Judging by the amount of blood the exit wound must be far larger than the small hole in the forehead above the right eye.
‘Who is that?’ said Martin, who’d now switched to crime scene mode. Experience had taught him that first impressions were the most important ones. So he scanned the surroundings, paying particular attention to anything out of the ordinary.
Such as an inverted cross on a wall, a shattered mirror below a cupboard or an apartment so tidy that it reveals the criminal’s intention to be as inconspicuous as possible.
The oddities weren’t always apparent; often, clues to the circumstances surrounding the crime, motives, victims and suspects were located subtly. Like the piece of metal on the carpet by the fitted cupboard in this cabin.
Martin bent down to the hairclip. It was small, colourful and cheap. The sort of thing you might see on a doll.
Or a young girl.
‘Good God, that’s…’ Behind him Bonhoeffer was staring at the corpse, his eyes as wide as saucers. Clearly the shock at what they’d found was preventing him from uttering the dead man’s name.
‘Who?’ Martin asked harshly. Bonhoeffer swallowed.
‘His name is Veith Jesper,’ he said, pointing at the man in the blood-soaked uniform. ‘One of my security officers.’
50
‘Will you ever interrupt my work with a piece of good news, Bonnie?’
Yegor briefly put his phone down, threw Ikarus off the bed and got up. In truth he hadn’t been working, but enjoying a snooze after some disappointing sex with his wife. But he’d rather run up and down the promenade deck naked with a flag sicking out of his arse than let his captain in on the fact that he took the occasional siesta.
‘Shot in the head?’ he asked, the mobile back to his ear.
Sleepily, his wife turned over in the bed and farted. Bloody hell, that was even more disgusting than the mess his captain was describing.
On his way to the bathroom, Yegor wondered whether there was any way of sweeping the matter under the carpet, but realised it was doubtful. So he said, ‘Leave everything as it is.’ While only half listening to Bonhoeffer he breathed into his hand and pulled a face.
Half an hour’s siesta and I’ve got breath like an Albanian sewage works.
‘Of course we’re going to continue,’ he interrupted the captain’s nervous torrent of words.
Are there only idiots working for me?
‘We’re almost halfway; what point would there be in turning around now? Don’t touch anything in that room, and notify the authorities.’
Yegor flipped open the loo seat and undid the button fly on his pyjamas. ‘And muster all those PR luvvies on my payroll. The losers can finally work for their money. I don’t want to read reports like “Horror cruise on the Sultan – one dead and one missing” or anything similar.’
Although it would be almost impossible to avoid the headlines, of course. And that was partly his fault, as Yegor knew.
It took a while for the first drops to come. In the past his urethra had burned when he’d been with the wrong sort of women. The feeling he had now reminded him that his check-up was long overdue.
Getting old is a whore, Yegor thought, peering through the open bathroom door into the semi-darkness of the bedroom. His wife’s feet were sticking out from under the duvet. Even from this distance he could see her crushed stiletto toes. Revolting.
Wait. What did this bird-brain of a captain just suggest?
‘Stop? Again?’ In his anger the ship owner found it difficult to avoid peeing on the floor. Ikarus, startled by his master’s outburst, padded into the bathroom with his ears pricked up.
‘Our Chilean moneybags might have put one suicide down to bad luck. He’s a superstitious Catholic. The worst sort of person. If another body turns up, the jerk will see it as a bad omen and put his chequebook away quicker than you can say “prison”. I don’t mind how you do it, just draw the fucking thing out until the contract’s been signed!’
Yegor hung up, had a shake and flushed. From the bedroom he could hear his wife’s drowsy voice, but he couldn’t care less what she was saying.
He was annoyed with himself. He’d intended to stay calm. People who shouted didn’t have a grip on themselves or their lives. But since they’d left Hamburg, no, since the approach into Oslo, when that tongue-tied Anouk suddenly reappeared from nowhere, he’d had one shit-filled profiterole after another hurled at him.
