‘What happens if I refuse?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘No. You can get out and go home.’
And never find out where my son is.
‘It would be a mistake, though, now you’ve come this far.’
‘You’re lying. Those DVDs are fakes.’
The voice sighed deeply. ‘You’re mistaken.’
‘Then tell me how you did it. You say there were two babies.’ Stern’s voice cracked. ‘Why didn’t we notice? Who did the other child belong to? Why did you exchange it?’
And why didn’t anyone miss it after it died in Sophie’s arms?
‘All right, I’ll tell you. But then it’s your turn.’
Stern shut the lid and shook his head.
‘You can’t understand the whole story unless you know how I earn my living.’
‘You traffic in children.’
‘Among other things. We engage in many business activities, but dealing in newborn babies is one of the most lucrative.’
Stern swallowed hard. It was two minutes past six. He looked in the rear-view mirror, but the avenger had yet to appear.
‘My business is based on the baby depository – a wonderful invention. Are you aware that certain Berlin hospitals maintain containers in which mothers can dump their unwanted offspring instead of abandoning them elsewhere or even killing them?’
‘Yes.’
But what has that to do with Felix?
‘When was the last time you heard of a baby being dumped in one? It’s said to happen very, very rarely, but that’s a lie. The fact is, it happens all the time.’
The voice clicked his tongue.
‘As soon as a mother inserts her baby in the compartment, a silent alarm goes off inside the hospital and a member of staff comes and takes charge of the foundling. In two cases out of three, that member of staff is a nurse on my payroll.’
‘No,’ Stern gasped.
‘Oh yes. That’s the advantage of the silent alarm, nobody hears it. Data protection legislation prohibits the installation of CCTV cameras outside these depositories, so the hospital administrators don’t know how many babies actually get dumped. All I have to do is collect them when their mothers abandon them of their own free will. The best part is, most of them are German babies, and childless couples pay top prices for those. It’s a very simple business, really. Or would be, if someone didn’t persist in killing my associates.’
Stern felt unutterably sick. It was the perfect crime. Child-traffickers didn’t even have to risk a charge of kidnapping. The babies were ‘voluntarily’ surrendered to them, and no missing infants were subsequently sought by heartbroken parents.
‘I still don’t understand what this has to do with Felix.’ Stern was feeling bereft of energy. The wind, which continued to buffet the car with undiminished ferocity, could have blown him away.
The voice paused briefly. Stern waited with bated breath. Then the dam broke.
‘Your Felix was in the wrong hospital at the right time. A day before his birth, another very cute little baby was left in the hospital’s depository. I informed my impatient customers of that fortunate occurrence. Unhappily, it transpired from a preliminary examination conducted by one of my doctors that the foundling had a terminal heart defect.’
An iron band seemed to enclose Stern’s chest.
‘It was doomed from the first. An operation would have been pointless and was out of the question in any case. No one could be allowed to know of the child’s existence.’
The band tightened.
‘I was in a difficult position, you must understand. It was one of my first transactions. I couldn’t renege on the deal, nor did I want to. On the other hand, I didn’t want to supply damaged goods.’
‘So you switched the babies?’
‘Exactly. As luck would have it, the foundling actually resembled your Felix. But even if he’d been bigger, fatter or uglier, you’d never have spotted the difference between such newborn babies. You only noticed the little birthmark the second time you saw your son, and by then we’d made the switch.’
Stern nodded despite himself. The voice was right. Immediately after the difficult delivery, the wet, bloodstained baby had been handed to Sophie wrapped in a blanket, and because Felix was the only male infant on the ward, they would have had no cause for concern when he was carried out of the room for postnatal attention. After all, why should anyone have wanted to do anything so cruel to them?
‘Have you caught on at last? Discounting the first few moments after birth, it was always the foundling you fondled and caressed.’
The unsteady pictures of the neonatal ward flashed through Stern’s mind once more.
