Eye Collector, The (11 page)

‘TomTom needs feeding and my own stomach thinks my throat’s cut, so it’d be good to get home soon.’

‘I’ve only one more question,’ I told her, though I really didn’t know where to start.

How did you know about the ultimatum? No one can see into the past, so why did you think up this crazy story? And why drag me into it?

Alina threw back her head and laughed. ‘For someone who treated me like a burglar to start with, you seem very appreciative of my company.’

I laughed back. ‘Journalistic interest, that’s all,’ I said, trying to sound casual.

She raised her eyebrows, and I suddenly knew what had previously disturbed me about her varying facial expressions and her posture a moment ago.

It was the fact that she communicated with expressions and gestures at all. To the best of my knowledge, registering joy and sorrow – even throwing up your arms after winning a race
– were instinctive modes of behaviour. But what of the gradations in between? What of loathing, regret, disgust, or Alina’s look of nervous impatience at this moment? I knew a blind
greengrocer in Kreuzkölln who had once asked me to tip him off if he looked surly. Most of the time he was merely concentrating, he said, not angry at all. Ever since that conversation I had
assumed that facial expressions were the result of a learning process in which you copied other people, but Alina had so many non-verbal modes of expression that this couldn’t be true.

Unless the Eye Collector isn’t all she’s lying about...

‘Can’t we discuss your questions on the way?’ she asked. I shook my head although I’d have been happy to accept her suggestion. I, too, wanted to get away as soon as
possible. The possibility that Stoya had traced my call was extremely remote. I’d only been on his wanted list for a couple of minutes, after all, but Alina’s arrival on the scene had
destroyed my sense of security. The only problem was, I still had too little information on which to base my next move.

‘It’s tricky outside at present,’ I said truthfully. ‘There are big branches coming down every two minutes. I’d wait until the storm subsides a little.’

She stopped fondling her dog. ‘All right, what do you want to know?’

How did you really know about this boat?

What’s your connection with the Eye Collector?

Are you genuinely blind?

‘Let’s go on from where you left off,’ I said, as much to sort out my own thoughts as for any other reason.

Go on from the murder. From the point where you broke the woman’s neck and dragged her corpse into the garden.
‘What happened next?’

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

A shadow seemed to flit across her face. She kept her eyes tight shut. Her lips were also compressed, which lent her face a tense expression.

‘I went over to the tool shed,’ she said slowly, as if she found it hard to unearth a long-buried recollection from the depths of her memory. ‘It was made of timber, not metal.
I knew that because I got a splinter in my finger when I slid the bolt open. Besides, there was a smell of resin when I went inside.’

She paused for a moment, nervously plucking at her left thumb with the fingers of her right hand.

‘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.’

‘Was he still alive?’

‘I think so. He smelt like my brother Ivan. I can scarcely remember Ivan’s face, but I’ll never forget the smell of sweets and grimy knees that filled my nostrils when we had a
bath together. I always smell it when I dream of little boys.’

Or when you kidnap one.

‘Can you describe his face?’

‘No. I told you: the only faces I really remember are those of my parents.’

I apologized for the interruption and asked her to go on.

‘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.’

‘What about the girl?’

‘What girl?’ She looked genuinely surprised. ‘I don’t know anything about that.’

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘The Eye Collector has kidnapped some twins for the first time. The papers are full of it.’

‘I can’t read newspapers, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

‘There’s radio and television.’

‘And the Internet. Thanks for the tip.’

‘Then you must have gathered that the police are looking for
two
missing children, Toby and Lea. They’re twins.’

‘But I didn’t, okay?’

TomTom raised his head, alerted by the indignation in his mistress’s voice.

‘Yesterday I went straight to the police, who questioned me in the same shitty tone of voice you’re using now. They thought I was a crackpot, I grasped that at once. I was so furious
when I got home, the rest of the world could get stuffed as far as I was concerned. So I settled down in front of the goggle-box with a bottle of wine and blotted out reality with some old Edgar
Wallace movies until I got so sozzled I fell asleep. Today I was woken up by some lunatic who made a date with me out here in the wilds.’ She snorted angrily. ‘And I, being a silly cow,
actually made my way here, only to be shat on a second time.’

The paraffin lamp flickered, reminding me that it was high time I attended to the generator, or I and my weird visitor would soon be sitting in the dark.

‘And you expect me to believe all this?’ I said.

Alina gripped the handle of her dog’s harness and stood up. ‘What the hell, you think I’m lying anyway. But ask yourself this: If I’d really made the story up, would it
have sounded so poorly rehearsed?’

She was right. Crazy though it sounded, the very fact that she’d known nothing about the kidnapped girl endorsed her credibility. No one seeking to make herself look important by
concocting false testimony would have been careless enough to overlook the second victim.

Unless that, too, was part of a plan I failed to comprehend.

‘I can only say what I saw,’ she said, shouldering her rucksack.

I also got to my feet – rather too abruptly, because I felt dizzy all of a sudden. My migraine had now reached the stage at which only prescription drugs would deal with it. Fortunately,
there was a half-used pack of Maxalt somewhere amid the clutter on the Volvo’s passenger seat.

‘Wait,’ I said, massaging the nape of my neck. This time Alina dispensed with her cane and relied entirely on the dog, which gently tried to tow her past me. I gestured to her to
stop. She couldn’t see, of course, so I caught hold of her by the sleeve of her sweater.

‘What?’ was all she said, and turned her head in my direction. We were close for the first time and I caught a whiff of the discreet scent she was wearing. It was light and less
tangy than I’d have expected.

‘Why waste time on me if you don’t believe me anyway?’

It was a fair question, and I tried to answer it at length. I told her that I’d often interviewed people whom I didn’t at first believe, but who had changed my mind. Checking a
source was never a waste of time, I said, especially in the case of a story as exceptional as hers.

