by Ruth Ware
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?
If only. If only I’d just knocked twice like any normal person—or even once. I would never have known she was there, never have put myself in this position where I had to be locked up—silenced . . .
Silenced. It was an uncomfortable thought, and the word stuck in my head, reverberating there like an echo.
I had to be silenced. But silenced for how long? Locked up here until . . . what? Some prearranged deadline had passed?
Or silenced . . . permanently?
Supper was white fish in a sort of cream sauce, with boiled potatoes. It was cold, congealing around the edges, but I was hungry. Before I ate I looked at the pill in my hand, wondering what to do. It was half my normal dose. I could take the whole pill now, or I could split it, and start building up a reserve in case . . . but in case what? I could hardly escape, and if Anne decided to stop dispensing the pills, I would run out long before she took pity on me.
In the end, I gulped down the whole thing, reasoning that I had a deficit to make up. I could start biting them in half tomorrow, if it seemed important. I felt better almost immediately, though I knew, logically, that it couldn’t be the pills. They didn’t absorb that fast, and the effect took a while to build up in my system. Whatever I was experiencing was completely placebo-based. At this point, though, I didn’t care. I would take what I could get.
Then I started picking at the lukewarm supper. As I sat on the bunk, chewing the tepid, gluey potato slowly, in an effort to make it less unappealing, I tried to rearrange the pieces of the puzzle I had assembled so painstakingly inside my head.
I knew now what that derisive snort meant when I had said Who is it up to? Ben?
Poor Ben. I felt a rush of guilt that I had been so quick to judge him, and then another rush, this time of anger. I’d been so focused on Anne’s chance mention of a male accomplice that it had never occurred to me that Anne herself might have been the one to run quickly down the spa stairs while her varnish was supposed to be drying and scrawl those words. Stupid, stupid Lo.
But stupid Ben, too. If he hadn’t spent so many years belittling my feelings and if he hadn’t been so eager to spill the beans to Nilsson, instead of supporting my story, then I might not have been so quick to jump to conclusions.
I knew now who he was. It must be Richard Bullmer. He owned the boat. And of all the men on the ship, I could imagine him planning and carrying out a murder better than anyone else. Certainly better than fat, fussy Alexander or the lumbering, bearlike Nilsson.
Except that no murder had taken place. Why did I have to keep reminding myself of that fact? Why was it so hard to grasp?
Because you’re here, I thought. Because whatever you saw—whatever happened in that cabin—it was important enough that they would lock you up here and prevent you from going to see the police at Trondheim. What had happened? It must be something so high-stakes that they simply couldn’t afford to let me talk about it. Was it smuggling? Were they throwing something overboard to an accomplice?
It’ll be you next, you stupid bitch, said the voice inside my head, and an image of myself falling through deep water shot through me, like an electric shock deep in my skull.
I winced and gritted my teeth, forcing myself to swallow another glutinous mouthful of potato. The ship heaved, and nausea swilled around in the pit of my stomach.
What was going to happen to me? There were only two possibilities—they were going to let me go at some point. Or they were going to kill me. And somehow, the first one didn’t seem very likely anymore. I knew so much. I knew about Anne. I knew she wasn’t nearly as ill as she pretended. And they could not afford for me to get out and tell my story—a story of kidnap, imprisonment, and bodily harm—though would anyone believe me?
I touched my fingers to my cheek, where the blood was still caked from where she’d whacked me into the doorframe. I felt suddenly gross—dirty and sweaty and blood-smeared. Anne—judging by her previous timings—wouldn’t be back for hours.
There wasn’t much I could do to improve my lot, stuck in this two-meter coffin. But at least I could keep myself clean.
The jet was nothing like the one in my suite upstairs. Even turned up full it was a tepid trickle, but I stood underneath it for so long I felt my fingers wrinkle into mush. The clotted blood on my hand dissolved into the water and I shut my eyes and felt the warmth pour through me, seeping into my muscles.
When I climbed out I felt better, more like myself, washed clean of some of the fear and violence that had marked the last few days. It was putting my clothes back on that made me really realize how far I’d sunk. They stank—not to put too fine a point on it—and were stained with blood and sweat.
I lay down on the bunk and shut my eyes, listening to the steady thrum of the engine and wondering where we were. It was Wednesday night—or maybe even Thursday morning now. From what I could remember we had only a little over twenty-four hours of this trip left. And then what? When the boat got into Bergen on Friday morning, the other passengers would leave and with them would go my last hope of someone realizing what had happened.
For twenty-four hours I was probably safe. But after that . . . Oh God, but I couldn’t think about that.
I pressed my hands into my eyes, listened to the blood roaring in my head. What should I do? What could I do?