‘And the other baby …?’
‘It died as expected, two days after the switch. You saw the CCTV shots yourself.’
‘Just a minute. Don’t tell me those pictures—’
‘Were taken by a fixed surveillance camera?’ said the voice, sounding amused. ‘Why not? Because of the cuts? The blurring, the close-ups, zooms and other digital effects? You’ve no idea what modern photo-editing software can do. Like scan a birthmark in the shape of Italy on to the shoulder of a ten-year-old boy. Ironical, isn’t it, that I had to lie to you to induce you to believe me?’
‘What if you’re lying to me again?’ Stern shouted.
‘Find out for yourself. That’s as much as I’m going to tell you. Make up your mind. Either put one of those things over your face if you want to see your son again’ – Stern stared at the plastic container in his hands – ‘or it’s goodbye.’
All the lights on the Brücke went out, plunging the car park beside the storm-tossed lake into gloom. Stern clamped the mobile even harder to his burning ear, but the line was dead.
And now?
He looked at the ignition key. But where would I drive to? Back to a life the emptiness of which would, from now on, be filled with agonizing doubts? He suspected that he’d just been listening to a madman’s cleverly concocted lie, but that no longer mattered. All that mattered was how much he wanted to believe that lie.
He opened the box and paused for a moment before extracting a wipe. It lay in his hand, heavy with moisture and steeped in a substance that, although it might not kill him, would assuredly bring him nearer to death. Involuntarily reminded of a shroud, he draped it over his face. Then he held his breath and thought of Felix. When his lungs reached bursting point, he breathed in deeply through his mouth and nose. He got as far as three deliberate breaths before utter darkness and silence engulfed him.
6
There was a smell of sweat and vomit. Carina feared the worst as she entered the restroom, used by hospital staff for snatching some sleep when their thirty-six-hour shifts permitted.
‘He was going in there the last time I saw him,’ the red-haired nurse called in a low voice. She had remained outside in the corridor. Carina didn’t even bother to try the switch. The ceiling light in the cramped little room hadn’t worked for ages and no one had told the maintenance man. Nurses who retired there for a nap didn’t need a light in any case, which was why the blinds were always lowered as well.
But even the meagre light from the corridor revealed enough to make Carina shudder.
Picasso!
He was lying in a pool of vomit beside the narrow couch, having either fallen off it or failed to make it before he collapsed.
‘What … Oh, my God!’ The nurse had followed Carina in by now. She covered her mouth with a trembling hand.
‘Fetch a doctor and call the police at once,’ Carina told her as she bent over her motionless colleague.
The redhead didn’t appear to understand. She stood rooted to the spot, her lower lip trembling uncontrollably.
‘Is he … is he …?’ she asked, too shocked to utter the word.
Dead?
Carina knelt down beside Picasso. Gripping him by one muscular shoulder, she turned him over onto his back. The
smell became even worse. She felt sick until it struck her that this was a good sign. She could detect urine, sweat and vomit, but no blood.
She sighed, her suspicions confirmed. ‘Fetch a doctor! Fetch a doctor at once!’ she shouted, loudly enough to jolt the other girl out of her inertia.
Picasso’s eyelids flickered, then opened. Despite the dim light, Carina saw that his eyes looked far more alert than she’d expected in view of his poisoning symptoms.
‘Can you hear me?’
He blinked.
Thank God.
She reached for his hands, meaning to soothe him by holding them, and found
that he was clutching a sheet of paper.
‘What’s this?’ she asked, as if he was in a condition to answer. His hands relaxed a little, enabling her to withdraw the sheet.
It was a computer printout. In the light from the corridor she made out the clinic’s data table. Picasso had used the hospital computer to print out the bed layout of the intensive care ward.
But why?
She saw two names underlined in red. And was horrified.
Surely not!
She rechecked the date of the layout, which was several weeks old. But there was no doubt.
