The Woman in Cabin 10 (23 page)

She must have. We hadn’t stopped. We hadn’t even got near enough to land to see it. But who was she, and why was she hiding on the ship?

I tried to ignore my aching head, to think logically. Was she a member of the crew? She had access to the staff door, after all. But then I remembered Nilsson punching in the code, me standing behind him as he did. He’d made no effort to shield the keypad. If I’d wanted to, it would have been child’s play to note down the numbers as he entered them. And after that, once you were below decks, there were not many further locked doors.

She’d had access to the empty cabin, though—and that
did
require a passkey, either a guest one, programmed to that door specifically, or a staff one that opened all the cabin doors. I thought of the cleaners I’d seen in their little hutches below decks, their scared faces looking out at me before the door swung shut. How much would one of them sell a passkey for? A hundred kroner? A thousand? They wouldn’t even need to sell it—I was certain there were places you could get key cards copied. They would just have had to loan it out for an hour or two, no questions asked. I thought of Karla—she had practically
told
me that it went on, that someone might have lent the cabin to a friend.

But it didn’t have to be that. The passkey could have been stolen, for all I knew, or bought off the Internet—I had no idea how those electronic locks worked. There might have been no one else involved at all.

Was it possible that all this time I had been looking for an accomplice—a perpetrator among the crew or passengers—and they’d been innocent all along? I thought of the accusations I’d hurled at Ben, the suspicions I’d had of Cole, of Nilsson, of everyone, and I felt sick.

But the fact that this girl existed and was alive, that didn’t automatically rule out someone else’s involvement. The more I thought about it, the more I was sure that
someone
had been helping her above decks—someone had written that message on the spa wall, had tipped Cole’s camera into the hot tub, had stolen my phone. They couldn’t
all
have been her. Someone would have seen and recognized the girl I had been shouting about for two days if she’d been wandering around the ship.

Ugh, this was making my head hurt. Why? That was the question I couldn’t answer. Why go to such lengths to hide on board the ship, to stop me from asking questions? If the girl had died, the cover-up made sense. But she was alive and well. It must be
who
she was that was important. Someone’s wife? Someone’s daughter? Lover? Someone trying to get out of the country with no questions asked?

I thought of Cole and his ex-wife, Archer and his mysterious “Jess.” I thought of the way the photograph had disappeared from the camera.

None of it made sense.

I rolled over, feeling the weight of the darkness all around. Wherever we were, it was very deep beneath the ship, I was sure of that now. The engine was loud, much louder than on the passenger deck, louder even than I remembered it being on the staff deck. I was somewhere else, on an engine deck, perhaps, far below the waterline, deep in the hull.

At that thought, I felt again the horror begin to creep over me, the tons and tons of water weighing on my head and shoulders, pressing against the hull, the air in the cabin circulating, circulating, and me here suffocating in my own panic. . . .

My legs shaking, I climbed cautiously off the bunk and made my way slowly across the floor, my arms stretched out in front of me, cringing from what might be in here with me in the absolute darkness. My imagination conjured up horrors from my childhood nightmares—giant spiderwebs across my face, men with clutching arms, even the girl herself, lidless, lipless, tongueless. But another part of me knew that there was no one here but myself—that I would have been able to hear, smell,
sense
another human being in such a confined space.

After a few moments of cautious inching, my fingers encountered the door, and I felt my way across it. The first thing I tried was the handle, but it was still locked—I hadn’t expected anything else. I felt for a spy hole, but there was none, or none that I could find on the blank expanse of plastic. I didn’t remember seeing one earlier, anyway. What I did remember, and what I felt for next, was the flat beige light switch to the left of the door. My fingers found it in the darkness, and I pressed it, my heart beating hard in my chest.

Nothing happened.

I flicked it back, but without hope this time, because I knew what they’d done. There must be some kind of override in the passage outside, some sort of master switch or fuse. The door was already shut when the light went out, and in any case, in any cabin I’d been in before there was always some kind of security light—you were never in
complete
darkness, even when the lights were turned out. This was something else—this was an utter, total darkness that could only come from the electricity being completely cut.

