The Child

  Stern asked no questions and simply let the boy run on. Looking down at his own hands, he saw that he’d unconsciously clasped them together like a man at prayer.

  ‘The bulb was flickering and clicking away when I got down to the cellar. On, off, on. Sometimes it was light for a little, then dark. But even when the light came on I couldn’t see much, the bulb was just too dirty. I knew, of course, that sheets and towels were hung up to dry on one side of the cellar, and on the other side were the baskets with our jeans and T-shirts in them. But the light was flickering even worse than I was trembling, and I was scared someone was hiding behind the sheets, ready to grab me. I was much younger then, and I nearly did it in my pants.’

  Stern raised his eyebrows and nodded at the same time. For one thing because he could empathize with Simon’s fear; for another because he was beginning to see what the boy was getting at.

  ‘And is it like that now? With the pictures you see?’

  ‘Yes. When I remember myself in my previous life, it’s like that day at the children’s home. I’m back in the cellar and the dirty bulb is flickering.’

  Click. Click.

  ‘That’s why I only see outlines, shadows. Everything’s blurred … But the light seems to be getting brighter every night.’

  ‘You mean you can remember things better when you wake up?’

  ‘Yes. Like yesterday I began to wonder if I’d really killed the man at all. With the axe, I mean. But this morning it was quite clear again. Just like that number.’

  Click.

  ‘What number?’

  ‘The 6. It’s only painted on it.’

  ‘Painted on what?’

  Click. Click.

  ‘A door. A metal door. It’s near some water.’

  Stern suddenly longed for something to drink. There was an unpleasant taste in his mouth and he wanted to rinse it away. That and the terrible presentiment Simon’s words were giving rise to.

  ‘What happened there?’ he asked without meaning to.

  What happened behind the door numbered 6?

  A man started whistling and footsteps went by in the passage outside, but Stern’s brain filtered out these acoustic distractions until only Simon’s voice remained. The voice that was describing the death throes of a man he claimed to have murdered twelve years ago.

  Two years before he was born.

  Stern fervently hoped that someone would interrupt them and spare him from having to listen to every last detail. For instance, the serrated knife with which the victim had managed to wound his assailant before he died. Roughly in the same part of his body as Simon’s milk-chocolate birthmark.

  He looked desperately at the door, but it remained shut. No doctor or nurse interrupted Simon’s terrible story, which he recounted in an almost dispassionate tone. His big eyes were closed again.

  ‘Do you remember the address?’ Stern asked breathlessly when the boy had finished at last. He could scarcely hear himself speak, the blood was pounding so loudly in his ears.

  ‘I’m not sure. Yes, perhaps.’

  Simon said only one more word, but it was enough to bring Stern’s whole body out in goose pimples. He knew the place. He had sometimes gone walking there. With Sophie. During her pregnancy.

  6

  ‘No, I don’t have a search warrant. I’m not a policeman either.’

  Stern wondered whether the yob with the unwashed hair and the ring in his nose had ever been to school. An expanse of pink gum showed beneath his short upper lip. That, combined with a very pronounced overbite, endowed him with the semblance of a permanent grin.

  ‘Then you can’t,’ Sly mumbled, propping his legs on the desk. He had proudly introduced himself by that ludicrous pseudonym a few minutes ago, when Stern entered the little office on the ground floor of the haulage company’s headquarters.

  ‘What do you want with Number 6 anyway? I don’t think we rent out the single-figure garages any more.’

  Simon had preserved only a fragmentary recollection of the address back at the hospital, but his reference to Spree Garages had been quite enough. Stern knew the dilapidated warehouses beside the canal in the Alt-Moabit district. The headquarters of the long-established Berlin firm was a sandstone-coloured brick building overlooking the water. Just behind it were the garages used by some customers as storage space for furniture, electrical appliances and other junk. Trade wasn’t as good now that immigrant labourers were prepared to dispose of old washing machines for two euros fifty an hour, so the owners hadn’t troubled to renovate the place.

