The Woman in Cabin 10 (19 page)

Tomorrow, though. Tomorrow we would be in Trondheim, and no matter what, I was going to get myself off this boat and straight to the nearest police station.

- CHAPTER 21 -

M
aking myself up for dinner that night, I felt like I was applying war paint—lacquering on, layer by layer, the calm, professional mask that would enable me to get through this.

Part of me, a big part, wanted to go and huddle beneath my duvet—the idea of making small talk with a group of people containing a potential murderer, eating food served by someone who might have killed a woman last night—that thought was terrifying, and utterly surreal.

But another, more stubborn part refused to give in. As I applied mascara borrowed from Chloe in the bathroom mirror, I found myself searching in my reflection for the angry, idealistic girl who’d started her journalism course at uni fifteen years ago, thinking of the dreams I’d had of becoming an investigative reporter and changing the world. Instead, I had fallen into travel writing at
Velocity
to pay the bills and, almost in spite of myself, I’d begun to enjoy it—had even started to relish the perks, and to dream of a role like Rowan’s, running my own magazine. And that was fine—I wasn’t ashamed of the writer I’d become; like most people, I’d taken work where I could find it and tried to do the best I could in that job. But how could I look that girl in the mirror in the eye, if I didn’t have the courage to get out there and investigate a story that was staring me in the face?

I thought of all the women I’d admired reporting from war zones around the world, of people who’d exposed corrupt regimes, gone to prison to protect their sources, risked their lives to get at the truth. I couldn’t imagine Martha Gellhorn obeying an instruction to
Stop digging
, or Kate Adie hiding in her hotel room because she was scared of what she might find.

STOP DIGGING
. The letters on the mirror were etched in my memory. Now, as I finished my makeup with a swipe of lip gloss, I huffed on the mirror, and wrote in the steam obscuring my reflection one word:
NO.

Besides, as I shut the bathroom door behind me and put on my evening shoes, a smaller, more selfish part of me was whispering that I was safest in company. No one could harm me in front of a room full of witnesses.

I was just straightening my gown when there was a knock on the door.

“Who is it?” I called.

“It’s Karla, Miss Blacklock.”

I opened the door. Karla was outside, smiling with that permanent air of slightly anxious surprise.

“Good evening, Miss Blacklock. I just wanted to remind you that dinner is in ten minutes, and drinks are being served in the Lindgren Lounge, whenever you wish to join us.”

“Thank you,” I said, and then, on impulse as she turned to go, “Karla?”

“Yes?” She turned back, her eyebrows raised so that her round face looked almost alarmed. “Is there something else with which I can help?”

“I—I don’t know. It’s just . . .” I took a deep breath, trying to think how to phrase it. “When I came and talked to you earlier today in the staff quarters, I felt like . . . I felt like maybe there was something else you could have told me. That perhaps you didn’t want to speak in front of Miss Lidman. And I just wanted to say—I’m going into Trondheim tomorrow, to talk to the police about what I saw, and if there’s anything—anything at all—that you wanted to say, now would be a really good time to tell me. I could make sure it was anonymous.” I thought again of Martha Gellhorn and Kate Adie, of the kind of reporter I’d once wanted to be. “I’m a journalist,” I said as convincingly as I could. “You know that. We protect our sources—it’s part of the deal.”

Karla said nothing, only twisted her fingers together.

“Karla?” I prompted. For a moment I thought that there might be tears in her blue eyes, but she blinked them away.

“I don’t . . .” she said, and then muttered something under her breath in her own language.

“It’s okay,” I said. “You can tell me. I promise it won’t go any further. Are you frightened of someone?”

“It is not that,” she said miserably. “I am sad because I am sorry for you. Johann is saying that you make it up, that you are . . . what’s the word?
Paranoid
, and that you . . . you seek the attention by making up stories. And I don’t believe this. I believe you are a good person and that you believe what you say is true. But, Miss Blacklock, we need our jobs. If the police say that something bad happened on this boat, no one will want to travel with us, and it may not be so easy to find another job. I need this money, I have a little boy, Erik, at home with my mother; she needs the money that I send back. And just because perhaps someone let a friend use an empty cabin, that doesn’t mean she was killed, you know?”

She turned away.

