Passenger 23

by Sebastian Fitzek

Martin felt as if his senses were playing tricks on him, as if he were still taking the PEP pills. His mouth was dry. The scratching sounds now seemed to be coming from the back door he’d entered the house by.

  ‘Do you find your clients on the internet?’ he asked Elena as he moved over to the garden door.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. Her voice became softer, but as clear as a bell, as if she were in the neighbouring room. ‘Here I was actually fibbing. The firm disguised as a travel agency belongs to me, not Shahla. It’s a brilliant system, even if I’ll probably have to make some modifications now, but so far my clients have simply booked a passage for those they wish to get out of the way, and I’ve taken care of the target once they’re on board.’

  Martin was surprised to hear her so talkative. He sensed she was trying to play for time, but why? What was she up to?

  ‘With Naomi Lamar I was paid by Anouk’s grandfather, who’d got to the truth of the mother’s atrocities.’

  ‘And who booked you in for a two-month ordeal?’ Martin pressed her. He had to speak louder for Elena to understand him, though she didn’t seem bothered that he’d strayed from her field of view for a while. He gazed into the garden through a window by the door. A mangy dog was padding languidly around the pool. Had it been scratching at the door?

  ‘The grandfather wanted Naomi, before she died, to experience physically what the daughter had gone through. But that’s not my thing. Shahla took care of that. I don’t enjoy torture. As I said, for me it’s all about money.’

  ‘So who paid for you to kill my wife?’ Martin asked, on his way back to the television.

  ‘Nobody,’ Elena said. ‘It happened just as you read it. By chance Shahla caught Nadja indecently assaulting your son. The sight of it tore open the wounds her own mother had inflicted on her. She flipped out when she saw what your wife was doing to Timmy.’

  In the background Martin could hear a gentle hubbub. Elena was phoning from a public place. She was probably sitting in an anonymous internet café.

  ‘You know I’m telling the truth, Martin. You must have detected the signs of abuse in your son, didn’t you?’

  There was nothing Martin could do. Tears came to his eyes.

  ‘There you go,’ Elena said, proving that she was able to see him. ‘Back then Shahla was employed to clean the ship’s clinic. Over time we became friends. I learned of her terrible past. Nadja’s death was an overreaction, an accident if you like. And when it happened, when she’d struck Nadja dead, she stormed into my office and asked for help. She didn’t know what to do.’

  ‘So the two of you threw my wife overboard together and placed the cloth with chloroform in their cabin?’

  ‘Precisely,’ Elena said. ‘From that point on Shahla owed me a favour, which I called in for Naomi’s punishment. I knew the pleasure it would give her to exact revenge.’

  ‘Anouk was with you the whole time?’

  ‘With Shahla,’ Elena replied. ‘She set up a den for her near the blue shelf, where she was supposed to stay till we got to Oslo.’

  Martin had never seen it, and yet the fluorescent markings shone in his mind, which Anouk had followed with her UV lamp in the darkness of the lower deck whenever she wanted contact with Shahla, Elena or perhaps even her mother.

  ‘Her grandfather has friends in Norway. Anouk was going to stay with them.’

  There was whistling on the line, but Elena’s voice was still easy to understand. ‘We were planning to get her off the ship and Shahla took her to the nest where she was meant to spend the last night.’ Elena sounded contrite. ‘Unfortunately Anouk played stubborn that day. She was thoroughly bored, nervous, overwrought. She didn’t want to be locked up any longer and managed to run away from Shahla, armed with her favourite teddy and a torch, which she was going to use to pay her mother one final visit.’

  ‘But she ran straight into the captain!’ Martin shook his head. Bonhoeffer had actually been telling the truth from the start. After Anouk had run away from the nest, the chambermaid had to quickly grab a pile of towels to give her an excuse for being around at that time, should she meet someone while searching for the girl. That’s why to Gerlinde it had looked like a coincidence that the chambermaid had bumped into Anouk, when in actual fact she had been on the run from Shahla.

  Martin was no longer able to suppress his anger. Hurrying back to the coffee table he grabbed the beer and hurled it at the television.

