Eye Collector, The (33 page)

The illuminated display read -1.

Frank took the stairs.

Construction work. No access,
said a sign on the door of the semi-basement. By now, Frank’s surprise had given way to a strong suspicion that something was amiss.

The door wasn’t locked, presumably for safety reasons. Laurel and Hardy failed to notice him when he turned right and made his way into the big, abandoned kitchen through a rear entrance,
which was also open.

I could have told my former colleague all this, together with the fact that Frank had appeared from nowhere just as Stoya’s sadistic subordinate was trying to brand me on the face with an
electric hob. The shadowy figure looming up behind me hadn’t belonged to Scholle; it was Frank, who, armed with an iron bar he’d found on the floor, had taken the big cop by surprise.
He hit Scholle at the precise moment when, horrified by Alina’s self-mutilation, the fat detective had momentarily relaxed his grip on my head.

But there was no time to impart all this information. The ultimatum would expire in twenty-five minutes, and I didn’t want to waste them on a description of how we’d escaped through
the emergency exit and made a dash for the Toyota, in which we were now speeding along the urban expressway.

‘Where are you?’ asked Stoya, clearly at pains to sound as calm as possible.

‘On the way to you, but that’s immaterial. Just tell me whether you found the car near some water.’

‘What car?’

‘Don’t play games – you’re only wasting time. Yes or no. River, canal, lake – whatever. Is there any water in the vicinity?’

A moment’s hesitation. Then, finally, a curt ‘Yes.’

‘Good. It’s only a shot in the dark, and don’t ask me where it came from, but...’

I can hardly believe it myself.

‘... you must look for those kids somewhere afloat.’

‘Afloat?’

‘On board a ship or boat of some kind.’

That’s if you’re prepared to be guided by a screwball and believe in the accuracy of her most recent ‘memories’.

‘I feel sick,’ Alina groaned softly beside me. I lowered the mobile for a moment, but she again declined my offer to drive her back to the hospital.

‘Bloody hell, we don’t have time to search every tub in the area,’ I heard Stoya yell as I put the mobile to my ear once more. ‘We’ve less than half an hour. If you
throw me off the scent...’

‘What scent?’ I cut in. ‘If the hideaway is on water, is it any wonder your dogs haven’t barked yet?’

No reply. All I could hear was the hum of the traffic I was threading my way through. ‘I can’t guarantee I’m right,’ I said in a further attempt to sway him.
‘I’m not convinced myself, to be honest, but if you’re groping in the dark anyway, where’s the harm?’

The ensuing lull in the conversation was even longer than the first. After twenty seconds, which to me felt like twenty minutes, I heard Stoya come to a decision. It proved to be a mistake.

(19 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)

PHILIPP STOYA

(DETECTIVE SUPERINTENDENT, HOMICIDE)

Stoya surveyed the poorly-lit parking lot: an expanse of potholed asphalt, a warden’s dilapidated hut with shattered windows, the barrier beside the entrance wrenched off
its base. The whole place was strewn with discarded products of the affluent society.

The waste disposal company, which had gone bust years ago, was just one more proof, thought Stoya, that the German industry was going to the dogs. As you’d expect, a vehicle abandoned here
would have remained unnoticed until bulldozers moved in to demolish the incineration plant, complete with its chimney.

Having previously declined to cooperate, chance was now eagerly working overtime.

Of all cars, it was nurse Katharina Vanghal’s car on which some young hooligans had chosen to vent their fury after an abortive visit to a disco (the bouncers wouldn’t let them in).
They did so just as a bleary-eyed police patrol drove past. This meant that the car, which had meanwhile lost a window and both wing mirrors, became a matter of record. And this, in turn, meant
that all the warning lights on the police computer lit up a few hours later, when Vanghal’s car was sought in connection with the Eye Collector.

‘How many potential hiding places?’ Stoya had pulled in to the kerb and was questioning the commander of the special task force by radio.