All at once, a hand descended on her shoulder. She spun round as if she’d been shot. A doctor and another nurse had hurried to the scene.
‘Hey, hey, take it easy. You’d better come with us and wait for—’
Carina shook off the doctor’s hand and thrust him aside, then unzipped her bumbag and pulled out her gun.
‘He’s been drugged,’ she said, looking at Picasso, who was struggling to haul himself on to the couch unaided. Whatever it was that had been slipped into his coffee to facilitate Simon’s abduction, the dose had been too low to fell a bear of a man like him.
‘Don’t dare follow me. Call the police and tell them to send all available units to Havelchaussee.’
‘But, Carina …’ the doctor called after her half-heartedly. None of the nurses ventured to follow her either, now that she was holding a gun.
What now?
The gun was of little use, but she couldn’t wait here for the police to arrive. She had to help Stern, but how? She’d left her own car outside the house.
‘You can’t get away,’ called the doctor.
He was right. Unless …
She rushed into the nurses’ room and grabbed Picasso’s leather jacket. On her way back along the corridor she paused briefly outside a room immediately opposite the smoking room. To be on the safe side, she opened the door, confirming her worst fears. It was empty.
Even while racing downstairs to the main entrance she felt in the pockets of the jacket. Wallet, chewing gum, keys.
Bingo.
Carina sprinted past the feverishly phoning receptionist and out into the car park. She knew where Picasso left his low-slung sports car.
‘It’ll do 280 kph max,’ he’d boasted once, when trying to persuade her to come for a spin. She doubted whether even that would be fast enough to avert disaster.
7
Stern regained consciousness to find that the ‘shroud’ over his face had changed. It was thicker, denser and made of a coarse material that scratched his skin unpleasantly, like a cheap woollen sweater. His nausea was almost unbearable. It stemmed not only from the chloroform, which had yet to leach from his body, but also from the thing in his mouth. The gag tasted simultaneously sweet and salty, as if it had been rolled up and shoved beneath his tongue by a pair of sweaty hands. He started to retch, and even that minimal contraction of his throat muscles unleashed a wave of pain that spread from the nape of his neck to his forehead. He’d never had such a headache in his life. Nor felt so scared.
He opened his eyes and the darkness seemed to become even more intense. At least there had been streaks of light behind his closed eyelids. Now even those had vanished. His heart stopped beating for one scary moment. Then another.
I’m paralysed, it flashed through his mind. From the neck down. I can’t even move my lips.
He tried to open his mouth but failed. He was relieved to find that his jaw muscles were still working until he realized to his horror why he could only breathe through his nose.
They gagged me, then pulled a sack over my head.
‘Where am I?’ he grunted as well as the duct tape over his mouth permitted. Stark panic lodged in his nervous system like ticks in a dog’s fur. He thought he was going to suffocate.
Suddenly a little light came on above his head, and he wished they’d blindfolded him as well. His head wasn’t inside a sack after all. Even when his eyes had got used to the faint light source and the flashes on his retinas were gradually fading, it still took a while to grasp whose eyes were staring at him through the ski mask. His own!
He blinked twice in the rear-view mirror, then turned his head. Slowly and cautiously, avoiding any sudden movement that might cause him to vomit with the gag in his mouth.
Was this really …? Yes, no doubt about it. He was sitting in an empty car. In the passenger seat. And he knew who the Mercedes belonged to. Him.
But where am I?
The greyish-black streaks beyond the windscreen slowly took shape. At first he mistook the swaying masts for an optical illusion, another of the anaesthetic’s side effects. They proved to be trees bending before the wind. Between the Mercedes and the edge of the woods lay an expanse of open ground the size of a car park.
Cautiously, Stern leaned forwards to take the weight off his wrists, which were bound behind his back. Eyes narrowed, he tried to remember why this godforsaken spot seemed familiar. The truth was just beginning to dawn when he was distracted by a sound behind him. Someone coughed into a handkerchief.
