Martin muttered a goodbye and hung up before Gerlinde could finish her sentence.

‘Hey, what’s wrong?’ Kramer asked, peering at him from the corner of his eye. ‘Is everything alright?’

No, it’s not.

Martin could sense that his mouth was hanging open, but there were more important things to do than close it again.

Gerlinde’s comment about her age had unsettled him. The black van was holding its lane, but in his head a thought had derailed, which he desperately wanted to grab hold of again. Needed to grab hold of.

What had Diesel said about Anouk?

‘The result of her IQ test she took in year 5 was 135… And she came second in a national memory championship.’

Seventy-eight plus five.

Helivellolivo!

‘Stop!’ he screamed at Kramer, who’d just moved into the slow lane. ‘Let me out!’

‘Here?’

‘Right now!’ Martin opened the sliding door on the passenger side. An icy wind flew inside. He heard Kramer curse, but the van slowed down, veered right and finally came to a halt on the hard shoulder.

‘You’re wrecking the operation,’ Kramer yelled after him, as Martin had already jumped out. ‘If you bugger off again without permission, that will be that, you psycho.’

Martin briefly glanced back and nodded.

He ran over to the other side of the motorway to find someone who’d get him back to Berlin as quickly as possible…

78+5

… so he could search through the memory on his phone in peace, where somewhere the truth was hiding…

73

It took him four hours to get home. Thirty minutes for the transcript of the session with Anouk that he’d recorded on his smartphone on the Sultan. And two hours after that he sensed that he was on the verge of cracking the riddle.

Martin sat in his poorly ventilated period apartment at a wobbly kitchen table, from which he’d first had to elbow a pile of unpaid bills, reminders and advertising flyers onto the floor to give him enough room for his work.

In front of him were his mobile phone and two sheets of A4 paper. On one sheet he’d jotted down the questions he’d asked Anouk on his second visit to Hell’s Kitchen. On the other were the girl’s answers, at least so far as he could recall them, for Anouk hadn’t said them out loud, but written them on her toy computer, which was now in possession of the FBI, like Shahla’s notebook and her iPad.

On the left-hand piece of paper, the one with the questions, Martin had noted the following:

1. When I came to see you a couple of hours ago with Dr Beck you mentioned a name to me, Anouk. Can you remember what that was?

2. Do you have any idea where you are at the moment?

3. How old are you?