The Woman in Cabin 10

by Ruth Ware

  For the rest of the night I lay on the bunk with the book open on the pillow beside me, running my fingers over the worn dust cover, but I knew the words by heart, too well perhaps, and somehow they failed to exert their familiar magic. Instead, I found myself running over the conversation with Carrie again and again, and thinking about what lay in wait for me.

  There were only two ways I was getting out of here—one was alive and the other was dead, and I knew which way I wanted it to be. In which case my choice was simple: to leave with Carrie’s help, or without.

  A few days ago, a few hours ago, I would have said unhesitatingly that my only real option was without—after all, she had beaten me, imprisoned me, starved me, even. But after tonight, I wasn’t so sure. Her hands as she helped me to sit, the way she had waited as I ate, watching every mouthful, her face full of sadness . . . her eyes as she turned to leave . . . I didn’t think she was a killer, not by choice, anyway. And something had happened these last few days that had made her realize that. I thought of the long, nightmarish wait for her to come, the way the hours had ticked past so slowly for me, my hunger growing and growing inexorably. But now, for the first time, I thought that perhaps the hours had been as slow and torturous for her, too, and perhaps she, too, had come face-to-face with something she was not ready for. She must have imagined me down here, growing weaker and weaker, clawing at the door. Until at last her resolve broke and she ran down with a stolen plate of lukewarm food.

  What must she have thought when she opened the door and found me slumped on the floor—that she had come too late? That I had collapsed, maybe from hunger, maybe from sheer exhaustion? And suddenly perhaps she knew—that she couldn’t live with another death, not one that she’d caused.

  She hadn’t wanted me to die, I was utterly certain of that. And I doubted if she could kill me, not if I kept reminding her of the fact that I was here because of her, because I had fought for her and tried to help her.

  Bullmer on the other hand . . . Bullmer, who had lived through his wife’s chemo, counting her money and planning her death, only to be cheated out of it at the eleventh hour . . .

  Yes. Bullmer, I could imagine all too clearly, would kill. And he probably wouldn’t lose a single hour of sleep over it.

  Where was he? Had he left the ship, establishing an alibi while Carrie starved me to death? I wasn’t sure. He had taken good care to isolate himself far away from Anne’s death; I couldn’t imagine he would allow himself to be implicated in mine.

  As I was pondering this, I heard the slow grinding roar of the ship’s engine start up. It hummed for a while, and then I felt the whole boat rock and shift, and I knew that we were moving again, out of Bergen harbor, the darkness swallowing the ship as we sailed out into the North Sea.

  - CHAPTER 30 -

  The engine had stopped again when I woke up, but I could feel the shifting mass of water all around us. I wondered where we were—in the fjords, perhaps. I imagined the walls of dark rock rising up all around us, framing a narrow slip of bleached sky above, and sinking down below into the deep blue sea. I knew that some of the fjords could be more than a kilometer deep—unimaginably deep and cold. A body sunk into those kinds of depths might very easily never be found.

  I was just wondering what time it was when there was a knock at the door, and Carrie appeared with a tray of muesli and a mug of coffee.

  “I’m sorry it’s not more,” she said as she put the tray down. “Now that the passengers and crew have all left, it’s got harder to take food without making the cook suspicious.”

  “The crew have left?” The words dismayed me, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on why.

  “Not all of them,” Carrie said. “The captain’s still here, along with some of his people. But all the passenger-facing staff have gone into Bergen with Richard for some kind of team-building-review thing.”

  Richard. So Bullmer wasn’t on the boat. Maybe that explained Carrie’s change in attitude. With Bullmer gone . . .

  I began to eat the muesli, slowly, and as before she sat and watched me, her eyes sad beneath their savagely epilated brows.

  “You didn’t pluck your eyelashes?” I said between mouthfuls. She shook her head.

  “No, I couldn’t quite bring myself. My eyelashes are a bit skimpy without mascara anyway, but I thought if anyone noticed, I’d claim they were false.”

