It was ages since I’d done any maintenance on the boat, and I was afraid it would take me a while to get the generator going. If it didn’t, I could cope. I could make do with candles and the butane cooker. Warmth wasn’t a concern as the old wood-burning stove in the houseboat’s saloon was reliable. And the chemical toilet required no power.
I was just about to pick up my things when my state of mind changed abruptly. My sense of peace and contentment vanished in an instant. I approached the houseboat tensely, nervously. My nervousness gave way to a fear that became more intense with every step I took. At first I thought the fear irrational because I couldn’t identify its source. But then I saw it.
A glimmer of light.
My reason for suddenly wanting to turn and run. Away from my hiding place. From this place known to no one.
No one but the person inside the houseboat, who had just lit a cigarette.
72
For the first article I wrote as a crime reporter, I interviewed an elderly couple whose flat had been burgled. The worst thing about it, they told me, was not the theft of articles of value – not even the loss of irreplaceable things like family photographs, holiday souvenirs and diaries. What really horrified them was the revulsion they would feel whenever they entered their own home from now on.
‘By rummaging in our drawers, by laying hands on our underwear – just by breathing the air within our own four walls – those swine violated our privacy.’
The seventy-two-year-old husband did the talking while his wife held his hand and kept nodding in confirmation of every word he uttered.
‘We weren’t robbed, we were raped.’
At the time I’d thought their reaction grossly exaggerated. Now, as I tried to set foot on the foredeck without a sound, I understood what the old folk had been trying to convey.
Whoever was waiting for me in the houseboat’s dark interior had destroyed the sense of security that had always greeted me there.
I unfolded the longest blade in my Swiss Army knife and tiptoed down the steps to the main deck. If the worst came to the worst my torch would provide an additional means of defence.
The stout planks creaked as I set foot on the last step leading to the deckhouse I’d once spent several weeks converting into my living room.
If the burglar was still inside the main cabin, I had cut off his only escape route – unless, of course, he jumped into the lake through one of the big lattice windows. There was nowhere to hide.
My houseboat was no bigger than a spacious garage. In addition to a little galley and an even smaller toilet, it was divided into two adjoining compartments. I was standing outside the larger of the two, which one had to cross in order to reach the bedroom in the bow. The front door, which I had never kept locked over the years, had a transom window set into it at head height. Cautiously, I peered through it.
Discounting the red dot hovering like a glow-worm in the left-hand corner, the room was in complete darkness. The houseboat was so darkened by the trees and bushes growing around its natural hiding place, I could scarcely see the door handle.
Holding my breath and listening to the thud of my heartbeat, I braced myself for a physical confrontation. When I felt sufficiently ready I flung the door open, burst into the living quarters, and shouted ‘Hands up!’ at the top of my voice.
Simultaneously, I turned on my torch and shone it on the sofa immediately beneath the window on the lake side.
I’d been prepared for anything: a tramp who had made himself at home in the cold weather; even for Stoya, who had somehow managed to locate my hideaway before I could reach it.
For anything.
But not this.
71
‘Good God, are you crazy or something?’
A young woman I’d never seen before had made herself at home on the sofa in total darkness.
‘First I nearly break my neck getting here, and now you scare me half to death.’
I raised my right arm and shone the torch straight at her face. To my surprise she neither blinked nor shaded her eyes with her hand. The stranger, whom I guessed to be in her late twenties, continued to sit there, gazing stolidly in my direction.
‘Who the hell are you?’ I demanded. I could have followed that up with two more questions: What are you doing here? How did you find this place?
Her low, rather husky voice went with the cigarette and a fairly masculine posture. She was sitting there with her legs crossed, left ankle on right knee.
‘You tell me it’s a matter or life or death, and then you keep me waiting for a good hour...’
She tapped the big watch on her wrist. For some reason the glass was hinged open and her fingers were resting on the exposed hands.
‘... and now you appear to be drunk.’
Utterly bewildered, I removed the beam of my torch from her face and played it over the rest of her.
She was wearing tight jeans, slashed at the knees, and black paratrooper’s boots. Instead of a winter jacket she had put on several multicoloured sweaters over each other. As far as I could tell in the dim light, her clothing might have been unusual but it wasn’t dishevelled.
‘Do we know each other?’ I asked hesitantly.
‘No.’ She paused for a moment. ‘That’s why I’m here.’
An unpleasant thought occurred to me: Was I dealing with a madwoman? The Wannsee Home wasn’t far away, nor was the Wald Clinic for psychosomatic disorders.
That’s all I need.
How on earth could I get rid of a mentally sick woman without drawing attention to myself?
They’re probably out looking for her already.
‘Look, I’ve no idea who you are, so please leave at...’
I broke off in mid sentence and instinctively took a step backwards.
Jesus, what was that?
‘Everything okay?’ she said.
No, it damn well wasn’t. I’d just glimpsed some movement beside the sofa. Clearly, this mysterious woman hadn’t sneaked aboard my boat unaccompanied.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ I demanded. The very thought of being confronted by a second intruder had set my pulse racing again.
