“Nilsson? No.” Richard Bullmer frowned. “He reports to the captain, not to me. Why do you ask?”
“Well . . .” I began. But I was interrupted by Ulla appearing at my elbow with a tray, on which was a champagne glass and a bottle in a holder full of ice.
“Um, thanks,” I said uncertainly. I wasn’t sure I wanted to drink right now—not after Nilsson’s biting comments earlier, and on top of the hangover from last night—and it seemed an incongruous accompaniment to what I was about to say. But I felt again the impossibility of my position—I was Bullmer’s guest, and Velocity’s representative, and I was supposed to be impressing all these people with my professionalism and dazzling them with my charm, and instead I was about to hurl the very worst of all possible accusations at his staff and guests. The least I could do was to accept his champagne with good grace.
I took the glass, sipping tentatively at it as I tried to get my thoughts in order. It was sour and made me shiver, and I almost pulled a face before realizing how rude that would appear to Bullmer.
“I— This is difficult.”
“Nilsson,” Bullmer prompted. “You were asking if I’d spoken to him.”
“Yes. Well, last night I had to phone him. I . . . I heard noises, coming from the cabin next to mine. Number ten,” I said, and then stopped.
Richard was listening, but so were the other three, rather avidly in Lars’s case. Well, since I didn’t have a choice, maybe I could turn that to my advantage. I cast a quick look round the circle of faces, trying to gauge their reactions, check for any trace of guilt or anxiety. Out of the three, Lars’s moist red lips were curled in a disbelieving skepticism, and Chloe’s green eyes were wide with frank curiosity. Only Cole was looking worried.
“Palmgren, yes,” Bullmer said. He was frowning, puzzled as to where this was leading. “I thought that one was empty. Solberg canceled, didn’t he?”
“I went to the veranda,” I said, gaining momentum. I glanced around the listeners again. “And when I looked out there was no one there, but there was blood on the glass safety barrier.”
“Good Lord,” Lars said. He was openly grinning now, not even trying to hide his disbelief. “It’s like something out of a novel.” Was he deliberately trying to undermine my account, throw me off-balance? Or was this just his normal manner? I couldn’t tell. “Go on,” he said, with something close to sarcasm. “I’m on tenterhooks to find how this turns out.”
“Your security guard let me in,” I said, my voice harder now, and speaking fast. “But the cabin was empty. And the blood on the glass had been—”
There was a chink and a splash, and I stopped.
We all turned and looked at Cole, who was holding something over the side of the Jacuzzi. His hand was dripping blood, running down his fingers onto the pale wooden decking.
“I’m okay, I think,” he said unsteadily. “I’m sorry, Richard, I don’t know how, but I knocked my champagne over and I broke it, trying to save the glass. I don’t think there’s any glass in the water.”
He held out a palmful of bloodstained shards, and Chloe gulped and squeezed her eyes shut.
“Ugh!” Her face was greenish white. “Oh God, Lars . . .”
Richard put down his glass, heaved himself out of the Jacuzzi, his near-naked body steaming in the cold air, and grabbed a white robe from a pile left on the bench. For a moment he said nothing, just looked dispassionately at Cole’s hand, streaming blood onto the deck, and glanced at Chloe, who appeared close to fainting. Then he issued a series of orders like a surgeon barking out commands in an operating theater.
“Cole, for God’s sake put down that pile of glass. I’ll ring for Ulla to get you cleaned up. Lars, take Chloe off to lie down, she’s gone white as chalk. Give her a Valium if that’s what it takes. Eva has access to the medical supplies. And Miss Blacklock . . .” He turned to me and then paused, seeming to weigh his words very carefully as he belted the robe around himself. “Miss Blacklock, please take a seat in the restaurant, and when I’ve sorted this mess out, we’ll run through what you actually saw and heard.”
- CHAPTER 20 -
By the end of the next hour, I could see why Richard Bullmer had got to where he had in life.
He didn’t just take me through my story—he grilled me on every single word, pinning me down on times, specifics, winkling out details I thought I didn’t even know—like the exact shape of the blood spatter on the glass screen, and the way it was smeared, rather than sprayed, across the surface.
He didn’t fill in any gaps with speculation, didn’t try to lead me on, or persuade me on details I wasn’t sure of. He just sat and fired questions at me between sips of scalding black coffee, his blue eyes very bright: What time? How long? When was that? How loud? What did she look like? As he spoke the slightly mockney overlay to his speech vanished, and the intonation became pure Old Etonian and 100 percent business. He was utterly focused, his attention on my story absolute, and without a trace of emotion in his face.
If someone had been walking along the deck outside and had glanced in the window, they would never have known that I had just told him something that could deal a sucker punch to his business, and revealed the presence of a possible psychopath on board a small ship. As my story unfolded I was expecting echoes of Nilsson’s distress, or the clannish denial of the stewardesses, but although I watched Bullmer’s face carefully, I saw neither of those, no hint of accusation or censure. We might have been trying to solve a crossword, for all the emotion he displayed, and I couldn’t help being a little impressed by his stoicism, though it felt strange to be on the receiving end of it. It had not been pleasant dealing with Nilsson’s skepticism and upset, but it did at least feel a very human reaction. With Bullmer, I couldn’t tell what he was feeling. Was he furious, or panicked, and simply hiding it well? Or was he really as cool and calm as he seemed?
Perhaps, I thought, as he ran me through the conversation I’d had with the girl again, this sangfroid was simply what it took to have accomplished what he had—pulling himself up by his bootstraps to a position dealing with hundreds of jobs and millions of pounds of investment.
At last we had gone through my account backwards, forwards, and sideways, and I had no more details to contribute. Bullmer sat for a moment, his head bowed, his brows knitted, thinking. Then he looked briefly at the Rolex on his tanned wrist and spoke.
“Thank you, Miss Blacklock. I think we’ve got as far as we can, and I can see the staff will want to start laying the table for dinner in a moment. I’m sorry, this has clearly been a very distressing and frightening experience for you. If you’ll give me permission, I’d like to discuss it with Nilsson, and Captain Larsen, to make sure that everything is being done that possibly can be, and perhaps we could meet first thing tomorrow to discuss the next steps. In the meantime, I very much hope you will be able to relax enough to enjoy the dinner that’s coming and the rest of the evening, in spite of what’s happened.”
“What will the next step be?” I asked. “I understand we’re heading to Trondheim—but is there anywhere closer we could stop? I feel like I should report this to the police as soon as possible.”
“It’s possible there might be somewhere closer than Trondheim, yes,” Bullmer said, getting to his feet. “But we’ll be in Trondheim early tomorrow morning, so it might be that it’s still the best place to head for. If we stop somewhere in the middle of the night I think our chances of finding an on-duty police station might be slim. But I’ll have to speak to the captain to find out what the most appropriate course of action would be. The Norwegian police may not be able to act if the incident took place in British or international waters—it’s a question of legal jurisdiction, you understand, not their willingness to investigate. It will all depend.”
“And if it did? What if we were in international waters?”
“I believe the boat is registered in the Cayman Islands. I’ll have to speak to the captain about how that might affect the situation.”