‘Yes, yes. And chickens die of tooth decay.’

She rolled her eyes and waddled, stooped, over to a globe screwed to the floor. Opening the lid she took out a bottle of advocaat. She put her cigarettes back in her pocket.

‘I know what people say about me,’ she said, after Martin declined the drink she’d offered him.

He wanted answers, not alcohol.

Gerlinde poured herself half a tumbler and took appreciative sips. ‘People think I’m frittering away my husband’s inheritance on the seven seas. But I was the one with money in the family. It was my construction firm. I only signed it over to the poor fool for tax reasons. Do you know what slogan we used for roadbuilding?’ She was already giggling at the punchline: ‘Dobkowitz – we put stones in your way!’

Martin kept a straight face. ‘Very interesting, but you were going to…’

‘And do you know why I’m aboard this ship?’ Gerlinde took another sip of the viscous liquid that Martin had never been able to even contemplate drinking due to its pus-like colour.

‘Not to have a holiday. Not to squander my last days before they stick me in wooden pyjamas. But to toil away.’

She fluttered her right hand in the air. ‘Tell him, Gregor, what I’m working on.’

‘I have the honour of assisting you in writing a book,’ the butler said obediently, seemingly uncertain as to whether he should go now or answer further questions.

‘And not just any old book!’ In triumph Gerlinde clapped her hands, which were adorned with thick rings. ‘But a thriller about crimes on the high seas that are hushed up. I’m so well informed because of my research. I have ears everywhere and every night I walk my patrols. Or should I say “ride” my patrols?’ She pointed at her wheelchair. ‘Whatever… I wouldn’t have seen it otherwise.’

‘Seen what?’ Martin asked. By now his patience had run so thin that he felt like grabbing the old woman’s wrinkled neck with both hands and shaking the truth out of her about how she’d found the teddy.

‘The girl. To begin with they wanted to deceive me into believing that it was just a laundry bag. But since when have laundry bags been weeping on deck 3 after midnight, looking as pale as Jesus on Good Friday?’ She put her glass of advocaat down on a chest of drawers and pushed past Martin into the neighbouring room, through a lilac-coloured string curtain that divided the two parts of the suite.

Martin followed her and found himself in another room that reminded him of the opening credits of a psychological thriller where the killer pins newspaper reports of his crimes to the walls and uses a carpet cutter to scratch out the eyes from the face of his next victim.