The Woman in Cabin 10(30)
I was about to protest that she wasn’t staff, not unless the cleaners valeted rooms wearing Pink Floyd T-shirts and not much else. But then I shut my mouth. I wanted to see below decks for myself.
I followed him along the lurching corridor to a small service door by the stairwell. It was fitted with a keypad lock, into which he tapped a quick six-digit code, and the door swung outwards. From the outside I would have assumed the door hid a cleaning cupboard, but in fact there was a small, dimly lit landing and a flight of narrow stairs led down into the depths of the ship. As we descended I realized, unsettlingly, that we must now be below the waterline, or very near it.
We emerged into a cramped corridor that had a completely different feel to the passenger part of the ship. Everything was different—the ceiling was lower, the air was several degrees hotter, and the walls were closer together and painted a dingy shade of beige, but it was the lights that made me feel instantly claustrophobic—dim and fluorescent, with a strange high-frequency flicker that made your eyes tire almost at once.
Doors opened off to the left and the right, eight or ten cabins crammed into the same space as two above. We passed one door that was ajar and I saw a windowless shared bunk room lit by the same graying fluorescent light, and an Asian woman sitting on a bunk inside, pulling on her tights, her head and shoulders cramped in the narrow space beneath the bunk above. She looked nervously up as Nilsson passed, and then at the sight of me her face froze, like a panicked rabbit in the headlights. For a moment she just sat, motionless, and then with a convulsive start she reached out with her foot and kicked the door shut, the sound as loud as a gunshot in the confined space.
I felt myself blush like a Peeping Tom caught in the act, and hurried after Nilsson’s retreating back.
“This way,” Nilsson said over his shoulder, and we turned into a door marked STAFF MESS.
This room was larger at least, and I felt the growing sense of claustrophobia lift slightly. The ceiling was still low, and there were still no windows, but the room opened out into a small dining room, a lot like a miniature version of a hospital canteen. There were only three tables, each seating maybe half a dozen people, but the Formica surfaces, the steel grab rails, and the powerful smell of institutional cooking all combined to underline the difference between this deck and the one above.
Camilla Lidman was seated alone at one of the tables, drinking coffee and going through some kind of spreadsheet on a laptop, and across the room, five girls were sitting around another, eating breakfast pastries. They looked up as Nilsson entered.
“Hej, Johann,” one of them said, and followed with something in singsong Swedish, or maybe Danish, I wasn’t sure.
“Let’s speak in English, please,” Nilsson said, “as we have a guest present. Miss Blacklock is trying to trace a woman she saw in the next-door cabin—number ten, Palmgren. The woman she saw was white, with long dark hair, in her late twenties or early thirties, and she spoke good English.”
“Well, there’s me and Birgitta,” said one of the girls with a smile, nodding at her friend opposite. “My name is Hanni. But I don’t think I’ve been in Palmgren. I work behind the bar mainly. Birgitta?”
But I was shaking my head. Hanni and Birgitta both had pale skin and dark hair but neither was the girl from the cabin, and even though Hanni’s English was excellent, she had a noticeable Scandinavian accent.
“I’m Karla, Miss Blacklock,” said one of the two blond girls. “We met yesterday, if you recall. And we spoke on the phone last night.”
“Of course,” I said absently, but I was too busy scanning the faces of the other girls to pay proper attention. Karla and the fourth girl at the table were both blond, and the fifth had Mediterranean coloring and very short hair, almost a pixie cut. More important, none of them looked like my memory of that vivid, impatient face.
“It’s not any of you,” I said. “Is there anyone else who fits the description? What about the cleaners? Or the sailing crew?”
Birgitta frowned and said something to Hanni in Swedish. Hanni shook her head and spoke in English.
“The crew are mainly men. There’s one woman, but she’s redheaded and perhaps forty or fifty, I think. But Iwona, one of the cleaners, has dark hair. She’s Polish, I’m not sure how old she is.”
“I’ll get her,” Karla said. She got up with a smile and squeezed out from behind the table.
“There’s Eva,” Nilsson said thoughtfully, as Karla left the room in search of the absent Iwona. “She’s one of the spa therapists,” he added to me.
“She’s up in the spa, I think,” said Hanni. “Setting up for the day. But she’s in her late thirties at least, maybe forties.”
“We’ll go and speak to her after this,” Nilsson said.
“Don’t forget Ulla.” The pixie-haired girl spoke up for the first time.
“Ah, yes,” Nilsson said. “Is she on duty? Ulla is one of the stewardesses for the forward cabins and the Nobel Suite,” he added to me.
The girl nodded.
“Yes, but I think she’ll be coming off shortly.”
“Miss Blacklock,” said a voice from behind me, and I turned to see Karla presenting a colleague, a small, dumpy woman in her forties with dyed-black hair showing threads of gray at the roots. “This is Iwona.”