The Child

by Sebastian Fitzek

  Simon heard the dry rustle of newspaper.

  ‘It’s in every scandal sheet. They found Losensky’s diary in his bedside cupboard and printed extracts from it.’

  Müller proceeded to read aloud:

  ‘“So I told Simon about my last great plan. I said I was going to carry it out on the Brücke at 6 a.m. on November 1st. ‘Simon,’ I said, ‘I’m going to shoot the evil one after he’s handed over the baby, but I’m not sure if I’m doing the right thing. That’s why I’m asking one last favour of you. Very soon, when you enter the presence—’”

  ‘“—of our Creator, tell him I killed them all with a pure heart.”’

  To Müller’s and Borchert’s astonishment, Simon had opened his eyes and completed the last few words of Losensky’s confession.

  ‘“Ask him if I’m doing wrong. If I am, he must send me a sign and I’ll stop at once.”’

  ‘You’re awake.’

  ‘Yes, I have been for quite a while,’ Simon admitted. He cleared his throat, looking sheepish.

  Borchert bent over him. ‘So it’s true?’

  ‘I couldn’t understand everything you’ve been saying, but I can remember the voice. It sounded very … very kind, somehow.’

  The ambulance was slowing. Simon made a feeble attempt to sit up.

  ‘So I didn’t do anything bad?’

  ‘No, not at all.’ Borchert and Müller spoke almost simultaneously.

  ‘I didn’t kill anyone?’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘But why aren’t Robert and Carina here?’

  ‘The thing is …’ Müller rested his long, warm fingers on Simon’s forehead. ‘You’ve spent most of the last three days asleep.’

  ‘And during that time,’ Borchert added, ‘certain things have, well … happened.’

  ‘Like what?’ Simon was puzzled. The two grown-ups sounded odd, as if they were keeping something from him.

  ‘Did I do something wrong? Don’t Robert and Carina like me any more?’

  ‘Nonsense. Don’t even think it.’

  ‘Can you really not remember anything?’ asked Borchert.

  Simon shook his head. He had woken up numerous times in the last few nights, but only briefly and always on his own.

  ‘No. What’s wrong?’

  The sun seemed suddenly to go down behind the vehicle’s frosted glass windows, and the hollow sound of its diesel engine reminded Simon unpleasantly of the moment when the ugly woman drove her car into the underground garage.

  ‘We’re there,’ called a voice from the front of the ambulance. Someone got out.

  ‘Where are Robert and Carina?’ Simon asked again. The rear doors opened.

  ‘Well,’ said Professor Müller, taking him gently by the hand, ‘I think you’d better hear that from someone else.’

  2

  Skewed and devoid of a soundtrack, the black-and-white shots were of cheapest home video quality. The car’s headlights were dazzling the camera, which lent them a resemblance to overexposed ultrasound pictures.

  ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ the district attorney had quipped when shown the tape for the first time. Brandmann himself had taken a while to make out the figures of the two men standing in front of the car.

  ‘There, you can see Losensky draw his gun.’ He cleared his throat and tapped the relevant spot on the screen with the edge of a throwaway lighter.

  ‘You’re in the light.’

  ‘Oh, sorry.’ Brandmann stepped out of the projector’s beam. ‘There, look: the old man seems to be hesitating. Now he raises the gun a little, and: bang!’

  The muzzle flash left a bright yellow streak on the screen. As if struck by a wrecking ball, Stern went over backwards in the lido car park, hitting his head, and lay motionless.

  ‘Engler filmed this himself. His camera was lying on the parcel shelf of the car he was hiding in.’

  The inspector cleared his throat, as he did after almost every sentence he uttered. He refrained from asking if he could smoke and paused the tape briefly.

  ‘It would have made perfect visual evidence. An abortive child-trafficking transaction. A pair of scumbags eliminating each other. Engler was a video freak. We assume he simply left the camera running in order to be able to sell the tape as a snuff movie later on. Or for home use, who knows? Of course, we were never meant to see the shots that follow.’

  3

  ‘Where are you taking me?’