I crawled back to the bunk and beneath the covers, my muscles shaking with a mixture of panic and that sick flu-like feeling I’d had before. My head felt filled with a spreading blankness, as if the dark of the cabin had seeped inside my skull and was filtering through my synapses, deadening and muffling everything apart from the panic that was building in my gut.

Oh God. Don’t. Don’t give way, not now.

I couldn’t. I
wouldn’t
. I wouldn’t let her win.

The anger that flooded over me suddenly was something that I could hang on to, something concrete in the silent blackness of this little box. That bitch. What a traitor. So much for the fucking sisterhood. I had fought for her, put my credibility on the line, endured Nilsson’s doubt and Ben’s probing—and all for what? So that she could betray me, bash my head into a steel frame post, and lock me into this fucking coffin.

Whatever the plot was—she was in on it.

She had definitely been the person who had ambushed me in the corridor. And the more I thought about it, the more I was sure that the hand that had come snaking in to snatch my food tray was hers, too, a skinny, lithe, strong hand. A hand that could scratch and slap and smack a person’s head against the wall.

There must be
some
reason for all this—no one would go through this elaborate charade for nothing. Had she been faking her own death? Had I been
meant
to see what happened? But if so, why go to such lengths to pretend she was never there? Why clear the cabin, wipe away the blood, destroy the mascara, and deliberately discredit everything about my account of that night?

No. She hadn’t wanted to be seen. Something had happened in that cabin, and whatever it was, I was not supposed to have witnessed it.

I lay there, cudgeling my battered brain to try to work it out, but the more I tried to ram the bits of information together, the more it felt like a jigsaw with too many pieces to fit the frame.

I tried to think through the possibilities that would mesh with the scream and the blood and the cover-up. A fight? A blow to the nose, a yell of pain, a gush of blood as the person ran to the veranda to try to bleed into the sea, leaving that smear on the glass . . . no deaths. And if the girl was some kind of stowaway, that could explain why they had covered it up—moved her to a different location, cleaned away the blood.

But other parts of the picture didn’t fit. If the fight had been unintended and unpremeditated, how had they cleared the cabin so fast? I had seen the girl in situ earlier that day, the room behind her cluttered with clothes and belongings. If the fight had been unplanned, there was no way they could have stripped and cleaned that suite in the few minutes it had taken me to ring Nilsson.

No—whatever had happened in there had been
planned
. They had cleared it beforehand, meticulously cleaned it. And I was beginning to suspect it was not chance that it was number ten that had been empty. No, one cabin had been left empty deliberately, and it
had
to be ten. Palmgren was the very last one on the ship. Its veranda was not overlooked, and there were no other cabins to see something floating past, disappearing in the foam of the ship’s wake.

Someone
had
died. I was sure of it. Just not that girl. But then who?

I tossed and turned in the darkness, listening for any sounds above the roar of the engine and trying to answer the questions churning uneasily inside. My brain felt fogged and thick, but I kept coming back to that question. Who?
Who had died?

- CHAPTER 24 -

W
hen I woke next it was to the same metallic click I’d heard before, and the lights flickered on. They strobed for a moment, the warming hum of the low-energy bulbs audible above the engine sound and mingling with the whining in my ears. I jumped up, my heart going a mile a minute, knocking over something on the floor beside the bed as I gazed wildly around.

I had missed my chance.

God
damn
it, I had missed my chance again.

I
had
to find out what was going on here, what they intended to do with me, why they were keeping me shut up here. How long had I been here? Was it daytime now? Or was this just the time that it suited the girl—or whoever my captor was—to turn the electricity back on?

I tried to count back. I had been hit in the early hours of Tuesday morning. At the very least it was Wednesday morning now, possibly later. It felt as if I’d been here longer than twenty-four hours—much longer.

I went to the bathroom to splash water on my face. It was as I was drying myself that a wave of vertigo washed over me, making my head reel and the whole room shift and shudder. I had the sudden sensation of falling, and I put out my hand to steady myself against the doorframe, shutting my eyes against the sensation of plummeting very far and very fast into black water.

