Eye Collector, The (3 page)

Words can sometimes define a whole universe. ‘I love you’ or ’We’re a family’, for example – a combination of innocuous letters that lend your life meaning.
‘That time on the bridge’ definitely came into this category. If it hadn’t been so sad, one could have laughed at the fact that we behaved like the characters in a
Harry
Potter
novel and spoke of ‘You-Know-Who’ instead of calling a spade a spade. Angélique, the mentally deranged woman whose life I’d taken, was my personal Lord
Voldemort.

‘Julian, you go on ahead to the recreation room. That’s where the children will be waiting for us.’ I knelt down so we were at eye level. ‘I’m just going to nip out
and see if I left my wallet in the car, okay?’

He nodded silently.

I watched him until he disappeared round the corner and all I could hear was the squeak of his trainers on the lino and the slithery sound of the heavy carrier bag being towed along.

Then I turned and made my way out of the hospital. I never went back.

The Volvo was parked beneath a huge horse-chestnut tree in the gloom of the winter morning, so I inserted the ignition key and turned on the reading light over the passenger
seat. I looked everywhere: in the footwell, on the rear seats, under a stack of old newspapers. There were few things I hated more than driving with bulging pockets. As a rule, therefore, I tossed
my keys, mobile phone and wallet on to the passenger seat before getting in behind the wheel. A ritual I seemed to have neglected this time, because I could find nothing there apart from a
ballpoint pen and half a packet of chewing gum. No sign of my wallet.

After taking another look under the seats I opened the glove compartment, although I felt sure I’d never kept anything in there except the scanner I used to monitor police radio traffic.
In my early days as a crime reporter it gave me a pang whenever I heard the voices of my former colleagues. Now I was used to not belonging any more. Besides, my boss, Thea Bergdorf, had only given
me the job because of my inside knowledge. It had been made clear to me that that eavesdropping on the police, whenever I was on the move, was an unwritten clause of my contract. Especially on days
like today, when we were expecting the worst. I had fixed the scanner so it came on automatically as soon as I turned the ignition key, which was why the thing was hissing away in the glove
compartment and flashing like a Christmas tree.

I was just about to abandon my search and rejoin Julian when I heard a voice that banished all thought of my missing wallet.

‘...Westen, Kühler Weg, corner of Alte Allee...’

I stared at the glove compartment, then turned up the volume.

‘I repeat. One-zero-seven in Kühler Weg. Mobile units at the scene.’

My eyes strayed to the dashboard clock.

Damn it. Not again.

One-zero-seven. Official radio code for the discovery of a dead body.

(44 HOURS 38 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)

TOBY TRAUNSTEIN (AGE 9)

Dark. Black. No, not black. That’s the wrong word.

It wasn’t like the paintwork on Dad’s new car. Nor like the blotchy darkness you see in front of your eyes when you shut them suddenly. Nor was it like the greyish gloom he
remembered from the night-time nature ramble they’d gone on with Frau Quandt. This was different. Denser, somehow. Creepier. As if he were submerged in a barrel of oil.

Toby opened his eyes again.

Nothing.

The darkness around him was impenetrable. Nothing like the forest that surrounded the summer camp their class had gone to last summer. There was no moonlight or torchlight like there had been
when they were combing the forest path for clues on that paperchase through the Grunewald. No smell of soil, vegetation or wild boar dung, and no Lea clutching his hand like a crybaby and starting
at every rustle and crackle. There were no noises in here that would have scared his twin sister. In here – wherever ‘here’ was – there was...
nothing.

Nothing apart from his boundless fear of being paralysed. For although he realized that darkness was insubstantial (just as he knew from Herr Hartmann, his art teacher, that black was merely an
absence of light, not a colour), it seemed to be holding him in a vice-like grip.

He still didn’t know whether he was standing up or lying down. He might even be upside down. That would explain the pressure inside his head and why he was feeling so dizzy. Or possibly
frazzled,
as his father used to say when he came home after work and told Mum to run him a bath.