If Anne was telling the truth, hurting her wouldn’t achieve anything. There was another locked door the other side of this one, and very likely other codes on the exits. For a minute I wondered if I got out into the corridor, could I find and smash a fire alarm before Anne caught up with me? But it seemed like too long a shot. From what I’d seen of Anne’s strength and quickness, I was unlikely to get that far.
No. My best chance was simple—I had to get Anne on my side.
But how? What did I actually know about her?
I tried to think about what I knew about Anne Bullmer—her fantastic wealth, her lonely upbringing, trailing around the boarding schools of Europe. It was no wonder it had taken me so long to make the connection. The rake-thin, sad-eyed woman in her gray silk wraps and designer headscarves—yes, somehow that fit with what I’d been told. But I could not make one word of what Ben had said connect with the girl in the Pink Floyd T-shirt, with her mocking dark eyes and cheap mascara. It was like there were two Annes. Same height, same weight, but that was where the similarity ended.
And then . . . something clicked.
Two Annes.
Two women.
The gray silk robe that matched her eyes . . .
I opened my eyes and swung my legs over the side of the bunk, groaning with my own stupidity. Of course—of course. If I hadn’t been half-dead with fear and panic and the pain in my head, I would have seen it. How could I not have thought of it?
Of course there were two Annes.
Anne Bullmer was dead—had been since the night we left England.
The girl in the Pink Floyd T-shirt was very much alive, and had been impersonating her ever since.
Same height, same weight, same broad cheekbones—it was only the eyes that didn’t match, and they had taken a calculated risk that no one would remember the features of a woman they’d barely met. No one on board knew Anne before the trip. Richard had even told Cole not to take any photographs of her, for Christ’s sake! Now I understood why. It wasn’t to protect a woman self-conscious about her appearance. It was so there would be no compromising photographs for his wife’s friends and family to puzzle over afterwards.
I shut my eyes, my fingers gripping my hair so hard that it hurt, tugging painfully on my scalp, trying to work out what must have happened.
Richard Bullmer—it must have been him—had smuggled the woman in cabin 10 on board somehow. She was in that cabin before the rest of us ever came on the ship.
The day we set sail she had been waiting for the word, for instruction from Richard, to clear her cabin and get ready. I thought back to what I’d seen over her shoulder—a silk robe strewn across the bed, makeup, Veet in the bathroom—waxing strips. Christ—how could I have been so stupid? She had been shaving and ripping off her body hair, ready to impersonate a woman with cancer. But instead of Richard with his prearranged knock, I had come along, inadvertently given the signal, and she’d seen me instead.
What the hell must she have thought? I replayed again the fright and irritation in her face as she’d tried to shut the door and I’d stopped her. She’d been desperate to get rid of me but trying to act as unsuspiciously as possible. Far better that I just remembered a strange woman lending a mascara than started telling tales of a fellow guest slamming the door in my face.
And it had nearly worked. It had so nearly worked.
Did she tell Richard when he came? I couldn’t be sure, but I thought not. He had seemed so normal at that first night’s dinner—the perfect host. And besides, it was her blunder, and he didn’t look like the kind of man you’d want to confess a mistake to. More likely she just crossed her fingers and hoped to get away with it.
Then she had packed her things, cleared the room, and waited.
After drinks that first night, Anne, somehow, had been taken to cabin 10. Was she alive, lured there by some cock-and-bull story? Or was she already dead?
Either way, it didn’t really matter, because the end result was the same. While Richard was back in Lars’s cabin, establishing his alibi with an uninterrupted poker game, the woman in cabin 10 had bundled the real Anne overboard and hoped that the body would never be found.
And they would have got away with it, if I—frightened and traumatized from the burglary—hadn’t heard the splash and jumped to a conclusion that was so wrong, it was almost completely right.
So who was she? Who was this girl who had hit me, and fed me, and locked me up here like an animal?
I had no idea. But I knew one thing—she was my best hope of getting out of here alive.
- CHAPTER 27 -
All that night I lay awake, trying to work out what I should do. Judah and my parents would not be expecting me home until Friday and would have no reason to suspect anything was wrong until then. But the other passengers must know that I hadn’t returned to the ship. Would they have raised the alarm? Or had Bullmer given them some story to explain my disappearance—unavoidably detained in Trondheim, perhaps? Decided to return home unexpectedly?
I wasn’t sure. I tried to think who might be concerned enough to ask questions. I had little hope of Cole, Chloe, or most of the others making a fuss. They didn’t know me. They had no contact details for any of my family. They would very likely accept whatever Bullmer told them.
Ben, then? He knew me well, enough to know that an early-morning flit to Trondheim without a word wasn’t in character. But I wasn’t sure. Under normal circumstances I was fairly certain he’d have contacted Judah or my parents with his concerns, but the way I had left things with him wasn’t exactly normal circumstances. I had all but accused him of being complicit in a murder, and aside from his justifiable anger, he probably wouldn’t be surprised at my disappearing off the ship without a word of good-bye.
