‘The blue shelf?’
Daniel Bonhoeffer was closing the connecting door to his bedroom, where he’d just been checking on Julia, when his mobile rang. The sedative was no longer working. When she wasn’t screaming at him, she was prowling up and down the room like a tiger and punching the fitted cupboards.
‘Yes, it’s between decks B and C, amidships beside the control rooms. But what the hell do you want there?’
In your state?
Elena didn’t answer him. Either she’d hung up or the connection had been lost. Daniel couldn’t understand either.
His fiancée was sick. She ought to be in bed rather than taking a stroll to the lower decks that housed the monster she was going to visit with Martin Schwartz.
The blue shelf.
A rather cynical description of a machine dating from a time when environmental protection was the expensive hobby of eccentric do-gooders and rubbish was still disposed of on the high seas. The Sultan was one of the first large luxury liners to have its own on-board water treatment and waste incineration plant. But the ship hadn’t been launched with it. In the first three years of the Sultan’s career, when not even all European ports were skilled at recycling and separating waster, rubbish for which there were no or only overpriced delivery points was officially dumped in the sea.
The rubbish was first squashed in a shaft-like, circular press and then thrust into the sea as lumps weighing several tonnes.
Into the blue shelf.
The machine which used to dump the rubbish and which owed its name to its polluting activity, was located in the place he’d just described to Elena: the blue shelf.
Wait, of course…
Daniel pressed a speed-dial button on his desk telephone, but before he was connected to the MCR, the machine control room, a livid Julia stormed out of the bedroom behind him.
‘Hey, Julia, wait…’ He hung up again to stop his friend from leaving, but she was already at the door.
‘Don’t touch me!’ she hissed angrily when he tried to grab her arm. She was wearing the white dressing gown he’d put her in yesterday. Her hair stuck to her temples like seaweed. Overnight her face seemed to have got narrower, while her body didn’t fill the towelling dressing gown, as if she’d been shrunk by fear, worry and despair.
‘Julia, please. Stay here. Where do you think you’re going?’
‘Away,’ she said. ‘Away from the man who wouldn’t help me save my daughter’s life.’
‘Julia, I understand…’
‘No. You don’t understand. You don’t have any children. You’ve never had any. You’ll never understand me,’ she hurled at him before throwing open the door and disappearing into the corridor.
Daniel, upset by her bitter, hostile accusations, didn’t react and let her go.
As if in a daze he returned to his desk where the phone was ringing. He slowly picked up the receiver.
‘It’s Rangun here from the MCR. Did you just try to call us, Captain?’
He nodded. Tried to concentrate. ‘Yes. I just wanted to find out whether the blue shelf is still connected.’
Officially the dumping machine had been out of service for five years. But unofficially it had never been disconnected from the electricity supply in case the waste incinerator conked out again and there was a refuse problem on a lengthy passage. At any rate nine tonnes of solid rubbish were produced on the Sultan every day, in addition to 28,000 litres of sludge. Every single day!
‘Theoretically, captain, yes,’ the technical officer replied.
Daniel knew the man. With his falsetto voice, on the phone he sounded like a woman. In the ship’s choir he sang a bright soprano at the Christmas festivities, although no one made fun of him because what Rangun’s voice lacked in masculinity was more than made up for by his trained body.
‘Theoretically? What does that mean?’
‘As was recommended, we didn’t disconnect the rubbish press from the electricity supply, but it hasn’t been service in a long time. I’m not sure it’s still fit for purpose.’
Daniel suspected that the engineer might be surprised at the topic of their conversation, but his lower rank prevented him from asking direct questions, and Daniel had no intention of sharing his hunch with the man: that there couldn’t be a better place for hiding someone for months on end.
Or for getting rid of them!
The blue shelf had a floor which, at the push of a button, opened up in the middle and retracted into the walls until the shaft was no more than a bottomless tube through which the press could push the squashed refuse straight into the water. ‘Can you switch it off?’ he asked Rangun.
‘Not from here. It’s not wired up to the new control system. But it’s possible to cut the circuit over there. Do you want me to take a look?’
‘No, wait. I’ll come to you.’
Another witness; that was all they needed!
Daniel hung up, grabbed his captain’s hat from the desk, hurried to the exit, opened the door…
… and found himself staring into the barrel of a revolver.