- 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.