The Woman in Cabin 10 (29 page)

Shaking with fear and exertion, I got one foot up in front of me, and I gripped the edge of the frosted privacy screen and hauled myself to standing. Now, all I had to do was edge my body weight out, round the seaward side of the privacy glass, and swing myself to safety on the other side.

All
. Yeah. Right.

I took a deep breath, feeling my cold, sweaty fingers slip on the glass. There was no bloody
purchase
. Every other part of this boat was pimped up, couldn’t they have spared a little bling for the privacy glass? Just a few rhinestones, some fancy etching,
something
to give my fingers an edge to hang on to?

I put one foot out, edging it round the high wall of glass . . . and I instantly knew the espadrilles had been a mistake.

I had left them on, thinking that something to protect my feet and give me extra purchase on the glass would be no bad thing, but as my weight swung out over the water, I felt the sole of my supporting foot slip against the sharp edge.

I gasped, and my fingers tightened desperately on the glass in front of me. If sheer willpower could have held me steady, I would have made it. I felt one nail break, then two—and then the glass seemed to be pulled out from between my scrabbling hands with a suddenness that left me unable to do anything—even scream.

I felt the wind against my cheek for a brief, terrifying instant, my hair flapping in the darkness, my hands still clutching at the air—I was falling, falling backwards towards the fathomless waters of the fjord.

I hit the blackness of the sea with a sound like a gunshot, a fierce, smacking blow that knocked all the breath from my lungs.

I felt the air bubbling from my lungs as I plummeted through the stone-cold chill, I felt the icy water strike through to my bones, and as I plunged deeper into fathomless black, I felt a silky current rise from far below me, grip my feet, and pull.

- CHAPTER 33 -

I
didn’t scream. I didn’t have time. I was twenty, thirty, forty feet down in icy black water before I had time to draw a breath.

I don’t remember what I felt as I fell—only the bone-cracking smack as I hit the sea, and the paralyzing cold of the water. But I do remember the gut-churning panic as the current seized me, deep, deep below.

Kick
, I told my legs, feeling the breath sob in my throat. And I kicked. In the black and the cold, I kicked, first because I didn’t want to die, and then as the black cold began to grip, because there was nothing else I could do, because my lungs were screaming and I knew that if I didn’t break the surface soon, I would be dead.

The current pulled and tugged at my legs with slippery fingers, trying to drag me deep into the darkness of the fjord, and I kicked and kicked with increasing desperation and despair. In the dark, with the swirling currents of the fjord all around, it was almost impossible to tell which way was up. What if I was driving myself further into the depths? And yet, I didn’t dare stop. The instinct to survive was too strong.
You’re dying!
shouted a voice in the back of my head. And my legs had no other response except to kick, and kick, and kick.

I shut my eyes against the salt sting, and against my closed lids lights began to spark and shimmer, terrifyingly close to the shards of light and dark that fragmented my vision when I had a panic attack. But amazingly, unbelievably, when I opened my eyes again, I could see something. A pale, luminous shimmer of the moonlight on water.

For a second I almost didn’t believe it, but it was coming closer . . . and closer, and the tug of the current on my body was loosening, and then I broke the surface with a breath that sounded closer to a scream, water streaming down my face, coughing and sobbing, and coughing again.

I was very close to the hull of the ship, close enough to feel the throb of the engines like a pulse through the water, and I knew that I had to start swimming. Not just because it was totally possible to die of hypothermia in really not-very-cold seas, but more urgently because if the ship started moving while I was this close, nothing short of divine intervention would save me, and I’d had bad luck enough these past few days to make me think that if there was a God up there, he didn’t like me very much.

Shivering, I trod water and tried to get my bearings. I had surfaced at the front of the boat, and I could see the string of lights at the quayside and what I thought might be the dark shape of a ladder, although my streaming eyes made it hard to be sure.

It was hard to make my body obey; I was shaking so convulsively that I could barely control my limbs, but I forced my arms and legs to start moving, and gradually I began to swim towards the lights, coughing against the waves that slapped my face, feeling the chill of the water striking through to my bones, forcing myself to breathe slowly and deeply, though every part of my body wanted to gasp and pant at the physical assault of the cold. Something soft and yet solid bumped against my face as I swam, and I shuddered, but it was more with cold than revulsion. I could worry about dead rats and decaying fish when I got to shore. Right now, the only thing I cared about was surviving.

