by Ruth Ware
“I’m afraid it wasn’t me,” Eva said, but quite kindly. There was no trace of the slightly tribal defensiveness the girls downstairs had betrayed. She gave a little laugh. “If I’m being honest, it’s a long time since I was in my twenties. Have you spoken to the stewardesses? Hanni and Birgitta both have dark hair and are around that age. And so does Ulla.”
“Yes, we’ve spoken to them,” Nilsson said. “And we’re on our way to see Ulla now.”
“She’s not in any trouble,” I said. “The woman, I mean. I’m worried for her. If you can think of anyone it might be . . .”
“I’m sorry not to be able to help,” Eva said. She spoke directly to me, and she did look sorry, the most genuinely concerned of any of the people I had spoken to so far. There was a little frown between her beautifully plucked brows. “I really am. If I hear anything . . .”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Thanks, Eva,” Nilsson repeated, and turned to go.
“You’re welcome,” Eva said. She walked us to the door. “I look forward to seeing you later, Ms. Blacklock.”
“Later?”
“At eleven a.m. It is the ladies’ spa experience—in your press schedule?”
“Thanks,” I said. “See you then.” And as I turned to leave I thought, guiltily, of the unread pages of the press pack back in my cabin, and wondered what else I might have missed.
We left the spa via the exit to the deck, and as the door swung back, it was wrenched out of my hand by the strong breeze, banging sharply against a rubber stand put there for the purpose. Nilsson closed it behind me, and I moved to the ship’s rail, shivering in the wind.
“Are you cold?” Nilsson shouted, above the roar of the wind and the noise of the engines. I shook my head.
“No, I mean, yes, I am, but I need the fresh air.”
“Are you still feeling unwell?”
“Not out here. But my head’s aching.”
I stood, holding on to the cold painted iron of the railing, and leaned out, looking down, past the glass-walled balconies of the cabins aft, down at the creaming waves at the ship’s wake, and the great dark expanse farther out, unimaginably deep and cold. I thought of the fathoms and fathoms of swirling blackness beneath us, of the darkness and silence below, and how something—someone—might fall for days through those black depths, to rest at last on a lightless seabed.
I thought of the girl the night before, how easy it would be for someone—Nilsson, Eva, anyone—to just walk up behind me, give me a gentle push . . .
I shuddered.
What had happened? I couldn’t have imagined it. The scream, and the splash maybe. But not the blood. I couldn’t have imagined that.
I took a huge lungful of the clean North Sea air, turned around, and smiled determinedly at Nilsson, shaking my hair back, where the wind had whipped it across my face.
“So whereabouts are we?”
“International waters,” Nilsson said. “On our way to Trondheim, I believe.”
“Trondheim?” I tried to think back to the bits of the press pack I’d actually read. “I thought we were going to Bergen first.”
“A change of plan, perhaps. I know that Lord Bullmer is very much hoping that you will all get a glimpse of the northern lights. Perhaps there are particularly good conditions tonight so he wanted to hasten north. Or it might have been a suggestion of the captain; there may be climatic reasons why it’s better to do the trip that way round. We have no fixed itinerary. We are very much able to cater to the whims of our passengers. It may be that someone at dinner last night was particularly anxious to see Trondheim.”
“What’s in Trondheim?”
“Trondheim itself? Well, there is a famous cathedral. And parts of the city are very attractive. But it’s mainly the fjords. That and the fact that the city is of course much farther north than Bergen, so there’s a better chance of seeing the aurora. But it might be that we have to go farther north still, to Bodø or even Tromsø. At this time of year, it’s still uncertain.”
“I see.” For some reason his words unsettled me. It was one thing to feel yourself part of an organized, itinerized trip. It was quite another to realize you were a helpless passenger with someone else at the wheel.
“Miss Blacklock—”
“Call me Lo,” I interrupted. “Please.”
