Tiago saw chair legs, a mattress and a door. He smelled the mucus and bogies pouring from his nose. He had to close his eyes again because he didn’t want to watch himself vomiting.
But before he could throw up the peanuts that he’d most recently eaten, his jaws were forced apart and he tasted a strange metallic tang in his mouth, which wasn’t blood. He’d had so many nosebleeds as a child that he was easily able to tell the difference.
He opened his eyes again. Saw the hate-filled face of the officer above his. And felt the barrel of the revolver between his lips being edged more deeply down his throat.
‘Hmmmmmm,’ Tiago groaned, which was supposed to signify something like, ‘Please wait. I’ve got something you have to take a look at.’ The weapon in his mouth made it impossible to formulate a clear word.
The weapon and the pain.
Tiago feverishly sought a way out, an opportunity to get free, repel the attack, but there was no TV showdown in this killer’s script.
No delay. No conversation in which he could explain his real motive, allowing his saviour to ride to the rescue in time. No respite in which the victim could free himself with cunning.
Finished. All over.
Tiago no longer had an opportunity to show this crazed officer Lisa’s letter and explain to the man why it was so bloody important that the girl’s mother read it. Or the captain.
The killer didn’t laugh, didn’t play the superior savouring his omnipotence, didn’t even make him beg. He yanked the barrel from his mouth, aimed at Tiago’s forehead from no further than twenty centimetres and hissed, ‘You fucking paedo.’
Then he shot.
42
‘Why on earth have we stopped?’
Martin confronted the captain just as he was about to leave his cabin to go up to the bridge.
After he’d finally managed to get rid of his unwelcome visitors (Shahla was visibly pleased to be able to leave, whereas Gerlinde had only wheeled out of his suite under protest) he’d briefly lain on his bed, but quickly realised that he wouldn’t get any peace while the ship wasn’t moving forwards.
Because the generators had been switched off, the stabilisers weren’t working either. Each wave that slapped against the ship’s side sounded twice as loud, and the rolling and pitching of the liner were more pronounced than ever.
‘Maintenance,’ Bonhoeffer said, his hand already on the handle of the door that concealed the narrow private staircase to the bridge.
Martin didn’t believe a word. ‘Maintenance? In the middle of the night?’
Before leaving his cabin he’d thrown on a few clothes he’d bought yesterday in the on-board shop. As he hadn’t intended to stay on the Sultan, he’d boarded only with a change of socks and pants. Now he was wearing a grey, old-style polo shirt with the cruise line’s emblem and a pair of black jeans that he had to turn up as they were much too long. But he hadn’t bought himself another pair of shoes, which is why he was now standing beside the captain barefoot. It was only thanks to his quick reactions that he’d avoided being soaked through again. On the way to see Bonhoeffer he’d almost crashed into a drunk passenger staggering out of the ship’s disco on deck 11, carrying a neon drink that glowed in the dark.
‘I’ve really got my hands full at the moment,’ Bonhoeffer said in an attempt to get rid of him. ‘I have to…’ The captain let his hand slide off the doorknob and made a weary gesture mid-sentence as if all efforts would be in vain. ‘What the hell, I’ve got to make an announcement anyhow; you might as well hear it from me first.’
‘Another Passenger 23?’ Martin speculated.
Bonhoeffer nodded. The deep bags beneath his eyes looked as if they’d been made up. He pinched the bridge of his nose, which now was only covered with a thick plaster. ‘Lisa Stiller, fifteen years old, from Berlin. We’re showing her picture on the on-board television, just in case someone’s seen her. She’s a victim of cyberbullying and she left a farewell note.’
‘When?’ Martin turned his arm to look at the watch on his wrist, and even that movement pulled painfully on his shoulder muscles. On the other hand, his toothache and headache had both gone for the time being.
‘When did she probably go overboard? Mother and daughter had dinner till 21.44, then the two of them retired to their cabins. According to the computer log Lisa last used her key card at 21.59.’