  The grimy office stank of cigarette smoke and public lavatories, probably thanks to the air freshener Sly had suspended from the overhead light to save himself the trouble of airing the place regularly. No wonder the closed blinds were coated with mildew from window sill to ceiling. Stern couldn’t understand why anyone would have wanted to shut out the little light there was on such a dark and rainy autumn day.

  He trotted out the story he’d come up with on the drive from the hospital. ‘I’m an executor in search of the heirs to what could be a substantial estate. We think Garage Number 6 may contain clues of potential use to us.’

  While speaking he had opened his wallet and extracted two fifty-euro notes. Sly took his legs off the desk. His imbecilic grin widened.

  ‘I wouldn’t risk my job for a hundred smackers,’ he said with feigned self-righteousness.

  ‘You bet you would.’

  Stern turned to look at the man who had just come panting into the office. He put his money away.

  ‘Christ, this place stinks like a Turkish brothel.’

  The sweating, bald-headed newcomer looked like an ambulant Buddha. A thirty-two-inch widescreen TV would have fitted on Andreas Borchert’s back without overlapping his shoulders.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ Sly demanded, jumping to his feet. The grin had been wiped off his face like chalk off a blackboard.

  ‘Please don’t disturb yourself. You’re welcome to remain seated.’

  Borchert unceremoniously thrust the man back on his chair and went over to a key board hanging on the wall beside a poster-sized street map of Berlin.

  ‘Which one is it, Robert?’

  ‘Number 6.’ Stern wondered if it had been wise to call his former client and enlist his help. He was familiar with Andi Borchert’s arbitrary problem-solving methods. Two years ago Borchert had been a producer of cheap ‘adult entertainment’, yucky hard-core porn that had made him a small fortune until the day when one of his ‘actresses’ was brutally raped on set. Everything pointed to Borchert’s guilt until Stern managed to convince the court otherwise. After his acquittal, Borchert had got off with a suspended sentence for seeking out the real culprit and beating him into a speechless pulp. Secured once again by Stern’s skilful courtroom tactics, this much-reduced penalty had unintentionally gained him Andi Borchert’s undying friendship.

  ‘Try calling the cops,’ Borchert growled in Sly’s direction as he took the relevant key from the board, ‘and you and I will go for a little ride together, understand?’

  Stern couldn’t suppress a smile when his ex-client simply strode out of the office without waiting for a submissive nod from the clerk. He caught him up and trudged across the stretch of open ground that led to the garages.

  ‘OK, once more for the benefit of someone with no school-leaver’s certificate.’

  Borchert didn’t seem to mind treading in a puddle every other step in his white boxing boots. His propensity to sweat at the least physical exertion had earned him several nicknames including ‘Mr Sumo’. Borchert knew them all, not that anyone had ever used them in his presence.

  ‘All I gathered on the phone was, you need help because a boy of ten has murdered a man.’

  ‘More than one, actually.’ Stern told him the incredible story as they made their way across the haulage company’s yard, speaking faster and faster the more sceptical his ex-client’s expression became. They paused for a moment beside a rusty skip.
A black cat was just climbing into it.

  ‘What? Fifteen years ago in a previous life? You’re pulling my leg!’

  ‘You think I’d have asked for your help if I had any choice?’ Stern brushed his damp hair back and gestured to Borchert to accompany him to the garages.

  ‘Martin Engler has been on the case since I found that body two days ago. You know, the inspector who was after your blood.’

  ‘I remember the bastard.’

  ‘And he remembers how I wrecked his nice, open-and-shut case.’

  When investigating Andi Borchert, Engler had omitted to look at his medical history. The big man had suffered since adolescence from partial erectile dysfunction. To put it in the vernacular, he was almost impotent and could only get it up, if at all, on home territory and after lengthy foreplay. Ergo, he couldn’t have raped the girl.