  “Who—”

  I stopped. I’d been going to say “Who killed her?” but suddenly I couldn’t bring myself to voice that question. I was too scared that it might be Carrie. And anyway, my best hope was in persuading her that she wasn’t a killer, not reminding her that she’d done it once and could do it again.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I . . . What did you say, to my relatives, I mean? And the other passengers? Do they think I’m in Trondheim?”

  “Yes. I put my wig back on and left the boat with your passport. I picked a time when the stewards were all preparing breakfast and it was a member of the sailing crew on duty at the gangway—lucky you didn’t go on the tour of the bridge, you didn’t meet any of them. And lucky we’ve both got dark hair. I don’t know what I would have done if you were a blonde—I don’t have a blond wig. And then I rejoined the boat as Anne, and hoped they wouldn’t notice that Anne got on but had never actually got off.”

  Lucky. It wasn’t the word I’d have chosen. So the paper trail was complete—a record of me leaving the boat and never returning. No wonder no police had turned up to search the vessel.

  “What was the plan?” I said quietly. “If I hadn’t seen you? What was supposed to happen?”

  “I would still have got off at Trondheim,” she said bitterly. “But this time as Anne. And then I’d have put my wig on, changed my clothes, drawn on my eyebrows, and disappeared into the crowd as just another anonymous backpacker. The trail would have ended in Trondheim—an unstable woman, facing death, disappearing without a trace . . . And then, when everything had died down, Richard and I were going to ‘meet,’ fall in love, publicly this time—do it all over again for the cameras.”

  “Why did you do it, Carrie?” I asked despairingly, and then bit my tongue. Now wasn’t the time to antagonize her. I needed to get her on my side and I wasn’t going to do that by making her feel accused. But I couldn’t hold it in anymore. “I just don’t understand.”

  “Nor do I, sometimes.” She put her hands over her face. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

  “So tell me,” I said. I put my hand out, almost timidly, and let it rest on her knee, and she flinched as though she was expecting to be struck. I realized how frightened she was—how much of that vicious energy had come from terror, not hate.

  “Carrie?” I prodded. She looked away and spoke towards the orange curtain, as if she couldn’t face me.

  “We met at the Magellan,” she said. “I was a waitress there while I was trying to make it as an actress. And he—he just swept me off my feet, I suppose. It was like something out of Fifty Shades, penniless me, and him, falling in love, showing me this life I’d never dreamed of. . . .”

  She stopped, swallowed.

  “I knew he was married, of course—he was completely honest about that. So we could never see each other in public, and I couldn’t tell anyone about him. Their marriage had been over almost before it started—she was horribly cold and controlling, and they lived separate lives, her in Norway and him in London. He hasn’t had an easy life, you know—his mother left when he was a baby, and his father died when he was barely out of school. It seemed so unfair that Anne, the person who should have loved him most of all, couldn’t even bear to be with him! But she was dying, and he couldn’t bring himself to divorce a woman with just months to live—it seemed too cruel, and he kept talking about afterwards, when she died, when we’d be together . . .” Her voice trailed off, and for a minute I thought that was it, she wa
s going to get up and go, but she started speaking again, the words coming faster now, as if she was unable to stop herself.

  “One night he had this idea—he said that I should dress up as his wife and go to the theater, so that we could be out in public together. He gave me one of her kimonos, and I watched a film of her talking, so I knew how to carry myself and how to act, and I hid my hair under a swimming cap, with one of her scarves on top. And we pulled it off—we sat in a box, just the two of us, and drank champagne and, oh, it was amazing. Like a game, fooling everyone.

