“I don’t see—”
“Someone came into my cabin and took it.” I spoke slowly, trying to keep ahold of myself. I had the strange feeling that if I didn’t speak calmly and clearly, I might start screaming down the phone. “Why would they do that, if they didn’t have anything to hide?”
There was a long pause.
“Nilsson?”
“I’ll come and see you,” he said at last. “Are you in your cabin?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be about ten minutes. I’m with the captain, I must finish here, but I will come as soon as possible.”
“Good-bye,” I said, and banged the phone down, more angry than afraid, though I wasn’t sure if it was with myself, or with Nilsson.
I paced the small cabin again, running through the events of last night, the pictures, sounds, fears, crowding my head. The feeling I could not get over was one of violation—someone had been in my room. Someone had taken advantage of the fact that I was busy with Nilsson to come and pick through my belongings and pull out the one piece of evidence that supported my story.
But who had access to a key? Iwona? Karla? Josef?
There was a knock at the door and I turned sharply and went to unlock it. Nilsson stood outside, an uneasy mixture of truculent, ursine, and tired. The dark circles under his eyes were not as big as mine, but they were getting there.
“Someone took the mascara,” I said.
He nodded.
“May I come in?”
I stood back, and he edged past me into the room.
“Can I sit?”
“Please.”
He sat, the sofa protesting gently, and I perched opposite him on the chair from the dressing table. Neither of us spoke. I was waiting for him to begin—perhaps he was doing the same, or simply trying to find the words. He pinched at the bridge of his nose, a delicate gesture that looked oddly comic in such a big man.
“Miss Blacklock—”
“Lo,” I said, firmly. He sighed and began again.
“Lo, then. I have spoken to the captain. None of the staff are missing, we are quite certain of that now. We’ve also spoken to all the staff and none of them saw anything suspicious about that cabin, all of which leads us to the conclusion—”
“Hey,” I interrupted hotly, as if somehow preventing him from saying the words would affect the conclusion he and the captain had come to.
“Miss Blacklock—”
“No. No, you don’t get to do this.”
“Don’t get to do what?”
“Call me ‘Miss Blacklock’ one minute, tell me you respect my concerns and I’m a valued passenger blah blah blah, and then the next minute brush me off like a hysterical female who didn’t see what she saw.”
“I don’t—” he started, but I cut him off, too angry to listen.
“You can’t have it both ways. Either you believe me or— Oh, no, wait!” I stopped in my tracks, unable to believe I hadn’t thought of it before. “What about CCTV? Don’t you have some kind of security system?”
“Miss Blacklock—”
“You could check the tapes of the corridor. The girl will be on there—she must be!”
“Miss Blacklock,” he said more loudly, “I have spoken to Mr. Howard.”
“What?”
“I have spoken to Mr. Howard,” he said, more wearily. “Ben Howard.”
“So?” I said, but my heart was thumping fast. “What can Ben possibly know about this?”
“His cabin is on the other side of the empty one. I went to see him, to find out if he could have heard anything, if he could corroborate your account of a splash.”
“He wasn’t there,” I said. “He was playing poker.”
“I know that. But he told me . . .” Nilsson trailed off.
Oh, Ben, I thought, and there was a sinking sensation in my stomach. Ben, you traitor. What have you done?
I knew what he’d said. I knew it from Nilsson’s face, but I wasn’t going to let him off the hook that easily.
“Yes?” I said through gritted teeth. I was going to force him to do this properly. He was going to have to spell this out, one excruciating syllable at a time.
“He told me about the man in your flat. The burglar.”
“That has nothing to do with this.”
“It, um—” He coughed and folded first his arms, then his legs. The picture of a man his size, perched uncomfortably on a sofa, trying to efface himself into nothing, was almost ludicrously comic. I said nothing. The sensation of watching him squirm was almost exquisite. You know, I thought viciously, you know what a shit you’re being.
“Mr. Howard tells me that you, er, you haven’t been sleeping well, since the, er, the break-in,” he managed.
I said nothing. I sat there cold and hard with rage against Nilsson, but mostly against Ben Howard. That was the last time I confided in him. Would I never learn?
“And then there is the alcohol,” he said. His fair, crumpled face was unhappy. “It, um . . . it doesn’t mix well with . . .”
He trailed off. His head turned towards the bathroom door, to the pathetic pile of personal belongings.
“With what?” I said, my voice low and hard and totally unlike my own. Nilsson raised his eyes to the ceiling, his discomfort radiating through the room.
“With . . . antidepressants,” he said, his voice almost a whisper, and his gaze flicked again to the crumpled half-used packet of pills beside the sink, and then back to me, every inch of him apologetic.
But the words were said. They could not be unsaid, and we both knew it.
I sat, saying nothing, but my cheeks were burning as if I’d been slapped. So this was it. Ben Howard really had told him everything, the little shit. A few minutes, he’d talked to Nilsson. One conversation, and in that time he’d not only failed to support my story—he’d spilled every detail of my biography that he had at hand, and made me look like an unreliable, chemically imbalanced neurotic in the process.
Yes. Yes, I take antidepressants. So what?
No matter that I’ve been taking—and drinking on—those pills for years. No matter that I had anxiety attacks, not delusions.
But even if I’d had full-blown psychosis, that didn’t detract from the fact that, pills or no pills, I saw what I saw.
“So that’s it, then,” I spoke, finally, the words clipped and flat. “You think, just because of a handful of pills, I’m a paranoid nutjob who can’t tell fact from fiction? You do know that there are hundreds of thousands of people on the same medication I take?”
“That is absolutely not what I was trying to say,” Nilsson said awkwardly. “But it is a fact that we have no evidence to support your account and, Miss Blacklock, with respect, what you believe happened is very close to your own exper—”
“NO!” I shouted, standing up, towering over his unhappily crouched body, in spite of the fact that he must have half a foot on me ordinarily. “I told you, you do not get to do this. You don’t get to call me obsequious names and then dismiss what I’ve told you. Yes, I haven’t been sleeping. Yes, I’d been drinking. Yes, someone broke into my flat. It has nothing to do with what I saw.”
“But that is the problem, isn’t it?” He stood, too, now, nettled, a flush across his broad cheeks. “You didn’t see anything. You saw a girl, of which there are many on this boat, and then much later you heard a splash. From that you have jumped to conclusions which are very close to the traumatic event you yourself experienced a few nights ago—a case of two and two making five. This does not warrant a murder investigation, Miss Blacklock.”
“Get out,” I said. The ice around my heart seemed to be melting. I could feel that I was about to give way to something very stupid.
“Miss—”
“Get. Out!”
I stalked to the door and wrenched it open. My hands were trembling.
“Get out!” I repeated. “Now. Unless you want me to call the captain and tell him that a lone female traveler asked you repeatedly to leave her cabin and you refused. GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY CABIN.”