As Tiago checked out the cabin he’d entered, a smile of satisfaction appeared on his face. This was nothing like the pigsty he’d found in the previous room. The scumbag in the last atrium cabin – a pensioner from Switzerland travelling on his own, according to the travel documents in the desk drawer – had spread half his dinner in the bed and chucked his dirty underwear on the floor. Tiago hated this lack of respect. Didn’t those bastards know the time pressure that a chambermaid was under? That they only earned a few cents per room?

All he found in this cabin, the third of his ‘breakfast shift’ today, were the inevitable traces of the night: crumpled sheets, a used water glass on the bedside table, jeans and underwear scrunched up on the sofa. But no gnawed chicken wings on the carpet, while even the bathroom looked like what you might expect from a civilised person. In the previous cabin, by contrast, the old fart had quite clearly got the flannel mixed up with toilet paper. Nor had he found it necessary to use the loo brush after doing his business. This impertinence had been the last straw that prompted Tiago’s revenge. He really ought not to waste any time in his ‘work’, but the minute it had taken to remove the skid marks from the flannel with the pensioner’s toothbrush was worth it.

Such a shame I won’t be there when the old fart is slobbering all over the bristles tonight, Tiago thought in amusement as he opened the cupboard housing the built-in safe.

There were only a handful of hotel safe systems and Tiago knew them all. It usually took him a while to crack the general code, but here on the Sultan that wasn’t necessary. Here you opened the safe with the cabin key. It couldn’t get any better.

‘What have we got here, then?’ he asked himself as he examined the school ID card, which he’d found amongst cheap fashion jewellery, an iPod and some European cash. The young girl with her dyed hair and defiant stare suited the black jump boots and exclusively sombre clothes hanging here in the wardrobe. He read the name: Lisa Stiller.

If I had a fifteen-year-old daughter I wouldn’t let her have a nose stud, Tiago thought. He was conservative in such matters. The body of a woman, especially that of a girl, was sacred to him. He even regarded pierced ears as abuse, to say nothing of tattoos and piercings elsewhere.

With the palm of his hand Tiago stroked the felt-lined bottom of the safe and came across a brand-new screwdriver and small spray can.

Black paint?

Surely Lisa wasn’t planning on decorating the ship with graffiti?