The Eye Collector

by Sebastian Fitzek

  ‘I’m sorry, I know it’s far too late but I’d really like a word with him.’

  Nicci sighed. ‘Oh Zorro, Julian stopped coughing half an hour ago. I’m so relieved he’s asleep at last.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said sadly, amazed that she was remaining so calm although I’d dug her out of bed in the middle of the night. For all that, I felt sure she would have done the same in my position. Anyone who had just escaped certain death felt a need to commune with his family, regardless of its current state of dissolution.

  I debated whether to ask her to go upstairs and see if Julian had been woken by the phone, but it proved to be unnecessary.

  ‘Oh, damn!’

  Nicci had lowered the phone, but I could hear her berating our son for padding downstairs in his bare feet.

  ‘You’ll catch your death.’

  She was so scared of electro-smog, she wouldn’t have a cordless phone in the house. I prayed to God she wouldn’t send Julian upstairs again.

  There was a rustling sound. A moment later I was speaking to the person I loved best in the world.

  ‘Hi there, Jules. Happy birthday.’

  ‘Thanks, Daddy.’

  The sound of Julian’s sleepy but happy voice was almost more than I could bear just then.

  ‘Sorry I woke you. I only wanted to...’

  He took advantage of my hesitation to break in eagerly.

  ‘Mummy hung some things on the line today.’

  My fingers tightened on the phone as I struggled with an urge to weep.

  The line. It had once been my job to tie it to the banisters on the stairs leading to the first floor. Throughout the year, Nicci and I used to hoard little oddments we felt Julian would enjoy getting: a set of transfers for an album, a CD, a new pencil box, but also big presents like an iPod, or, last year, a PlayStation. Wrapped up separately and interspersed with fruit and sweets, these surprises were suspended from the ‘birthday line’ and Julian was allowed to open one a day from the first day in Advent onwards. The biggest on his birthday, the last one at Christmas.

  ‘I’m coming home today, so I’ll hang something on it too,’ I promised.

  ‘Really? You bought it for me?’ It almost broke my heart, he sounded so enthusiastic.

  His wants list this year had included a shockproof watch with a built-in radio. Needless to say, I hadn’t found the time to buy one.

  ‘When will I get it?’

  ‘As soon as you’ve had a good night’s sleep, pal.’

  I shut my eyes before a tear could escape.

  The older you get, the more your life is founded on unfulfilled promises. There is always, of course, a good reason why you can’t accompany your son to the school play or attend a PTA meeting, or why, when on holiday, you send the rest of the family down to the beach and wait for an email in your hotel room. God must have thought that by giving people an awareness of their mortality he was creating a paradise on earth: a world filled with individuals who realize that their life must end and will therefore make the most of the little time allotted them. Most of the people I know are well aware that life affords them daily opportunities to squander their time on making money, whereas they only have one chance to celebrate their child’s eleventh birthday. A chance I’d just missed.

  ‘At seven o’clock?’ he asked. That was the latest time for breakfast if he didn’t want to be late for class, though I doubted if Nicci would let him go to school in his present condition.

  ‘I’ll be there,’ I said, feeling that I genuinely meant it. ‘Seven o’clock, word of honour. And please forgive me for not being there tonight, when you were feeling so poorly.’

  He laughed. ‘No problem. Mummy told me you’re looking for the man who kidnaps children.’

  Really? Did she now!

  ‘It’s okay. That’s more important.’

  Utterly disconcerted, I groped for words. Before I could ask what else Mummy had said about me, Julian started coughing. A moment later Nicci was on the phone again.

  ‘I’d better get him back to bed.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘What for? I’m his mother.’

  ‘I mean, for what you told him. I know you don’t like my job, and I’m quite sure it’s partly responsible for the fact that the gulf between us is wider than the San Andreas Fault, but I’m really grateful to you for not letting it affect my relationship with Julian.’

  Silence. For a while, all I could hear was leaves rustling outside the houseboat and logs crackling in the stove. Then Nicci sniffed.

  ‘Oh Zorro, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘That makes two of us,’ I said. Then I added to my mountain of broken promises. ‘I told Julian I’d look in at seven. What say we have breakfast together?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Let’s make it a real birthday breakfast, the way we used to. Remember how I carried Julian downstairs while he was still asleep and the first thing he saw when he woke up were the candles on his cake?’

  She gave another sniff. I was loath to break the spell by blathering on, so I said goodbye.

  ‘See you in the morning,’ she said. Then, just before she hung up: ‘You won’t forget about Thursday, will you?’

  Seven words. Seven knives that pricked the bubble of hope.

  Thursday.

  The divorce preliminaries.

  ‘No,’ I said, feeling like the pathetic fool I doubtless was. ‘I’ll be there. With my lawyer.’

  29

  (4 HOURS 8 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)

  ALEXANDER ZORBACH

  First I felt her hand on my shoulder. Then the breath on my neck that accompanied her words.

  ‘May I ask you something?’

  Alina was standing just behind me. So close, I couldn’t have turned round without touching her. But I didn’t want to do that at the moment. All I wanted was to stand beside the window and stare out into the darkness of the forest, which suited my present state of mind so well.

