‘Watch me, I’m just going to stand here,’ he said, raising both hands. ‘May I ask a favour if I promise not to move and not come too close?’
No nod. No twitch of the eyebrows. No reaction. Anouk remained silent. And yet, in spite of the sick pallor in her face and terrified body language, Martin thought he could see signs of mental recovery in the girl.
Her gaze was no longer lifeless, but expectant, furtive. She didn’t let him out of her sight for a second, unlike yesterday when she’d spent most of the time looking straight through him. And there was further evidence that she’d managed to climb a few rungs of the ladder out of her emotional cellar: she was neither scratching nor sucking her thumb, even though she was in a high state of agitation.
Seeing the plasters with animal figures that held the white gauze bandages in position, Martin guessed that Elena’s assistant had changed the girl’s dressings.
‘Don’t worry, we don’t have to talk,’ he said in a reassuring tone.
If he was right he’d soon find out everything he wanted to know from her, without the traumatised girl having to open her mouth even once.
‘I only came to give you something I bet you’ve been missing for quite a while.’
He showed her the torch.
The effect was striking. Anouk reacted in a split second. She leaped up from the loo seat and grabbed Martin’s hand. She was about to snatch the torch from him, but he was too quick and pulled it away just in time.
‘You have to tell me the truth first,’ he demanded. He felt a lump in his throat, for his words stirred a memory of Timmy and how he used to blackmail him.
‘Can I go to tennis, Papa?’
‘You have to tidy your room first.’
Often Timmy had rebelled, throwing himself on the floor, crying and defiantly ignoring the ‘tidying for playing’ deal.
Anouk was obstinate too. She wanted the torch. But she wasn’t yet ready to trust him.
She stared at him grimly with a deep frown.
‘Okay, I’m going to tell you what happened,’ Martin said. ‘I think you know where your mother is. You even drew the place for us, on your toy computer, although we didn’t understand your clue and we don’t know where this shaft is. But you know the way. You marked it with the UV pens that I found in your pencil case. Unfortunately, these marks can’t be seen with normal light…’
When he made the mistake of briefly glancing up at the overhead light, he was suddenly struck by a flash. The adverts claim that there are thirty-seven types of headache that can be treated with non-prescription medicines. Clearly this wasn’t one of them. It felt as if someone were sticking very thin, red-hot needles from the inside of his head through his eyes to the other side of the pupils. Martin even thought he could feel the points of the emerging needles, bloodily tearing the insides of his lids whenever he blinked.
Leaning against the door, watched mistrustfully by Anouk, who was standing as if rooted to the basin, he waited until the pain had subsided to a tolerable level. Then he turned off the light.
The darkness was a relief. His headache faded to a pale shadow of itself. The attack died away as quickly as it had come.
He briefly allowed his eyes to get used to the almost complete darkness. Then he turned on the torch. And the beam that was barely visible in normal light suddenly filled the entire room, making the white bathroom tiles fluoresce, as well as Anouk’s nightshirt, teeth and fingernails.
Pens. Drawing. Torch.
‘I knew it,’ Martin said to himself. There was no hint of triumph in his voice when his theory proved correct. Anouk’s eyes shone spookily in the black light. She looked like a ghost without lips from a horror story.
The torch he was aiming at the girl wasn’t weak, but a UV lamp shining light at a frequency barely visible to the naked eye. He’d once used a similar model on an operation.
But where did Anouk get these torches from?
A question he had to postpone, for now there were more important things to clear up. ‘It showed you the way to your mother, didn’t it?’
When Anouk failed to react, he asked insistently, ‘Where was she taken to?’
Anouk’s response pulled the carpet from under his feet again. For, just as at their first meeting, she whispered his name again.
‘Martin.’
‘I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me,’ he wanted to reply, wondering why he couldn’t hear his own voice even though his lips were moving.
Then he wondered why he wasn’t fainting.
The pain behind his eyes had returned, this time with a run-up and twice the momentum.
Martin sank to the floor and felt it getting worse. Anouk had stepped over him and turned the overhead light on again. He felt as if a ghost had swapped the bathroom light for a blowtorch. Its blazing light was attempting to bore into his eyes. Unlike last night in the captain’s suite, however, he didn’t feel as if he was losing consciousness. But he could barely move his extremities.
He felt Anouk, who was suddenly kneeling above him, open his fingers. He could do nothing to stop her taking the torch from his hand. ‘What are you doing?’ he mumbled.
‘Yes,’ she said, which was probably related to the fact that she’d discovered the key in his breast pocket.
Which she could open the airlock with. Which she could get out of here with.
‘Hey, wait please. Wouldn’t it be better if I came with you?’
Wherever you want to go.
With the greatest effort of will, Martin managed to shift onto his side. He saw her bare feet toddle out of the bathroom. Heard her say ‘Yes’ again, loudly and clearly, which made no sense as there were no signs she was going to wait for him.
‘Where are you going?’ he wanted to call out, but he could muster barely more than a whisper.
Anouk turned briefly towards him. Saw her lips say, ‘To the blue shelf,’ and heard the words too, which came to him with a slight delay, as if the distance between them had already reached a range where sound took noticeably longer than light.
