‘Don’t you want to talk about it?’
Sticking his bottom lip out defiantly and drawing his chin more tightly to his chest, Timmy shook his head.
‘Aren’t you having fun at school any more?’
His son shrugged.
Timmy was sitting at his little desk and scratching his knee beneath it.
‘Look, I don’t care about the five you got in Maths,’ Martin told his son.
This was just a symptom. One of many that had manifested themselves recently, such as Timmy’s unbelievable need for sleep. These days Nadja was barely able to get him out of bed in the morning, and he’d already had three lates in the register. Then he’d stopped playing tennis. Just like that. Martin and Nadja were not the sort of parents to force their child to do something, but the decision to give up from one day to the next had taken them by surprise. They thought he’d been happy and was desperate for the next season to start when he had a good chance of being selected to play for Berlin. If Timmy hadn’t been ten years old, Martin would have assumed that his odd behaviour was down to girl trouble. But there had to be another reason.
‘Have you got problems at school?’
Timmy looked up. Martin saw with horror how tired his son was. Almost as tired as he was.
‘No. Everything’s okay. No one’s making me eat doners, if that’s what you mean.’
At Timmy’s school, a ‘doner’ was a handful of leaves and mud that the strongest in the class gathered up to shove into the mouths of the weakest. Just because they could.
‘It’s because of you. Because you’re away so often, and with Mama…’ Timmy’s voice cracked. Martin could see how desperately hard he was trying not to cry in front of his father.
‘Hey, come here.’ He went over to him, kneeled beside the desk and put his arms around his son.
He could feel how much weight Timmy had lost since the gaps between their marital arguments had become so short they were now sustained fire.
‘When Mama and Papa row it’s got nothing to do with you. I hope you know that.’
Timmy nodded and sniffed.
‘It’s all my fault, big man. I’m away far too often. But I swear that’s going to stop. I’ve just got one more job to do, then I’m going to resign and find a job I can do from home. How does that sound?’
His son freed himself from their embrace. His face was writ with scepticism. It was evident that he didn’t believe the good news.
‘And then you’ll be with me all the time?’
‘Yes. I promise. I’ll come back soon and then we’ll be together forever.’
Martin gave Timmy a kiss on his forehead and tousled his hair.
Then he got up, went to the door and took his duffle bag that he’d already packed.
He opened the door to Timmy’s room and turned around again, as something had occurred to him.
‘I’m afraid I’ve lied to you, sweetie.’
Timmy, who hadn’t moved, nodded.
His tears had vanished. With a stony face he said, ‘I know, Papa. We’ll never see each other again.’
Timmy swallowed. ‘I’m going to die. Just like you, now.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes. You know. Water is ouch. And you’re falling into the…’
*
Water.
Hard.
Black.
The pain of impact wrenched Martin from his memory-filled unconsciousness. The sensation – as if a giant were tearing his spinal column from his back – shot upwards from his coccyx to his brain. At the same time, the deeper he sank, the greater the pressure in his ears.
Martin gasped for air, but not even water would flood into his lungs. His head was still stuck inside the bag. At least his arms were no longer like lead and he could free himself from it.
Disoriented, he thrashed about with his arms and legs. His boots hung like weights on his feet. His clothes would become a coffin if he didn’t get rid of them.
There was no hope in making it back to the surface with them on.
But do I want to make it back?
While his body was instinctively being guided by a survival programme, in his head Martin was already regretting having survived the fall.
You’re falling, he heard the dream voice of his son say, and thought of another Tim. Tim Sears, one of the few people to have survived a jump from a cruise ship. But he’d plunged twenty metres into the warm Gulf of Mexico after a booze-up. In the ice-cold Atlantic there’s no way Sears would have survived seventeen hours before being rescued.
Although… it wasn’t that cold. The electric shock that the killer had shot through Martin’s body must have reset the synapses in his nerve centre.
He couldn’t feel the thousands of pins sticking into his face. The water was cold, but not icy.
A warm current?
Martin thrashed around more frantically. Wore himself out.
Air, I need…
Air. Cold. Wet.
Suddenly the pressure in his ears was gone.
Martin’s head pushed through the surface of the water. He screamed for oxygen. And anticipated the worst: to be fully conscious on the choppy ocean in the middle of a black nothingness. Unable to see any lights. Neither those of the Sultan, which would have sailed on without anyone raising the alarm, nor those of the stars in the cloudy sky above him.
What he didn’t anticipate was the arm he knocked against. And the laughter he heard.
Then Martin was moved by a force he couldn’t explain. He felt a jolt and the water beneath his back turned hard.
And as the laughter rose in volume and a woman with a British accent and shrill voice said, ‘He must be as pissed as a fart,’ Martin stared up at the dark, hooded figure by the railings. Up to the faceless individual on the naturist deck who’d immobilised him with a taser and shoved a bag over his head, before dragging him over to the front end of the deck and hauling him over the railings, sending him five metres down into the Sultan’s outdoor pool.