As far as Martin was concerned it was okay that they hadn’t managed to reach the captain till now. The news they had to pass on was devastating. And seeing as Shahla was dead and Naomi couldn’t possibly have survived her fall, there was nothing they could do until their arrival at New York except take Anouk into safekeeping again and try to question her. The first they’d already done. The second was likely to be fruitless.

Moreover, he and Elena needed time to resolve all the questions that had been plaguing them ever since they’d discovered who was behind Anouk’s abduction and her mother’s torture.

To begin with they hadn’t been able to make head or tail of it. Their minds couldn’t progress beyond the question of how Anouk could have been raped by a woman.

All they had to aid their quest for the truth was the weapon that had killed the culprit.

The laptop.

Martin had opened it without any great expectations, merely curious as to why Shahla had been carrying it in a bucket when she attacked him. He’d assumed that the computer would be damaged by the blow to her head and by having been dropped. But the laptop was still in perfect working order. When he flipped up the lid Martin came across the exchange between torturer and victim. At first glance it appeared as if Shahla had been conducting a sort of perverted voyeuristic conversation with Naomi.

‘She wanted Anouk’s mother to confess to the worst thing she’d ever done in her life.’

‘Why?’ Elena croaked. She sounded as if she’d been screaming her heart out at a rock concert, although she wasn’t mumbling any more. Once again the shock had strange consequences. The fact that she was responsible for someone’s death, even if that individual had probably been a psychopath, had loosened her tongue but irritated her vocal chords.

‘Because Naomi was only allowed to die if Shahla was satisfied with the confession.’

Martin, who’d already skimmed the beginning of the text, gave Elena a brief summary of what Anouk’s mother had admitted to the chambermaid.

‘Good God. Is there any sort of hint as to why Shahla did that?’

‘Yes, there is.’

He tapped his finger on the screen.

‘Naomi asked Shahla who she was, and to begin with the answer was slightly cryptic, in the style of a fairy tale, making a few points that Naomi would barely be able to compute. Then Shahla became more concrete. Here.’

Martin read out the relevant passage:

I was eleven when I was abused for the first time. My father was away on business; he was the managing director of a Pakistani electronics firm that would later be sold to Microsoft. But when I was a child my dad spent more time on aeroplanes than at home with us.