When the next university vacation came around I returned to the trade fair hotel. In skimpy clothes and sexy make-up. I sat at the bar. My husband never found out how I financed my studies.
My expensive handbags.
The trips to Europe.
I know that what I did isn’t just bad, it’s sick too. Because although I reached the point where I had more money than I could spend, I didn’t stop even after we got married.
The spider had taken its time to comment on her confession. More than ten hours, according to the clock on the notebook.
In the meantime, while she had waited for the bucket, squatting on the cold floor of the well, Naomi had almost gone mad.
Her arms, which until a few days ago she’d feared were infected with tapeworm, were no longer itching, nor her throat, beneath the skin of which the parasite had wriggled so vigorously, especially at night, when she kept being woken up.
Although the burning and throbbing had gone, she did feel a strong pressure behind her left eye and it was perfectly plain what that meant.
How do you scratch behind your eyeball?
Naomi wished she had stronger fingernails that didn’t keep breaking. Ideally as long and pointed as a knife, then she’d be able to put an end to all this at once.
Without the horrific question-and-answer game.
While she’d been waiting for the answer the engines had stopped. Abruptly. Just like that. Were they in a port? But if so, why was she being rocked from side to side?
After a very, very long time the gap above her head finally opened and from the darkness the bucket with the notebook was lowered down to her. Together with the punishment, for the spider clearly wasn’t satisfied with her answer.
‘Sex for money? A really dirty secret, Professor.’ These were the words typed directly below her last entry. ‘But not what I wanted to hear.’ And then: ‘Think about it again. I know you can. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’
While Naomi read the comment about her confession a small dot moved on the screen. Then another. And another.
With a scream she recoiled from the computer, but the dots had already started to spread out over her arm and wouldn’t readily be removed from her skin, filthy clothes or hair.
Cimex lectularius.
‘Who are you?’ she howled in disgust, while trying in desperation to hit and shake the bedbugs away, even though as a biologist she knew how ridiculous that was. The bloodsuckers could survive forty days without food and in the most intense cold. The well would have to be heated to fifty-five degrees for three days. Even after that you couldn’t be certain that one of the critters wouldn’t survive on her body.
Screaming, she started scratching herself again.
‘Why are you doing this to me?’ she typed into the notebook and sent the bucket up again. ‘WHO ARE YOU???’
This time the answer came back with surprising rapidity. Just a few minutes later Naomi was able to open the notebook again. In the bluish, fluorescent light of the screen she read:
The truth is, you’ve no right to ask me questions. But as my answer will put you on the right track and bring all of this to a swifter conclusion, I won’t be so petty. You won’t find out my name. But if I were a character from a fairy tale, my story would begin like this: ‘Once upon a time there was a beautiful little bundle of joy. Although he had no brothers or sisters, he did have a mother who loved him more than anything else in the world. And a strict father who always gave him funny looks when they were alone together.’ Well, are you bored yet? Don’t worry, there is a point to my story, which I bet you haven’t been expecting…
47
Martin woke with a persistent ringing in his ears, which sounded as if a telephone had come off the hook nearby. To begin with he didn’t know where he was. The bed he was lying on, the smell of his pillow, the entire room was unfamiliar, even though he could barely make out anything of his surroundings. It was dark. The little light there was in the room was seeping through the narrow slit where the two curtains met.
As he sat up the first memories washed back into his consciousness, bringing with them a touch of queasiness.
Timmy. Anouk. The Sultan.
Rolling onto his side he felt blindly for the bedside light, but then waited for a while before switching it on for fear that the light might burn his retina.
With each movement he made, not only did his head feel as if his brain had the consistency of a fried egg, but his entire body was jammed in a corset of pain. And yet he seemed to recall that it had been even worse yesterday, when he
… was talking to that woman. The mother, yes.
Slowly everything came back to him.
The attack on the naturist deck, his fall into the pool, Gerlinde’s Bermuda Deck theory, Julia, her daughter Lisa, the victim of cyberbullying who’d apparently thrown herself overboard because of a sex video… him fainting.
His boss had warned him. Christ, they’d all advised him against injecting antibodies.
Or coming aboard this ship.
Martin plucked up courage to turn on the light. The flash that shook through him wasn’t as unpleasant as he’d feared.
As he felt for his mobile he asked himself two questions. First, how had he got into his suite? And second, how could the cordless telephone be sitting properly in the charger, inactive and with a dark display, when he could hear the dialling tone loud and clear?
He stuck fingers into both his ears and the sound didn’t get any quieter.
Great. This is what it must feel like when you begin the day as an alcoholic.
Pounding skull, phantom noises, gaps in the memory and a bladder as full as a train after a local derby.
He grabbed the telephone, stood up and shuffled to the bathroom. It felt like it took him ten minutes to get there, and indeed he had to sit down on the bed once for a rest, otherwise he’d have collapsed halfway.
He left the bathroom light off as he wanted to spare himself the sight of his face in the mirror. He also found the loo in the dark.
He lifted the lid, pulled down his boxer shorts (who undressed me?), and dialled Diesel’s mobile number as he sat down. It took an age for him to answer.
