by Ruth Ware
I said none of them, just gulped.
“Yes?” she said, with a touch of defiance. She brought up a corner of her silk robe and wiped at her eyes, and then put her chin up. “Can I help you?”
I swallowed again, and then said, “I, yes, I hope so. I’m sorry for intruding, you must be tired after the spa morning.”
“Not particularly,” she said, rather shortly. I bit my lip. Maybe referring to her illness hadn’t been tactful.
“I was actually hoping to speak to your husband.”
“Richard? He’s busy, I’m afraid. Is it something I can help with?”
“I—I don’t think so,” I said awkwardly, and then wondered whether to make my excuses and leave, or stay and explain. I felt bad disturbing her, but it seemed equally wrong to knock and then leave so abruptly. Part of my discomfort was the tears—pulling me in two directions, to go and leave her to her private grief, to stay and offer comfort. But it was also because I found her gaunt, smooth face so unsettling. She seemed so unassailable in every other way. To see someone like Anne Bullmer, so privileged, with every advantage that money could buy—the latest medicine, the best doctors and treatments available—to see her fighting for her life like this, before our very eyes, was almost unbearable.
I wanted to run away, but that knowledge forced me to stand my ground.
“Well, I’m sorry,” she said. “Perhaps it can wait until later? Can I tell him what it’s about?”
“I . . .” I twisted my fingers together. What could I possibly say? There was no way I was spilling my suspicions to this frail, haunted-looking woman. “I— He promised me an interview,” I said, remembering his throwaway words after dinner. It was kind of half-true, after all. “He told me to come to the cabin this afternoon.”
“Oh.” Her face cleared. “I am sorry. He must have forgotten. I think he’s gone to the hot tub with Lars and a few others. Hopefully you can catch him at dinner.”
I had no intention of waiting that long, but I didn’t say that, just nodded.
“Am I— Will we see you at dinner?” I asked, and cringed at the way I was stumbling over my words. For God’s sake. She’s ill, not a leper. She nodded.
“I hope so. I’m feeling a little better today. I get very tired, but it seems like a capitulation to let my body win too often.”
“Are you still undergoing treatment?” I asked. She shook her head, the soft silk scarf around her skull rustling as she did.
“Not at the moment. I’ve finished my last round of chemotherapy, for the moment, anyway. I’ll undergo radiotherapy when we get back, and then I suppose we’ll see.”
“Well, best of luck,” I said, and then winced at the way the innocent remark seemed to make her survival into a kind of game of chance. “And, um, thanks,” I finished.
“No problem at all.”
She shut the door and I turned to walk back towards the stairs to the upper deck, feeling my face burn with a kind of shame.
I had never been to the hot tub, but I knew where it should be—on the top deck above the Lindgren Lounge, just outside the spa. I made my way up the thickly carpeted stairs towards the restaurant deck, expecting that feeling of light and space that I’d had before—but I’d forgotten the sea mist. When I got to the door that opened onto the deck, a wall of gray greeted me behind the glass, blanketing the ship in its folds so you could barely see from one end of the deck to the other, giving a strange, muffled feeling.
The mist had brought a chill to the air, fogging the hairs on my arms with drizzle, and as I stood uncertainly in the lee of the doorway, shivering and trying to get my bearings, I heard the long, mournful boom of a fog horn.
The whiteness made everything seem unfamiliar, and it took me a few minutes to work out where the stairs to the top deck were, but eventually I realized they must be to my right, further up towards the prow of the boat. I couldn’t imagine anyone enjoying a Jacuzzi in this weather, and for a moment I wondered if Anne Bullmer had been mistaken. But as I rounded the glassed-in tip of the restaurant I heard laughter and looked up to see lights glowing in the mist above my head, coming from the deck above. Seemingly there were people mad enough to strip down, even in this cold.
I wished I’d brought a coat, but there was no sense going back for one, so I wrapped my arms around myself and climbed the slippery vertiginous steps to the upper deck, following the sound of voices and laughter.