  The wheelchair’s footrest left a black mark on the wall as it was manhandled up the stairs from the underground garage. Simon looked over his shoulder at Borchert, who was hauling away at the handles and sweating. ‘You’re due for some rehab,’ he panted.

  The ambulance driver, pushing from below, was also breathing somewhat faster as they neared the top.

  ‘What sort of rehab?’

  ‘Special treatment for specially difficult cases like you.’

  ‘But where are we?’

  They had reached the top step. Simon looked down at Professor Müller, who was still standing at the foot of the stairs.

  ‘A private clinic,’ Müller said with a smile.

  ‘Without a lift? Funny sort of clinic, isn’t it?’

  ‘You’d best take a look round yourself. Wheeee!’

  Simon couldn’t help giggling. All at once it felt like being in a fairground dodgem car. Borchert propelled him violently forwards, then backwards, then spun him on the spot like a top.

  ‘Please stop,’ he cried between gusts of laughter, but Borchert spun him twice more before pushing him out of the stairwell and along a passage with bare walls.

  ‘I feel sick,’ he groaned. The wheelchair came to rest at last, unlike the images whirling before his eyes. The faces of Borchert, Müller and the ambulance driver gradually stopped revolving around him.

  ‘What … what’s this?’

  Experimentally, Simon felt his head. He always removed his wig and deposited it on his bedside table at night, but no, he wasn’t dreaming. He could distinctly feel the wig beneath his tingling fingers. So the whole scene couldn’t be a dream, much as it looked like one.

  ‘Well, what do you think?’

  Simon’s look of mute amazement was answer enough. Very slowly, as if he’d just taken his medication, he folded up the white hospital blanket on his lap and draped it over the armrest.

  He couldn’t have explained why he did this. Perhaps it was just to occupy his trembling hands before the flood of glorious impressions totally paralysed him. Then his face broke into an irrepressible smile and the leaden armour that had seemed to encase his limbs fell away.

  He turned, hesitated and scanned his companions’ faces with an unspoken question in his eyes. They smiled at him encouragingly. Borchert, whose own eyes were strangely moist, was grinning even more broadly than the other two. So Simon stood up and took two paces into the room, which seemed incredibly spacious. Although there was so much else to discover, he couldn’t detach his gaze from the palm trees flanking the doorway. He shut his eyes, afraid that the mirage would have disappeared when he reopened them. But a moment later everything was still there: the sandy beach; the bamboo hut, brown as sugar cane; the ceaseless, muffled roar of the surf; and, a little way off, the smiling young woman with flowers in her hair.

  ‘Hello Simon,’ said Carina, coming towards him slowly.

  He was pervaded from within by a pleasurable sensation of warmth.

  ‘May I?’ he asked shyly, wondering why his voice sounded so different. And, as the men broke into laughter and applause, he planted one bare foot awkwardly on the creamy white sand, like a young puppy.

  4

  Brandmann pressed ‘Play’ again and the frozen image lurched into motion. On the screen, Losensky was overpowered by Engler, who abruptly turned his head.

  ‘This is the moment when Carina Freitag enters the equation,’ Brandmann explained. ‘Not that she ever appears on camera. Her gun wasn’t loaded, unfortunately.’

  ‘Or fortun
ately.’

  ‘Yes. Depends which way you look at it.’

  The screen showed Engler raising his automatic and aiming at an invisible Carina. Then, from behind him, came a muzzle flash. The bullet hit him squarely in the back of the head.

  ‘Yes,’ said Stern, ‘that’s the way it was.’ He removed his little finger from the cigarette burn in the worn leather sofa and struggled to his feet. Then he started humming.

  ‘Abba, eh?’ Brandmann smiled. ‘I honestly believe Losensky interpreted it as a divine omen and fired a warning shot in the air when he heard you hum “Money, Money, Money”.’

  ‘That’s pretty much what I was gambling on. It was only fright that sent me over backwards, not a bullet. I realized I wasn’t hurt, so I knew I mustn’t try to break my fall or he’d know I was still alive. When you come down to it, I beat Engler at his own game. He tricked me by playing dead and it worked for me too. Mind you, it did get me these.’

