interview room’s table until he found what he was looking for. At the last moment he tore open the pack, fished out a paper handkerchief and clamped it to his nose.

Aacheeoo!

‘Sorry.’ The homicide detective blew his nose, and Stern wondered whether he hadn’t uttered an almost imperceptible ‘Arsehole!’ as he sneezed.

That would have figured. Having secured acquittals for several of Engler’s personal collars, Stern wasn’t exactly one of the inspector’s closest friends.

‘Ahem.’

The policeman seated beside Engler had cleared his throat. Stern glanced at him. An overweight individual with an enormous Adam’s apple jutting from beneath his double chin, he had introduced himself, on entering the windowless interview room, as Thomas Brandmann. No rank, no clue to his function. He hadn’t uttered another word, just emitted a guttural grunt every five minutes. Stern didn’t know what to make of him. Unlike Engler, who after over twenty years’ service was almost part of the murder squad’s furniture, this man mountain had never crossed his path before. His manner could have signified that he was heading the investigation. Or the exact opposite.

Engler held up a packet of aspirins. ‘Like one too? You look as if you could use one.’

‘No thanks.’ Stern instinctively fingered the painful, throbbing lump on his forehead. His brains were still scrambled after that fall in the cellar, and he resented the fact that, bloodshot eyes and runny nose apart, the inspector made a livelier impression than he did. Sessions on a sunbed and jogging in the woods were more beneficial than long nights at the computer in an office.

‘Right, then I’ll summarize.’

Engler picked up his notebook. Stern couldn’t hide a grin when Brandmann, who still hadn’t uttered a word, cleared his throat again.

‘You discovered the body around five-thirty this afternoon. A boy, Simon Sachs, led you to the spot, accompanied by Carina Freitag, a hospital nurse. The said boy is ten years old and suffering from a cerebral tumour. He is currently’ – Engler turned over a page – ‘undergoing treatment in the neurological ward of the Seehaus Clinic. He claims to have murdered the man himself in a previous life.’

‘Yes,’ said Stern, ‘fifteen years ago. I haven’t been counting, but I reckon I must have told you that a dozen times already.’

‘Possibly, but—’

Engler broke off in mid-sentence. To Stern’s surprise he tilted his head back again and compressed his nostrils between his thumb and forefinger.

‘Take no notice,’ he said in a Donald Duck voice. ‘Goddamned nosebleed. Always happens when I get a cold.’

‘You shouldn’t take aspirins, then.’

‘Thins the blood, I know. But where were we?’ Engler was still addressing the drab grey ceiling. ‘Ah yes … You may well have spouted this crazy yarn a dozen times, and each time I’ve wondered whether I ought to submit you to a drugs test.’

‘Feel free. If you want to violate a few more of my rights, be my guest.’ Stern held out an imaginary tray on his upturned palms. ‘I don’t get much fun out of life these days, but taking you and your outfit to court would certainly make an amusing change.’

‘Please don’t upset yourself, Herr Stern.’

Stern gave a start.
Amazing
, he thought.
Engler’s hulking great companion can speak after all
.

‘You aren’t under suspicion,’ Brandmann went on.

Stern seemed to hear an unspoken ‘yet’.

‘Just to dispel any doubt,’ he said, resisting the temptation to clear his own throat, ‘I may be a lawyer but I’m not insane. I don’t believe in reincarnation, the transmigration of souls, and all that hogwash, nor do I waste my spare time digging up skeletons. Speak to the boy, not me.’

Brandmann nodded. ‘We will as soon as he comes to.’

Simon had been found unconscious. As luck would have it, he hadn’t blacked out as suddenly as he had two years before, when the tumour in his frontal lobe first made itself felt. Then he had collapsed in the middle of the classroom after hitting his head on the teacher’s desk on his way to the blackboard. This time he’d managed to slide down the wall and wind up sitting with his back to it in the flooded side passage. He had fallen into a deep sleep but seemed all right in other respects.

