‘Yes.’
Certainly.
Of course he did.
It was the cruise liner on which, five years ago, during the third night of the transatlantic crossing, his wife had climbed over the railings of her balcony cabin, and leaped fifty metres into the depths. Just after she’d held a chloroform-soaked cloth over Timmy’s sleepy face and then tossed him overboard.
3
Southampton
Seventeen hours later
Naomi loved thrillers. The bloodthirstier the better. For the cruise on the luxury liner she’d hauled a whole wagonload on board the Sultan of the Seas (she hadn’t been able to get used to this newfangled e-reader), and on a good day she could get through almost an entire book, depending on how thick it was.
Or how bloody.
Sometimes she wasn’t sure who was nuttier: the author who thought up all this sick nonsense, or she who actually paid money to get cosy around the pool with axe murderers and psychopaths, within range of the sexy waiters who, between chapters, would supply her with coffee, soft drinks or cocktails, depending on the time of day.
In the seven years of her marriage, before God decided that an urn on the mantelpiece suited her better than a ring on her finger, her husband had once said he wondered why there were age limits for films and computer games, but not for books.
How right he’d been.
There were scenes she’d read years ago that she was still unable to get out of her head, no matter how hard she tried. For example that one from The Cleaner, where Joe’s looking forward to a wild sex adventure with his conquest in the park, but instead the crazed bitch rips off one of his balls with a pair of pliers.
She shuddered.
After a description like that you have to think the author’s a pervert, yet the book was a huge success, and its writer, Paul Cleave, who she saw at a crime festival reading was charming, good-looking and amusing. Funny, like large sections of the book itself.
Very different from Hannibal by Thomas Harris. It made her sick when Dr Lecter ate the brain of his adversary from the man’s open skull while he was still alive. The book got almost seven hundred five-star ratings!
Sick.
Almost as sick as the story of the thirty-seven-year-old woman who is kept in a well by her abductor until one day a pail is lowered down with a bowl of rice in it. On the bowl are two words, which the woman, a PhD in biology, can barely make out in the darkness: Spirometra mansoni.
The Latin name of a parasite which exists predominantly in south-east Asia, as wide as a shoelace and up to thirty centimetres long, and which grows into a semi-transparent, ribbed tapeworm. This migrates beneath the human skin to the brain. Or behind the eye, as with the woman in the book, whose hunger is so unbearable that in the end she is forced to eat the contaminated rice to avoid dying a miserable death.
For Christ’s sake, what’s that book called again?
She thought of her shelves in the conservatory back home, of the authors sorted alphabetically, but she couldn’t remember it.
Hold on, is that a possibility? It’s not so long ago that… oh, yes, now I remember!
At the moment when the pain wrenched her back to reality from her momentary doze, Naomi remembered.
It wasn’t a book.
It was her life.
Somewhere on the Sultan of the Seas.
And much to her displeasure it was long from over.
4
With a duffle bag over his shoulder, Martin Schwartz climbed the steps of the Sultan of the Seas amidships, and felt terrible.
He hated this ship, the subtle pastel-coloured panelling, the mahogany and teak furniture, and the soft carpets you walked along as if in a meadow. He hated the ridiculous staff uniforms, worn even by the lowliest porters, as if they were in the navy rather than at a funfair of mass tourism. He hated the discreet vanilla aroma mixed into the air conditioning system; hated the euphoria in the eyes of the passengers he’d boarded with. Women, men, children, families. Looking forward to seven nights of luxury, twenty-four-hour, all-inclusive buffets, restorative days on deck or in the two-thousand-square-metre spa with its ‘above-ocean’ fitness centre. They were planning to see the shows in the most modern musical theatre on the seven seas and enjoy cocktails in one of the eleven bars dotted around the seventeen decks. They were going to drop their children off at Pirate Club, clamber up the longest water slide ever built on a liner, fritter away their money in the casino or spend it in the shopping mall, which had been designed in the style of an Italian piazza. Maybe they boarded the ship with the same mixed feelings as when getting on a plane, a respectful concern as to whether the technology they were surrendering themselves to would get them unharmed from A to B. Martin was certain, however, that none of the almost three thousand passengers would have given the slightest thought to the fact that they’d be spending the next few days living in a small city, in which thousands of people belonging to the most diverse cultures and classes would collide, starting with the two-dollar-per-hour workers down in the laundry to the millionaires on the wind-protected loungers on the upper deck. A city where everything existed, apart from law enforcers. Where if you dialled 110 you got room service rather than the police. A city where the moment you stepped aboard you submitted to the legal system of some backwards banana republic, under whose flag the ship had been launched.