‘Good, so you’ve woken up. Almost half an hour before time.’
Stern recognized the voice. It sounded distinctly more human without any electronic distortion.
Cold air streamed into the car as the man got out. The yellowish light of the reading lamp had illuminated his distinctive profile for only a moment, but that was long enough for Stern to recognize him in the rear-view mirror. The sight of the man reduced his capacity for thought to zero, for what he had seen was a sheer impossibility.
‘Well, now do you believe in reincarnation?’ Engler laughed as he opened the passenger door and hauled Stern out like a sack of potatoes.
Stern stumbled forwards. Unable to save himself because his wrists were cuffed, he fell headlong on the muddy ground. His fall was cushioned by a layer of wet leaves and soil – much to his regret, because it didn’t knock him out.
Engler of Homicide? How could it be?
A pair of strong hands hauled him to his feet again. Two things suddenly occurred to him: he recognized the place and knew why he was here.
‘You shouldn’t believe everything you see or hear,’ the inspector said as he set Stern on his feet. Highly amused, he imitated the charade he’d staged at the psychiatrist’s practice. ‘Hello? Dr Tiefensee? Are you there?’ He held a plastic device to his lips and went on, in a disguised voice: ‘See those surgical scissors? Stab him in the heart.’
Engler stepped back and slammed the passenger door, which was still open. The sound reminded Stern of the doors slamming in Tiefensee’s practice. It struck him only now that the two voices had not overlapped. Whenever Engler had used the voice scrambler he was in one of the treatment rooms. He had spoken in his normal voice only in the passage outside.
‘It was a lot of fun, getting my associate off the hook when you surprised him at Tiefensee’s place.’ Engler laughed. ‘Nearly as much fun as that staged shooting. Jesus Christ, man, everything was going according to plan, and all at once you wanted to turn yourself in? I had to put a stop to that. Lucky you’re so gullible. All it took to deceive you was three gunshots, a shattered windscreen and some stage blood. OK, maybe a DVD as well.’
His laughter sounded almost hysterical now. He calmed down a little and spat on the muddy ground.
‘How did you like the episode with the motorcyclist? Imagine, he wanted five hundred euros to shoot out the windscreen and hold a gun to your head. Don’t worry, though, he’s no great loss to humanity. The fellow had a taste for children, and besides, he also had Tiefensee on his conscience. He was the long-haired type you chased down the street, remember?’
Stern took a step backwards and came up against the boot of his Mercedes. He felt he would soon need something to lean against if he didn’t want to fall over again, here in the middle of the car park of the deserted Wannsee Lido.
‘That reminds me.’ Engler acted as if he’d just remembered something important. ‘Too many people knew about the Brücke for my taste, so I’ve arranged a new rendezvous with the man who plans to kill me. I’ve also postponed our appointment for forty-five minutes. Still, I’m sure we won’t get bored, waiting for our surprise visitor to arrive.’
8
Nothing. No lights, no car. No sign of life. The absence of something can sometimes be just as palpable as the presence of a noisy crowd. To Carina, standing by herself in the car park beside the Brücke, her solitude felt overwhelming.
Where are they? Where’s Robert? Simon?
The car she’d driven here was the only one outside the floating restaurant. The rustle of leaves, the creak of rigging and the splash of the waves might be drowning other sounds in the vicinity, but her instincts told her there were none to drown. She was alone.
She took out her mobile to give the police another call, as she had done on the drive here. There was no point in trying Stern again. His phone was either turned off or out of range.
With the little automatic in her hand she made her way once more to the locked gate leading to the gangway and wondered whether to try to climb over it. The wrought-iron grille was topped with spikes and enough barbed wire to rip an intruder’s stomach open.
She couldn’t help thinking of movies in which the hero would grab a rope and haul himself aboard, but her feeble arms transmitted a very explicit message: ‘Not a chance.’
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