00.24 nautical time
50°27’N, 16°50’W
Speed: 21.5 knots, Wind: 18 knots
Swell: 10–15 feet
Distance from Southampton: 592 nautical miles
Martin Schwartz failed to notice the danger that approached him from behind. With his eyes closed, he was standing against the railings on the aft-port section of deck 17, the highest freely accessible outside area of the ship, allowing the powerful wind to blast his face. He could taste the salty air, but it seemed to be saturated with soporifics rather than oxygen.
With every breath he felt weaker and wearier, which may have also been down to the toothache that was still simmering on a medium flame in his upper jaw, while those PEP pills must also be discomforting him still. At least he hadn’t suffered any headaches for a while now.
He took a deep breath. Tasted the salt in the air.
Did you stand here too, Nadja, and contemplate death?
Martin bent over the railings and peered seventy-five metres down.
It was a moonless night. The seething crests of the waves were lit up solely by the ship’s outside headlights. He tried to imagine how it must feel to slam against the surface of the sea down below.
You can’t have wanted that death, Nadja. Nobody can want that.
Martin listened to the archaic swishing of the waves, the untamed wilderness separated from the luxuries of the Western world only by a few plates of metal.
And from rapists, traitors and murderers.
He lifted his head, felt the hypnotic effect of staring into black nothingness, all of a sudden able to understand that suction described by melancholic individuals when they felt drawn to the depths of the ocean.
The ocean, magnet for depressives.
But you weren’t depressive, Nadja.
He stood on the lowest strut of the railings, with one foot at first, then with both, trying to put himself in his wife’s shoes for her final seconds.
She’d been afraid of the darkness. The night when she apparently jumped must have been very murky. The clouds were low; it was foggy. They might not have even been able to see the water.
Martin’s thoughts turned to Timmy. As a young boy he’d pointed at the water and said, ‘Ouch!’ whenever they’d seen a lake, the seaside, or even a swimming pool. He’d barely been able to stand when Nadja explained to him how dangerous the water could be for a child. ‘Water is very big ouch!’ she’d told him time and time again, and even though every parent guide advised against using baby language wherever possible, this had worked. Timmy never lost respect for the wet element and he’d been the best swimmer in his class. How likely was it that a mother who loved children so much that she’d become a primary school teacher, would throw her own son on a foggy night into that very same ‘ouch’ she’d warned him about all his life?
‘Right, I’ve done it. Here I am again,’ Diesel announced, having first wanted to finish a round of his online game. ‘I just had to shoot down a helicopter first.’
For a moment Martin had completely forgotten that he’d rung him. Because of the wind he was wearing an earphone and could speak hands free. The Skype connection was astonishingly clear, given that he was in the middle of the Atlantic.
‘Is the doctor going to pull through?’ Diesel asked. Martin had sent him a short email with the outline of recent events, together with the passenger and crew lists that Bonhoeffer had provided him with.
‘I hope so,’ he said.
During the summer the platform he was now standing on functioned as a naturist area. In autumn this was the loneliest place out of doors, especially at night when the temperatures dropped to single digits. This is why Martin had chosen deck 17 for his night-time excursion. He’d wanted to be alone and ponder possible connections: the death of his family, the call from Gerlinde Dobkowitz, the raped girl, the new cuts on Anouk’s arm and the attack on Elena that could have just as easily got him.
When he realised his thoughts were going around in circles and he needed someone to help him, he’d called Diesel.
‘We won’t know more precisely for twenty-four hours,’ Martin said. ‘It’s not clear what triggered those damn swellings on her face. The ship’s laboratory doesn’t have the equipment to analyse what was in that grease on the floor of the anchor deck.’
‘So who looks after the doctor if the doctor’s unwell?’ Diesel asked. There was a hissing in the background. Diesel had warned Martin at the beginning of their conversation that he was about to warm a plate of ravioli on his Bunsen burner. The editor-in-chief didn’t think much of microwaves.
‘Jacques Gérard, her assistant,’ Martin said. ‘We’ve got to bring him into the loop. Dr Beck is currently in the room next door to Anouk on the quarantine station.’
Of course there were beds free in the official ship’s clinic, even some with a swing function that balanced out every wave movement, but just as in a casualty department these beds were only separated by curtains. No other passengers were in-patients yet on the Sultan; should that change the captain wanted to avoid at all costs a stranger getting a glimpse of the ship’s doctor in this state. And so Martin had carried the crumpled body of Dr Beck from the anchor deck to Hell’s Kitchen, where a weedy Frenchman with tortoiseshell glasses and a drooping mouth had immediately given Elena a huge injection of cortisone. At the very least this had removed the danger of suffocation. Now, seven hours later, the ship’s doctor still looked as if she’d been in a nasty street fight, but she was stable, if unresponsive.
‘Luckily your killer doesn’t seem to be an expert on poison doses,’ Diesel said.
Or maybe he was.
Martin doubted that the culprit had intended to kill the doctor or anyone else.
More likely he wanted to give them a demonstration of what he was capable of if they didn’t put an end to their investigation.
‘Whether it was a failure or planned that way, the attack tells us quite a lot about your adversary,’ Diesel said after Martin had shared his thoughts with him.
‘Such as?’
‘First, the man who raped the girl is still onboard the ship.’
Martin shrugged. ‘Which means he could be a crew member or a passenger.’
‘More likely crew, I’d say, because – secondly – he’s got access to the sealed-off areas.’
‘Locks, especially electronic ones, are easy for any amateur hacker to break,’ Martin disagreed.
