Eye Collector, The (36 page)

Although Alina had lost all sense of time, she felt sure the men had arrived on the scene far too late.

Four policemen. Many minutes too late.

They came dashing into the building almost simultaneously, their boots clattering on the stairs. The thunder of boots died away abruptly when they saw Lea. Their orders had been to arrest
Zorbach, but the sight of the kidnapped girl
alive
in Alina’s arms changed everything.

That was when they started to believe me,
Alina reflected, but she derived no satisfaction from the thought.

‘Are they still here?’ she asked the paramedic, who was still dressing her hand.

Or have they been taken away?

Feeling a slight movement, she guessed that the man had nodded his head.

Or shaken it.

‘Damn it all, stop treating me like a child who’s not allowed to know anything! I heard what they said!’

‘It’s a waste of time – they were dead meat by the time I fished them out,’
said the policeman who’d been smoking a cigarette and discussing the operation
with a colleague outside the ambulance half an hour ago.
‘There’d be more point in giving my daughter’s teddy bear the kiss of life.’

Alina had felt like jumping out of the ambulance and slapping the man’s face.
‘How can you talk like that, you arsehole?’
she’d wanted to shout.
‘You got
the doors open and let some light in. You jumped down the shaft and shone your torch on the water and hauled them up by the rope they’d got entangled in – yes, but you showed up too
damned late!’

‘Have you ever had to deal with a victim of drowning?’ she asked the paramedic, who was taping her dressing into place. She just managed to hold her tears at bay.

He grunted an affirmative.

Either he’d been instructed not to speak to her or he was still too dismayed by what had happened.

‘How long do you...’ Alina swallowed hard. ‘I mean, how soon do you give up trying to resuscitate someone after a swimming accident?’

He clearly felt he was on safer ground. ‘It depends. We once got a man back after twenty minutes, but that was exceptional.’

‘And what would be normal?’

Alina fingered the dressing on her left hand.

‘A minute or two.’

A minute or two?

It had taken at least two minutes for Zorbach to gain access to the lift shaft. Heaven alone knew how long Toby had been underwater by then.

Under stressful conditions, minutes flash past like shooting stars – so fast, you barely notice them. But perhaps this had been more like a session in a dentist’s chair. Perhaps the
seconds had only felt like hours. Perhaps less time had elapsed than she feared.

Alina felt sick. The survival of two people had become a straightforward arithmetical problem, the adding together of periods of time whose combined total would spell certain death.
Zorbach
had taken two minutes to get into the lift, spent two minutes submerged in icy water, and been hauled out after another two minutes...

That was too long. Too long for the little boy, for Alex, and – it had suddenly dawned on her – for herself as well. Alex Zorbach had something in common with her eyesight. She
hadn’t grasped its vital importance until she lost it.

He shouldn’t have given away his watch,
she told herself, unable to suppress the thought although she knew how childish it was.

He gave away his time...

Weeping now, she failed to hear the paramedic get to his feet. He cleared his throat in an embarrassed way.

‘Did you know that the world record for holding one’s breath stands at seventeen minutes four seconds?’

The sudden onset of emotion was so overwhelming, Alina thought she would suffocate.

‘It was set by David Blaine, the professional magician and stunt man. Mind you, he did breathe pure oxygen for twenty-three minutes beforehand.’

Big tears welled up in her sightless eyes. The whole world had been transformed from one moment to the next. The poles swapped places, Germany ceased to be in Europe, Berlin was on another
planet, and Alina herself, a human being no longer, had become pure energy.

‘Still, nearly three minutes without any training isn’t too bad, is it?’

Positive energy.

She sprang to her feet. Her one remaining wish was to fall into the arms of the owner of that hoarse voice, who was standing just outside the rear doors of the ambulance.

‘You’re alive?’ she said, smiling happily through her tears.

‘Yes, but be thankful you can’t see what a wreck I look.’

Zorbach joined in her laughter. She felt the ambulance lurch as he started to climb aboard.

‘And Toby?’

