The Woman in Cabin 10 (25 page)

- CHAPTER 27 -

A
ll that night I lay awake, trying to work out what I should do. Judah and my parents would not be expecting me home until Friday and would have no reason to suspect anything was wrong until then. But the other passengers must know that I hadn’t returned to the ship. Would they have raised the alarm? Or had Bullmer given them some story to explain my disappearance—unavoidably detained in Trondheim, perhaps? Decided to return home unexpectedly?

I wasn’t sure. I tried to think who might be concerned enough to ask questions. I had little hope of Cole, Chloe, or most of the others making a fuss. They didn’t know me. They had no contact details for any of my family. They would very likely accept whatever Bullmer told them.

Ben, then? He knew me well, enough to know that an early-morning flit to Trondheim without a word wasn’t in character. But I wasn’t sure. Under normal circumstances I was fairly certain he’d have contacted Judah or my parents with his concerns, but the way I had left things with him wasn’t exactly normal circumstances. I had all but accused him of being complicit in a murder, and aside from his justifiable anger, he probably wouldn’t be surprised at my disappearing off the ship without a word of good-bye.

Out of all the guests, Tina seemed like my best bet, and I was crossing my fingers that she would contact Rowan when I failed to return. But it seemed very slim odds to hang my life on.

No. I had to take matters into my own hands.

By the time morning came I hadn’t slept, but I knew what I had to do, and when the knock came, I was ready.

“Come in,” I said. The door cracked open, and the girl put her head cautiously around the doorframe. She saw me sitting quietly on the bed, washed and clean, holding the book in my lap. “Hey,” I said.

She put down the tray of food on the floor. She was dressed as Anne this time, wearing a headscarf, her eyebrows not penciled in, but she didn’t move like Anne, she moved like the girl I’d seen before, dumping the tray down impatiently and straightening up with none of the meditative grace she’d shown when impersonating Richard’s wife.

“Hey yourself,” she said, and her voice was different, too—the crystalline consonants elided and blurred. “You finished with that?” She nodded at the book.

“Yes, can you swap it for another one?”

“Yeah, I guess. What do you want?”

“I don’t mind. Anything. You choose.”

“Okay.” She held out her hand for
The Bell Jar
and I handed it over, and then steeled myself for what I had to do next.

“I’m sorry,” I said awkwardly. “About the tray.”

She gave a smile at that, a flash of straight white teeth, a glint of mischief in her dark eyes.

“That’s all right. I don’t blame you; I’d have done the same. You’ve got a rubber one this time, though. Fool me once, and all that.”

I looked down at the breakfast lying on the floor. It was true. The brittle melamine tray was gone, replaced by one made of thicker, grippy plastic, like the kind you serve drinks on in bars.

“I can’t complain, I guess.” I forced a smile. “I earned it.”

“Your pill’s on the saucer. Remember—good behavior, yeah?”

I nodded, and she turned to leave. I gulped. I had to stop her, say something.
Anything
that might prevent me from being condemned to another day and night here alone.

“What’s your name?” I said desperately.

She turned back, her face suspicious.

“What?”

“I know you’re not Anne. I remembered, about the eyes. On the first night Anne had gray eyes. You don’t. Other than that it’s very convincing. You’re a really good actress, you know.”

Her face went completely blank and for a minute I thought that she was going to slam out of the room and leave me here for another twelve hours. I felt like a fisherman, reeling in a huge fish on a delicate line, my muscles tense with the effort but trying not to jerk or show the strain.

“If I’ve got it wrong—” I began cautiously.

“Shut up,” she said, fierce as a lioness. Her face was completely transformed, savage with anger, her dark eyes full of rancor and distrust.

“I’m sorry,” I said humbly. “I didn’t . . . Look, does it matter? I’m not going anywhere. Who would I tell?”

“Fuck,” she said bitterly. “You’re digging your grave, do you get that?”

I nodded. But I had known that for a few days now—whatever the girl tried to tell herself—whatever
I
tried to tell myself—there was only one way I was leaving this room.

“I don’t think Richard will let me leave,” I said. “You know that, right? So name or no name, it doesn’t really matter.”

Her face, beneath the expensive headscarf, was white. When she spoke her voice was bitter.

“You fucked it all up. Why couldn’t you leave well enough alone?”

“I was trying to help!” I said. I didn’t mean it to sound the way it came out, but in the little room it sounded frighteningly loud. I swallowed, and spoke more quietly. “I was trying to help
you
, don’t you get that?”

“Why?” she said. It was half a question, half a cry of frustration. “Why? You barely knew me—why did you have to keep digging?”

