by Ruth Ware
“Miss Blacklock—”
“Lo,” I said, firmly. He sighed and began again.
“Lo, then. I have spoken to the captain. None of the staff are missing, we are quite certain of that now. We’ve also spoken to all the staff and none of them saw anything suspicious about that cabin, all of which leads us to the conclusion—”
“Hey,” I interrupted hotly, as if somehow preventing him from saying the words would affect the conclusion he and the captain had come to.
“Miss Blacklock—”
“No. No, you don’t get to do this.”
“Don’t get to do what?”
“Call me ‘Miss Blacklock’ one minute, tell me you respect my concerns and I’m a valued passenger blah blah blah, and then the next minute brush me off like a hysterical female who didn’t see what she saw.”
“I don’t—” he started, but I cut him off, too angry to listen.
“You can’t have it both ways. Either you believe me or— Oh, no, wait!” I stopped in my tracks, unable to believe I hadn’t thought of it before. “What about CCTV? Don’t you have some kind of security system?”
“Miss Blacklock—”
“You could check the tapes of the corridor. The girl will be on there—she must be!”
“Miss Blacklock,” he said more loudly, “I have spoken to Mr. Howard.”
“What?”
“I have spoken to Mr. Howard,” he said, more wearily. “Ben Howard.”
“So?” I said, but my heart was thumping fast. “What can Ben possibly know about this?”
“His cabin is on the other side of the empty one. I went to see him, to find out if he could have heard anything, if he could corroborate your account of a splash.”
“He wasn’t there,” I said. “He was playing poker.”
“I know that. But he told me . . .” Nilsson trailed off.
Oh, Ben, I thought, and there was a sinking sensation in my stomach. Ben, you traitor. What have you done?
I knew what he’d said. I knew it from Nilsson’s face, but I wasn’t going to let him off the hook that easily.
“Yes?” I said through gritted teeth. I was going to force him to do this properly. He was going to have to spell this out, one excruciating syllable at a time.
“He told me about the man in your flat. The burglar.”
“That has nothing to do with this.”
“It, um—” He coughed and folded first his arms, then his legs. The picture of a man his size, perched uncomfortably on a sofa, trying to efface himself into nothing, was almost ludicrously comic. I said nothing. The sensation of watching him squirm was almost exquisite. You know, I thought viciously, you know what a shit you’re being.
“Mr. Howard tells me that you, er, you haven’t been sleeping well, since the, er, the break-in,” he managed.
I said nothing. I sat there cold and hard with rage against Nilsson, but mostly against Ben Howard. That was the last time I confided in him. Would I never learn?
“And then there is the alcohol,” he said. His fair, crumpled face was unhappy. “It, um . . . it doesn’t mix well with . . .”
He trailed off. His head turned towards the bathroom door, to the pathetic pile of personal belongings.
“With what?” I said, my voice low and hard and totally unlike my own. Nilsson raised his eyes to the ceiling, his discomfort radiating through the room.
“With . . . antidepressants,” he said, his voice almost a whisper, and his gaze flicked again to the crumpled half-used packet of pills beside the sink, and then back to me, every inch of him apologetic.
But the words were said. They could not be unsaid, and we both knew it.
I sat, saying nothing, but my cheeks were burning as if I’d been slapped. So this was it. Ben Howard really had told him everything, the little shit. A few minutes, he’d talked to Nilsson. One conversation, and in that time he’d not only failed to support my story—he’d spilled every detail of my biography that he had at hand, and made me look like an unreliable, chemically imbalanced neurotic in the process.
Yes. Yes, I take antidepressants. So what?
No matter that I’ve been taking—and drinking on—those pills for years. No matter that I had anxiety attacks, not delusions.
But even if I’d had full-blown psychosis, that didn’t detract from the fact that, pills or no pills, I saw what I saw.