Not bothering to wash his hands, Yegor made his way back to bed. He had to get past Ikarus, who gave him a look of irritation. He bent down to his dog and tickled the terrier’s neck.
‘Yes, I know. It’s Daddy’s own fault. But do you know what, Ikarus? I just can’t bear being blackmailed.’ The dog put its head to one side as if it understood every word. Yegor smiled and poked his wet nose.
‘Veith was a waste of space,’ he whispered so his wife, now awake, couldn’t hear him. ‘I must have given him my special revolver.’ The one that shoots backwards if you turn the lever. Which is precisely what he’d done before handing the weapon to that violence-hungry fool. It was a present from a comrade. Custom made. A joke amongst old friends from the Foreign Legion. Not traceable back to him.
‘Do you understand, Ikarus?’ The dog panted and Yegor took that as a yes.
Yegor turned off the bathroom light – the only one that had been on – and got back into bed. His wife wanted to stroke his arm, but he pushed her hand away.
What a shame that Veith isn’t a Jap, he thought. They commit hara-kiri for all manner of crap. Code of honour and so on.
They might have been able to make it appear as if the security officer couldn’t deal with the shame of having failed to find that suicide brat.
But who’d believe that of a clog-wearer?
Yegor yawned. There was nothing worse than being wrenched from the middle your siesta. He was dog tired. For a while he pondered whether it had been a mistake to let Veith eliminate himself. But the man himself was to blame. What kind of crusade did he have against that… Tiamo… Tigo…?
Yegor couldn’t recall the name. And ultimately he didn’t care. As his eyes gradually closed, he merely wondered where that Argentinian Lothario was now, after probably – almost certainly – staring death in the face not long ago.
51
Daniel hung up, taken aback by the ship owner’s reaction. Kalinin had sounded really tired at first, as if he’d just been woken from sleep, even though it was still broad daylight outside. Then Yegor didn’t seem surprised in the slightest, as if he’d been waiting for the news that one of his officers had been shot dead. It was only during his angry outburst at the end of their conversation that he’d sounded normal again.
‘Who knows about this love nest here?’ Schwartz asked, shaking a locked fitted cupboard beside the bed by the handle. The presence of a corpse and the accompanying stench seemed to bother the investigator far less than it did the captain.
Daniel looked at the bolted cabin door. He just wanted to get away from this stinking, windowless hole as quickly as possible.
‘Almost two thousand people,’ he replied. ‘All the employees plus a handful of passengers who engage in a little holiday flirt with a member of staff.’
And don’t want to play out their adventure in their own cabin because there’s usually a cuckolded partner waiting for them there.
‘And do you have an idea of who uses this nest.’ There was a crack and Martin had the metal handle in his hand.
Bonhoeffer massaged his stiff neck. ‘No. As I said, this room doesn’t exist officially. Which means you can’t reserve the nest either. There’s no visitor rota or anything like that.’
‘But someone must have coordinated the allocation and handover of the key?’
‘Yes, and I’ll give you three guesses who the management suspect.’ Without looking at it, Bonhoeffer pointed to the corpse at their feet. The ship pitched heavily and he felt terribly sick. His stomach contracted like a bagpipe, s
queezing its acidic contents back up his gullet.
He suggested they continue their conversation elsewhere, but the detective was using the metal handle as a lever to force open the cupboard.
There was a crack and the plywood door was left hanging from one hinge. Soon afterwards it had been ripped off altogether.
So much for Yegor’s order to leave everything as it was.
‘Well, well, what do we have here?’ Schwartz muttered as he took a little plastic case from the cupboard.
It was slightly larger than a piece of hand luggage, with lots of stickers on the front and back, some badly effaced. Most of them were flags, symbols or maps of places this case had probably journeyed to. The colour of the case (pink) and the palm-sized sticker of a boyband on one of the side pockets suggested that its owner was young and female.
