‘Why didn’t I think of that immediately!’ She tried to stand up, but needed a second attempt because she fell back on the bed at the first.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked when she was finally on her feet.

‘We’ve got no time to lose,’ she said, grabbing the dressing gown. ‘Quick. I’ll… I’ll take you there.’

56

‘The blue shelf?’

Daniel Bonhoeffer was closing the connecting door to his bedroom, where he’d just been checking on Julia, when his mobile rang. The sedative was no longer working. When she wasn’t screaming at him, she was prowling up and down the room like a tiger and punching the fitted cupboards.

‘Yes, it’s between decks B and C, amidships beside the control rooms. But what the hell do you want there?’

In your state?

Elena didn’t answer him. Either she’d hung up or the connection had been lost. Daniel couldn’t understand either.

His fiancée was sick. She ought to be in bed rather than taking a stroll to the lower decks that housed the monster she was going to visit with Martin Schwartz.

The blue shelf.

A rather cynical description of a machine dating from a time when environmental protection was the expensive hobby of eccentric do-gooders and rubbish was still disposed of on the high seas. The Sultan was one of the first large luxury liners to have its own on-board water treatment and waste incineration plant. But the ship hadn’t been launched with it. In the first three years of the Sultan’s career, when not even all European ports were skilled at recycling and separating waster, rubbish for which there were no or only overpriced delivery points was officially dumped in the sea.

The rubbish was first squashed in a shaft-like, circular press and then thrust into the sea as lumps weighing several tonnes.

Into the blue shelf.

The machine which used to dump the rubbish and which owed its name to its polluting activity, was located in the place he’d just described to Elena: the blue shelf.

Wait, of course…

Daniel pressed a speed-dial button on his desk telephone, but before he was connected to the MCR, the machine control room, a livid Julia stormed out of the bedroom behind him.

‘Hey, Julia, wait…’ He hung up again to stop his friend from leaving, but she was already at the door.

‘Don’t touch me!’ she hissed angrily when he tried to grab her arm. She was wearing the white dressing gown he’d put her in yesterday. Her hair stuck to her temples like seaweed. Overnight her face seemed to have got narrower, while her body didn’t fill the towelling dressing gown, as if she’d been shrunk by fear, worry and despair.

‘Julia, please. Stay here. Where do you think you’re going?’

‘Away,’ she said. ‘Away from the man who wouldn’t help me save my daughter’s life.’