‘Your family had cabin 8002, which is almost outside the range of the hull camera, right at the other end.’
The captain sounded chesty, a consequence of the bulging plaster across his nose, which restricted his breathing. Dr Beck had attended to him. Martin didn’t know whether he’d admitted to his fiancée the true cause of his injuries or if he’d told her a white lie. He didn’t much care either.
‘It’s a miracle you can see anything at all,’ Bonhoeffer said, and he was right.
That first puff of grey had been illuminated for no more than a split second by the ship’s lights. Before the body hit the water it had already disintegrated into the darkness.
My son disintegrated!
‘Do you want to watch it to the end?’ the captain asked, waving the remote control in his hand.
Yes. Absolutely. But before that, Martin wanted to know something else. He pointed at the timecode at the bottom of the screen, which was flickering in the freeze-frame.
‘When did Nadja and Timmy last enter their cabin that day?’
Bonhoeffer sighed. ‘Please don’t lay into me again, but back then our access control data was routinely wiped at midnight. That’s our system for recording the use of electronic key cards. Five years ago we were only allowed to store the data for twenty-four hours. Things are different today.’
‘So you don’t know how often they went in and out that day?’
‘All we know is that they skipped dinner.’
‘Okay.’ As Martin opened his mouth it felt as if his heart were beating louder. ‘Then please continue the video.’
To the end.
Bonhoeffer pressed a button on his remote control and the gloomy images resumed moving. The timecode at the bottom of the screen counted up in seconds until it happened again at 085732BZ: the second puff of grey fell.
Wait.
‘Stop there!’ Martin shouted frantically.
The words shot from his mouth before the realisation had quite dawned on him.
‘The cloud,’ he exclaimed, stepping closer to the screen and touching with a couple of fingers the outline of the shadow now hanging in the air about halfway down the ship. Gravity suspended by a simple press of a button on the remote control.
‘What?’ Bonhoeffer asked. From the lilt in the captain’s voice, Martin could tell he knew exactly what he’d noticed. He’d seen it immediately. Any fool could see it at first glance. It was hardly surprising that this film must never be made public.
‘It’s too small.’
‘Small?’
‘Yes. The first cloud was larger.’
And that was impossible. Impossible if Nadja had first doped Timmy and thrown him overboard. Logically she could only have jumped after him. Which means the first shadow would have to be smaller than the second.
But it was the other way around!
Furious, he turned to the captain.
‘I was right,’ he said, pointing his finger at Bonhoeffer. ‘It was all one big lie. Your cruise line…’ he said, taking a step closer to the captain, whose eyes flickered, ‘claimed it was suicide. You stigmatised her as a child murderer, just to…’
Yes, why in fact?
The obvious answer, which he could provide himself, drained Martin of any energy to continue his outburst.
Timmy and Nadja. Two grey clouds which had fallen overboard one shortly after another. There was no doubting this fact.
All that the sequence of their jumps proved was that someone else was responsible for their deaths.
Someone who’d stolen Nadja’s suitcase, gathered Timmy’s teddy as a trophy and passed it on to Anouk like a baton.
Someone who was probably still on the ship.
Someone who – if they’d left Anouk alive for so long – was probably still holding her mother prisoner too. He didn’t know anything about this person’s motives, nor who they were.
All he knew was that he’d find them.
He was dead certain about that.
26
Naomi
The computer had been there from the beginning.
Small, silver, angular. A laptop with a chunky battery and an American keyboard.
The glow of the screen was the first thing Naomi Lamar had seen when she awoke from her unconsciousness eight weeks ago.
‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’ it said in smallish black letters on a white background. Naomi had read the question and collapsed inside the well, sobbing hysterically.
She’d named her prison the well because it had rounded walls that stank of mud, faeces, slime and filthy water. Not overpowering, but pervasive. The pong lingered in the rough metal walls like cigarette fumes in the wallpaper of a smoker’s apartment.
She’d never escape from here without outside help.
She’d realised this from the second she’d first opened her eyes and glimpsed her surroundings.
Naomi looked at the bare walls, tatty and scratched, as if legions of people before her had tried to get a hold with their fingernails, in a futile attempt to climb up.
For up seemed to be the only way out in a round room with no doors and a concrete floor with a fine crack. A gap not even big enough to stick your little finger into. An opportunity for a crowbar, if one had been to hand. Naomi was wearing nothing but tattered pyjamas. Fortunately it wasn’t so cold in her dungeon; she suspected that some generators or other technical devices were warming her prison with their sticky, radiated heat. She slept on a mat that took up almost the entire room. Apart from this there was a plastic bag and a grey bucket, which was lowered every couple of days on a thin rope, smeared with Vaseline to prevent Naomi from getting any ideas about trying to climb it.
Oh, yes, she also had the computer.
At the start of her martyrdom – eight weeks ago, if the date on the screen was to be believed – she hadn’t tied the bucket to the rope properly and her faeces came pouring out on top of her. Most of it had trickled away through the crack. But not all.
