‘Wouldn’t you rather we looked at this in my cabin?’ Daniel said, barely able to hold back whatever it was trying to find its way out of his stomach. But Schwartz ignored him. With rapid hand movements he opened the zip and flapped the lid to one side.

‘Anouk,’ he said. Daniel wasn’t sure whether this was a hunch or a certainty. He saw typical girls’ clothes, tidily packed, filling every centimetre of the case. Skirts, underwear, tights and – right on top of the pile – a drawing pad and pencil case.

But that’s absurd, he thought.

‘Anouk can’t have been hiding here the whole time.’

Schwartz shook his bald head. ‘I can’t imagine it either. Unless the staff haven’t used this love nest for a couple of months.’

My arse.

It was only three weeks ago that Daniel’s first officer had been bragging about how he’d had it off with a cook here. He himself had never had any truck with the nest, but he’d certainly have got wind of the uproar there’d have been if cabin 2186 had been out of action for any length of time.

‘What’s that?’ Daniel asked, pointing at the back of the case lid. He might have been mistaken, but in the inside netting wasn’t that a…

‘A torch,’ Schwartz said, pulling it out.

So it was.

The thing was narrow, with a light-blue shiny metallic casing. And it looked exactly the same as the one they’d found on Anouk.

Schwartz turned the switch at the end of the handle and the weak beam on this torch was hard to see with the naked eye too.

‘A dim light with empty batteries?’ Daniel asked. His bafflement at least mitigated the feeling of sickness. And the confusion only grew when Schwartz found another torch, wrapped up in a sock, in a side compartment. This one didn’t work any better either.

What does that mean?

An abducted girl, two broken torches?

Daniel couldn’t make any sense of the discovery. Unlike Schwartz. All of a sudden he grabbed the pencil case and rummaged inside. When he seemed to have found what he was looking for, Schwartz slapped his forehead like someone who’s overlooked something obvious. Then he turned the switch of the torch again, and yet again, and each time he gave a soft sigh, even though Daniel couldn’t notice the slightest difference.

No bright light.

Nothing that might give him a flash of inspiration.

‘What have you found?’ he asked the detective.

Schwartz clenched the torch handle tightly, now holding it like a baton just before the transfer to the next runner.

‘I know what’s going on,’ he said flatly. The detective strode past Bonhoeffer, climbed over the body and yanked open the cabin door.

52

Naomi