Recalling what Zorbach had said to him a minute earlier –
‘Yes or no. River, canal, lake-whichever. Is there any water in the vicinity?’
– he almost broke into
hysterical laughter.
Goddammit, Zorbach,
he thought,
this is Köpenick, not the Sahara. There’s more water here than dry land. That gives the Eye Collector only ten million
places to drown his victims.

The industrial estate they had been searching, hitherto without success, was situated beside a triangular stretch of open water at the confluence of the Dahme, the Spree and the Teltow Canal.
Even the street names had liquid connotations. His present location was the Regattastrasse-Tauchersteig intersection.

Tauchersteig...
The second name, roughly translated as ‘Diver’s Rise’, struck him as a bad omen.

The radio in his hand crackled. ‘There are masses of private moorings here,’ the task force commander replied. ‘Around a dozen cabin cruisers have been laid up here for the
winter.’

‘Forget the cabin cruisers.’

Zorbach had said something about a big compartment with a massive steel door, and you didn’t find those aboard a cabin cruiser.

‘It would be something sizeable – a vessel in commercial use, probably.’

‘That leaves only two possibilities.’

Stoya nodded. A coal barge and a container ship. Although very little moonlight was filtering through the overcast sky, the landing stage was bathed in a sulphurous yellow glow by several street
lights, so Stoya could easily make them out from where he was.

Goods traffic on the Berlin waterways had greatly declined with the advent of winter, and even the two commercial vessels seemed to be out of operation. They were lying motionless on the
opposite side of the Teltow Canal.

‘The coal barge is nearer the landing stage,’ the team leader said over the radio.

Stoya was still nodding. That was why he had returned to the parking lot, to gain some idea of how the Eye Collector might have transported the two unconscious children from there to his
hideaway.

‘In a wheelchair,’
Zorbach had said. So the perpetrator must have had to do everything twice over: open the boot, ensconce his drugged victims in the wheelchair, trundle them
unobserved to the landing stage on the other side of the road, and then...

Yes, and then what?
Unless the Eye Collector had grown wings, there was only one possibility. He must have put them in a small boat of some kind and rowed them across to the far bank.

But why? Why hadn’t he simply driven his car around to the other bank?

‘Let’s take the container ship,’ he said, privately wondering whether he’d lost his marbles like Zorbach. The man had clearly flipped, but he seemed to be well-informed.
First the ultimatum, then the parking ticket, and last but not least the bungalow. He still couldn’t believe that his former colleague was personally implicated, but he couldn’t dismiss
the possibility that Zorbach had access to inside information. Quite how, they didn’t have time to find out now that Scholle had so obviously screwed things up. Hell, they didn’t even
have the time to run a careful check on the blind girl’s hallucinations.

‘Mind you,’ said the task force commander, ‘the coal barge can be reached more quickly from the landing stage.’

Stoya could hear the sound of an outboard motor in stereo, over the phone and from across the water. The rubber dinghy containing the commander, four of his men and a sniffer dog had set off for
the far bank. They seemed to be obeying his instructions and making for the long-hulled vessel on which at least forty steel containers were stacked in three layers.

‘The very fact that it’s moored a bit further away makes it our first choice,’ said Stoya.

The coal barge was readily visible from the busy waterway, whereas the container ship was partly obscured by it. There was nothing but a rubble-strewn wilderness beyond the landing stage –
an ideal set-up for someone wanting to convey bulky objects aboard unobserved.

Besides,
thought Stoya,
the coal barge looks too squat. Too squat to have a lower deck capacious enough to accommodate a hiding place like the one Zorbach described.

But he kept that thought to himself. If he proved wrong he didn’t want to be blamed for basing his decision, not on hard facts, but on the recommendations of a blind medium.

Not to mention those of the principal suspect!

‘Wow,’ said the task force commander, who was steadily nearing his destination. ‘This tub is huge.’

‘Exactly. And we certainly don’t have time to raid them both.’

Stoya detached his sweaty fingers from the radio microphone and prayed he was doing the right thing.

(13 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)

TOBY TRAUNSTEIN

After PE one time, Kevin had – just for fun – released the strap that attached the heavy blue plastic safety mattress to the wall of the gym. Toby, busy doing up
his shoes, had failed to react quickly enough and was buried beneath the monstrous great thing.