  He pointed to his flesh-coloured cervical collar and the bandage around his head. Although concussed, he had managed to worm his way across the car park and reach the revolver Engler had kicked out of Losensky’s hand. However, if Carina’s intervention hadn’t gained him a few vital seconds, he wouldn’t have had time to raise the gun, take aim and fire.

  Stern limped over to the special investigator.

  ‘I thought you were my enemy all the time, that’s why I confided in your partner instead of you.’

  ‘That’s understandable.’ Brandmann cleared his throat for the twentieth time at least and flicked the flint wheel of his lighter with a thumb. ‘But Engler wasn’t my partner. Officially I’m a criminal profiler employed by the Federal Police Bureau, but that’s just camouflage. I really work for Internal Affairs. Engler had long been suspected of involvement in criminal activities. There were indications that he owned a clutch of holiday homes in Mallorca and other assets unaffordable on his salary, but no one had guessed the full extent of his activities, least of all me.’

  Brandmann’s reproachful expression was presumably aimed at himself.

  ‘So you weren’t supposed to be investigating my case at all?’

  The inspector shook his massive head.

  ‘Not from the very first, no. We didn’t believe there was any connection between Engler’s corruption and Simon’s dead bodies.’ He cleared his throat and licked his dry lips. ‘Our strategy was to make him nervous by means of my clumsily intrusive interference in his work. If we exerted sufficient pressure and put him off his stroke, we hoped he’d get careless – send an unencrypted email or use an insecure mobile number. Anything that would lead us to his sources of income. But when the Simon Sachs case became more and more convoluted, the chief superintendent thought it wouldn’t do any harm to bring in a man of my experience. So I helped the team out a bit – organized Simon’s lie-detector test, collected witnesses’ statements and assisted Engler in his scene-of-crime work.’

  ‘And gave Picasso your phone number?’

  ‘Yes. Your father was given it too, by the way. The two of them were to call me as soon as they spotted anything suspicious. Picasso was neutralized before he could see that the police guard on Simon’s room had been withdrawn. We already know who slipped an overdose of rohypnol into his coffee, by the way.’

  Stern raised his eyebrows.

  ‘The police guard himself, an accomplice of Engler’s. According to his statement, Herr Stern, you overpowered him. Too bad he didn’t know of Engler’s death at the time he was interviewed.’ Brandmann couldn’t hide a smile. ‘The whole thing was meticulously planned. I reckon Engler thought he was fireproof after all those years of leading a double life. He lured you, Carina, Simon and even his own prospective murderer to the lido car park – right under the eyes of the police.’

  ‘Where were you all the time?’ Stern’s question sounded rather more abrupt than he intended. ‘If it was your job to keep an eye on Engler, why didn’t you get wind of his last major operation?’

  Brandmann cleared his throat and made an apologetic gesture.

  ‘Chief Superintendent Hertzlich withdrew me when the situation escalated. I was only there to investigate financial irregularities, as I told you. From that time on, my work was temporarily suspended so as not to interfere with further investigations. I was already packing my bags.’

  ‘And now? What happens now? What about Engler’s associates? Somebody must have been helping him, surely?’

  Brandmann gave an affirmative grunt after each question, his Adam’s apple jerking up and down.

  ‘Yes, worse luck. Losensky had considerably thinned the ranks of his psychopathic associates in recent years, but Engler was always able to replace them in short order. As head of the murder squad he was well-placed, after all. Nevertheless, we’ve confiscated a mass of material that should help to smash the remainder of his gang. Hard disks, files, tapes, DVDs – not forgetting Engler’s car. The boot was crammed with the latest video technology …’

  Stern was reminded of how Engler had filmed himself and Brandmann at the animal cemetery. He had thought the pictures were live, but they’d merely been played after the event. A cheap trick like the performance at Tiefensee’s practice.

  ‘The only nice thing we found when we searched Engler’s home was his dog. Charlie the Labrador will be living with me from now on.’ Brandmann chuckled.

  ‘Didn’t you discover anything else?’ Stern asked hesitantly.

  ‘Not what you’re alluding to, no. To be honest, I wouldn’t get your hopes up too much in that respect.’

  Stern’s heart raced. At the same time, the left-hand side of his body went numb as if someone had sprayed it with coolant from the inside. He had almost been expecting the news, but having his worst fears confirmed at first hand was something else.

