She was missing for eight weeks?
Martin still couldn’t believe what he’d heard.
Obviously he knew that it wasn’t rare for people to go missing at sea.
In the period after Nadja’s and Timmy’s death he’d made a detailed study of every case over the past few years. They ran into dozens.
He’d frequented self-help groups, founded by relatives of ‘cruise victims’, spoken to lawyers who specialised in compensation cases against those responsible, and had tried to make the captain personally liable for the fact that the search operation had been as inadequate as the preservation of evidence in his wife’s cabin.
Until the unsuccessful action against the captain Daniel Bonhoeffer and the cruise line, some years after Nadja and Timmy’s disappearance, he’d kept up with every report about crimes on cruise ships. He then realised that his campaign against cruise lines was merely an attempt to anaesthetise the pain. Whatever he did, nothing was going to bring back his family. Once he’d accepted this fact he stopped following news reports about missing persons at sea. They’d lost all meaning for him, as had life itself. Which is why this was the first time he’d heard the name Anouk Lamar.
‘And now she’s reappeared out of the blue?’ he said, parroting back the words with which Gerlinde Dobkowitz had just finished a long monologue.
‘Yes. I saw it with my own eyes. It was at the end of my daily patrol, amidships in between decks 2 and 3. I was just turning a corner when I saw the scrawny creature running straight towards me, her head turned back as if fleeing from someone. I heard rapid footsteps, muffled by this metre-high carpet my wheelchair always sinks into like quicksand. Well, anyway, what’s important is that I saw Anouk stop to throw something into a brass bin affixed to the wall.’ As she spoke she went red in the face; the memory of the episode seemed to animate her.
‘After this she stayed exactly where she was, while I wheeled myself as fast as possible behind one of those elephantine flowerpots they use for planting on this boat. I managed to get out of the way just in time before the captain could see me.’
‘The captain.’
‘No idea what he was up to at that time of night, but he practically ran into the young girl. Here, take a look for yourself!’
Gerlinde took a mobile phone from her tracksuit trouser pocket and showed him a photo. It was dark and blurred. ‘Yes, I know. I’m no Helmut Newton with the lens.’ Gerlinde pursed her lips. ‘It needed a flash, but I didn’t want to be discovered. I really had to strain to get anything at all on camera through the foliage.’
‘Who else is that in the picture?’ Martin asked. Besides a girl and a tall man, the photo showed a third person standing between the two of them. She was barely bigger than Anouk and almost as thin.
‘That’s Shahla, such a kind soul. She cleans my cabin sometimes too. Shahla bumped into the other two after fetching a pile of vomit-soaked towels from the infirmary. It was a rough night.’
With her right hand Gerlinde simulated the movements of a rocking ship.
‘I’ll admit that when I took the photo I wasn’t sure exactly who the girl was. I only worked it out when I’d gone through my research files and came across Anouk’s missing-person photo. I knew at once that the girl needed urgent help. I mean, it was half past midnight, she was wearing nothing but a T-shirt and panties, and her eyes were puffy from sobbing. When the captain asked if she was lost she didn’t reply. Nor when he asked her where her parents were.’
‘You heard all of this?’
‘Do you think I’m in a wheelchair because I’m deaf? The plants may have blocked my sight, but not my ears. I also heard the captain warning Shahla pointedly not to tell anyone about this. Then they took the poor thing to Dr Beck in the infirmary. When they’d all gone I found this in the bin.’
Gerlinde pointed to the cuddly toy that Martin still held tightly in his left hand.
‘She threw it in there?’ Martin stared at the teddy, which weirdly looked both familiar and strange.
‘I swear it on the sweat of my compression stockings,’ Gerlinde declared, raising her right hand. ‘You recognise it, don’t you?’ Gerlinde didn’t say any more until he looked her in the eye. ‘That’s the teddy your son, Timmy, was clutching in the photos that appeared in the media, isn’t it?’
Martin nodded. Strictly speaking, only one magazine had reported on his family’s fate and printed Timmy’s photo, and not until a year after the tragedy under the headline ‘Lost – why are more and more people disappearing without trace on cruise ships?’
Gerlinde was astonishingly well informed.
‘And that was two days ago?’
‘Yes, on the Oslo–Hamburg leg.’
‘Does anyone know where Anouk has been hiding all these weeks?’
Gerlinde waggled her bony hand from side to side.
‘I don’t imagine so, given how agitated the captain was when I paid him a visit the following morning.’ She smiled mischievously.
‘He denied everything to begin with and tried to tell me that my beta blockers had been making me hallucinate. But when he saw the photo, the captain started sweating his arse off and ran straight to Yegor.’
‘Yegor Kalinin? The ship owner? Is he on board?’
‘He moved into the Maisonette Suite a fortnight ago in Funchal. Do you know him?’
Martin nodded. He’d come across him in court. Most people expect former members of the Foreign Legion of German–Russian descent to be total hulks, whereas in fact the fifty-seven-year-old, self-made millionaire who owned the second-largest fleet of cruise ships in the world looked more like an academic schoolmaster. Stooped, rimless glasses on a pointed nose, and hair receding behind the ears.
What’s he doing here on board?
‘In fact that’s how I got your mobile number,’ Gerlinde explained.
‘What?’
‘Yegor came to see me personally and told me some cock-and-bull story about how damaging a false rumour could be about passengers who vanish and then turn up again. He was trying to intimidate me. He handed me the file from the case you took out against him, with the comment that surely I didn’t want to let false accusations ruin me like they had like you, Herr Schwartz.’ Gerlinde gave a crooked smile. ‘He must have overlooked the fact that your private number was in the case notes. Because of this, it was he and that imbecile Bonhoeffer who first gave me the idea of contact—’
‘Bonhoeffer?’ Martin interrupted her in horror. ‘Daniel Bonhoeffer?’
The crook who hadn’t even thought it necessary to turn around?
‘Yes. Why have you turned as white as a sheet?’ It was impossible. Martin may have lost the case, but Bonhoeffer had been suspended after the incidents.
‘Yes, Daniel Bonhoeffer. The captain.’
A bolt shot through Martin’s skull, as if someone were stabbing his brain with a hot needle.
‘Oh, goodness me. Didn’t you know that he’d been reinstated?’ Gerlinde asked in dismay.
Martin didn’t say goodbye. Not to her, nor to the butler in the neighbouring room. He packed his duffle bag, stuffing the teddy into one of the outside pockets, and stormed out of the cabin with the same speed that the pain was spreading through his head.