The Woman in Cabin 10(72)

I was lying on my side, staring at the cream melamine wall when the knock came.

“Come in,” I said dully, and then almost laughed at myself for the stupidity of social niceties in a situation like this. What did it matter if I said “Come in” when they would do as they liked regardless?

“It’s me,” said the voice outside the door. “No more shit with the trays, okay? Or this’ll be the last pill you get off me, right?”

“Okay,” I said. I was trying not to sound too eager, but I sat up, pulling the thin blanket around myself. I hadn’t used the shower since I got here and I smelled of sweat and fear.

The door cracked open cautiously, and the girl pushed a tray of food through the bottom with her foot and then slipped through the gap, locking it behind herself.

“Here you go,” she said. She held out her hand, and on the palm was a single white tablet.

“One?” I said incredulously.

“One. Maybe I can bring you a couple more tomorrow, if you behave.”

I had just given her the best blackmail weapon ever. But I nodded and took the pill from her palm. From her pocket she pulled a book—one of mine, in fact, from my room. The Bell Jar. Not what I’d have chosen under the circumstances, but it was better than nothing, I guessed.

“I thought you might like something to read, you might be going a bit nuts with nothing to do.” Her eyes strayed to the pill, and then she added, “No offense.”

“Thanks,” I said. She turned to go and I said, “Wait.”

“Yeah?”

“I—” Suddenly I wasn’t sure how to ask what I wanted to ask. I clenched my hand around the pill in my palm. Shit. “What—what’s going to happen to me?”

Her face changed at that, something guarded came over her expression, like a curtain falling across a window.

“That’s not up to me.”

“Who is it up to? Ben?”

She gave a derisory snort at that.

“Enjoy.”

As she turned to leave, she caught sight of herself in the little mirror on the back of the en suite door.

“Fuck, I’ve got blood on my face. Why didn’t you say? If he knows you attacked me . . .” She went into the little toilet to splash and wipe her face.

But it wasn’t just the blood she wiped away. When she came out, I froze. With that one simple act, I realized who she was.

In wiping away the blood she had wiped both her eyebrows clean off, leaving a smooth, skull-like forehead that was instantly, unbearably recognizable.

The woman in cabin 10 was Anne Bullmer.





- CHAPTER 26 -

I was too stunned to say anything. I just sat there, openmouthed with shock.

The girl looked from me, back to her reflection in the en suite mirror, and realized what she’d done. An expression of annoyance crossed her face for a moment, but then she seemed to shrug it off and stalked out of the room, letting the door swing shut behind her. I heard a key scrape in a lock, and then another door bang farther away.

Anne Bullmer.

Anne Bullmer?

It seemed impossible that she could be the same gaunt, gray, prematurely aged woman I’d seen and spoken to. And yet—her face was unmistakable. The same dark eyes. The same high, jutting cheekbones. The only thing I couldn’t understand was how I’d missed it before.

If I hadn’t seen her, midtransformation, I would never have believed how much her hair and the delicately penciled eyebrows changed her face. Without them she looked oddly featureless and smooth. It was impossible not to think of death and illness when you looked at that bone-pale sweep of skin, and the scarf tied tight around her skull only emphasized that fragility—painfully underscoring the lines of her neck and the shape of the bones beneath.

But her sleek black brows and the vibrant mass of dark hair changed all that beyond recognition. With it she became young, healthy, alive.

I realized, when I’d spoken to Anne Bullmer before, I had been so mesmerized by the trappings of her illness that I’d never really looked at the woman beneath. I had tried not to look in fact. I had just seen the distinctive, draping clothes, the missing eyebrows, the distractingly smooth skull beneath those delicate scarves . . .

The hair must be a wig—I had no doubt about that. There was no room under those thin silk scarves Anne wore for those thick dark tresses.

But was she sick? Well? Dying? Faking? It didn’t make sense.

I tried to think back to what Ben had told me—four years of chemo and radiotherapy. Could you really fake that, even with private doctors in your pay and enough money to enable you to hop from one health system to another every few months? Maybe.

At least this explained one thing—how she had got on board, and what had happened to her after that splash in the night. She’d simply pulled off her wig, put on her scarf, and resumed her life as Anne Bullmer. It also explained how she had access to every part of the ship—to the passkeys and the staff areas, and this secret locked vault down in the belly of the boat. When your husband was the owner, nothing was out of bounds, presumably.

But the thing that puzzled me most was why? Why dress up in a wig and a Pink Floyd T-shirt and spend the afternoon hanging out in an empty cabin? What was she doing there? And if it was so secret, why answer the door at all?

As the last question ran through my head, I had a sudden flash of myself knocking on the door—one, two, three . . . pause, and another bang, and the way the door had been snatched open as if someone had been waiting for that final knock. It was an odd knock, idiosyncratic. The kind of knock you might use if you were arranging a code. Was it possible I had, completely accidentally, stumbled on a prearranged signal for the woman in the cabin—Anne Bullmer—to open the door?