The Woman in Cabin 10 (30 page)

- CHAPTER 35 -

I
t was growing light when I realized that I could go no farther, that my muscles, exhausted beyond endurance, just simply would not obey me. I was no longer walking, I was stumbling as if I were drunk, my knees buckling when I tried to climb over a fallen tree stump.

I had to stop. If I didn’t, I would fall where I stood, so deep in the Norwegian countryside that my body might never be found.

I needed shelter, but I had left the road a long time back, and there were no houses to be seen. I had no phone. No money. I didn’t even know what time it was, although it must be close to dawn.

A sob rose in my dry throat, but just at that moment, I saw something loom from between the sparse trees—a long, low shape. Not a house—but some kind of barn, perhaps?

The sight gave my legs a last shot of energy, and I staggered out from between the trees, across a dirt track, through a gate in a wire fence. It
was
a barn—although the name seemed almost too grand for the shack that lay in front of me, with its rickety wooden walls and corrugated iron roof.

Two shaggy little horses turned their heads curiously as I trudged past, and then one of them returned to drinking from what I saw, with a leap of my heart, was a trough of water, its surface pink and gold in the soft dawn light.

I staggered to the trough, falling on my knees in the short grass beside it, and cupping the water in my hands I drank great gulps of it down. It was rainwater, and it tasted of mud and dirt and rust from the metal trough, but I didn’t care. I was too thirsty to think about anything except slaking my parched throat.

When I’d drunk as much as I could, I straightened up and looked around me. The shed door was shut, but as I put my hand to the latch, it swung open and I went cautiously through, shutting the door behind me.

Inside there was hay—bales and bales of it—some tubs that I thought might be feed or supplements, and, hanging on the wall on pegs, a couple of horse blankets.

Slowly, drunk with weariness, I pulled the first one down and laid it over the deepest pile of hay—not even thinking about rats or fleas, or even Richard’s men. There was surely no way they could find me here, and I had got to the stage where I almost didn’t care—if they would just let me rest, they could take me away.

Then I lay down on the makeshift bed and drew the other blanket over the top of me.

And then I slept.

“
H
allo?”
The voice in my head spoke again, painfully loud, and I opened my eyes to a blinding light, and a face gazing into mine. An elderly man with a full white beard and a strong resemblance to Captain Birdseye was peering at me with rheumy hazel eyes, and a mix of surprise and concern.

I blinked and scrambled backwards, my heart thudding painfully, and then tried to get to my feet, but my ankle gave a wrench of pain and I stumbled. The man took my arm, saying something in Norwegian, but without thinking I jerked it savagely out of his grip, and fell back onto the floor of the barn.

For a few minutes we just looked at each other, him taking in my scrapes and cuts, me looking at his lined face and the dog barking and circling behind him.

“
Kom
,” he said at last, getting painfully to his knees and holding out his hand with cautious calm, as if I were a wounded animal that might snap at any provocation, and not a human at all. The dog barked again, hysterically this time, and the man shouted something over his shoulder that was clearly
quiet, you!
or something to that effect.

“Who—” I licked dry lips and tried again. “Who are you? Where am I?”

“Konrad Horst,” the man said, pointing at himself. He pulled out his wallet and flicked through until he found a photo of an elderly lady with rosy cheeks and a bun of white hair, cuddling two blond-haired little boys.

“
Min kone
,” he said, enunciating slowly. And then, pointing to the children, something that sounded like “
Vorry bon-bon
.”

Then he pointed out of the barn door at an extremely elderly Volvo standing outside.

“
Bilen min
,” he said, and again, “
Kom.
”

I didn’t know what to do. There
was
something reassuring about the photos of his wife and grandchildren—but even rapists and killers had grandkids, right? On the other hand, maybe he was just a nice old man. Maybe his wife would speak English. At the very least they’d likely have a phone.

I looked down at my ankle. I didn’t have much choice. It had swollen to twice its usual size, and I wasn’t sure I could even hobble as far as the car, let alone make it to an airport.

Captain Birdseye held out his arm and made a little gesture.

“
Pleese
?
” he rumbled interrogatively, as if giving me a choice. But it was an illusion. I had no choice.

I let him help me to my feet, and I got into the car.