Leaning against the edge of the stretcher on which she’d just been lying, she sensed that Zorbach had stopped short.

No, please, no.

She buried her face in her hands.

‘He must have been submerged for five minutes or more.’ She wondered why Zorbach was imparting this frightful information with such composure. His tone was calm, almost contented.
‘They almost lost him twice, but it seems he’s a tough little bugger. His heart is beating again. He’s still on the critical list and he’ll have to spend some time in an
artificial coma, but the doctors are hopeful he’ll pull through.’

From that moment on, nothing could stop her. Stretching out her arms and throwing caution to the winds, she made for the ambulance’s open double doors and the top of the folding steps on
which she guessed Zorbach was standing. She laughed aloud, euphorically convinced that he would catch her if she fell.

Alex is alive. Both the children are safe.
All would now be well, she felt sure. Nothing else could go wrong.

Seldom had anyone been so mistaken.

(7.27 A.M., ONE HOUR AFTER THE DEADLINE)
ALEXANDER ZORBACH

There are very few times when we succeed in living for the moment alone – times when there is no past or future, only here and now.

In my own life I can definitely remember only two such occasions. One I experienced when holding new-born Julian in my arms for the first time. The second occurred when, weak at the knees and
swathed in a warm blanket, I waited for Alina to embrace me on the steps of an ambulance.

It was my moment of greatest elation and uttermost exhaustion. Only a minute earlier I’d had to fight my way past worried doctors loath to remove my oxygen mask after successfully reviving
me. I’d also had to sidestep Stoya, who would have liked to debrief me the moment they detected my heartbeat.

My bronchial tubes were still full of water and I needed careful medical supervision like Toby, who had been deprived of oxygen for very much longer. At that moment of boundless jubilation,
however, my health mattered as little to me as the innumerable questions that still needed answering as soon as we could come to rest.

Why had Alina never envisioned more than one child? Why did she think it had died in its hiding place if Toby was still alive?

I had often wondered too, in the last few hours, why her mysterious ‘memories’ were partly accurate – the strangely specific deadline, the description of the bungalow –
but had almost led us astray at the crucial moment:
‘All I felt before was a ship. No factories or warehouses.’

Even the question of why the Eye Collector had chosen to involve me, of all people, in his game by sending Alina to see me, directing me to the dying woman in the cellar, and placing the photo
on my mother’s bedside table – even that no longer mattered. Now that we’d snatched his victims from him in the nick of time, I didn’t even want to know the Eye
Collector’s identity. There was no past or future at this moment. Only the present.

A present in which Alina made a blunder that changed everything.

As she hurried towards me, her foot caught in one of the struts supporting the stretcher. She tripped and made an instinctive attempt to save herself, but she couldn’t, of course, see the
grab handle mounted on the wall beside the medicine cabinet. Her hand slid helplessly downwards, pulling a defibrillator to the floor, and was brought up short by a metal rack.

The smile left her face and tears of pain sprang to her eyes.

‘Your hand!’ I cried, as though that could help, and knelt down beside her.

Your left hand – the one you burnt!

She’d put all her weight on it, and the edge of the rack must have dug into her flesh through the dressing.

‘I’m all right,’ she said through gritted teeth, her forehead filmed with sweat. ‘No problem.’ The pain seemed to persist as I folded her in my arms – clung
to her like a drowning man and never wanted to let her go again. ‘I’m all right,’ I heard her say again. She started to repeat it but failed. I wouldn’t have believed her in
any case, for the tighter I held her the greater her resistance. It was as if the blood in her veins had stopped flowing – as if I were holding a marble statue in my arms, not a living
creature.

‘I felt something!’ she said in a low voice.

No!

I shut my eyes.

‘It isn’t just physical contact... I only remember when I’m hurt...’

I shrank away from her, my legs trembling.

‘What is it?’

‘Your telephone!’

I looked up at the clothes hook on which the paramedic had hung Alina’s cord jacket.

The buzzing grew steadily louder.

‘What about it?’ I asked, getting to my feet.

