Anouk was back in her own world. She’d put one foot in front of the other as if mechanically, apparently feeling neither Martin’s arm supporting her nor Elena’s hand leading her. Out of the cathedral, through the control rooms, back up the steps to Hell’s Kitchen, where she now lay back in her bed, self-absorbed, but her eyes open, staring at the ceiling. Stoical, with a dispassionate expression, refusing to answer any of the questions that he and Elena had put to her in turn.
‘But why?’
‘Why did you do that?’
‘Why did you kill your mother?’
Because since losing consciousness Elena had barely been able to stand, Martin accompanied her back to her sickroom, where they now sat face to face across a small dining table.
Martin did indeed find his mobile again in the bathroom. Now it lay before them on the shining matt Resopal top, beside the open laptop which Elena had used to save his life. Blood still stuck to one side, in the spot where it had struck Shahla’s head.
As far as Martin was concerned it was okay that they hadn’t managed to reach the captain till now. The news they had to pass on was devastating. And seeing as Shahla was dead and Naomi couldn’t possibly have survived her fall, there was nothing they could do until their arrival at New York except take Anouk into safekeeping again and try to question her. The first they’d already done. The second was likely to be fruitless.
Moreover, he and Elena needed time to resolve all the questions that had been plaguing them ever since they’d discovered who was behind Anouk’s abduction and her mother’s torture.
To begin with they hadn’t been able to make head or tail of it. Their minds couldn’t progress beyond the question of how Anouk could have been raped by a woman.
All they had to aid their quest for the truth was the weapon that had killed the culprit.
The laptop.
Martin had opened it without any great expectations, merely curious as to why Shahla had been carrying it in a bucket when she attacked him. He’d assumed that the computer would be damaged by the blow to her head and by having been dropped. But the laptop was still in perfect working order. When he flipped up the lid Martin came across the exchange between torturer and victim. At first glance it appeared as if Shahla had been conducting a sort of perverted voyeuristic conversation with Naomi.
‘She wanted Anouk’s mother to confess to the worst thing she’d ever done in her life.’
‘Why?’ Elena croaked. She sounded as if she’d been screaming her heart out at a rock concert, although she wasn’t mumbling any more. Once again the shock had strange consequences. The fact that she was responsible for someone’s death, even if that individual had probably been a psychopath, had loosened her tongue but irritated her vocal chords.
‘Because Naomi was only allowed to die if Shahla was satisfied with the confession.’
Martin, who’d already skimmed the beginning of the text, gave Elena a brief summary of what Anouk’s mother had admitted to the chambermaid.
‘Good God. Is there any sort of hint as to why Shahla did that?’
‘Yes, there is.’
He tapped his finger on the screen.
‘Naomi asked Shahla who she was, and to begin with the answer was slightly cryptic, in the style of a fairy tale, making a few points that Naomi would barely be able to compute. Then Shahla became more concrete. Here.’
Martin read out the relevant passage:
I was eleven when I was abused for the first time. My father was away on business; he was the managing director of a Pakistani electronics firm that would later be sold to Microsoft. But when I was a child my dad spent more time on aeroplanes than at home with us.
I had everything a child could wish for. A house in an area with security guards, our evergreen garden shut off from the hardship of normal people that we only ever saw when the chauffeur bypassed the traffic jams on the way to our private school. Then we would peer through the tinted windows of our limousine at the ordinary houses where people lived who’d never be able to afford the mobiles and computers that my dad made.
My life as a young teenager consisted of ballet, golf and English lessons. And sex.
Or ‘cuddling’, as my mum called it.
‘Her mother?’ Elena interrupted him in disbelief. She was so unsettled she bit her bottom lip.
‘Yes,’ Martin confirmed. ‘Apparently it wasn’t the father who abused Shahla.’
Most people would find that unimaginable. But as a detective Martin knew that the sexual abuse of children by their mothers, although a taboo subject, wasn’t completely uncommon. According to estimates, ten per cent of all sexual abusers were women. Children’s organisations spoke of much higher unreported figures, as only very few victims ever took action against their mothers and, if they did find the courage to do so, would come up against the same disbelief shown by Elena:
‘Shahla was raped by her mother? How’s that possible?’
‘She describes it a little later. Here…’
Martin scrolled down three paragraphs.
Mummy knew what she was doing and what she demanded of me was wrong. Whenever my father was away for a period of time she came to ‘comfort’ me, as she called it. I didn’t think anything of it to begin with. I even liked it. The way she stroked and caressed me felt nice. But later her hands started to wander, her fingers touched me in places I found embarrassing. She said it was okay. And that she would kiss me down there. It would help me grow up, she said. A perfectly normal occurrence between a mother and her child. But then she got pushier. When she forced me to put on the condom…
‘Wait. A condom?’ Elena asked, now even more incredulous. Her voice was squeaking with tension.
Martin, who’d already read the next couple of sentences, was able to explain the apparent contradiction.
‘In this exchange of messages, Shahla describes her own experiences of abuse to extract a confession from Anouk’s mother,’ he told Elena. ‘And now she reveals another bombshell.’ He grabbed his throat, which had just started to constrict. ‘We’ve already heard that it was the mother rather than father who jumped into bed with her. Now Shahla tells Naomi’ – he cleared his throat – ‘that she was born a boy.’