I
t was only as we drove that I realized quite how far I had run the night before. You couldn’t even see the fjord from this wooded fold of the hillside, and the Volvo must have jolted down several miles of rutted track before we reached the semblance of a road.

We were turning onto the tarmac when I noticed something in the little well beneath the radio—a mobile phone. It was very, very ancient, but it was a phone.

I put out my hand, hardly able to breathe.

“May I?”

Captain Birdseye looked across, and then grinned. He put the phone in my lap but then tapped the screen, saying something in Norwegian. As soon as I looked at the phone, I realized what he was saying. There was no reception at all.

“
Vente
,” he said loudly and clearly, and then slowly, in what sounded like heavily accented English, “Wait.”

I held the phone in my lap, watching the screen with a lump in my throat as the trees flashed past. But something didn’t make sense. The date on the phone showed the twenty-ninth of September. Either I was miscounting, or I had lost a day.

“This,” I pointed at the date on the phone. “Today, is it really the twenty-ninth?”

Captain Birdseye glanced at the screen and then nodded.

“
Ja, tjueniende
. Toos-day,” he said, enunciating the word very slowly, but he didn’t need to. The pronunciation was close enough to the English for me to be in no doubt about what he was saying. Tuesday. Today was
Tuesday
. I had been asleep in that little hut for a full day and a night.

I was just computing that, and trying not to think about how worried Judah and my parents must be, when we turned into the driveway of a neat little blue-painted house, and something flickered in the corner of the phone’s screen—a single bar of reception.

“Please?” I held it up, my heart suddenly beating so hard in my throat that the words felt choked and strange in my mouth. “Can I call my family in England?”

Konrad Horst said something in Norwegian that I didn’t understand, but he was nodding, and so, with fingers that shook so hard I could hardly find the right keys, I pressed +44 and dialed the number of Judah’s mobile phone.

- CHAPTER 36 -

W
e said nothing for the longest time, either of us. We just stood in the middle of the airport like two fools, holding each other, Judah touching my face and my hair and the bruises on my cheek like he truly couldn’t believe it was me. I suppose I was probably doing the same to him, I can’t remember.

All I could think was
I’m home. I’m home. I’m home.

“I can’t believe it,” Judah kept saying. “You’re okay.”

And then the tears started, and I began to cry into the harsh scratchy wool of his jacket, and he didn’t say anything at all, just held me like he’d never let me go.

A
t first I hadn’t wanted the Horsts to call the police, but I couldn’t make them understand that, and after I’d spoken to Judah and he had promised to call Scotland Yard with my story—a story so improbable that I almost didn’t believe it myself—I began to accept that not even Richard Bullmer could buy his way out of this one.

When the police arrived, they took me to a health center first, to get treatment for my cut feet and wrenched ankle and to have my medication represcribed. It seemed to take forever, but at last the doctors pronounced me fit enough to leave, and the next thing I knew, I was being driven to a police station up the valley, where an official from the British Embassy in Oslo was waiting.

Again and again I found myself reciting the story of Anne, and Richard and Carrie, and each time it sounded more and more implausible to my own ears.

“You have to help her,” I kept saying. “Carrie—you have to go after the boat.”

The official and the police officer exchanged a look, and the policeman said something in Norwegian. I knew, suddenly, that whatever it was they were holding back, it was not good news.

“What?” I asked. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“The police have found two bodies,” the embassy official said at last, his voice awkward and formal. “The first in the early hours of Monday morning, dredged up by a fishing boat, the second later on Monday, recovered by police divers.”

I put my head in my hands, grinding my fingers into my eyes, watching the pressure build and bloom as flames and sparks on the insides of my lids. I drew a deep breath.

“Tell me.” I looked up. “I have to know.”

“The body recovered by divers was a man,” the embassy official said slowly. “He had been shot through the temple, the police believe it may have been a self-inflicted wound. He had no ID on him, but they are presuming it to be the body of Richard Bullmer. He was reported missing from the
Aurora
by the crew.”

“And . . .” I swallowed. “And the other?”

“The other was a woman, very slim, with shorn hair. The police will have to conduct a postmortem, but the preliminary findings are that she was drowned. Miss Blacklock?” He looked around, nervously, as if unsure what to do. “Are you all right, Miss Blacklock? Can someone get her a tissue, please? Please don’t cry, Miss Blacklock, you’re all right now.”