There was a glass screen halfway along the deck, and when I slipped round it, there they were—Lars, Chloe, Richard Bullmer, and Cole, seated around the edge of the most enormous Jacuzzi I’d ever seen. It must have been eight or ten feet across, and they were leaning back against the sides, with just their shoulders and heads showing, the steam rising so densely from the bubbling water that it was hard for a moment to see who was in there.
“Miss Blacklock!” Richard Bullmer called heartily, his voice carrying easily above the roaring of the jets. “Have you recovered from last night?”
He stuck out a tanned, muscular arm, steaming and goose-bumped in the cold air, and I shook his dripping hand and then wrapped my arms back around myself, feeling the warmth of his grip fade immediately and the chill of the wind on my now-damp hands.
“Come for a dip?” Chloe asked with a laugh, waving an inviting hand at the rolling cauldron of bubbles.
“Thanks”—I shook my head, trying not to shudder—“but it’s a bit cold.”
“It’s warmer in here, I can tell you!” Bullmer gave a wink. “Hot Jacuzzi, cold shower”—he indicated an open-sided shower to one side of the Jacuzzi, a vast rainwater shower rose poised above the tray. There was no temperature control, just a steel push button with a blue center, and the sight made me shudder involuntarily—“and then straight into the sauna,” he finished, jerking a thumb at a wooden cabin tucked behind the glass screen. Craning my head round I could see a glass door streaming with condensation, and through the trickling runnels, the red glow of a brazier. “Then rinse and repeat as many times as your heart can stand it.”
“It’s not really my cup of tea,” I said awkwardly.
“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,” Cole said. He grinned, showing his pointed incisors. “I have to say, jumping out of the sauna into the cold shower was a pretty incredible experience. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?”
I flinched.
“Thanks, but I think I won’t.”
“Suit yourself.” Chloe smiled. She stretched out a languorous arm, dripping water onto Cole’s camera, which was resting on the floor below, and picked up a frosted glass of champagne from a little table placed alongside the tub.
“Look . . .” I took my courage in both hands and spoke directly to Lord Bullmer, trying to ignore the watching, interested faces of the others. “Lord Bullmer—”
“Call me Richard,” he interrupted. I bit my lip and nodded, trying to keep my thoughts in order.
“Richard, I was hoping to talk to you about something, but I’m not sure if now is the right time. Could I come and see you later, in your cabin?”
“Why wait?” Bullmer shrugged. “One thing I’ve learned in business—now almost always is the right time. What feels like prudence is almost invariably cowardice—and someone else gets in there before you.”
“Well . . .” I said, and then stopped, unsure what to do. I really didn’t want to speak in front of the others. The “someone gets there before you” part certainly wasn’t reassuring.
“Have a glass of something,” Bullmer said. He pressed a button on the rim of the Jacuzzi and a girl appeared silently out of nowhere. It was Ulla.
“Yes, sir?” she said politely.
“Champagne, for Miss Blacklock.”
“Certainly, sir.” She melted away.
I took a deep breath. There was no alternative. No one could divert the boat except Bullmer, and if
I didn’t do this now, I might never get the chance. Better to speak up, even with an audience, than risk . . . I pushed that thought away.
I opened my mouth. Stop digging hissed the voice inside my head, but I forced myself to speak.
“Lord Bullmer—”
“Richard.”
“Richard, I don’t know if you’ve spoken to your head of security, Johann Nilsson. Have you seen him today?”
“Nilsson? No.” Richard Bullmer frowned. “He reports to the captain, not to me. Why do you ask?”
“Well . . .” I began. But I was interrupted by Ulla appearing at my elbow with a tray, on which was a champagne glass and a bottle in a holder full of ice.
“Um, thanks,” I said uncertainly. I wasn’t sure I wanted to drink right now—not after Nilsson’s biting comments earlier, and on top of the hangover from last night—and it seemed an incongruous accompaniment to what I was about to say. But I felt again the impossibility of my position—I was Bullmer’s guest, and Velocity’s representative, and I was supposed to be impressing all these people with my professionalism and dazzling them with my charm, and instead I was about to hurl the very worst of all possible accusations at his staff and guests. The least I could do was to accept his champagne with good grace.