‘Hello?’
‘It’s me.’
‘Do I know you? I mean, you could easily be Martin Schwartz if you didn’t sound so fucking awful.’
‘What’s the time?’
‘You’re calling me because you want to know the time? Jesus, you must be bored.’ Diesel laughed and said, ‘At the next stroke it will be two-oh-eight p.m. precisely.’ Then he burped.
Two p.m.! Taking into account the time difference it was now noon on the Atlantic. He’d slept for at least ten hours.
‘But I’m glad you’ve rung. Have you checked your emails?’
‘No.’
‘You ought to. I’ve been through the staff and passenger lists your buddy Bonhoeffer gave you.’
Martin started to relieve himself while Diesel went on talking.
‘We’ve got almost six hundred matches for guests and employees who were on board both the day that Nadja and Timmy vanished, as well as five years later when Anouk and her mother were officially declared missing.’
‘How many of those are potential rapists?’
‘For a start, 338 employees. From the carpenter and the cook to the captain, all of them are on there. That’s assuming the list is complete. And here we have the biggest problem.’
‘Are you saying that Bonhoeffer didn’t give me the complete documents?’ he asked.
‘I’m saying he can’t have given you any complete documents. To save money most cruise lines engage foreign low-wage firms as subcontractors. And for tax reasons these subcontractors sometimes invent names or omit them, or even put down too many to get extra money. It’s a hopeless mess.’
Martin thought hard. This meant the staff and passenger lists were a dead end. ‘What about passengers?’ he asked all the same. ‘Do we have any repeat g
uests?’
‘Yes, of course. People who go on cruises are repeat offenders. Although the selection here is smaller. If you filter the eighty-seven passengers who were on board both five years ago and two months ago, removing all lone women travellers and pensioners on their last legs, you’re left with thirteen men as possible rapists. And now, hold on tight.’
Diesel paused.
‘What?’
‘One of them is called Peter Pax.’
My cover name?
‘That’s impossible,’ Martin rasped.
‘Well, what do you want me to say, buddy?’ Martin could practically hear Diesel shrug.
‘If you’d got your seahorse badge while at primary school, I’d advise you now to swim back home. I think someone’s trying to pin something on you.’
Yes, and I know who it is.
Martin took hold of the loo paper. ‘His name begins with Yegor and ends with Kalinin.’
‘The ship owner?’
‘The captain might be in on it too, but I’m not so sure, he’s such a weed. Can you find out what cabin this Pax is supposed to have been in?’
Unlike with normal hotels, where it was all down to the benevolence of the receptionist whether you got a sticky cell next to the underground car park or a light-filled sanctuary, when booking cruises you could usually choose your own cabin number.
‘Yes, I’ve got it somewhere. Hang on a mo, I’ll check.’
Martin stood up and flushed.
‘Oh, no, please. Please don’t tell me that while talking to me you’ve been doing what it sounds like,’ Diesel begged in disgust.
Martin didn’t respond to this, but asked him to check another person.
‘Who?’
‘Lisa Stiller, fifteen years old, from Berlin. Her mother’s called Julia and both are on the current passenger list. Please find out who paid for the cruise and where it was booked. And have a look for a video on’ – he had to rack his brains until he remembered the name of the portal that Bonhoeffer had told him about yesterday – ‘on isharerumours or something similar. It’s tagged with the name Lisa Stiller.’
‘What’s the point of that?’
‘Lisa’s fifteen years old and has been missing since yesterday. This video is supposedly the reason for her suicide.’
Diesel sighed. ‘Another child? Bloody hell, what’s going on?’
‘It’s all connected. For example, I saw Lisa yesterday when I was on the way to Anouk on’ – Martin paused – ‘on the lower deck where actually she shouldn’t…’ he muttered, stopping mid-sentence.
What is that?
‘Hello? Hey there? Have you jumped too now?’ he heard Diesel call out.
‘Shut up for a moment.’
The dialling tone inside his head had quietened down, but now there was another noise vexing him. A whole bundle of noises! They must have been there the whole time; it’s just that he’d only become aware of them now.
Placing his hand on the basin, Martin could feel the vibrations. He teetered out of the bathroom, oriented himself by the slit of light in the curtains, went over to it and then opened the curtains as well as the door to his terrace. Cold, clear air poured into the cabin.
What he saw corresponded with the creaking, scraping, droning, vibrating and humming he heard around him.
And with the rocking of the ship.
‘We’re moving,’ he said, looking in disbelief at the foam-crested mountains of waves before him. The misty grey horizon had shunted so close to the ship that you could stretch your arm out to it.
‘Obviously you’re moving. I mean, it is a cruise, isn’t it?’ Diesel said, who couldn’t know that the captain had stopped the Sultan yesterday night for a man-overboard manoeuvre. But now the engines were running again, which could mean one of two things. Either they’d found Lisa. Or given up altogether.
‘Found you!’ Diesel exclaimed, and for a fraction of a second Martin thought he was actually talking about the girl, but of course he meant Peter Pax’s cabin number. ‘He had the same one on both trips,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you ought to pay 2186 a visit.’