He had never ventured to ask the precise meaning of
frazzled.
Dad didn’t like his kids asking too many questions. Toby had learnt that lesson while on holiday in Italy two years
ago, when he’d dared to wonder aloud over supper whether Dad’s translation of
caldo
as ‘cold’ was really correct. Although Daddy had told him to stop his everlasting
questions and the look on Mummy’s face should have warned him not to cast doubt on his father’s knowledge of Italian, he hadn’t been able to resist pointing out that every tap in
the hotel must be defective because only hot water came out of the ones marked
caldo.
Daddy’s hand had shot out. He’d stopped asking too many questions after that slap in the
restaurant. Now he didn’t know exactly what
frazzled
meant, he had no idea why he couldn’t move and he was feeling so sick. His feet and his head seemed to be imprisoned in a
vice and he couldn’t feel his arms any more.
No, wrong.
He could feel them as far as his shoulders. Maybe even a little lower down, where he’d suddenly developed the awful
tingling sensation he got when his best friend Kevin gave him a Chinese burn. Kevin the big-head, who had really been christened Kornelius, but who threatened to thump anyone who addressed him by
that ‘poncey name’.

Kevin, Kornelius, Cacky Pants...

Everything below the elbow, or what normally lay or dangled to his left and his right – in other words, his forearms, wrists and hands
(Shit, where are my hands?)
– all these
had disappeared.

He tried to scream but his mouth and throat were too dry. All he produced was a pathetic croak.

Why aren’t I covered with blood if my hands have been cut off? Amputated, or whatever it’s called.

A stale smell infiltrated Toby’s nostrils. Sweetish like rancid butter but a lot less strong. It was a while before he grasped that the darkness must be enclosed by walls that were
reflecting his bad breath back into his face. It was even longer before, to his infinite relief, he rediscovered his hands. They were behind his back.

I’m tied up. No, wrong. I’m wedged in.

His mind started to race.

I’m lying on my arms, that’s for sure.

Feverishly, he tried to recall what he’d been doing just before he came here, wherever ‘here’ was, but his memory seemed to have been sluiced away by a tide of pain. The last
thing he remembered was playing that silly game of computer tennis in the living room, the one where you had to jump around in front of the TV set and Lea always won. Then Mum had put them to bed.
And now he was here. Here in this
nothingness.

Toby swallowed hard, and all at once he felt even more scared than before. So scared that he didn’t even notice the sharp smelling rivulet trickling from between his legs. Fear of being
buried alive was now doing what the constraints of his invisible prison had failed to do completely: it was paralysing him.

He swallowed again, reflecting that the darkness was like a living creature which could hold you tight and tasted like metal when you gulped it down.

He felt as queasy as he had after that long car journey, when he’d insisted on reading and Dad got mad because they’d had to stop. He was holding his breath so as not to be sick when
suddenly...

What the...?

His roaming tongue had encountered a foreign body.

What on earth is it?

The thing was clinging to the roof of his mouth. Like a potato crisp, but its surface was harder and smoother.

And colder.

He ran his tongue over the object, feeling the saliva accumulate. Instinctively breathing through his nose, he suppressed his urge to swallow until the foreign object detached itself from the
roof of his mouth and came away on his tongue.

And then it dawned on him. Even though he couldn’t recall
how
he had got here,
who
had kidnapped him and
why
he was being held captive – even though he
hadn’t the least idea
what
it was, this dark nothingness that hemmed him in – he had at least solved
one
mystery.

A coin.

Before confining Toby Traunstein in the darkest place imaginable, someone had inserted a coin in his mouth.

(44 HOURS 31 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)

ALEXANDER ZORBACH

‘You insensitive, irresponsible, self-centred shit!’

‘You’ve forgotten
stupid
and
objectionable
.’

I sounded calm. Far calmer than I usually did when arguing with my still-wife. At our last meeting we had finally agreed to get divorced. Now Nicci repeated the sentence she had hurled in my
face that night: ‘I sometimes wonder how I ever got together with you.’
Good question.

