“Thanks,” I said. I put it on the back of my tongue, took a gulp of the juice on the tray, and swallowed it.
At last the plate was empty, and I realized, as I scraped up the last of the potato, Carrie still watching me from across the room, that it was the first time she had waited while I ate. The thought made me bold enough to try something, maybe something stupid, but the words came out before I could stop them.
“What’s going to happen to me?”
She said nothing, only levered herself to her feet, shaking her head slowly and dusting down her cream silk trousers. She was painfully thin, and I wondered, briefly, whether that was all part of the part for impersonating Anne or whether she was naturally that skinny.
“Is he—” I swallowed. I was pushing my luck, but I had to know. “Is he going to kill me?”
She still didn’t answer, just picked up the tray and made for the door, but as she turned to pull it shut behind her, I saw there was a tear, welling up, about to spill. She paused for a second, the door almost shut, and I thought for a minute that she was about to say something. But instead, she just shook her head again, sending the tear tracing across her cheek, and then she wiped it away, almost angrily, and the door slammed shut behind her.
After she had gone I stood, holding on to the bunk, steadying myself, and then I saw it, on the floor, another book. This one my copy of Winnie-the-Pooh.
Pooh has always been my comfort read, my go-to book in times of stress. It’s a book from the time before I started getting afraid, when there were no threats that were not Heffalumps, and I, like Christopher Robin, could conquer the world.
I had almost not packed it. But at the last moment, when I was shoving clothes and shoes into my case, I had seen it there, resting on my night table, and I’d put it in as a kind of protective charm against the stresses of the trip.
For the rest of the night I lay on the bunk with the book open on the pillow beside me, running my fingers over the worn dust cover, but I knew the words by heart, too well perhaps, and somehow they failed to exert their familiar magic. Instead, I found myself running over the conversation with Carrie again and again, and thinking about what lay in wait for me.
There were only two ways I was getting out of here—one was alive and the other was dead, and I knew which way I wanted it to be. In which case my choice was simple: to leave with Carrie’s help, or without.
A few days ago, a few hours ago, I would have said unhesitatingly that my only real option was without—after all, she had beaten me, imprisoned me, starved me, even. But after tonight, I wasn’t so sure. Her hands as she helped me to sit, the way she had waited as I ate, watching every mouthful, her face full of sadness . . . her eyes as she turned to leave . . . I didn’t think she was a killer, not by choice, anyway. And something had happened these last few days that had made her realize that. I thought of the long, nightmarish wait for her to come, the way the hours had ticked past so slowly for me, my hunger growing and growing inexorably. But now, for the first time, I thought that perhaps the hours had been as slow and torturous for her, too, and perhaps she, too, had come face-to-face with something she was not ready for. She must have imagined me down here, growing weaker and weaker, clawing at the door. Until at last her resolve broke and she ran down with a stolen plate of lukewarm food.
What must she have thought when she opened the door and found me slumped on the floor—that she had come too late? That I had collapsed, maybe from hunger, maybe from sheer exhaustion? And suddenly perhaps she knew—that she couldn’t live with another death, not one that she’d caused.
She hadn’t wanted me to die, I was utterly certain of that. And I doubted if she could kill me, not if I kept reminding her of the fact that I was here because of her, because I had fought for her and tried to help her.
Bullmer on the other hand . . . Bullmer, who had lived through his wife’s chemo, counting her money and planning her death, only to be cheated out of it at the eleventh hour . . .
Yes. Bullmer, I could imagine all too clearly, would kill. And he probably wouldn’t lose a single hour of sleep over it.
Where was he? Had he left the ship, establishing an alibi while Carrie starved me to death? I wasn’t sure. He had taken good care to isolate himself far away from Anne’s death; I couldn’t imagine he would allow himself to be implicated in mine.
As I was pondering this, I heard the slow grinding roar of the ship’s engine start up. It hummed for a while, and then I felt the whole boat rock and shift, and I knew that we were moving again, out of Bergen harbor, the darkness swallowing the ship as we sailed out into the North Sea.
- CHAPTER 30 -
The engine had stopped again when I woke up, but I could feel the shifting mass of water all around us. I wondered where we were—in the fjords, perhaps. I imagined the walls of dark rock rising up all around us, framing a narrow slip of bleached sky above, and sinking down below into the deep blue sea. I knew that some of the fjords could be more than a kilometer deep—unimaginably deep and cold. A body sunk into those kinds of depths might very easily never be found.
I was just wondering what time it was when there was a knock at the door, and Carrie appeared with a tray of muesli and a mug of coffee.
“I’m sorry it’s not more,” she said as she put the tray down. “Now that the passengers and crew have all left, it’s got harder to take food without making the cook suspicious.”
“The crew have left?” The words dismayed me, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on why.
“Not all of them,” Carrie said. “The captain’s still here, along with some of his people. But all the passenger-facing staff have gone into Bergen with Richard for some kind of team-building-review thing.”
Richard. So Bullmer wasn’t on the boat. Maybe that explained Carrie’s change in attitude. With Bullmer gone . . .
I began to eat the muesli, slowly, and as before she sat and watched me, her eyes sad beneath their savagely epilated brows.
“You didn’t pluck your eyelashes?” I said between mouthfuls. She shook her head.
“No, I couldn’t quite bring myself. My eyelashes are a bit skimpy without mascara anyway, but I thought if anyone noticed, I’d claim they were false.”
“Who—”
I stopped. I’d been going to say “Who killed her?” but suddenly I couldn’t bring myself to voice that question. I was too scared that it might be Carrie. And anyway, my best hope was in persuading her that she wasn’t a killer, not reminding her that she’d done it once and could do it again.
“What?” she asked.
“I . . . What did you say, to my relatives, I mean? And the other passengers? Do they think I’m in Trondheim?”
“Yes. I put my wig back on and left the boat with your passport. I picked a time when the stewards were all preparing breakfast and it was a member of the sailing crew on duty at the gangway—lucky you didn’t go on the tour of the bridge, you didn’t meet any of them. And lucky we’ve both got dark hair. I don’t know what I would have done if you were a blonde—I don’t have a blond wig. And then I rejoined the boat as Anne, and hoped they wouldn’t notice that Anne got on but had never actually got off.”
Lucky. It wasn’t the word I’d have chosen. So the paper trail was complete—a record of me leaving the boat and never returning. No wonder no police had turned up to search the vessel.
“What was the plan?” I said quietly. “If I hadn’t seen you? What was supposed to happen?”
“I would still have got off at Trondheim,” she said bitterly. “But this time as Anne. And then I’d have put my wig on, changed my clothes, drawn on my eyebrows, and disappeared into the crowd as just another anonymous backpacker. The trail would have ended in Trondheim—an unstable woman, facing death, disappearing without a trace . . . And then, when everything had died down, Richard and I were going to ‘meet,’ fall in love, publicly this time—do it all over again for the cameras.”
“Why did you do it, Carrie?” I asked despairingly, and then bit my tongue. Now wasn’t the time to antagonize her. I needed to get her on my side and I wasn’t going to do that by making her feel accused. But I couldn’t hold it in anymore. “I just don’t understand.”