Martin hated the Sultan, its passengers and the crew.
But most of all he hated himself.
He’d sworn he’d never set foot on a cruise ship again. Especially not on this one. Yet a single call from a pensioner he didn’t even know had made him toss all his resolutions overboard.
How true!
As he laughed cynically to himself, an elderly, overweight couple coming towards him on the steps gave him a suspicious look.
Toss overboard.
It would be difficult to put more aptly.
Having reached deck 12 he studied the sign with the cabin numbers. To get to suite 1211 he had to go to the port side.
Martin yawned. Although – or perhaps because – yesterday the dentist had convinced him to have a temporary implant, the toothache had given him no respite all night; he hadn’t slept a wink apart from a ten-minute doze on the plane to London.
Then, in the taxi from Heathrow to Southampton, the calls on his mobile were the last straw. First Kramer tried to phone him, then the boss personally, to bellow what the hell did he think he was doing missing the operational meeting without an excuse. If he didn’t come to the station immediately he needn’t come back ever again.
‘What’s more, you fucking well promised to pay regular visits to the doctor. The shit you’d better be swallowing every day can cause cerebral failure, though I doubt in your case there’d be any noticeable difference.’
At some point Martin had let the insults go into voicemail. He doubted that they could get by without him. The moment the next kamikaze mission came around, this entry in his personal file would be forgotten again. Or this time had he actually overstepped the mark simply by booking his passage on the Sultan without consulting his superiors or requesting time off? In a 150-square-metre suite on deck 11 for two thousand euros per night, including a business-class flight from New York back to Berlin.
And yet Martin didn’t have any intention of making the crossing. He just wanted to talk to Gerlinde Dobkowitz, take a look at her supposed ‘proof’ and then get off again as quickly as possible. But the cranky old woman had refused to leave the ship for him. As Martin had learned yesterday evening from some online research, in cruise forums the seventy-eight-year-old Gerlinde Dobkowitz was something of a legend. From her pension she’d rented one of the few permanent cabins on the Sultan for the rest of her life. And since the ship had been launched eight years ago, she only ever left it when maintenance work required she do so.
So Martin had to go aboard to her, and as nobody was permitted aboard the Sultan without proof of passage he’d been forced to book himself a
cabin. The veranda suite at the stern of the liner had been the only one that could be booked online at such short notice, which was why he was now paying twelve thousand euros for a twenty-minute conversation. The sailing schedule ought to have given him more than two hours for their meeting, but on the drive to Southampton the taxi driver had made a point of showing him every traffic jam in southern England.
Oh, well, the cost wouldn’t bankrupt him.
Although his police salary wasn’t huge, he had hardly spent any of it for years, which meant that his account had swelled to such a size that a couple of months ago the bank had even sent him a card on his thirty-eighth birthday.
At that moment, however, with his finger on the bell to cabin 1211, he felt more like someone on the wrong side of fifty.
He pressed the polished brass button and heard a subtle chiming inside. The door was opened a few seconds later and he found himself facing a young man wearing a tailcoat, patent leather shoes and an obsequious smile. Martin recalled that the Sultan prided itself on providing a butler for every guest who booked an overpriced suite.
The specimen standing before him was in his early twenties, with short, black hair that, with its middle parting, stuck to his rather narrow skull as if ironed on. He had watery eyes and a receding chin. Courage and determination were not the first words that came to mind when looking at such an individual.