At last the sensation receded, and I made my way back to the bunk, where I sat and put my head between my knees, feeling my skin shiver with cold and hot.
Had
the ship moved? It was hard to know what was dizziness and what was the movement of the waves, so far down beneath the decks. The movement of the ship felt very different down here—not so much a rhythmic rise and fall, but a sluggish roll that mingled with the constant roar of the engine to give a strange, hypnotic feeling.

There was a tray beside the bed, with a Danish pastry and a bowl of slopped muesli. That must have been what I knocked when I jumped up out of sleep. I picked it up and forced myself to take a spoonful. I wasn’t hungry, but I’d eaten nothing but a few meatballs since Monday night. If I were going to get out of here, I would need to fight, and to fight, I needed to eat.

What I really wanted, though, was not food. It was my pills. I
wanted
them, with a fierce, physical longing that I remembered from the last time I tried to stop taking them. Only this time I knew that things wouldn’t get better without them, as I had kept telling myself last time. They were going to get worse.

If you’re around to see it
, said a nasty little voice in my head. The muesli stuck in my throat, and suddenly I couldn’t swallow.

I longed for the girl from the cabin to come back. A vivid, luxuriantly violent image flashed across my brain: me, grabbing her hair the way she’d grabbed mine, smashing her cheekbone against the sharp metal edge of the bunk, watching the blood flow, the way it would smell sharp and raw in the confined, airless cabin. I remembered again the blood on the veranda, the way it had smeared across the glass, and I wished with a powerful, vicious longing that it
had
been hers.

I hate you
, I thought. I swallowed against the pain in my throat, forcing the soggy half-chewed muesli down. I took another spoonful, my fingers shaking as I conveyed it to my mouth.
I hate you so much
.
I hope you
do
drown.
The muesli felt like cement, choking me as I tried to swallow it, but I forced it down again and again, until the bowl was half empty.

I did not know if I could do this, but I had to try.

I picked up the tray, the thin melamine tray, and I smacked it on the metal edge of the bunk. It bounced back and I only just flinched out of the way in time. I had a sudden, sharp flashback to the burglary—to the door smacking into my cheekbone, and I had to shut my eyes for a moment and steady myself on the bunk.

I didn’t try that again. Instead, I leaned the tray on the metal edge and put my knee on the nearest side, and all my weight on my hands on the far edge. Then I pushed down. The tray did nothing at first, and I pressed harder. Then it snapped in half with a noise like a gunshot, sending me sprawling onto the bed. But I had what I’d been aiming for—two pieces of plastic, not quite razor-sharp, but each with an edge formidable enough to do some damage.

I picked up each piece, weighing them in my hand for the best way to hold them, and then, holding the one that felt like the most intimidating weapon, I walked across to the door and crouched against the wall next to the frame.

And I waited.

I
t seemed to last for hours, that day. Once or twice I felt my eyes sliding shut, my body trying to shut down amid the exhausting flood of adrenaline and fear, but I jerked them back open.
Stay with it, Lo!

I began to count. Not from panic this time but just to keep myself awake. One. Two. Three. Four. When I got to a thousand I changed and began to count in French.
Un. Deux. Trois. . . .
Then in twos. I played games in my own head—fizz-buzz, that children’s game where you say “fizz” for every five or multiple of five, and “buzz” for every seven.

One. Two. Three. Four. Fizz. (My hands were shaking.) Six. Buzz. Eight. Nine. Ten— No wait, that should have been fizz.

I shook my head impatiently, rubbed my aching arms, and started again. One. Two. . . .

And then I heard it—a noise in the corridor. A door slamming. I caught my breath.

They were coming closer. My heart began to race. The pit of my stomach clenched.

A key in the lock . . .

And then the door cracked cautiously open and I pounced.

Her.

