The Woman in Cabin 10(35)

- CHAPTER 13 -

Ulla and Nilsson both excused themselves when my breakfast arrived, leaving me to stare out the window as I ate. Up here, with a view of the sea and the deck, I didn’t feel quite so sick, and I managed a respectable amount of breakfast, feeling the energy come back into my limbs and the nagging nausea abate. It struck me that at least half the reason I had been feeling so crappy was probably low blood sugar. I always get strange and shaky on an empty stomach.

But though the food and the sight of the ocean made me feel physically better, I could not stop running over last night’s events in my head, replaying the conversation with the girl, the surprise on her face, the touch of irritation as she shoved the mascara into my hand. Something had been going on—I was sure of it. It felt like coming into a film halfway through, struggling to work out who the characters were. I had interrupted the girl doing something. But what?

Whatever it was, it was probably linked to her disappearance. And whatever Nilsson thought, I could not believe she had been cleaning the room. No one cleaned a room in a thigh-skimming Pink Floyd T-shirt. And besides—she just hadn’t looked like a cleaner. You didn’t get hair and nails like that on a cleaner’s wage. The gloss on that thick dark mane had spoken of years of conditioning wraps and expensive low lights. Industrial espionage? A stowaway? An affair? I remembered the cold glint in Cole’s eyes as he spoke about his ex-wife, and Camilla Lidman’s bland reassurances downstairs. I thought of Nilsson’s lumbering strength, of Alexander unpleasantly dwelling on the topic of poison and unnatural death last night at dinner—but each possibility seemed more unlikely than the last.

It was her face that troubled me. The more I struggled to remember it, the more it blurred. The concrete bits—her height, the color of her hair, the state of her nails—all that I could picture clearly. But her features . . . a neat nose . . . narrow dark brows carefully plucked. That was about it. I could say what she was not: plump, old, acne-spotted. Saying what she was was far harder. Her nose had been . . . normal. Her mouth . . . normal. Not wide, not rosebud, not pouting, not bee-stung. Just . . . normal. There was nothing distinctive that I could put my finger on.

She could have been me.

I knew what Nilsson wanted. He wanted me to forget what I’d heard, the scream, the stealthy slide of the screen door, and that horrible, huge slithering splash.

He wanted me to start doubting my own account of things. He was taking me seriously, only to make me start undermining myself. He was letting me ask all the questions I wanted—enough to convince myself of my own fallibility.

And part of me couldn’t blame him—this was the Aurora’s maiden voyage, and the boat was stuffed with journalists and photographers and influential people. There was hardly a worse time for something to go wrong. I could imagine the headlines now: “Voyage to Death—Passenger on Luxury Press Trip Drowned.” As head of security, Nilsson’s neck would be on the line. He’d lose his job, at the very least, if something went wrong on the Aurora, on the very first voyage he was involved in.

But more than that—the kind of publicity that an unexplained death would generate could sink the whole enterprise. Something like this could scupper the Aurora before she was even launched, and if that happened, everyone on board could lose their jobs, from the captain down to Iwona, the cleaner.

I knew that.

But I had heard something. Something that had made me start from my sleep with my heart pounding two hundred beats per minute, and my palms wet with sweat, and the conviction that somewhere very close by, another woman was in grave trouble. I knew what it was like to be that girl—to realize, in an instant, how incredibly fragile your hold on life could be, how paper-thin the walls of security really were.

And whatever Nilsson might say, if nothing had happened to that girl, then where was she? The scream, the blood—all those I could have imagined. But the girl—I definitely hadn’t imagined the girl. And she could not have vanished into thin air without help.

I rubbed my eyes, feeling the gritty residue of last night’s eye makeup, and I realized—I had just one single thing to prove she had not been a figment of my imagination: that Maybelline mascara.

Wild thoughts tripped through my head, one after the other. I would take it back to England in a plastic bag and get it fingerprinted. No, better yet, I’d get it DNA tested. There was DNA on makeup brushes, wasn’t there? On CSI: Miami they would have based an entire prosecution case on a trapped eyelash. There must be something they could do.

I pushed aside the mental image of myself marching up to Crouch End police station with a mascara in a bag and demanding advanced forensic analysis from a police officer only barely restraining his amused smile. Someone would believe me. They had to. And if they didn’t I’d—I’d pay to get it done myself.

I pulled out my phone, ready to google “private DNA testing cost,” but even before I had unlocked the home screen, I realized how crazy it was. I wasn’t going to get police-grade DNA testing from an Internet company specializing in cheating spouses. And what would the results tell me anyway, without anything to compare it to?

Instead, I found myself checking my e-mail. Nothing from Judah. In fact, nothing at all. There was no phone reception, but I seemed to be connected to the boat’s Wi-Fi network and I forced a refresh. But nothing happened. The little “updating” icon whirred and whirred, and then NO NETWORK CONNECTION popped up.