Eye Collector, The (19 page)

Gives her arm a final squeeze before she goes.

And then, at about the same moment as the siren goes off in the distance, she turns to the bedside table and straightens a small, rectangular object.

A photo frame.

The picture in it shows neither father nor mother, so it can only be of a child. A boy or a girl. The shadowy form in the photo is impossible to identify. She can only make out the eyes. Or
rather, the eye. The other is invisible.

Or not there at all.

She turns and looks at the open door. The siren grows louder. At the same time, the world around her darkens...

The flashes of light turn back into black specks, and the black specks combine to form a shroud of all-embracing darkness...

... in which Alina recovers consciousness, roused by the burglar alarm of the art gallery six floors below. And by someone hammering on her front door.

(8 HOURS 17 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)

ALEXANDER ZORBACH

She opened the door in the nick of time. Another moment, and the bulky thing would have slipped through my bleeding fingers. I had climbed the stairs, misjudging not only my
physical condition but the weight of the machine I’d stolen from the gallery.

Alina let me in without a word, trembling all over.

I put the HD-DVD recorder down. ‘What’s happened?’ she asked dully. I might have asked her the same thing.

As if it weren’t enough that she was facing me stark naked and making no move to cover herself, she had suddenly lost all her hair as well. That was accounted for by the wig on the chest
of drawers beside the door. But far more disconcerting was the fear that I sensed in every fibre of her body. She was breathing fast, with her arms hanging limp at her sides and her hands trembling
uncontrollably. For one who attached such importance to expression, her face now resembled a rigid mask. She had been weeping. Big fat tears had rolled down her cheeks, streaking them with eye
shadow and accentuating her doll-like appearance.

I reached for her instinctively, but she retreated a step.

‘Don’t touch me,’ she whispered, fending me off with both hands.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

‘He was here.’

‘Who?’

‘Who the hell do you think?!’ she yelled, and I felt almost glad she was capable of such an outburst. Blazing anger was preferable to fear. ‘The swine had his knife with him.
The knife he uses to...’ She left the rest unsaid. It wasn’t necessary.

I ran my eyes over her naked body to see if the Eye Collector had injured her anywhere, but all I saw was the rather too thin but undeniably shapely figure of a young woman whom I would, under
other circumstances, have found sexually attractive. Correction: whom I found sexually attractive even under present circumstances, though I swiftly suppressed the thought.

‘Where did he go?’ I demanded, setting off along the passage. The confounded burglar alarm died away at last.

‘Don’t bother,’ Alina called after me. ‘He’s gone.’ She folded her arms over her breasts with one hand covering the strange tattoo on her neck. In the gloomy
passage it looked like a big birthmark.

‘How do you know?’

‘Because TomTom has stopped reacting.’ I looked down the passage to the door of what I assumed, from the sound of running water, to be the bathroom. The dog was lying outside it in a
sphinx-like pose. His tail thumped the floor in welcome.

‘He can’t scent danger any more. Besides, the balcony door is open, I can tell by the draught. I think he must have gone down the fire escape.’

I approached the bathroom door. Clouds of steam were drifting out into the passage. I peered through the haze.

Nothing.

Nothing of note except an old-fashioned enamel bathtub on the point of overflowing.

I turned off the tap and and nearly scalded my hand extracting the bath plug. As I went out I caught sight of some make-up articles on the shelf in front of the brightly lit bathroom cabinet.
This surprised me, but now wasn’t the time to dwell on it.

‘What did he want?’ I asked.

‘To persuade us to stop.’

Alina briefly described what had given her such a shock minutes earlier. ‘“Stop playing,” he told me. He could only have meant his sick game of hide-and-seek.’ She broke
off. ‘And you? Why have you come back?’

‘I need your TV set.’

She presented her right ear to me, a gesture that assured me of her full attention.

‘What for?’

I told her about the camera in the art gallery. ‘It films anyone who passes the door of this building,’ I concluded.

‘So?’

‘It’s hooked up to a DVD recorder.’ I pointed along the passage to where I’d left it – stupidly, since she couldn’t see me. ‘A gadget like that can
store up to 172 hours of pictures, probably more.’

