Two weeks later
Internal Investigations
Berlin
The fan on the air conditioning unit, which was currently switched to heating mode, rattled as if a leaf had got caught up in it. Given that the interrogation room was in a soundproofed basement at least two kilometres from the nearest tree, this would have been rather surprising. It was much more likely that the humming box was on its last legs.
Martin was expecting a loud bang at any moment, to announce that the ancient thing below the ceiling had finally gone out of service.
Over the last few hours while he’d been attached to the lie detector, the unit had provided the room with warm air to some extent, but it stank of burned rubber.
‘Shall we take a break?’ his interviewer said, leaning back in her swivel chair. She’d been introduced to him as Dr Elizabeth Klein. Apparently she’d worked for years at the Federal Intelligence Service, where she’d developed a reputation as an interrogation expert, specialising in psychopathic serial killers. At first glance, however, she looked more like the spiritual course leader of an esoteric self-help group. All items of her clothing shimmered in every tone of orange imaginable, from the cardigan she’d knitted herself to the voluminous culottes.
‘No,’ Martin replied, removing the patches from his arm and chest. ‘We’re not going to take a break. We’re going to finish here.’
Against expectation Dr Klein nodded. ‘So you’ve got nothing more to tell us?’
‘Apart from the fact that anyone who contradicts my version of events can kiss my arse?’ Martin put a finger to the corner of his mouth and pretended to think. ‘No.’ He shook his head.
Dr Klein gazed at one of the many bangles on her right arm, twiddled it and nodded. When she looked back up at him there was a wise expression in her eyes.
No sympathy, please. I can’t cope with sympathy now.
Martin cleared his throat and asked whether he might get up. Dr Klein sighed. ‘Alright. Of course, we’re a long way off concluding this internal investigation. You must know how long it takes when an officer is caught up in a homicide.’
She gave him the hint of a smile.
‘But I can tell you now that for the most part your statements concur with the information we’ve received from the captain, the doctor, this’ – she leafed through a slim file in front of her – ‘this Tiago Álvarez character and Gerlinde Dobkowitz.’
‘Fantastic.’ Martin rubbed his cold hands. ‘Was I able to convince the technology too?’
He pointed first at the camera in the ceiling, then at the laptop between them, on which the lie detector had recorded his vital signs during his statement.
The interrogator wiggled her hand from side to side.
‘According to the polygraph you seem to be telling the truth. Apart from…’
Martin raised his eyebrows. ‘Apart from what?’
She gave him a long stare. Then she took a tissue from one of the many pockets in an item of clothing – now Martin couldn’t be sure whether it was a pair of culottes or wraparound dress.
She blew her nose, stood up, went over to the security camera and pulled out a cable that ran directly from the wall into the device.
‘Let’s talk privately, Herr Schwartz.’
She looked down at him like a vulture targeting its prey. Martin eyed her sceptically as she returned to the desk.
‘The machine didn’t show any striking fluctuations,’ she said. ‘In any event, where you pieced together from hearsay all those things you weren’t personally witness to, polygraphic assessment isn’t much use. But at one point…’ She turned the laptop to face him. ‘Here you start to sweat and your heart rate shoots up. Even without the camera, I also detected various microexpressions that signalled to me you weren’t telling the truth.’ She showed him a section of graph where the waves looked like the ECG of someone on the verge of cardiac arrest.
‘What was I saying then?’ Martin asked, even though he had a very good idea.
‘You were basically telling Dr Beck that you hadn’t seen anything in Shahla Afridi’s notes referring to your son’s fate.’
Martin nodded.
‘That was a lie, wasn’t it?’
He swallowed deeply, but didn’t say anything.
‘Herr Schwartz, it won’t change my assessment one bit. As far as I can see, you’ve not done anything wrong except take absence without leave. I’m only interested privately in what you found out about Timmy and Nadja.’
Oh, really? Are you? Why? For a bit of sensationalism, perhaps?
Looking into her good-natured eyes he knew he was being unfair on her.
‘The video that Bonhoeffer showed you. Where you see them jumping from the ship,’ she insisted. ‘You know now why the larger shape went first, followed by the smaller one, don’t you?’
Martin gave a terse nod. He’d learned the truth three days following Shahla’s death, after the Sultan had berthed in New York and the FBI had taken up the investigation. By that point Daniel’s men had already located the secret place near the blue shelf where the chambermaid had hidden Anouk for the last few weeks, and which had also been Lisa’s hiding spot during the night she faked her suicide. In the bare, container-like room, which had been used to store recyclable metal and other raw materials before the waste dumping facility was decommissioned, they’d found a mattress, a banana crate that had served as a bedside table and a metal shelf unit screwed into the wall with books, children’s games, puzzles, cuddly toys and even an iPad full of films, e-books and computer games.
Besides the multimedia content, FBI technicians discovered in the browser a link to a cloud server where Shahla had stored personal documents. After they’d managed to crack the code, they came across a diary entry relating to the day when Timmy and Nadja died. In a break during questioning, the chief FBI investigator had left Martin alone with an extract from the diary.
Just like this internal investigation by Dr Klein, the FBI also came to the conclusion that although Schwartz was an important witness, he wasn’t a suspect and so should be allowed to return to Germany along with Julia and Lisa Stiller, on condition that he make himself available for further questioning. Letting him see the diary entry was probably a favour from the FBI investigator, seeing as Martin wasn’t only a colleague, he’d also proved highly cooperative throughout questioning.
For five whole minutes Martin had read over and over again the few lines Shahla had written, so often that they clung to his memory like leeches, and he could still recite them verbatim in his mind:
I often wonder whether it was chance or destiny that helped me with this German family. During dinner I was about to do the turn-down when I caught the mother in her cabin, indecently assaulting her son. She was lying naked on top of him, and wasn’t able to wriggle off quickly enough.