“Lo, then.” Nilsson’s broad, comfortable face looked pained, something troubled in his teddy-bear expression. “I don’t want you to think that I don’t believe you, Lo, but in the cold light of day—”
“Am I still sure?” I finished. He nodded. I sighed, a little unhappily, thinking back to my doubts of the night before and the way Nilsson’s unspoken question echoed the unpleasant little nagging voice at the back of my skull. I twisted my fingers in the cloth of my top before I spoke. “The truth is, I don’t know. It was late, and you’re right, I had been drinking—I could have been mistaken about the scream and the splash. Even the blood—I guess it could have been a trick of the light, although I’m pretty sure of what I saw. But the woman in the cabin—there’s no way I could have imagined her. I just couldn’t. I saw her, I spoke to her. If she’s not here—not on the ship, I mean—then where is she?”
There was a long silence.
“Well, we haven’t spoken to Ulla,” he said at last. “From your description, I’m not sure it’s her, but we should rule it out at least.” He drew out his staff radio and began tapping at the buttons. “I don’t know about you, but I could do with a coffee, so perhaps we could ask her to meet us in the passenger dining room.”
The breakfast room was the same room we had eaten dinner in last night, but the two large tables had been broken up into half a dozen smaller ones, and when Nilsson pushed open the door, no one was there apart from a young waiter with corn-colored hair swept into a side parting. He came forward to greet me with a smile.
“Miss Blacklock? Are you ready for breakfast?”
“Yes, please,” I said vaguely, looking around the room. “Where should I sit?”
“Anywhere you like.” He waved a hand at the empty tables. “Most of the other guests have chosen to breakfast in their cabins. Perhaps by the window? Can I bring you tea, coffee?”
“Coffee, please,” I said. “Milk, no sugar.”
“And a cup for me, please, Bjorn,” Nilsson said. And then, over Bjorn’s shoulder, “Ah, hello, Ulla.”
I turned to see a stunningly beautiful girl with a heavy black bun walking across the dining room to our table.
“Hello, Johann,” she said. Her singsong accent clinched the matter, but I was sure, even before she spoke, that she wasn’t the girl in the cabin. She was singularly beautiful, her skin against her black hair as white and clear as porcelain. The girl in the cabin had been vividly good-looking, but not that delicate, classical loveliness, like a Renaissance painting. Also Ulla must have been nearly six feet. The girl in the cabin had been around my height, nowhere near Ulla’s. Nilsson gave me a questioning look, but I shook my head.
Bjorn returned with two cups on a tray and a menu for me, and Nilsson cleared his throat.
“Won’t you have a cup with us, Ulla?”
“Thank you,” she said, shaking her head so that her heavy bun swayed at the nape of her neck. “I’ve had breakfast already today, but I’ll sit for a moment.”
She slipped onto a chair opposite and looked at us both, smiling expectantly. Nilsson coughed again.
“Miss Blacklock, this is Ulla. She’s the stewardess for the forward cabins, so the Bullmers, the Jenssens, Cole Lederer, and Owen White. Ulla, Miss Blacklock is looking for a girl who she saw yesterday and is anxious to trace. She’s not on the passenger list, so we are thinking she may be a member of staff, but we have had no luck in finding her. Miss Blacklock, do you want to describe the girl you saw?”
“She had long dark hair,” I said
. “She was about your age—late twenties, maybe—really pretty, and she spoke English like someone born in Britain. She was about my height. Can you think of anyone”—I was aware my voice had started to sound pleading—“anyone who would fit that description?”
“Well, I have dark hair, obviously,” Ulla said with a laugh. “But it was not me, so after that I am not so sure. There is Hanni, she has dark hair, and Birgitta—”
“I’ve met them,” I interrupted. “It’s not them. Anyone else? Cleaners? Sailing crew?”
“N-no . . . there’s no one on the sailing crew who could fit that description,” Ulla said slowly. “On the staff there is also Eva, but she is too old. Have you spoken to the kitchen staff?”