Carina had driven him back to the clinic in the ambulance as quickly as possible, with the result that Stern was alone at the scene of the crime when Engler turned up with his people and the forensics team.

‘Better still,’ Stern advised, ‘get hold of the psychologist. Who knows what that man Tiefensee planted in the boy’s mind under hypnosis.’

‘Hey, good idea! The psychologist! Thanks, I’d never have thought of that in a thousand years.’

Engler grinned sarcastically. His nosebleed had stopped and he was once more looking Stern full in the face.

‘So you say the murdered man had been lying there for fifteen years?’

Stern groaned. ‘No,
I
don’t say so, the boy does. He may even be right.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, I’m no pathologist, but the cellar was damp and the body was in a dark wooden cubby hole like a coffin, where it wasn’t exposed to a direct supply of oxygen. For all that, some parts of the body were almost completely decomposed. They included the head, which I had the dubious pleasure of holding in my hands. And that means—’

‘That the victim wasn’t dumped there yesterday. Correct.’

Stern swung round in surprise. The man leaning against the door frame in a studiously casual pose had materialized without a sound. With his frosted black hair and tinted, gold-rimmed glasses, Christian Hertzlich looked more like an ageing tennis coach than a chief superintendent of police. Stern wondered how long Engler’s immediate superior had been listening to them sparring.

‘Thanks to modern forensic medicine, we shall very soon learn the approximate date of death,’ said Hertzlich. ‘But no matter whether the man died five, fifteen or even fifty years ago’ – he took a step forwards – ‘one thing’s for sure: the boy can’t have killed him.’

‘My view precisely. Is that all?’ Stern stood up, shot his cuff and ostentatiously glanced at his watch. It was nearly half past ten.

‘Of course you’re free to go. In any case, I have a far more urgent matter to discuss with these gentlemen.’

Hertzlich had been holding a folder clamped beneath his arm the whole time. He presented it to his subordinates like a trophy.

‘There’s been a truly surprising new development.’

Martin Engler waited until the lawyer had closed the door behind him. Then, unable to control his annoyance any longer, he got to his feet so abruptly his chair fell over backwards.

‘What was all that crap?’

Brandmann cleared his throat. He actually seemed about to say something, but Hertzlich got in first. He deposited the folder face down on the table.

‘What do you mean? It went perfectly.’

‘The hell it did, sir,’ Engler retorted. ‘That’s no way to conduct an interview. I’m not doing it again, not ever.’

‘Why so hot under the collar?’

‘Because I made myself look ridiculous. Nobody falls for the good-cop bad-cop routine any longer, least of all a lawyer of Robert Stern’s calibre.’

Hertzlich looked down at his highly polished Oxfords. He shook his head in surprise.

‘I thought you’d grasped our methodology, Engler.’

Methodology … What garbage!
Engler was seething with rage.

Since Inspector Brandmann had joined them, barely a week had gone by without him having to take part in at least one seminar on psychological interviewing techniques. The youthful giant had been loaned to them three weeks earlier by the Federal Police Bureau, under the auspices of a training programme for which he worked as a psychological profiler. He was officially assigned to Engler’s team as an adviser, but it very much looked as if his status had just been upgraded to that of special investigator. At all events, Engler was even compelled to tolerate his presence during interrogations.

‘I’m bound to say the chief superintendent is right.’ Brandmann’s amiable tone only made the prevailing tension worse. ‘Everything went according to plan.’ He cleared his throat. ‘First, we frayed Stern’s nerves by keeping him waiting. Then my silence prevented him from knowing which side I was on. That, incidentally, is the difference between our own technique and the obsolete tactic you’ve just described, Inspector Engler.’

Brandmann paused for effect. Engler wondered why he had to add such a stupid grin to his lecture.

‘Just because I
didn’t
play the so-called good cop, Stern’s nervousness turned to bewilderment and he tried to get at you. When he failed he lost his temper.’