To the blue shelf?
Martin hauled himself to his knees, supported himself on the balls of his hands and crawled behind Anouk on all fours.
He’d heard that term somewhere before.
But where? Where?
Unable to crawl out of the bathroom any quicker than in slow motion, he watched helplessly as Anouk opened the cabin door and left without turning back to him.
54
Naomi
The familiar creaking. Was she hearing it for the last time?
The noise that heralded the opening of the gap sounded to her like an overture, a fitting introduction to her farewell song.
Naomi Lamar stood up and, on wobbly legs, watched the bucket swinging down towards her.
She was so nervous that she could feel her bladder, even though she’d just been in the circle. There wasn’t a corner in the well, but she’d found a spot where she reckoned the urine ran most rapidly into the crack in the floor.
Naomi put her head back and wiped from her brow a bedbug that had crawled out of her hair. Her body wasn’t twitching any more. It was just burning, she’d scratched herself so sore. Neck, arms, chest, her hairy legs.
But deliverance is coming from above.
The bucket hovered half a metre above her head. There was an astonishing jolt and she was terrified that the computer might fall out. Naomi stretched her arms up (to the spider), but nothing happened except for the fact that now she could reach the bucket.
She clutched it, held it tight, as tightly as she’d hold Anouk if she could just see her once more in her life.
When it was at waist height, she sank to the ground together with the bucket. And cried.
She recalled the day when the exam results had been posted at university and she hadn’t wanted to go to the foyer, hadn’t wanted to queue up with all the other students whose dreams were boosted or shattered with a single glance. And yet she hadn’t been
able to wait in her room for a minute. Curiosity had got the better of fear and so she’d taken the quickest route to the noticeboard, just as now her curiosity wouldn’t allow her any hesitation in taking the computer from the bucket and flipping it open.
Naomi managed to keep her eyes closed for one, maybe two seconds. She couldn’t hold out any longer.
She began reading the spider’s message. The last message she would ever receive from it, after Naomi had admitted indisputably the worst things she’d ever done to anyone in her life:
Well done, Mrs Lamar. That’s exactly what I wanted to hear. Finally you’ve told the truth. If there’s anything else you’d like to say before you die, you may now type it into the computer. Once you’ve sent it back up to me, I shall allow you to die.
55
As Martin staggered into the entrance area of Hell’s Kitchen he tried to cling onto the counter, pulling down a plastic pot with artificial hydrangeas.
Anouk had long since vanished.
When he’d finally made it back to his feet and out of the sickbay, all he’d seen was her back, a strip of bare skin where the hospital gown wasn’t properly tied. Then the electric doors had closed and Martin was helpless to stop the girl from leaving the quarantine area.
To hunt for the black-light markings in the ship’s bowels. Barefoot. Holding the UV torch.
His eyes filled with tears, Martin stared at the steel doors of the airlock, completely at a loss as to how he was going to open them again, that was assuming he could manage the indomitable three metres between him and the exit.
Fucking side effects.
Something – the pills, his tooth operation, his fall into the pool, his sheer exhaustion, probably a mixture of all these – had turned his head into a pressure vessel.
Every step triggered a moderate tremor, which is why it was better to think carefully about where he should go now. Towards the exit would be a pure waste of energy. Anouk had his key and without it he wouldn’t get out of here.
I’m sick. Exhausted. And locked in.
Martin felt for his phone, but it was no longer in his trouser pocket. He couldn’t recall Anouk having taken this as well while he was lying on the bathroom floor; it probably slipped out as he fell.
As he turned around his brain sloshed in the other direction. He could taste bile and smell his own sweat.
Martin wanted to lie on the floor and sleep. But if he was determined to get out of here he didn’t have any choice. He closed his eyes and felt his way back along the reception counter to the sickbay. The less he was distracted by his external senses, the greater the chance he might avoid being sick. And in fact he made better progress blind. Until he got to the cabin area there was nothing he could knock against, and he just had to keep going straight. All the while he was careful to breathe deeply to supply his brain with oxygen.
When he reached the end of the counter he waited for a moment until he was able to localise the pain in the back of his head. A good sign. So long as the pain was restricted to certain areas rather than being ubiquitous, he could focus on it and – hopefully – overcome it.
When he dared open his eyes he saw the door to Anouk’s room, which thankfully was still ajar.
Pondering what he should do if he didn’t find his mobile, Martin realised to his relief that he didn’t need it. All he had to do was press the worry button, which was connected to his mobile and… Elena’s!
Thinking of the doctor made him pause.
Why hadn’t it dawned on him straight away? He wasn’t alone down here. After the attack on Dr Beck, the ship’s doctor had also been transferred to Hell’s Kitchen!
Martin turned right.
Daniel had told him that her cabin was diagonally opposite Anouk’s. On this side of the corridor there was only one door it could be, and this was locked.
Martin screwed up his eyes tightly. The fireball beneath the left-hand side of his forehead had grown to the size of a fist, which was squashing his brain as if it were a sponge. Better than the demolition ball from earlier on. He hammered on the door. Shook the handle. Called Elena’s name. Nothing happened.