“Never mind.” I was beginning to despair. This was starting to feel like a recurring nightmare, interviewing person after person after person, while all the while the memory of the dark-haired girl began to dissolve and shimmer, slipping through my fingers like water. The more faces I saw, each corresponding slightly but not completely to my memory, the harder I was finding it to hold on to the image in my head.
And yet, there was something defining about that girl, something I was sure I’d recognize if I saw her again. It wasn’t the features—they were pretty, but ordinary enough. It wasn’t the hair, or the Pink Floyd T-shirt. It was something about her, the sheer liveliness and vivacity of her expression as she peered sharply out into the corridor, her surprise as she had seen my face.
Was it really possible she was dead?
But the alternative was not much better. Because if she wasn’t, the only other possibility—and suddenly I wasn’t sure if it was better or worse—was that I was going mad.
- CHAPTER 13 -
Ulla and Nilsson both excused themselves when my breakfast arrived, leaving me to stare out the window as I ate. Up here, with a view of the sea and the deck, I didn’t feel quite so sick, and I managed a respectable amount of breakfast, feeling the energy come back into my limbs and the nagging nausea abate. It struck me that at least half the reason I had been feeling so crappy was probably low blood sugar. I always get strange and shaky on an empty stomach.
But though the food and the sight of the ocean made me feel physically better, I could not stop running over last night’s events in my head, replaying the conversation with the girl, the surprise on her face, the touch of irritation as she shoved the mascara into my hand. Something had been going on—I was sure of it. It felt like coming into a film halfway through, struggling to work out who the characters were. I had interrupted the girl doing something. But what?
Whatever it was, it was probably linked to her disappearance. And whatever Nilsson thought, I could not believe she had been cleaning the room. No one cleaned a room in a thigh-skimming Pink Floyd T-shirt. And besides—she just hadn’t looked like a cleaner. You didn’t get hair and nails like that on a cleaner’s wage. The gloss on that thick dark mane had spoken of years of conditioning wraps and expensive low lights. Industrial espionage? A stowaway? An affair? I remembered the cold glint in Cole’s eyes as he spoke about his ex-wife, and Camilla Lidman’s bland reassurances downstairs. I thought of Nilsson’s lumbering strength, of Alexander unpleasantly dwelling on the topic of poison and unnatural death last night at dinner—but each possibility seemed more unlikely than the last.
It was her face that troubled me. The more I struggled to remember it, the more it blurred. The concrete bits—her height, the color of her hair, the state of her nails—all that I could picture clearly. But her features . . . a neat nose . . . narrow dark brows carefully plucked. That was about it. I could say what she was not: plump, old, acne-spotted. Saying what she was was far harder. Her nose had been . . . normal. Her mouth . . . normal. Not wide, not rosebud, not pouting, not bee-stung. Just . . . normal. There was nothing distinctive that I could put my finger on.
She could have been me.
I knew what Nilsson wanted. He wanted me to forget what I’d heard, the scream, the stealthy slide of the screen door, and that horrible, huge slithering splash.
He wanted me to start doubting my own account of things. He was taking me seriously, only to make me start undermining myself. He was letting me ask all the questions I wanted—enough to convince myself of my own fallibility.
And part of me couldn’t blame him—this was the Aurora’s maiden voyage, and the boat was stuffed with journalists and photographers and influential people. There was hardly a worse time for something to go wrong. I could imagine the headlines now: “Voyage to Death—Passenger on Luxury Press Trip Drowned.” As head of security, Nilsson’s neck would be on the line. He’d lose his job, at the very least, if something went wrong on the Aurora, on the very first voyage he was involved in.
But more than that—the kind of publicity that an unexplained death would generate could sink the whole enterprise. Something like this could scupper the Aurora before she was even launched, and if that happened, everyone on board could lose their jobs, from the captain down to Iwona, the cleaner.
I knew that.
But I had heard something. Something that had made me start from my sleep with my heart pounding two hundred beats per minute, and my palms wet with sweat, and the conviction that somewhere very close by, another woman was in grave trouble. I knew what it was like to be that girl—to realize, in an instant, how incredibly fragile your hold on life could be, how paper-thin the walls of security really were.
