The Woman in Cabin 10 (24 page)

- CHAPTER 25 -

I
was lying on my side, staring at the cream melamine wall when the knock came.

“Come in,” I said dully, and then almost laughed at myself for the stupidity of social niceties in a situation like this. What did it matter if I said “Come in” when they would do as they liked regardless?

“It’s me,” said the voice outside the door. “No more shit with the trays, okay? Or this’ll be the last pill you get off me, right?”

“Okay,” I said. I was trying not to sound too eager, but I sat up, pulling the thin blanket around myself. I hadn’t used the shower since I got here and I smelled of sweat and fear.

The door cracked open cautiously, and the girl pushed a tray of food through the bottom with her foot and then slipped through the gap, locking it behind herself.

“Here you go,” she said. She held out her hand, and on the palm was a single white tablet.

“One?” I said incredulously.

“One. Maybe I can bring you a couple more tomorrow, if you behave.”

I had just given her the best blackmail weapon ever. But I nodded and took the pill from her palm. From her pocket she pulled a book—one of mine, in fact, from my room.
The Bell Jar.
Not what I’d have chosen under the circumstances, but it was better than nothing, I guessed.

“I thought you might like something to read, you might be going a bit nuts with nothing to do.” Her eyes strayed to the pill, and then she added, “No offense.”

“Thanks,” I said. She turned to go and I said, “Wait.”

“Yeah?”

“I—” Suddenly I wasn’t sure how to ask what I wanted to ask. I clenched my hand around the pill in my palm. Shit. “What—what’s going to happen to me?”

Her face changed at that, something guarded came over her expression, like a curtain falling across a window.

“That’s not up to me.”

“Who is it up to? Ben?”

She gave a derisory snort at that.

“Enjoy.”

As she turned to leave, she caught sight of herself in the little mirror on the back of the en suite door.

“Fuck, I’ve got blood on my face. Why didn’t you say? If he knows you attacked me . . .” She went into the little toilet to splash and wipe her face.

But it wasn’t just the blood she wiped away. When she came out, I froze. With that one simple act, I realized who she was.

In wiping away the blood she had wiped both her eyebrows clean off, leaving a smooth, skull-like forehead that was instantly, unbearably recognizable.

The woman in cabin 10 was Anne Bullmer.

- CHAPTER 26 -

I
was too stunned to say anything. I just sat there, openmouthed with shock.

The girl looked from me, back to her reflection in the en suite mirror, and realized what she’d done. An expression of annoyance crossed her face for a moment, but then she seemed to shrug it off and stalked out of the room, letting the door swing shut behind her. I heard a key scrape in a lock, and then another door bang farther away.

Anne Bullmer.

Anne Bullmer?

It seemed impossible that she could be the same gaunt, gray, prematurely aged woman I’d seen and spoken to. And yet—her face was unmistakable. The same dark eyes. The same high, jutting cheekbones. The only thing I couldn’t understand was how I’d missed it before.

If I hadn’t seen her, midtransformation, I would never have believed how much her hair and the delicately penciled eyebrows changed her face. Without them she looked oddly featureless and smooth. It was impossible not to think of death and illness when you looked at that bone-pale sweep of skin, and the scarf tied tight around her skull only emphasized that fragility—painfully underscoring the lines of her neck and the shape of the bones beneath.

But her sleek black brows and the vibrant mass of dark hair changed all that beyond recognition. With it she became young, healthy,
alive
.

I realized, when I’d spoken to Anne Bullmer before, I had been so mesmerized by the trappings of her illness that I’d never really looked at the woman beneath. I had tried
not
to look in fact. I had just seen the distinctive, draping clothes, the missing eyebrows, the distractingly smooth skull beneath those delicate scarves . . .

The hair must be a wig—I had no doubt about that. There was no room under those thin silk scarves Anne wore for those thick dark tresses.

But was she sick? Well? Dying? Faking? It didn’t make sense.

I tried to think back to what Ben had told me—four years of chemo and radiotherapy. Could you really fake that, even with private doctors in your pay and enough money to enable you to hop from one health system to another every few months? Maybe.

At least this explained one thing—how she had got on board, and what had happened to her after that splash in the night. She’d simply pulled off her wig, put on her scarf, and resumed her life as Anne Bullmer. It also explained how she had access to every part of the ship—to the passkeys and the staff areas, and this secret locked vault down in the belly of the boat. When your husband was the owner, nothing was out of bounds, presumably.

But the thing that puzzled me most was
why
? Why dress up in a wig and a Pink Floyd T-shirt and spend the afternoon hanging out in an empty cabin? What was she doing there? And if it was so secret, why answer the door at all?