‘Possibly. But the key question is: who knew that you were going to visit the anchor room?’
‘The captain, me…’ Martin thought about it. ‘And the technical manager who had to disable the lock.’
And maybe two hundred other people, depending on who Bonhoeffer’s been jabbering to.
‘What sort of techie is he?’
‘No idea.’
‘Then you ought to give him a good talking to, same with Gérard Depardieu.’
‘Jacques Gérard?’
‘That’s the fellow. I can’t imagine the assistant won’t get suspicious about where his boss has been all day. Check all men who could potentially be Anouk’s rapist; work out whether they’re intelligent and arrogant. After all – thirdly – the man in question was able to predict your movements and – fourthly – he obviously likes playing games with his victims.’
Which means your analysis can go straight in the bin, Martin thought.
Manipulative criminals were usually of above-average intelligence and, through the art of transformation, able to give their victims and the police the runaround. You could stand face to face with them and they’d be able to disguise their real personality with virtuosity. Depressives would wear permanent grins on their faces, while sadists acted tame. Besides, anyone who kept his victims hidden for weeks and tortured them was quite clearly a psychopath who couldn’t be identified by normal methods. And certainly not by amateur attempts at profiling.
‘And if I were you, I’d feel free to ask whoever it is you put your finger on about their mother.’
‘Why?’ Martin asked, slightly confused.
‘I’m not sure what it means; it’s just a feeling I get in my stomach. Do you know that? Sometimes it starts bubbling and you think you’re going crap your pants, but it turns out just to be wind.’
Rather than giving Martin any time to digest his revolting comparison, Diesel went straight on. ‘Right then, like you asked I’ve been researching other double cases of people missing at sea – where it’s not depressives travelling on their own with money, health or marriage problems, who in all likelihood jumped overboard of their own accord.’
‘And?’ Martin asked. ‘What did you find out?’
‘First of all, besides Timmy and Anouk, there aren’t other instances anywhere in the world where children have disappeared on a cruise ship. Not even a teenager who’s taken the golden plunge in the past ten years. When I think of all those balcony rails I mucked about on plastered when I was sixteen, I find that astonishing.’
It sounded as if Diesel was seeing how many ravioli he could stuff into his mouth at once, as the words that followed became ever more incomprehensible. ‘What’s more, no more than two people have vanished at any one time.’
Which makes the repetition of these cases on the Sultan even more suspicious.
‘But three times, on different liners, one parent of a family has disappeared. And what’s striking here is that each time it’s the woman who’s never been seen again. I’ll send you an email with the name and routes.’
‘Wait a minute.’ Martin ran his hand across his shaved head, on which a wafer-thin fuzz had grown in the last few days. ‘Does that mean there’s a serial offender targeting women?’
‘No idea. That’s something you’ve got to find out. I don’t have time to play Miss Marple for you. Now I’ve got to follow another trail.’
‘What trail?’
‘The fragrant trail of my girlfriend who’s just got back from work.’
‘Love to Ira,’ Martin said before severing the Skype connection.
*
He was wondering whether to pay a final visit to Anouk and Elena before retiring to his cabin when he heard a crack behind him and at the same time felt a painful stab in his side.
Martin was about to grab his hip, astonished that such a large insect could have stung him so far from the coast, and through a leather jacket too, when he found himself on the ground, unable to do anything but watch his feet hammering convulsively against the planks of the deck. Meanwhile it felt as if molten lava were being channelled into his body through the puncture site. Thinking he was burning internally, Martin wanted to scream, but this was rendered impossible by the darkness that suddenly surrounded his head. An elastic darkness that tasted of plastic, which flapped into his mouth when he tried to breathe in air.
Now Martin felt something beneath his arms wrenching him back to his feet. The attacker must have immobilised him with a taser, before shoving a bag over his head. Nothing else could be responsible for the situation he was in.
Martin felt his head crash against something hard, he heard himself retch, thought of Anouk and her toy computer, on which he would have now written ‘HELP’, in capitals and double underlined. Paradoxically the taste of spaghetti carbonara, Timmy’s favourite meal, was on his tongue and the smell of burned plastic in his nose; his eyes were streaming and he was thrashing around like a madman, but unfortunately without any control, and feebly.
All of a sudden something pressed against his stomach that felt like a rod.
The first wave of pain from the electrical charge subsided, which is why Martin realised his feet were losing contact with the ground.
The pressure of the rod against his stomach became more intense when he staggered forwards.
He heard someone cough and thought it was himself to begin with, but that was impossible.
I’ve got my mouth full of bag.
His arms began to tingle, as if they’d been in the freezer and were now gradually thawing. As Martin tried to tear the plastic from his head his hands hit the object pressing into his stomach, and at that very moment he understood what was happening to him.
The parapet! he yelled inside his head. All his mouth could do was force out an agonised grunt.
I’m hanging over the parapet!
On his stomach, bent forwards, as he could tell from the slowly increasing pressure in his head.
Paddling backwards with his arms, Martin was able to grab the handrail and brake his forwards movement. His fingers clawed into the wood. He got a splinter beneath his thumbnail and thought he was hanging upside down, the rod now pressing against his thigh.
‘Ouch,’ he heard his wife’s voice, mingling with Timmy’s, although it had been so long since he last heard his son that he barely remembered it.
‘Water is very big ouch!’
He felt his own weight pulling him down, pressing against his wrists. Felt another stab, this time in the back. Felt his elbows double up.
His fingers come away.
He felt himself fall.