‘Shahla was a man?’ Elena was growing more confused by the minute. She looked at Martin as if he’d grown a second nose.
Martin answered her in Shahla’s words that he read from the screen of the notebook:
When I refused the put the condom over my penis, she shouted at me that I was a loser. Useless. She said she didn’t love me, that she’d always wanted a girl rather than a smelly boy. She slapped me in the face and let me go away in tears, only to repeat the game the following day. At some point I gave in, put on the condom, and in time slept with her. All the while a single thought dominated my head: I wish I were a girl. I wish I were a girl.
During the sex, during my rape (it took me years to understand what she’d done to me) my personality split. My mind flew off into a girl’s body and stayed there, long after my mother had let me be. I no longer wanted to be the defiled boy, but the girl my mother had always wished for and who would have been spared all that if only I’d been born in the right body.
Four days after my eighteenth birthday my father sold his firm and not long afterwards he and my mother died when their private jet crashed.
The first thing I did with the fortune they left me was to have a sex change, which no responsible surgeon ought to have been allowed to carry out. But I bribed the examining psychiatrist, who certified me to be of perfectly sound mind. As you might imagine, the changes to my body didn’t relieve my emotional suffering. Without a penis, with shattered and reconstructed cheekbones, a more feminine nose and small breasts, I felt dirtier than I ever had in my mother’s arms.
In an online suicide forum, where I was researching suitable methods of suicide, I met by chance a thirteen-year-old girl who’d had similar experiences to me and whose suffering was still ongoing. Her mother forced her to masturbate in front of her.
She wrote that she was about to go on a cruise where she was planning to take her life. It was through this girl that I realised our mistake.
Why should we victims kill ourselves while the real criminals went on living?
That was ten years ago.
I signed up as a chambermaid on the ship where the girl was planning to leap to her death and made sure she survived the crossing. Unlike her mother. My first in a short series of victims.
Elena laid her hand comfortingly on Martin’s forearm and asked him to speak more slowly. Without knowing it he’d sped up with every line.
To begin with I was satisfied with numbing my victims and throwing them overboard. But over the years I learned to perfect my system. With a keen intelligence and above-average financial means I purchased the suicide forum called Easyexit that had put me on the right path, albeit by chance. Today it has offshoots all over the world; the website has local listings in thirty-two countries. It’s unbelievable how many people can’t bear to live on this planet any more. Millions of them.
And amongst them I find my traps. I proceed with great caution. When I learn that a child has been abused by their parents (it doesn’t matter whether it’s a boy or a girl) I use a chain of travel agents called Querky Travel – owned by me – to book passage for the child and parents, who of course know nothing of their ‘luck’. So I disguise the trip as a lottery win. This works in only a few instances – most are mistrustful when someone wants to give them something – which is why my success quota has remained very low.
Once, however, in the case of a German family, I was helped by chance.
Martin paused. Scrolled up, then down again, but couldn’t find any clue as to what to make of these words.
‘Why have you stopped?’ Elena asked. ‘Is there anything about your wife and son?’
‘No, unfortunately,’ Martin whispered.
Or perhaps thank God.
He cleared his throat and went on reading:
By now the rumour seems to have circulated on Easyexit that there’s a travel agency which organises the final passage for people who get what they deserve. I imagine this is why Justin Lamar contacted me. Am I right in thinking your father-in-law doesn’t seem to like you very much? He covered the costs of your trip. And offered a special commission if, rather than reeling off the normal programme, I made you suffer for your sins. Which is perfectly possible here on the Sultan, where the blue shelf provides the ideal space for it.
Let’s get a couple of things straight, Naomi.
I never put tapeworms into your food. And what you took to be bedbugs were harmless mites. I wasn’t intending to poison your body physically, but mentally. Just as my mother did to me. She didn’t hit me or insert any objects into me. But all the same she infected me with a virus that ate me from the inside out. Just as Anouk, to whom I’ve been a mother over these last few weeks, will continue to be devoured on the inside by what you did to her. And what you’re going to confess now.
He looked up from the screen. Elena stared at him agog.
‘Anouk was…’
Now the circle is closing. Now there’s a point to all this madness.
Nodding energetically, Martin skipped to the end of the document. To Naomi’s confession.