“Hang on.” I put out a hand towards her arm, trying to stop her going. “What are you saying? There
was
a girl in there? Did someone smuggle her in?”

“I am saying nothing.” She pulled her arm out of my grip. “I am saying, please, Miss Blacklock, don’t make trouble if nothing happened.”

And then she ran up the corridor, punched the code into the staff door, and was gone.

O
n the way up to the Lindgren Lounge, I found myself replaying the conversation in my head, trying to work out what it meant.
Had
she seen someone in the cabin, or suspected someone was there? Or was she just torn between her sympathy for me and her fear of what might happen if what I was saying was true?

Outside the lounge I checked my phone surreptitiously, hoping against hope that we might be close enough to land for a signal, but there was still nothing. As I was putting it away in my evening bag, Camilla Lidman glided up.

“May I take that for you, Miss Blacklock?” She indicated the bag. I shook my head.

“No, thank you.” My phone was set to beep when it connected to roaming networks. If a signal did come, I wanted it by my side so I could act immediately.

“Very well. May I offer you a glass of champagne?” She indicated a tray on a small table by the entrance, and I nodded and took a frosted flute. I knew I should keep a clear head for tomorrow, but one glass for Dutch courage couldn’t hurt.

“Just to let you know, Miss Blacklock,” she said, “that the talk on the northern lights has been canceled tonight.”

I looked at her blankly, realizing that I’d forgotten, yet again, to check the itinerary.

“There was to have been a presentation on the northern lights after dinner,” she explained, seeing my expression. “A talk from Lord Bullmer accompanied by photographs from Mr. Lederer, but unfortunately, Lord Bullmer has been called away to deal with an emergency and Mr. Lederer has hurt his hand, so it has been rescheduled for tomorrow, after the group returns from Trondheim.”

I nodded again and turned to the rest of the room to see who else was missing.

Bullmer and Cole were both absent, as Camilla had said. Chloe was not there, either, and when I asked Lars, he said she was feeling ill and lying down in her room. Anne was present, although she looked pale, and as she raised her glass to her lips, her robe slipped, showing a deep purple bruise on her collarbone. She saw me glance, and look hastily away, and gave a self-conscious laugh.

“I know, it looks terrible, doesn’t it? I tripped in the shower, but I bruise so easily now, it looks worse than it is. It’s a side effect of the chemotherapy, unfortunately.”

As we took our seats at dinner, I saw Ben motion invitingly at the seat next to his, opposite Archer, but I pretended not to see, and instead took the chair closest to where I was standing, next to Owen White. He was giving Tina a long talk on his financial interests and his role at the investment company he worked for.

As I listened, half an ear on their conversation, half an ear on the rest of the table, I realized that the talk had shifted, and he was speaking in a low voice, as if unwilling to be overheard.

“. . . quite honestly, no,” he was confiding to Tina. “I’m just not one hundred percent convinced that the setup is sustainable—it’s such a niche investment area. But I don’t imagine Bullmer will have trouble getting interest from elsewhere. And of course he has pretty deep pockets of his own, or rather Anne does, so he can afford to wait for the right person to come on board. It’s a shame Solberg wasn’t able to come, this is much more his bailiwick.”

Tina nodded wisely, and then the conversation passed on to other topics—holiday destinations they had in common, the identity of the neon green cube of jelly that had just appeared on a plate in front of us, flanked by a little pile of something I thought might be seaweed. I let my gaze pass over the room, Archer was saying something to Ben and laughing uproariously. He looked drunk, his bow tie already askew. Anne, at the same table, was talking to Lars. There was no trace of the tears I’d seen earlier that afternoon, but there was something haunted about her expression, and her smile, as she nodded at something Lars was saying, was strained.

“Pondering our hostess?” said a low voice from across the table, and I turned to see Alexander sipping at a glass. “She’s quite the enigma, isn’t she? Looks so fragile, and yet they say she’s the power behind Richard’s throne. The iron fist in the silk glove, you could say. I suppose that having that kind of money from the age when most children are still drooling into their cornflakes has a steeling effect on one’s character.”

“Do you know her well?” I asked. Alexander shook his head.