“So that’s it, then,” I spoke, finally, the words clipped and flat. “You think, just because of a handful of pills, I’m a paranoid nutjob who can’t tell fact from fiction? You do know that there are hundreds of thousands of people on the same medication I take?”
“That is absolutely not what I was trying to say,” Nilsson said awkwardly. “But it is a fact that we have no evidence to support your account and, Miss Blacklock, with respect, what you believe happened is very close to your own exper—”
“NO!” I shouted, standing up, towering over his unhappily crouched body, in spite of the fact that he must have half a foot on me ordinarily. “I told you, you do not get to do this. You don’t get to call me obsequious names and then dismiss what I’ve told you. Yes, I haven’t been sleeping. Yes, I’d been drinking. Yes, someone broke into my flat. It has nothing to do with what I saw.”
“But that is the problem, isn’t it?” He stood, too, now, nettled, a flush across his broad cheeks. “You didn’t see anything. You saw a girl, of which there are many on this boat, and then much later you heard a splash. From that you have jumped to conclusions which are very close to the traumatic event you yourself experienced a few nights ago—a case of two and two making five. This does not warrant a murder investigation, Miss Blacklock.”
“Get out,” I said. The ice around my heart seemed to be melting. I could feel that I was about to give way to something very stupid.
“Miss—”
“Get. Out!”
I stalked to the door and wrenched it open. My hands were trembling.
“Get out!” I repeated. “Now. Unless you want me to call the captain and tell him that a lone female traveler asked you repeatedly to leave her cabin and you refused. GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY CABIN.”
Nilsson hunched his head into his neck and walked stiffly to the door. He paused in the doorway for a moment, as if he was about to say something, but perhaps it was my face, or something in my eyes, because when he looked up and met my gaze, he seemed to flinch and turn away.
“Good-bye,” he said. “Miss—”
But I didn’t wait to hear any more. I slammed the door in his face and then flung myself on the bed to sob my heart out.
- CHAPTER 15 -
There’s no reason, on paper at least, why I need these pills to get through life. I had a great childhood, loving parents, the whole package. I wasn’t beaten, abused, or expected to get nothing but As. I had nothing but love and support, but that wasn’t enough somehow.
My friend Erin says we all have demons inside us, voices that whisper we’re no good, that if we don’t make this promotion or ace that exam we’ll reveal to the world exactly what kind of worthless sacks of skin and sinew we really are. Maybe that’s true. Maybe mine just have louder voices.
But I don’t think it’s as simple as that. The depression I fell into after university wasn’t about exams and self-worth, it was something stranger, more chemical, something that no talking cure was going to fix.
Cognitive behavioral therapy, counseling, psychotherapy—none of it really worked in the way that the pills did. Lissie says she finds the notion of chemically rebalancing your mood scary, she says it’s the idea of taking something that could alter how she really is. But I don’t see it that way; for me it’s like wearing makeup—not a disguise, but a way of making myself more how I really am, less raw. The best me I can be.
Ben has seen me without makeup. And he walked away. I was a
ngry for a long time, but in the end, I realized, I don’t blame him. The year I turned twenty-five was pretty bloody awful. If I could have walked away from myself, I would have.
But that didn’t excuse what he’d done now.
“Open up!”
The sound of laptop keys stopped, and I heard a chair scrape back. Then the cabin door opened cautiously.
“Yes?” Ben’s face filled the gap, his expression turning to surprise as he saw me. “Lo! What are you doing here?”
“What do you think?”
He had the grace to look slightly abashed at that.
“Oh, that.”
“Yes, that. You spoke to Nilsson,” I said tightly.
“Look—” He put up a hand, placating, but I wasn’t to be soothed.
“Don’t look me. How could you, Ben? How long did it take you to spill all the beans—the breakdown, the meds, the fact that I almost lost my job—did you tell him all that? Did you tell him about the days I couldn’t get dressed, couldn’t leave the house?”
“No! Of course not. Christ, how could you think that?”