Suddenly, however, everything went blurry before my eyes. They felt as if they’d been staring at a flickering screen for hours on end. I was also feeling nauseous, so I limited myself to
asking the one question that could definitely enable me to verify the truth of Alina’s statements: ‘Where did you take the boy?’

(10 HOURS 40 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)

TOBY TRAUNSTEIN

The walls of his prison were...
soft?

Toby kneaded his hands together to make sure his sense of touch wasn’t deceiving him. This was more than likely because his senses were currently monopolized by something else:
thirst.
He had no idea how long he’d been unconscious, but it must have been hours. Possibly days. The last time he’d woken up with such a sore throat had been New Year’s
Day, after he’d made a pig of himself on all those stupid crisps. But it hadn’t hurt half as much as this.

And my arms hadn’t exploded either.

He didn’t know what had woken him, his unbearable thirst or the throbbing pain in his arms. They felt as if he’d been lying on them for a whole week.

Rolling over on his side in the cramped darkness, relieving his hands of the weight of his body, took a laborious eternity
(longer than one of old Hertel’s maths lessons)
. The blood
came coursing back into his numb limbs and he started to scratch the places that smarted most: his upper arms, the crook of his elbow and his wrists. His wrists, especially, felt the way they had
when he was looking for his football in the garden next door and reached into that lousy clump of stinging nettles.

‘You should only slap them, not scratch,’ he remembered his mother saying.
Honestly, Mummy, that didn’t even work with a mosquito bite. This itches so much, I feel like
ripping the skin off my bones.

He made a claw of his right hand, applied it to his left wrist at pulse level, and drew a deep breath.

Only slap, don’t scratch.

Stuff it. He dug his fingernails deep into his flesh and groaned with relief when the itching abated a little. It even took his mind off his thirst, if only for a few seconds. He’d
scarcely stopped scratching when the flames flared up again and the throbbing, smarting sensation maddened him even more than the impenetrable darkness surrounding him.

‘Hello?’ he called, and winced at the sound of his own voice.

Sniffly and tearful.

He didn’t want to cry. It would be shaming enough if his friends discovered he’d peed his pants when they let him out of here. In the next ten minutes or so at latest, when Jens and
Kevin lost interest in their practical joke. Because that’s what it was, you bet. A stupid, rotten, lousy practical joke!

What else would it be, you little piddle-pants? Stop blubbing.

Kevin was always boasting about the knockout drops they sold in the chemist’s shop his parents owned. He must have tried some out on him to pay him back.

Just because I hid his pants in the girls’ changing room after swimming. But at least that was funny. Not like this...

Toby tried to stretch. His elbows dug into the walls of his prison. It surprised him again that they yielded under pressure. Had the idiots stuck him in a tent?

No, it was too cramped for that. Besides, the surface wasn’t smooth. It didn’t feel like rubber or canvas. It was much rougher, more like coarse carpeting or wallpaper, or...

Or a sack?

Toby started sobbing again. He couldn’t help thinking of the horror video Jens had showed them during break at school. His parents were filthy rich.
(Dad always says their windscreen
replacement business makes so much money, they could wipe their arses on banknotes if they ran out of toilet paper.)
That was why Jens was the first boy in his class with the latest iPhone. The
kind you could use to view internet videos at a moment’s notice.

They’d all met up behind the gym the very first day, and Jens had proudly showed them the clip where a naked girl was stuffed into a sack by a gang of youths. She tried to defend herself,
lashing out with her arms and legs, but they got her into it in the end and tied the neck securely. Toby had joined in the others’ laughter at first, because it really did look as if a dozen
snakes were rampaging around inside the sack. But he’d felt sick when the youth with the cigarette in his mouth laughingly emptied a can of petrol over the squirming sack. He’d turned
away and walked back to the playground. On his own.

They’re probably doing the same to me. Because I was too chicken to watch.

‘Okay, you win,’ he called into the darkness. He pictured Kevin and Jens clutching their mouths so he couldn’t hear them giggling.

‘Come on, let me out.’

No answer.

Desperately, he rammed both fists against the material at head height, feeling the sweat run down his face. He was panting even harder than he would have done after running the 400 metres,
although he hadn’t exerted himself half as much as that in the last few minutes.

There’s nothing much anyone
can
do in here. Except feel scared.

Toby sniffed and drew several deep breaths. His fingers still tingled as if they were thawing out after a snowball fight. He ran them over the yielding walls around him.

They weren’t damp and there was no smell of petrol, thank God, so they’d left out that bit of the video.

So far.

All at once his fingers encountered something cold: a small metal object was hanging from the side of his cloth prison, roughly on a level with his tummy button. It was the size of the Zippo
lighter that his father always topped up at weekends.

Hey, it even felt like a Zippo.

But it definitely wasn’t one, because that sort of lighter had a hinged top you could open and a flint wheel you could turn.

And it certainly wouldn’t be hanging from a cloth ceiling in the dark.

Toby held his breath so as not to be distracted by the sound of his own hoarse breathing. Then, when he felt the top of the foreign object and came across a tiny U-shaped shackle, he knew what
he was holding in his hand.

It’s a padlock. A little bronze padlock like the one I use to chain up my bike.

He coughed with excitement. He still wasn’t sure what the discovery signified, but at least it
was
a discovery. Something that might help to get him out of here.

Is this a test, then? Are you guys testing me?

He shook the padlock impatiently, but nothing happened whichever way he tugged at it.

Brute force is useless!
He heard his mother’s voice again, and this time he took her advice. He explored the object cautiously with his fingers. When he ran them over the bottom of
the thing, his certainty suddenly evaporated. Was it a padlock? Hell, where was the keyhole?