‘What are you blathering about?’ she retorted, sounding as if she doubted my sanity. ‘You called me. ’
‘I did?’
The absurdity of her statement took the edge off my fear. She herself was looking somewhat disconcerted.
‘You are Alexander Zorbach, the journalist?’
I nodded, but she repeated the question with a touch of irritation, presumably because she couldn’t see me nod in the gloom.
‘Yes, I am. But I didn’t call you.’
No one could have. No one knows about this place. No one except...
She sighed and brushed a strand of hair off her forehead.
‘So who gave me the directions to this arsehole of the world?’
No one except my mother, but she has spent years on a life-support machine.
I opened my mouth without knowing what I was going to say. The situation seemed so inexplicable. But before I could utter a word, the first of a whole raft of questions answered itself.
I suddenly realized who else had sneaked aboard with this woman. Or rather, what else.
The beam of my torch wandered downwards and lit up something on the floor beside the sofa: a handle attached to a leather harness, itself attached to a dog. A Labrador or a Golden Retriever. I wasn’t sure which, but I realized something else. Something that seemed impossible.
I went right up to the sofa and shone my torch straight in the woman’s eyes.
Bloody hell...
There could be no doubt. It all fitted: the hinged watch glass, the dog in the harness, her reference to having fallen over on the way here.
What’s going on here?
I’d hit on an answer, only to find it even more incomprehensible. How had this nameless woman had made her way to my houseboat?
I only knew that she would never b
link however long I shone the torch in her clouded eyes.
The woman who had discovered my hideaway was blind.
70
The wind had freshened and waves were slapping the hull at irregular intervals. The snow had been falling silently when I had reached the houseboat. At the time there had been no sign of an approaching storm, but now the planks beneath my feet were beginning to pitch and toss.
‘I’d better go,’ said my mysterious guest. I was lighting the old-fashioned paraffin lamp I always took care to fill and leave on the window sill before I left the boat.
‘No, not so fast.’
I deposited the lamp on the coffee table in front of the blind woman. Its flickering, sulphurous yellow light transformed the whole room into a chiaroscuro, a shadow play.
Closer inspection caused me to revise my original estimate of the stranger’s age. She was twenty-five at most, probably younger. I looked down at her boots, which were very dirty. Their sides were adorned with coloured transfers of naked Japanese girls. This suited her, because her taut skin, high forehead and wide-set eyes lent her face a subtly Eurasian look. The most noticeable feature of her appearance, however, was a multitude of dyed red dreadlocks.
My father would probably have described her as a punk. My mother, though doubtless less judgemental, would have been secretly worried that such a pretty girl might be ruining her hair by dyeing it.
‘I’ll be glad when you’ve gone,’ I said. ‘But first you must answer some questions.’
‘Like?’
Who phoned you? Who told you how to get here? What did you think you’d gain by visiting me here?
‘Let’s start with your name.’
‘Alina.’
She felt in the black rucksack between her long legs. ‘My name is Alina Gregoriev, and I’ve had more than enough aggro for one day.’
Her breath was visible now. I hadn’t been aware until then how cold it was on board. I would have to get the wood stove going as soon as I was alone.
‘What do you want from me?’ I asked.
‘I’ll say it again for the record, Mister Reporter: You talked me into this wild-goose chase.’
She mimed a telephone with her hand and imitated an imaginary caller: ‘Take the bus to Nikolskoer Weg. Stay on that side of the road and walk to the next entrance on the right.’
This is impossible, I thought as she continued to give an exact description of the route I myself had followed earlier.
‘After a while you’ll reach a turn-off. Keep going until you come to a fallen tree, blah blah blah...’
Quite impossible...
‘It wasn’t me,’ I said, struggling to retain my composure.
Who knows about this place except me?
Who would want to play a practical joke on me and a blind girl?
I hesitated, eyeing the figure on the sofa with renewed mistrust. ‘Surely you can hear I’m not the person who called you.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, because you’re—’
‘Because I’m blind ? she said with a wry smile. ‘I’d have expected an investigative journalist to be rather better informed.’ She shook her head, acting as if she was disappointed. ‘It’s a stupid misconception that all blind people can hear better. Sure, we concentrate better because we’re not being distracted by visual stimuli, and our other senses often compensate for our inability to see. But that doesn’t automatically make bats of us, and besides, every blind person is different.’
She grasped the handle on her dog’s harness and stood up.
‘For instance, I only have good spatial hearing. I can tell from the echo of my voice that there’d be room for a beer crate between my head and the ceiling. I also know I’d bump into a wooden partition after taking four steps or so.’
You do sound a bit batty, I thought, but I said nothing.
‘But my voice recognition is poor,’ she went on. ‘I have enough of a problem when someone greets me in the street by simply saying “Hi there” or “It’s me.” It often takes me a while to identify people by their voices. That even applies to close friends and patients I’ve treated for years.’
‘Patients?’ I said, mystified, as I watched her pulling at the longish object in her hands, which turned out to be a telescopic cane.
