Martin followed Gerlinde Dobkowitz from the balcony back into the suite.
‘If you’d please excuse us,’ the old lady said to the butler, pointing to her bed and winking. ‘Herr Schwartz wants to show me a new Kama Sutra position.’
‘Of course,’ Gregor answered, without batting an eyelid, and got up from the desk.
Gerlinde shot Martin a look as if it were the butler whose mental state ought to be a matter of concern.
‘He’s completely humourless,’ she apologised with a whisper, yet loud enough that Gregor could hear. ‘But he’s helping me achieve my life’s work, aren’t you Gregor?’
‘I’m delighted to be of assistance, Frau Dobkowitz.’
‘Yes, yes. And chickens die of tooth decay.’
She rolled her eyes and waddled, stooped, over to a globe screwed to the floor. Opening the lid she took out a bottle of advocaat. She put her cigarettes back in her pocket.
‘I know what people say about me,’ she said, after Martin declined the drink she’d offered him.
He wanted answers, not alcohol.
Gerlinde poured herself half a tumbler and took appreciative sips. ‘People think I’m frittering away my husband’s inheritance on the seven seas. But I was the one with money in the family. It was my construction firm. I only signed it over to the poor fool for tax reasons. Do you know what slogan we used for roadbuilding?’ She was already giggling at the punchline: ‘Dobkowitz – we put stones in your way!’
Martin kept a straight face. ‘Very interesting, but you were going to…’
‘And do you know why I’m aboard this ship?’ Gerlinde took another sip of the viscous liquid that Martin had never been able to even contemplate drinking due to its pus-like colour.
‘Not to have a holiday. Not to squander my last days before they stick me in wooden pyjamas. But to toil away.’
She fluttered her right hand in the air. ‘Tell him, Gregor, what I’m working on.’
‘I have the honour of assisting you in writing a book,’ the butler said obediently, seemingly uncertain as to whether he should go now or answer further questions.
‘And not just any old book!’ In triumph Gerlinde clapped her hands, which were adorned with thick rings. ‘But a thriller about crimes on the high seas that are hushed up. I’m so well informed because of my research. I have ears everywhere and every night I walk my patrols. Or should I say “ride” my patrols?’ She pointed at her wheelchair. ‘Whatever… I wouldn’t have seen it otherwise.’
‘Seen what?’ Martin asked. By now his patience had run so thin that he felt like grabbing the old woman’s wrinkled neck with both hands and shaking the truth out of her about how she’d found the teddy.
‘The girl. To begin with they wanted to deceive me into believing that it was just a laundry bag. But since when have laundry bags been weeping on deck 3 after midnight, looking as pale as Jesus on Good Friday?’ She put her glass of advocaat down on a chest of drawers and pushed past Martin into the neighbouring room, through a lilac-coloured string curtain that divided the two parts of the suite.
Martin followed her and found himself in another room that reminded him of the opening credits of a psychological thriller where the killer pins newspaper reports of his crimes to the walls and uses a carpet cutter to scratch out the eyes from the face of his next victim.
‘This is my research centre,’ Gerlinde explained succinctly. The room was dominated by a black filing cabinet that stood in the middle of the cabin like a modern kitchen island. Shelves stuffed with books and files filled three of the four walls. The external wall was coated with a green paint you could write on like a blackboard, interrupted only by a window. On it were photos, outlines of the ship, cabin floorplans, newspaper articles, Post-its and handwritten notes that Gerlinde had scribbled in white Sharpie between the documents.
Martin saw arrows and lines. ‘Killer’ was inside a fat circle, as was ‘Bermuda Deck’, which he read three times.
Opening one of the upper drawers, Gerlinde took out a thin hanging file, from which she plucked a newspaper article.
‘Missing at sea,’ read the headline from the Annapolis Sentinel, a local American paper.
‘One of the shareholders of this cruise line is a media mogul. He did all he could to prevent the story from being published everywhere. Apart from a few internet blogs, this is pretty much the only rag that reported on the case.’
Gerlinde tapped her index finger on the photo of a mother with her daughter just before embarkation, at the bottom of the gangway where all the Sultan’s passengers had their picture taken so that they could later acquire an expensive photograph of themselves.
‘Didn’t your wife and Timmy disappear on the Sultan’s transatlantic crossing five years ago?’ Gerlinde asked.
She tapped the photo in the article again. ‘Barely eight weeks ago Naomi and Anouk Lamar vanished into thin air, four days’ sail from the Australian coast.’
Martin grabbed the article from her hand.
‘It’s happened again?’
Another mother and child? On the Sultan again?
The eccentric old lady shook her head.
‘Not again. It’s happening still.’