by Ruth Ware
The bluntness of his words made me cringe, but I nodded.
“Not in so many words—but yes. He made a comment about medication not mixing well with alcohol and I think he thought . . .”
Bullmer said nothing, he just regarded me impassively, and I found my words tumbling out, almost as if I were trying to defend Nilsson.
“It’s just that I was burgled, before I came on board the ship. There was a man—he came into my flat and attacked me. Nilsson found out about it and I think that he felt, well, not that I’d made it up, but that I . . . might have overreacted.”
“I’m deeply ashamed that a member of this boat’s staff made you feel that way,” Bullmer said. He took my hand, holding it in a viselike grip. “Please believe me, Miss Blacklock, I take your account with the utmost seriousness.”
“Thanks,” I said, but that one small word didn’t do justice to the relief that someone, someone finally believed me. And not just someone—Richard Bullmer, the Aurora’s owner. If anyone had the power to get this sorted, it was him.
As I walked back to my cabin, I pressed my hands to my eyes, feeling them sting with tiredness, and then I felt in my pocket for my mobile to check the time. Almost five. Where had the time gone?
Automatically I opened up my e-mails and forced a refresh—but there was still no connection and I felt a pang of unease. Surely, surely this outage had gone on too long? I should have mentioned it to Bullmer, but it was too late now. He had gone—slipping into one of those unsettling concealed exits behind a screen, presumably to talk to the captain or radio land.
What if Jude had e-mailed? Rung, even, though I doubted we’d be close enough to land yet for a signal. Was he still ignoring me? For a minute I had a sharp flash of his hands on my back, my face against his chest, the feel of his warm T-shirt beneath my cheek, and it hit me with such force that I almost staggered beneath the weight of longing for his presence.
We would be in Trondheim tomorrow, at least. No one could prevent me from accessing the Internet then.
“Lo!” said a voice from behind me, and I turned to see Ben walking along the narrow corridor. He wasn’t a big man, but he seemed to fill it entirely, an Alice in Wonderland trick of the perspective that made the corridor seem to shrink down to nothing and Ben grow bigger and bigger as he came nearer.
“Ben,” I said, trying to make my voice convincingly cheerful.
“How did it go?” He began to walk alongside me towards our cabins. “Did you see Bullmer?”
“Yes . . . I think it went okay. He seemed to believe me, anyway.” I didn’t say what I had started thinking after Richard left, which was that he had not got as far as he had by showing all the cards in his hand. I’d come out of the meeting feeling confident and appeased, but as I ran back through his words, I realized he hadn’t promised anything; in fact, he hadn’t really said anything that could be quoted out of context as unqualified support for my story. There had been a lot of if this is true . . . and if what you say . . . nothing very concrete, when you came down to it.
“Great news,” Ben said. “Is he diverting the boat?”
“I don’t know. He seemed to think it wouldn’t make any difference to divert now, that we’d do better to push on to Trondheim and get there as early as possible tomorrow.”
We had reached our cabins, and I pulled my room key out of my pocket.
“God, I hope this dinner isn’t another eight-course one tonight,” I said wearily as I unlocked and opened my door. “I want to get enough sleep to be coherent for the police in Trondheim tomorrow.
“That’s still your plan, then?” Ben asked. He leaned his hand on the doorframe, effectively preventing me from either leaving or closing the door, though I assumed it wasn’t that calculated.
“Yes. As soon as the boat docks I’m going there.”
“Doesn’t it depend on what the captain says about the boat’s position?”
“Probably. I think Bullmer’s speaking to him about it now. But regardless, I want to get this on record with someone official, even if they can’t investigate.” The sooner my words were down in some official file, the safer I’d feel.
“Fair enough,” Ben said easily. “Well, whatever happens tomorrow, you’ve got a clean slate with the police. Stick to the facts—be clear and unemotional, like you sound like you were with Bullmer. They’ll believe you. You’ve got no reason to lie.” He dropped his arm and took a step back. “You know where I am if you need me, yeah?”