“Just the pills, then? And the fact that I was broken into, and a few other spicy details to give the idea that I’m definitely not to be trusted?”
“No! It wasn’t like that!” He walked to the veranda door and then turned to face me, running his hands through his hair so it stood on end. “I just— Shit, it all came out. I don’t know how. He’s good at his job.”
“You’re the journalist! What the hell happened to ‘No comment’?”
“No comment,” he groaned.
“You have no idea what you’ve done,” I said. My hands were clenched into fists, my nails biting into my palms, and I forced myself to unclench them, rubbing my aching palms on my jeans.
“What d’you mean? Look, hang on, I need a coffee. Want one?”
I wanted to tell him to sod off. But the truth was, I did want a coffee. I nodded curtly.
“Milk, no sugar, right?”
“Right.”
“Some things haven’t changed,” he said, as he filled the espresso machine with mineral water and slotted in a foil pod. I shot him a look.
“A hell of a lot has changed, and you know it. How could you tell him that stuff?”
“I’m— I don’t know.” He shoved his hands into his unruly hair again, gripping the roots as if he could somehow grasp an excuse out of his head if he pulled hard enough. “He ran into me on the way back from breakfast, stopped me in the corridor, and started saying he was concerned about you—stuff about noises in the night—I was hungover, I actually couldn’t really work out what he was on about. I thought he was talking about the break-in at first. Then he starts on about you being in a fragile state— Jesus, Lo, I’m sorry, it’s not like I went and knocked his door down desperate for a chat. What was he on about?”
“It doesn’t matter.” I took the coffee he held out. It was too hot to drink, and I held it in my lap.
“It does. It’s clearly knocked you for six. Did something happen last night?”
About 95 percent of me wanted to tell Ben Howard to piss off, and that he had forfeited the right to my trust by blabbing about my private life and reliability as a witness to Nilsson. Unfortunately the remaining 5 percent seemed to be particularly forceful.
“I . . .” I swallowed against the ache in my throat, and the desire to tell someone what had happened. Maybe if I told Ben he could suggest something I’d not thought of? He was a reporter, after all. And, though it hurt to admit it, a pretty respected one.
I took a deep breath and then relayed the story I’d told Nilsson the night before, gabbling this time, desperate to make my case convincing.
“And the thing is she was there, Ben,” I finished. “You have to believe me!”
“Whoa, whoa,” Ben said. He blinked. “Of course I believe you.”
“You do?” I was so surprised, I put down the cup of coffee with a crack on the glass tabletop. “Really?”
“Of course I do. I’ve never known you to imagine anything.”
“Nilsson doesn’t.”
“I can see why Nilsson doesn’t want to believe you,” Ben said. “I mean, we all know that crime on cruise ships is a pretty murky area.”
I nodded. I knew as well as he did—as well as any travel journalist did—the rumors that abounded about cruise ships. It’s not that the owners are any more criminal than any other area of the travel industry, it’s just that there’s an inherent gray area surrounding crime committed at sea.
The Aurora wasn’t like some ships I’d written about, which were more like floating cities than boats, but it had the same contradictory legal status in international waters. Even in cases of well-documented disappearances, things get brushed under the carpet. Without a clear police jurisdiction to take control, the investigation is too often left to the onboard security services, who’re employed by the cruise liner and can’t afford to ruffle feathers, even if they wanted to.
I rubbed my arms, feeling suddenly cold, in spite of the fuggy warmth of the cabin. I’d gone in to Ben to bawl him out with the aim of making myself feel better. The last thing I expected was for him to back up my unease.
“The thing that worries me most . . .” I said slowly, then stopped.
“What?” Ben prompted.
“She . . . she lent me a mascara. That was how I met her—I didn’t know the cabin was empty, and I banged on the door to ask if I could borrow one.”
“Right . . .” Ben took another gulp of coffee. His face over the top of the cup was puzzled, clearly not seeing where this was leading. “And?”
