The Woman in Cabin 10(95)

“But—but Velocity—your job. Rowan’s maternity cover. This is your big chance. I can’t screw that up for you.”

“It’s not my big chance.” I sighed. I slid down beneath the sheets, still holding Judah’s hands in mine. “I realized that when I was on the boat. I’ve spent, what, nearly ten years working at Velocity, while Ben and everyone else took risks, went on to bigger and better stuff, and I didn’t. I was too scared. And I felt like I owed Velocity for standing by me when things were bad. But Rowan’s never going to leave—she’ll be back in six months, maybe less, and I’ve got nowhere to go. And the truth is, even if I did pull myself up the ladder, it’s not what I want anymore. I never wanted it—I realized that on board the boat. God knows I had enough time to think about it.”

“What do you mean? It’s—ever since we met, it’s all you’ve talked about.”

“I think I lost sight of what I wanted. I don’t want to end up like Tina and Alexander, traveling from country to country and only seeing five-star hotels and Michelin restaurants. Yes, Rowan’s been to half the luxury resorts in the Caribbean, but in return she spends her life reporting the stories that people like Bullmer want her to tell, and I don’t want that, not anymore. I want to write about the things people don’t want you to know. And if I’m going to start pulling my way up from the bottom again, well, I can freelance from anywhere. You know that.”

A thought came to me, and I let out a shaky, involuntary laugh.

“I could write a book! My Floating Prison: True-Life Hell on the Seven Seas.”

“Lo.” Judah took my hands, his eyes wide and dark in the moonlight, and painfully beseeching. “Lo, stop, stop joking. Are you serious about this?”

I took a deep breath. Then I nodded.

“I’ve never been more serious in my life.”


Afterwards, Judah lay in my arms, his head in the crook of my shoulder in a way that I knew would give me a cramp eventually, but I couldn’t bear to pull away.

“Are you awake?” I whispered. He didn’t answer for a moment, and I thought that he had fallen asleep, in that way he had of slipping out of consciousness between one breath and the next, but then he stirred, and spoke.

“Just.”

“I can’t sleep.”

“Shh . . .” He rolled over in my arms, touching my face. “It’s okay, it’s all over.”

“It’s not that . . . it’s . . .”

“Are you still thinking about her?”

I nodded in the darkness, and he sighed.

“When you saw her body,” I started, but he shook his head.

“I didn’t.”

“What do you mean? I thought the police sent you photographs to identify?”

“It wasn’t a body—I wish it had been, if I’d seen it was Carrie’s corpse, not yours, I wouldn’t have spent two days in hell, thinking you were dead. It was just clothes. Photographs of clothes.”

“Why did they do that?” It seemed an odd decision—why ask Judah to identify the clothes, and not the body?

I felt Judah’s shoulders lift in the darkness in a shrug.

“I don’t know. At the time I assumed it was because the body was too bashed up, but I spoke to the FLO in charge of the case after you called—I wanted to find out how the hell they could have got it so wrong—and she spoke to the Norwegians and seemed to think it was because the clothes were found separately.”

Huh. I lay there, trying to puzzle it out. Had Carrie kicked off the boots and hoodie to try and swim for it, in a desperate attempt to get away from Bullmer?

I was almost afraid to go to sleep, expecting to be haunted by Carrie’s reproachful face, but when I finally closed my eyes it was Bullmer’s face that rose up in front of me, laughing, his black hair riffled by the wind as he tumbled down, down from the deck of the Aurora.

I opened my eyes, my heart thumping, trying to remember that he was gone—that I was safe, that Judah was lying in my arms and the whole nightmare was over and done with.

But it wasn’t. Because I just didn’t believe what had happened.

It wasn’t just Carrie’s death that I couldn’t accept—it was Bullmer’s. Not because I thought he should have lived, but because his death, out of all of it, just didn’t make sense. Carrie’s suicide I could have believed, but not his. Try as I might, I couldn’t imagine that man, with his cold, fierce determination, giving up. He had fought so hard, played his cards with such cold daring. Would he really throw in his hand, just like that? It didn’t seem possible.

But it was. And I had to accept that. He was gone.

I shut my eyes again, pushing his specter away from me, and I curled my body around Judah’s, and I thought, very deliberately, about the future, about New York, and about the leap of faith I was about to make.

For a moment I saw a sharp, flashing image imprinted on the darkness of my closed lids: myself poised on the very edge of a high, high place, balancing on a rail, the dark waves below.

But I had no fear. I had fallen before, and I’d survived.





STANDARD


Thursday, 26 November

MYSTERY WOMAN IN AURORA DROWNING IDENTIFIED

Almost two months after the shocking discovery of two bodies at sea, one of them British businessman and peer Richard Bullmer, Norwegian police have today released a statement announcing the identity of the body dredged up by fishermen in the North Sea to be that of his wife, Anne Bullmer, heiress to the billion-pound Lyngstad fortune.