This time it had taken more than an hour, two aspirins and three ibuprofen before the attack was over.
Martin sensed that a residue of pain still lingered in his head, like a heap of smouldering embers just waiting to flare up again. The skin over his skull felt taut, as if he’d had sunburn, and his mouth was dry.
Bloody pills.
He was just crossing the Grand Lobby when he realised that it was his mobile that had been ringing so insistently the whole time. His standard ringtone was a guitar riff, which is why he hadn’t responded to the futuristic plinking and bleeping coming from his trouser pocket. Here out in the Atlantic, hundreds of nautical miles from the coast of Europe, the mobile network was currently unavailable; someone was evidently trying to phone him via the internet.
He stopped beside the glass lifts at the edge of the circular lobby adorned with columns, and looked at his phone. Indeed. A Skype call.
The display showed the photo of Saddam Hussein and so it wasn’t hard for Martin to identify the caller. He knew only one person who found the weekly changing photos of dictators in his contact profile funny.
He answered the call with the words, ‘I can’t at the moment.’
‘I’m not interested in your irregular bowel movements,’ Clemens Wagner replied with an audible grin. For an informer he took quite a lot of liberties, but the eccentric with his dyed, platinum-blond hair and flame tattoos on both forearms could allow himself these. When it came to getting background information there was scarcely anyone better than Diesel. A nickname the nutter owed to his pyromaniac tendencies.
‘Found anything out for me yet?’ Martin asked. Surprised, he looked up. The lifts were stuck between decks 5 and 7, so he opted for the stairs.
‘No, I’m calling you because I miss your voice so much.’
Diesel’s main job was as editor-in-chief of 101Punkt5, a private radio station in Berlin. Martin had got to know him through a colleague he was vaguely acquainted with. Her name was Ira Samin, an outstanding police psychologist, who’d saved a number of lives by negotiating after hostages were taken in a spectacular operation at Diesel’s radio station. The editor-in-chief, as gutsy a man as he was crazy, had been a great help to her with his unorthodox methods, and after some hesitation, had accepted Martin’s offer to earn a little extra cash as a private researcher.
Most people think that police investigations consist mainly of office work, and they’re basically right. In times of scant resources and staff shortages, however, work is increasingly farmed out to private individuals. Diesel was put on a list of unofficial employees as a researcher, and just prior to his meeting with Dr Beck, Martin had emailed him with the confidential request to supply him with information about Anouk Lamar and her family.
‘I haven’t got much,’ Diesel said. ‘Cruise companies aren’t exactly WikiLeaks informants. All I know so far is that Anouk is a single child. Highly intelligent, went to a school for gifted pupils. The result of her IQ test she took in year 5 was 135. She learns languages quicker than a computer; apparently she’s fluent in five others apart from English. And she came second in a national memory championship. Intelligence is in her genes. When she was only seventeen, her mother developed a computer programme that allowed share prices to be predicted by observing fish schooling. Before her death Naomi Lamar worked as a professor of evolutionary biology at a private university.’
Martin approached the left side of a huge marble staircase which, together with its sister flight, rose from the lobby to a floor with luxury boutiques. A considerable number of passengers who passed through the foyer, or had sat down in one of its classy leather armchairs for an early drink, were holding a mobile phone or camera. With the golden handrail, the antique vases on the pillars and a tastefully illuminated fountain in the middle, the steps of the Grand Lobby were a popular subject for photographs.
‘What do we know about the father?’
‘Theodor Lamar? Civil engineer, built rollercoasters for amusement parks around the world. Died prematurely of cancer three years ago. You don’t have to worry that he’s hiding on your boat with a cleaver.’
‘How do we know all this?’
Martin recalled an extraordinary case in which a man with memory loss, who’d been declared dead years earlier, had been arrested at the scene of a murder.
‘Because there was a forensic post-mortem examination,’ Diesel said. ‘Requested by the paternal grandfather, Justin Lamar. He was intending to sue the hospital because his son Theo had behaved strangely after the cancer operation.’
‘Strangely?’
‘He wasn’t breathing any more.’
‘Malpractice?’
‘According to Grandpa Lamar, yes. But I wouldn’t set too much store by his statement.’
‘Why not?’
