I never put tapeworms into your food. And what you took to be bedbugs were harmless mites. I wasn’t intending to poison your body physically, but mentally. Just as my mother did to me. She didn’t hit me or insert any objects into me. But all the same she infected me with a virus that ate me from the inside out. Just as Anouk, to whom I’ve been a mother over these last few weeks, will continue to be devoured on the inside by what you did to her. And what you’re going to confess now.

He looked up from the screen. Elena stared at him agog.

‘Anouk was…’

Now the circle is closing. Now there’s a point to all this madness.

Nodding energetically, Martin skipped to the end of the document. To Naomi’s confession.

65

Julia’s biggest fear was that she’d lost her mind. Or, even worse, that she was only dreaming that Lisa had opened the balcony door and was now standing before her. If she were suddenly to awake in Daniel’s cabin, still sedated by the drugs he’d forced on her, and if her daughter were to vanish into thin air for a second time, the pain she’d feel on waking would finally be unbearable. She was absolutely certain of that.

At her mother’s funeral the pastor had said that parents do not die until their children stop thinking of them. He forgot to mention the reverse situation where parents die inside when nothing remains but the thought of their children.

And yet Lisa seemed anything but an illusion. And if she were, then the Fata Morgana ordering her to come into the cabin and sit in the armchair beside the bed was astonishingly realistic.

‘There you are. Finally. I’ve been waiting for you all day.’

Wearing a black lace-up dress, Lisa was standing a short distance away in front of the television, in exactly the spot where the chambermaid had been cowering as she bled from her mouth. The sight had been substantially less frightening than the one of her daughter now. Lisa looked as if she’d made herself up in the dark on choppy seas. Eyeliner that had run and mascara applied too thickly disfigured her pale face. In her hand she held a long screwdriver.

Julia looked at her daughter as if she were a ghost, which essentially she was, and uttered just a single word:

‘Why?’

Why are you still alive?

Why did you do that to me?

An abortive smile formed on Lisa’s lips.

‘You don’t know?’ Her voice was cold. Pitiless. It matched her expression. ‘You destroyed it,’ she said.

‘What, darling. What did I destroy?’

Lisa yelled at her, ‘He belonged to me. I had him first.’

He? Who was she talking about?

‘I… I’m sorry, I don’t know what…’