“Yeah.” I gave him a tired smile and was about to shut the door when he put his hand back on the frame so that I couldn’t shut it without trapping his fingers.
“Oh, I nearly forgot,” he said casually. “Did you hear about Cole?”
“His hand?” I’d almost forgotten, but it came back to me now with shocking vividness, the slow drip of blood on to the decking, Chloe’s greenish face. “Poor guy. Will he need stitches?”
“I don’t know, but it’s not just that. He managed to knock his camera into the hot tub at the same time—he’s beside himself, says he can’t understand how he came to leave it so close to the edge.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Nope. He reckons the lens will be okay, but says the body and the SD card’s fucked.”
I felt the room shift and move a little, as if everything were going in and out of perspective, and I had a prickling flash of the photo of the girl on the little screen—a photo that was most likely gone forever now.
“Hey,” Ben said with a laugh, “no need to look so doom-laden! He’ll have insurance, I’m sure. It’s just a shame about the shots. He was showing them to us over lunch. He had some great pics, there was a lovely one of you from last night.” He stopped and put out a hand to touch my chin. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” I jerked my head away from him and then tried to force a convincing smile. “I’m just—I don’t think I’d go on a cruise again, it’s really not suiting me . . . you know . . . the sea . . . the kind of hemmed-in-ness of it all. I really just want to get to Trondheim now.”
My heart was hammering, and I couldn’t wait for Ben to get his hand off the door and leave. I needed to get my head together—needed to work this out.
“Do you . . . mind?” I nodded at Ben’s hand, still resting on the doorframe, and he gave an easy laugh and straightened up.
“Sure! Sorry, I shouldn’t be gabbing. You probably want to dress for dinner . . . right?”
“Right,” I said. My voice sounded high and false. Ben moved his hand, and I closed the door with an apologetic smile.
When he was gone, I slid the dead bolt across and then I slumped down with my back against the wood, drew my knees up to my chest, and rested my forehead on my knees, a picture, stark in front of my closed lids. It was Chloe, reaching out for her glass of champagne, her arm dripping onto Cole’s camera on the deck below.
There was no way Cole or anyone else could have knocked that camera in. It wasn’t on the rim of the tub. Someone had taken advantage of the kerfuffle surrounding my announcement and the broken glass and had picked it up from the floor and thrown it in. And I had absolutely no way of knowing who that was. It could have happened at any time—even after we’d all left the deck. It could have been almost any of the guests or staff—or even Cole himself.
The room seemed to close around me, stiflingly warm and airless, and I knew I had to get out.
On the veranda the sea mist was still close around the boat, but I took great gulping breaths of the cold air, feeling the freshness fill my lungs, jolting me out of my stupor. I had to think. I felt like I had all the pieces of the puzzle in front of me, that I must be able to put them together if I only tried hard enough. If only my head wasn’t aching so much.
I leaned over the balcony, just as I had the night before, remembering that moment—the sound of the veranda door sliding stealthily
back, the huge smacking splash, shocking in the quiet, and the smear of blood across glass, and suddenly I was absolutely and completely certain that I had not imagined it. None of it. Not the mascara. Not the blood. Not the face of the woman in cabin 10. Most of all, I had not imagined her. And for her sake, I could not let this drop. Because I knew what it was like to be her—to wake in the night with someone in your room, to feel that utter helpless certainty that something awful was going to happen, with nothing you could do to prevent it.
The September night air felt suddenly cold, very cold, reminding me how far north we were—almost to the Arctic Circle now. I shivered convulsively and, drawing my phone out of my pocket, I checked the reception one more time, holding it up high as if that would somehow magically improve the signal, but there were no bars.
Tomorrow, though. Tomorrow we would be in Trondheim, and no matter what, I was going to get myself off this boat and straight to the nearest police station.
- CHAPTER 21 -
Making myself up for dinner that night, I felt like I was applying war paint—lacquering on, layer by layer, the calm, professional mask that would enable me to get through this.
