Eye Collector, The (28 page)

‘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 installing 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.

‘Yes?’

She handed him a folder.

‘What’s this?’

‘The parking ticket we were told to check.’

‘Well?’

The blonde’s upper lip was trembling with nerves, but her voice was firm. ‘The car is a green VW Passat, year of manufacture 1997.’ Then she named the registered owner.

Stoya’s ears started to buzz and his mouth went dry. Now it was his turn to need a drink badly. ‘Say that again.’

‘It’s registered to a Katharina Vanghal.’

It can’t be.

Stoya looked across the table at Frank Lahmann, whose expression at that moment was just as disconcerted.

This is impossible.

The tortured nurse’s car really had been standing in a disabled parking place the previous afternoon, just as Zorbach had claimed the whole time.

‘You see?’ Frank said triumphantly when the policewoman had closed the door behind her. ‘The Eye Collector went to the blind physiotherapist yesterday afternoon, just as I told
you. He was caught on video as he left the building, a piece of information you’ve disregarded for far too long. No idea how the blind girl knows all these things, but I reckon it’s
time you started listening to her.’

‘Oh, you do, do you?’ Angrily, Stoya tossed the folder containing the parking ticket onto the table in front of him. ‘You really think I should go chasing after a
ghost?’

‘A ghost?’

Stoya uttered a bark of laughter when he saw the surprise in Frank’s eyes.

‘I’ve run a check on her. Nobody took down a statement from an Alina Gregoriev yesterday. None of my men saw her. She was never here, get it?’

Frank had been listening with his mouth open.

‘But that’s not all. The computer knows nothing about her either. Alina Gregoriev isn’t a registered resident of Berlin. There isn’t a physiotherapist of that name
anywhere in Germany, so don’t give me any more shit about a blind medium who can see into a person’s past by touching them. If Zorbach isn’t the perpetrator, where does he get all
his information?’

Stoya leant both forearms flat on the table and looked the trainee journalist in the eye. ‘And don’t say Alina Gregoriev. The woman doesn’t
exist
!’

(3 HOURS 31 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)

ALEXANDER ZORBACH

I could sense it. Alina was in the process of withdrawing into herself. It was apparent from her body language: arms folded on chest, knees clamped tightly together, mouth
turned down at the corners. In spite of her butch cowboy boots and patched jeans, she looked like a stubborn little girl as she rejected my advice to drink her coffee while it was still hot. Her
face was expressionless.

What is it? What did you discover about yourself that was so awful?

She was visibly clamming up. At the same time, I felt sure she wanted to talk. She needed a safety valve. The question was, which would gain the upper hand: her desire to jettison mental ballast
or her fear of self-exposure?

All my experience, both as a police negotiator and as a journalist, had taught me neither to pressure a person caught on the horns of an emotional dilemma nor to give them too long to think. It
was a tightrope act.

My best results had come from steering the conversation into supposedly safe channels by asking questions the interviewees could answer in their sleep. Questions they were bound to have been
asked a hundred times before.

In Alina’s case, only one question occurred to me: ‘How did it happen?’ I watched her hands, lips and eyes to see if I had got any physical reaction. ‘Say if you
don’t want to talk about it, but it would really interest me to know how you lost your eyesight.’

She drew a deep breath, held it, and expelled it in one long exhalation. Then she sighed faintly.

‘It was an accident.’

She opened her eyes and pointed to them. They looked like dull, polished marbles in the dim candlelight. Unzipping her cord jacket, she took out a packet of cigarettes and lit one from the
candle.

‘It happened twenty-two years ago. I was three at the time and wanted to build a sandcastle with my new girlfriend from the neighbourhood. We hadn’t been living in California long
– being a civil engineer, my father had spent most of his life globe-trotting from one big construction site to another. This time, however, Dad was employed on a huge hydroelectric dam
project that would take years to complete, so we’d bought a house for the first time. A typical American clapboard house with a picket fence, driveway and garage.’ She paused.
‘That garage...’ she said, as if to herself.

‘What about it?’

She took a big drag at her cigarette and blew the smoke at the candle, which flickered. ‘The previous owner had used it as a workshop. There was a trestle table, a workbench, tools hanging
on the walls, and cans of paint everywhere. My father had intended to clear the place out as soon as possible. But I was too quick for him.’

She swallowed hard.

Now it gets serious. Now we’re entering the red zone, the place where painful memories lie buried.

‘To build our sandcastle we needed a mould for the turrets, so I went to get an old glass jar from the garage. I was a tidy little girl. Tidier than I am now, probably.’ She gave a
mirthless laugh. ‘Anyhow, I ran some water into it to rinse it out. And that was a mistake.’

‘Why?’

‘Heaven knows what the previous owner of the house had used it for, but the jar contained some calcium carbide. Luckily there was a loud explosion, or my mother wouldn’t have known
so quickly that an accident had happened.’

Alina blinked as if a movie visible to her alone were unfolding behind her eyelids, which were now closed again.

