The Woman in Cabin 10

“What is your name, Miss?”

“I—” I said, and then stopped.

There was another crackle from his radio and he held up a finger.

“One moment, please.” He put his hand to his hip, and I saw that what I had taken for a gun was actually a police radio in a holster, hanging next to a pair of handcuffs. He spoke briefly into the receiver and then climbed into the driver’s side of the car and began a longer conversation on the car radio.

“Ja,” I heard, and then a burst of conversation I didn’t understand. Then he looked up at me through the windscreen, and his eyes met mine, his gaze puzzled. “Ja,” he said again, “det er riktig. Laura Blacklock.”

Everything seemed to slow down, and I knew with a cold certainty that it was now, or not at all. If I ran now, I might be making a mistake. But if I didn’t, I might not live to find out, and I could not afford to take that risk.

I hesitated for just one second more, and then I saw the policeman replace the radio receiver and reach for something in his glove compartment.

I had no idea what to do. But I had not believed Carrie before, and it had nearly cost me everything.

Screwing my courage for the pain I knew was coming, I began to run—not up the road as before but down, cross-country, scrambling headlong down the vertiginous side of the fjord.

- CHAPTER 35 -

It 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.

“Hallo?” 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.

It 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 -

We 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.