Part of me, a big part, wanted to go and huddle beneath my duvet—the idea of making small talk with a group of people containing a potential murderer, eating food served by someone who might have killed a woman last night—that thought was terrifying, and utterly surreal.
But another, more stubborn part refused to give in. As I applied mascara borrowed from Chloe in the bathroom mirror, I found myself searching in my reflection for the angry, idealistic girl who’d started her journalism course at uni fifteen years ago, thinking of the dreams I’d had of becoming an investigative reporter and changing the world. Instead, I had fallen into travel writing at Velocity to pay the bills and, almost in spite of myself, I’d begun to enjoy it—had even started to relish the perks, and to dream of a role like Rowan’s, running my own magazine. And that was fine—I wasn’t ashamed of the writer I’d become; like most people, I’d taken work where I could find it and tried to do the best I could in that job. But how could I look that girl in the mirror in the eye, if I didn’t have the courage to get out there and investigate a story that was staring me in the face?
I thought of all the women I’d admired reporting from war zones around the world, of people who’d exposed corrupt regimes, gone to prison to protect their sources, risked their lives to get at the truth. I couldn’t imagine Martha Gellhorn obeying an instruction to Stop digging, or Kate Adie hiding in her hotel room because she was scared of what she might find.
STOP DIGGING. The letters on the mirror were etched in my memory. Now, as I finished my makeup with a swipe of lip gloss, I huffed on the mirror, and wrote in the steam obscuring my reflection one word: NO.
Besides, as I shut the bathroom door behind me and put on my evening shoes, a smaller, more selfish part of me was whispering that I was safest in company. No one could harm me in front of a room full of witnesses.
I was just straightening my gown when there was a knock on the door.
“Who is it?” I called.
“It’s Karla, Miss Blacklock.”
I opened the door. Karla was outside, smiling with that permanent air of slightly anxious surprise.
“Good evening, Miss Blacklock. I just wanted to remind you that dinner is in ten minutes, and drinks are being served in the Lindgren Lounge, whenever you wish to join us.”
“Thank you,” I said, and then, on impulse as she turned to go, “Karla?”
“Yes?” She turned back, her eyebrows raised so that her round face looked almost alarmed. “Is there something else with which I can help?”
“I—I don’t know. It’s just . . .” I took a deep breath, trying to think how to phrase it. “When I came and talked to you earlier today in the staff quarters, I felt like . . . I felt like maybe there was something else you could have told me. That perhaps you didn’t want to speak in front of Miss Lidman. And I just wanted to say—I’m going into Trondheim tomorrow, to talk to the police about what I saw, and if there’s anything—anything at all—that you wanted to say, now would be a really good time to tell me. I could make sure it was anonymous.” I thought again of Martha Gellhorn and Kate Adie, of the kind of reporter I’d once wanted to be. “I’m a journalist,” I said as convincingly as I could. “You know that. We protect our sources—it’s part of the deal.”
Karla said nothing, only twisted her fingers together.
“Karla?” I prompted. For a moment I thought that there might be tears in her blue eyes, but she blinked them away.
“I don’t . . .” she said, and then muttered something under her breath in her own language.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You can tell me. I promise it won’t go any further. Are you frightened of someone?”
“It is not that,” she said miserably. “I am sad because I am sorry for you. Johann is saying that you make it up, that you are . . . what’s the word? Paranoid, and that you . . . you seek the attention by making up stories. And I don’t believe this. I believe you are a good person and that you believe what you say is true. But, Miss Blacklock, we need our jobs. If the police say that something bad happened on this boat, no one will want to travel with us, and it may not be so easy to find another job. I need this money, I have a little boy, Erik, at home with my mother; she needs the money that I send back. And just because perhaps someone let a friend use an empty cabin, that doesn’t mean she was killed, you know?”
She turned away.
“Hang on.” I put out a hand towards her arm, trying to stop her going. “What are you saying? There was a girl in there? Did someone smuggle her in?”