48
Nautical time: 12.33
50°27’ N, 17°59’ W
Speed: 23.4 knots, wind: 30 knots
Sea swell: 10 feet
Distance from Southampton: 630 nautical miles
‘Number 2186?’
The captain was massaging the back of his neck. The plaster on his nose was smaller and the rings around his eyes darker. If exhaustion could be traded on the stock market, Bonhoeffer would be one of the wealthiest men on the planet. His eyes had shrunk to the size of a five-cent coin and they didn’t seem to be helping much in the search for the right key card.
‘2186,’ Martin confirmed, surprised that they were looking for a cabin with this number on deck 3. They were outside a greyish-ginger door with no number in a side corridor that branched off from the entrance to the atrium. Bonhoeffer was now making his third attempt to slide a key card through the reader. He was holding a selection, the size of bank cards in a variety of colours, all of which had a hole in the upper right-hand corner and were threaded on a fine metal chain.
‘Don’t you have something like a skeleton key?’ Martin asked.
‘Not for the nest.’
‘The nest?’
‘As you can see, this isn’t a passenger cabin any more,’ Bonhoeffer said, his eyes on the missing number on the door. If you stood up close you could see the residue of glue with which it had originally been stuck.
‘So what is it?’ Martin asked.
‘A relic. Something like the Sultan’s appendix. After all, this lady is eight years old now and no longer the youngest in the industry. When she was launched, the expectation was that the demand for inner cabins would rise, but that was a mistake. Most people want a suite, or at least a cabin with a balcony. At a pinch they’ll take something overlooking the atrium. And nobody wants to be just above the waterline. That’s why six years ago we converted the ten lowest inner cabins on deck 3 into storerooms and offices.’
‘And a nest?’ Martin asked. Bonhoeffer nodded.
‘The number’s an in-joke, a play on numbers. When 2 become 1 and want a private d8, they can come here to have 6.’
He couldn’t help yawning and didn’t bother to put his hand in front of his mouth.
‘It’s forbidden for employees to have sex in their own cabins, and it’s not very practical either because most have to share with a colleague. But the crew have needs, especially on trips around the world. Of course the nest doesn’t exist officially, but we turn a blind eye when during their months at sea employees use this as a refuge for their tête-à-têtes, so long as they’re discreet about it.’
Bonhoeffer yawned again, a bigger one this time.
‘You ought to lie down. Or will your bad conscience prevent you from sleeping?’ Martin asked sarcastically.
Bonhoeffer had told him over the phone what had happened in the night. After his seizure-like collapse, the captain got Elena’s assistant doctor to bring him back to his room, where he’d slept right through an eight-hour search operation that, ‘as expected’, to use Bonhoeffer’s words, had failed to bring any results.
When, following the security call, the coastal station began to coordinate measures and a Royal Navy ship from the British fleet, on manoeuvres in the area, had arrived, there was no longer any reason for the Sultan to hang around in the middle of the ocean. Or to incur the wrath of the almost three thousand passengers still alive, who could saddle the owners with compensation demands for unreasonable delay.
Julia Stiller had suffered a nervous breakdown when the main engine started into life again and had been catapulted into a dreamless sleep by a sedative, from which she would awaken at some point in the captain’s cabin. Hundreds of nautical miles from her daughter. She’d actually wanted to change onto the navy vessel, but had been refused entry as an ‘unauthorised person’.
‘I don’t have a bad consci
ence,’ the captain protested. ‘We paused the journey to—’
‘For eight hours?’ Martin interrupted him. ‘Are you saying a child’s life isn’t worth any more than that?’ He laughed cynically.
Bonhoeffer took a deep breath, then exhaled noisily through puckered lips. It sounded like air escaping from a shrivelled balloon. Furious, he said, ‘A farewell letter, cyberbullying as a motive, no traces of violence or any other crime in the cabin, and even though no one could survive out there for an hour without a life vest the search goes on till the following morning. What do you expect?’
‘That for once you succeed in arriving at the destination with all your passengers.’
‘I could just as easily say you ought to have taken better care of your family. Have you ever googled suicide? There are forums where half the world exchanges ideas on the most effective ways of topping yourself. And do you know what’s right up there? Exactly. Cruises. Those twenty-three passengers per year who take a leap into the blue shelf. If every depressive with internet access decides to do train drivers a favour and book a cruise rather than throw themselves on the track, then don’t fucking well blame me!’
Now worked up, he slashed one of the cards at random through the slot and happened to get the right one. There was a click and a green light flashed.
‘I’m not responsible for this insanity,’ he barked, pushing on the handle. The door sprang open and they were immediately met by an unpleasant metallic smell.
‘Nor for this either?’ Martin asked. He pointed at the floor of the cabin.
They both stared speechlessly at the man at their feet, who’d been shot in the head.
49
They bolted the door behind them and Martin ordered the captain not to move or touch a thing.
The body was sitting on the floor, with legs outstretched and back leaning up against an unmade single bed. The head was bent at the neck and the lifeless eyes were staring up at the dusty cabin ceiling. In the overhead light the pillow beneath his head had a wet shimmer.
Passenger 23 Page 19