To be frank, I was utterly unable to fathom what women saw in me. Nicci and I had first met in the lecture room of the psychology faculty, a room full of men who were taller, better-looking and
certainly more charming than I. Yet she had plumped for me. It couldn’t have been my outward appearance. I hate seeing myself in photos. Out of two hundred snaps there’ll be at most one
of which I’m not ashamed. It will be a blurred or ill-exposed picture that doesn’t show up my steadily developing double chin. People used to say I reminded them of Nicolas Cage because
of my doleful expression; now, all I have in common with him is thinning hair. I’ve put on a kilo a year since my thirtieth birthday, even though I avoid junk food and go jogging twice a
week. Nicci put her finger on it at the start of our relationship when she called me a ‘collector’s item’ of no obvious value. Like an old banger: elderly enough to qualify for a
scrappage scheme but too endearing, in spite of its quirks, to trade in for a new model. In that respect, of course, she had since changed her mind.

‘What kind of father abandons his ten-year-old son in a hospice for the dying?’ she demanded angrily.

I didn’t even trouble to explain that Julian had been very understanding when I called him from the car and asked him to distribute the presents on his own because an emergency had arisen.
I had to get to a crime scene, and I could hardly take a ten-year-old boy along.

‘And what kind of mother takes her son to see a witch doctor when he’s got bronchitis?’ I retorted.

Damn it, what wouldn’t I give for a cigarette at this moment...

Instinctively, I felt for the nicotine patch on my right arm. I was holding the phone wedged between my chin and my neck.

‘That’s a low blow, Alex,’ Nicci said after a short pause. ‘You didn’t even leave Julian enough money for a cab.’

‘Because I’ve lost my wallet someplace. Shit happens, for God’s sake.’

‘In your world, Alex,’ she replied, ‘in your world disasters follow one another in quick succession. It’s those bad vibes of yours.’

‘Please don’t start that again!’

My hands were trembling. I tried to calm down by wrapping them more tightly around the steering wheel. My nerves had got even worse since I’d tried to give up smoking.

In spite of that itchy plaster on my triceps.

‘It’s your negative energy,’ she said, sounding almost compassionate. ‘You positively attract evil.’

‘I only write about it. I report the facts. There’s a psychopath on the loose who destroys families in such an atrocious way, even the scandal sheet I work for doesn’t dare
print all the details.’

He plays the oldest children’s game in the world – hide-and-seek – and he plays it until an entire family comes to grief. He plays it until death.

My eyes strayed to the old newspaper lying on the passenger seat. I had written the headline myself:

Like my former occupation as a police negotiator, my job at the paper had often taxed my powers of endurance to the limit. But the case of the Eye Collector had lent a new
dimension to the word horror. He killed the mothers of the children he kidnapped and then gave the fathers a few hours to find their offspring before they asphyxiated in a hideaway to which
he’d conveyed them. Throw in the fact that the psychopath removed the left eye from each little corpse, and you had a case which truly transcended the bounds of what was conceivable.

Nicci continued to pontificate. ‘Negative thoughts find expression in reality,’ she said. ‘Positive thinking breeds positive experiences.’

‘Positive thinking? Are you completely off your trolley? The Eye Collector has already struck three times.’
Six dead: three women, two little girls, one boy.
‘You think
the madman will stop if I pull over on to the hard shoulder and meditate for a bit? No, better still, maybe I’ll simply place an order with the Universe, like it says in that book on your
bedside table.’ I was talking myself into a rage. ‘Or I’ll call one of those astrology hotlines you waste a fortune on. Maybe the housewife at the other end take a quick look at
her tea leaves and see where the Eye Collector is hiding?’

A click signalled an incoming call. I removed the mobile from my ear and checked the display.

‘Don’t hang up,’ I told Nicci, and gratefully put her on hold.

‘Hello, Alex. It’s me, your favourite trainee.’

Frank Lahmann.

If he’d caught me at a better moment I’d have said, ‘Favourite trainee? You mean you’ve quit?’ But I wasn’t in the mood for banter, so I left it at a curt
‘Hello.’