The Eye Collector

  I was wondering how she’d hit on such an analogy when she answered the question unasked.

  ‘I once heard a medium describe his visions like that in a TV documentary, and somehow I grasped what he meant.’

  A birchwood log exploded behind the stove’s glass window. Alina fell silent for quite a while, running her fingers nervously through her hair.

  ‘The man on the phone shouted “Don’t go down into the cellar.”?’ I prompted her.

  ‘That’s what he said.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘Then the woman turned towards me and I found myself looking into my mother’s eyes.’

  ‘She turned towards you?’ I repeated, feeling bewildered.

  ‘Yes, it always happens like that. I don’t know why, but when I’m in physical contact with certain people – people who are highly charged with energy – I seem to enter them. It’s as if I’m exploring some dark secret in their soul.’

  She had moved her head a little while speaking and appeared to be looking out of the window facing the lake. I followed her blank gaze into the darkness.

  ‘So you saw your vision through the eyes of the...?’ I hesitated, momentarily unable to believe I’d meant to ask such a crazy question.

  She took advantage of the pause to complete my sentence. ‘Yes,’ she said, turning to face me again. ‘I was the Eye Collector. All that happened after that, I saw through his eyes.’

  At that moment a sizeable wave struck the houseboat’s hull. The spoon in her coffee mug rattled and the paraffin lamp flickered in a sudden draught. A gust of wind had found its way through cracks in the window surround.

  ‘What happened then?’ I asked when the gust had subsided.

  Alina now spoke faster, as if eager to get something off her chest.

  ‘I saw I was standing behind a wooden door. It wasn’t quite shut, and I’d been peering through the crack into the room where the woman was phoning.’

  ‘What did she do then?’

  ‘What her husband had told her not to.’

  Don’t go down into the cellar.

  ‘“You’re scaring me, darling,” she said, and took a step towards the door I was standing behind. Then a nightmarish thing happened.’

  Alina’s eyes were shut, but I could see them rolling around beneath her eyelids. TomTom raised his head and pricked his ears as if infected by his owner’s inner turmoil.

  ‘I leapt out from behind the door and wound a length of flex around her neck. She went rigid with fright.’ Her voice had gone husky. She sniffed before whispering softly, ‘And then I broke her neck.’

  Involuntarily, I held my breath. Alina, too, sounded breathless.

  ‘There was a sound like an eggshell being crushed. She died instantly.’

  66

  ‘What did you do with the body?’ I asked, kneading my temples. My headache was still bearable, but I would have to take something soon or it would pass the critical point and put me out of action for hours.

  ‘I hauled her outside by the flex. It all happened so quickly, somebody seemed to have pressed a fast-forward button in my head. But that’s typical of my waking dreams.’

  ‘Where did you take her?’ I asked impatiently.

  ‘I towed her across the living room to a terrace door and from there into the garden. It was very much colder out there. Snow crunched beneath my feet. I left her lying near the garden fence, a little way from a small shed.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘No, not just like that.’ Alina drained her coffee. ‘First, I put something in her hand.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A stopwatch.’

  Of course.

  My patience had been tried for long enough – I couldn’t restrain myself any longer. Everything she’d told me so far could have been gleaned from reports in today’s newspapers. Even some of my own earlier articles would have been sufficient. It was no secret that the murdered woman had phoned her husband shortly before her death. This had emerged from a check on her line and had been splashed on the morning news, providing grist to the headline-writer’s mill: ‘A LAST FAREWELL?’ Although no details of the conversation had been published, Alina could have figured it out. The stopwatch story had also long since stopped being a secret. The forensics officer who examined the first victim had been afraid he’d triggered the timer on a bomb by moving her. It turned out that the stopwatch had been rigged so that activated at a moment when the Eye Collector assumed his victim would be discovered – not a very accurate method for someone to adopt who had hitherto left no clues apart from a few clothing fibres. The lethal countdown had not started until four hours after the discovery of the second corpse, and the stopwatch had been ticking in the dead woman’s hand for forty minutes after the police had mounted guard over the third of the crime scenes.