I could not have fallen in more than twenty or thirty yards from the quay, but now it seemed to be much farther. I swam and swam, and at times I could swear the lights of the shore were getting farther away, and other times they seemed almost close enough to grasp—but at last I felt the rusted iron of the ladder bang against my numb fingers, and I was climbing and slipping and slipping and climbing up the ladder, trying not to shiver loose my grip as I hauled my wet and shuddering bones up the rungs.

At the edge of the quay I collapsed onto the concrete, gasping and coughing and shaking, and then I got to my hands and knees and looked up, first at the
Aurora
and then towards the little town in front of me.

It wasn’t Bergen. I had no idea where we were, but it was a small town, barely even a village, and this late at night there was not a soul about. The smattering of cafés and bars that lined the quayside were all closed. There were a few lights in shop windows, but the only establishment I could see that looked as if I might stand a chance of finding someone to open the door was a hotel overlooking the quay.

Trembling, I got to my feet, lurched over the low chain that fenced off the sheer drop to the sea, and half walked, half staggered across the quayside towards the hotel. The
Aurora
’s engine had picked up a notch, and there was an urgency to it now. As I crossed the seemingly endless concrete apron of the quay, it rose again in pitch, and there was the sound of sloshing water, and as I glanced fearfully behind me, I saw the boat begin to pull slowly away, its prow pointing out into the fjord, its motors grinding and thrumming as it inched slowly away from the shore.

I looked quickly away, filled with a kind of superstition, as if just turning to look at the boat could attract the attention of the people on board.

As I reached the steps up to the hotel door, the sound of the engine picked up, and I felt my legs give way as I banged, banged, banged on the door. I heard a voice saying “Please, please, oh please somebody come . . .” And then the door opened and the light and warmth flooded out, and I felt myself helped upright and over the threshold to safety.

S
ome half hour later I was huddled in a wicker armchair, wrapped in a synthetic red blanket, in the dimly lit, glassed-in terrace overlooking the bay. I had a cup of coffee in my hands, but I was too tired to drink it, and I could hear voices in the background, speaking in . . . Norwegian, I supposed it must be. I was overwhelmingly tired. I felt as if I hadn’t slept properly in days—which perhaps I hadn’t, and my chin kept nodding onto my chest and then jerking back up as I remembered where I was, and what I’d escaped from. Had it been real, that nightmare of the beautiful boat, with its coffin-like cell, far beneath the waves? Or was this all one long hallucination?

I was half dozing and half watching the still black lights of the bay, the
Aurora
a distant speck far up the fjord, moving west, when I heard a voice over my shoulder.

“Miss?”

I looked up. It was a man wearing a slightly skewed name tag reading
ERIK FOSSUM—GENERAL MANAGER.
He looked as if he had been dragged from his bed, his hair rumpled and his shirt buttons awry, and he passed a hand over an unshaven chin as he sat down in the armchair opposite me.

“Hello,” I said, wearily. I’d gone through my story with the man at the desk—at least as much of it as I thought safe to give, and as much as his English would permit. He was obviously the night porter, and he looked and sounded more Spanish or Turkish than Norwegian, although his Norwegian seemed to be better than his English, which was fine when it came to stock phrases about checking in and opening hours, but not up to a garbled tale of mixed identity and police.

I had seen him showing the only ID I had with me—Anne’s—to the manager, and heard his low, guarded tones, and heard my own name repeated several times.

Now the man sitting opposite me folded his fingers and smiled, slightly nervously.

“Miss—Black Lock, is that right?” He pronounced it as two words. I nodded.

“I don’t completely understand—my night manager tried to explain—how do you have Anne Bullmer’s credit cards? We know Anne and Richard well; they stay here sometimes. Are you a friend?”

I put my hands over my face, as if I could press back the tiredness that was threatening to overwhelm me.

“I—it’s a really long story. Please, can I use your phone? I have to contact the police.”

