Placing his hand on the basin, Martin could feel the vibrations. He teetered out of the bathroom, oriented himself by the slit of light in the curtains, went over to it and then opened the curtains as well as the door to his terrace. Cold, clear air poured into the cabin.

What he saw corresponded with the creaking, scraping, droning, vibrating and humming he heard around him.

And with the rocking of the ship.

‘We’re moving,’ he said, looking in disbelief at the foam-crested mountains of waves before him. The misty grey horizon had shunted so close to the ship that you could stretch your arm out to it.

‘Obviously you’re moving. I mean, it is a cruise, isn’t it?’ Diesel said, who couldn’t know that the captain had stopped the Sultan yesterday night for a man-overboard manoeuvre. But now the engines were running again, which could mean one of two things. Either they’d found Lisa. Or given up altogether.

‘Found you!’ Diesel exclaimed, and for a fraction of a second Martin thought he was actually talking about the girl, but of course he meant Peter Pax’s cabin number. ‘He had the same one on both trips,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you ought to pay 2186 a visit.’

48

Nautical time: 12.33

50°27’ N, 17°59’ W

Speed: 23.4 knots, wind: 30 knots

Sea swell: 10 feet

Distance from Southampton: 630 nautical miles

‘Number 2186?’

The captain was massaging the back of his neck. The plaster on his nose was smaller and the rings around his eyes darker. If exhaustion could be traded on the stock market, Bonhoeffer would be one of the wealthiest men on the planet. His eyes had shrunk to the size of a five-cent coin and they didn’t seem to be helping much in the search for the right key card.

‘2186,’ Martin confirmed, surprised that they were looking for a cabin with this number on deck 3. They were outside a greyish-ginger door with no number in a side corridor that branched off from the entrance to the atrium. Bonhoeffer was now making his third attempt to slide a key card through the reader. He was holding a selection, the size of bank cards in a variety of colours, all of which had a hole in the upper right-hand corner and were threaded on a fine metal chain.

‘Don’t you have something like a skeleton key?’ Martin asked.

‘Not for the nest.’

‘The nest?’

‘As you can see, this isn’t a passenger cabin any more,’ Bonhoeffer said, his eyes on the missing number on the door. If you stood up close you could see the residue of glue with which it had originally been stuck.

‘So what is it?’ Martin asked.