The Woman in Cabin 10

by Ruth Ware

  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 fucking 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 fucking 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.

  Someone had died. I was sure of it. Just not that girl. But then who?

  I tossed and turned in the darkness, listening for any sounds above the roar of the engine and trying to answer the questions churning uneasily inside. My brain felt fogged and thick, but I kept coming back to that question. Who? Who had died?

  - CHAPTER 24 -

  When I woke next it was to the same metallic click I’d heard before, and the lights flickered on. They strobed for a moment, the warming hum of the low-energy bulbs audible above the engine sound and mingling with the whining in my ears. I jumped up, my heart going a mile a minute, knocking over something on the floor beside the bed as I gazed wildly around.

  I had missed my chance.

  God damn it, I had missed my chance again.

  I had to find out what was going on here, what they intended to do with me, why they were keeping me shut up here. How long had I been here? Was it daytime now? Or was this just the time that it suited the girl—or whoever my captor was—to turn the electricity back on?

  I tried to count back. I had been hit in the early hours of Tuesday morning. At the very least it was Wednesday morning now, possibly later. It felt as if I’d been here longer than twenty-four hours—much longer.

  I went to the bathroom to splash water on my face. It was as I was drying myself that a wave of vertigo washed over me, making my head reel and the whole room shift and shudder. I had the sudden sensation of falling, and I put out my hand to steady myself against the doorframe, shutting my eyes against the sensation of plummeting very far and very fast into black water.

  At last the sensation receded, and I made my way back to the bunk, where I sat and put my head between my knees, feeling my skin shiver with cold and hot. Had the ship moved? It was hard to know what was dizziness and what was the movement of the waves, so far down beneath the decks. The movement of the ship felt very different down here—not so much a rhythmic rise and fall, but a sluggish roll that mingled with the constant roar of the engine to give a strange, hypnotic feeling.

  There was a tray beside the bed, with a Danish pastry and a bowl of slopped muesli. That must have been what I knocked when I jumped up out of sleep. I picked it up and forced myself to take a spoonful. I wasn’t hungry, but I’d eaten nothing but a few meatballs since Monday night. If I were going to get out of here, I would need to fight, and to fight, I needed to eat.

  What I really wanted, though, was not food. It was my pills. I wanted them, with a fierce, physical longing that I remembered from the last time I tried to stop taking them. Only this time I knew that things wouldn’t get better without them, as I had kept telling myself last time. They were going to get worse.

  If you’re around to see it, said a nasty little voice in my head. The muesli stuck in my throat, and suddenly I couldn’t swallow.

  I longed for the girl from the cabin to come back. A vivid, luxuriantly violent image flashed across my brain: me, grabbing her hair the way she’d grabbed mine, smashing her cheekbone against the sharp metal edge of the bunk, watching the blood flow, the way it would smell sharp and raw in the confined, airless cabin. I remembered again the blood on the veranda, the way it had smeared across the glass, and I wished with a powerful, vicious longing that it had been hers.

  I hate you, I thought. I swallowed against the pain in my throat, forcing the soggy half-chewed muesli down. I took another spoonful, my fingers shaking as I conveyed it to my mouth. I hate you so much. I hope you do drown. The muesli felt like cement, choking me as I tried to swallow it, but I forced it down again and again, until the bowl was half empty.

  I did not know if I could do this, but I had to try.

  I picked up the tray, the thin melamine tray, and I smacked it on the metal edge of the bunk. It bounced back and I only just flinched out of the way in time. I had a sudden, sharp flashback to the ­burglary—to the door smacking into my cheekbone, and I had to shut my eyes for a moment and steady myself on the bunk.

  I didn’t try that again. Instead, I leaned the tray on the metal edge and put my knee on the nearest side, and all my weight on my hands on the far edge. Then I pushed down. The tray did nothing at first, and I pressed harder. Then it snapped in half with a noise like a gunshot, sending me sprawling onto the bed. But I had what I’d been aiming for—two pieces of plastic, not quite razor-sharp, but each with an edge formidable enough to do some damage.

  I picked up each piece, weighing them in my hand for the best way to hold them, and then, holding the one that felt like the most intimidating weapon, I walked across to the door and crouched against the wall next to the frame.

  And I waited.

  It seemed to last for hours, that day. Once or twice I felt my eyes sliding shut, my body trying to shut down amid the exhausting flood of adrenaline and fear, but I jerked them back open. Stay with it, Lo!

  I began to count. Not from panic this time but just to keep myself awake. One. Two. Three. Four. When I got to a thousand I changed and began to count in French. Un. Deux. Trois. . . . Then in twos. I played games in my own head—fizz-buzz, that children’s game where you say “fizz” for every five or multiple of five, and “buzz” for every sev
en.