  For a while he thought the connection had been lost, but then he heard Elena say calmly, ‘You’re directing your anger at the wrong person.’

  Martin was almost lost for words. ‘Are you trying to tell me that Nadja and Timmy’s deaths are not your fault, but Shahla’s?’

  ‘I find it pointless to discuss questions of blame in my profession. But if you’re into poetic justice then you ought to thank me. After all, I killed Shahla.’

  ‘Because you wanted to give yourself the perfect alibi. A killer, caught in the act and no longer able to blow the whistle on her accomplice. No, you’re not going to get away with shifting your guilt onto others. Or was it Shahla who gave Anouk the teddy to make me come aboard? Or told her to say my name during that first session to rattle me.’

  He kicked the coffee table so hard that the gun fell to the floor.

  ‘The teddy was Shahla’s idea,’ Elena admitted blithely. ‘She kept it as a souvenir of Timmy and in truth only gave it to Anouk so she had something to play with. There was no ulterior motive there. But it did give Daniel the idea of contacting you. I was against it. I knew the reputation you had as a detective and didn’t want you getting in my way. That’s why I showed you the report about the rape wounds as I knew from that point your search would be focused on a man.’

  ‘And just to be on the safe side you injured yourself too?’ Martin picked up the pistol.

  ‘I’m allergic to groundnut oil and so I smeared some on my cheek when I was crawling around on the floor in the anchor room,’ Elena confessed. ‘I didn’t want to be around you any longer; I just wanted to look after Anouk unimpeded. Which I was able to do when I was practically lying next to her in Hell’s Kitchen.’

  Her voice became firmer.

  ‘But let me say this again: I’m not mad. Killing is my job. Not my calling.’

  Looking at the weapon in his hand, Martin twiddled it and watched his distorted reflection change in the chrome barrel.

  ‘You wanted to use Lisa to kill her mother.’

  ‘Yes, that was wrong.’

  If she weren’t such a damn good actress, Martin might have imagined he detected genuine remorse in Elena’s voice.

  ‘Lisa is Daniel’s goddaughter. She wrote an email to him saying that she had man trouble. Daniel forwarded it to me, thinking that as a woman I’d be better placed to help a girl with this problem. He didn’t know what the “man trouble” actually consisted of.’

  Elena’s sounded breathy. She cleared her throat.

  ‘And Lisa didn’t know who I was when I invited her to the Easyexit chatroom. But she very quickly opened up her heart to me. In retrospect I ought to have known that she was lying. Her stories became increasingly far-fetched. To begin with, she made only vague mention of abuse, then she told me she was having sex with an older man, and finally that her mother was forcing her to. I began to doubt her, but when she sent me the video I believed her again and so I booked a passage for her and her mother to clear the matter up.’

  So that was the reason, Martin thought.

  That’s why she was so flustered when Diesel rang and said how the video had been staged.

  ‘I didn’t twig that Lisa was lying to me. I knew nothing of how obsessed and unhappy she was. If Julia Stiller had forced her daughter to have sex with that Tom she would have deserved to die.’

  Martin laughed sarcastically. ‘And after Naomi you were in practice.’

  ‘I corrected my mistake in time.’

  ‘We almost died!’

  Martin recalled the scene in Lisa’s
cabin. By the irony of destiny, Elena had told the truth when she said she was Querky. She could have passed Lisa’s test and said her chatroom nickname. The only reason Elena had hesitated was that it would have blown her cover.

  ‘And you don’t think you’re mad, Elena?’ Martin asked. ‘You’re absolutely potty!’

  The petrol mower had now sprung into life on the front lawn of the neighbouring house. Martin wondered whether it was drowning out other sounds. Sounds that might reveal Elena’s true intentions.

  ‘Where are you?’ he asked her.

  As expected, Elena didn’t respond to this, instead asking a question of her own: ‘Are you still in contact with Lisa’s mother?’

  ‘What? Yes, why?’ Martin had spoken to Julia Stiller once. She’d just been visiting her daughter on the closed ward of the psychiatric unit and wanted to thank him again for having saved her daughter’s life. It must have been the tenth time she’d done so. He might well be the only person she could talk to about the sluggish progress in Lisa’s treatment.