Leaving a window of three hours at most.
In that time the Sultan would have done a good fifty nautical miles.
‘What do the security cameras say?’
‘Nothing.’
Bonhoeffer raised both hands like a boxer trying to fend off a blow to the head. ‘No, it’s not the same as with your family,’ he whispered, even though there was nobody in the vicinity. ‘We have a recording of the girl spraying a camera lens with black paint. That was at 21.52. She must have known the precise location of the camera covering her balcony.’
Bonhoeffer spoke with an animation that went beyond the normal degree of professional sympathy. The captain wanted to turn away again, but Martin held him back.
‘What’s happening now?’ he asked.
‘We’ve stopped the ship and we’re searching the sea from the bridge with floodlights and telescopes. At the same time ten of my men are combing all the public areas and we’re soon going to start with the announcements. I don’t hold out much hope.’ He told Martin that both the door to the corridor and the partition door between Lisa’s and her mother’s cabin had been bolted from the inside, unlike the balcony door that had stood wide open.
‘Mother and daughter were travelling without the father?’
The captain nodded.
A parent travelling alone, a child vanishing.
A pattern was gradually emerging, although Martin couldn’t tell what picture it was forming. Either he was standing too far away from the screen with the answer, or too close to it.
‘Where’s the mother now?’ he asked Bonhoeffer.
‘Julia Stiller’s…’ The captain looked as if he’d just had a flash of inspiration. ‘Good idea,’ he said excitedly and fished a key card from the breast pocket of his shirt. He nodded at the door.
‘She’s waiting in my cabin. Talk to her. She could use a psychologist.’
43
All of a sudden this man was in the room. Tall, shaven head, with a large nose and a face that looked as exhausted as she felt. Julia had just popped to the bathroom to splash a handful of water in her face and she’d screamed at the mirror. When she returned to the sitting room in these ridiculous disposable slippers, which housekeeping always put beside your bed, and a white dressing gown that Daniel had helped her into, the stranger was waiting for her.
‘Who are you?’ Her heart beat faster, and the pressure of the tears welling behind her eyes grew greater. She automatically assumed the worst. That this man with the sad look was a messenger bringing her the news she wouldn’t be able to cope with.
‘My name is Martin Schwartz,’ he said in German with a slight Berlin accent. In normal circumstances she would have asked him which district he came from and whether they might be neighbours.
‘Do you work here? Are you looking for my child? What news have you got? You are looking for Lisa, aren’t you? Can you help me?’
She heard herself babble, without commas or full stops, probably because she wanted to prevent Martin Schwartz from speaking and telling her that they’d found something.
A video of her jumping, an item of clothing in the ocean.
She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her dressing gown and noticed that the exhausted-looking man was wearing neither shoes nor socks. Curiously the sight of this came as some relief; they certainly wouldn’t send a barefooted messenger to announce that her daughter was no longer alive.
Or would they?
‘Who are you?’ she asked again, anxiously.
‘Someone who knows exactly how you’re feeling right now.’
He passed her a tissue.
/> ‘I doubt that,’ she said feebly, with an introverted voice. Fresh tears filled her eyes and she turned to the terrace door, not because she was embarrassed of crying in front of a stranger, but because she couldn’t stand that damn sympathy in his eyes any more. In the reflection of the dark glass she saw his lips move.
