The Child by Sebastian Fitzek Read Free Book Online

boy. He’d stared at the nameless youngster again and again. In slow motion, freeze-frame and fast-forward. After the tenth time his eyes had smarted so much, he fancied he could detect reddish signs of wear on the DVD.
    This morning, after a sleepless night, he felt as helpless and emotionally drained as he had on the day of Felix’s funeral. He had lost his grip on reality. His rational lawyer’s brain was trained to always see problems from two sides. A client was either guilty or innocent. In this respect, the personal nightmare into which he’d stumbled yesterday was no different from the tragedies he had to deal with professionally. Here, too, only two possibilities existed: Felix was either dead or still alive. The former was the more likely. The boy with the birthmark might have been a chip off the same block as himself, but that was far from being proof.
    Proof of what?
Stern asked himself as he emerged from the hospital lift. As ever, when he pondered a difficult problem, his mind’s eye envisioned a bare white wall on which he stuck Post-it notes recording his main hypotheses. Where important cases were concerned, his brain contained a kind of cell to which he withdrew whenever he wanted to sort out his thoughts. The biggest Post-it of all bore the words FELIX ALIVE? in bold capitals.
    Later on, long after the burial in the woodland cemetery, he’d naturally wondered whether the boy had been exchanged. But Felix had been the only male child in the ward. The other three mothers had given birth to girls, which completely precluded the risk of a mix-up. Besides, before the post mortem Stern had satisfied himself that he was really mourning the right child. He still recalled how he felt when he lifted the inert little body lying on the autopsy table in order to run his fingers over the birthmark in farewell.
    What, then? Rebirth? Reincarnation?
    He tore up that mental Post-it before giving it serious consideration. He was a lawyer. He couldn’t resolve problems by resorting to parapsychology, much as it pained him to accept the fact. FELIX = DEAD, he wrote on a third Post-it. He was just trying to entrench this in his mind when his thoughts performed another somersault.
    If he’s dead, why is someone casting doubt on his death? And what has it all to do with Simon Sachs? How in the world did the boy know about the body in the cellar?
    Stern wondered what it said about his state of mind this Saturday morning that he had set off for the Seehaus Clinic determined to get to the bottom of the last question. He was so engrossed in his sombre thoughts that he failed to hear the male nurse who was pushing an elderly patient to the physiotherapy department in a wheelchair. The two men were humming the Abba classic ‘Money, Money, Money’ in unison as Stern rounded the corner and blundered into them.
    He crashed into the chrome-plated chariot sideways on, lost his balance, and made a desperate grab for the nurse’s sleeve but missed. Having briefly supported himself by planting one hand on the patient’s head, he gripped his wrist as he tumbled and eventually fell flat on the mint-green linoleum, but not before pulling out the cannula that connected the old man to his drip.

2
    ‘Jesus! Are you OK, Herr Losensky?’ The bearded nurse knelt down beside the wheelchair, looking concerned, but his patient seemed half-amused and waved him away.
    ‘It’s nothing, nothing. I’ve got a guardian angel.’ The old man reached under his open-necked shirt and pulled out a chain with a cross dangling from it. ‘Better look after our friend there.’
    Stern massaged his palms, which he’d bruised on the unyielding floor when trying to break his fall. He ignored the throbbing pains in his knees rather than present an even more pathetic picture.
    ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said apologetically when he had regained his feet. ‘Is everything OK?’
    ‘That depends,’ the nurse growled. He carefully slid the old man’s