Julia put down the cup without having taken a sip and looked askance at Daniel. ‘A passenger what?’
The captain gave a bleak laugh. ‘Of course. You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? But believe me, that’ll soon change. The phrase will be on everyone’s lips.’
Passenger 23?
‘I hope it’s not catching,’ she said, essaying a tired joke she didn’t even want to laugh at herself.
‘I need to fill in some detail for you to understand.’
Daniel reached for a pilot case that he’d put under the bench. Julia heard the catches snap open, and soon afterwards a thin, black paper file lay on the table before her.
He removed the rubber band that kept the cover shut and opened it up.
‘It happened two months ago on the leg of our world trip between Fremantle and Port Louis,’ he said, turning the file to allow Julia to see the postcard-sized colour copy that showed two faces. One was a laughing, suntanned woman with a pageboy haircut, who obviously spent a large proportion of her free time in the gym and never entered a supermarket without a calorie chart. She had her arm around a young, equally thin girl who reminded Julia of Lisa when she was ten: a serious but open face, with reddened cheeks and silky, shiny, windswept hair, each strand shimmering in a different, natural tone of brown, although none as dark as the eyes that captured the viewer’s gaze. The girl had slightly sticking-out ears, which she would ‘grow into with time’, to use a phrase she tried to comfort Lisa with whenever her daughter discovered something new about her body she didn’t like. And yet the defiant look the girl gave the camera suggested this flaw didn’t cause her to suffer.
‘That’s Naomi and Anouk Lamar,’ Daniel explained. ‘Mother and daughter. Thirty-seven and eleven, from America. Both of them disappeared from their balcony cabin during the night of the seventeenth to eighteenth of August.’
Julia looked at the photo. ‘They disappeared?’
Daniel nodded. ‘Like all the others.’
The others?
‘Just hold on a sec.’ Julia gave him a sceptical look. ‘Are you trying to tell me that people vanish on the Sultan?’
‘Not just on the Sultan,’ Daniel replied, tapping his finger on the table top. ‘On all cruise ships. It’s a massive problem, but you won’t find a single word about it in any of the catalogues. Of course there aren’t any official statistics – this sort of thing mustn’t ever be made public – but at the last US Congress hearing the industry was forced to come clean. After much debate we admitted to the figure of 177 passengers disappeared without trace over the past ten years.’
One hundred and seventy-seven?
‘So many? What happened to them all?’
‘Suicide,’ Daniel said.
Her heart started beating faster and she felt her breathing getting more difficult.
‘That’s the official explanation, at least. And in most cases it’s true. Lisa’s liaison teacher is right. There’s no better place to commit suicide than a cruise ship. You don’t need razor blades, rope or tablets.’
Julia’s throat grew tighter.
Now do you understand why the two of you have got to get off that boat immediately?
‘Jump over the railings and it’s all done. No body. No witnesses. The perfect place to take your own life. Unnoticed on the high seas, preferably in the middle of the night; nothing can go wrong. At a little more than sixty metres, the impact alone is enough to kill you, and if not…’ Daniel said, assuming a pained expression, ‘then have fun with the propeller. The best thing of all is that your nearest and dearest don’t have to be shocked at the sight of your dead body.’
Julia glanced at the photo of Naomi and Anouk. Something in Daniel’s little performance didn’t quite fit.
‘Are you telling me that mother and daughter threw themselves overboard together?’ she asked him.
‘Obviously not hand in hand. In their cabin we recovered a cloth soaked in chloroform. Presumably Mrs Lamar put her daughter to sleep first and jumped once she’d thrown her overboard. It wouldn’t be the first time something like that has happened.’
Julia nodded. She remembered a television programme about cases where parents first killed their children before killing themselves, which was ostensibly such a frequent occurrence that in forensic medicine they’d come up with a specific term for it: murder-suicide. She tried to imagine what must go through a mother’s head who chose to murder her own daughter, but found she couldn’t. ‘One hundred and seventy-seven suicides?’ she thought out loud, still astonished by this unbelievably high figure.
Daniel nodded. ‘And those are just the ones we couldn’t keep quiet. Believe you me, the number of unknown cases is higher. Much higher.’
‘How high?’
‘If you take all cruise ships currently sailing across the globe, we estimate that each year an average of twenty-three people go overboard.’
Passenger 23!
Now she understood what Daniel was getting at.
‘Have you lost another one, then?’
We’ve got a Passenger 23!
‘No.’ Daniel shook his head. ‘That wouldn’t be a problem. We’re well used to covering up that sort of thing.’
Covering up?
‘Let me guess. It was something similar that almost cost you your job and your health back then.’
‘Yes,’ Daniel conceded frankly. ‘But this time the mess is far more complicated.’
The captain pointed at the photo of the sweet girl with the slightly sticking-out ears. ‘Anouk Lamar disappeared eight weeks ago. We stopped the ship, informed the coastal stations, spent $800,000 on a completely pointless search with boats and aircraft, declared her dead, organised the funeral with an empty coffin and put our hands deep into our pockets for hush money so that the media would report the story as a suicide, until we could finally shelve the case.’
Daniel took out a second photo from the black paper folder. Julia barely recognised the girl because she’d aged so much. Not physically, but emotionally. The confident expression in her dark eyes had given way to an uncanny emptiness. Anouk’s gaze was as lustreless as her hair. Her skin exhibited an unhealthy pallor, as if she hadn’t seen the sun in ages.
‘When was this photo taken?’ Julia asked anxiously.
‘The day before yesterday.’ A smile of desperation played on Daniel’s lips. ‘You heard me correctly. The girl cropped up again two nights ago.’