The Woman in Cabin 10(50)

I felt suddenly and nauseously claustrophobic, as if the stifling opulence of the boat were closing around me.

“I’ve got to get out,” I said. “Anywhere.”

“Lo.” Ben put a hand out towards my shoulder, but I pulled myself away from his grasping fingers and staggered towards the deck door, forcing it open against the wind.

On deck, the wind hit me in the face like a punch, and I stumbled to the rail, hanging over it, feeling the pitch of the boat. The dark gray waves stretched out like a desert—mile upon mile, stretching to the horizon, no sign of land of any kind, nor even a ship. I shut my eyes, seeing the fruitless whirling of the Internet search engine icon. There was literally no way of calling for help.

“Are you all right?” I heard over my shoulder, the words snatched by the wind. Ben had followed me. I screwed my eyes shut against the salt spray that smacked the side of the ship and shook my head.

“Lo . . .”

“Don’t touch me,” I said through gritted teeth, and then the boat went up and over a particularly big wave and I felt my stomach clench and I threw up over the rail, my stomach heaving and heaving until my eyes watered and there was nothing left but acid. I saw, with a kind of vicious pleasure, that my vomit was spattered across the hull and porthole below. Paintwork not so perfect now, I thought as I wiped my mouth with my sleeve.

“Are you okay?” Ben said again from behind me, and I clenched my fists on the rail. Be nice, Lo . . .

I turned round and forced myself to nod.

“I actually feel a bit better. I’ve never been a great sailor.”

“Oh, Lo.” He put an arm around me and squeezed, and I let myself be pulled into his hug, suppressing the urge to pull away. I needed Ben on my side. I needed him to trust me, to think I trusted him. . . .

A whiff of cigarette smoke caught my nostrils and I heard the tap, tap of high heels coming along the port side of the boat.

“Oh God.” I stood up straighter, moving away from Ben almost as if it were accidental. “It’s Tina, can we go in? I can’t face her at the moment.”

Not now. Not with tears drying on my cheeks and vomit on my sleeve. It was hardly the professional, ambitious image I was trying to project.

“Sure,” Ben said solicitously, and he held open the door as we hurried inside, just as Tina rounded the corner of the deck.

After the roar of the wind the corridor was suddenly quiet, and stiflingly hot, and we watched in silence as Tina strolled to the rail and leaned over, just a few paces upwind of where I had vomited moments before.

“If you want to know the truth,” Ben said, looking out through the glass at Tina’s unconscious back, “my money would be on her. She’s a stone-cold bitch.”

I looked at him in shock. Ben had sometimes been hostile about the women he worked with, but I’d never heard such naked dislike in his voice.

“Excuse me? Because she’s an ambitious woman?”

“Not just that. You haven’t worked with her, I have. I’ve met a few careerists in my time, but she’s in another league. I swear she’d kill for a story or a promotion, and it’s women she seems to pick on. I can’t stand women like that. They’re their own worst enemy.”

I kept silent. There was something close to misogyny in his words and tone, but at the same time, it was so uncomfortably close to what Rowan had said that I wasn’t sure if I could dismiss it as just that.

But Tina had been downstairs in the spa with me when the message appeared. And then there was her defensiveness earlier this morning. . . .

“I asked her where she was last night,” I said, half reluctantly. “She was really odd. Very aggressive. She said I shouldn’t go about making enemies.”

“Oh that,” Ben said. He smiled, but it wasn’t a pleasant smile, there was something rather unkind about it. “You won’t get her to admit it, but I happen to know she was with Josef.”

“Josef? As in, cabin attendant Josef? Are you kidding me?”

“Nope. I got it from Alexander during the tour. He saw Josef tiptoeing out of Tina’s cabin in the early hours in a state of—let’s just say déshabillé.”

“Blimey.”

“Blimey indeed. Who’d have thought Josef’s devotion to passenger comfort would extend so far. He’s not really my type, but I wonder if I could persuade Ulla to do the same. . . .”

I didn’t laugh. Not with the narrow, sunless rooms just a couple of decks beneath where we were standing right now.

How far might someone go to escape their confines?

But then Tina turned from where she was smoking at the rail and caught sight of me and Ben inside the boat. She flicked her cigarette over the rail and gave me a little wink before making her way back along the deck, and I felt suddenly vile at the thought of all the men chuckling about her little adventure behind her back.

“What about Alexander, then, if it comes to that?” I said accusingly. “His cabin’s aft, along with ours. And what was he doing spying on Tina in the middle of the night?”

Ben snorted.

“Are you kidding me? He must be three hundred and fifty pounds. I can’t see him lifting an adult woman over a rail.”

“He wasn’t playing poker, so we’ve no idea where he was, apart from the fact that he was prowling around in the early hours of the morning.” I remembered, too, with a sudden chill, that he had been in the photo on Cole’s camera.