‘Don’t answer it,’ Alina sobbed. She buried her face in her hands. ‘Please don’t answer it.’

Cynics contend that dying begins at birth. Like every extreme proposition, this drastic statement contains a germ of truth. Everyone reaches a point at which life ends and
dying begins; an infinitesimally small but logical, measurable moment at which we cross an invisible boundary that marks the watershed of our existence. Behind it lies all we once regarded as the
future; ahead of us lies only death. Where most people are concerned, that watershed is located somewhere in the last quarter of their lifeline. Others, for instance those afflicted by some
terminal illness, may be only halfway along it when they get there. Scarcely anyone crosses the watershed knowingly. Very few people can say when the vital phase of their life ends and dying
begins. But I am one of them. I can tell you precisely.

I started dying in that ambulance, the moment I put the mobile to my ear and heard my wife’s nervous laugh.

“Sorry to call you, but I’m rather worried. I was playing hide-and-seek with our son, and the crazy thing is, I can’t find him anywhere.’

Crash!

A door seemed to slam in the innermost depths of my soul, cutting me off from all I had ever lived for.

Oh God,
I thought, and said the words out loud.

‘Oh God!’

Everything around me started to spin as I blundered out of the ambulance in a daze.

‘How could I have been so blind?’

All those unresolved questions. All those potential answers. In a terrible, horrific way, everything now made sense.

‘It’s too late,’ I sobbed into the phone, paralysed by the realization that we’d been looking in the wrong direction all the time. Backwards, into the past.

Alina couldn’t see into the past and had never been able to do so. None of what she’d told me had happened.

Not yet.

Outside the ambulance I tripped and fell headlong, face down in wet gravel and gasping for breath. I felt sick when I grasped the true significance of what had just dawned on me.

It’s still going to happen, all of it.

The true horror still lay ahead. Alina had never looked into the past, always into the future!

‘Don’t go down into the cellar, you hear?’ I yelled into the phone, scrambling to my feet.

Where’s the way out? Where’s my car?

‘Don’t go down into the cellar!’ I repeated.

Insane though it seemed, if my direst imaginings proved correct I would have to stick to Alina’s version of the Eye Collector’s script – with one exception. If Nicci was to
survive, I must persuade her to heed my warning at all costs.

‘Don’t go down into the cellar!’

I stumbled, my knees buckling, but I couldn’t give up. I had to resist the inevitable – the thing I’d failed to see although it had been staring me in the face all the time.
Even when Nicci spoke the last words she ever uttered: ‘You’re scaring me, darling.’

Then I heard the sounds of a struggle.

A man hiding behind the cellar door. He attacks her, breaks her neck, drags her out into the garden...

The sounds matched the scenario Alina had described.

I started yelling when I remembered that there was a wooden shed in Nicci’s garden.

ALEXANDER ZORBACH

Later (very much later), in the few brief moments when my cocktail of antidepressants and sedatives permitted me to think coherently, I wondered how I could have laboured under
such a fatal misapprehension for so long.

Alina had never discussed her gift in detail with anyone before. Had she done so under less chaotic circumstances, she might have realized far sooner that no feature of her visions proved beyond
doubt that she was remembering
the past.
In the case of her earliest vision – the accident with the inebriated driver – she thought she saw herself lying on the asphalt, but why
should she have been the last girl the drunk ran over? And what of the fellow student she accused of raping his sister? That case was actually on record! He committed incest at least once more
before taking his own life, so it was probably that future rape Alina saw, not one he’d already committed.

Blind... We were so blind...

The drive from Grünauer Strasse to Nicci’s house would normally have taken fifteen minutes. I did it in ten, but I got there an eternity too late.

‘And then I broke her neck. There was a sound like an eggshell being crushed. She died instantly.’

Like a cheap stereo effect, the words Alina had uttered yesterday resonated in each of my ears in turn. I thumped myself on the head and turned up the radio as loud as it would go, but nothing
could erase the memory of our first conversation on the houseboat.