‘No idea what he was up to at that time of night, but he practically ran into the young girl. Here, take a look for yourself!’

Gerlinde took a mobile phone from her tracksuit trouser pocket and showed him a photo. It was dark and blurred. ‘Yes, I know. I’m no Helmut Newton with the lens.’ Gerlinde pursed her lips. ‘It needed a flash, but I didn’t want to be discovered. I really had to strain to get anything at all on camera through the foliage.’

‘Who else is that in the picture?’ Martin asked. Besides a girl and a tall man, the photo showed a third person standing between the two of them. She was barely bigger than Anouk and almost as thin.

‘That’s Shahla, such a kind soul. She cleans my cabin sometimes too. Shahla bumped into the other two after fetching a pile of vomit-soaked towels from the infirmary. It was a rough night.’

With her right hand Gerlinde simulated the movements of a rocking ship.

‘I’ll admit that when I took the photo I wasn’t sure exactly who the girl was. I only worked it out when I’d gone through my research files and came across Anouk’s missing-person photo. I knew at once that the girl needed urgent help. I mean, it was half past midnight, she was wearing nothing but a T-shirt and panties, and her eyes were puffy from sobbing. When the captain asked if she was lost she didn’t reply. Nor when he asked her where her parents were.’

‘You heard all of this?’

‘Do you think I’m in a wheelchair because I’m deaf? The plants may have blocked my sight, but not my ears. I also heard the captain warning Shahla pointedly not to tell anyone about this. Then they took the poor thing to Dr Beck in the infirmary. When they’d all gone I found this in the bin.’

Gerlinde pointed to the cuddly toy that Martin still held tightly in his left hand.

‘She threw it in there?’ Martin stared at the teddy, which weirdly looked both familiar and strange.

‘I swear it on the sweat of my compression stockings,’ Gerlinde declared, raising her right hand. ‘You recognise it, don’t you?’ Gerlinde didn’t say any more until he looked her in the eye. ‘That’s the teddy your son, Timmy, was clutching in the photos that appeared in the media, isn’t it?’

Martin nodded. Strictly speaking, only one magazine had reported on his family’s fate and printed Timmy’s photo, and not until a year after the tragedy under the headline ‘Lost – why are more and more people disappearing without trace on cruise ships?’

Gerlinde was astonishingly well informed.

‘And that was two days ago?’

‘Yes, on the Oslo–Hamburg leg.’

‘Does anyone know where Anouk has been hiding all these weeks?’

Gerlinde waggled her bony hand from side to side.