‘Wouldn’t you rather we looked at this in my cabin?’ Daniel said, barely able to hold back whatever it was trying to find its way out of his stomach. But Schwartz ignored him. With rapid hand movements he opened the zip and flapped the lid to one side.
‘Anouk,’ he said. Daniel wasn’t sure whether this was a hunch or a certainty. He saw typical girls’ clothes, tidily packed, filling every centimetre of the case. Skirts, underwear, tights and – right on top of the pile – a drawing pad and pencil case.
But that’s absurd, he thought.
‘Anouk can’t have been hiding here the whole time.’
Schwartz shook his bald head. ‘I can’t imagine it either. Unless the staff haven’t used this love nest for a couple of months.’
My arse.
It was only three weeks ago that Daniel’s first officer had been bragging about how he’d had it off with a cook here. He himself had never had any truck with the nest, but he’d certainly have got wind of the uproar there’d have been if cabin 2186 had been out of action for any length of time.
‘What’s that?’ Daniel asked, pointing at the back of the case lid. He might have been mistaken, but in the inside netting wasn’t that a…
‘A torch,’ Schwartz said, pulling it out.
So it was.
The thing was narrow, with a light-blue shiny metallic casing. And it looked exactly the same as the one they’d found on Anouk.
Schwartz turned the switch at the end of the handle and the weak beam on this torch was hard to see with the naked eye too.
‘A dim light with empty batteries?’ Daniel asked. His bafflement at least mitigated the feeling of sickness. And the confusion only grew when Schwartz found another torch, wrapped up in a sock, in a side compartment. This one didn’t work any better either.
What does that mean?
An abducted girl, two broken torches?
Daniel couldn’t make any sense of the discovery. Unlike Schwartz. All of a sudden he grabbed the pencil case and rummaged inside. When he seemed to have found what he was looking for, Schwartz slapped his forehead like someone who’s overlooked something obvious. Then he turned the switch of the torch again, and yet again, and each time he gave a soft sigh, even though Daniel couldn’t notice the slightest difference.
No bright light.
Nothing that might give him a flash of inspiration.
‘What have you found?’ he asked the detective.
Schwartz clenched the torch handle tightly, now holding it like a baton just before the transfer to the next runner.
‘I know what’s going on,’ he said flatly. The detective strode past Bonhoeffer, climbed over the body and yanked open the cabin door.
52
Naomi
… IF I could, I’d tuern back the clock, or at least apologies for what I did. But I don[t think I’lll ever get the ppportunity, wikll I?
She’d blindly written the last lines, riddled with typos, looking at the screen as if through a wall of water, the letters blurring in the fog of tears, with clammy fingers that tried to overtake each other as she typed, faster and faster, because Naomi Lamar would have bitten a chunk of flesh from her body out of disgust at herself, if she’d had even a second while she was writing to consider what she’d done. What she’d just confessed to the spider. Which was: the worst thing.
She hadn’t remembered it again, because that would have meant having to forget it first. Deep down she’d always known what the spider wanted to hear. She just hadn’t been capable of writing it down. Thinking about it was bad enough. But thoughts could be suppressed, by pain, hunger or cold, for example. Things she’d had in spades over the last few weeks.
To know it was written down, even the process itself of writing it, was something else entirely.
To see the wickedness in black on white, her own shame before her very eyes, was much worse than merely thinking about it, and the spider knew this.
That’s the reason, that’s the only reason I’ve had to type into this wretched computer here at the bottom of the well.
Without correcting her spelling (which, for some reason she couldn’t even explain to herself, Naomi had done previously when typing the invalid confessions – it was probably just force of habit; she’d always stressed to Anouk the importance of good spelling) she’d tugged on the rope. She was desperate to tie it around her neck rather than on the bucket the notebook was placed in. Although with her on the end of the rope she doubted it would be yanked up.
Ever since the computer had vanished upwards into the darkness above her head, she’d started scratching again.
