It felt as if she were kicking into thin air. Julia had gone at it with such momentum that she almost slipped and fell, only staying on her feet because she was holding onto the railing.
What the devil…?
She stared at the door that her foot had kicked in the screen. It looked like the cat flap in a back door, except that large dog could have got through this. Or a human being.
Julia’s pulse started to race. She bent down and looked through the flap onto Lisa’s balcony. The hairs on her forearms stood on end. She felt electrified by an intuition.
The door was fastened shut. Normally you’d need a tool to open it, to make maintenance easier or speed up transporting things between cabins. But the lock seemed to have been unfastened.
By Lisa perhaps?
Julia took off her dressing gown and, dressed only in panties and a bra, slipped through the flap in the screen. She scraped a knee and shin, but she was no more aware of this than she was of the chilly wind that could now assail the entire surface of her body.
Is this what you did too, my love?
She tried to peer through the glass into her daughter’s cabin, but the doors were locked and the curtains closed. With both hands she shielded her head from external lights, but still couldn’t see anything.
Did you lock the connecting door from your side, Lisa? And put the chain on afterwards?
She turned back to the flap.
Did you creep through there to vanish through my cabin?
Julia felt her heart beating faster. Had it been the breath of wind when the balcony door was opened, or the sound of a door snapping shut that had woken her from her sleep?
The door by which you left my cabin, darling?
Julia knew she was about to fall into the worst state of grief possible, in which relatives try their best to deny the truth and cling to any theory, however absurd, that offers hope. But what else could she do?
She struck her fist against the glass, kicked the sliding door with her bare foot, rammed it with her knee, yelled Lisa’s name… and got the fright of her life, when the curtains opened.
To reveal her daughter’s face.
64
‘Shahla was a man?’ Elena was growing more confused by the minute. She looked at Martin as if he’d grown a second nose.
Martin answered her in Shahla’s words that he read from the screen of the notebook:
When I refused the put the condom over my penis, she shouted at me that I was a loser. Useless. She said she didn’t love me, that she’d always wanted a girl rather than a smelly boy. She slapped me in the face and let me go away in tears, only to repeat the game the following day. At some point I gave in, put on the condom, and in time slept with her. All the while a single thought dominated my head: I wish I were a girl. I wish I were a girl.
During the sex, during my rape (it took me years to understand what she’d done to me) my personality split. My mind flew off into a girl’s body and stayed there, long after my mother had let me be. I no longer wanted to be the defiled boy, but the girl my mother had always wished for and who would have been spared all that if only I’d been born in the right body.
Four days after my eighteenth birthday my father sold his firm and not long afterwards he and my mother died when their private jet crashed.
The first thing I did with the fortune they left me was to have a sex change, which no responsible surgeon ought to have been allowed to carry out. But I bribed the examining psychiatrist, who certified me to be of perfectly sound mind. As you might imagine, the changes to my body didn’t relieve my emotional suffering. Without a penis, with shattered and reconstructed cheekbones, a more feminine nose and small breasts, I felt dirtier than I ever had in my mother’s arms.
In an online suicide forum, where I was researching suitable methods of suicide, I met by chance a thirteen-year-old girl who’d had similar experiences to me and whose suffering was still ongoing. Her mother forced her to masturbate in front of her.
She wrote that she was about to go on a cruise where she was planning to take her life. It was through this girl that I realised our mistake.
Why should we victims kill ourselves while the real criminals went on living?
That was ten years ago.
I signed up as a chambermaid on the ship where the girl was planning to leap to her death and made sure she survived the crossing. Unlike her mother. My first in a short series of victims.
Elena laid her hand comfortingly on Martin’s forearm and asked him to speak more slowly. Without knowing it he’d sped up with every line.
To begin with I was satisfied with numbing my victims and throwing them overboard. But over the years I learned to perfect my system. With a keen intelligence and above-average financial means I purchased the suicide forum called Easyexit that had put me on the right path, albeit by chance. Today it has offshoots all over the world; the website has local listings in thirty-two countries. It’s unbelievable how many people can’t bear to live on this planet any more. Millions of them.