  One. Two. Three. Four. Fizz. (My hands were shaking.) Six. Buzz. Eight. Nine. Ten— No wait, that should have been fizz.

  I shook my head impatiently, rubbed my aching arms, and started again. One. Two. . . .

  And then I heard it—a noise in the corridor. A door slamming. I caught my breath.

  They were coming closer. My heart began to race. The pit of my stomach clenched.

  A key in the lock . . .

  And then the door cracked cautiously open and I pounced.

  Her.

  She saw me leap towards the gap and tried to close it, but I was too quick for her. I thrust my arm in the gap, and it slammed onto my forearm—hard. I screamed with pain, but the door bounced back, and I was able to wedge half my body into the gap, stabbing at her grappling arm with the jagged edge of the broken tray, but instead of falling backwards as I’d anticipated, she rushed forwards into the room, thumping me back against the plastic wall, the tray cutting painfully into my arm. I pulled myself up, blood dripping down the back of my hand, but she was faster. She lunged at the door, locked it, and then stood with her back to it, the key clenched in her fist.

  “Let me go.” It came out like the growl of an animal—not quite human. She shook her head. Her back was to the door, and she had my blood on her face, and she was scared, but kind of exhilarated, too, I could see it in her eyes. She had the upper hand, and she knew it.

  “I’ll kill you,” I said. I meant it. I held up the tray, stained with my own blood. “I’ll cut your throat.”

  “You couldn’t kill me,” she said, and her voice was just as I remembered it, with a kind of scornful defiance behind her words. “Look at you, you can barely stand up, you poor bitch.”

  “Why?” I said, and there was a note in my voice that sounded like a whining little child. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because you made us,” she hissed, suddenly furious. “You wouldn’t stop digging, would you? No matter how much I tried to warn you off. If you’d just kept your mouth shut about what you saw in that bloody cabin—”

  “What did I see?” I said, but she shook her head, her lip curling.

  “God, you must think I’m even dumber than I look. Do you actually want to die?”

  I shook my head.

  “Good. What do you want, then?”

  “I want to get out of here,” I said. I sat down on the bunk abruptly, not sure if my legs would hold me much longer.

  She shook her head once more, vehemently this time, and I saw that flicker of fear in her eyes again.

  “He’d never let me.”

  He? The word sent a prickle through me, the first concrete evidence that someone upstairs had been helping her. Who was he? But I didn’t dare ask, not now. There was something more important I needed first.

  “My pills, then. Let me have my pills.”

  She looked at me appraisingly.

  “The ones you had by the sink? I might be able to do that. Why d’you want them?”

  “They’re antidepressants,” I said bitterly. “They have— You shouldn’t withdraw from them too fast.”

  “Oh . . .” There was sudden comprehension on her face. “That’s why you look so bad. I couldn’t work it out. I thought I’d hit your head too hard. Okay. I can do that. But you have to promise me something in return.”

  “What?”

  “No more trying to attack me. These are for good behavior, right?”

  “All right.”

  She straightened, picked up the plate and bowl, and held out her hand for the shards of tray. I hesitated for a moment and then handed them over.

  “I’m going to unlock the door now,” she said. “But don’t do anything stupid. There’s another door outside this one, operated by a code. You won’t get very far. So no silly buggers, all right?”

  “All right,” I said reluctantly.

  After she’d gone I sat on the bench staring into space, thinking about what she’d said.

  He.

  She did have an accomplice on board. And that one word meant I could rule out Tina, Chloe, Anne, and two-thirds of the staff.

  Who was he? I ticked them off in my head.

  Nilsson.

  Bullmer.

  Cole.

  Ben.

  And Archer.

  In the less-likely column I put Owen White, Alexander, and the crew and stewards.

  My mind circled the possibilities, but the one factor I kept coming back to was the spa and the STOP DIGGING message. There was only one man who had been down there, one man who could have written that sign. Ben.

  I had to stop focusing on motives. Why was an unsolvable question that I just didn’t have enough information to answer.

  But the how—there were very few people on board with the opportunity to write that note. There was one functional entrance into the spa, and Ben was the only male who I was certain had used it.

  So many things made sense. His quickness to undermine my story to Nilsson. The fact that he—alone of everyone on board—had tried to get into my cabin on that last night, and knew that I was locked in the bathroom, making it possible to steal my phone.

  The fact that his cabin was on the other side of the empty one, yet he’d heard nothing and seen nothing.

  The fact that he’d lied about his alibi, playing poker.

  And the fact that he had tried so hard to stop me from pushing on with the investigation.

  The clicking of the puzzle pieces into place should have given me satisfaction, but they didn’t. Because what use were answers to me down here? I needed to get out.

  - CHAPTER 25 -

  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 attac
ked 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 . . .