  ‘Let me guess,’ I said, making no attempt to disguise my sarcasm. ‘The countdown had been set at forty-five hours precisely!’

  To my surprise. Alina shook her head vigorously. ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  I stared at her cigarette, which was smouldering away in the ashtray.

  The Eye Collector’s deadline is common knowledge.

  It was in all the newspapers. I’d been the first to write about it six weeks ago, after Stoya tipped me off.

  Alina clicked her tongue and TomTom looked up. ‘I know what you’re thinking, but you’re mistaken. The papers, the radio, the Internet – they all got it wrong. The deadline was forty-five hours seven minutes.’

  She put her empty coffee mug down and got up off the sofa. ‘Forty-five hours and seven minutes precisely. And now, it’s time I was going.’

  65

  (10 HOURS 47 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)

  ‘Where the devil are you?’ Stoya barked in my ear. I had absolutely no intention of revealing my whereabouts until I’d grasped what kind of game I was involved in.

  I was calling him from the deck of my houseboat for privacy’s sake, having talked Alina into another mug of coffee by promising to drive her home. It was so dark outside, I couldn’t even see the surface of the lake beneath me.

  ‘I can’t tell you that,’ I began, but Stoya cut me short.

  ‘Well, I can. I know exactly where you are, my friend: up to your neck in doodoo. What’s more, you’ll be in it over your head if you don’t come down to headquarters right away. It’s time you answered a couple of questions.’

  What were you doing at the crime scene?

  Why did we find your wallet there?

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I promise I’ll drop in before long, but first I’d like some info from you.’

  Stoya gave an incredulous laugh. ‘Christ, man! Scholle suggested putting the squeeze on you at our last meeting. You’re lucky we know each other so well or I’d have marched into the public prosecutor’s office by now. If you’re trying to pull some kind of newshound’s stunt on me, forget it.’

  I shivered. I’d lost all sense of time and had no idea how long I’d been talking to the mysterious girl. The temperature outside had definitely taken a dive since my arrival. The skin of my face felt taut, almost sunburnt, and it hurt even to breathe.

  ‘Take it easy,’ I said. ‘Just tell me whether a blind girl named Alina Gregoriev turned up at headquarters yesterday, claiming to know something about the Eye Collector.’

  ‘A blind girl?’ Stoya said after a moment. The wind had dropped a little, so I was able to hear him better. ‘Goddammit, Alex, ever since you hacks turned the Eye Collector into a cult figure like Hannibal Lecter, I’ve had all the nutters in Berlin knocking on my door. The tales they tell are worth a euro a word, if that. Only last night we had a visit from a social worker who claimed his late wife had opened the front door to him when he came home from work.’

  A snow-laden gust of wind blew straight into my face. ‘So did this girl come to the station?’ I asked hesitantly.

  ‘Could have.’

  I wiped the melting snowflake
s off my forehead. ‘Okay, then tell me one more thing...’

  ‘That makes two questions.’

  ‘The ultimatum.’

  ‘What about it?’ he said impatiently.

  ‘Is it possible you held out on me?’

  All I could hear for a moment were the wind-lashed trees and the sound of waves lapping against the hull. Then Stoya said grimly, ‘What are you getting at?’

  My stomach muscles tensed as they had yesterday, when I heard the 107 on the radio. It was standard police procedure to withhold or doctor relevant information about a crime so as to expose false confessions and sort out copycats.

  But that shouldn’t be the case here, because if the blind girl was right on this point, it would mean that...

  ‘Seven minutes,’ I said. The hand that was holding the phone to my ear began to tremble. ‘The deadline was set at forty-five hours seven minutes.’

  And if the children’s father doesn’t discover where they’re hidden by then, they die.