Martin massaged his neck, pressing his thumb directly onto the extension of his cervical spine, in the hope that it might increase the pain level at first before reducing it. As he did this he cocked his head to one side, looked up and, above the door saw the red lever Elena had shown him on his first visit to Hell’s Kitchen.
‘In an emergency you can unlock the door that way…’
Without hesitating, Martin pulled the lever. He heard a hydraulic hissing, then the door opened slightly inwards.
‘Elena?’
He entered the dimly lit cabin, which was furnished exactly like Anouk’s. The same blend of hotel and luxury sanatorium. The air smelled of a mixture of bad breath and room spray.
The doctor was lying on her side, head facing the door, eyes closed. In the glow of the bedside light the consequences of the attack were still unmistakeable. Swollen eyes, puffy cheeks, a bloated neck. But her breathing was regular and she didn’t appear to be in pain. He also took it as a good sign that she didn’t have any tubes in her arms or a mask on her face.
He went over to her bed and stroked her bare upper arm. When she failed to react he tried to shake her awake.
She grunted, smacked her lips softly and made a sluggish movement to knock his hand away, but he just held it there more tightly. ‘Elena, you’ve got to help me.’
Drunk with sleep, she opened her eyes and didn’t seem to recognise him at first. Only gradually did her eyes become clear.
‘Whash…’ she asked in a daze.
He bent down to her. ‘I need your key! Where is it?’
She pulled a face as if having bitten into something sour. A faint quiver around the corners of her mouth was the sign of a suppressed yawn.
‘Why, you’ve got… you… must… have…?’
Martin didn’t want to lose a second. He was locked in here, Anouk running around the ship on her own, and even if all probability dictated the opposite, his gut feeling told him that her mother was alive. And in great danger.
‘The key!’ he yelled, grabbing her by the shoulders.
Terrified, Elena looked to the chair on the left, over which a dressing gown and her uniform were hanging. Martin understood without the need for any words.
He limped to the chair, feeling first in her trousers, but then found it in the breast pocket of her blouse.
‘Where are you going?’ he heard Elena’s hoarse voice say when he was at the door.
He turned around. ‘Do you have any idea what the blue shelf is?’
The doctor’s eyes opened wide.
‘The blue shelf?’ she asked, her elbows digging into the mattress to push her up.
‘Yes.’
Elena threw off the duvet, beneath which she’d been lying in just panties and a T-shirt. Her eyes flashed with distress.
‘Why didn’t I think of that immediately!’ She tried to stand up, but needed a second attempt because she fell back on the bed at the first.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked when she was finally on her feet.
‘We’ve got no time to lose,’ she said, grabbing the dressing gown. ‘Quick. I’ll… I’ll take you there.’
56
‘The blue shelf?’
Daniel Bonhoeffer was closing the connecting door to his bedroom, where he’d just been checking on Julia, when his mobile rang. The sedative was no longer working. When she wasn’t screaming at him, she was prowling up and down the room like a tiger and punching the fitted cupboards.
‘Yes, it’s between decks B and C, amidships beside the control rooms. But what the hell do you want there?’
In your state?
Elena didn’t answer him. Either she’d hung up or the connection had been lost. Daniel couldn’t understand either.
His fiancée was sick. She ought to be in bed rather than taking a stroll to the lower decks that housed the mo
nster she was going to visit with Martin Schwartz.
The blue shelf.
A rather cynical description of a machine dating from a time when environmental protection was the expensive hobby of eccentric do-gooders and rubbish was still disposed of on the high seas. The Sultan was one of the first large luxury liners to have its own on-board water treatment and waste incineration plant. But the ship hadn’t been launched with it. In the first three years of the Sultan’s career, when not even all European ports were skilled at recycling and separating waster, rubbish for which there were no or only overpriced delivery points was officially dumped in the sea.
The rubbish was first squashed in a shaft-like, circular press and then thrust into the sea as lumps weighing several tonnes.
Into the blue shelf.
The machine which used to dump the rubbish and which owed its name to its polluting activity, was located in the place he’d just described to Elena: the blue shelf.
Wait, of course…
Daniel pressed a speed-dial button on his desk telephone, but before he was connected to the MCR, the machine control room, a livid Julia stormed out of the bedroom behind him.
‘Hey, Julia, wait…’ He hung up again to stop his friend from leaving, but she was already at the door.
‘Don’t touch me!’ she hissed angrily when he tried to grab her arm. She was wearing the white dressing gown he’d put her in yesterday. Her hair stuck to her temples like seaweed. Overnight her face seemed to have got narrower, while her body didn’t fill the towelling dressing gown, as if she’d been shrunk by fear, worry and despair.
‘Julia, please. Stay here. Where do you think you’re going?’
‘Away,’ she said. ‘Away from the man who wouldn’t help me save my daughter’s life.’
‘Julia, I understand…’
‘No. You don’t understand. You don’t have any children. You’ve never had any. You’ll never understand me,’ she hurled at him before throwing open the door and disappearing into the corridor.
Daniel, upset by her bitter, hostile accusations, didn’t react and let her go.
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