And amongst them I find my traps. I proceed with great caution. When I learn that a child has been abused by their parents (it doesn’t matter whether it’s a boy or a girl) I use a chain of travel agents called Querky Travel – owned by me – to book passage for the child and parents, who of course know nothing of their ‘luck’. So I disguise the trip as a lottery win. This works in only a few instances – most are mistrustful when someone wants to give them something – which is why my success quota has remained very low.
Once, however, in the case of a German family, I was helped by chance.
Martin paused. Scrolled up, then down again, but couldn’t find any clue as to what to make of these words.
‘Why have you stopped?’ Elena asked. ‘Is there anything about your wife and son?’
‘No, unfortunately,’ Martin whispered.
Or perhaps thank God.
He cleared his throat and went on reading:
By now the rumour seems to have circulated on Easyexit that there’s a travel agency which organises the final passage for people who get what they deserve. I imagine this is why Justin Lamar contacted me. Am I right in thinking your father-in-law doesn’t seem to like you very much? He covered the costs of your trip. And offered a special commission if, rather than reeling off the normal programme, I made you suffer for your sins. Which is perfectly possible here on the Sultan, where the blue shelf provides the ideal space for it.
Let’s get a couple of things straight, Naomi.
I never put tapeworms into your food. And what you took to be bedbugs were harmless mites. I wasn’t intending to poison your body physically, but mentally. Just as my mother did to me. She didn’t hit me or insert any objects into me. But all the same she infected me with a virus that ate me from the inside out. Just as Anouk, to whom I’ve been a mother over these last few weeks, will continue to be devoured on the inside by what you did to her. And what you’re going to confess now.
He looked up from the screen. Elena stared at him agog.
‘Anouk was…’
Now the circle is closing. Now there’s a point to all this madness.
Nodding energetically, Martin skipped to the end of the document. To Naomi’s confession.
65
Julia’s biggest fear was that she’d lost her mind. Or, even worse, that she was only dreaming that Lisa had opened the balcony door and was now standing before her. If she were suddenly to awake in Daniel’s cabin, still sedated by the drugs he’d forced on her, and if her daughter were to vanish into thin air for a second time, the pain she’d feel on waking would finally be unbearable. She was absolutely certain of that.
At her mother’s funeral the pastor had said that parents do not die until their children stop thinking of them. He forgot to mention the reverse situation where parents die inside when nothing remains but the thought of their children.
And yet Lisa seemed anything but an illusion. And if she were, then the Fata Mor
gana ordering her to come into the cabin and sit in the armchair beside the bed was astonishingly realistic.
‘There you are. Finally. I’ve been waiting for you all day.’
Wearing a black lace-up dress, Lisa was standing a short distance away in front of the television, in exactly the spot where the chambermaid had been cowering as she bled from her mouth. The sight had been substantially less frightening than the one of her daughter now. Lisa looked as if she’d made herself up in the dark on choppy seas. Eyeliner that had run and mascara applied too thickly disfigured her pale face. In her hand she held a long screwdriver.
Julia looked at her daughter as if she were a ghost, which essentially she was, and uttered just a single word:
‘Why?’
Why are you still alive?
Why did you do that to me?
An abortive smile formed on Lisa’s lips.
‘You don’t know?’ Her voice was cold. Pitiless. It matched her expression. ‘You destroyed it,’ she said.
‘What, darling. What did I destroy?’
Lisa yelled at her, ‘He belonged to me. I had him first.’
He? Who was she talking about?
‘I… I’m sorry, I don’t know what…’
Her daughter interrupted Julia’s helpless stammering and screamed, ‘With us it was love. But you… you just wanted to fuck Tom!’
‘Tom?’
At that moment Julia performed a cliché. Her jaw dropped. And she felt incapable of closing it again.
