Free Eye Collector, The by Sebastian Fitzek

her expression. In any case, I wasn’t sure of the extent to which blind people’s faces register their emotions.
    ‘Yesterday I went to the police and told them all I know, but the idiots didn’t take me seriously. I had to make my statement to some fool who didn’t even have an office of his
own.’
    ‘What was it about?’
    She sighed. ‘I’m a physio, as I already said. Most of my patients are regulars, but yesterday a stranger turned up at my practice without an appointment. He complained of severe pain
in the lumbar region.’
    ‘And?’ I said with mounting impatience.
    ‘So I started to give him a massage, but I didn’t get far. I had to break off the treatment.’
    ‘Why?’
    A wave made the whole houseboat shudder. I glanced at the window facing the lake, but total darkness prevailed outside.
    ‘For the same reason we’re talking together now. I suddenly realized who he was.’
    ‘Well, who was he?’ My stomach tensed even before I heard her reply.
    ‘The person you’ve written about so often in the last few weeks.’
    She paused for a moment. The cold around me seemed to intensify.
    ‘I’m pretty sure the man I treated yesterday was the Eye Collector.’

69
    Dry birchwood logs were crackling loudly in the stove. I’d quickly put a match to them after persuading Alina to stay.
    ‘Just another ten minutes’ were all she’d granted me. Then she would have to catch the bus back to the city centre, which only went once an hour. I still hadn’t decided
whether to offer to drive her home in the Volvo. I simply didn’t know what to make of her and the whole situation.
    I closed the little stove’s soot-stained window. Together with the paraffin lamp, the flickering firelight was now generating the warm glow I had always enjoyed during my periodic retreats
here.
    To work. Or to sort out my thoughts...
    But this time I failed to experience the snug sensation with which I usually sat down at the little desk beneath the window on the landward side. I was feeling even edgier than I did during the
minutes preceding copy deadline, when I still had to type my last few lines and was battling simultaneously with the clock and the nicotine withdrawal symptoms that regularly assailed me now that
Thea had banned smoking in the newsroom.
    ‘Coffee?’ I asked, going to the galley at the far end of the room. It was little more than a miniature worktop with a gas ring, two fitted cupboards and a sink.
    ‘Black,’ came the terse reply. Alina seemed far calmer than I, although just as many questions must have been whirling around in her head. After all, she was on her own in the wilds
with a total stranger.
    And she was blind!
    I lit the butane gas ring.
    ‘You say you recognized the Eye Collector?’ I said as I looked in the cupboards for some instant coffee. I tried to rid my voice of any derisive undertone, but it wasn’t easy.
‘Does that mean you aren’t completely blind?’
    I had known, ever since my mother lost her sight after a stroke, that it was a widespread misapprehension that all blind people live in darkness. In Germany they are officially classified as
blind if they can detect less than two per cent of what a sighted person sees. Two per cent can mean a great deal to those affected, but I wasn’t sure how even this minimal residue of sight
had enabled Alina to see the Eye Collector.
    Four women, three children – seven dead in only six months. And there wasn’t even a photofit picture of the serial murderer!
    She shook her head.
    ‘What about silhouettes, shadows and so on?’ I asked.
    ‘No. No silhouettes, colours, flashes of light or anything like that. In my case everything has gone. That’s to say...’ She hesitated. ‘Everything except my sensitivity
to light and darkness. At least I’ve retained that.’
    Retained...
    So she hadn’t been blind from birth.
    The water in the kettle started to boil. I spooned some instant coffee into a mug.
    ‘Just now, when you