And whatever Nilsson might say, if nothing had happened to that girl, then where was she? The scream, the blood—all those I could have imagined. But the girl—I definitely hadn’t imagined the girl. And she could not have vanished into thin air without help.
I rubbed my eyes, feeling the gritty residue of last night’s eye makeup, and I realized—I had just one single thing to prove she had not been a figment of my imagination: that Maybelline mascara.
Wild thoughts tripped through my head, one after the other. I would take it back to England in a plastic bag and get it fingerprinted. No, better yet, I’d get it DNA tested. There was DNA on makeup brushes, wasn’t there? On CSI: Miami they would have based an entire prosecution case on a trapped eyelash. There must be something they could do.
I pushed aside the mental image of myself marching up to Crouch End police station with a mascara in a bag and demanding advanced forensic analysis from a police officer only barely restraining his amused smile. Someone would believe me. They had to. And if they didn’t I’d—I’d pay to get it done myself.
I pulled out my phone, ready to google “private DNA testing cost,” but even before I had unlocked the home screen, I realized how crazy it was. I wasn’t going to get police-grade DNA testing from an Internet company specializing in cheating spouses. And what would the results tell me anyway, without anything to compare it to?
Instead, I found myself checking my e-mail. Nothing from Judah. In fact, nothing at all. There was no phone reception, but I seemed to be connected to the boat’s Wi-Fi network and I forced a refresh. But nothing happened. The little “updating” icon whirred and whirred, and then NO NETWORK CONNECTION popped up.
With a sigh, I put the phone away in my pocket and surveyed the blueberries on my plate. The pancakes had been delicious, but my appetite was gone. It seemed impossible, surreal: I’d witnessed a murder—or had heard one at least—and yet here I was, trying to force down pancakes and coffee, while all the time there was a murderer walking free and there was nothing I could do.
Did they know they’d been heard and reported? With the noise I’d been making, and the questions I’d been asking all round the boat, if they didn’t last night, they did now.
The boat took another wave, broadside on, and I pushed the plate away and stood up.
“Is there anything else, Miss Blacklock?” Bjorn asked, and I jumped violently and swung around. He had appeared as if by magic from a door set into the paneling at the back of the room
. It was almost impossible to see unless you knew it was there. Had he been there all that time, watching me? Was there some kind of spy hole?
I shook my head and did my best to smile as I walked across the slowly tilting floor.
“No, thank you, Bjorn. Thanks for all your help.”
“Have a wonderful morning. Do you have plans? If you haven’t tried it, the view from the deck-top hot tub is stunning.”
I had a sudden vision of myself, alone in the hot tub, a hand in latex gloves pushing me beneath the water . . .
I shook my head again.
“I’m supposed to be going to the spa, I think. But I might go for a lie-down in my cabin first. I’m very tired. I didn’t sleep well last night.”
“Of course.” He pronounced it like off course. “I completely understand. A little ara and ara is prescribed, perhaps!”
“Ara and ara?” I was puzzled.
“Is that not the expression? Ara and ara, rest and relaxion?”
“Oh!” I blushed. “Rest and relaxation. Yes, of course. Sorry—like I said, I’m so tired . . .” I was edging towards the door, my skin suddenly crawling at the thought of the unseen eyes that could be watching our conversation. At least in my cabin I could be sure of being alone.
“Enjoy your rest!”
“I will,” I said. I turned to go—and walked slap into a bleary-eyed Ben Howard.
“Blacklock!”
“Howard.”
“Last night . . .” he said awkwardly. I shook my head. I wasn’t about to have this conversation in front of the softly spoken Bjorn, who was smiling at the opposite side of the room.
“Let’s not go there,” I said curtly. “We were both drunk. Have you only just woken up?”
“Yeah.” He stifled a huge yawn. “After I left your cabin I bumped into Archer and we ended up playing poker with Lars and Richard Bullmer until stupid o’clock.”