It took him four hours to get home. Thirty minutes for the transcript of the session with Anouk that he’d recorded on his smartphone on the Sultan. And two hours after that he sensed that he was on the verge of cracking the riddle.
Martin sat in his poorly ventilated period apartment at a wobbly kitchen table, from which he’d first had to elbow a pile of unpaid bills, reminders and advertising flyers onto the floor to give him enough room for his work.
In front of him were his mobile phone and two sheets of A4 paper. On one sheet he’d jotted down the questions he’d asked Anouk on his second visit to Hell’s Kitchen. On the other were the girl’s answers, at least so far as he could recall them, for Anouk hadn’t said them out loud, but written them on her toy computer, which was now in possession of the FBI, like Shahla’s notebook and her iPad.
On the left-hand piece of paper, the one with the questions, Martin had noted the following:
1. When I came to see you a couple of hours ago with Dr Beck you mentioned a name to me, Anouk. Can you remember what that was?
2. Do you have any idea where you are at the moment?
3. How old are you?
Martin picked up his mobile and rewound again to the relevant point. During the recording itself he’d felt that there was something not quite right about Anouk’s behaviour, even taking into consideration her trauma. At the time her answers seemed to follow an opaque logic. It was as if he’d been listening to an unfamiliar foreign or secret language.
Like Livish.
Martin listened to his third question again.
‘How old are you?’
On the recording he heard the signal for the emergency drill, which he’d ignored. Then it clearly took a while for him to formulate his fourth question.
‘My God, who did that to you?’
Martin remembered discovering the round burn scars from cigarettes on Anouk’s tummy. Now he knew that these had been inflicted on her before the trip by the men Naomi had left her alone with. But back then he’d assumed they were the work of a rapist who was still on board.
According to his notes, question 4 was the first that Anouk had answered, by writing his name on the screen of her toy computer:
Martin
He picked up the sheet of questions again.
4. My God, who did that to you?
5. But you know I’m not a bad man, don’t you?
Martin couldn’t hear it on the recording of course, but he saw Anouk before him screwing up her eyes in concentration and counting on her fingers. And then writing something which first he’d taken to be a mathematical sum and then a clue relating to the anchor deck: 11+3.
‘Seventy-eight plus five,’ he heard Gerlinde say. This is what had put him on the right track.
‘How old are you?’
Below this he jotted down Anouk’s third answer in pencil:
11 + 3
Stunned, he pushed himself back from the kitchen table and stood up so frantically that his chair tipped over backwards. That’s it. That’s the solution. The pattern.
Martin knew that he was on the verge of unlocking a secret he’d thought far too little about until now. All the madness he’d experienced on the Sultan hadn’t given him time to get to the bottom of things. And once he was back on land the grief devouring him on the inside had prevented him from seeing the basics.
The truth!
The cloth with the chloroform.
If Shahla’s account was true, how had it got into their cabin?
If the chambermaid had only caught them ‘by chance’, why would she have had chloroform on her?
All of a sudden Martin saw a hole in the entire story – the discrepancies which, in his loathing of himself and his fate, he hadn’t called into question.
Picking up his mobile he dialled the number of the New York clinic where Anouk was being kept. Elena, who’d accompanied the girl to Manhattan, had called him from there. He just had to press recall to get the main office. He introduced himself as Dr Schwartz in the hope of being connected quicker as a potential colleague, but it took a good quarter of an hour before he got the doctor in charge, Dr Silva, on the line.
‘Anouk is not who we think she is,’ he explained to the elderly gentleman who sounded as if he had a cold.
‘What are you saying?’ Silva asked.
Martin was pacing in circles around his kitchen, far too agitated to keep still.
‘She’s not traumatised, at least not to the extent that it appears.’
‘Not traumatised?’ Silva was incensed. ‘First the girl was raped and then abducted.’
Martin paused briefly, to order his thoughts and avoid sounding like one of the befuddled patients his colleague treated.
‘Have you ever worked with highly intelligent children, doctor?’ he asked Silva. ‘You know what happens when they’re not stretched. Children who are that bright start displaying behavioural problems. A few go silent, others stop eating and sink into depression, and others become loud, aggressive and even violent sometimes. To other people or themselves.’