  Borchert was eternally grateful to Stern, not only for getting him off but for ensuring that the trial was held in camera. A porn film producer who couldn’t get it up would have been a public laughing stock. Although none of the spicy details leaked out, thanks to Stern, Borchert had turned his back on film-making and now ran several successful nightclubs in Berlin and the surrounding area.

  ‘Engler would love to pin something on me,’ said Stern.

  Borchert kicked aside an empty beer can. ‘Sure I’ll help you, but I still don’t understand. Why get involved?’

  Stern avoided the question. ‘I’ve taken the boy’s case, OK?’

  He didn’t want to tell Borchert about the DVD yet, even though that would at once explain why he needed some back-up. Andi was the only person Stern knew who was imperturbable enough to wallow in the mire on his behalf without asking too many questions. However, he was afraid his ex-client would think him insane if he revealed the true reason why he was retracing the road Simon claimed to have trodden in a previous life.

  Maybe I really have gone insane? There was that two-minute video. On the other hand, there were all the laws of nature that weighed against the possibility his infant son could still be alive. Then again, they also weighed against the fact that Simon appeared to remember a murder committed well before he was born.

  ‘OK, your honour, no more questions.’ Borchert raised his hands like the victim of a stick-up. ‘But please don’t tell me we’re looking for another body.’

  ‘We are. I was with Simon at the hospital earlier on, and he gave me this address.’

  The drizzle had eased a little, and Stern could at last look ahead without having to blink away droplets the whole time. They were no more than fifty metres from the metal door of Number 6, which was part of a block of shabby-looking lock-ups a stone’s throw from the Spree.

  ‘Simon says the man wouldn’t fit into the freezer, so he cut his legs off.’

  7

  Stern didn’t really know what he’d expected to see when they opened the door. A horde of rats dragging a severed leg across the concrete floor perhaps, or a buzzing black cloud of fruit flies and blowflies hovering over a half-open chest freezer. His mind’s eye had been prepared for the sight of any harbinger of death, which was why the reality made him feel so unutterably sad.

  He ought really to have felt relieved when the garage turned out to be empty. No furniture. No electrical appliances. No books. The dusty light bulb cast a dim glow over two small crates filled with old crockery and a worn-out office chair, nothing more. Stern felt as if all hope were escaping from a valve in his side. He became painfully aware how fiercely and irrationally he had wanted to find something lifeless in the garage. The more inexplicable Simon’s memories were, the more reasonable it seemed to believe in a connection between Felix and a ten-year-old boy with a birthmark on his shoulder. He could scarcely grasp that he’d rooted this irrational equation in his subconscious.

  ‘So much for your feng shui shit,’ Borchert growled. Stern didn’t trouble to explain that the classical Chinese philosophy of building and garden design had nothing to do with reincarnation or the transmigration of souls. To the club owner, anything he couldn’t actually touch was psychobabble concocted by people with too much time on their hands. It was precisely this straightforward attitude that Stern had found so appealing only a short time ago.

  ‘What are you up to now?’ asked Borchert. Stern had abruptly knelt down and was shuffling along on all fours. He didn’t reply, just went on running his fingers over the dusty concrete floor in search of irregularities. He sensed the pointlessness of this long before he gave up.

  ‘No dice,’ he said eventually, getting to his feet and patting the dust off his camel hair coat. ‘No double floor. Nothing.’

  ‘That’s odd, considering the rest of your story sounded so plausible,’ Borchert said sarcastically. For some reason his forehead was once more beaded with sweat although he hadn’t budged from the spot for the last couple of minutes.

  Stern paused on the way out and glanced thoughtfully over his shoulder. Then he turned off the light and left his companion to shut the heavy door.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Something doesn’t add up.’

  ‘I’ve noticed that too, now you come to mention it.’ Borchert withdrew the key from the lock and grinned. ‘Maybe it’s the fact that we’re standing here in the drizzle after looking for a corpse in an empty garage.’

  ‘I don’t mean that. You’d understand if you’d been with me two days ago. I mean, that boy had been in hospital for the last few months, and before that in a children’s home. How could he have known about the body in the factory cellar? He even knew the man’s approximate date of death.’