  Stoya realized he’d given himself away when he took too long to reply, so he didn’t bother to lie to me. ‘How did you know that?’ he asked bluntly.

  I shut my eyes.

  It can’t be true. Dear God, tell me it isn’t true.

  ‘Now listen carefully.’ My former colleague’s voice seemed to come from far away. ‘First you appear like magic at the crime scene, then we find your wallet there, and now you’re in possession of a piece of information not even known to my closest associates.’

  I didn’t make it up. She told me. Alina, the blind witness who can see into the past.

  Stoya’s final words made me shiver harder than ever. ‘The moment you said that, you became our chief suspect. I suppose you realize that?’

  64

  (10 HOURS 44 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)

  ALEXANDER ZORBACH

  I was almost surprised to find Alina still there when I finished my conversation with Stoya and went back inside, although it would have been impossible for her to sneak past me unnoticed and go ashore.

  Out into the cold, stormy darkness.

  But her disappearance would have been only one more link in the chain of inexplicable things that had happened to me in the last few hours.

  How did she know about the extra seven minutes?

  Alina was still seated on the sofa, patting her dog, when I re-entered the warm, stuffy living area. TomTom was clearly enjoying himself. He’d stretched out on his side with all four legs extended to give his mistress easier access to his chest and tummy.

  ‘Can we go?’ she asked without looking up. I realized that it was little things which sighted people find so off-putting about talking with the blind.

  We say almost more with our bodies than our mouths. Looks, gestures, movements – even a faint twitch of the lips – can express a kaleidoscope of emotions that are sometimes emphasized but often contradicted by what we say. This applies above all to posture. Under normal circumstances it is considered impolite not to look someone in the eye when speaking to them, and although I knew Alina was blind I felt slighted when she only presented her profile. Then it struck me that she was, logically enough, turning one ear in my direction.

  ‘TomTom needs feeding and my own stomach thinks my throat’s cut, so it’d be good to get home soon.’

  ‘I’ve only one more question,’ I told her, though I really didn’t know where to start.

  How did you know about the ultimatum? No one can see into the past, so why did you think up this crazy story? And why drag me into it?

  Alina threw back her head and laughed. ‘For someone who treated me like a burglar to start with, you seem very appreciative of my company.’

  I laughed back. ‘Journalistic interest, that’s all,’ I said, trying to sound casual.

  She raised her eyebrows, and I suddenly knew what had previously disturbed me about her varying facial expressions and her posture a moment ago.

  It was the fact that she communicated with expressions and gestures at all. To the best of my knowledge, registering joy and sorrow – even throwing up your arms after winning a race – were instinctive modes of behaviour. But what of the gradations in between? What of loathing, regret, disgust, or Alina’s look of nervous impatience at this moment? I knew a blind greengrocer in Kreuzkölln who had once asked me to tip him off if he looked surly. Most of the time he was merely concentrating, he said, not angry at all. Ever since that conversation I had assumed that facial expressions were the result of a learning process in which you copied other people, but Alina had so many non-verbal modes of expression that this couldn’t be true.

  Unless the Eye Collector isn’t all she’s lying about...

  ‘Can’t we discuss your questions on the way?’ she asked. I shook my head although I’d have been happy to accept her suggestion. I, too, wanted to get away as soon as possible. The possibility that Stoya had traced my call was extremely remote. I’d only been on his wanted list for a couple of minutes, after all, but Alina’s arrival on the scene had destroyed my sense of security. The only problem was, I still had too little information on which to base my next move.

  ‘It’s tricky outside at present,’ I said truthfully. ‘There are big branches coming down every two minutes. I’d wait until the storm subsides a little.’

  She stopped fondling her dog. ‘All right, what do you want to know?’

  How did you really know about this boat?

  What’s your connection with the Eye Collector?

  Are you genuinely blind?

  ‘Let’s go on from where you left off,’ I said, as much to sort out my own thoughts as for any other reason.

