Daniel took out a second photo from the black paper folder. Julia barely recognised the girl because she’d aged so much. Not physically, but emotionally. The confident expression in her dark eyes had given way to an uncanny emptiness. Anouk’s gaze was as lustreless as her hair. Her skin exhibited an unhealthy pallor, as if she hadn’t seen the sun in ages.

‘When was this photo taken?’ Julia asked anxiously.

‘The day before yesterday.’ A smile of desperation played on Daniel’s lips. ‘You heard me correctly. The girl cropped up again two nights ago.’

11

She was missing for eight weeks?

Martin still couldn’t believe what he’d heard.

Obviously he knew that it wasn’t rare for people to go missing at sea.

In the period after Nadja’s and Timmy’s death he’d made a detailed study of every case over the past few years. They ran into dozens.

He’d frequented self-help groups, founded by relatives of ‘cruise victims’, spoken to lawyers who specialised in compensation cases against those responsible, and had tried to make the captain personally liable for the fact that the search operation had been as inadequate as the preservation of evidence in his wife’s cabin.

Until the unsuccessful action against the captain Daniel Bonhoeffer and the cruise line, some years after Nadja and Timmy’s disappearance, he’d kept up with every report about crimes on cruise ships. He then realised that his campaign against cruise lines was merely an attempt to anaesthetise the pain. Whatever he did, nothing was going to bring back his family. Once he’d accepted this fact he stopped following news reports about missing persons at sea. They’d lost all meaning for him, as had life itself. Which is why this was the first time he’d heard the name Anouk Lamar.

‘And now she’s reappeared out of the blue?’ he said, parroting back the words with which Gerlinde Dobkowitz had just finished a long monologue.

‘Yes. I saw it with my own eyes. It was at the end of my daily patrol, amidships in between decks 2 and 3. I was just turning a corner when I saw the scrawny creature running straight towards me, her head turned back as if fleeing from someone. I heard rapid footsteps, muffled by this metre-high carpet my wheelchair always sinks into like quicksand. Well, anyway, what’s important is that I saw Anouk stop to throw something into a brass bin affixed to the wall.’ As she spoke she went red in the face; the memory of the episode seemed to animate her.

‘After this she stayed exactly where she was, while I wheeled myself as fast as possible behind one of those elephantine flowerpots they use for planting on this boat. I managed to get out of the way just in time before the captain could see me.’

‘The captain.’