I took the glass, sipping tentatively at it as I tried to get my thoughts in order. It was sour and made me shiver, and I almost pulled a face before realizing how rude that would appear to Bullmer.
“I— This is difficult.”
“Nilsson,” Bullmer prompted. “You were asking if I’d spoken to him.”
“Yes. Well, last night I had to phone him. I . . . I heard noises, coming from the cabin next to mine. Number ten,” I said, and then stopped.
Richard was listening, but so were the other three, rather avidly in Lars’s case. Well, since I didn’t have a choice, maybe I could turn that to my advantage. I cast a quick look round the circle of faces, trying to gauge their reactions, check for any trace of guilt or anxiety. Out of the three, Lars’s moist red lips were curled in a disbelieving skepticism, and Chloe’s green eyes were wide with frank curiosity. Only Cole was looking worried.
“Palmgren, yes,” Bullmer said. He was frowning, puzzled as to where this was leading. “I thought that one was empty. Solberg canceled, didn’t he?”
“I went to the veranda,” I said, gaining momentum. I glanced around the listeners again. “And when I looked out there was no one there, but there was blood on the glass safety barrier.”
“Good Lord,” Lars said. He was openly grinning now, not even trying to hide his disbelief. “It’s like something out of a novel.” Was he deliberately trying to undermine my account, throw me off-balance? Or was this just his normal manner? I couldn’t tell. “Go on,” he said, with something close to sarcasm. “I’m on tenterhooks to find how this turns out.”
“Your security guard let me in,” I said, my voice harder now, and speaking fast. “But the cabin was empty. And the blood on the glass had been—”
There was a chink and a splash, and I stopped.
We all turned and looked at Cole, who was holding something over the side of the Jacuzzi. His hand was dripping blood, running down his fingers onto the pale wooden decking.
“I’m okay, I think,” he said unsteadily. “I’m sorry, Richard, I don’t know how, but I knocked my champagne over and I broke it, trying to save the glass. I don’t think there’s any glass in the water.”
He held out a palmful of bloodstained shards, and Chloe gulped and squeezed her eyes shut.
“Ugh!” Her face was greenish white. “Oh God, Lars . . .”
Richard put down his glass, heaved himself out of the Jacuzzi, his near-naked body steaming in the cold air, and grabbed a white robe from a pile left on the bench. For a moment he said nothing, just looked dispassionately at Cole’s hand, streaming blood onto the deck, and glanced at Chloe, who appeared close to fainting. Then he issued a series of orders like a surgeon barking out commands in an operating theater.
“Cole, for God’s sake put down that pile of glass. I’ll ring for Ulla to get you cleaned up. Lars, take Chloe off to lie down, she’s gone white as chalk. Give her a Valium if that’s what it takes. Eva has access to the medical supplies. And Miss Blacklock . . .” He turned to me and then paused, seeming to weigh his words very carefully as he belted the robe around himself. “Miss Blacklock, please take a seat in the restaurant, and when I’ve sorted this mess out, we’ll run through what you actually saw and heard.”
- CHAPTER 20 -
By the end of the next hour, I could see why Richard Bullmer had got to where he had in life.
He didn’t just take me through my story—he grilled me on every single word, pinning me down on times, specifics, winkling out details I thought I didn’t even know—like the exact shape of the blood spatter on the glass screen, and the way it was smeared, rather than sprayed, across the surface.
He didn’t fill in any gaps with speculation, didn’t try to lead me on, or persuade me on details I wasn’t sure of. He just sat and fired questions at me between sips of scalding black coffee, his blue eyes very bright: What time? How long? When was that? How loud? What did she look like? As he spoke the slightly mockney overlay to his speech vanished, and the intonation became pure Old Etonian and 100 percent business. He was utterly focused, his attention on my story absolute, and without a trace of emotion in his face.