“And . . . it’s gone.”
“What—the mascara? What d’you mean, gone?”
“It’s gone. It was taken out of my cabin while I was with Nilsson. Everything else I could almost write off—but if there’s nothing going on, why take the mascara? It was the only concrete thing I had to show that there was someone in that cabin, and now it’s gone.”
Ben got up and went to the veranda, pulling the gauze curtains shut, although it seemed an odd, unnecessary gesture. I had the strange, fleeting impression that he didn’t want to face me and was thinking about what to say.
Then he turned and sat back down on the end of the bed, his expression pure businesslike determination.
“Who else knew about it?”
“About the mascara?” It was a good question, and one, I realized with a touch of chagrin, that I had not thought to ask myself. “Um . . . I guess . . . no one apart from . . . Nilsson.”
It was not a reassuring thought. We looked at each other for a long time, Ben’s eyes reflecting the uncomfortable questions that were suddenly churning inside me.
“But he was with me,” I said at last. “When it was taken.”
“The whole time?”
“Well . . . more or less . . . No, wait, there was a gap. I ate breakfast. And I spoke to Tina.”
“So he could have taken it.”
“Yes,” I said slowly. “He could.” Had he been the one in my cabin? Was that how he had known about my medication, and the advice not to mix them with alcohol?
“Look,” Ben said at last. “I think you should go and see Richard Bullmer.”
“Lord Bullmer?”
“Yes. Like I said, I played poker with him last night and he seems like a decent bloke. And there’s no sense in messing around with Nilsson—Bullmer is where the buck stops. My dad always used to say, if you’ve got a complaint, go straight to the top.”
“This is hardly a customer services issue, Ben.”
“Regardless. But this Nilsson guy—it doesn’t look good for him, does it? And if there’s anyone on this boat who can hold Nilsson accountable, it’s Bullmer.”
“But will he? Hold him accountable, I mean? He’s got as much motive as N
ilsson for hushing this up. More, in fact. Like you say, this has got the potential to play out very badly for him, Ben. If this gets out, the Aurora’s future will be very shaky. Who the hell wants to pay tens of thousands of pounds for a luxury trip on a boat where a girl died?”
“I bet there’s a niche market,” Ben said, with a slightly twisted smile. I shuddered. “Look, it can’t hurt to go and see him,” he persisted. “At least we know where he was all last night, which is more than we can say for Nilsson.”
“You’re sure none of the people you were with left the cabin?”
“Absolutely sure. We were in the Jenssens’ suite—there’s only one door and I was sat facing it all night. People got up and went to the loo and stuff, but they all used the bathroom in the cabin suite. Chloe sat and read for a while and then went into the bedroom next door—there’s no exit from that except through the main room of the suite. No one left until four at the earliest. You can rule out all four men, plus Chloe.”
I frowned, ticking off passengers on my fingers.
“So that’s . . . you, Bullmer . . . Archer . . . Lars, and Chloe. Which leaves Cole, Tina, Alexander, Owen White, and Lady Bullmer. Plus the staff.”
“Lady Bullmer?” Ben raised an eyebrow. “I think that’s stretching it.”
“What?” I said defensively. “Maybe she’s not as ill as she looks.”
“Yup, that’s right, she’s faked four years of recurrent cancer and grueling chemo and radiotherapy just to provide an alibi for the murder of a strange girl.”
“There’s no need to be sarcastic. I was just making the point.”
“I think the passengers are a red herring, though,” Ben said. “You can’t get away from the fact that you and Nilsson were the only people who knew about that mascara. If he didn’t take it, he must have told the person who did.”
“Well . . .” I said, and then stopped. An uneasy feeling, not unlike guilt, was trickling down the back of my neck.
“What?”
“I—I was trying to think. When Nilsson took me round the staff. I can’t absolutely remember . . . I could have mentioned it.”