But I couldn’t speak. And the worst of it was that he was right, I
was
all right, but Carrie was not.

It should have been a comfort that Bullmer had killed himself, but I couldn’t find any. I just sat there, crying into the tissue they gave me, and thinking of Carrie and everything she’d done to me and for me. Whatever the rights and wrongs, she had paid with her life. I hadn’t been fast enough to save her.

- CHAPTER 37 -

T
he taxi from the airport took us back to Judah’s. We didn’t discuss it, exactly, but somehow I couldn’t face my basement flat. I’d had enough of being shut up in lightless rooms, and Judah seemed to realize that.

In his living room he tucked me up on the couch with a blanket, as if I were a small child, or someone recovering from an illness, and he kissed me very gently on my forehead, like I might break.

“I can’t believe you’re home,” he said again. “When they showed me your boots in that photo . . .”

His eyes welled up, and I felt my own throat scratch with tears.

“She took them,” I said croakily. “So I could pretend to be her. She—”

But I couldn’t finish.

Judah held me for a long time, and then when he could speak he swallowed and said, “You—you’ve got a lot of messages, you know. People have been calling me because your voice mail got full. I’ve been writing them down.”

He felt in his pocket, and handed me a list, and I scanned down it. Most of them were names I would have expected . . . Lissie . . . Rowan . . . Emma . . . Jenn . . . One or two were a surprise.

Tina West
said one, in Judah’s handwriting.
Very relieved you’re safe. No need to call back.

Chloe Yansen
(I assumed that was Judah’s phonetic spelling of Jenssen.)
Hopes you’re okay. Please call if there is anything she or Lars can do.

Ben Howard. No message.

“God, Ben.” I felt a stab of guilt. “I’m surprised he’s speaking to me. I more or less accused him of being behind all this. Did he really call?”

“That’s not the half of it,” Judah said, and I saw him wipe his eyes surreptitiously on his T-shirt. “He was the one who raised the alarm. He called me from Bergen trying to find out if you’d made it home okay, and when I said I hadn’t heard from you since Sunday, he told me to call the UK police and tell them it was a matter of urgency. He said he’d been raising hell since Trondheim and no one on the crew would listen to him.”

“Don’t make me feel worse.” I put my hands over my face.

“Hey, he’s still a self-important little shit,” Judah said. He gave me his endearing smile, and I saw with a pang that his tooth had re-rooted. “And he did give a pretty crappy interview to the
Mail
, which made it sound like you two had barely just broken up.”

“Okay,” I said, with a slightly shaky laugh. “That makes me feel a bit better about accusing him of murder.”

“Look, do you want a cup of tea?”

I nodded, and he got up and made his way to the kitchen. I took a handful of tissues out of a box on the coffee table and wiped my eyes, then picked up the remote control and turned on the television, trying for some semblance of normality.

I was just scrolling through the channels, looking for something reassuring and familiar—a
Friends
rerun, maybe, or
How I Met Your Mother—
when I stopped dead, my heart in my mouth.

My eyes were fixed on the television screen—at the man staring out at me.

It was Bullmer.

His eyes were locked onto mine, his mouth quirked in that asymmetric smile, and for a second I thought I might be hallucinating. I drew a breath, ready to scream for Judah, ask him if he could see the face staring out of the screen at me like a nightmare—but then the screen cut back to a newsreader, and I realized what was happening. It was a report of Bullmer’s death.

“. . . breaking news of the death of British businessman and peer Lord Richard Bullmer. Lord Bullmer, who was the majority shareholder in the troubled Northern Lights Group, has been found dead after being reported missing just hours earlier from his luxury yacht the
Aurora
off the coast of Norway.”

The screen cut again, this time to Richard standing on a podium as he gave some kind of address.

His lips were moving, but his speech was muted, so that the newsreader could carry on narrating the story over the top of the images, and as the camera zoomed in on his face, I found myself turning down the volume, leaving the couch and kneeling in front of the TV, my face just inches from his.

When the talk came to an end, Richard bowed, and the camera went close up on his face, and he looked straight out of the screen and gave me his characteristic little wink—so that my stomach turned, and my skin crawled.