As the last question ran through my head, I had a sudden flash of myself knocking on the door—one, two, three . . . pause, and another bang, and the way the door had been snatched open as if someone had been waiting for that final knock. It was an odd knock, idiosyncratic. The kind of knock you might use if you were arranging a code. Was it possible I had, completely accidentally, stumbled on a prearranged signal for the woman in the cabin—Anne Bullmer—to open the door?

If only. If only I’d just knocked twice like any normal person—or even once. I would never have known she was there, never have put myself in this position where I had to be locked up—silenced . . .

Silenced. It was an uncomfortable thought, and the word stuck in my head, reverberating there like an echo.

I had to be silenced. But silenced for how long? Locked up here until . . . what? Some prearranged deadline had passed?

Or silenced . . . permanently?

S
upper was white fish in a sort of cream sauce, with boiled potatoes. It was cold, congealing around the edges, but I was hungry. Before I ate I looked at the pill in my hand, wondering what to do. It was half my normal dose. I could take the whole pill now, or I could split it, and start building up a reserve in case . . . but in case what? I could hardly escape, and if Anne decided to stop dispensing the pills, I would run out long before she took pity on me.

In the end, I gulped down the whole thing, reasoning that I had a deficit to make up. I could start biting them in half tomorrow, if it seemed important. I felt better almost immediately, though I knew, logically, that it couldn’t be the pills. They didn’t absorb that fast, and the effect took a while to build up in my system. Whatever I was experiencing was completely placebo-based. At this point, though, I didn’t care. I would take what I could get.

Then I started picking at the lukewarm supper. As I sat on the bunk, chewing the tepid, gluey potato slowly, in an effort to make it less unappealing, I tried to rearrange the pieces of the puzzle I had assembled so painstakingly inside my head.

I knew now what that derisive snort meant when I had said
Who is it up to? Ben?

Poor Ben. I felt a rush of guilt that I had been so quick to judge him, and then another rush, this time of anger. I’d been so focused on Anne’s chance mention of a male accomplice that it had never occurred to me that Anne herself might have been the one to run quickly down the spa stairs while her varnish was supposed to be drying and scrawl those words. Stupid,
stupid
Lo.

But stupid Ben, too. If he hadn’t spent so many years belittling my feelings and if he hadn’t been so eager to spill the beans to Nilsson, instead of supporting my story, then I might not have been so quick to jump to conclusions.

I knew now who
he
was. It must be Richard Bullmer. He owned the boat. And of all the men on the ship, I could imagine him planning and carrying out a murder better than anyone else. Certainly better than fat, fussy Alexander or the lumbering, bearlike Nilsson.

Except that no murder had taken place. Why did I have to keep reminding myself of that fact? Why was it so hard to grasp?

Because you’re here
, I thought. Because whatever you saw—whatever happened in that cabin—it was important enough that they would lock you up here and prevent you from going to see the police at Trondheim. What had happened? It must be something so high-stakes that they simply couldn’t afford to let me talk about it. Was it smuggling? Were they throwing something overboard to an accomplice?

It’ll be you next, you stupid bitch
, said the voice inside my head, and an image of myself falling through deep water shot through me, like an electric shock deep in my skull.

I winced and gritted my teeth, forcing myself to swallow another glutinous mouthful of potato. The ship heaved, and nausea swilled around in the pit of my stomach.

What
was
going to happen to me? There were only two possibilities—they were going to let me go at some point. Or they were going to kill me. And somehow, the first one didn’t seem very likely anymore. I knew so much. I knew about Anne. I knew she wasn’t nearly as ill as she pretended. And they could not afford for me to get out and tell my story—a story of kidnap, imprisonment, and bodily harm—though would anyone believe me?

I touched my fingers to my cheek, where the blood was still caked from where she’d whacked me into the doorframe. I felt suddenly gross—dirty and sweaty and blood-smeared. Anne—judging by her previous timings—wouldn’t be back for hours.

There wasn’t much I could do to improve my lot, stuck in this two-meter coffin. But at least I could keep myself clean.

T
he jet was nothing like the one in my suite upstairs. Even turned up full it was a tepid trickle, but I stood underneath it for so long I felt my fingers wrinkle into mush. The clotted blood on my hand dissolved into the water and I shut my eyes and felt the warmth pour through me, seeping into my muscles.

When I climbed out I felt better, more like myself, washed clean of some of the fear and violence that had marked the last few days. It was putting my clothes back on that made me really realize how far I’d sunk. They stank—not to put too fine a point on it—and were stained with blood and sweat.