‘I’m still listening,’ Dr Silva said when Martin paused.
‘What I’m trying to say is that I believe Anouk suffered from understimulation stress for months. Of course she was badly traumatised by the serious abuse. But that wasn’t what stopped her from talking or made her scratch her skin.’
‘So what was it?’ Silva asked.
‘To put it crudely, Anouk got bored.’
‘What?’
‘Being locked up on a ship, first in a windowless dungeon, then on an isolation ward, without any opportunity for normal development. Even mentally healthy people would find it hard to cope with that. So how must a hyperactive, highly intelligent child feel? Scratching herself was an expression of her lack of stimulation.’
‘What other evidence do you have?’
‘The code,’ Martin replied. ‘Anouk couldn’t tolerate sitting still any more or continue to obey Shahla’s instruction not to talk to anyone. That’s why she made up a game and communicated to me in a secret language. A highly intelligent game. Anouk’s code is difficult to decrypt. You have to be a memory champion like her to master it.
‘How does this secret language work?’ Silva sounded faintly irritated. Martin could understand that. He’d have reacted just as sceptically if a supposed colleague had rung out of the blue from abroad to give him a lecture.
‘Have you also noticed that Anouk never answers the first three questions? Not in any conversation?’ he asked.
A pause. When Silva spoke again he sounded dumbfounded. ‘I’m afraid it’s not my place to discuss the findings of our treatments with outsiders,’ he said in a manner which left Martin in no doubt that he’d hit the bullseye.
Excitedly, he outlined his theory to the psychiatrist. ‘This is Anouk’s system. She delays her answers by three, which basically means…’
‘That she doesn’t answer the first one until she’s been asked the fourth.’
‘And then answers the second when she’s asked the fifth and so on. You have to adjust the answers by three positions.’ Martin looked triumphantly, first at the paper with the questions, then at the sheet of answers. Everything made much more sense if you put Anouk’s first answer beneath the first question, her second answer beneath the second question, and so on. The results were as follows:
Question 1: When I came to see you a couple of hours ago with Dr Beck you mentioned a name to me, Anouk. Can you remember what that was?
Answer: Martin
Question 2: Do you have any idea where you are at the moment?
Answer: Anouk draws a ship.
Question 3: How old are you?
Answer: 11+3.
Question 4: My God, who did that to you?
Answer: My mama.
Question 5: But you know I’m not a bad man, don’t you?
Answer: ??? (Probably nods in agreement.)
Everything was so clear, so logical. And effortlessly easy when you knew the system. And yet, when on the phone to Silva, Martin had arrived at the sixth question, he felt as if he’d overlooked something fundamental again.
‘This is quite remarkable information, Dr Schwartz,’ he heard the psychiatrist say. A couple of other sentences followed, but Martin wasn’t really listening.
He picked up his pencil and stuck the end with the rubber into his mouth.
He’d asked nine questions in that therapy session. Anouk had answered five with her system. The sixth had remained open.
‘Can you tell me the name of the person you’ve been with all this time?’
Martin sat back down at the kitchen table and wrote No. 6 on the answer sheet. A tingling sensation ran down his back from the neck to the coccyx. ‘Would you agree with me?’ he heard Silva say. He said yes, even though he had no idea what the question had been.
Question 6.
When he first recalled their session he’d assumed that Anouk hadn’t written anything after ‘My mama’. But now he wasn’t so sure.
Martin shut his eyes and once more turned his thoughts back to that loathsome ship. He was in Hell’s Kitchen again. Asking the exhausted-looking Anouk, ‘Is there anything I can bring you?’
He recalled the alarm for the ship’s exercise drill. Seven short tones and one long one.
Anouk picking up the toy computer one last time.
‘Can you tell me the name of the person you’ve been with all this time?’
And the name she’d written on the screen before turning away and sticking her thumb in her mouth.
It’s not possible.
The truth struck like a stab of a knife which didn’t kill him, but made him bleed slowly.
‘Hello, Dr Schwartz? Are you still there?’ Dr Silva said several thousands of kilometres away, but Martin had stopped listening some time ago.
He’d left the phone on the kitchen table to pack his stuff. Another trip awaited him. He had to hurry. He’d already wasted too much time.