The bucket was also used to supply her with food: bottles of water, chocolate bars and microwave meals she had to eat cold.
Two months.
Without a shower. Without any music.
And without any light, save for the weak glow of the screen, which wasn’t sufficient to tell where the plastic bucket disappeared to nor who it was – from whatever height – who lowered it to her. Besides the water, food and tissues, which she used as sanitary towels during her period, there would regularly be a new battery in the bucket. Naomi didn’t use much energy.
The only software on the computer was a cheap word-processing programme with no saved documents. Obviously there was no internet connection. And naturally Naomi wasn’t able to change the system preferences. Not even the brightness of the monitor, on which this single question flashed continually: ‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’
For the first few days of her solitary confinement, sick with worry about Anouk, she had actually thought about her transgressions. About one which was serious enough to justify the horrific punishment she’d been suffering ever since she’d run out of her cabin that night in her pyjamas to look for her daughter. Anouk had left her a note at the foot of her bed.
I’m sorry, Mama.
There was nothing else on the piece of white paper, hastily scribbled without any explanation. No sign-off. Just: I’m sorry, Mama. In conjunction with the fact that it was half past two in the morning and Anouk was no longer sleeping beside her, there couldn’t be a more distressing message for a mother.
Naomi wouldn’t have discovered the note until the following morning if she hadn’t been wrenched from her sleep by the turbulent sea. In the well, too, she clearly felt it when the waves were rough, which is why she knew she was still on the ship, rather than having been transferred to a container somewhere.
Naomi couldn’t understand what was happening to her. How she’d got here. Or why.
After the note at the end of her bed, the
last thing she remembered of her life was an open door in her corridor on deck 9, diagonally across from her own cabin. She’d thought she could hear Anouk crying. She’d knocked and called her daughter’s name. Poked her head through the door.
After that… blackness.
From that point on her memory was as dim as the hole she now found herself in.
‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’
She had no intention of giving the spider an answer. In her imagination it wasn’t a human being up there at the edge of the well, but a fat, hairy tarantula operating the bucket.
‘Where’s my daughter?’ she’d typed into the computer, replying with her own question. Naomi had shut the laptop and put it inside the plastic bag (she’d soon learned why the bag was there – the bucket wasn’t always cleaned) and tied it to the rope.
The answer came half an hour later:
‘She’s alive – safe and well.’
Naomi demanded proof. A picture, a voice message, anything. But the spider refused to grant that wish, upon which Naomi sent the notebook back up with the words: ‘Fuck you’.
As punishment she had to go twenty-four hours without water. It was only when, crazy with thirst, she started drinking her own urine that a new bottle was lowered. Since then she’d never dared insult the spider again.
This was another way in which the bucket system worked brilliantly: to discipline her. Punish her.
The second, more gruesome punishment, as a consequence of which she would probably perish, wasn’t imposed until much later. Because of her first confession.
‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’
She hadn’t answered the spider for seven weeks. With her intelligence – she did, after all, teach biology at an elite university – she’d compiled hypotheses, evaluated her options, analysed opportunities. Rather than blindly giving an answer.
Not me. No.
Naomi rocked her head forwards and back, and scratched her neck. Movements she was already making unconsciously.
Her hair was gradually falling out; it stuck to her fingers when she ran them over her head. She was pleased there wasn’t a mirror in the well. It also spared her the sight of the worms that were crawling beneath her skin.
Fuck, I had to eat that rice.
Nine days ago. She would have starved otherwise.
For a whole week beforehand the bucket had come down with only empty bowls. Each time with the same command, written in felt-tip: Answer the question!
But she didn’t want to. She couldn’t.
‘What will happen to me if I confess?’ she’d dared ask the spider.
The answer came the following day with the computer, directly beneath her question.
‘What will happen to me if I confess?’
‘You’ll be allowed to die.’
It was several hours before she’d stopped crying.
She was as convinced that the spider was lying to her about Anouk as she was about the truth of that statement.
‘You’ll be allowed to die.’
For a while she’d pondered whether there was any hope that she might escape the solitary confinement of this stinking prison, but then she’d resigned herself to her fate and made her confession to the computer, and thus the spider:
‘I killed my best friend.’
27
Hell’s Kitchen
One step forwards. Two steps back.
Working with Anouk was similar to his own life.
Her condition had improved slightly. And substantially worsened at the same time.
On the one hand it was a good sign that she recoiled in fear when he entered her room, as Martin could see that, for the time being at least, she was reacting to changes in her immediate environment.
A modicum of progress, possibly a result of the television, which was now showing Tom and Jerry haring around the screen.
On the other hand – and this was the bad news – she was in the process of slipping back into behaviour patterns of early childhood. She sat in almost exactly the same cross-legged position on the bed, sucking her right thumb noisily. And scratching herself with the other hand.
Martin could see that her fingernails had already dug deep furrows in her right forearm, and his heart sank. If she didn’t stop this soon it would start bleeding… and then she’d have to be strapped.