  ‘That depends,’ I replied, checking to see whether Nicci really had hung up. My mobile contained an anonymous prepaid SIM card, a crime reporter’s basic equipment, but I suspected Stoya might be able to trace me all the same. I didn’t care now, I decided. I had no idea what to do next in any case, and the thought of spending the next few nights on remand had lost much of its deterrent effect after what had happened to us.

  ‘That business tonight...’ Alina said softly.

  The cellar.

  ‘What... what was it?’

  I didn’t answer although I knew what she was getting at.

  Alina had just come into contact with evil in the truest sense of the word. The Eye Collector had wrapped his mutilated victim in airtight plastic film and thereby caused her to putrefy while still alive. Then, in order to prolong the unknown woman’s sufferings, he had deliberately kept death at bay by installing a catheter, together with other devices that kept her supplied with what she needed to survive including a ventilator.

  I turned to Alina and looked at her. The fact that she had kept her eyes shut since our escape struck me as indicative. She wanted to cut herself off, to sever all visual connection with a world in which perverse psychopaths demanded human victims.

  ‘Would you have brought yourself to do it?’ she asked me after a while.

  Do what, throw the switch? Turn off the ventilator so the light came on and the door opened again? Kill the woman so we could live?

  ‘I don’t know,’ I answered truthfully.

  The poor thing was past saving, of course, and I knew it. As with my mother, the intensive care machines had prolonged her death, not her life, yet I’d once more lacked the courage to kill someone, on the off chance of finding another solution.

  On the smallest possibility!

  Because I had never, at any point, felt sure of having solved the Eye Collector’s riddle.

  You can turn off the pump and win...

  ‘Luckily, we didn’t have to make that decision in the end,’ I sai
d. I removed Alina’s hand from my shoulder and sat down on the sofa where I’d found her for the first time yesterday afternoon.

  Sitting down beside me, she ran her slender fingers cautiously across the top of the table in front of her. I pushed the large mug of coffee – I’d brewed some before phoning – towards her. She raised her eyebrows but said nothing. Then she took a big drink. When she put the mug down her lips glistened in the light of the candle I’d lit as well as the stove as soon as we got there. Eventually she said, ‘Yes, we made it anyway. Luckily.’

  Alina had ignored my urgent admonitions in the cellar of the bungalow. She had run her hands over dying woman’s arms, hands and fingers and come across the little box enclosing her index finger: a photoelectric pulse oximeter of the sort with which patients are fitted before surgery so that their oxygen saturation and heart rate can be monitored during the operation. Alina’s reasoning had been as simple as it was logical. Turning off the ventilator couldn’t guarantee the unfortunate woman’s death on its own. Only the absence of a pulse would convince the Eye Collector that his victim was dead. And that permitted another solution: that one didn’t have to turn off her life-support systems in order to set off the chain reaction which would, I hoped, liberate us.

  It took me several tense seconds to tear the surprisingly tough plastic film encasing the woman’s mutilated body and remove the pulse oximeter from her finger. When I finally succeeded, nothing happened.

  Absolutely nothing.

  The darkness persisted, the suction pump continued to hum. But then, just as I was about to hyperventilate, TomTom stopped whimpering and silence fell. Total silence.

  A moment later the lock on the cellar door opened with a faint click and the ventilator resumed pumping air into the putrescent woman’s lungs. She herself seemed quite unaware of what had been going on around her. I wasn’t even sure whether the responses I’d noticed on entering the cellar were intentional or an uncontrolled reflex.

  Taking Alina’s hand, I hurried up the steps and out into the passage. The door slammed shut behind us before I could stop it, but I didn’t linger. We raced back along the passage, through the living room and out into the open, where I filled my lungs with cold air untainted by the smell of death. I got through to emergency and gave them the address.

  ‘Quick. Someone’s dying here!’

  We ran on across the unfenced back garden, which adjoined a narrow lane, and followed TomTom back to the place where we’d left the car. For a moment I’d been tempted simply to give up, to turn myself in and explain everything to Stoya.

  But explain what? That a blind girl’s visions had led me to the Eye Collector’s torture chamber?

  In the end it was Alina who had urged me on, shouted at me not to waste time and drive off – to leave this scene of horror, the concentrate of all my future nightmares.

  Hearing her cross her legs on the sofa beside me, I gave a start and opened my eyes. Exhaustion had almost sent me to sleep in the midst of my horrific memories.

  ‘At times like these I curse my lot,’ she said in a low voice. ‘And I don’t mean my blindness.’

  She drank some more coffee. Her lower lip quivered. It persisted in doing so even when she bit it.

  ‘I’m talking about my gift. ’ A tear crept from beneath from her right eyelid.

  I took her hand. ‘Back in the cellar,’ I said softly, ‘when you touched that dying woman, it happened again, didn’t it?’

  ‘No.’ She raised her head. ‘Worse than that.’

  What could be worse than what we’ve just been through?

  ‘I discovered something in that cellar.’

  ‘About the Eye Collector?’ I asked.

  ‘No. About myself.’

  Pulling off her wig, she shook her shaven head and tapped herself on the chest. ‘I discovered something quite awful about myself !’