‘You feel as if every single one of your thoughts has been dipped in syrup and candied with tiny pieces of broken glass,’ she heard him say. ‘And the more intensely you think of your child, the more these thoughts scour the open wound in your heart. At the same time there are at least two voices screaming inside your head. One is demanding to know why you weren’t there when your daughter needed help, why you failed to see the signs. The other is asking reproachfully what right you think you have to sit around here while the thing that gives your life meaning has vanished into thin air. But this cacophony inside your head together with my voice and everything around you – it sounds muffled and hazy as if you’re listening to it from behind a closed door. And as the worry for your daughter weighs more heavily, as heavy as all the weights in this world put together, plus an extra two thousand kilograms, a ring is circling your vital organs, throttling your lungs, squashing your stomach, thwarting your heart; and all you feel is that you’ll never be able to laugh, dance, live again, no, you’re certain that it will never be good again, and that everything which once mattered, such as a sunrise after a party, the last sentence of a good book, the smell of freshly mown grass just before a summer storm, that none of this will have the slightest meaning any more, which is why you’re already thinking what might be the best way to switch off the broken-glass thoughts and the tinnitus voices in your head should this suspicion ever become terrible certainty. Am I right? Does that in any way reflect your emotional state, Frau Stiller?’
She turned around, captivated by his monologue. And by the truth of his words.
‘How…?’
Seeing his tear-stained face, she didn’t need to formulate her question.
‘You’ve lost someone too,’ she stated.
‘Five years ago,’ he said bluntly, which she could have slapped him for, as he’d just spelled out that the unbearable situation she was in could last for years!
I couldn’t even bear it for a day, she thought, and the next thought that entered her mind was that Martin Schwartz hadn’t been able to bear it either. He was standing before her, talking, breathing, weeping, but no longer living.
She closed her eyes and sobbed. In a film this would have been the moment when she cried on the shoulder of the stranger. In real life it was the moment when the slightest contact would have made her thrash around like a rabid dog.
‘If only we hadn’t got on this ship,’ she groaned.
If only I’d taken Tom’s call five minutes earlier.
‘It’s the perfect place for a suicide. Daniel said that himself.’
‘Daniel? Do you know the captain personally?’ Martin looked at her sceptically.
‘Yes, he’s Lisa’s godfather. He invited her.’
‘Who did I invite?’
They both turned to the door, which must have opened silently. Daniel took a raincoat from the wardrobe in the corridor.
‘You invited Lisa. On this trip.’
The captain shook his head in confusion. ‘What gives you that idea?’
Julia stared at him as if he were an alien. ‘Just stop this now – you gave her the bloody trip as a birthday present.’
‘No, Julia. You’re mistaken.’
‘I’m mistaken? What’s got into you, Daniel? We telephoned on her birthday. I even thanked you.’
In her turmoil she could feel the blood rushing to her cheeks. Daniel was still shaking his head, but he looked thoughtful.
‘For the upgrade, I thought, yes. I moved you up from an inner cabin to two balcony cabins when I saw the booking. But that wasn’t made by me; it was done normally, over the internet. In fact I recall being surprised you hadn’t got in touch earlier.’
‘Does that mean…’
She bit her lower lip.
‘That Lisa lied to you,’ Bonhoeffer said.
‘Worse,’ Martin chipped in from the side. He first looked Daniel in the eye, then at her, before saying. ‘It means your daughter planned all this long ago.’
44
One parent. One child. A third person who pays for the cruise, but isn’t on board themselves.
Just like Naomi and Anouk Lamar.
Just like Nadja and Timmy.
The parallels were becoming increasingly clear.
And even if Martin wasn’t able to make sense of the clues, he knew that it couldn’t be a coincidence.
‘But… where… where, I mean… a trip like this is expensive, where did Lisa get the money from?’ the bewildered mother said, to no one in particular.
‘Was the booking made by credit card, debit card or transfer?’ Martin asked.
‘I’ll have to look,’ Bonhoeffer said, hurriedly checking his watch. Apparently he was expected back at any moment.
‘Lisa doesn’t have a credit card,’ Julia said, before slapping both hands over her mouth.
‘Oh, Christ, the video!’ she gasped.
‘Which video?’ Martin asked.
The captain put his raincoat down on a chest of drawers and came into the sitting room, shaking his head.
‘That’s nonsense, Julia, and you know it.’ He tried to put his arm around her, but she moved away.
‘I don’t know anything any more.’ she screamed at him. ‘Would I recognise my daughter if she were here with me now and not somewhere…’ Her voice cracked.