That was five years ago. Her name was Nadja Schwartz.
When Martin read this for the first time he had to laugh. A paradoxical reaction of his mind, which really ought to have made him scream. He recalled sensing that he was getting a bad nosebleed, but his nose remained dry. Instead he heard a loud, high-pitched buzzing, which didn’t signal a headache this time, but split into two voices. One of them, a deep, calm and pleasant voice, whispered confidentially in his ear that he shouldn’t believe what he was reading. That Shahla was a liar. The other one emitted a shrill, hoarse yell and uttered a single word: condom!
It took Martin back to the day five years ago, before the cruise, before his last mission, when he’d come home early from the meeting. He’d never found out who his wife’s lover was, the man who’d left the condom in his bed.
Unrolled, but unused.
But now, when he thought of how he’d met Nadja, everything took on a different meaning. In casualty with the black eye that her boyfriend had given her. Not out of jealousy, as she’d claimed. But because she actually had got too close to the man’s son.
Martin couldn’t help thinking back to his last conversation with Timmy too: ‘Don’t you want to talk about it?’
The last conversation between father and son, which essentially wasn’t about the five in Maths, nor the unusual increase in his need for sleep and why he’d suddenly stopped wanting to play tennis.
The signs of abuse.
What had been Timmy’s answer back then?
‘It’s because of you. Because you’re away so often, and with Mama…’
… with Mama, who saw in her young son a substitute partner? Just as Shahla’s mother had done?
The deep voice whispered that he was wrong, but it became ever softer.
And after Martin had thrown up for the third time, the hoarse voice didn’t have to bellow so loudly to convince him that there was no reason why Shahla, who could never have anticipated that her diary would fall into his hands, should have lied when writing it. Particularly as these lines shed light on the mystery as to why Nadja had fallen overboard first.
And then Timmy!
Shahla had written:
When I saw the mother with her son I flipped out. In a blind fury I grabbed the nearest object, a heavy desk lamp, and hit the woman over the head. She lost consciousness immediately; perhaps she was dead. Her son ran into the bathroom and locked himself in. What was I to do? It was a messy situation. If I hadn’t lost it, I’d have been able to deliver the punishment much more cleanly on another occasion. But now I was forced to dispose of the mother’s body at once. Luckily the weather was bad that night and there was a large sea swell. Besides, it wouldn’t be in the cruise line’s interest to try to prove an act of violence by video analysis. Suicide is better for a shipping company’s image than having a serial killer on board, which is why I didn’t hesitate for long before throwing Mrs Schwartz overboard. Unfortunately her son had by now left the bathroom and was watching me. When he saw his mother fall over the railings he ran to the balcony, right past me, climbed the parapet… and leaped after her.
First the large shadow.
Then the small one.
Here in the interrogation room, Martin had great difficulty not bursting out into a crying fit, similar to the one he’d had when he read the diary extract and understood for the first time the full implication of Shahla’s account.
Timmy loved his mother. In spite of everything.
Just as the battered wife stops the police from arresting the husband who beats her, Timmy’s love for his mother and fear of losing her was much greater and stronger than his fear of further abuse.
Tears shot into Martin’s eyes, which did not go unnoticed by Dr Klein.
‘Don’t you want to talk about it?’ she asked.
Talk about what? he thought.
That there are mothers who abuse their children? And children who love their parents in spite of everything?
Until death.
‘Let me guess,’ the interrogator said. ‘The truth you now know is so horrendous that you don’t care about your own life.’
‘I felt like that before.’
‘Was that the reason?’
‘The reason for what?’
‘That you jumped in after Lisa?’
Martin closed his eyes.
He briefly felt the impact again, twenty metres down, as a result of which he’d broken his foot. Elena had splinted it with an elastic bandage, which was why he was now limping.
He’d felt as if he’d jumped into a saucepan, except that the foaming water lapping above his head had burned like thousands of pins. Pins of ice, which sucked all strength from his body almost the very moment that the Atlantic had him in its claws.
‘I haven’t given it a thought,’ Martin said, and if he’d still been wired up to the lie detector this would have registered that he was telling the truth. He’d just jumped, a reflex, without making any conscious decision.
Lisa had come off worse. When she hit the water she broke her hip and dislocated her left shoulder. Thank goodness, because she was screaming blue murder when her head popped back up above the surface of the water. The stillness of the sea and the lucky coincidence that the captain had already stopped the ship beforehand, had made it possible to save her.
‘I expect you’ll be given an award,’ Dr Klein said.
‘A medal, I hope. I can at least use that as a coaster,’ Martin muttered. ‘I didn’t do anything.’
In his mind he could taste the salt water which he’d swallowed by the litre and later vomited.
‘You pushed the detached railings over to Lisa so she could keep herself alive until the rescue crew got to you.’
Dr Klein reached for Martin’s hand and squeezed it. He was unsure whether he found this gesture unpleasant or whether it should make him unhappy.
‘I don’t know that Lisa Stiller’s so thrilled about it,’ he said, pulling his fingers back.
If Martin was correctly informed, both Anouk and Lisa were currently in psychiatric institutions; one in Manhattan, the other on the outskirts of Berlin, where Julia Stiller was also taking professional help to process the horrific experience. Martin hoped they wouldn’t too quickly expose the children to the world of doctors with their questions and pills, but not everyone shared his preference for televisions and Game Boys when the aim was to liberate traumatised and mentally ill patients from their world of shadows and illusion.
‘Can I go now?’ he asked, standing up.
Dr Klein nodded. She took a mobile phone from a trouser pocket.
‘Of course. Shall we call you a car?’
Martin forced an innocuous smile and politely declined.
What address would he give to the taxi driver? His life was now void of destinations.