Out of all the guests, Tina seemed like my best bet, and I was crossing my fingers that she would contact Rowan when I failed to return. But it seemed very slim odds to hang my life on.
No. I had to take matters into my own hands.
By the time morning came I hadn’t slept, but I knew what I had to do, and when the knock came, I was ready.
“Come in,” I said. The door cracked open, and the girl put her head cautiously around the doorframe. She saw me sitting quietly on the bed, washed and clean, holding the book in my lap. “Hey,” I said.
She put down the tray of food on the floor. She was dressed as Anne this time, wearing a headscarf, her eyebrows not penciled in, but she didn’t move like Anne, she moved like the girl I’d seen before, dumping the tray down impatiently and straightening up with none of the meditative grace she’d shown when impersonating Richard’s wife.
“Hey yourself,” she said, and her voice was different, too—the crystalline consonants elided and blurred. “You finished with that?” She nodded at the book.
“Yes, can you swap it for another one?”
“Yeah, I guess. What do you want?”
“I don’t mind. Anything. You choose.”
“Okay.” She held out her hand for The Bell Jar and I handed it over, and then steeled myself for what I had to do next.
“I’m sorry,” I said awkwardly. “About the tray.”
She gave a smile at that, a flash of straight white teeth, a glint of mischief in her dark eyes.
“That’s all right. I don’t blame you; I’d have done the same. You’ve got a rubber one this time, though. Fool me once, and all that.”
I looked down at the breakfast lying on the floor. It was true. The brittle melamine tray was gone, replaced by one made of thicker, grippy plastic, like the kind you serve drinks on in bars.
“I can’t complain, I guess.” I forced a smile. “I earned it.”
“Your pill’s on the saucer. Remember—good behavior, yeah?”
I nodded, and she turned to leave. I gulped. I had to stop her, say something. Anything that might prevent me from being condemned to another day and night here alone.
“What’s your name?” I said desperately.
She turned back, her face suspicious.
“What?”
“I know you’re not Anne. I remembered, about the eyes. On the first night Anne had gray eyes. You don’t. Other than that it’s very convincing. You’re a really good actress, you know.”
Her face went completely blank and for a minute I thought that she was going to slam out of the room and leave me here for another twelve hours. I felt like a fisherman, reeling in a huge fish on a delicate line, my muscles tense with the effort but trying not to jerk or show the strain.
“If I’ve got it wrong—” I began cautiously.
“Shut up,” she said, fierce as a lioness. Her face was completely transformed, savage with anger, her dark eyes full of rancor and distrust.
“I’m sorry,” I said humbly. “I didn’t . . . Look, does it matter? I’m not going anywhere. Who would I tell?”
“Fuck,” she said bitterly. “You’re digging your
grave, do you get that?”
I nodded. But I had known that for a few days now—whatever the girl tried to tell herself—whatever I tried to tell myself—there was only one way I was leaving this room.
“I don’t think Richard will let me leave,” I said. “You know that, right? So name or no name, it doesn’t really matter.”
Her face, beneath the expensive headscarf, was white. When she spoke her voice was bitter.
“You fucked it all up. Why couldn’t you leave well enough alone?”
“I was trying to help!” I said. I didn’t mean it to sound the way it came out, but in the little room it sounded frighteningly loud. I swallowed, and spoke more quietly. “I was trying to help you, don’t you get that?”
“Why?” she said. It was half a question, half a cry of frustration. “Why? You barely knew me—why did you have to keep digging?”
“Because I knew what it was like to be you! I know—I know what it’s like to wake up in the night, afraid for your life.”
“But that’s not me,” she snarled. She stalked across the little cabin. Close up I could see that her eyebrows had just the faintest brush of regrowth. “It was never me.”
“It will be, though,” I said, holding her gaze so she couldn’t look away. I couldn’t afford to release her from the knowledge of what she was doing. “When Richard’s got Anne’s money—what do you think his next move will be? Making himself safe.”
“Shut up! You have no idea what you’re talking about. He’s a good man. He’s in love with me.”
I stood up, level with her. Our eyes were locked, our faces just inches apart in the tiny space.
“That’s bullshit and you know it,” I said. My hands were shaking. If this went wrong she might lock the door and never come back, but I had to make her face up to the reality of the situation—both for my sake and hers. If she walked away now, we were very likely both dead. “If he was in love with you he wouldn’t be beating you up and forcing you to dress up as his dead wife. What do you think this charade is all about? Being with you? It’s not about you. If it was, he’d have got a divorce and walked off into the sunset with you—but she’d have taken her money with her. She was heir to a billion-pound dynasty. Those kinds of people don’t risk marriage without a prenup.”