‘Don’t look like that! He was my first.’ With a vulgar gesture Lisa grabbed her crotch. ‘He took my virginity, Mama. We were to be together forever. But then you came along.’
‘Tom?’
Tom Schiwy?
‘Wasn’t it enough taking my father away? Did you have to steal the love of my life from me too?’
‘Your liaison teacher… the man I had an affair with, Tom Schiwy…?’
… abused you?
Lisa took a step closer. In the mirror Julia could see that her combat boots weren’t done up. The laces were flapping loose.
‘Loved. Oh, yes. We were going to get married. He told me I was much more mature than all the others.’
‘But darling, sweetheart…’ Julia was about to get out of the armchair, but Lisa threatened her with the screwdriver and made her sit back down.
‘Don’t try telling me it wasn’t your fault. I saw the way you spruced yourself up for him. You went to the parent consultation dolled up like a cheap tart to throw yourself at him. You’d have loved to go to school just in your underwear, wouldn’t you?’ She gave Julia a scornful stare, pointing first at her panties and then at her bra. ‘Christ, do you actually know how unhappy I was?’
Lisa blew a strand of hair from her face.
‘Didn’t you notice I wasn’t able to eat any more? That I was only wearing black clothes? And skiving off school with my new friends? No, you didn’t. You only had eyes and ears for your Tom.’
You’re wrong. Oh, God, darling. You’re wrong.
‘Listen to me, Lisa,’ Julia instructed her. ‘I understand your anger. But what your teacher did with you…’
‘Don’t you go fucking justifying yourself,’ Lisa interrupted her. ‘Querky said you’d try to talk your way out of it.’
Querky?
‘Wait a sec, I thought that was your boyfriend?’
This time Lisa managed an honest smile. Derogatory and derisive. ‘Querky’s a she. Yes, you know what, dearest Mother? I didn’t know either. I met her on the internet. In a suicide forum.’
‘Jesus Christ, Lisa…’
‘Shit, I wanted to kill myself when Tom dumped me for you.’
Tears flooded into Julia’s eyes at this admission. ‘I’m really sorry, I didn’t know…’
‘But Querky opened my eyes.’ Lisa stabbed the screwdriver in Julia’s direction. ‘It wasn’t me who had to be punished, but you.’
‘And that’s why you staged your own suicide?’
To scare the living daylights out of me?
‘You needed to experience what I had to go through. What it means to lose the thing you love most in life.’ Lisa gave a self-satisfied grin. ‘That was part one of my plan. Me and Querky worked it out together. Man, that woman is so cool. She works here on the ship. She hung a chambermaid’s uniform in my cupboard and programmed my key so I could go anywhere on the ship, even down to the crew deck where I hid last night.’
That’s why Martin Schwartz saw her down there, Julia remembered. It must have been while Lisa was preparing all this nonsense and looking for somewhere to bunk down.
‘Querky really thought of everything. She even paid for the trip so we could entice you on board.’
Jesus Christ!
In spite of Lisa’s threats, Julia couldn’t hold out in her seat any longer. She stood up and took a step towards her daughter who was now wielding the screwdriver like a dagger.
‘What are you planning?’ she asked, looking Lisa directly in the eye. Her daughter held her gaze effortlessly.
‘You’ll see, Mama.’ She gave a crooked smile. ‘You’ll see.’
66
Naomi’s last confession consisted of just four sentences:
The worst thing I’ve ever done in my life is to force my daughter to have sex with men.
Martin heard Elena gasp. He continued reading:
There’s no excuse for what I did. Not even the fact that, when it began I was taking hard drugs which were ruining my already unstable psyche. Nor that I stopped it when one of the groups of men I gave her to were so violent that she’s likely to have permanent physical damage. I deserve to die.
‘Jesus Christ, that’s how Anouk got her injuries!’ Elena croaked after he’d uttered the final sentence.
Martin nodded. They’d thought the rapist was still on board. But Anouk had been abused before their departure – and at her mother’s instigation! The wounds hadn’t been inflicted on the ship, but back at home.
