Captain Birdseye held out his arm and made a little gesture.
“Pleese?” he rumbled interrogatively, as if giving me a choice. But it was an illusion. I had no choice.
I let him help me to my feet, and I got into the car.
It was only as we drove that I realized quite how far I had run the night before. You couldn’t even see the fjord from this wooded fold of the hillside, and the Volvo must have jolted down several miles of rutted track before we reached the semblance of a road.
We were turning onto the tarmac when I noticed something in the little well beneath the radio—a mobile phone. It was very, very ancient, but it was a phone.
I put out my hand, hardly able to breathe.
“May I?”
Captain Birdseye looked across, and then grinned. He put the phone in my lap but then tapped the screen, saying something in Norwegian. As soon as I looked at the phone, I realized what he was saying. There was no reception at all.
“Vente,” he said loudly and clearly, and then slowly, in what sounded like heavily accented English, “Wait.”
I held the phone in my lap, watching the screen with a lump in my throat as the trees flashed past. But something didn’t make sense. The date on the phone showed the twenty-ninth of September. Either I was miscounting, or I had lost a day.
“This,” I pointed at the date on the phone. “Today, is it really the twenty-ninth?”
Captain Birdseye glanced at the screen and then nodded.
“Ja, tjueniende. Toos-day,” he said, enunciating the word very slowly, but he didn’t need to. The pronunciation was close enough to the English for me to be in no doubt about what he was saying. Tuesday. Today was Tuesday. I had been asleep in that little hut for a full day and a night.
I was just computing that, and trying not to think about how worried Judah and my parents must be, when we turned into the driveway of a neat little blue-painted house, and something flickered in the corner of the phone’s screen—a single bar of reception.
“Please?” I held it up, my heart suddenly beating so hard in my throat that the words felt choked and strange in my mouth. “Can I call my family in England?”
Konrad Horst said something in Norwegian that I didn’t understand, but he was nodding, and so, with fingers that shook so hard I could hardly find the right keys, I pressed +44 and dialed the number of Judah’s mobile phone.
- CHAPTER 36 -
We said nothing for the longest time, either of us. We just stood in the middle of the airport like two fools, holding each other, Judah touching my face and my hair and the bruises on my cheek like he truly couldn’t believe it was me. I suppose I was probably doing the same to him, I can’t remember.
All I could think was I’m home. I’m home. I’m home.
“I can’t believe it,” Judah kept saying. “You’re okay.”
And then the tears started, and I began to cry into the harsh scratchy wool of his jacket, and he didn’t say anything at all, just held me like he’d never let me go.
At first I hadn’t wanted the Horsts to call the police, but I couldn’t make them understand that, and after I’d spoken to Judah and he had promised to call Scotland Yard with my story—a story so improbable that I almost didn’t believe it myself—I began to accept that not even Richard Bullmer could buy his way out of this one.
When the police arrived, they took me to a health center first, to get treatment for my cut feet and wrenched ankle and to have my medication represcribed. It seemed to take forever, but at last the doctors pronounced me fit enough to leave, and the next thing I knew, I was being driven to a police station up the valley, where an official from the British Embassy in Oslo was waiting.
Again and again I found myself reciting the story of Anne, and Richard and Carrie, and each time it sounded more and more implausible to my own ears.
“You have to help her,” I kept saying. “Carrie—you have to go after the boat.”
The official and the police officer exchanged a look, and the policeman said something in Norwegian. I knew, suddenly, that whatever it was they were holding back, it was not good news.
“What?” I asked. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“The police have found two bodies,” the embassy official said at last, his voice awkward and formal. “The first in the early hours of Monday morning, dredged up by a fishing boat, the second later on Monday, recovered by police divers.”
I put my head in my hands, grinding my fingers into my eyes, watching the pressure build and bloom as flames and sparks on the insides of my lids. I drew a deep breath.
“Tell me.” I looked up. “I have to know.”
“The body recovered by divers was a man,” the embassy official said slowly. “He had been shot through the temple, the police believe it may have been a self-inflicted wound. He had no ID on him, but they are presuming it to be the body of Richard Bullmer. He was reported missing from the Aurora by the crew.”