What pinned his skinny body to the floor more firmly even than the thick foam plastic mattress was paralysing fear. He couldn’t get up because several chortling classmates leapt on top of
it to prevent him from doing so. Convinced that he would suffocate within seconds, he’d screamed...

... like a girl. Jesus, how embarrassing...

... and burst into tears...

At least I didn’t wet myself, though I nearly did...

And afterwards, when Herr Kerner had quelled the rumpus, he didn’t speak to Kevin for a whole week.

Or was it Jens? Oh well, whoever it was...

Now, as he lay on the cold floor with his knees drawn up, staring into the darkness, he realized how absurd he’d been to be scared that time. The mattress hadn’t touched the ground
all around, so he’d had plenty of air to breathe. Now that he’d extricated himself from the wooden chest, oxygen was no longer a problem either. It seeped through the cracks in the
metal compartment in which he was lying. The difference between now and that day in the gym, it dawned on him, was the absence of a Herr Kerner. There was no PE teacher around to put an end to the
nonsense and haul the mattress off him. Then, his ordeal had been over within seconds; now, he’d been in total darkness for ever so long. Not a thing to eat or drink. His prison stank of shit
and piss, but he’d ceased to notice that. He was drifting off...

... Did I bring my atlas?
he wondered.
It’s geography after PE, and I’ve forgotten my atlas...

He heard something go bang immediately beneath the steel floor pressed against his ear. The floor had stopped swaying, which could be a good sign – in fact the whole compartment seemed to
have stopped moving the way it had moved just after he pulled that confounded rope.

‘The rope!’ he groaned. ‘Why on earth did I do that?’ Then he slipped back into the feverish dreamworld in which his direst fear was to get a black mark in the class
book.

Herr Pohl will give me another black mark if I turn up again without my atlas. That would make three, and Dad’ll be really mad at me...

Another noise made him jump, but it sounded nicer than that bang just now. It was like a gentle whisper. Soft and soporific. Toby started to drift off again...

... because three black marks in the class book equal one detention...

But he was prevented from drifting off by a novel, quite genuine sensation. Suddenly it was everywhere – wherever in the darkness he propped himself up on his hands or stretched out his
fingers and touched the floor: icy cold, invisible moisture!

Greedily, he opened his mouth and licked the wet floor like a dog.

Water at last.

The first few drops stung his raw throat like acid, it was so long since he’d drunk anything. Then things improved a little. Whatever the source of the water, it was seeping into his
prison from below and rising higher every second. Although this made it easier for him to drink, he became too greedy.

He choked and started retching. When he vomited he thought his skull would explode into fragments and land in the slightly brackish water around him.

I’ve had it,
he thought in despair, suddenly feeling too weak even to drink.

Only a couple of centimetres deep at first, the water rose steadily higher, chilling him to the bone and making him shiver violently.

That’s it. I give up.

Swallowing, even opening his mouth, was taking superhuman effort. Standing up was out of the question, even lying there was tiring, and staying awake seemed impossible.

The best thing I can do is go back to sleep,
he thought, half in the present and half in a merciful dreamworld.

Daddy can’t get mad at me if I go to sleep, can he? I won’t get a black mark in my sleep, will I?

He was lying on his side, curled up like an embryo with his left eye already submerged, when – somewhere outside the walls of his prison – someone called his name.

(10 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)

SPECIAL TASK FORCE

(ON BOARD THE CONTAINER SHIP)

‘Toby?’

Within minutes of boarding the boxy, ungraceful-looking vessel, the men had grasped the futility of their task and started to bellow the children’s names.

‘Lea? Toby?’

In spite of the reinforcements that had joined them from the shore, they couldn’t possibly break open and search each container in the time remaining. Besides, the dogs hadn’t made a
sound on the bridge or on the first of the lower decks, which reeked of diesel and lubricating oil. The only time they’d barked, and then only briefly, was outside a cabin in which the
ship’s captain, awakened by the sound of his door bursting open, had been scared to death when men in black combat gear and ski masks dashed in and dragged him out of his bunk.