‘Show the gentleman in,’ Martin heard Gerlinde Dobkowitz call out from inside her suite. The butler stood to one side.
Martin’s brain had great difficulty in processing all the sights that assailed him once he entered.
As an investigator he knew that often you needed a very sharp pencil to draw the line between an eccentric lifestyle and madness requiring therapy. At first glance he could see that Gerlinde Dobkowitz straddled both sides of this line.
‘Finally!’ she greeted him from her bed. She was enthroned in a sea of pillows, newspapers and computer printouts. Her overladen bed stood in the middle of a space which the shipyard’s interior designers had originally specified as a living room. But they had not reckoned with Gerlinde Dobkowitz. At least Martin couldn’t imagine that flowery wallpaper the colour of raspberry mousse, a zebra fur rug or fake antlers above the air vents were part of the basic design of every three-room suite aboard the Sultan.
‘You need to recalibrate your tachometer,’ the old woman said, her eyes fixed on a wooden grandfather clock at the entrance to the suite. ‘It’s almost six o’clock!’
With a grumpy gesture she shooed her butler away to an antique, felt-covered bureau, which stood at right angles to the partition wall, beneath an oil painting that presumably once depicted Rembrandt’s Man with the Golden Helmet, but was now covered in notes attached to the canvas by drawing pins.
The old woman gave Martin the evil eye. ‘I thought I’d have to wait until New York to bring my brownies to the White House.’
Gerlinde reached for a huge pair of glasses on her bedside table. He was amazed she didn’t need both hands to put them on her nose. The lenses were tinted pale pink and as thick as the bottom of a whisky tumbler, which made the alert eyes behind them assume owl-like proportions. Indeed it required little imagination to see Gerlinde’s overall resemblance to a bird. She had claw-like fingers, and her long, crooked nose stuck out like a beak from the old woman’s narrow, corvid face that was nothing but skin and bones.
‘I hope it’s not that sandpaper stuff again. Just put it beside the organic waste bin and then nighty night.’
She waved in Martin’s direction as if trying to swat away a bothersome fly.
‘I fear you’ve got me mixed up with someone else,’ he said, putting down his duffle bag.
Gerlinde raised her eyebrows in bewilderment.
‘Aren’t you the man with the loo paper?’ she asked, astonished.
Martin, who’d gradually realised what organic waste bin, brownies, sandpaper and White House meant, wondered how he could have been so foolish as to come here. What madness had induced him to rub salt into those wounds of his that would never heal? It must have been the hope of finally bringing closure to the tragedy. And hope, that treacherous serpent, had lead him down a blind alley, at the end of which a grandmother in bed was waiting for him.
Martin followed Gerlinde’s puzzled look to her butler.
‘Who the devil is this, Gregor?’
Gregor, who’d sat at the bureau in front of a typewriter which would have drawn in the crowds to the Berlin Museum of Technology, peered cluelessly over the top of a sheet of paper he’d inserted. ‘I regret to say I’m at as much of a loss as—’
‘Who are you?’ Gerlinde interrupted the genteel stammering.
‘My name is Martin Schwartz, we spoke yesterday on the phone.’
She hit her forehead with a loud slap of the hand.
‘Oh, yes, of course, goodness me!’
Gerlinde pushed a pile of papers to one side and threw back the duvet, beneath which she’d been lying in her snow-white trainers.
‘I’m delighted you’ve come. I know how difficult it must be for you…’
She swung her legs over the side of the bed. Gerlinde was wearing a pink tracksuit she could have fitted into twice.
‘… seeing as how it was here on the Sultan that your wife and son—’
‘Excuse my impatience,’ Martin interrupted. He had neither the time nor energy for pleasantries. He wasn’t even bothered by the presence of the butler. ‘You said on the phone you had proof that my wife didn’t jump to her death of her own accord.’
Gerlinde nodded, not in the least annoyed that he’d interrupted her. Pulling herself to her feet with the assistance of a wheelchair parked beside her bed, she yanked open the drawer of her bedside table.