  Go on from the murder. From the point where you broke the woman’s neck and dragged her corpse into the garden. ‘What happened next?’

  ‘After I put the stopwatch in her hand, you mean?’

  A shadow seemed to flit across her face. She kept her eyes tight shut. Her lips were also compressed, which lent her face a tense expression.

  ‘I went over to the tool shed,’ she said slowly, as if she found it hard to unearth a long-buried recollection from the depths of her memory. ‘It was made of timber, not metal. I knew that because I got a splinter in my finger when I slid the bolt open. Besides, there was a smell of resin when I went inside.’

  She paused for a moment, nervously plucking at her left thumb with the fingers of her right hand.

  ‘There was something on the floor. It looked like a bundle of rags, but it was another body. Smaller and lighter than that of the woman lying dead on the lawn. It was a little boy.’

  ‘Was he still alive?’

  ‘I think so. He smelt like my brother Ivan. I can scarcely remember Ivan’s face, but I’ll never forget the smell of sweets and grimy knees that filled my nostrils when we had a bath together. I always smell it when I dream of little boys.’

  Or when you kidnap one.

  ‘Can you describe his face?’

  ‘No. I told you: the only faces I really remember are those of my parents.’

  I apologized for the interruption and asked her to go on.

  ‘I carried the boy to a car parked on the edge of the woods beyond the garden fence. I think it was early morning, shortly after sunrise. Suddenly everything went dark again and I thought the vision was over. Then two red lights came on in the boot of the car. I laid the boy down inside.’

  ‘What about the girl?’

  ‘What girl?’ She looked genuinely surprised. ‘I don’t know anything about that.’

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘The Eye Collector has kidnapped some twins for the first time. The papers are full of it.’

  ‘I can’t read newspapers, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘There’s radio and television.’

  ‘And the Internet. Thanks for the tip.’

  ‘Then you must have gathered that the police are looking for two missing children, Toby and Lea. They’re twins.’

  ‘But I didn’t, okay?’

&
nbsp; TomTom raised his head, alerted by the indignation in his mistress’s voice.

  ‘Yesterday I went straight to the police, who questioned me in the same shitty tone of voice you’re using now. They thought I was a crackpot, I grasped that at once. I was so furious when I got home, the rest of the world could get stuffed as far as I was concerned. So I settled down in front of the goggle-box with a bottle of wine and blotted out reality with some old Edgar Wallace movies until I got so sozzled I fell asleep. Today I was woken up by some lunatic who made a date with me out here in the wilds.’ She snorted angrily. ‘And I, being a silly cow, actually made my way here, only to be shat on a second time.’

  The paraffin lamp flickered, reminding me that it was high time I attended to the generator, or I and my weird visitor would soon be sitting in the dark.

  ‘And you expect me to believe all this?’ I said.

  Alina gripped the handle of her dog’s harness and stood up. ‘What the hell, you think I’m lying anyway. But ask yourself this: If I’d really made the story up, would it have sounded so poorly rehearsed?’

  She was right. Crazy though it sounded, the very fact that she’d known nothing about the kidnapped girl endorsed her credibility. No one seeking to make herself look important by concocting false testimony would have been careless enough to overlook the second victim.

  Unless that, too, was part of a plan I failed to comprehend.

  ‘I can only say what I saw,’ she said, shouldering her rucksack.

  I also got to my feet – rather too abruptly, because I felt dizzy all of a sudden. My migraine had now reached the stage at which only prescription drugs would deal with it. Fortunately, there was a half-used pack of Maxalt somewhere amid the clutter on the Volvo’s passenger seat.

  ‘Wait,’ I said, massaging the nape of my neck. This time Alina dispensed with her cane and relied entirely on the dog, which gently tried to tow her past me. I gestured to her to stop. She couldn’t see, of course, so I caught hold of her by the sleeve of her sweater.