  “We did it once or twice more, only when Anne was passing through London, so people wouldn’t be suspicious, and then a few months later he had this idea—it seemed crazy at first, but he’s like that, you know? Nothing is impossible—he truly makes you believe that. He said that he had a press trip coming up, that Anne was due to be there for the first night, but that she was getting off the boat late that night and going home to Norway. And he said, what if I stayed on and pretended to be her? He could smuggle me on board, and we could be a real couple—together, in public, for a whole week. He promised me I could pull it off, he said that no one on board had actually met her, and he would make sure no one photographed me so there wouldn’t be any chance of getting caught afterwards. The boat was stopping in Bergen at the end of the trip, so people would just assume Anne had stayed on for a few extra days, and then I could change into my own clothes on the last day and go home as me. He arranged for one of the other guests not to turn up so there was an empty cabin and he said the only thing—” She stopped. “The only thing was, I’d have to cut my hair, to be convincing. But it seemed . . . it seemed worth it. To be with him.”

  She swallowed, and when she spoke again, it was more slowly.

  “On the first night I was just getting into my clothes as Anne, when Richard came to the cabin. He was beside himself. He said that Anne had found out about the affair and had gone mad, lashing out at him. He’d pushed her away to try to protect himself, and she had stumbled and hit her head on the coffee table. When he tried to revive her he—he found—” She faltered, but carried on. “He found she was dead.

  “He didn’t know what to do—he said that if there was a police investigation, my presence on board would come out and no one would believe his version of the fight. He said that both of us would be prosecuted, him as a murderer, me as an accessory to a premeditated plot. He said it would come out—the fact that I’d been dressing up as Anne. He said that Cole had a photograph of me in Anne’s clothes. He persuaded me—” She stopped again, emotion choking her voice. “He persuaded me the only thing to do was to tip Anne’s body overboard and carry on with the plan. If she went missing in Bergen, nothing could be traced back to us. But it wasn’t supposed to happen like this!”

  Objections crowded to the tip of my tongue, screaming to be unleashed. How could Anne have got off the boat on the first night when we weren’t due to arrive in Norway until the following day? And how could she get off without her passport, without the crew knowing that she’d left? It didn’t make sense—the only explanation was that Richard had never been intending for Anne to walk down that gangplank of her own volition, and Carrie must know that herself. She wasn’t stupid. But I’d seen this kind of willful blindness before, women who insisted their boyfriends weren’t cheating in the face of all the evidence, people working for horrendous employers who’d persuaded themselves they were just following orders and doing what was necessary. There seemed to be no limit to the capacity of people to believe what they wanted to see, and if Carrie had argued herself into accepting Richard’s twisted version of the facts in the face of all logic, she wasn’t likely to listen to me.

  Instead, I took a deep breath, pushed back the protests clamoring in my head, and asked the question that everything hinged on.

  “What’s going to happen to me?”

  “Fuck!” Carrie stood up, raking her hands across her head so that the headscarf slipped, showing the shaven scalp beneath. “I don’t know. Stop asking me, please.”

  “He’s going to kill me, Carrie.” He was going to kill us both, I was fairly sure of that now, but I wasn’t sure if she was ready to hear that. “Please, please, you can get us both out of here, you know you can. I’ll give evidence—I’ll say that you saved me, that—”

  “First”—she broke in, face hard—“I’d never betray him. I love him. You don’t seem to get that. And second, even if I went along with you, I’d end up on a murder charge.”

  “But if you testified against him—”

  “No.” She cut me off. “No. That’s not going to happen. I love him. And he loves me. I know he does.”

  She turned away, towards the door, and I knew that it was now or never, that I had to try to make her see the truth of what she was involved in, even if she walked away and I ended up starving to death down here in my metal coffin.

  “He’s going to kill you, Carrie,” I spoke to the back of her head as she reached the door. “You know that, right? He’s going to kill me, and then kill you. This is your last chance.”

  “I love him,” she said. There was a crack in her voice.

  “So much that you helped him kill his wife?”

  “I didn’t kill her!” she shouted, the anguished cry painfully loud in the cramped space. She stood with her back to me, her hand on the door handle, and her whole narrow body shook, like a child racked by sobs. “She was already dead—at least, that’s what he said. He left her body in the cabin in a suitcase, and I wheeled it to cabin ten when you were all at dinner. All I had to do was throw the whole thing over the side while he was playing poker. But . . .”