I lay down on the bunk and shut my eyes, listening to the steady thrum of the engine and wondering where we were. It was Wednesday night—or maybe even Thursday morning now. From what I could remember we had only a little over twenty-four hours of this trip left. And then what? When the boat got into Bergen on Friday morning, the other passengers would leave and with them would go my last hope of someone realizing what had happened.

For twenty-four hours I was probably safe. But after that . . . Oh God, but I couldn’t think about that.

I pressed my hands into my eyes, listened to the blood roaring in my head. What should I do? What
could
I do?

If Anne was telling the truth, hurting her wouldn’t achieve anything. There was another locked door the other side of this one, and very likely other codes on the exits. For a minute I wondered if I got out into the corridor, could I find and smash a fire alarm before Anne caught up with me? But it seemed like too long a shot. From what I’d seen of Anne’s strength and quickness, I was unlikely to get that far.

No. My best chance was simple—I had to get Anne on my side.

But how? What did I actually know about her?

I tried to think about what I knew about Anne Bullmer—her fantastic wealth, her lonely upbringing, trailing around the boarding schools of Europe. It was no wonder it had taken me so long to make the connection. The rake-thin, sad-eyed woman in her gray silk wraps and designer headscarves—yes, somehow that fit with what I’d been told. But I could not make one word of what Ben had said connect with the girl in the Pink Floyd T-shirt, with her mocking dark eyes and cheap mascara. It was like there were two Annes. Same height, same weight, but that was where the similarity ended.

And then . . . something clicked.

Two Annes.

Two women.

The gray silk robe that matched her eyes . . .

I opened my eyes and swung my legs over the side of the bunk, groaning with my own stupidity. Of course—of
course
. If I hadn’t been half-dead with fear and panic and the pain in my head, I would have seen it. How could I not have thought of it?

Of course there were two Annes.

Anne Bullmer was dead—had been since the night we left England.

The girl in the Pink Floyd T-shirt was very much alive, and had been impersonating her ever since.

Same height, same weight, same broad cheekbones—it was only the eyes that didn’t match, and they had taken a calculated risk that no one would remember the features of a woman they’d barely met. No one on board knew Anne before the trip. Richard had even told Cole not to take any photographs of her, for Christ’s sake! Now I understood why. It wasn’t to protect a woman self-conscious about her appearance. It was so there would be no compromising photographs for his wife’s friends and family to puzzle over afterwards.

I shut my eyes, my fingers gripping my hair so hard that it hurt, tugging painfully on my scalp, trying to work out what must have happened.

Richard Bullmer—it must have been him—had smuggled the woman in cabin 10 on board somehow. She was in that cabin before the rest of us ever came on the ship.

The day we set sail she had been waiting for the word, for instruction from Richard, to clear her cabin and get ready. I thought back to what I’d seen over her shoulder—a silk robe strewn across the bed, makeup, Veet in the bathroom—
waxing strips
. Christ—how could I have been so stupid? She had been shaving and ripping off her body hair, ready to impersonate a woman with cancer. But instead of Richard with his prearranged knock,
I
had come along, inadvertently given the signal, and she’d seen me instead.

What the hell must she have thought? I replayed again the fright and irritation in her face as she’d tried to shut the door and I’d stopped her. She’d been desperate to get rid of me but trying to act as unsuspiciously as possible. Far better that I just remembered a strange woman lending a mascara than started telling tales of a fellow guest slamming the door in my face.

And it had nearly worked. It had
so
nearly worked.

Did she tell Richard when he came? I couldn’t be sure, but I thought not. He had seemed so normal at that first night’s dinner—the perfect host. And besides, it was her blunder, and he didn’t look like the kind of man you’d want to confess a mistake to. More likely she just crossed her fingers and hoped to get away with it.

Then she had packed her things, cleared the room, and waited.

After drinks that first night, Anne, somehow, had been taken to cabin 10. Was she alive, lured there by some cock-and-bull story? Or was she already dead?

Either way, it didn’t really matter, because the end result was the same. While Richard was back in Lars’s cabin, establishing his alibi with an uninterrupted poker game, the woman in cabin 10 had bundled the real Anne overboard and hoped that the body would never be found.

And they would have got away with it, if I—frightened and traumatized from the burglary—hadn’t heard the splash and jumped to a conclusion that was so wrong, it was almost completely right.

So who was she? Who was this girl who had hit me, and fed me, and locked me up here like an animal?

I had no idea. But I knew one thing—she was my best hope of getting out of here alive.