“Never met her. Richard spends half his life on a plane, but
she
almost never leaves Norway. It’s totally alien to me—as you know, I
live
for travel; I can’t imagine confining yourself to a petty little country like Norway when the restaurants and capitals of the world await. Never to taste sucking pig at elBulli, or sample the glorious fusion of cultures that is Gaggan in Bangkok! But I suppose it’s a reaction against her upbringing—I believe she lost her parents in a plane crash at the age of eight or nine, and spent the rest of her life being shuttled around the boarding schools of Europe by her grandparents. I imagine you might choose to go the other way as an adult.”

He picked up his fork, and we were just starting to eat when there was a noise at the door, and I looked up to see Cole walking unsteadily across to the table.

“Mr. Lederer!” A stewardess hurried to take an extra chair from the ones at the side of the room. “Miss Blacklock, might I ask you to just . . .”

I moved my plate and chair slightly and she put a seat at the head of the table for Cole, who slumped heavily down. His hand was bandaged, and he looked as if he’d been drinking.

“No, I won’t have champagne,” he said in answer to Hanni gliding up with a tray. “I’ll have a Scotch.”

Hanni nodded and hurried away, and Cole sat back in his chair and passed a hand over his unshaven face.

“Sorry about your camera,” I said cautiously. He scowled, and I saw that he was very drunk already.

“It’s a fucking nightmare,” he said. “And the worst of it is, it’s my own bloody fault. I should have backed it up.”

“Are all the shots gone?” I asked. Cole shrugged.

“No idea, but probably, yes. Got a guy back in London who might be able to get some of the data off, but it’s showing fuck all when I put it in my computer, it’s not even reading the card.”

“I’m really sorry,” I said. My heart was beating fast. I wasn’t sure if this was sensible, but I figured I had nothing to lose now. “Was it just stuff from the voyage? I thought I saw one shot from somewhere else . . . ?”

“Oh, yeah, I was swapping the cards over, it had a few shots from a shoot I did a couple of weeks back at the Magellan.”

I knew the Magellan—it was a very exclusive all-male members club in Piccadilly, founded as a meeting place for diplomats and what the club described as “gentlemen travelers.” No women were allowed as members, but female guests were permitted, and I had attended functions there once or twice in Rowan’s stead.

“Are you a member?” I asked. He gave a snort.

“Not bloody likely. Not my style, even if they’d let me in, which is doubtful. Too crusty for my taste—anywhere that won’t let you wear jeans isn’t for me. The Frontline is more my cup of tea. Alexander’s a member, though. So is Bullmer, I think. You know the drill, you have to be either too posh to function or rich as shit, and fortunately I’m not either.”

His last remark fell into a lull in conversation from the rest of the table, the words painfully loud and noticeably slurred in the silence, and I saw a few heads turn, and Anne glance at the steward with a nod that I interpreted as
Get his food over there before the whiskey.

“What were you doing there, then?” I said, keeping my voice low, as if I could persuade him to moderate his tone by osmosis.

“Pictures for
Harper’s
.” His plate arrived and he began spearing foodstuffs at random, shoving the fragile architectural morsels into his mouth seemingly without even tasting them. “Some launch, I think. Can’t remember. Christ.” He looked down at his hand, the fork awkwardly balanced against the bandage. “This is sodding painful. There’s no way I’m trailing round Trondheim cathedral tomorrow, I’m going to the doctor to get this checked out and get some decent painkillers.”

A
fter dinner finished, we took our coffee through to the lounge, and I found myself standing next to Owen White, both of us staring out the long window, into the fog. He nodded politely but seemed in no hurry to open the conversation. I tried to think what Rowan would do. Charm him? Or brush him off and go and talk to someone of more immediate use to
Velocity
? Archer, perhaps?

I glanced over my shoulder at Archer and saw that he was very, very drunk and had pinned Hanni into a corner of the room, her back to the window, his broad frame effectively blocking her exit. Hanni was holding a jug of coffee in one hand and was smiling politely but with a trace of wariness. She said something and gestured to the coffeepot, obviously as a way of taking her leave, but he laughed and put one heavy arm around her shoulders in a gesture of avuncular possession that made my flesh creep a little.

Hanni said something else that I didn’t catch, and then slipped out from under his grip with what looked like practiced dexterity. For a moment Archer’s face looked a mixture of foolishness and fury, but then he seemed to shrug it off and moved across to talk to Ben.