I had made up my mind as I hung, dripping and exhausted, over the polished check-in desk. In spite of my promise to Carrie, this was my only chance to save her. I didn’t for one second believe that Richard would let her live. She knew too much, had screwed too much up. And without the headscarf I had no chance of passing myself off as Anne, and without Carrie’s passport I had no chance of posing as Carrie, and both were lost somewhere in the bay, fathoms down. Only Anne’s purse had survived, miraculously still in the pocket of the Lycra stretch pants as I crawled up the ladder, out of the water.

“Of course,” Erik said sympathetically. “Would you like me to phone them? They may not have an English speaker on duty at this time of night. I must warn you, we don’t have a police station in the town, the nearest one is a few hours away in the next . . . what’s the word. The next valley. It will probably be tomorrow before someone can come out.”

“Please tell them it’s urgent, though,” I said wearily. “The sooner, the better. I can pay for a bed. I have money.”

“Let’s not worry about that,” he said with a smile. “Can I get you another drink?”

“No. No, thanks. Just please tell them to come
soon
. Someone’s life could be in danger.”

I let my head rest, heavy on my hand, my eyelids almost closing as he went back to the front desk, and I heard the sound of a phone receiver being lifted, and the
beep-beep-beep-beep
 . . .
beep-beep-beep
of a number being dialed. It sounded like a long one. Maybe the Norwegian number for 999 was different? Or perhaps he was calling the local station.

It rang. Someone at the other end picked up and there was a brief exchange. Through the haze of exhaustion I heard Erik saying something in Norwegian out of which I could only pick the word
hotel
. . . then a pause and then another burst of Norwegian. Then I heard my own name, given twice, and then Anne’s.

“
Ja, din kone, Anne
,” Erik said, as if the person on the other end had not heard correctly, or had not believed what he’d heard. Then more in Norwegian, and then a laugh, and finally. “
Takk, farvel, Richard
.”

My head jerked up from my supporting hand, and every part of me went suddenly cold and still.

I looked out to the ships in the bay, to the
Aurora
, its lights disappearing in the far, far distance. And . . . was it my imagination? It looked as if the ship had stopped.

I sat for a moment longer, watching its lights, trying to measure them against the landmarks of the bay, and at last I was almost sure. The
Aurora
was no longer moving west up the fjord. It was turning around. It was coming back.

Erik had hung up, and was dialing another number now.

“
Politiet, takk
,” he said as someone answered.

For a moment I couldn’t move, frozen with the realization of what I’d done. I hadn’t believed Carrie’s assertions about Richard’s web of influence, not really. I’d dismissed them as the paranoia of a woman too beaten down to believe in the possibility of escape. But now . . . now those fears seemed all too real.

I set the coffee cup gently down on the table, let the red blanket fall to the floor, and, very quietly, I opened the terrace door and slipped outside, into the night.

- CHAPTER 34 -

I
ran, up through the winding streets of the little town, my breath tearing in my chest, stones cutting into my bare feet and making me wince with pain. The streets petered out, and the streetlights began to disappear, but I ran on in the dark and the cold, stumbling through invisible puddles and over wet grass and graveled paths, until my feet grew too numb for me to even feel the cuts and the stones.

Even then I kept going—desperate to put as many miles as possible between myself and Richard Bullmer. I knew that I could not keep this up, that at some point I was going to have to give in—but my only hope was to keep going as long as possible, until I found myself some kind of shelter.

Finally, I could not run anymore. I let myself drop back to a kind of gasping, limping jog, and then as the lights of the village grew smaller in the distance, I slowed to a walk, a painful, stumbling walk, along a winding dark road that twisted into the darkness, climbing up the side of the fjord. Every few hundred yards I looked back over my shoulder, down into the valley, to the shrinking speckle of lights of the little portside town, and to the dark slick of the fjord waters, where the lights of the
Aurora
were coming closer. They were unmistakable now. I could see the ship clearly, and I could see, too, light beginning to tinge the sky above me.

Dawn must be coming already—God, what day did that make it? Monday?

But something seemed wrong, and after a few minutes I realized what it was. The lights were not to the east but to the north. What I could see was not dawn but the eerie green and gold streaks of the northern lights.

