Daniel hung up, taken aback by the ship owner’s reaction. Kalinin had sounded really tired at first, as if he’d just been woken from sleep, even though it was still broad daylight outside. Then Yegor didn’t seem surprised in the slightest, as if he’d been waiting for the news that one of his officers had been shot dead. It was only during his angry outburst at the end of their conversation that he’d sounded normal again.
‘Who knows about this love nest here?’ Schwartz asked, shaking a locked fitted cupboard beside the bed by the handle. The presence of a corpse and the accompanying stench seemed to bother the investigator far less than it did the captain.
Daniel looked at the bolted cabin door. He just wanted to get away from this stinking, windowless hole as quickly as possible.
‘Almost two thousand people,’ he replied. ‘All the employees plus a handful of passengers who engage in a little holiday flirt with a member of staff.’
And don’t want to play out their adventure in their own cabin because there’s usually a cuckolded partner waiting for them there.
‘And do you have an idea of who uses this nest.’ There was a crack and Martin had the metal handle in his hand.
Bonhoeffer massaged his stiff neck. ‘No. As I said, this room doesn’t exist officially. Which means you can’t reserve the nest either. There’s no visitor rota or anything like that.’
‘But someone must have coordinated the allocation and handover of the key?’
‘Yes, and I’ll give you three guesses who the management suspect.’ Without looking at it, Bonhoeffer pointed to the corpse at their feet. The ship pitched heavily and he felt terribly sick. His stomach contracted like a bagpipe, squeezing its acidic contents back up his gullet.
He suggested they continue their conversation elsewhere, but the detective was using the metal handle as a lever to force open the cupboard.
There was a crack and the plywood door was left hanging from one hinge. Soon afterwards it had been ripped off altogether.
So much for Yegor’s order to leave everything as it was.
‘Well, well, what do we have here?’ Schwartz muttered as he took a little plastic case from the cupboard.
It was slightly larger than a piece of hand luggage, with lots of stickers on the front and back, some badly effaced. Most of them were flags, symbols or maps of places this case had probably journeyed to. The colour of the case (pink) and the palm-sized sticker of a boyband on one of the side pockets suggested that its owner was young and female.
‘Wouldn’t you rather we looked at this in my cabin?’ Daniel said, barely able to hold back whatever it was trying to find its way out of his stomach. But Schwartz ignored him. With rapid hand movements he opened the zip and flapped the lid to one side.
‘Anouk,’ he said. Daniel wasn’t sure whether this was a hunch or a certainty. He saw typical girls’ clothes, tidily packed, filling every centimetre of the case. Skirts, underwear, tights and – right on top of the pile – a drawing pad and pencil case.
But that’s absurd, he thought.
‘Anouk can’t have been hiding here the whole time.’
Schwartz shook his bald head. ‘I can’t imagine it either. Unless the staff haven’t used this love nest for a couple of months.’
My arse.
It was only three weeks ago that Daniel’s first officer had been bragging about how he’d had it off with a cook here. He himself had never had any truck with the nest, but he’d certainly have got wind of the uproar there’d have been if cabin 2186 had been out of action for any length of time.
‘What’s that?’ Daniel asked, pointing at the back of the case lid. He might have been mistaken, but in the inside netting wasn’t that a…
‘A torch,’ Schwartz said, pulling it out.
So it was.
The thing was narrow, with a light-blue shiny metallic casing. And it looked exactly the same as the one they’d found on Anouk.
Schwartz turned the switch at the end of the handle and the weak beam on this torch was hard to see with the naked eye too.
‘A dim light with empty batteries?’ Daniel asked. His bafflement at least mitigated the feeling of sickness. And the confusion only grew when Schwartz found another torch, wrapped up in a sock, in a side compartment. This one didn’t work any better either.
What does that mean?
An abducted girl, two broken torches?
Daniel couldn’t make any sense of the discovery. Unlike Schwartz. All of a sudden he grabbed the pencil case and rummaged inside. When he seemed to have found what he was looking for, Schwartz slapped his forehead like someone who’s overlooked something obvious. Then he turned the switch of the torch again, and yet again, and each time he gave a soft sigh, even though Daniel couldn’t notice the slightest difference.
No bright light.
Nothing that might give him a flash of inspiration.
‘What have you found?’ he asked the detective.
Schwartz clenched the torch handle tightly, now holding it like a baton just before the transfer to the next runner.
‘I know what’s going on,’ he said flatly. The detective strode past Bonhoeffer, climbed over the body and yanked open the cabin door.