‘Jump over the railings and it’s all done. No body. No witnesses. The perfect place to take your own life. Unnoticed on the high seas, preferably in the middle of the night; nothing can go wrong. At a little more than sixty metres, the impact alone is enough to kill you, and if not…’ Daniel said, assuming a pained expression, ‘then have fun with the propeller. The best thing of all is that your nearest and dearest don’t have to be shocked at the sight of your dead body.’

Julia glanced at the photo of Naomi and Anouk. Something in Daniel’s little performance didn’t quite fit.

‘Are you telling me that mother and daughter threw themselves overboard together?’ she asked him.

‘Obviously not hand in hand. In their cabin we recovered a cloth soaked in chloroform. Presumably Mrs Lamar put her daughter to sleep first and jumped once she’d thrown her overboard. It wouldn’t be the first time something like that has happened.’

Julia nodded. She remembered a television programme about cases where parents first killed their children before killing themselves, which was ostensibly such a frequent occurrence that in forensic medicine they’d come up with a specific term for it: murder-suicide. She tried to imagine what must go through a mother’s head who chose to murder her own daughter, but found she couldn’t. ‘One hundred and seventy-seven suicides?’ she thought out loud, still astonished by this unbelievably high figure.

Daniel nodded. ‘And those are just the ones we couldn’t keep quiet. Believe you me, the number of unknown cases is higher. Much higher.’

‘How high?’

‘If you take all cruise ships currently sailing across the globe, we estimate that each year an average of twenty-three people go overboard.’

Passenger 23!

Now she understood what Daniel was getting at.

‘Have you lost another one, then?’

We’ve got a Passenger 23!

‘No.’ Daniel shook his head. ‘That wouldn’t be a problem. We’re well used to covering up that sort of thing.’

Covering up?

‘Let me guess. It was something similar that almost cost you your job and your health back then.’

‘Yes,’ Daniel conceded frankly. ‘But this time the mess is far more complicated.’

The captain pointed at the photo of the sweet girl with the slightly sticking-out ears. ‘Anouk Lamar disappeared eight weeks ago. We stopped the ship, informed the coastal stations, spent $800,000 on a completely pointless search with boats and aircraft, declared her dead, organised the funeral with an empty coffin and put our hands deep into our pockets for hush money so that the media would report the story as a suicide, until we could finally shelve the case.’