I picked up the remote with shaking hands, ready to exorcise him from my life once and for all, when the camera panned, and I saw a woman seated in the front row, smiling and applauding, and I paused, my finger hovering over the off button. She was extraordinarily beautiful, with a long river of dark gold hair and broad cheekbones, and for a moment I couldn’t think where I had seen her before. And then . . . I realized.

She was Anne. Anne as she had been before Richard was through with her, young and beautiful and alive.

As she applauded, she seemed suddenly to realize that the cameras were on her, and her eyes flickered towards the lens, and I saw something there, although whether it was my imagination or not, it was hard to tell. It seemed to me that there was something sad in her expression, something a little trapped and afraid. But then she smiled more broadly and put her chin up, and I saw that this was a woman who would never capitulate, never give way, a woman who would fight to the last.

Then the picture changed and we were back in the newsroom, and I turned off the screen and went back to the couch. I drew the blanket over me and turned my face to the wall, listening to Judah making tea in the next room . . . thinking.

T
he clock on Judah’s bedside table showed gone midnight. We were lying together, his chest molding to my spine, his arm around me, holding me close, as if he didn’t trust me not to disappear in the night.

I had waited until I thought he was asleep before I let myself cry, but when a particularly big sob shook my ribs, he spoke, soft and low against my ear.

“Are you okay?”

“I thought you were asleep.” My voice came out cracked and hoarse with tears.

“Are you crying?”

I wanted to deny it, but my throat had closed up and I couldn’t speak, and anyway, I’d had enough of lies and pretending.

I nodded, and he put his hand up, feeling the wetness on my cheeks.

“Oh, honey.” I heard the movement of his throat as he swallowed. “It’ll be . . . you don’t have to . . .”

He stopped, unable to continue.

“I can’t stop thinking about her,” I said against the ache in my throat. It was easier not looking at him, speaking to the quiet darkness and the slivers of moonlight across the floor. “I can’t accept it; it’s all wrong.”

“Because he killed himself?” Judah asked.

“Not just that. Anne. And . . . and Carrie.”

Judah said nothing, but I knew what he was thinking.

“Say it,” I said bitterly. He sighed, and I felt his chest rise and fall against my spine, his breath warm against my cheek.

“I probably shouldn’t say this, but I can’t help but feel . . . glad.”

I twisted round under the sheets to look at him, and he held up a hand.

“I know, I know it’s wrong, but what she did to you . . . honestly, if it had been up to me, I wouldn’t have dredged her out. I’d have left her there for the fishes. It’s probably a good thing it wasn’t my decision.”

I felt anger rise up inside me, anger on behalf of Carrie, beaten and bullied and lied to.

“She died because of me,” I said. “She didn’t have to let me go.”

“Bullshit. You were only there because of her. She didn’t have to kill a woman and lock you up.”

“You don’t know that. You don’t know what goes on in other people’s relationships.”

I thought of Carrie’s terror, of the bruises on her body, of her belief that she would never escape Richard. She had been right. Judah said nothing, and I could not see his expression in the dark, but I felt his silent disagreement.

“What,” I demanded, “you don’t believe me? You don’t think people can be sucked into doing something out of fear, or inability to see any other way out?”

“No, it’s not that,” Judah said slowly. “I believe that. But I still think, in spite of it all, we’re responsible for our own actions. We all get scared. But you can’t tell me that you’d do that to another person, no matter how tough things seemed—lock them up like that, imprison them—no matter how scared you were.”

“I don’t know,” I said. I thought of Carrie, of how brave she had been, and how fragile. I thought of the masks she wore to hide the terror and loneliness inside. I thought of the bruise on her collarbone, and the fear in her eyes. I thought of how she had given up everything for me.

“Listen.” I sat up and wrapped the sheet around me. “That job you were talking about, before I left. The one in New York. Did you turn it down?”

“Yes, I mean, well, no . . . I’m going to. I haven’t called them yet. After you went missing, it kind of slipped my mind. Why?” Judah’s voice was suddenly uneasy.

“Because I don’t think you should. I think you should take it.”

“What?”
He sat up, too, and a shaft of moonlight fell across his face, showing me an expression full of shock, anger. For a minute he didn’t seem to know what to say, then the words came pouring out. “What the
hell
? Why? Where has this come from?”