If someone had been walking along the deck outside and had glanced in the window, they would never have known that I had just told him something that could deal a sucker punch to his business, and revealed the presence of a possible psychopath on board a small ship. As my story unfolded I was expecting echoes of Nilsson’s distress, or the clannish denial of the stewardesses, but although I watched Bullmer’s face carefully, I saw neither of those, no hint of accusation or censure. We might have been trying to solve a crossword, for all the emotion he displayed, and I couldn’t help being a little impressed by his stoicism, though it felt strange to be on the receiving end of it. It had not been pleasant dealing with Nilsson’s skepticism and upset, but it did at least feel a very human reaction. With Bullmer, I couldn’t tell what he was feeling. Was he furious, or panicked, and simply hiding it well? Or was he really as cool and calm as he seemed?
Perhaps, I thought, as he ran me through the conversation I’d had with the girl again, this sangfroid was simply what it took to have accomplished what he had—pulling himself up by his bootstraps to a position dealing with hundreds of jobs and millions of pounds of investment.
At last we had gone through my account backwards, forwards, and sideways, and I had no more details to contribute. Bullmer sat for a moment, his head bowed, his brows knitted, thinking. Then he looked briefly at the Rolex on his tanned wrist and spoke.
“Thank you, Miss Blacklock. I think we’ve got as far as we can, and I can see the staff will want to start laying the table for dinner in a moment. I’m sorry, this has clearly been a very distressing and frightening experience for you. If you’ll give me permission, I’d like to discuss it with Nilsson, and Captain Larsen, to make sure that everything is being done that possibly can be, and perhaps we could meet first thing tomorrow to discuss the next steps. In the meantime, I very much hope you will be able to relax enough to enjoy the dinner that’s coming and the rest of the evening, in spite of what’s happened.”
“What will the next step be?” I asked. “I understand we’re heading to Trondheim—but is there anywhere closer we could stop? I feel like I should report this to the police as soon as possible.”
“It’s possible there might be somewhere closer than Trondheim, yes,” Bullmer said, getting to his feet. “But we’ll be in Trondheim early tomorrow morning, so it might be that it’s still the best place to head for. If we stop somewhere in the middle of the night I think our chances of finding an on-duty police station might be slim. But
I’ll have to speak to the captain to find out what the most appropriate course of action would be. The Norwegian police may not be able to act if the incident took place in British or international waters—it’s a question of legal jurisdiction, you understand, not their willingness to investigate. It will all depend.”
“And if it did? What if we were in international waters?”
“I believe the boat is registered in the Cayman Islands. I’ll have to speak to the captain about how that might affect the situation.”
I felt a sinking in my stomach. I’d read accounts of investigations on boats registered to the Bahamas and so on—one solitary policeman dispatched from the island to do a cursory report and get the issue off his desk as quickly as possible—and that, only where there was a clear sign of someone gone missing. What would happen in this case, where the only evidence that the girl had even existed was long gone?
Still, I felt better for having spoken to Richard Bullmer. At least he seemed to believe me, to take my story seriously, unlike Nilsson.
He held out his hand, taking his leave, and as his piercing blue eyes met mine, he smiled, almost for the first time. It was a curiously asymmetric smile that pulled up one side of his face more than the other, but it suited him, and there was something wryly sympathetic about it.
“There’s one other thing you should know,” I said abruptly. Bullmer’s eyebrows went up, and he dropped his hand.
“Yes?”
“I . . .” I swallowed. I didn’t want to say this, but if he was going to speak to Nilsson, it would come out anyway. It would be better coming from me. “I was drinking, the night before . . . before it happened. And I also take antidepressants. I have done so for several years, since I was about twenty-five. I—I had a breakdown. And Nilsson—I think he felt . . .” I swallowed again. Bullmer’s eyebrows rose even higher.
“Are you saying that Nilsson threw doubt on your story because you take medication for depression?”