“Because I knew what it was like to be you! I know—I know what it’s like to wake up in the night, afraid for your life.”

“But that’s not me,” she snarled. She stalked across the little cabin. Close up I could see that her eyebrows had just the faintest brush of regrowth. “It
was never me
.”

“It will be, though,” I said, holding her gaze so she couldn’t look away. I couldn’t afford to release her from the knowledge of what she was doing. “When Richard’s got Anne’s money—what do you think his next move will be? Making himself safe.”

“Shut up! You have no idea what you’re talking about. He’s a good man. He’s in love with me.”

I stood up, level with her. Our eyes were locked, our faces just inches apart in the tiny space.

“That’s bullshit and you know it,” I said. My hands were shaking. If this went wrong she might lock the door and never come back, but I had to make her face up to the reality of the situation—both for my sake and hers. If she walked away now, we were very likely both dead. “If he was in love with you he wouldn’t be beating you up and forcing you to dress up as his dead wife. What do you
think
this charade is all about? Being with you? It’s not about you. If it was, he’d have got a divorce and walked off into the sunset with you—but she’d have taken her money with her. She was heir to a billion-pound dynasty. Those kinds of people don’t risk marriage without a prenup.”

“Shut up!” She put her hands over her ears, shaking her head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Neither of us wanted to be in this situation!”

“Really? You think it’s coincidence he fell in love with someone who bears a startling resemblance to Anne? He planned this from the beginning. You’re just a means to an end.”

“You know nothing about it,” the girl snarled. She turned away from me, walked to where the window would have been if I had one, and back. There was nothing of Anne’s weary serenity in her expression now—it was naked fear and fury.

“All the money, without the controlling wife—I think he had that carrot waved in front of his nose by Anne’s illness, and suddenly found he liked the idea: a future without Anne, but with the money. And when the doctors gave her the all clear, he didn’t want to let go of it—is that right? And then he saw you—and a plan started to form. Where did he pick you up—a bar? No, wait.” I remembered the photo on Cole’s camera. “It was at his club, right?”

“You know nothing about it!” the girl shouted. “NOTHING!”

And before I could say anything else, she turned on her heel, unlocked the door with a trembling hand, and slammed out of the room,
The Bell Jar
still clutched beneath her arm. The door banged shut behind her, and I heard her key scraping shakily in the lock. Then farther away another bang, and then it was still.

I sat back on the bunk. Had I made her doubt Richard enough to put her trust in me? Or was she going upstairs right now to tell him this whole conversation? There was only one way to find out, and that was by waiting.

But as the hours slipped away and she didn’t come back, I started to wonder how long that wait would be.

And when she didn’t reappear with supper, and hunger began to claw at my stomach, I began to suspect I’d made a horrible mistake.

- CHAPTER 28 -

I
t’s terrifying how long the hours can feel when you have no clock, no means of telling the time, and no way of knowing if anyone will come for you.

I lay for a long time, staring at the bunk above me, running over the conversation in my head and trying to work out if I’d just made the worst mistake of my life.

I’d gambled on establishing some kind of bond with the girl, forcing her to face up to what she was doing—and it was starting to look like I’d failed.

The hours dragged on and still no one came. My hunger grew more and more distracting. I wished I hadn’t given her back the book, there was nothing in the cabin I could distract myself with. I began to think about solitary confinement—how prisoners went slowly crazy, heard voices, begged for release.

At least the girl had left the electricity on, although I wasn’t sure it was an act of mercy—she had been so furious when she left the room she’d probably have switched it off just to punish me. More likely she’d just forgotten. But that small fact—the idea that I could choose my environment even in such a minor way—helped.

I showered again and licked the dried croissant jam off the plate. I lay on the bed and shut my eyes, and tried to remember things—the layout of the house I grew up in. The plot of
Little Women
. The color of Jude’s—

But no. I pushed that away. I couldn’t think of Judah. Not here. It would break me.

In the end—more as a way of taking charge of the situation than because I really thought it would help—I turned out the light and lay, staring into the blackness, trying to sleep.

I
’m not sure if I did sleep. I dozed, I guess. Hours passed, or seemed to. No one came, but at some point in the long darkness, I was jerked awake and sat up, my pulse spiking, trying to fathom what was different. A noise? A presence in the dark?

My heart was thumping as I slipped out of bed and felt my way by touch to the door, but when I flicked on the light nothing was different. The cabin was empty. The tiny en suite as bare as ever. I held my breath, listening, but there were no footsteps in the corridor outside, no voices or movements. Not a sound disturbed the quiet.

