Martin picked up his mobile and rewound again to the relevant point. During the recording itself he’d felt that there was something not quite right about Anouk’s behaviour, even taking into consideration her trauma. At the time her answers seemed to follow an opaque logic. It was as if he’d been listening to an unfamiliar foreign or secret language.

Like Livish.

Martin listened to his third question again.

‘How old are you?’

On the recording he heard the signal for the emergency drill, which he’d ignored. Then it clearly took a while for him to formulate his fourth question.

‘My God, who did that to you?’

Martin remembered discovering the round burn scars from cigarettes on Anouk’s tummy. Now he knew that these had been inflicted on her before the trip by the men Naomi had left her alone with. But back then he’d assumed they were the work of a rapist who was still on board.

According to his notes, question 4 was the first that Anouk had answered, by writing his name on the screen of her toy computer:

Martin

He picked up the sheet of questions again.

4. My God, who did that to you?

5. But you know I’m not a bad man, don’t you?

Martin couldn’t hear it on the recording of course, but he saw Anouk before him screwing up her eyes in concentration and counting on her fingers. And then writing something which first he’d taken to be a mathematical sum and then a clue relating to the anchor deck: 11+3.

‘Seventy-eight plus five,’ he heard Gerlinde say. This is what had put him on the right track.

‘How old are you?’

Below this he jotted down Anouk’s third answer in pencil:

11 + 3

Stunned, he pushed himself back from the kitchen table and stood up so frantically that his chair tipped over backwards. That’s it. That’s the solution. The pattern.

Martin knew that he was on the verge of unlocking a secret he’d thought far too little about until now. All the madness he’d experienced on the Sultan hadn’t given him time to get to the bottom of things. And once he was back on land the grief devouring him on the inside had prevented him from seeing the basics.

The truth!

The cloth with the chloroform.

If Shahla’s account was true, how had it got into their cabin?

If the chambermaid had only caught them ‘by chance’, why would she have had chloroform on her?

All of a sudden Martin saw a hole in the entire story – the discrepancies which, in his loathing of himself and his fate, he hadn’t called into question.