The Woman in Cabin 10

Then I picked up the bedside phone with fingers that shook only slightly and dialed 0 for the operator.

“Hello?” said a singsong voice. “How can I help you, Miss Blacklock?”

For a minute I was so disconcerted that she knew it was me that I completely lost my train of thought. Then I realized—my room number would probably come up on the desk phone. Of course it would be me. Who else would be phoning from my room in the middle of the night?

“H-hello!” I managed. In spite of the tremor, my voice sounded surprisingly calm. “Hello. Who is this, please?”

“It’s your cabin stewardess, Karla, Miss Blacklock. Can I help you?” Beneath her perky phone manner a touch of concern had crept in. “Are you all right?”

“No, no, I’m not all right. I—” I stopped, aware how ridiculous this might sound.

“Miss Blacklock?”

“I think—” I swallowed. “I think I’ve just seen a murder.”

“Oh my goodness.” Karla’s voice was shocked, and she said something in a language I didn’t understand—Swedish perhaps, or maybe Danish. Then she seemed to control herself and spoke in English again. “Are you safe, Miss Blacklock?”

Was I safe? I looked across at the cabin door. It was double-locked and with the chain across, I was as certain as I could be that no one could get in.

“Yes, yes, I think I am. It was in the next-door cabin—number ten. Palmgren. I—I think someone threw a body overboard.”

My voice cracked as I said it, and I suddenly felt like laughing—or maybe crying. I took a deep breath and pinched the bridge of my nose, trying to get ahold of myself.

“I will send someone right away, Miss Blacklock. Don’t move. I will call you when they are at the door so you know who it is. Hold on, please, and I will call you right back.”

There was a click, and she hung up.

I was still holding the receiver, and I put it gently back on the cradle, feeling oddly dissociated, almost like I was having an out-of-body experience. My head was throbbing, and I realized I needed to get dressed before they arrived.

I picked up the bathrobe from where it hung on the back of the bathroom door—and did a double take. When I went down to dinner I had left it on the floor, along with the clothes I’d worn on the train. I remembered looking back over my shoulder at the bomb site I’d made in the bathroom—clothes on the floor, makeup scattered across the counter, lipstick-smeared tissues in the sink—and thinking, I’ll deal with that later.

It was all gone. The bathrobe had been hung up, my dirty clothes and underwear had disappeared, whisked off to God knows where.

On the vanity counter, my cosmetics had been neatly set out in rows, along with my toothbrush and toothpaste. Only my tampons and pills were left inside my toiletry bag, a weirdly coy touch that was somehow worse than everything being out in the open, and made me shudder. Someone had been inside my room. Of course they had. That was what maid service meant, for heaven’s sake. But someone had been inside my room, messing with my things, touching my wrinkled tights and my half-used eyeliner pencil.

Why did the thought make me want to cry?

I was sitting on the bed, head in my hands and thinking about the contents of the minibar, when the phone rang, and a couple of seconds later, as I crawled across the duvet to pick up the receiver, there was a knock on the door.

I picked up the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Miss Blacklock?” It was Karla.

“Yes. There’s someone at the door. Should I answer it?”

“Yes, yes, please do. It is our head of security, Johann Nilsson. I will leave you now with him, Miss Blacklock, but please do call me at any time if you need any further assistance.”

There was a click and the line went dead, and the knock on the door came again. I belted my bathrobe more securely and went to open it.

Outside was a man I hadn’t seen before, dressed in some kind of uniform. I don’t know what I was expecting—something pseudo-policeman-like. This was more like a nautical uniform—closer to a purser or something. He was about forty or thereabouts, and tall enough to have to stoop as he took a step forward into the doorway, with rumpled hair that looked like he’d only just got out of bed, and eyes so startlingly blue that it looked almost as if he were wearing colored contacts. I was staring at them when I realized, suddenly, that he was holding out a hand.

“Hello, you must be Miss Blacklock, I presume?” His English was very, very good. Just a faint trace of a Scandinavian accent, so slight he might almost have been Scottish or Canadian. “My name is Johann Nilsson. I am head of security on the Aurora. I understand you’ve seen something that disturbed you.”

“Yes,” I said firmly, suddenly painfully aware of the fact that I was in a dressing gown with my mascara halfway down my cheeks while he was fully and professionally dressed. I tightened the belt again, nervously this time. “Yes. I saw—heard—something thrown overboard. I—I think it was, it must have been . . . a body.”

“You saw, or heard?” Nilsson said, cocking his head to one side.

“I heard a splash—a very loud splash. It was quite clearly something very big falling overboard—or being pushed. And then I ran to the balcony and I saw something—a body, it looked like—disappearing under the waves.” Nilsson’s expression was grave but guarded, and as I spoke his frown deepened. “And there was blood on the glass wall of the balcony,” I added.

His lips tightened at that, and he gave a short nod towards the veranda door.

“Your balcony?”

“The blood? No. Next door.”

“Can you show me?”

I nodded, pulled the belt again, and watched as he undid the latch of the veranda door. Outside, the wind had picked up, and it was very cold. I led the way to the narrow space, which felt painfully small now with Nilsson’s bulk beside me. He seemed to take up all the room there was and more, but part of me was very glad he was there. I didn’t think I could have brought myself to go out there on my own.

“There.” I pointed over the privacy barrier that separated my veranda from that of cabin 10. “Look over there. You’ll see what I mean.”

Nilsson peered over the barrier and then looked back at me, frowning slightly.

“I don’t see where you mean. Could you show me?”

“What do you mean? It was a big smear all down the glass.”

He edged backwards, extending a hand towards the barrier by way of invitation, and I pushed past him to peer over. My heart was pounding in spite of myself. I didn’t expect to see the murderer still there, or to get a fist in my face, or feel a bullet fly past my ear. But it felt horribly vulnerable to peer over the wall not knowing what I might find on the other side.

But what I found was . . . nothing.

No murderer, crouched to spring. No smear of blood. The glass barrier shone in the moonlight, clean, innocent of so much as a fingerprint.

I turned back to Nilsson, knowing that my face must be stiff with shock. I shook my head, tried to find the words. He watched me, something sympathetic in his blue eyes.

It was the sympathy that stung more than anything else.

“It was there,” I said angrily. “He’s obviously wiped it off.”

“He?”

“The murderer! The fucking murderer, of course!”

“There’s no need to swear, Miss Blacklock,” he said mildly, and went back inside the cabin. I followed him, and he carefully shut and latched the door behind me and then stood, his hands by his sides, as if waiting for me to say something. I could smell his cologne—not an unpleasant smell, faintly woody. But suddenly the spacious room felt oppressively small.

“What?” I said at last, trying and failing not to make the word sound aggressive. “I told you what I saw. Are you saying I’m lying?”

“Let’s go next door,” he said diplomatically.

I yanked the bathrobe belt tighter still, so tight now I could feel it digging into my stomach, and followed him, barefoot, into the corridor. He gave one short knock at the door of cabin 10, and then, when there was no answer, produced a passkey from his pocket and opened the door.