‘Now it’s all beginning to make sense,’ Martin whispered.
He looked Elena in the eye. Anger flared in her face. She too had understood why Anouk had hit her mother.
No, not her mother. Her rapist!
Although she hadn’t written it explicitly, everything suggested that Shahla had wanted to free Anouk from her mother rather than abduct her. They would probably find a den in the lower deck, not far from the blue shelf, a place where Anouk had been more or less able to move around freely during the last couple of months. He still didn’t understand what Anouk and Shahla were doing that night when the captain saw them in the corridor near the ‘nest’, where Gerlinde had taken the photograph. But now it was perfectly clear why Anouk had refused to speak a word the whole time, even though she knew exactly who’d taken her away and where her mother was. Why she needed the UV light, so that she could find her way to Naomi without the chambermaid by means of invisible marks. To torture her, observe her, or just to take pleasure in her suffering. Or to kill her, as she had done in the end.
‘We have to let Daniel know,’ Elena said, grabbing Martin’s mobile on the table.
It started to vibrate.
67
Martin took the call by pressing the touch screen of his smartphone and the picture of Stalin vanished from the screen.
‘Diesel?’ he asked.
‘Call me Edward Snowden if you like.’
Martin’s finger was already hovering over the icon to disconnect the conversation.
‘Listen, I can’t talk now. All hell has been let loose here and…’
‘I’ve hacked Lisa’s Facebook profile,’ Diesel interrupted him impassively.
Martin didn’t waste time asking how he’d done that. He knew that the editor-in-chief could count not just tattoo artists and pyromaniacs amongst his friends, but numerous technology freaks as well, who provided him with the newest versions of cracked computer games.
‘And?’
‘Well, I stumbled on an intere
sting exchange with a chap called Tom Schiwy.’
‘Who’s that?’ Martin asked. He’d put it on loudspeaker so Elena could hear.
‘Her liaison teacher. She obviously had a relationship with him.’
The doctor frowned, but the disfigured half of her face remained unmoved.
‘Isn’t this Lisa still only fifteen?’ Martin asked.
‘Precisely. But there’s more! This teacher had something going with the mother too.’
Martin and Elena exchanged glances of amazement.
‘With Julia Stiller?’ Martin asked.
‘How many other mothers has she got?’ Diesel must have been chewing gum because his words were accompanied by disagreeable lip-smacking noises. ‘And now, here’s the hammer blow. Are you belted up?’
‘What?’
‘The video you wanted me to search for on isharerumours.com…’
‘Is it genuine?’ Martin stared at the phone, as if he could press the answer out of him just with his eyes.
‘Yes, looks like it. And I’ll give you three guesses who the bloke is.’
Martin paused. He hardly dared voice his suspicions. ‘This Schiwy guy?’
Diesel did an impression of a trumpet fanfare and dropped another bomb straight away. ‘Bingo! Lisa’s hopelessly in love with that arsehole. In her eyes her mother is a cheap whore who’s nicked her Prince Charming. To win back that shit she offered to behave like a strumpet too, if that’s what he wanted. And the cunt went for it at once. Acted out a perverse role play with the girl in which she had to play the child prostitute strolling down Frobenstrasse and jump into his car.’
‘But how did the video get onto the internet?’ Martin asked.
‘Hold onto yourself, this is where it gets extraordinary: Lisa uploaded it herself. Yes, no joke. I found that from her email traffic too. When Tom refused to get back with her, despite the child prostitute game, her knee-jerk reaction was to upload it and threaten to blow his cover. But that cut no ice with the arsehole, because he wasn’t identifiable on the video. When the nasty comments appeared, Lisa changed her strategy and tried to blackmail the bastard with her suicide. Just before they got on board she sent Tom a final email in which she threatened to leap into the sea if he didn’t come back to her. This apparently put the wind up Schiwy. He sent an email to Julia, forwarding the video, probably to warn her. He didn’t want to be responsible for her death. But, if you ask me, that doesn’t make it any better.’
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