‘Shit, don’t tell me
you
set off the alarm down there.’

‘Amazing what you can do with a loose cobblestone.’ I tried to inject a smile into my voice. ‘Come on, it’ll only be a matter of minutes before the police put two and two
together and ring your doorbell.’

She shook her head and drew a deep breath. A little more of her physical tension seemed to leave her. Although she probably wouldn’t have admitted it, even to herself, I sensed that she
found my presence reassuring.

‘I must be nuts,’ she said, but she set off towards her TV.

I followed her once I had hurried back to the chest of drawers and retrieved the heavy HD-DVD recorder. The cut I’d sustained when smashing the gallery window had stopped bleeding.

Our route through the flat, which was surprisingly brightly light, led past the bathroom and into a living room with an open kitchen adjoining it. I noticed only now that the flat was a
duplex.

Swiftly and unerringly avoiding a downwards-leading spiral staircase, Alina opened a door on the far side of the living room. TomTom had trotted after us but hunkered down beside the living-room
sofa.

‘Aren’t you going to put something on?’ I asked when we were standing in what was readily identifiable as her bedroom. I was once again surprised by all the mirrors, one of
them even on the ceiling.

‘Why?’ she demanded, calmly walking over to the big television set facing the bed.

‘You’re naked,’ I said.
And I’m only human,
I added in my head.

‘The central heating’s on,’ she replied tersely.

She bent down to remove the plug of her DVD player. I didn’t know where to look for a moment, not wanting to feel like a voyeur. Piercings and tattoos didn’t grab me as a rule, and
shorn heads, even if shaved into a labyrinthine pattern, weren’t high on my scale of what I considered attractive.

Although Charlie had once tried to explain to me how close sex was to pain, I’d never been able to comprehend this SM fetish idea. Well, perhaps she’d been right. Perhaps sexual
desire really could interact, not only with pain but with death itself. That was the only way I could account for my urge, at this of all moments, to touch Alina’s bare flesh, when my senses
should have been entirely focused on the thought of escaping from a serial killer.

And from the police!

In any event, it wasn’t common sense but my sad recollection of Charlie that reminded me of what I had to concentrate on next.

Alina got to her feet again and surrendered the television set to me. It took me only a few seconds to hook up the HD-DVD recorder.

‘Did you really have to smash the gallery window? The artists who own the place are really nice people.’

She handed me the remote control and I switched the AV feed on the television.

‘I had no option. I’d called Stoya and invited him to watch a video on which the Eye Collector may be visible.’

‘And?’

I sighed. ‘He refused to waste his time on my diversionary tactics.’

I looked up at Alina, who was now perched on the edge of the bed. She was so slim, there wasn’t a sign of a crease in her tummy even though she wasn’t sitting up particularly
straight.

‘So I’ll have to check it myself. When did the man turn up here?’

‘Just after three.’

‘And when did you get rid of him?’

‘A few minutes later.’

‘He left, just like that?’

‘Yes. That surprised me too. He must have noticed something. I was scared stiff when the vision suddenly broke off. I said something about a migraine and asked him to leave, which he
promptly did. Rather odd, don’t you think? He didn’t even ask for his money back.’

I set the hard-disk recorder’s timer at 3.10 p.m., hoping that this would be neither too far after the event nor so far in advance that I would waste time viewing useless footage.

3.10 p.m. yesterday?
I thought.
I was in the paper’s underground car park. I had just made myself comfortable on the back seat of my Volvo, intending to take a nap, but I’d
had so little sleep in the previous few days, I slept until the five-o’clock conference.

It took me only a few minutes to find the relevant place. The recorder didn’t operate during fallow periods, luckily, so it only stored what the camera actually shot. Although I still
couldn’t fathom what the installation had to do with art, I made a mental note to compensate the gallery owners for the damage as soon as I was in a position to do so.

If I ever was.

I stared in disbelief at the picture before my eyes and forgot to blink. It wasn’t until Alina spoke to me that I realized I must have been sitting there like a stuffed dummy, gazing at
the screen for a considerable time.