  ‘We’re still evaluating the evidence, but so far we haven’t found anything that points to your son. No documents, no photos or films of him, either as an infant or more recently. As for the baby depository theory …’ Brandmann ahemmed. To judge by his husky voice, he really did have a lump in his throat. ‘Well, we’re naturally following up that lead and checking hospitals nationwide to see if such an eventuality might be possible. To date, however, we haven’t turned up anything that would corroborate what Engler told you.’

  Naturally.

  Stern put all his weight on his right-hand crutch and drove it into the cellar’s concrete floor as hard as he could. With his free hand he felt for the crumpled envelope in his hip pocket. Engler’s parting gift to him had been a photo of the ten-year-old boy in the act of blowing out his birthday candles. Written across the cake in capital letters were the words APRIL FOOL!

  So he’d been hoodwinked on that score too. He blinked as if something had flown into his eye. It might sometime transpire how Engler had got hold of the CCTV footage and managed to manipulate it so convincingly. It might even prove possible to find the birthday child whose features had been modified to resemble his own with the aid of some kind of ultra-modern picture-processing software. The boy’s whole figure might be a bogus, computer-generated illusion.

  Stern relaxed his furious grip on the photo when he heard the blood roaring in his ears. None of this altered the fact that the video of that ten-year-old boy had been simply a cheap trick. Felix was dead and always had been. He was glad he’d never shared his irrational hopes with Sophie.

  ‘We shall follow up every possible lead and check to see if your son—’ Brandmann broke off and stared at the ceiling. Muffled reggae music was drifting down into the cellar from upstairs.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked in surprise.

  ‘That? That’s our cue.’

  Stern hobbled to the door.

  ‘Thanks a lot for showing me the tape, but I’m afraid I must now ask you to remove your shoes.’

  ‘Why on earth?’ Brandmann looked as if Stern had tipped a glass of iced water over his crotch.

  Stern opened the door and the Caribbean strains increas
ed in volume.

  ‘Because that concludes the official part of the proceedings and I want to keep a longstanding promise.’

  5

  ‘There you are!’

  Laughing, Simon plodded towards Stern across the man-made beach. A dozen operatives from an events agency had spent the previous night spreading fine sand all over the living-room floor. That done, the walls were quickly decorated with tropical motifs and a host of artificial palm trees, banana fronds and torches distributed around the dunes. Even the hearth was filled with driftwood and now resembled a campfire à la Robinson Crusoe. What really put the finishing touch to the island scenery, however, was a genuine bamboo beach bar. Installed behind it, Andi Borchert was busy mixing non-alcoholic cocktails.

  Stern experienced a sudden urge to run away, to head in the direction his dark thoughts were trying to propel him – to go anywhere, as long as it was away from this place he no longer recognized as his home. Not because of the coral sand and the palm trees, but because it was filled with sounds he had banished from it for years: laughter, music, happy voices. Looking around, he saw Simon, Carina, Borchert, Brandmann, Professor Müller – even his father. Familiar faces all, and all belonging to people whom he himself had invited but now found somehow disconnected from.

  And then, as Simon drew nearer and his urge to flee became almost irresistible, a change came over him. It was as if the boy were carrying an invisible torch that lit up his surroundings. Stern realized only now how much he had missed him.

  When Simon was standing in front of him at last, smiling with a sincerity of which most grown-ups are incapable, he understood for the first time why Carina had summoned him to that derelict industrial estate. The boy had never really needed his help. It was the other way round.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ Simon said, and his laughter momentarily silenced the nagging questions in Stern’s mind.

  ‘Thanks, this is really cool!’

  At the touch of his soft hand, Stern had a vague feeling that the answers he’d been seeking in the last few days weren’t crucial at all. As the boy led him to the beach bar, he saw for the first time what his open but unseeing eyes had ignored until now: Simon, Carina, the twins, himself. They had all survived. No longer tormented by inexplicable, murderous fantasies, the boy at his side could laugh, eat an ice, dance the lambada and enjoy this moment, even though the thing running riot in his head was far more destructive than any bad thoughts.