The Woman in Cabin 10

All I could think was I’m home. I’m home. I’m home.

“I can’t believe it,” Judah kept saying. “You’re okay.”

And then the tears started, and I began to cry into the harsh scratchy wool of his jacket, and he didn’t say anything at all, just held me like he’d never let me go.

At first I hadn’t wanted the Horsts to call the police, but I couldn’t make them understand that, and after I’d spoken to Judah and he had promised to call Scotland Yard with my story—a story so improbable that I almost didn’t believe it myself—I began to accept that not even Richard Bullmer could buy his way out of this one.

When the police arrived, they took me to a health center first, to get treatment for my cut feet and wrenched ankle and to have my medication represcribed. It seemed to take forever, but at last the doctors pronounced me fit enough to leave, and the next thing I knew, I was being driven to a police station up the valley, where an official from the British Embassy in Oslo was waiting.

Again and again I found myself reciting the story of Anne, and Richard and Carrie, and each time it sounded more and more implausible to my own ears.

“You have to help her,” I kept saying. “Carrie—you have to go after the boat.”

The official and the police officer exchanged a look, and the policeman said something in Norwegian. I knew, suddenly, that whatever it was they were holding back, it was not good news.

“What?” I asked. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“The police have found two bodies,” the embassy official said at last, his voice awkward and formal. “The first in the early hours of Monday morning, dredged up by a fishing boat, the second later on Monday, recovered by police divers.”

I put my head in my hands, grinding my fingers into my eyes, watching the pressure build and bloom as flames and sparks on the insides of my lids. I drew a deep breath.

“Tell me.” I looked up. “I have to know.”

“The body recovered by divers was a man,” the embassy official said slowly. “He had been shot through the temple, the police believe it may have been a self-inflicted wound. He had no ID on him, but they are presuming it to be the body of Richard Bullmer. He was reported missing from the Aurora by the crew.”

“And . . .” I swallowed. “And the other?”

“The other was a woman, very slim, with shorn hair. The police will have to conduct a postmortem, but the preliminary findings are that she was drowned. Miss Blacklock?” He looked around, nervously, as if unsure what to do. “Are you all right, Miss Blacklock? Can someone get her a tissue, please? Please don’t cry, Miss Blacklock, you’re all right now.”

But I couldn’t speak. And the worst of it was that he was right, I was all right, but Carrie was not.

It should have been a comfort that Bullmer had killed himself, but I couldn’t find any. I just sat there, crying into the tissue they gave me, and thinking of Carrie and everything she’d done to me and for me. Whatever the rights and wrongs, she had paid with her life. I hadn’t been fast enough to save her.

- CHAPTER 37 -

The taxi from the airport took us back to Judah’s. We didn’t discuss it, exactly, but somehow I couldn’t face my basement flat. I’d had enough of being shut up in lightless rooms, and Judah seemed to realize that.

In his living room he tucked me up on the couch with a blanket, as if I were a small child, or someone recovering from an illness, and he kissed me very gently on my forehead, like I might break.

“I can’t believe you’re home,” he said again. “When they showed me your boots in that photo . . .”

His eyes welled up, and I felt my own throat scratch with tears.

“She took them,” I said croakily. “So I could pretend to be her. She—”

But I couldn’t finish.

Judah held me for a long time, and then when he could speak he swallowed and said, “You—you’ve got a lot of messages, you know. People have been calling me because your voice mail got full. I’ve been writing them down.”

He felt in his pocket, and handed me a list, and I scanned down it. Most of them were names I would have expected . . . Lissie . . . Rowan . . . Emma . . . Jenn . . . One or two were a surprise.

Tina West said one, in Judah’s handwriting. Very relieved you’re safe. No need to call back.

Chloe Yansen (I assumed that was Judah’s phonetic spelling of Jenssen.) Hopes you’re okay. Please call if there is anything she or Lars can do.

Ben Howard. No message.

“God, Ben.” I felt a stab of guilt. “I’m surprised he’s speaking to me. I more or less accused him of being behind all this. Did he really call?”

“That’s not the half of it,” Judah said, and I saw him wipe his eyes surreptitiously on his T-shirt. “He was the one who raised the alarm. He called me from Bergen trying to find out if you’d made it home okay, and when I said I hadn’t heard from you since Sunday, he told me to call the UK police and tell them it was a matter of urgency. He said he’d been raising hell since Trondheim and no one on the crew would listen to him.”

“Don’t make me feel worse.” I put my hands over my face.

“Hey, he’s still a self-important little shit,” Judah said. He gave me his endearing smile, and I saw with a pang that his tooth had re-rooted. “And he did give a pretty crappy interview to the Mail, which made it sound like you two had barely just broken up.”

“Okay,” I said, with a slightly shaky laugh. “That makes me feel a bit better about accusing him of murder.”

“Look, do you want a cup of tea?”

I nodded, and he got up and made his way to the kitchen. I took a handful of tissues out of a box on the coffee table and wiped my eyes, then picked up the remote control and turned on the television, trying for some semblance of normality.

I was just scrolling through the channels, looking for something reassuring and familiar—a Friends rerun, maybe, or How I Met Your Mother—when I stopped dead, my heart in my mouth.

My eyes were fixed on the television screen—at the man staring out at me.

It was Bullmer.

His eyes were locked onto mine, his mouth quirked in that asymmetric smile, and for a second I thought I might be hallucinating. I drew a breath, ready to scream for Judah, ask him if he could see the face staring out of the screen at me like a nightmare—but then the screen cut back to a newsreader, and I realized what was happening. It was a report of Bullmer’s death.

“. . . breaking news of the death of British businessman and peer Lord Richard Bullmer. Lord Bullmer, who was the majority shareholder in the troubled Northern Lights Group, has been found dead after being reported missing just hours earlier from his luxury yacht the Aurora off the coast of Norway.”

The screen cut again, this time to Richard standing on a podium as he gave some kind of address.

His lips were moving, but his speech was muted, so that the newsreader could carry on narrating the story over the top of the images, and as the camera zoomed in on his face, I found myself turning down the volume, leaving the couch and kneeling in front of the TV, my face just inches from his.

When the talk came to an end, Richard bowed, and the camera went close up on his face, and he looked straight out of the screen and gave me his characteristic little wink—so that my stomach turned, and my skin crawled.

I picked up the remote with shaking hands, ready to exorcise him from my life once and for all, when the camera panned, and I saw a woman seated in the front row, smiling and applauding, and I paused, my finger hovering over the off button. She was extraordinarily beautiful, with a long river of dark gold hair and broad cheekbones, and for a moment I couldn’t think where I had seen her before. And then . . . I realized.

She was Anne. Anne as she had been before Richard was through with her, young and beautiful and alive.

As she applauded, she seemed suddenly to realize that the cameras were on her, and her eyes flickered towards the lens, and I saw something there, although whether it was my imagination or not, it was hard to tell. It seemed to me that there was something sad in her expression, something a little trapped and afraid. But then she smiled more broadly and put her chin up, and I saw that this was a woman who would never capitulate, never give way, a woman who would fight to the last.