‘What video are we talking about?’ Martin tried again.
‘It supposedly shows her daughter prostituting herself,’ Bonhoeffer explained. Then, turning to Julia, he added, ‘It’s a nasty fake, like everything on isharerumours. Lisa’s the victim of cyberbullying, not a whore selling her body to pay for a cruise.’
There was a crackling in the ceiling and Martin heard a whisper that grew louder when the captain turned a knob on the cabin wall.
‘… we request you to switch to channel 5. Lisa Stiller was last seen yesterday at dinner in the Georgica Room. We apologise for disturbing you in the middle of the night, but we hope that with your help…’
Bonhoeffer turned down the volume of the cabin speaker again. Having found the remote control on the glass coffee table, Martin switched on the plasma-screen television. Channel 5 was showing a close-up of a portrait taken for a biometric passport. Because you weren’t allowed to smile for these photos, the young, sleep-deprived girl with her chalk-white skin and jet-black hair looked rather grumpy. At the sight of her, Julia Stiller burst into tears. And Martin’s heart did a double beat.
‘I know that girl,’ he said, his gaze fixed on the screen. ‘I saw her yesterday.’
45
‘What?’ Bonhoeffer and the girl’s mother asked as if one person.
‘You know Lisa?’
Martin nodded to Julia. ‘Yes, I’ve seen her. Here on the ship.’
‘Where?’
‘Down below.’
‘What do you mean below?’ Julia shouted.
Below. Deck A. The staff area.
Martin slapped his head. A dull pain was throbbing beneath his right temple once more.
Lisa Stiller had got out of his way in the corridor yesterday morning, when Elena took him to see Anouk for the first time.
‘I’m such an idiot. I ought to have twigged immediately.’ No chambermaid would be allowed to wear a piercing on this conservative ship. She didn’t belong down there.
What the hell was she looking for? And how had she gained entry to that area in the first place?
The pain spread across his forehead to the bridge of his nose. His eyes watered as he tried to figure out how everything fitted together.
Timmy’s the second one to jump, but without his teddy, because Anouk’s got that and she knows my name, and she’s in Hell’s Kitch
en, where I bump into Lisa, whose trip had been paid for by someone else…
He thought of Anouk’s grandfather, of his blog (The sharks will rip out the teeth of that whore who fucked the cancer into my son’s body) and as the pain cut like a welding burner across the back of his head to the neck, he thought of the torch, of how Anouk liked to draw, how she scratched herself. Elena’s face that had blown up into a balloon alternated with the drunk man from the disco and his neon drink… and for a second he had it.
The answer.
The solution.
All of a sudden everything was clear, but then there was a crack in both ears and this time it wasn’t the speaker in the ceiling, but the overflow valve in his head that had shut itself off on its own.
And while the fraught voices around Martin got quieter and quieter, the sun set in his mind’s eye and the world turned black.
46
Naomi
I committed adultery. In the most despicable way possible. I had sex for money.
*
It began with a misunderstanding during my student days. At the time I was still called Naomi McMillan. I was working as an assistant at a trade fair stand in San Francisco marketing automobile accessories to earn a bit of money in the holidays. Us girls were accommodated in a hotel on site, and on the last day of the fair we were in high spirits as we partied at the bar. I got to know a young, good-looking rep from Chicago. We laughed, drank, one thing led to another and the following morning I woke up in his room. He’d already gone on his way, but not without leaving something for me: two hundred dollars in cash.
The man had assumed I was a prostitute.
I remember staring at that money on the bedside table for a solid hour. I was shaking, but not with anger at the guy whose surname I never knew and whose first name is irrelevant. No, I was shaking in disbelief at myself. For instead of feeling thoroughly ashamed or thinking I was cheap, deep down I found myself getting excited at the idea of having surrendered myself to a stranger for money. And what was even worse, I was minded to repeat it.
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