  ‘Tell Julia I’ll make amends for my mistake,’ Elena said. She sounded as if she were about to hang up.

  ‘Make amends for your mistake? Are you out of your mind? You’re a murderer. You can’t make amends for what you’ve done.’

  Martin aimed his pistol at the television, imagining she was standing before him.

  ‘You’ll see,’ Elena retorted.

  ‘I’ll see you,’ Martin said, sounding dead calm. ‘And then I’ll kill you.’

  He could virtually see her shake her well-coiffed hair.

  ‘No you won’t,’ she said.

  He frowned angrily. ‘You know what I’m capable of when I set my mind to something,’ he threatened.

  ‘Yes. I don’t doubt that. But you won’t hurt a hair on my head when you stand face to face with me, nor will you tell a soul about our conversation today.’

  He laughed out loud. ‘What makes you so sure?’

  Martin gave another start. The lawnmower had fallen silent. But now he heard the scratching noises at the door again, and this time it definitely wasn’t a dog. Someone was fiddling with the lock. He looked around. As it was an open-plan house there was nowhere on the ground floor to hide, particularly not if Elena was watching him via camera. But he didn’t think it was her trying to get inside the finca, and if it was, then she knew he was armed. He pointed the gun at the door, but then had a better idea.

  With a couple of rapid strides he made it to the stairs and ran to the upper floor, his pistol at the ready if anyone was lying in wait for him up there.

  His mobile rang in his pocket.

  Unknown caller.

  He answered as he entered the first room at the top of the stairs and shut the door.

  ‘You won’t kill me,’ he heard Elena say, continuing their conversation while Martin looked around in astonishment at the untidy room. The bed wasn’t made and dirty socks littered the floor. The walls were sprayed with gaudy, but amazingly talented graffiti images, and a laptop with a sticker of a heavy metal band sat on a glass table supported by two beer barrels.

  ‘How can you be so sure?’ he heard himself ask.

  Footsteps echoed in the sitting room below.

  Martin grabbed hold of a tennis racket that had been leaning against an open wardrobe. The footsteps were coming up the stairs.

  ‘Because you won’t shoot the woman who’s been a mother to your son,’ Elena said, and then Martin heard a second voice in the hall beyond the door. The voice of a young man, around fifteen years old.

  ‘Mama? Are you in there?’ he asked. ‘I thought you weren’t coming back for a fortnight.’

  The door opened and two men who resembled each other like father and son, stood opposite each other, paralysed with shock.

  76

  Elena hung up.

  She’d prepared Timmy for this moment. Two weeks ago, when she’d visited him soon after their stop in New York, he’d asked her yet again about his father (he never enquired about his mother) and she showed him the photo that the Polish newspapers had published shortly after his arrest.

  Shahla had caught Nadja.

  He’d never left the bathroom.

  That was the lie she’d dished up to Martin to make him abandon the search for his son. In vain. She’d suspected that he’d get to the bottom of the truth at some point.

  After Shahla had battered the mother with the desk lamp and locked Timmy in the bathroom, Elena had helped her to wrap the corpse in a sheet and throw it overboard. The security cameras showed two victims. Unfortunately it was noticeable that the suitcase was smaller than the mother’s body. They ought to have disposed of the suitcase first and then the corpse. A massive error, but luckily the cruise line had played the role of silent accomplice and made the recordings disappear to hush the matter up.

  Elena immediately started to look after the boy. Timmy, scared out of his wits and deeply troubled, didn’t have any idea how to get in touch with his father.

  Her research found out that his father was in prison in Warsaw as a dangerous criminal with links to the mafia.

  The perverted mother dead; the father a murderer. The relatives might not be any better. Under no circumstances were they going to send the traumatised boy back to such a wretched family. At this point Elena had no idea that Martin was working as an undercover investigator; she only found out years later when Daniel told her of the case that Schwartz had tried to bring against him. So at the time she decided to take Timmy into her care. She hid him for a while on the ship, took him to her house in Casa de Campo and put him in a boarding school there. Several times a year she visited him in the Dominican Republic, for as long and as often as she could.