‘Well?’ she asked. ‘What can you see?’

Shit. It can’t be true.

My mouth went dry as I cast about for a plausible reply.

‘See anything?’

‘Yes,’ I said hoarsely, but I didn’t want to betray the truth. ‘No... I mean... I’m not sure,’ I stammered helplessly. That was a lie. Of course I’d
seen
something
, but I couldn’t possibly tell Alina what it was, not right now. I welcomed her blindness for the first time. It meant she couldn’t see what I could: that the
fellow in the green parka and the down-at-heel Timberland boots – the one whose figure the HD-DVD recorder was currently projecting on the television screen – bore a strong resemblance
to someone well known to me.

Someone
very
well known to me.

Myself.

It was a while before I recovered my composure. Before the blood stopped roaring in my ears and the sensation returned to my fingers.

‘I can’t see his face,’ I said, which was true. The man, who had my slightly stooped way of walking and was imitating my mode of dress, had pulled the hood of the parka over
his head.

Something I would never do. Not even in the rain!

I tried to freeze-frame another picture by zapping back and forth, but the view didn’t improve. It was quite impossible to tell whether the man’s height and build were similar to
mine because he was too far away from the display window.

But he’s wearing my parka. My jeans. My boots.

A fist seemed to clench inside my stomach. The sight of the vague figure on the screen had triggered a disturbing déjà-vu.

‘No idea who he is,’ I said, feeling like I was lying under oath at court.

‘But it proves he was here,’ said Alina. She was either feeling cold after all or had changed her mind for some other reason. Whatever the truth, she was now standing in front of an
open wardrobe and removing various articles of clothing with slow, deliberate movements.

‘No, it only proves that
someone
left your building around the time in question.’

I pressed the ‘Play’ button in the hope that the unknown man would make a mistake and inadvertently turn to face the camera. Not a bit of it. Probably because of the sleet blowing
into his face, he walked on with his head down, eyes fixed on the pavement. But then, just before he disappeared from the camera’s field of view, it happened.

The collision.

Perhaps because he looked neither right nor left, he failed to see the guitar case lying at an angle to his line of advance. He must have trodden in it, because some coins cascaded on to the
pavement and a scrawny, emaciated young man made his furious appearance on the screen.

‘Your patient is having words with a beggar,’ I told Alina.

‘This beggar – what does he look like?’ she asked.

‘Medium height. Dark, straggly hair but not too much of it, and he’s holding a guitar.’

‘I know the man.’

I turned to her. ‘Who is he?’

‘A busker. Plays here every other day. I always give him something, though I’ve never heard anyone sing more off-key.’

‘Do you own a printer?’ I asked, momentarily forgetting what a stupid question that was.

‘No, and my set-up doesn’t include a PlayStation either.’

We couldn’t help smiling, either of us. At least Alina saw the funny side. I took out my mobile and quickly reinserted the battery but left the phone in flight mode so it couldn’t
log on to a network and betray my position to Stoya.

Always assuming the cops hadn’t located me long ago.

Then I photographed the television screen. After three attempts I had a passable, flicker-free photo of the street musician and one of my unknown doppelgänger.

‘Ready?’ I heard Alina ask behind me. I turned round to find her fully clothed. She was wearing jeans with leather patches and a red-and-brown checked lumberjack shirt knotted over
her midriff. In keeping with her new look, her feet were shod in down-at-heel cowboy boots that looked a size too big.

‘Oh no, I’m not dragging you any deeper into this business,’ I said, still rather confused by her abrupt transformation. The left-wing hipster had turned into Annie Oakley.

‘Don’t talk bullshit. You think I’m staying here by myself?’

She made her way out of the bedroom and back down the long passage to the front door with such speed and assurance, I had trouble keeping up with her.

‘Here, TomTom, we’ve got to go out again,’ she called. Ignoring my objections, she opened the chest of drawers and deftly identified several wigs by touch. It took her only a
moment to decide on a blonde bob with a graduated fringe.