‘Calcium carbide and water produce acetylene, an unstable explosive gas. I might have died if the rescue helicopter hadn’t turned up so promptly. As it was I only lost my
eyesight.’ She sketched some inverted commas in the air to accompany the ‘only’. ‘The corneas are damaged. Irreparably.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Shit happens,’ she said tersely, stubbing out her cigarette.

‘Too bad,’ I said softly.

At the age of three, long before she’d had a chance to see all the wonders of this world. It’s understandable she’s bitter.

‘Is that why you had that “hate” tattoo done?’

‘Hate? What gives you that idea?’ she asked in surprise. Then her lips curled in a faint smile. ‘Hang on.’

She stood up, took off her jacket and undid the top three buttons of her blouse.

‘Is this what you mean?’

She sat down again and presented her bare neck for my inspection. The font used was Runic in character, so the letters on her skin spelt the word ‘Fate’, not ‘Hate’. They
glistened like wet ink in the warm candlelight.

‘It reads “fate”,’ I said.

‘Depends which way you look at it,’ she said with a smile.

Depends which way you look at it. Au revoir. Be seeing you.

Our language is full of visual turns of phrase, and I wondered if all blind people used them as naturally as Alina. She surprised me once more by turning her back on me. ‘Look
again!’

I didn’t understand what she meant at first, but then, as I looked over her shoulder, it positively hit me in the eye.

‘Why, it’s an ambigram,’ I said, though I wasn’t sure if I’d used the correct term. The ambigrams familiar to me, like in the thriller
Angels and Demons,
were symmetrical pictures that could be inverted 180 degrees but still spelt the same word, the simplest example being the combination of letters ‘WM’. Alina’s tattoo was
different, however. I had never before seen anything of the kind. If you stood the line of characters on its head they spelt an entirely new word with an entirely different meaning.

‘Luck,’ I whispered.

She nodded.

Fate or luck,
I thought.
In real life, it just depends which way you look at it.

‘It’s an asymmetrical ambigram, to be precise. You don’t grasp its meaning at first sight, that’s why I had it done. Our eyes aren’t important. I’ll carry the
proof of that on my body forever.’

Her big, misty eyes seemed to be focused on my mouth. ‘I don’t think it matters what we see, only what we perceive. That’s what I try to tell myself, at least, but you know
what?’ She blinked, but it was no use. The dam had broken and tears streamed down her cheeks. ‘It just doesn’t work!’

‘Alina...’

I tried to take her hand, but she swiftly withdrew it and turned away.

‘It doesn’t matter how often I tell myself that I don’t need my eyes,’ she said in a muffled voice. She drew up her legs, planted her boots on the sofa, and rested her
head on her knees like an airline passenger in readiness for a crash. ‘That I don’t need to see the world I live in...’

I tried again. I stroked her back, but she merely curled up even tighter and hunched her shoulders as if my caresses were blows. It was as if she wanted to present as small a target as
possible.

‘I can wear trendy gear, go in for make-up and tattoos and tell myself it makes my blindness a little less extreme.’ Her body was shaking. ‘But it doesn’t work that
way.’

‘Let me help you.’

‘Help me?’ she cried. ‘How? You’ve no conception of the world I live in. You close your eyes, everything goes dark, and you think, “Ah, so that’s what
it’s like to be blind.” But it isn’t!’

‘I realize that.’

‘Like hell you do! Ever had someone grab your arm and propel you across the street against your will because they think a disabled person has to be helped? Ever been infuriated by dropped
kerbs installed for the benefit of wheelchair users, with the result that my kind can’t tell where the pavement ends and the road begins? Do people behave as if you aren’t there and
talk exclusively to the person you’re with? The answer’s no, am I right?’

She swallowed hard.

‘You act as if you understand, Alex, but the fact is, you’re clueless. Christ, I bet you’ve never even thought twice about the No. 5 Braille dot on your push-button phone. You
touch the key daily because it’s on
every
5. Phone, pocket calculator, ATM, computer. You make physical contact with my world day after day but you never spare it a single thought, so
don’t tell me you understand me and my life.’

She sniffed and wiped the tears from her cheeks with her forearm, breathing heavily. The verbal thunderstorm had dispelled much of her tension. The next time she spoke her voice was subdued once
more. She was far from through, though. I felt that the crux of what she had to tell me was still to come.

‘Sometimes when I’m asleep at night, I dream I’m falling down a well. Down and down I go – my descent into the darkness never ends and the darkness becomes darker still.
I stretch out my hands to touch the sides of the well, but there aren’t any. They dissolve like my memories of the world before the accident.’

The silence that followed was broken by a log spitting in the stove.

‘They disappear, understand? Everything goes. My memories of light, colours, shapes, faces, objects. The further I fall the more they fade. And you know what the worst of it is?’

It doesn’t stop when you wake up.

‘I shout myself awake and the falling sensation ceases,’ she said, sounding infinitely weary all of a sudden. ‘But only that. Everything else persists. I’m still
imprisoned in that black hole, that nothingness. I sit up in bed, trembling, cursing the day I wanted to make a sandcastle and wondering if I still exist at all.’ She turned her head as if
trying to look at me. ‘Does the outside world exist?’