‘I’m a physiotherapist.’
She felt for the feet of the coffee table with her cane. ‘I recognize people better by their bodies than their voices.’ She gave the handle a gentle tug. ‘Come on, TomTom, let’s go.’
TomTom? I thought briefly, somewhat distracted by the quirky sense of humour that had prompted her to name her guide dog after a satnav system.
The dog reacted at once.
‘Hey, stop, not so fast,’ I said as she started to make her way past me. ‘I’m not letting you leave till you tell me why you came. This man who called you...’
...who pretends to be Alexander Zorbach and somehow knows the location of my hideaway...
‘...he may have lured you here, but that doesn’t explain why you let him talk you into it.’
Let alone in your condition, I thought.
‘What did you hope to gain by coming to see me?’
Alina came to a halt. Her tone was weary, as if she’d told me the same thing a hundred times.
‘I thought it my duty to come, so I didn’t have to blame myself later. At least I have left no stone unturned, and since I’m familiar with your articles, Herr Zorbach, I honestly believed you’d phoned because you were interested in my evidence.’
‘What evidence?’
Her face was in shadow, so I couldn’t read her expression. In any case, I wasn’t sure of the extent to which blind people’s faces register their emotions.
‘Yesterday I went to the police and told them all I know, but the idiots didn’t take me seriously. I had to make my statement to some fool who didn’t even have an office of his own.’
‘What was it about?’
She sighed. ‘I’m a physio, as I already said. Most of my patients are regulars, but yesterday a stranger turned up at my practice without an appointment. He complained of severe pain in the lumbar region.’
‘And?’ I said with mounting impatience.
‘So I started to give him a massage, but I didn’t get far. I had to break off the treatment.’
‘Why?’
A wave made the whole houseboat shudder. I glanced at the window facing the lake, but total darkness prevailed outside.
‘For the same reason we’re talking together now. I suddenly realized who he was.’
‘Well, who was he?’ My stomach tensed even before I heard her reply.
‘The person you’ve written about so often in the last few weeks.’
She paused for a moment. The cold around me seemed to intensify.
‘I’m pretty sure the man I treated yesterday was the Eye Collector.’
69
Dry birchwood logs were crackling loudly in the stove. I’d quickly put a match to them after persuading Alina to stay.
‘Just another ten minutes’ were all she’d granted me. Then she would have to catch the bus back to the city centre, which only went once an hour. I still hadn’t decided whether to offer to drive her home in the Volvo. I simply didn’t know what to make of her and the whole situation.
I closed the little stove’s soot-stained window. Together with the paraffin lamp, the flickering firelight was now generating the warm glow I had always enjoyed during my periodic retreats here.
To work. Or to sort out my thoughts...
But this time I failed to experience the snug sensation with which I usually sat down at the little desk beneath the window on the landward side. I was feeling even edgier than I did during the minutes preceding copy deadline, when I still had to type my last few lines and was battling simultaneously with the clock and the nicotine withdrawal symptoms that regularly assailed me now that Thea had banned smoking in the newsroom.
‘Coffee?’ I asked, going
to the galley at the far end of the room. It was little more than a miniature worktop with a gas ring, two fitted cupboards and a sink.
‘Black,’ came the terse reply. Alina seemed far calmer than I, although just as many questions must have been whirling around in her head. After all, she was on her own in the wilds with a total stranger.
And she was blind!
I lit the butane gas ring.
‘You say you recognized the Eye Collector?’ I said as I looked in the cupboards for some instant coffee. I tried to rid my voice of any derisive undertone, but it wasn’t easy. ‘Does that mean you aren’t completely blind?’
I had known, ever since my mother lost her sight after a stroke, that it was a widespread misapprehension that all blind people live in darkness. In Germany they are officially classified as blind if they can detect less than two per cent of what a sighted person sees. Two per cent can mean a great deal to those affected, but I wasn’t sure how even this minimal residue of sight had enabled Alina to see the Eye Collector.
Four women, three children – seven dead in only six months. And there wasn’t even a photofit picture of the serial murderer!
She shook her head.
‘What about silhouettes, shadows and so on?’ I asked.
‘No. No silhouettes, colours, flashes of light or anything like that. In my case everything has gone. That’s to say...’ She hesitated. ‘Everything except my sensitivity to light and darkness. At least I’ve retained that.’
Retained...
So she hadn’t been blind from birth.
The water in the kettle started to boil. I spooned some instant coffee into a mug.
‘Just now, when you shone a light in my eyes, I sensed it. It’s as though the light is filtered through a very thick curtain. I can’t make out anything behind it, but I can sense a change.’
She smiled.
‘It’s a great help to me in everyday life. For instance, I can distinguish between times of day. That’s why I always ask for a window seat on a plane. Most flight attendants can’t understand why – in fact one tried to transfer me, but I told him to get lost. There’s nothing lovelier than the intensity of light reflected by clouds, don’t you think?’
The Eye Collector Page 6