Diesel sighed. ‘The grandfather’s got a screw loose. Officially he lives in an old people’s home, but it would be more accurate to describe it as a pensioners’ loony bin. There are regular protests by local residents because for some unfathomable reason that straitlaced lot in their fancy neighbourhood don’t want crazed coffin-dodgers sitting stark naked on the swings in their front gardens, which apparently happens all the time. Justin is less of an exhibitionist. His party trick is ringing the police.’
Martin had reached the top of the stairs and was checking out the display windows from the balustrade corridor.
Gucci, Cartier, Burberry, Louis Vuitton, Chanel.
The prices resulted in substantially fewer passengers on this level. Not even a dozen guests were wandering along the dark-red carpet. A family of three with a pram, two veiled women, a few staff members. He turned right to the corridor that led to the Sultan’s very own on-board planetarium. ‘Anouk’s grandfather rang the police?’ he asked Diesel.
‘On several occasions. The Annapolis Sentinel, a free local rag, ran a report on it. Shortly after Anouk and Naomi disappeared, Grandpa Justin called them to say they could abandon their search for his granddaughter. He’d chatted to her for half an hour on the phone, he claimed. She’d sounded jolly and was fine.’
‘Yeah, right.’
Jolly.
Martin couldn’t help think of the horrific injuries Anouk had sustained. Her dead eyes, the expression of her shredded soul. Even if the culprit had forced her to make the call (for whatever perverse reason) there’s no way the girl could have sounded jolly, and certainly not for half an hour.
‘Anouk’s grandfather seems to be a very special person,’ he said, thinking of Gerlinde. What a great pair the two of them would make.
‘You can say that again. He’s quoted in the article: Naomi’s not worth the bother. The sharks will rip the teeth out of that whore who fucked the cancer into my son’s body. Although whore and fucked are not spelled out in full – prudish Yanks.’ Diesel clicked his tongue. ‘But this is why I was calling you. Don’t you find it strange that a man who hates his daughter-in-law that much should pay for the trip?’
‘Was that in the paper too?’ Martin asked, puzzled.
Justin Lamar paid for the cruise?
‘No, it’s what the grandfather claims in his online blog. No joke – he started it up aged eighty-two. The old man updates it every week with new crackpot observations. They range from UFO sightings, human experiments in his home and tips for canine hypnosis.’
Martin stopped in his tracks when he suddenly saw him there.
Bonhoeffer!
As Elena had said, the captain must be on the way to his officers’ meeting, which was being held in the three-hundred-seater ocean planetarium.
‘I’ll call you back,’ Martin said quietly. Daniel was walking around twenty metres ahead of him, accompanied by two colleagues in white uniforms.
‘Fine, but not before ten, please. You know how I like getting up early. Just not in the morning.’
Martin was about to hang up when something occurred to him. ‘Hang on a sec, seeing as you’re on the line…’
‘You want me to water your plants? Forget it!’
‘Please find out how many missing-person cases there have been at sea over the last ten years where more than one person has vanished.’ He asked him to look particularly at cases where children were involved. ‘Not just on the Sultan, but all ships. And then check whether there are any overlaps between passenger and staff lists.’
Martin heard noises that reminded him of a pinball machine, but was not surprised. Diesel’s office in the radio tower on Potsdamer Platz looked like an amusement arcade, with games of skill and gambling machines in every corner. Quite often Diesel would play them during important meetings or phone conversations.
‘Anything else important you found out?’ Martin asked.
‘Oh, yes. I’m glad you asked. I almost forgot. Just one more thing.’
‘What?’
‘That you’re a complete idiot. You shouldn’t be on that ship. After Nadja and Timmy’s death the Sultan is the last place on earth you ought to be. And I’m a real arsewipe for having encouraged you to undertake your odyssey.’
‘You’re too hard on yourself,’ Martin said, before putting his mobile away.
He walked faster and caught up with the captain who, as the last person behind three female officers, was just about to close the entrance to the planetarium.
Martin’s footsteps were muffled by the carpet; Bonhoeffer didn’t hear him coming. The captain suspected nothing as he kicked away the holder of the heavy entrance door. Martin grabbed him by the collar and pulled him back as the door closed slowly.
‘Hey, what’s—’ a shocked Bonhoeffer asked.
He didn’t get any further. The first blow to the stomach took the captain’s breath away. The second broke his nose.