She saw me leap towards the gap and tried to close it, but I was too quick for her. I thrust my arm in the gap, and it slammed onto my forearm—hard. I screamed with pain, but the door bounced back, and I was able to wedge half my body into the gap, stabbing at her grappling arm with the jagged edge of the broken tray, but instead of falling backwards as I’d anticipated, she rushed forwards into the room, thumping me back against the plastic wall, the tray cutting painfully into my arm. I pulled myself up, blood dripping down the back of my hand, but she was faster. She lunged at the door, locked it, and then stood with her back to it, the key clenched in her fist.

“Let me go.” It came out like the growl of an animal—not quite human. She shook her head. Her back was to the door, and she had my blood on her face, and she was scared, but kind of exhilarated, too, I could see it in her eyes. She had the upper hand, and she knew it.

“I’ll kill you,” I said. I meant it. I held up the tray, stained with my own blood. “I’ll cut your throat.”

“You couldn’t kill me,” she said, and her voice was just as I remembered it, with a kind of scornful defiance behind her words. “Look at you, you can barely stand up, you poor bitch.”

“Why?” I said, and there was a note in my voice that sounded like a whining little child. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because you
made
us,” she hissed, suddenly furious. “You wouldn’t stop digging, would you? No matter how much I tried to warn you off. If you’d just kept your mouth shut about what you saw in that bloody cabin—”

“What did I see?” I said, but she shook her head, her lip curling.

“God, you must think I’m even dumber than I look. Do you actually
want
to die?”

I shook my head.

“Good. What do you want, then?”

“I want to get out of here,” I said. I sat down on the bunk abruptly, not sure if my legs would hold me much longer.

She shook her head once more, vehemently this time, and I saw that flicker of fear in her eyes again.

“He’d never let me.”

He?
The word sent a prickle through me, the first concrete evidence that someone upstairs had been helping her. Who was
he
? But I didn’t dare ask, not now. There was something more important I needed first.

“My pills, then. Let me have my pills.”

She looked at me appraisingly.

“The ones you had by the sink? I might be able to do that. Why d’you want them?”

“They’re antidepressants,” I said bitterly. “They have— You shouldn’t withdraw from them too fast.”

“Oh . . .” There was sudden comprehension on her face. “That’s why you look so bad. I couldn’t work it out. I thought I’d hit your head too hard. Okay. I can do that. But you have to promise me something in return.”

“What?”

“No more trying to attack me. These are for good behavior, right?”

“All right.”

She straightened, picked up the plate and bowl, and held out her hand for the shards of tray. I hesitated for a moment and then handed them over.

“I’m going to unlock the door now,” she said. “But don’t do anything stupid. There’s another door outside this one, operated by a code. You won’t get very far. So no silly buggers, all right?”

“All right,” I said reluctantly.

After she’d gone I sat on the bench staring into space, thinking about what she’d said.

He
.

She
did
have an accomplice on board. And that one word meant I could rule out Tina, Chloe, Anne, and two-thirds of the staff.

Who was
he
? I ticked them off in my head.

Nilsson.

Bullmer.

Cole.

Ben.

And Archer.

In the less-likely column I put Owen White, Alexander, and the crew and stewards.

My mind circled the possibilities, but the one factor I kept coming back to was the spa and the
STOP DIGGING
message. There was only one man who had been down there, one man who could have written that sign. Ben.

I had to stop focusing on motives.
Why
was an unsolvable question that I just didn’t have enough information to answer.

But the
how—
there were very few people on board with the opportunity to write that note. There was one functional entrance into the spa, and Ben was the only male who I was certain had used it.

So many things made sense. His quickness to undermine my story to Nilsson. The fact that he—alone of everyone on board—had tried to get into my cabin on that last night, and knew that I was locked in the bathroom, making it possible to steal my phone.

The fact that his cabin was on the other side of the empty one, yet he’d heard nothing and seen nothing.

The fact that he’d lied about his alibi, playing poker.

And the fact that he had tried so hard to stop me from pushing on with the investigation.

The clicking of the puzzle pieces into place should have given me satisfaction, but they didn’t. Because what use were answers to me down here? I needed to get out.