The Woman in Cabin 10

We stood in the doorway. Nilsson said nothing, but I could feel his presence at my back as I gazed, openmouthed, at the room.

It was utterly empty. Not just of people—but of everything. There were no suitcases. No clothes. No cosmetics in the bathroom. Even the bed was stripped back to the mattress.

“There was a girl,” I said at last, my voice unsteady. I shoved my hands in the pockets of the bathrobe so that he wouldn’t see how my fingers were clenched into fists. “There was a girl. In this room. I talked to her. I spoke to her. She was here!”

Nilsson said nothing. He walked through the silent moonlit suite and opened the door of the veranda, then looked outside, inspecting the glass barrier with almost insulting conscientiousness. But I could see from here there was nothing. The glass gleamed in the moonlight, misted faintly with ocean spray but otherwise quite untouched.

“She was here!” I repeated, hearing and hating the edge of hysteria in my voice. “Why won’t you believe me?”

“I didn’t say that I didn’t believe you.” Nilsson came back into the room and latched the veranda window. Then he walked me to the cabin door, and closed and locked it behind us.

“You don’t have to,” I said bitterly. My own door was still open and he escorted me inside. “But I tell you, she was there. She lent me— Oh!” Something suddenly struck me, and I ran to the bathroom. “She lent me a mascara. God damn it, where is it?”

I was rummaging through the carefully set-out cosmetics, but it wasn’t there. Where had it gone?

“It’s here,” I said desperately. “I know it is.” I looked around wildly, and something caught my eye, a flash of shocking pink behind the retractable shaving mirror at the side of the basin. I pulled it out—and there it was—an innocent little pink tube with a green cap.

“There!” I brandished it triumphantly at him, like a weapon. Nilsson took a step back, and then took the mascara gently from my hand.

“I see,” he said, “but with respect, Miss Blacklock, I’m not sure what this proves, apart from the fact that you borrowed a mascara from someone today—”

“What does it prove? It proves she was really there! It proves she existed!”

“It proves you saw a girl, yes, but—”

“What do you want?” I interrupted, desperately. “What more do you want from me? I’ve told you what I heard—what I saw. I’ve told you there was a girl in that cabin, and now she’s gone. Look on the manifest—there’s a guest missing. Why aren’t you more concerned?”

“That cabin is empty,” he said gently.

“I know!” I shouted, and then, seeing Nilsson’s face, I made a huge, concentrated effort to get myself under control. “I know—that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, for God’s sake.”

“No,” he said, still with that same quiet gentleness, the gentleness of a big man with nothing to prove. “This is what I’m trying to explain, Miss Blacklock. It has always been empty. There was no guest in that cabin. There never has been.”

- CHAPTER 11 -

I stared at him, openmouthed.

“What do you mean?” I managed at last. “What do you mean, no guest?”

“The cabin is empty,” he said. “It was reserved for another guest, an investor named Ernst Solberg. But he pulled out at the last minute—personal reasons, I understand.”

“So the girl I saw—she wasn’t supposed to be there?”

“Perhaps she was a member of the staff, or a cleaner.”

“She wasn’t. She was getting dressed. She was staying there.”

He said nothing. He didn’t have to—the question was obvious. If she was staying there, where was all her stuff?

“Someone could have taken it out,” I said weakly. “Between seeing me and your coming.”

“Really?” Nilsson’s voice was quiet, his question not skeptical, not mocking, just . . . uncomprehending. He sat down on the sofa, the springs squeaking beneath his bulk, and I sank onto the bed and put my face in my hands.

Because he was right. There was no way someone could have cleared the room. I didn’t know exactly how much time had elapsed between me calling Karla and Nilsson appearing at my door, but there was no way it was more than a few minutes. Five, seven at the outside. Probably not even that.

Whoever was in there might have had time to wipe the blood off the glass, but that was it. There was no way they could have emptied the entire cabin. What could they have done with the stuff? I would have heard if they had tipped it over the side. And there simply hadn’t been time for them to pack it up and take it down the corridor.

“Shit,” I said at last, into my hands. “Shit.”

“Miss Blacklock,” Nilsson said slowly, and I had a sudden premonition that I was not going to like his next question. “Miss Blacklock, how much did you have to drink last night?”

I looked up, letting him see my ravaged makeup and the fury in my sleep-bleared eyes.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I simply asked—”

There was no point in denying it. There were enough people who’d seen me at the dinner last night, knocking back champagne, then wine, then after-dinner shots, to blow a hole a mile wide in any claim that I was completely sober.

“Yes, I was drinking,” I said nastily. “But if you think that half a glass of wine turns me into some hysterical drunk who can’t tell reality from fantasy, you’ve got another think coming.”

He said nothing to that, but his gaze traveled to the bin beside the minibar, where a number of whiskey and gin miniatures and a considerably smaller quantity of tonic cans were stacked up.

There was a silence. Nilsson didn’t ram home his point, but he didn’t need to. Bastard room cleaners.

“I may have been drinking,” I said through clenched teeth, “but I wasn’t drunk. Not like that. I know what I saw. Why would I make it up?”

He seemed to accept that and nodded wearily.

“Very well, Miss Blacklock.” He rubbed a hand over his face, and I heard his blond stubble rasp against his palm. He was tired, and I noticed, suddenly and incongruously, that his uniform jacket was buttoned up askew, with an orphan buttonhole at the bottom. “Look, it is late, you are tired.”

“You’re tired,” I shot back with more than a touch of malice, but he only nodded, without rancor.

“Yes, I am tired. I think there is nothing we can do now until the morning.”

“A woman has been thrown—”

“There is no proof!” he said louder, his voice cutting over mine, and for the first time there was exasperation in his tone. “I’m sorry, Miss Blacklock,” he said more quietly. “I should not have contradicted you. But I don’t feel there is sufficient evidence to wake the other passengers at this point. Let us both get some sleep”—and you can sober up was the unspoken translation—“and we will try to resolve this in the morning. Perhaps if I take you to meet the ship’s staff we can track down this girl that you saw in the cabin. It is evident that she was not a passenger, correct?”

“She wasn’t at the dinner last night,” I admitted. “But what if she was a staff member? What if someone’s missing, and we’re wasting time in raising the alarm?”

“I’ll speak to the captain and the purser now, let them know the situation. But there are no staff members unaccounted for that I am aware of; if there were, someone would have noticed. This is a very small ship with a tight-knit crew. It would be hard for someone to go missing undetected, even for a few hours.”

“I just think—” I began, but he cut me off, politely and firmly this time.

“Miss Blacklock, I will not wake up sleeping staff and passengers for no good reason. I’m sorry. I will inform the captain and the purser and they will take whatever action they see fit. In the meantime, perhaps you could give me a description of the girl you saw, and I can double-check the passenger manifest and arrange that all the off-duty staff members who match the description are in the staff restaurant for you to meet tomorrow after breakfast.”