Julia pressed both hands over her mouth and bit her fingers. She turned back to the balcony.

There were two doors you could leave the cabin by.

And Lisa hadn’t used either of them.

40

Anyone entering their home with a reasonable expectation of finding themselves alone will be scared to death if they suddenly hear a voice from the darkness. Even if that voice says calmly, ‘Please don’t be afraid.’

Whipping around, Martin instinctively reached for a heavy lamp on the cupboard in the foyer of his suite, firmly expecting to be attacked again. But it was just Gerlinde Dobkowitz, approaching him with a broad smile. She was wearing a long-sleeved, flowery dress with a green silk scarf that hung down to the spokes of the wheelchair she was sitting in.

‘How on earth did you get in here?’ Martin asked, half in astonishment, half in anger. He put the lamp back in its place. Gerlinde moved closer. The grey tyres of her wheelchair drew deep furrows in the carpet.

‘She let me in.’

Gerlinde pointed behind her to a thin, black-haired woman who got up shyly from the chair where she’d been sitting with her knees tightly together.

She was wearing the old-fashioned chambermaid’s uniform – black skirt, white apron and silly bonnet – which was the norm for cleaners on the Sultan. Unlike Gerlinde, she appeared to feel completely out of place. She stood in the light of an arc lamp, swallowing with difficulty and grabbing her neck. Her eyes were fixed on the floor and she made no move to come closer or say anything. Martin guessed she was in her later twenties. She had Indian features and looked unusually pale with her natural cinnamon-coloured skin.

‘That’s Shahla,’ Gerlinde said. ‘I waited for you all day to arrange a meeting, but you haven’t thought it necessary to pop in to see me for even a minute.’ Gerlinde pursed her lips. She sounded like an offended grandmother scolding her grandchild for not coming to visit often enough. ‘You didn’t even call!’

‘It’s almost one in the morning,’ he said.

‘My official patrol time.’

‘And so you thought you’d just break into my cabin?’

Martin took off his soaking wet leather jacket, which took some effort. All the vertebrae in his back, which had taken the impact of the water, seemed to be displaced. He’d be as stiff as a plank in the morning.

‘I thought I’d let you in on the latest developments. Shahla was attacked.’

Welcome to the club.

‘They tried to find out from her something about the girl, which means that the culprit is still…’ Gerlinde hesitated and adjusted her monstrous glasses that had slipped too far down her nose. ‘Hmm, am I mistaken or did the shock make you wet yourself?’

She pointed at the damp patch on the carpet between Martin’s boots.