  Later, when she found out who Timmy’s father really was, it briefly occurred to her to bring the two of them together, but she abandoned the idea. Martin was a detective. One of the best. The danger was too great that he’d stick to her heels and hunt her down. Which he must be considering now. From today she was on the run; she’d done all she could to postpone this moment for as long as possible.

  During the years that she’d kept Timmy hidden from his father, he’d grown into a fine young man who enjoyed life in the Caribbean and now played tennis so well that he’d got to the final of the Caribbean junior championship.

  Two weeks ago Elena had told him who his father really was and that he was sure to come looking for him. So Timmy was forewarned. All the same, she didn’t want to imagine the shock he must be feeling now.

  With a sigh Elena put the mobile back in her Louis Vuitton handbag, opened a compact mirror, applied another layer of lipstick and pulled the décolleté of her little black number a little lower. Then she got up from the lounge chair by the windows.

  The swell in Ari Atoll was pleasantly calm, the MS Aquarion lay like a plank on the Indian Ocean and she had no trouble making it to the on-board bar in her ten-centimetre heels.

  ‘Gin and tonic, please,’ she said to the barman of the small but elegant cruise ship which had room for just under a thousand passengers. One of them, a man with unbelievably deep eyes, who was holding a beer, gave her a smile that did not fail to do the trick.

  ‘Please allow me,’ said the good-looking German, who she hadn’t let out of her sight since they’d left Sri Lanka.

  ‘That’s very kind of you, Herr…’

  ‘Schiwy,’ the man told her his name, which of course Elena already knew. ‘But please call me Tom.’

  She smiled and said the name she’d used to check in for this trip.

  ‘Tell Julia I’ll make amends for my mistake!’

  ‘So, what brings you on board?’

  ‘Whew.’ He pretended to wipe sweat from his brow. ‘It’s a long story.’

  ‘We’ve got a long journey ahead of us,’ Elena said, with an even friendlier smile and brushing, as if by accident, Tom’s hand on the bar with the tip of her finger.

  ‘Okay, well, if you want to hear the short version: I’m runn
ing away.’

  ‘From love, perhaps?’

  He nodded smugly. ‘If you like, yes. Can you imagine a situation where both a mother and daughter fall in love with you at the same time?’

  Elena winked coquettishly. ‘With you, Tom, yes.’

  He made a dismissive gesture. ‘Yes, yes, I know it sounds funny, but believe me, it’s absolute hell. Two jealous creatures, who are also related. One wanted literally to kill herself for love, and she’d have done it too, if I hadn’t warned her mother in time.’ He gave a lecherous grin. Evidently he thought that this frivolous story would enhance his attractiveness.

  ‘And so you booked this trip to flee from those wild women?’ Elena asked innocently.

  ‘No, no, this was just a slice of luck in the midst of adversity. I won the trip in a silly online card game. I mean, I often get mail telling me I’m the hundred thousandth visitor to some website or other, but this time it was actually true. The tickets were delivered to me directly.’ He was grinning from ear to ear. ‘They arrived right on cue.’

  ‘Just like you, Tom.’ Elena took his hand and squeezed it gently. ‘So, lucky at cards, are you?’

  ‘And in love… Well, I just have fun,’ he grinned back.

  ‘Sounds good,’ Elena said, getting down from her bar stool.

  ‘How about…?’ She nodded in the direction of the lifts. ‘I know my way around here fairly well. Do you fancy a tour behind the scenes of the ship?’

  Tom Schiwy finished his beer in one gulp and handed the barman his room card to put the drinks on his bill, before hurrying after the elegant blond.

  In excited anticipation of the evening and everything it would entail.

  About this book and thanks

  Before my final surprise on page 401 (which of course you can jump to straight away if you’re not interested in my ramblings about how Passenger 23 came about) I’d like to honour tradition and first of all thank you for choosing my book from amongst the hundred thousand new ones that appear each year. Now you’ve finished reading it, I expect you’ve got completely the wrong idea of me.