Her arms, neck, skull.
Naomi was sure she’d given the spider what it wanted.
Hunger, thirst, the tapeworm, the bedbugs; there was a point to all those punishments, she understood that now.
She had no idea how the spider had got to the bottom of her secret. On a cruise ship of all places.
But if you looked at it in the cold light of day, there was a point to everything now.
It’s just that I’ll never get to look at anything in the cold light of day again.
Naomi felt a menacing thought brewing inside her and started to hum. She knew she’d be allowed to die soon.
Not because I’m partly guilty for the death of my best friend.
She opened her mouth.
Not because I had sex for money.
Her bright, brittle humming turned into a throaty sound, grew…
With unknown men. Lots of men.
… into a scream, which got louder and louder until, multiplied by the echoes deep down inside the well, finally managed to…
But because three years ago I…
drown out in her head…
I started to…
… the thoughts of the worst thing she’d ever done.
… because I…
A scream so loud and stifling that for a while all she felt was the desire to see her lovely little girl just one more time before, finally and hopefully, her life came to a rapid end.
53
Anouk. Torch. Pencils. Drawing.
Single-word thoughts made a racket in Martin’s head, knocking him violently from the inside against the bell of his skull and producing a muffled, droning sound, which like discordant film music accompanied those images that were currently playing in his mind’s eye. Images in which he recalled his meetings with Anouk: the girl in her nightshirt, sitting silently and stoically on the bed, her arms a whetstone for her fingernails.
Martin thought about how Gerlinde had told him of the torch and remembered on his way to the captain barging into the disco-goer with his luminous drink. All of a sudden, seemingly unconnected scraps of thoughts were piecing together.
For this – as Martin assumed – final descent to Hell’s Kitchen, Bonhoeffer had let him go alone, although to begin with he’d raced after him and even blocked his way by the entrance to the staff deck.
‘What have you discovered?’ he’d asked.
Martin was just about to explain his suspicions to Bonhoeffer when the captain’s mobile rang.
Julia Stiller, the mother of the missing girl, had woken up i
n his cabin and was demanding to see Bonhoeffer. To be precise, she was screaming at him.
‘YOU FUCKING BASTARD! WHERE ARE YOU? HOW CAN YOU DO THIS TO ME?’
Martin had been able to hear every word, even though Bonhoeffer had pressed the phone tightly to his ear.
The captain had promised to return as quickly as possible once he’d seen to Julia, but right now Martin was standing alone outside Anouk’s room. His fingers were sweating as he swiped the key card. He entered without knocking.
And stood in an empty cabin.
For a moment he was unable to formulate a clear thought. He gazed hypnotically at the abandoned bed, as if Anouk would materialise before his eyes if he stared long enough at the crumpled sheet.
How can that be? Anouk doesn’t have a key. She can’t get out of here!
Martin’s bewilderment lasted little more than a second, before he was freed from his paralysis by the noise of the loo flushing. The bathroom door on his right opened and Anouk shuffled out. She was wearing a fresh nightshirt and must have taken off her tights. Her feet were bare. When she saw Martin, she retreated to the bathroom in fright.
‘Stop,’ Martin called, jamming his foot in the door just before Anouk could slam it in his face. ‘Don’t be scared; I’m not going to hurt you.’
He yanked the door open again. Anouk ducked, wrapped both arms around her head and stepped backwards until she knocked against the toilet. She sat on it.
‘You do remember who I am, don’t you?’
He put the key card into the breast pocket of his polo shirt and waited until Anouk’s breathing started to calm down. It took her a while to understand that he wasn’t going to touch her. When she felt brave enough to lower her elbows and look him straight in the eye he gave her a smile. Or at least he tried to pull the corners of his mouth into the appropriate position. Since he’d entered Hell’s Kitchen, his headaches had returned. A dull pressure behind the eyes that would soon turn into a tugging.
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