The Woman in Cabin 10(69)

Ugh, this was making my head hurt. Why? That was the question I couldn’t answer. Why go to such lengths to hide on board the ship, to stop me from asking questions? If the girl had died, the cover-up made sense. But she was alive and well. It must be who she was that was important. Someone’s wife? Someone’s daughter? Lover? Someone trying to get out of the country with no questions asked?

I thought of Cole and his ex-wife, Archer and his mysterious “Jess.” I thought of the way the photograph had disappeared from the camera.

None of it made sense.

I rolled over, feeling the weight of the darkness all around. Wherever we were, it was very deep beneath the ship, I was sure of that now. The engine was loud, much louder than on the passenger deck, louder even than I remembered it being on the staff deck. I was somewhere else, on an engine deck, perhaps, far below the waterline, deep in the hull.

At that thought, I felt again the horror begin to creep over me, the tons and tons of water weighing on my head and shoulders, pressing against the hull, the air in the cabin circulating, circulating, and me here suffocating in my own panic. . . .

My legs shaking, I climbed cautiously off the bunk and made my way slowly across the floor, my arms stretched out in front of me, cringing from what might be in here with me in the absolute darkness. My imagination conjured up horrors from my childhood nightmares—giant spiderwebs across my face, men with clutching arms, even the girl herself, lidless, lipless, tongueless. But another part of me knew that there was no one here but myself—that I would have been able to hear, smell, sense another human being in such a confined space.

After a few moments of cautious inching, my fingers encountered the door, and I felt my way across it. The first thing I tried was the handle, but it was still locked—I hadn’t expected anything else. I felt for a spy hole, but there was none, or none that I could find on the blank expanse of plastic. I didn’t remember seeing one earlier, anyway. What I did remember, and what I felt for next, was the flat beige light switch to the left of the door. My fingers found it in the darkness, and I pressed it, my heart beating hard in my chest.

Nothing happened.

I flicked it back, but without hope this time, because I knew what they’d done. There must be some kind of override in the passage outside, some sort of master switch or fuse. The door was already shut when the light went out, and in any case, in any cabin I’d been in before there was always some kind of security light—you were never in complete darkness, even when the lights were turned out. This was something else—this was an utter, total darkness that could only come from the electricity being completely cut.

I crawled back to the bunk and beneath the covers, my muscles shaking with a mixture of panic and that sick flu-like feeling I’d had before. My head felt filled with a spreading blankness, as if the dark of the cabin had seeped inside my skull and was filtering through my synapses, deadening and muffling everything apart from the panic that was building in my gut.

Oh God. Don’t. Don’t give way, not now.

I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t let her win.

The anger that flooded over me suddenly was something that I could hang on to, something concrete in the silent blackness of this little box. That bitch. What a traitor. So much for the f*cking sisterhood. I had fought for her, put my credibility on the line, endured Nilsson’s doubt and Ben’s probing—and all for what? So that she could betray me, bash my head into a steel frame post, and lock me into this f*cking coffin.

Whatever the plot was—she was in on it.

She had definitely been the person who had ambushed me in the corridor. And the more I thought about it, the more I was sure that the hand that had come snaking in to snatch my food tray was hers, too, a skinny, lithe, strong hand. A hand that could scratch and slap and smack a person’s head against the wall.

There must be some reason for all this—no one would go through this elaborate charade for nothing. Had she been faking her own death? Had I been meant to see what happened? But if so, why go to such lengths to pretend she was never there? Why clear the cabin, wipe away the blood, destroy the mascara, and deliberately discredit everything about my account of that night?

No. She hadn’t wanted to be seen. Something had happened in that cabin, and whatever it was, I was not supposed to have witnessed it.

I lay there, cudgeling my battered brain to try to work it out, but the more I tried to ram the bits of information together, the more it felt like a jigsaw with too many pieces to fit the frame.

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.