The realization made me laugh—a bitter, mirthless choke that sounded shockingly loud in the still night air. What was it Richard had said? Everyone should see the northern lights before they died. Well, now I had. But it just didn’t seem that important anymore.

I had stopped for a moment, watching the shifting glory of the aurora borealis, but now at the thought of Richard I began walking again. With each step, I remembered Carrie’s frantic exhortations to get running and get out—her hysterical assertions about the reach of Richard’s influence.

It didn’t seem so hysterical now.

If
only
I had believed her—I should never have shown Anne’s ID at the hotel, or trusted Erik with even the few details I’d given him. But I just hadn’t quite believed that anyone, however wealthy, could have the kind of reach Carrie believed. Now I realized I was wrong.

I groaned, at my own stupidity, at the cold that was striking through my thin, damp clothes. Most of all at the fact that I’d left the wallet on the desk. Stupid, stupid, stupid. That was five thousand wet, soggy, but still usable kroner, and I’d left them there for Richard as a little golden hello when he turned up at the hotel. What was I going to do? I had no ID, nowhere to sleep, no means of buying so much as a bar of chocolate, let alone a train ticket. My best hope was finding a police station, but how? Where? And did I dare tell them the truth when I got there?

I was just considering this when I heard the roar of an engine behind me and turned to see a car coming round the bend, frighteningly fast, clearly not expecting anyone to be out here at this time of night.

I scrambled for the verge, lost my footing, and fell, sliding down a length of scree that left me bloodied and scraped, my leggings in tatters, and came to a halt with a splash in a pebbly ditch that seemed to be some kind of stream or drainage channel down to the fjord below. The car itself had screeched to a halt on the road some five or six feet above me, the headlamps pointing out into the valley, and the smoke from the exhaust billowing red in the rear lights.

I heard the crunch of feet on the road above. Richard? One of his men? I
had
to get away.

I tried to stand on my ankle, felt it give, and then tried again, more carefully this time, but the pain made me give a sob.

At the sound, a figure, lit from behind so that I could see his shape only in silhouette, peered over the edge of the road, and a voice said something in Norwegian. I shook my head. My hands were trembling.

“I d-don’t speak Norwegian.” I tried to keep the sob out of my voice. “Do you sp-speak English?”

“Yes, I speak English,” the man said in a heavily accented voice. “Give me your hand. I will help you out.”

I hesitated, but there was no way I could get out of the ditch without help, and if the man really intended to hurt me he could just as easily climb down here and attack me in the shelter of the ditch. Better to get out, where I could at least run if I had to.

The lights of the car shone in my eyes, blinding me, and I put my hand up, shielding them against the glare, but all I could see was a dark shape, and a halo of blond hair beneath some kind of cap. It wasn’t Richard, at least, that I was sure of.

“Give me your hand,” the man said again, with a touch of impatience this time. “Are you hurt?”

“No, I’m n-not hurt,” I said. “At least, my ankle hurts, but I don’t think it’s broken.”

“Put the leg there.” He pointed at a rock about a foot out of the ditch, “and I will pull you up.”

I nodded, and with a feeling that I might be doing something very stupid, I set my good foot to the rock and leaned upward with my right hand.

I felt the man grab hold of my wrist, his grip immensely strong, and with a grunt he began to pull, bracing himself against a rock at the edge of the ditch. The muscles and sinews in my arm were screaming in protest, and when I tried to put my weight on my bad foot, I cried out, but at last, with a painful, scrambling rush, I was up and out of the ditch, and standing trembling on the edge of the verge.

“What are you doing out here?” the man said. I couldn’t see his face, but there was concern in his voice. “Are you lost? Have you had an accident? This road leads directly up the mountain, it’s no place for a tourist.”

I was trying to think of how to answer, when I realized two things.

The first was that he was carrying something in a holster at his hip, the shape of it silhouetted against the car lights. And the second was that the car itself was a police car. As I stood there, frozen, trying to think what to say, I heard the crackle of a radio pierce the night.

“I—” I managed.

The policeman took a step forward, tipping his cap so that he could see me more clearly, and frowned.

“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.