“Won’t you have a cup with us, Ulla?”
“Thank you,” she said, shaking her head so that her heavy bun swayed at the nape of her neck. “I’ve had breakfast already today, but I’ll sit for a moment.”
She slipped onto a chair opposite and looked at us both, smiling expectantly. Nilsson coughed again.
“Miss Blacklock, this is Ulla. She’s the stewardess for the forward cabins, so the Bullmers, the Jenssens, Cole Lederer, and Owen White. Ulla, Miss Blacklock is looking for a girl who she saw yesterday and is anxious to trace. She’s not on the passenger list, so we are thinking she may be a member of staff, but we have had no luck in finding her. Miss Blacklock, do you want to describe the girl you saw?”
“She had long dark hair,” I said. “She was about your age—late twenties, maybe—really pretty, and she spoke English like someone born in Britain. She was about my height. Can you think of anyone”—I was aware my voice had started to sound pleading—“anyone who would fit that description?”
“Well, I have dark hair, obviously,” Ulla said with a laugh. “But it was not me, so after that I am not so sure. There is Hanni, she has dark hair, and Birgitta—”
“I’ve met them,” I interrupted. “It’s not them. Anyone else? Cleaners? Sailing crew?”
“N-no . . . there’s no one on the sailing crew who could fit that description,” Ulla said slowly. “On the staff there is also Eva, but she is too old. Have you spoken to the kitchen staff?”
“Never mind.” I was beginning to despair. This was starting to feel like a recurring nightmare, interviewing person after person after person, while all the while the memory of the dark-haired girl began to dissolve and shimmer, slipping through my fingers like water. The more faces I saw, each corresponding slightly but not completely to my memory, the harder I was finding it to hold on to the image in my head.
And yet, there was something defining about that girl, something I was sure I’d recognize if I saw her again. It wasn’t the features—they were pretty, but ordinary enough. It wasn’t the hair, or the Pink Floyd T-shirt. It was something about her, the sheer liveliness and vivacity of her expression as she peered sharply out into the corridor, her surprise as she had seen my face.
Was it really possible she was dead?
But the alternative was not much better. Because if she wasn’t, the only other possibility—and suddenly I wasn’t sure if it was better or worse—was that I was going mad.
- CHAPTER 13 -
Ulla and Nilsson both excused themselves when my breakfast arrived, leaving me to stare out the window as I ate. Up here, with a view of the sea and the deck, I didn’t feel quite so sick, and I managed a respectable amount of breakfast, feeling the energy come back into my limbs and the nagging nausea abate. It struck me that at least half the reason I had been feeling so crappy was probably low blood sugar. I always get strange and shaky on an empty stomach.
But though the food and the sight of the ocean made me feel physically better, I could not stop running over last night’s events in my head, replaying the conversation with the girl, the surprise on her face, the touch of irritation as she shoved the mascara into my hand. Something had been going on—I was sure of it. It felt like coming into a film halfway through, struggling to work out who the characters were. I had interrupted the girl doing something. But what?
Whatever it was, it was probably linked to her disappearance. And whatever Nilsson thought, I could not believe she had been cleaning the room. No one cleaned a room in a thigh-skimming Pink Floyd T-shirt. And besides—she just hadn’t looked like a cleaner. You didn’t get hair and nails like that on a cleaner’s wage. The gloss on that thick dark mane had spoken of years of conditioning wraps and expensive low lights. Industrial espionage? A stowaway? An affair? I remembered the cold glint in Cole’s eyes as he spoke about his ex-wife, and Camilla Lidman’s bland reassurances downstairs. I thought of Nilsson’s lumbering strength, of Alexander unpleasantly dwelling on the topic of poison and unnatural death last night at dinner—but each possibility seemed more unlikely than the last.
It was her face that troubled me. The more I struggled to remember it, the more it blurred. The concrete bits—her height, the color of her hair, the state of her nails—all that I could picture clearly. But her features . . . a neat nose . . . narrow dark brows carefully plucked. That was about it. I could say what she was not: plump, old, acne-spotted. Saying what she was was far harder. Her nose had been . . . normal. Her mouth . . . normal. Not wide, not rosebud, not pouting, not bee-stung. Just . . . normal. There was nothing distinctive that I could put my finger on.
She could have been me.