He didn’t want do think of the consequences this would have for her already badly damaged psyche, and he made a mental note to ask Dr Beck for gloves or mittens, even if Anouk were to take these off again the moment she was alone.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you yet again,’ Martin said, placing a brown paper bag at the end of her bed.
Anouk leaned back slightly; she was breathing faster. A sign that he must not get any closer. All the same, she didn’t turn away from Martin or stare right through him. Her eyes were fixed on the bag.
As on his first visit he was now seized by an almost tangible feeling of melancholy, and he thought of all the nice things an eleven-year-old girl ought to be doing on a cruise ship.
Or a ten-year-old boy.
He was pricked by doubts about his faith, which in spite of everything he’d never abandoned altogether. He was convinced that there was more than just a long, dreamless sleep awaiting him after death. But he could only hope that he’d be spared a meeting with his maker. Otherwise he wouldn’t be able to restrict himself to just a friendly chinwag with the being responsible for manning the ticket office of life, issuing innocent children with one-way fares to the torture chamber of sexually disturbed psychopaths.
‘I’ve brought you something,’ Martin said softly, taking the teddy from the bag. A faint sign of recognition flashed in Anouk’s eyes. As if she were worried he might pack it away again, she hastily grabbed the filthy cuddly toy from his hands and buried her face in it.
Martin watched her in silence, noting the red blotches spreading across her neck and wondering whether he was doing the right thing.
It was possible that Yegor and Bonhoeffer were just bluffing and the girl wouldn’t be in any danger at all if he notified the authorities and thus the whole world about this unbelievable case. But it was a huge risk. For there were indications that the captain was right and he already wore a stamp on his forehead that said ‘scapegoat’. In all likelihood the truth was somewhere in between. The only thing for sure was that the moment he raised the alarm he wouldn’t have any further opportunity to speak personally to the girl, or at least attempt to. And thus he was torn between the desire to do the right thing and reveal the cover-up, and the hope that through Anouk he might learn something about the fate of his own family.
Churned up by these unsettling thoughts, he’d decided to pay her a second visit, this time alone, without the doctor.
‘I’ve got something else for you,’ Martin said, taking from the bag a cardboard box wrapped in transparent film.
‘It’s a toy computer,’ he explained, having removed a pink plastic device from its packaging. He’d picked it up in the ship’s toyshop on deck 3.
The rectangular thing looked like a tablet from the technological Stone Age, manufactured clumsily and cheaply, but it didn’t have any sharp edges and Anouk wouldn’t be able to do herself much harm with the blunt stylus stuck to its side.
Martin turned it on, checked that the batteries were working, and put it beside Anouk on the bed.
Then he took a step back and slipped his hand into his jeans pocket. With a single press of a button he activated the record function of his smartphone.
‘When I came to see you a couple of hours ago with Dr Beck you mentioned a name to me, Anouk. Can you remember what that was?’
The girl stopped sucking her thumb and, without letting go of the teddy, picked up the drawing computer. She placed it on her knee. Then she looked up.
‘Do you have any idea where you are at the moment?’ Martin asked. Anouk frowned in response. She looked tense, but not in pain. Like a schoolgirl
given a difficult mental arithmetic problem she can’t solve.
Martin decided to try some simpler questions.
‘How old are you?’
His question was accompanied by a piercing beep, followed by six more and concluded with a final, drawn-out toot. The noise, muffled by several doors, seemed to be coming from the corridor leading to Hell’s Kitchen. Suspecting that it was an internal alarm for staff, Martin ignored it.
Anouk looked as if she hadn’t heard the noise at all.
Her lips were moving like Timmy’s had when he had to learn something by heart. But they didn’t form any words, not even a sound. Instead she lifted her nightshirt to scratch her tummy above the waistband of her tights.
Martin saw a number of circular burn scars, on either side of her belly button, which looked as if cigarettes had been stubbed out on her.
‘My God, who did that to you?’ he asked, unable to conceal the revulsion in his voice. He turned away so that Anouk didn’t relate the fury in his face to herself. When he’d composed himself again and was about to resume his questions, he couldn’t speak.
That can’t be true!
Anouk had put the teddy down beside her and written a single word on the drawing computer:
Martin
His name. In clear letters. Right across the touchscreen. Anouk still had the stylus in her hand.
She can’t mean me, that’s impossible.
Martin forced a smile and counted down from ten until his heart rate was sufficiently normal for him to ask calmly, ‘But you know I’m not a bad man, don’t you?’
I’d never hurt you.
It must be a silly coincidence, he thought.
He hoped.
Martin was a common name, in the US too. It wasn’t unfeasible that the abuser might also coincidentally be called it.
Or called himself Martin. Or wore a shirt from the Caribbean island of St Martin…
Anything was possible.
But was it likely?
Anouk turned her head to the side. She looked around as if she were taking in her surroundings for the first time. Then she grabbed the stylus again and skilfully drew the outline of a large cruise ship. Martin peered through the portholes out at the water, which looked much darker than two hours ago. He had another stab at a direct question: ‘Can you tell me the name of the person you’ve been with all this time?’
Passenger 23 Page 12