‘Not just that, young man, not just that.’
She cast him a conspiratorial look, before adding, ‘I may even have proof that your family is still alive.’
As she uttered these words she tossed Martin a small, tatty teddy bear, which once upon a time had been white, but whose coat had now taken on the hue of dirty sand.
A hand opened in Martin’s stomach and a long finger tickled his oesophagus from within. He felt sick. He wouldn’t be getting off this ship again so quickly.
The old toy, reeking of sweat and oil, was missing an eye and its right paw, but the initials were still in the same place.
T.S.
Exactly where some years ago Nadja had sewn them with the machine, just before Timmy had gone on his first school trip to the field centre.
5
The same time, deck 5, cabin 5326
Loss. Grief. Fear.
Just as often as her path had been lined with trapdoors over the past few years, Julia Stiller had hoped that by now she was well trained in avoiding the dark entrances to the cellar that life held open for her. Or that next time she wouldn’t fall into them so deeply. Only so far that, with her own strength, she could haul herself up again from the edges of her psychological chute.
But far from it.
This time it was a telephone call that had scared her to death, proving that you could never prepare yourself for the guillotine of destiny. It had descended just at the moment when she finally felt happy again after a long, long time, here in the port of Southampton aboard the Sultan of the Seas.
It had now been three joyless years since her husband had been unfaithful, her group of friends had broken up, and her daughter had blamed her for the fact that they no longer lived in the villa in Köpenick, but in a two-room apartment in Hermesdorf. Small and cramped, but still so expensive that she had to work every night shift she could get as a nurse in the premature baby unit at the clinic, so as to make ends meet somehow.
Even her parents told her she’d overreacted. As if she’d deliberately been looking in the recycling for the bill – two plane tickets, but just one double room. To Capri, though Max had told her something about a training course in Dresden. One ticket was in his name, the other in t
hat of his assistant. The one with the cheap hair extensions and boobs laced up ridiculously high. Julia hadn’t thought twice about it. She’d gone straight into the basement, grabbed the full laundry basket, driven it to Max’s office, where he worked as a lawyer, and tipped out the washing onto his dumbfounded lover’s desk with the words, ‘If you’re screwing my husband you can wash his dirty underwear too.’
That had felt good. For about twenty seconds.
‘Where are you?’ she heard Tom Schiwy ask, and was already annoyed that she’d answered the phone in the first place. She’d made a pact with her daughter to switch off their mobiles at the start of the holiday, but in the excitement of the trip she must have forgotten. And now Julia had one of the indiscretions of her life as a single woman in her ear.
Albeit one of the more pleasant ones.
‘I told you what we were doing for the half-term holidays,’ she replied, smiling to Lisa who was just going into her own cabin through the connecting door.
‘I’m just going to have a quick look around the ship,’ her fifteen-year-old daughter whispered. Julia nodded.
To Tom she said, ‘We’ve just come on board.’
‘Oh, shit!’
Her daughter’s liaison teacher sounded unusually agitated, almost worried.
‘What’s wrong?’ Julia asked, surprised, as she fell back onto the unbelievably comfortable box-spring bed that occupied almost the entire cabin.
Why are you calling? Didn’t we agree that we’d only contact each other in an emergency?
‘We have to see each other. Immediately!’
‘Yeah, sure.’ Julia tapped her head. She wasn’t going to leave the Sultan of the Seas all of a sudden, not for any man in the world. Lisa exhibited the full range of problems you could develop during puberty. She refused meals together, kept getting thinner, she’d had her nose pierced, undermined her position as top of the class with bad marks, and now only hung around with friends who dressed in the same vampire-like way that she did. Since her fifteenth birthday she had been cultivating a Goth phase, whereby only black, second-hand clothes were permitted. They should be as ripped as possible and so full of holes that even moths would starve feeding off them. It must be an unwritten rule of her clique that you couldn’t laugh or ever give your mother a kiss. A rule that, ten minutes ago, Lisa had broken for the first time in weeks.
Passenger 23 Page 3