“Nor do I, sometimes.” She put her hands over her face. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”
“So tell me,” I said. I put my hand out, almost timidly, and let it rest on her knee, and she flinched as though she was expecting to be struck. I realized how frightened she was—how much of that vicious energy had come from terror, not hate.
“Carrie?” I prodded. She looked away and spoke towards the orange curtain, as if she couldn’t face me.
“We met at the Magellan,” she said. “I was a waitress there while I was trying to make it as an actress. And he—he just swept me off my feet, I suppose. It was like something out of Fifty Shades, penniless me, and him, falling in love, showing me this life I’d never dreamed of. . . .”
She stopped, swallowed.
“I knew he was married, of course—he was completely honest about that. So we could never see each other in public, and I couldn’t tell anyone about him. Their marriage had been over almost before it started—she was horribly cold and controlling, and they lived separate lives, her in Norway and him in London. He hasn’t had an easy life, you know—his mother left when he was a baby, and his father died when he was barely out of school. It seemed so unfair that Anne, the person who should have loved him most of all, couldn’t even bear to be with him! But she was dying, and he couldn’t bring himself to divorce a woman with just months to live—it seemed too cruel, and he kept talking about afterwards, when she died, when we’d be together . . .” Her voice trailed off, and for a minute I thought that was it, she was going to get up and go, but she started speaking again, the words coming faster now, as if she was unable to stop herself.
“One night he had this idea—he said that I should dress up as his wife and go to the theater, so that we could be out in public together. He gave me one of her kimonos, and I watched a film of her talking, so I knew how to carry myself and how to act, and I hid my hair under a swimming cap, with one of her scarves on top. And we pulled it off—we sat in a box, just the two of us, and drank champagne and, oh, it was amazing. Like a game, fooling everyone.
“We did it once or twice more, only when Anne was passing through London, so people wouldn’t be suspicious, and then a few months later he had this idea—it seemed crazy at first, but he’s like that, you know? Nothing is impossible—he truly makes you believe that. He said that he had a press trip coming up, that Anne was due to be there for the first night, but that she was getting off the boat late that night and going home to Norway. And he said, what if I stayed on and pretended to be her? He could smuggle me on board, and we could be a real couple—together, in public, for a whole week. He promised me I could pull it off, he said that no one on board had actually met her, and he would make sure no one photographed me so there wouldn’t be any chance of getting caught afterwards. The boat was stopping in Bergen at the end of the trip, so people would just assume Anne had stayed on for a few extra days, and then I could change into my own clothes on the last day and go home as me. He arranged for one of the other guests not to turn up so there was an empty cabin and he said the only thing—” She stopped. “The only thing was, I’d have to cut my hair, to be convincing. But it seemed . . . it seemed worth it. To be with him.”
She swallowed, and when she spoke again, it was more slowly.
“On the first night I was just getting into my clothes as Anne, when Richard came to the cabin. He was beside himself. He said that Anne had found out about the affair and had gone mad, lashing out at him. He’d pushed her away to try to protect himself, and she had stumbled and hit her head on the coffee table. When he tried to revive her he—he found—” She faltered, but carried on. “He found she was dead.
“He didn’t know what to do—he said that if there was a police investigation, my presence on board would come out and no one would believe his version of the fight. He said that both of us would be prosecuted, him as a murderer, me as an accessory to a premeditated plot. He said it would come out—the fact that I’d been dressing up as Anne. He said that Cole had a photograph of me in Anne’s clothes. He persuaded me—” She stopped again, emotion choking her voice. “He persuaded me the only thing to do was to tip Anne’s body overboard and carry on with the plan. If she went missing in Bergen, nothing could be traced back to us. But it wasn’t supposed to happen like this!”
Objections crowded to the tip of my tongue, screaming to be unleashed. How could Anne have got off the boat on the first night when we weren’t due to arrive in Norway until the following day? And how could she get off without her passport, without the crew knowing that she’d left? It didn’t make sense—the only explanation was that Richard had never been intending for Anne to walk down that gangplank of her own volition, and Carrie must know that herself. She wasn’t stupid. But I’d seen this kind of willful blindness before, women who insisted their boyfriends weren’t cheating in the face of all the evidence, people working for horrendous employers who’d persuaded themselves they were just following orders and doing what was necessary. There seemed to be no limit to the capacity of people to believe what they wanted to see, and if Carrie had argued herself into accepting Richard’s twisted version of the facts in the face of all logic, she wasn’t likely to listen to me.
Instead, I took a deep breath, pushed back the protests clamoring in my head, and asked the question that everything hinged on.
“What’s going to happen to me?”
“Fuck!” Carrie stood up, raking her hands across her head so that the headscarf slipped, showing the shaven scalp beneath. “I don’t know. Stop asking me, please.”
“He’s going to kill me, Carrie.” He was going to kill us both, I was fairly sure of that now, but I wasn’t sure if she was ready to hear that. “Please, please, you can get us both out of here, you know you can. I’ll give evidence—I’ll say that you saved me, that—”
“First”—she broke in, face hard—“I’d never betray him. I love him. You don’t seem to get that. And second, even if I went along with you, I’d end up on a murder charge.”
“But if you testified against him—”
“No.” She cut me off. “No. That’s not going to happen. I love him. And he loves me. I know he does.”
She turned away, towards the door, and I knew that it was now or never, that I had to try to make her see the truth of what she was involved in, even if she walked away and I ended up starving to death down here in my metal coffin.
“He’s going to kill you, Carrie,” I spoke to the back of her head as she reached the door. “You know that, right? He’s going to kill me, and then kill you. This is your last chance.”
“I love him,” she said. There was a crack in her voice.
“So much that you helped him kill his wife?”
“I didn’t kill her!” she shouted, the anguished cry painfully loud in the cramped space. She stood with her back to me, her hand on the door handle, and her whole narrow body shook, like a child racked by sobs. “She was already dead—at least, that’s what he said. He left her body in the cabin in a suitcase, and I wheeled it to cabin ten when you were all at dinner. All I had to do was throw the whole thing over the side while he was playing poker. But . . .”
She stopped, turned back round, slumped to the ground, her head bowed to her knees.
“But what?”
“But the case was incredibly heavy. I think he’d weighted it with something, and I banged it against the doorframe getting it into the suite. The lid sprang open and that’s when”—she gave a sob—“oh God, I don’t know anymore! Her face—it was all bloody, but just for a second—I—I thought her eyelids fluttered.”
“Jesus.” I went cold with horror. “You mean—you didn’t throw her over alive, did you?”
“I don’t know.” She buried her face in her hands. Her voice was cracked, high and reedy, with a tremor like someone on the verge of hysteria. “I screamed—I couldn’t help it. But I touched the blood on her face, and it was cold. If she’d been alive, the blood would have been warm, wouldn’t it? I thought perhaps I’d just imagined it, or it was some kind of involuntary movement—they say that happens, don’t they? In morgues and stuff. I didn’t know what to do—I just shut the case! But I can’t have fastened it properly, because when I threw it over the side, the catch burst open and I saw her face—her face in the water— Oh God!”