“Well, this is a chance in a lifetime, right? It’s the post you’ve always wanted.” I twisted the sheet around my fingers, cutting off the blood until they went numb and cold. “And let’s face it, there’s nothing holding you here, is there?”

“Nothing holding me here?” I heard him swallow, saw his fists clench and unclench against the white sheets. “I have
everything
holding me here, at least I thought I did. I—am—are you breaking up with me?”

“What?” Now it was my turn for shock. I shook my head and took his hands, rubbing my fingers across the sinews and the bones of his knuckles, hands that I knew by heart.
Fuck
. “Jude, no. Not in a million years. I’m saying—I’m trying to ask . . . Let’s go. Together.”

“But—but
Velocity
—your job. Rowan’s maternity cover. This is your big chance. I can’t screw that up for you.”

“It’s not my big chance.” I sighed. I slid down beneath the sheets, still holding Judah’s hands in mine. “I realized that when I was on the boat. I’ve spent, what, nearly ten years working at
Velocity
, while Ben and everyone else took risks, went on to bigger and better stuff, and I didn’t. I was too scared. And I felt like I owed
Velocity
for standing by me when things were bad. But Rowan’s never going to leave—she’ll be back in six months, maybe less, and I’ve got nowhere to go. And the truth is, even if I did pull myself up the ladder, it’s not what I want anymore. I never wanted it—I realized that on board the boat. God knows I had enough time to think about it.”

“What do you mean? It’s—ever since we met, it’s all you’ve talked about.”

“I think I lost sight of what I wanted. I don’t want to end up like Tina and Alexander, traveling from country to country and only seeing five-star hotels and Michelin restaurants. Yes, Rowan’s been to half the luxury resorts in the Caribbean, but in return she spends her life reporting the stories that people like Bullmer want her to tell, and I don’t want that, not anymore. I want to write about the things people
don’t
want you to know. And if I’m going to start pulling my way up from the bottom again, well, I can freelance from anywhere. You know that.”

A thought came to me, and I let out a shaky, involuntary laugh.

“I could write a book!
My Floating Prison: True-Life Hell on the Seven Seas
.”

“Lo.” Judah took my hands, his eyes wide and dark in the moonlight, and painfully beseeching. “Lo, stop, stop joking. Are you serious about this?”

I took a deep breath. Then I nodded.

“I’ve never been more serious in my life.”

A
fterwards, Judah lay in my arms, his head in the crook of my shoulder in a way that I knew would give me a cramp eventually, but I couldn’t bear to pull away.

“Are you awake?” I whispered. He didn’t answer for a moment, and I thought that he had fallen asleep, in that way he had of slipping out of consciousness between one breath and the next, but then he stirred, and spoke.

“Just.”

“I can’t sleep.”

“Shh . . .” He rolled over in my arms, touching my face. “It’s okay, it’s all over.”

“It’s not that . . . it’s . . .”

“Are you still thinking about her?”

I nodded in the darkness, and he sighed.

“When you saw her body,” I started, but he shook his head.

“I didn’t.”

“What do you mean? I thought the police sent you photographs to identify?”

“It wasn’t a body—I wish it
had
been, if I’d seen it was Carrie’s corpse, not yours, I wouldn’t have spent two days in hell, thinking you were dead. It was just clothes. Photographs of clothes.”

“Why did they do that?” It seemed an odd decision—why ask Judah to identify the clothes, and not the body?

I felt Judah’s shoulders lift in the darkness in a shrug.

“I don’t know. At the time I assumed it was because the body was too bashed up, but I spoke to the FLO in charge of the case after you called—I wanted to find out how the hell they could have got it so wrong—and she spoke to the Norwegians and seemed to think it was because the clothes were found separately.”

Huh. I lay there, trying to puzzle it out. Had Carrie kicked off the boots and hoodie to try and swim for it, in a desperate attempt to get away from Bullmer?

I was almost afraid to go to sleep, expecting to be haunted by Carrie’s reproachful face, but when I finally closed my eyes it was Bullmer’s face that rose up in front of me, laughing, his black hair riffled by the wind as he tumbled down, down from the deck of the
Aurora
.

I opened my eyes, my heart thumping, trying to remember that he was gone—that I was safe, that Judah was lying in my arms and the whole nightmare was over and done with.