And then I realized. The quiet.
That
was what had woken me. The engine had stopped.

I tried to count the days on my fingers, and although I couldn’t be sure, I was fairly certain it must now be Friday the twenty-fifth. And that meant that the ship had arrived at its last port, Bergen, where we were due to disembark and catch planes back to London. The passengers would be leaving.

And then I’d be alone.

The thought brought panic rushing through my veins. I don’t know why—maybe it was the idea that they were so close—sleeping, most likely, just a few feet above my head and yet there was nothing,
nothing
I could do to make them hear. And soon they would pack their cases and leave, and I would be alone in a boat-shaped coffin.

The thought was too much to bear. Without thinking, I grabbed the bowl that had held yesterday’s breakfast and banged it against the ceiling as hard as I could.

“Help!” I screamed. “Can anyone hear me? I’m trapped, please, please help!”

I stopped, panting, listening, hoping desperately that with the sound of the engine no longer masking my cries, someone might hear.

There was no answering thump, no muffled shout filtering back through the floors. But I heard a sound. It was a metallic grinding, as if something was scraping the outside of the hull.

Had someone heard? I held my breath, trying to still my thumping heart, beating so loud it threatened to drown out the faint sounds from outside the ship. Was someone coming?

The grinding came again. . . . I felt the ship’s side shudder, and I realized suddenly what it was. The gangway was being lowered. The passengers were disembarking.

“Help me!” I screamed, and I banged again, only now I was noticing the way the plastic ceiling deadened and absorbed the sound.

“Help me! It’s me, Lo. I’m here! I’m on the boat!”

No answer, just the breath tearing in my throat, my blood in my ears.

“Anyone? Please! Please help!”

I put my hands to the wall, feeling the thumps against the gangway being transmitted down through the hull and into my hands. The impact of goods trolleys . . . and luggage . . . and departing feet.

I could feel all this. But I could not hear it. I was deep below the water—and they were up above, where any faint vibrations that I could make with my plastic bowl would be drowned out by the sound of the wind and the screech of the gulls and the voices of their fellow passengers.

I let the bowl fall from my hands to the floor, where it bounced and rolled across the thin carpet, and then I dropped to the bed, and I crouched there, my arms wrapped around my head, my head pressed into my knees, and I began to weep, great choking tears of fear and desperation.

I had been afraid before. I’d been scared half out of my wits.

But I had never despaired, and it was despair that I was feeling now.

As I knelt on the thin, sagging mattress, sobbing into my knees, pictures passed through my head: Judah reading the paper, my mother doing the crossword, her tongue between her teeth—my father, mowing the lawn on a Sunday, humming tunelessly. I would have given anything to see one of them in this room, just for a moment, just to tell them I was alive and loving them.

But all I could think of was them waiting for my return. And their despair as I didn’t arrive. And finally the endless sentence of waiting, waiting without hope, for someone who would never come.

From: Judah Lewis

To: Judah Lewis, Pamela Crew and Alan Blacklock

BCC: [38 recipients]

Sent: Tuesday, 29 September

Subject: Lo—an update

Dear All,

I’m very sorry to be sending this news in an e-mail, but I’m sure you’ll understand that these last few days have been very difficult and we’ve had trouble responding to everyone’s concern and enquiries.

Up until now we didn’t really have anything concrete to share, and this has resulted in a lot of hurtful speculation on social media. However, we have now received some news. Unfortunately, it’s not what we were hoping for, and Lo’s parents, Pam and Alan, have asked me to send this update to her close friends and immediate family on behalf of them as well as myself, as some details seem to have been leaked to the press already, and we didn’t want anyone to find this out from the Internet.

There is no easy way to say this—early this morning Scotland Yard asked me to identify some photographs they received from the Norwegian police team handling the case. They were photographs of clothes, and the garments are Lo’s. I recognized them immediately. The boots in particular are vintage and very distinctive, and unmistakably hers.

We are obviously in pieces at this discovery, but we are holding on and waiting to find out what the police can tell us—this is all we know at present as the body is still in Norway and the Norwegian police have not shared any information on when we may be able to see it. In the meantime we would please ask you to use your discretion in talking to the media—if you have anything to add to the investigation, I can give you the names of the officers at Scotland Yard handling the case at the UK end. We also have a family liaison officer who is helping us deal with media enquiries, but some of the stories that are running are upsetting and untrue and we’d like to ask you all for your help in respecting Lo’s privacy.

We are just devastated at this turn of events and trying to come to terms with what it means, so please bear with us, and know that we’ll update you as soon as we can.

Judah