  She stopped, turned back round, slumped to the ground, her head bowed to her knees.

  “But what?”

  “But the case was incredibly heavy. I think he’d weighted it with something, and I banged it against the doorframe getting it into the suite. The lid sprang open and that’s when”—she gave a sob—“oh God, I don’t know anymore! Her face—it was all bloody, but just for a second—I—I thought her eyelids fluttered.”

  “Jesus.” I went cold with horror. “You mean—you didn’t throw her over alive, did you?”

  “I don’t know.” She buried her face in her hands. Her voice was cracked, high and reedy, with a tremor like someone on the verge of hysteria. “I screamed—I couldn’t help it. But I touched the blood on her face, and it was cold. If she’d been alive, the blood would have been warm, wouldn’t it? I thought perhaps I’d just imagined it, or it was some kind of involuntary movement—they say that happens, don’t they? In morgues and stuff. I didn’t know what to do—I just shut the case! But I can’t have fastened it properly, because when I threw it over the side, the catch burst open and I saw her face—her face in the water— Oh God!”

  She stopped, her breath coming fast and choking, but just as I was trying to grapple with the horror of what she might have done, think of what I could possibly say in reply to her confession, she spoke.

  “I haven’t been able to sleep, ever since, you know? Every night I lie there, thinking about her, thinking about how she could have been alive.”

  She looked up at me, and for the first time I saw her feelings naked in her eyes—the guilt and fear she’d been trying so desperately to hide ever since that first night.

  “This isn’t what was supposed to happen,” she said brokenly. “She was supposed to die at home, in her own bed—and I—and I—”

  “You don’t have to do this.” I spoke urgently. “Whatever happened with Anne’s death, you can stop this now. Can you really live with killing me? One death on your conscience has driven you half-crazy, Carrie. Don’t make it two—I’m begging you—for both of us. Please, let me go. I won’t say anything, I swear. I’ll—I’ll tell Judah I got off in Trondheim and must have blacked out. No one would believe me anyway! They didn’t believe me when I said a body went over the si
de—why would this be any different?”

  I knew why: because of DNA. Fingerprints. Dental records. The traces of Anne’s blood that must remain on the glass screen and somewhere in Richard’s cabin.

  But I didn’t say any of that, and Carrie didn’t seem to have thought of it. Her panic seemed to have been excised along with her tumbling, spewed-out confession, and her breathing had slowed. Now, her face, as she stared at me, was tearstained but calm, and oddly beautiful now that her hysteria had passed.

  “Carrie?” I said timidly, hardly daring to hope.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said. She got to her knees, picked up the tray, and turned for the door. As she did, her foot knocked against the copy of Winnie-the-Pooh, and she looked down. Something in her face changed, and she picked it up, riffling the pages with her free hand.

  “I loved that book as a kid,” she said. I nodded.

  “Me too. I must have read it a hundred times. That bit at the end, with the ring of trees . . . it always makes me sob.”

  “My mum used to call me Tigger,” she said. “She used to say, you’re like Tigger, you are, no matter how hard you fall, you always bounce back.” She gave a shaky laugh and then tossed the book onto the foot of the bunk, making an obvious effort to snap back to practicalities. “Listen, I might not be able to bring you supper tonight. The cook’s getting suspicious. I’ll do my best, but if I can’t, then I’ll bring you something extra for breakfast, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, and then, moved by some impulse, “thank you.”

  I thought about it after she left—the stupidity of thanking a woman who was keeping you captive, buying your compliance by withholding food and drugs. Was I developing Stockholm syndrome?

  Maybe. Although if I was, she had a considerably more advanced case than I did. Maybe that was closer to the truth—we weren’t captor and captive, but two animals in different compartments of the same cage. Hers was just slightly larger.