“I am saying nothing.” She pulled her arm out of my grip. “I am saying, please, Miss Blacklock, don’t make trouble if nothing happened.”
And then she ran up the corridor, punched the code into the staff door, and was gone.
On the way up to the Lindgren Lounge, I found myself replaying the conversation in my head, trying to work out what it meant. Had she seen someone in the cabin, or suspected someone was there? Or was she just torn between her sympathy for me and her fear of what might happen if what I was saying was true?
Outside the lounge I checked my phone surreptitiously, hoping against hope that we might be close enough to land for a signal, but there was still nothing. As I was putting it away in my evening bag, Camilla Lidman glided up.
“May I take that for you, Miss Blacklock?” She indicated the bag. I shook my head.
“No, thank you.” My phone was set to beep when it connected to roaming networks. If a signal did come, I wanted it by my side so I could act immediately.
“Very well. May I offer you a glass of champagne?” She indicated a tray on a small table by the entrance, and I nodded and took a frosted flute. I knew I should keep a clear head for tomorrow, but one glass for Dutch courage couldn’t hurt.
“Just to let you know, Miss Blacklock,” she said, “that the talk on the northern lights has been canceled tonight.”
I looked at her blankly, realizing that I’d forgotten, yet again, to check the itinerary.
“There was to have been a presentation on the northern lights after dinner,” she explained, seeing my expression. “A talk from Lord Bullmer accompanied by photographs from Mr. Lederer, but unfortunately, Lord Bullmer has been called away to deal with an emergency and Mr. Lederer has hurt his hand, so it has been rescheduled for tomorrow, after the group returns from Trondheim.”
I nodded again and turned to the rest of the room to see who else was missing.
Bullmer and Cole were both absent, as Camilla had said. Chloe was not there, either, and when I asked Lars, he said she was feeling ill and lying down in her room. Anne was present, although she looked pale, and as she raised her glass to her lips, her robe slipped, showing a deep purple bruise on her collarbone. S
he saw me glance, and look hastily away, and gave a self-conscious laugh.
“I know, it looks terrible, doesn’t it? I tripped in the shower, but I bruise so easily now, it looks worse than it is. It’s a side effect of the chemotherapy, unfortunately.”
As we took our seats at dinner, I saw Ben motion invitingly at the seat next to his, opposite Archer, but I pretended not to see, and instead took the chair closest to where I was standing, next to Owen White. He was giving Tina a long talk on his financial interests and his role at the investment company he worked for.
As I listened, half an ear on their conversation, half an ear on the rest of the table, I realized that the talk had shifted, and he was speaking in a low voice, as if unwilling to be overheard.
“. . . quite honestly, no,” he was confiding to Tina. “I’m just not one hundred percent convinced that the setup is sustainable—it’s such a niche investment area. But I don’t imagine Bullmer will have trouble getting interest from elsewhere. And of course he has pretty deep pockets of his own, or rather Anne does, so he can afford to wait for the right person to come on board. It’s a shame Solberg wasn’t able to come, this is much more his bailiwick.”
Tina nodded wisely, and then the conversation passed on to other topics—holiday destinations they had in common, the identity of the neon green cube of jelly that had just appeared on a plate in front of us, flanked by a little pile of something I thought might be seaweed. I let my gaze pass over the room, Archer was saying something to Ben and laughing uproariously. He looked drunk, his bow tie already askew. Anne, at the same table, was talking to Lars. There was no trace of the tears I’d seen earlier that afternoon, but there was something haunted about her expression, and her smile, as she nodded at something Lars was saying, was strained.
“Pondering our hostess?” said a low voice from across the table, and I turned to see Alexander sipping at a glass. “She’s quite the enigma, isn’t she? Looks so fragile, and yet they say she’s the power behind Richard’s throne. The iron fist in the silk glove, you could say. I suppose that having that kind of money from the age when most children are still drooling into their cornflakes has a steeling effect on one’s character.”