  28

  (3 HOURS 59 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)

  PHILIPP STOYA

  (DETECTIVE SUPERINTENDENT, HOMICIDE)

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘I’m sorry. This time I really don’t have a clue.’

  Frank rubbed his right ear. He seemed relieved that Scholle wasn’t present at this second interview, which was taking place at police headquarters. Stoya still wasn’t sure what would have happened if, after visiting the toilet, he’d returned to the conference room a moment later. He had seen Scholle relax his grip on the budding journalist’s neck and remove a longish object from his ear – all in double-quick time.

  ‘Just been tickling him a bit for fun,’ Scholle had assured him. But the hatred in his sidekick’s eyes and the undisguised belligerence in his voice had told a different story.

  He’d have rammed it home!

  Stoya knew what Scholle was capable of when making no progress with a case. Yet he hadn’t always been as ruthless. Divorce had changed him, transforming a good-natured cop into an unpredictable bloodhound. His marriage to the Russian dancer he’d met during a raid on a nightspot had been doomed from the start. Not for the first time, Scholle had mistaken pity for love – a side effect of his well-developed helper syndrome. He paid the brothel to release her, bought her a new wardrobe, and hoped to wean her off drugs if he married her and moved out into the countryside. His attempts at therapy ended the day he came home and found Natasha in their marital bed with a punter from the old days.

  If the judge hadn’t granted her the right to take their child away once a year, Scholle might still have been the good pal whose weekly session at the bowling alley mattered more to him than wrapping up a case.

  He got there only a minute too late, having lingered at his desk and wondered if he really ought to let Natasha and Marcus fly off to Moscow for a holiday. True, the terms of the custody agreement were quite specific. He would be committing an offence if he drove to the airport and prevented Natasha from leaving the country with their son.

  In the end his gut feeling triumphed. He sped off to Schönefeld, left his police car in a no-parking zone, and sprinted into the terminal. Too late. The Aeroflot machine was still standing on the tarmac but the doors had closed a minute earlier.

  Scholle took six months’ unpaid leave in order to scour the villages around Yaroslavl for his son, but without success. Natasha and Marcus never reappeared. The ground seemed to have swallowed them up.

  When Scholle returned, empty-handed and brokenhearted, he swore he would never let things ride again; never hesitate, even for a minute, to break regulations if his gut feeling said otherwise.

  ‘For the last time: Where is Alexander Zorbach hiding?’

  ‘Even if you get out a pencil like your colleague...’ Frank shrugged. ‘I can’t tell you.’

  ‘Really?’ said Stoya. ‘How about these?’ Opening a buff folder, he removed several enlarged photographs and spread them out on the table in front of Frank. ‘You’ve nothing to say about these either, I suppose?’

  The young man shut his eyes.

  ‘Katharina Vanghal, nurse, a widow of fifty-seven,’ Stoya went on. The crime scene photos looked like something out of an abattoir from hell. ‘Neighbours describe her as extremely retiring. No men or women friends, not even a household pet. Discounting her well-known mania for lighting up her house like Coney Island at Christmas, she led a thoroughly boring and inconspicuous existence.’ He paused briefly. ‘Until the Eye Collector decided to transform her cellar into a vacuum-sealed coffin and torture her there for the last few days of her life.’

  ‘Frightful.’ Frank turned away.

  ‘Yes, frightful’s the word. He wrapped her up in plastic film. Because of its pressure and the fact that she couldn’t move, she literally decomposed alive. To prevent her from dying too quickly, the madman sedated her, laid her down on a cooling mattress, and kept her hovering between life and death by means of artificial respiration. It’s clear that he not only has medical knowledge but is an amateur technician as well. After all, we found he’d powered his torture chamber by installi
ng a generator in the garden.’ Stoya held up two fingers in an unintentional V-sign. ‘One generator for two pumps with which to suck the air out of the cellar!’

  ‘Zorbach’s all thumbs, you know,’ Frank retorted. He was looking tired and his lips were cracked. Stoya decided to apply a little more pressure before offering him a glass of water.

  ‘He has a motive, though.’

  ‘Come again?’

  Stoya nodded casually. He might have been commenting on the weather. ‘Until two years ago, Katharina Vanghal worked at the Park Sanatorium, where Zorbach’s mother is a resident. She was a nurse there until she was summarily fired. According to her file, several of her bedridden patients were found to have developed fourth-degree decubitus ulcers, or bone-deep bedsores, because she hadn’t turned them often enough.’

  ‘So my boss revenged himself on his mother’s ex-nurse?’ Frank laughed. ‘You don’t believe that yourself.’

  ‘No. I don’t want to believe it, to be honest, but why are his prints all over that cellar if he has nothing to do with the affair?’

  Frank sighed and cast his eyes up at the ceiling. ‘Christ, how many more times? It was the blind girl. She led him there.’

  ‘God Almighty!’ Stoya slapped the table with the flat of his hand. ‘I’ve had enough of this mystical mumbo-jumbo. I want to know what—’

  ‘Excuse me, sir.’

  The superintendent swung round. He’d been shouting so loudly, he hadn’t heard the uniformed policewoman knock.