When he realised his thoughts were going around in circles and he needed someone to help him, he’d called Diesel.

‘We won’t know more precisely for twenty-four hours,’ Martin said. ‘It’s not clear what triggered those damn swellings on her face. The ship’s laboratory doesn’t have the equipment to analyse what was in that grease on the floor of the anchor deck.’

‘So who looks after the doctor if the doctor’s unwell?’ Diesel asked. There was a hissing in the background. Diesel had warned Martin at the beginning of their conversation that he was about to warm a plate of ravioli on his Bunsen burner. The editor-in-chief didn’t think much of microwaves.

‘Jacques Gérard, her assistant,’ Martin said. ‘We’ve got to bring him into the loop. Dr Beck is currently in the room next door to Anouk on the quarantine station.’

Of course there were beds free in the official ship’s clinic, even some with a swing function that balanced out every wave movement, but just as in a casualty department these beds were only separated by curtains. No other passengers were in-patients yet on the Sultan; should that change the captain wanted to avoid at all costs a stranger getting a glimpse of the ship’s doctor in this state. And so Martin had carried the crumpled body of Dr Beck from the anchor deck to Hell’s Kitchen, where a weedy Frenchman with tortoiseshell glasses and a drooping mouth had immediately given Elena a huge injection of cortisone. At the very least this had removed the danger of suffocation. Now, seven hours later, the ship’s doctor still looked as if she’d been in a nasty street fight, but she was stable, if unresponsive.

‘Luckily your killer doesn’t seem to be an expert on poison doses,’ Diesel said.

Or maybe he was.

Martin doubted that the culprit had intended to kill the doctor or anyone else.

More likely he wanted to give them a demonstration of what he was capable of if they didn’t put an end to their investigation.

‘Whether it was a failure or planned that way, the attack tells us quite a lot about your adversary,’ Diesel said after Martin had shared his thoughts with him.

‘Such as?’

‘First, the man who raped the girl is still onboard the ship.’

Martin shrugged. ‘Which means he could be a crew member or a passenger.’

‘More likely crew, I’d say, because – secondly – he’s got access to the sealed-off areas.’

‘Locks, especially electronic ones, are easy for any amateur hacker to break,’ Martin disagreed.

‘Possibly. But the key question is: who knew that you were going to visit the anchor room?’

‘The captain, me…’ Martin thought about it. ‘And the technical manager who had to disable the lock.’

And maybe two hundred other people, depending on who Bonhoeffer’s been jabbering to.

‘What sort of techie is he?’

‘No idea.’