  ‘Has that been confirmed?’

  ‘Yes,’ Stern said without mentioning the source. Till now he’d been dependent on the DVD voice.

  ‘Somebody must have told him, then.’

  ‘I guess so, but it doesn’t add up all the same.’

  Borchert shrugged. ‘Children talk to imaginary friends, so I’ve heard.’

  ‘When they’re three or four, maybe. Simon isn’t schizophrenic, if that’s what you mean. He doesn’t suffer from hallucinations. The guy with his skull split open actually existed, I found him myself. And what about this here?’ Stern indicated the door. The paint was peeling badly. ‘It had a 6 painted on it, just the way Simon said.’

  ‘Then he must have been here and seen it sometime.’

  ‘He was in a children’s home in Karlshorst, nearly an hour from here by car. It’s highly improbable, but even if you’re right it doesn’t make sense. Why should the boy believe himself to be a murderer just because someone else says so?’

  ‘What is this, a quiz show? How should I know?’ Borchert said irritably, but Stern wasn’t listening. His questions were more a way of sorting out his own thoughts than a request for answers.

  ‘OK, let’s assume Simon is being used by someone. Why should the murderer enlist the services of a little boy, of all people, to lead us to his victim or victims? Why bother? He could simply pick up a phone and call the police.’

  ‘Hey, you two!’ came a yell from the entrance to the main building. A bent-backed little man in blue overalls was waddling towards them across the rain-swept yard.

  ‘It’s old Giesbach – he owns the business,’ Borchert explained. ‘Not surprising he walks like that. He slipped a disc after hefting one packing case too many.’

  ‘What are you doing on my premises?’ the haulage boss demanded, waving his arms, and Stern mentally prepared himself for another confrontation. Then the old man stopped short and gave a hoarse laugh.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, Borchert. Now I know why that useless nephew of mine was shitting himself.’

  ‘You weren’t around and we were in a hurry, Giesbach.’

  ‘All right, all right. You might have called me, though.’

  The old man took the key from Borchert and looked at Stern.

  ‘Number 6, eh?’

  Stern would happily have taken a closer look at Giesbach’s weather-beaten face, bu
t he had to avert his head. From the viscous skeins of spittle escaping his lips with every word, the haulage boss might have been chewing a slice of cheese-topped pizza.

  ‘What did you want in there?’

  Borchert grinned. ‘My pal’s looking for a holiday home.’

  ‘Just asking. Number 6, eh? Fancy that.’

  ‘Meaning what?’ said Stern.

  ‘It was the only lock-up I ever rented out long-term.’

  ‘Who to?’

  ‘Man, you think I ask for ID when someone pays ten years in advance – in cash?’

  ‘Why should anyone rent an empty garage?’

  ‘Empty?’

  The instant the old man cackled derisively, Stern realized what had escaped his attention inside the garage. Scuff marks in the dust.

  ‘It was chock-a-block. We cleared it out last week. The lease had expired.’

  ‘What!’ the other two exclaimed in unison. ‘Where did you dump the stuff?’ Stern demanded.

  ‘Where it belonged. In that skip.’

  Stern felt his heart miss two beats as he followed the direction of the crippled haulier’s gaze. All at once it had returned: hope.

  ‘Should have cleared the place out two years ago. We failed to notice the lease had expired because we don’t rent out that range of garages any more. They’re due for demolition.’

  Stern turned and made his way back, as if in slow motion, to the rusty skip they’d passed on their way to the garages. When he was close enough to peer over the edge, he saw the black cat was still in there, sitting on a stack of old newspapers in front of an overturned chest freezer discoloured with age. It seemed to relish the pale yellow liquid seeping from under the lid. At all events, it didn’t take fright when Stern climbed into the skip, it just went on licking the rubber seal of the freezer, which definitely hadn’t seen the inside of a showroom for a dozen years or more.