Eye Collector, The (37 page)

‘What did you do with the body?’

‘I towed her outside by the flex... across the living room to a terrace door and from there into the garden... I left her lying near the garden fence, a little way from a small
shed.’

I prayed once more to a God I no longer believed in, imploring him to prove me a fool –
no one can see into the future, it’s impossible
– when, a few seconds later, I
drove along the street in which I’d spent twelve years of my life with Nicci.

Had the road ahead of me parted and engulfed the car, I would have reacted more calmly – indeed, I would have welcomed being spared what lay ahead.

‘What happened next?’
I heard myself ask.

‘After I put the stopwatch in her hand, you mean?’

I floored the accelerator and raced towards the house at the end of the street.

‘I went over to the tool shed... It was made of timber, not metal... There was something on the floor. It looked like a bundle of rags, but it was another body. Smaller and lighter than
that of the woman lying dead on the lawn. It was a little boy.’

Julian!

‘Was he still alive?’

A flock of crows took wing as I parked the Toyota in the driveway.

Please not, dear God, please not. Don’t let today be the day when I pay for my mistake on the bridge.

I jumped out of the car, bit my hand to prevent myself from crying out, and lost my balance. It was colder on the outskirts of the city, so the snow took longer to melt. I slipped on the smooth
driveway, and the moment I hit the ground something inside me broke beyond repair.

I crawled along on all fours, then got to my feet and ran into the garden past the big lime tree from which I’d meant to hang a swing. ‘Nicci!’ I called at the top of my voice,
throwing back my head.

Nicci!

I called her name over and over, louder and louder, but her eyes were unblinking and her lips would never open again.

At that moment I wanted to be as dead as she was. I hated myself for still being alive – hated myself for having lived a life that was one big mistake. It had cost my wife her life and my
son would now pay dearly...

Good God, Julian!

I looked over at the shed. The bolt had been drawn and the door was wide open.

‘I carried the boy to a car parked on the edge of the woods beyond the garden fence. I think it was early morning, shortly after sunrise. Suddenly everything went dark again and I
thought the vision was over. Then two red lights came on in the boot of the car. I laid the boy down inside.’

I hit my head with the heel of my hand as if to rid it of the bitter truth.

‘I remember driving uphill for a bit. We rounded several bends. Then the car pulled up and I got out.’

‘What happened after that?’

‘Nothing. I just stood there and watched.’

‘You watched?’

‘Yes. All at once I was holding something heavy.’

Once, long ago, when Julian was a baby and being a good father was all I could conceive of, I had sat with him at this very spot. Here, where my agony of mind was rending me apart.

I had cradled his sleeping head against my chest – gently, to prevent him from slipping sideways. Almost the way I was holding Nicci’s lifeless body now.

What dreams we’d had, what plans had once held our little family together, and how quickly I’d succeeded in destroying them all.

I removed the stopwatch from Nicci’s cold fingers and stood up.

We had meant to grow old together, here at the foot of the Rudower Dörferblick, a hill on the outskirts of Berlin, eighty-six metres high and composed of rubble from the ruins of the
war-torn German capital. On sunny days it presented a panoramic view of three villages: Bohnsdorf, Schönefeld and Wassmannsdorf. And, of course, of our own house and garden.

I looked down at the body of my murdered wife, then up at the summit of the grassy hill at the foot of which all our hopes had first come into flower and then been blighted forever.

I wasn’t sure if the tears in my eyes were deceiving me, or if I could really make out the figure of a man whose binoculars were reflecting the cold winter sunlight.

THE EYE COLLECTOR’S LAST LETTER, SENT BY EMAIL VIA AN ANONYMOUS ACCOUNT

To: Thea Bergdorf

Subject: Final words...

Dear Frau Bergdorf,

This email will, I think, be the last you receive from me for a long time. I trust you’ll note that I’ve addressed you more respectfully than in
my previous letters, though I doubt if your paper will accord me the same respect.

Despite the twins’ release, you probably continue to regard me as a monster deserving of his nickname. It would, however, be mistaken of you to believe that the scene I
witnessed through my binoculars left me completely unmoved. I was deeply saddened when I saw Zorbach go to pieces from my vantage point on the hill.

It wrung my heart to see someone I liked so much in such a state – emotionally shattered and looking years older, as if drained of vital energy the instant he took his
dead wife in his arms.

Alexander Zorbach was my mentor, the father I never had. He was my role model, and not only in the workplace, where I strove to emulate his enthusiasm and sense of humour. I
even tried to resemble him in outward appearance by secretly purchasing the sort of clothes he favoured – clothes in which I was filmed by the gallery’s camera when leaving
Alina’s block of flats.

I went to such lengths, just to be close to him, and now he’s ruined everything. Why on earth did he keep his eyes so firmly shut? Didn’t he
want
to see my
innumerable clues, intended to point out the dangers of the game? Intended to warn him not to rush into it without thinking. I wanted to play it, admittedly, but not with him. He had no business
taking part in this particular round.

I’m open to reproach, I’m sure, but not for having run the game unfairly. I wrote this to you already, and now you have the proof: I stick to the rules I’ve
laid down, and if I do change them, it’s always for the benefit of my countless opponents.

In Zorbach’s case I left it up to him, long before the first round began, whether or not to take the field at all.

The voices on the police radio frequency were produced by a little jamming device I built with the aid of a few components obtainable in any well-stocked electronics mart.
Then there was his wallet, which I purloined in the newspaper office and planted at the scene of the crime. It was up to him to interpret the signs. Were they an invitation to bring the Eye
Collector to book in order to clear himself of suspicion? Or a warning to attend to what really matters in this life: the family?

