I tried to think through the possibilities that would mesh with the scream and the blood and the cover-up. A fight? A blow to the nose, a yell of pain, a gush of blood as the person ran to the veranda to try to bleed into the sea, leaving that smear on the glass . . . no deaths. And if the girl was some kind of stowaway, that could explain why they had covered it up—moved her to a different location, cleaned away the blood.
But other parts of the picture didn’t fit. If the fight had been unintended and unpremeditated, how had they cleared the cabin so fast? I had seen the girl in situ earlier that day, the room behind her cluttered with clothes and belongings. If the fight had been unplanned, there was no way they could have stripped and cleaned that suite in the few minutes it had taken me to ring Nilsson.
No—whatever had happened in there had been planned. They had cleared it beforehand, meticulously cleaned it. And I was beginning to suspect it was not chance that it was number ten that had been empty. No, one cabin had been left empty deliberately, and it had to be ten. Palmgren was the very last one on the ship. Its veranda was not overlooked, and there were no other cabins to see something floating past, disappearing in the foam of the ship’s wake.
Someone had died. I was sure of it. Just not that girl. But then who?
I tossed and turned in the darkness, listening for any sounds above the roar of the engine and trying to answer the questions churning uneasily inside. My brain felt fogged and thick, but I kept coming back to that question. Who? Who had died?
- CHAPTER 24 -
When I woke next it was to the same metallic click I’d heard before, and the lights flickered on. They strobed for a moment, the warming hum of the low-energy bulbs audible above the engine sound and mingling with the whining in my ears. I jumped up, my heart going a mile a minute, knocking over something on the floor beside the bed as I gazed wildly around.
I had missed my chance.
God damn it, I had missed my chance again.
I had to find out what was going on here, what they intended to do with me, why they were keeping me shut up here. How long had I been here? Was it daytime now? Or was this just the time that it suited the girl—or whoever my captor was—to turn the electricity back on?
I tried to count back. I had been hit in the early hours of Tuesday morning. At the very least it was Wednesday morning now, possibly later. It felt as if I’d been here longer than twenty-four hours—much longer.
I went to the bathroom to splash water on my face. It was as I was drying myself that a wave of vertigo washed over me, making my head reel and the whole room shift and shudder. I had the sudden sensation of falling, and I put out my hand to steady myself against the doorframe, shutting my eyes against the sensation of plummeting very far and very fast into black water.
At last the sensation receded, and I made my way back to the bunk, where I sat and put my head between my knees, feeling my skin shiver with cold and hot. Had the ship moved? It was hard to know what was dizziness and what was the movement of the waves, so far down beneath the decks. The movement of the ship felt very different down here—not so much a rhythmic rise and fall, but a sluggish roll that mingled with the constant roar of the engine to give a strange, hypnotic feeling.
There was a tray beside the bed, with a Danish pastry and a bowl of slopped muesli. That must have been what I knocked when I jumped up out of sleep. I picked it up and forced myself to take a spoonful. I wasn’t hungry, but I’d eaten nothing but a few meatballs since Monday night. If I were going to get out of here, I would need to fight, and to fight, I needed to eat.
What I really wanted, though, was not food. It was my pills. I wanted them, with a fierce, physical longing that I remembered from the last time I tried to stop taking them. Only this time I knew that things wouldn’t get better without them, as I had kept telling myself last time. They were going to get worse.
If you’re around to see it, said a nasty little voice in my head. The muesli stuck in my throat, and suddenly I couldn’t swallow.
I longed for the girl from the cabin to come back. A vivid, luxuriantly violent image flashed across my brain: me, grabbing her hair the way she’d grabbed mine, smashing her cheekbone against the sharp metal edge of the bunk, watching the blood flow, the way it would smell sharp and raw in the confined, airless cabin. I remembered again the blood on the veranda, the way it had smeared across the glass, and I wished with a powerful, vicious longing that it had been hers.
I hate you, I thought. I swallowed against the pain in my throat, forcing the soggy half-chewed muesli down. I took another spoonful, my fingers shaking as I conveyed it to my mouth. I hate you so much. I hope you do drown. The muesli felt like cement, choking me as I tried to swallow it, but I forced it down again and again, until the bowl was half empty.
I did not know if I could do this, but I had to try.
I picked up the tray, the thin melamine tray, and I smacked it on the metal edge of the bunk. It bounced back and I only just flinched out of the way in time. I had a sudden, sharp flashback to the burglary—to the door smacking into my cheekbone, and I had to shut my eyes for a moment and steady myself on the bunk.
I didn’t try that again. Instead, I leaned the tray on the metal edge and put my knee on the nearest side, and all my weight on my hands on the far edge. Then I pushed down. The tray did nothing at first, and I pressed harder. Then it snapped in half with a noise like a gunshot, sending me sprawling onto the bed. But I had what I’d been aiming for—two pieces of plastic, not quite razor-sharp, but each with an edge formidable enough to do some damage.
I picked up each piece, weighing them in my hand for the best way to hold them, and then, holding the one that felt like the most intimidating weapon, I walked across to the door and crouched against the wall next to the frame.
And I waited.
It seemed to last for hours, that day. Once or twice I felt my eyes sliding shut, my body trying to shut down amid the exhausting flood of adrenaline and fear, but I jerked them back open. Stay with it, Lo!
I began to count. Not from panic this time but just to keep myself awake. One. Two. Three. Four. When I got to a thousand I changed and began to count in French. Un. Deux. Trois. . . . Then in twos. I played games in my own head—fizz-buzz, that children’s game where you say “fizz” for every five or multiple of five, and “buzz” for every seven.
One. Two. Three. Four. Fizz. (My hands were shaking.) Six. Buzz. Eight. Nine. Ten— No wait, that should have been fizz.
I shook my head impatiently, rubbed my aching arms, and started again. One. Two. . . .
And then I heard it—a noise in the corridor. A door slamming. I caught my breath.
They were coming closer. My heart began to race. The pit of my stomach clenched.
A key in the lock . . .
And then the door cracked cautiously open and I pounced.
Her.
She saw me leap towards the gap and tried to close it, but I was too quick for her. I thrust my arm in the gap, and it slammed onto my forearm—hard. I screamed with pain, but the door bounced back, and I was able to wedge half my body into the gap, stabbing at her grappling arm with the jagged edge of the broken tray, but instead of falling backwards as I’d anticipated, she rushed forwards into the room, thumping me back against the plastic wall, the tray cutting painfully into my arm. I pulled myself up, blood dripping down the back of my hand, but she was faster. She lunged at the door, locked it, and then stood with her back to it, the key clenched in her fist.
“Let me go.” It came out like the growl of an animal—not quite human. She shook her head. Her back was to the door, and she had my blood on her face, and she was scared, but kind of exhilarated, too, I could see it in her eyes. She had the upper hand, and she knew it.
“I’ll kill you,” I said. I meant it. I held up the tray, stained with my own blood. “I’ll cut your throat.”
“You couldn’t kill me,” she said, and her voice was just as I remembered it, with a kind of scornful defiance behind her words. “Look at you, you can barely stand up, you poor bitch.”
“Why?” I said, and there was a note in my voice that sounded like a whining little child. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because you made us,” she hissed, suddenly furious. “You wouldn’t stop digging, would you? No matter how much I tried to warn you off. If you’d just kept your mouth shut about what you saw in that bloody cabin—”