Zorbach came to a decision. He put his work before the welfare of his child and set out to hunt me down. He was like all the other fathers whose children I’ve hidden so
far. Fathers who had a choice throughout their lives between earning money and whoring around or taking good care of their own flesh and blood. Fathers as self-centred and uncaring as my own, who
went boozing with his pals when he might have rescued us from the chest freezer. His selfishness cost my little brother his life and me my sanity – or so, at least, a psychiatrist’s
analysis would have it. It is of course noticeable – I freely admit this – that I always reproduce my own and my brother’s attendant circumstances: a mother who needed removing
from the field of play at the outset; a father who neglected his offspring; a hiding place in which the air lasted for forty-five hours seven minutes; and a corpse with its left eye missing like my
brother’s.

I spent a long time working out how to guarantee a precise deadline, because it would violate the rules of the game if a participant suffocated before my ultimatum expired. It
would be equally unfair if one child had more time available than another. My brother had only forty-five hours seven minutes’ worth of air, and there was no way he could have obtained any
more. I would have preferred to use a chest freezer myself, but it’s almost impossible, alas, to calculate exactly how long a person will survive in an airtight container. Someone who
hyperventilates in a panic will use up air more quickly than someone asleep, and I myself am living proof that two people can survive for different periods of time on the same amount of oxygen.
Consequently, the only way I could see of creating almost identical conditions was to extract the air from the hiding place at a time determined by myself. Consider that my attempts to pump the air
out of the cellar in the nurse’s bungalow were not overly successful. Anyway, I doubt if Zorbach and Alina would have asphyxiated down there because I hadn’t managed to create a really
airtight seal. So I opted for another way of depriving my hideaway of oxygen: I flooded it.

You’re playing a sick, horrific game,
I hear you say.
A fair game,
is my response. Even the victims have a genuine chance, as you can see in the case of
little Toby.

He didn’t
have
to toil away for hours on end. He wouldn’t have died before the ultimatum expired even if he’d remained inside the trolley case and
failed to escape from the wooden chest; he would simply have gone to sleep. Nor did I leave him those implements in order to derive a perverse pleasure from his futile exertions. The coin and the
screwdriver weren’t burial gifts; because I’d changed the scenario, they were genuine aids to escape instead of the useless implements available to my brother and I. Unfortunately, Toby
allowed himself to be unduly alarmed when the lift suddenly descended a few metres, just because he’d tugged at the rope. Had he kept a clear head and hauled himself up it, he might have
managed to open the hatch through which Zorbach climbed.

Toby missed his chance. A little later – after forty-five hours seven minutes precisely – the lift descended into the cellar. This proves yet again how magnanimous
I am: I didn’t add in the time a healthy person can survive underwater.

‘What about Lea? Why wasn’t she in the lift too?
’ If you ask me that, it shows you haven’t understood a thing. I’m not interested in
wiping out an entire family.
I
survived the love test as a boy, so one child was also permitted to survive this time around. The oxygen in Lea’s refrigerator wouldn’t have run
out for ages. She was more likely to die of thirst in there.

I play fair no matter which way you look at it, and I’ve never played fairer than I did with Zorbach.

I warned him. Each of my warnings was a test, I grant you, but doesn’t that apply to every sin in life? Every cigarette packet threatens us with death, yet we’re
also aware of the intoxicating effect of its contents. Every warning is a simultaneous temptation. Like Alina, my blind visionary, whom I sent to see Zorbach on his houseboat. His mother betrayed
its whereabouts to me. Not personally, of course, because she’s incapable of speech. The diary on her bedside table, from which Zorbach read aloud to her whenever he found the time to visit
her, contained a detailed account of the day they happened on the secret path through the woods. I borrowed the book when visiting my grandmother at the sanatorium.

It’s certainly no accident that my granny was transferred from the old folks’ home in which she was treated so badly to the sanatorium in which Zorbach’s
mother is also a patient to this day. After writing my article, I ensured that she was moved to an institution whose patients received better treatment. It was there at the Park Sanatorium, as I
knew from my research, that Katharina Vanghal, the nurse who so badly neglected my grandmother, had been exposed and dismissed on the spot – months before she was re-employed by a negligent
personnel manager and left my grandmother to putrefy until her bedsores were open right to the bone. I repaid Vanghal in kind by gaining entry to her house, sedating her, and wrapping her up in
plastic film. At the time it was merely a pleasurable, cathartic form of revenge. I had yet to learn that her own putrefaction would eventually acquire significance within the context of my great
game.

When Zorbach and Alina asked me to get the parking ticket checked, I sent them to Vanghal’s bungalow. That was the bait. At the same time, I expressly warned Zorbach not
to go inside. I even signalled to him with the scrolling electronic sign on the door, which I was able to alter with a simple SMS.

Once again he had a choice: to carry on or give up.

And once again he decided in favour of the game and against his family. Even though his child was sick – even though it was Julian’s birthday – he ventured
into the darkened house. Once again he behaved no differently from all the other fathers who desert their children for months on end, forget their birthdays, and leave them to brood on the question
that torments them in their lonely beds at night: ‘Does Dad still love me?’

You see how fair I am? I played straight into my pursuers’ hands by revealing my true motive in an email I sent to Zorbach’s computer. I even planted a piece of
incriminating evidence on his mother’s bedside table: a photomontage of my brother with a vital clue on the back! Last of all, I put a stop to Scholle’s foul play and sent Zorbach back
on to the field.

Why, you ask? The answer is quite simple: yours truly, the Eye Collector, doesn’t want to win. I believe in love – in the love of fathers for their children. By
putting them to the test I give them a chance to prove it to me and the world at large. I’m happy only when I lose! That’s why I help my opponents, and why I ensured that Zorbach made a
personal appearance at the all-important finale in Grünauer Strasse.

And, once again, it was his choice alone which way to go: forwards to destruction or home to his son, who was hoping for a birthday present from him.