“The crew have left?” The words dismayed me, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on why.
“Not all of them,” Carrie said. “The captain’s still here, along with some of his people. But all the passenger-facing staff have gone into Bergen with Richard for some kind of team-building-review thing.”
Richard. So Bullmer wasn’t on the boat. Maybe that explained Carrie’s change in attitude. With Bullmer gone . . .
I began to eat the muesli, slowly, and as before she sat and watched me, her eyes sad beneath their savagely epilated brows.
“You didn’t pluck your eyelashes?” I said between mouthfuls. She shook her head.
“No, I couldn’t quite bring myself. My eyelashes are a bit skimpy without mascara anyway, but I thought if anyone noticed, I’d claim they were false.”
“Who—”
I stopped. I’d been going to say “Who killed her?” but suddenly I couldn’t bring myself to voice that question. I was too scared that it might be Carrie. And anyway, my best hope was in persuading her that she wasn’t a killer, not reminding her that she’d done it once and could do it again.
“What?” she asked.
“I . . . What did you say, to my relatives, I mean? And the other passengers? Do they think I’m in Trondheim?”
“Yes. I put my wig back on and left the boat with your passport. I picked a time when the stewards were all preparing breakfast and it was a member of the sailing crew on duty at the gangway—lucky you didn’t go on the tour of the bridge, you didn’t meet any of them. And lucky we’ve both got dark hair. I don’t know what I would have done if you were a blonde—I don’t have a blond wig. And then I rejoined the boat as Anne, and hoped they wouldn’t notice that Anne got on but had never actually got off.”
Lucky. It wasn’t the word I’d have chosen. So the paper trail was complete—a record of me leaving the boat and never returning. No wonder no police had turned up to search the vessel.
“What was the plan?” I said quietly. “If I hadn’t seen you? What was supposed to happen?”
“I would still have got off at Trondheim,” she said bitterly. “But this time as Anne. And then I’d have put my wig on, changed my clothes, drawn on my eyebrows, and disappeared into the crowd as just another anonymous backpacker. The trail would have ended in Trondheim—an unstable woman, facing death, disappearing without a trace . . . And then, when everything had died down, Richard and I were going to ‘meet,’ fall in love, publicly this time—do it all over again for the cameras.”
“Why did you do it, Carrie?” I asked despairingly, and then bit my tongue. Now wasn’t the time to antagonize her. I needed to get her on my side and I wasn’t going to do that by making her feel accused. But I couldn’t hold it in anymore. “I just don’t understand.”
“Nor do I, sometimes.” She put her hands over her face. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”
“So tell me,” I said. I put my hand out, almost timidly, and let it rest on her knee, and she flinched as though she was expecting to be struck. I realized how frightened she was—how much of that vicious energy had come from terror, not hate.
“Carrie?” I prodded. She looked away and spoke towards the orange curtain, as if she couldn’t face me.
“We met at the Magellan,” she said. “I was a waitress there while I was trying to make it as an actress. And he—he just swept me off my feet, I suppose. It was like something out of Fifty Shades, penniless me, and him, falling in love, showing me this life I’d never dreamed of. . . .”
She stopped, swallowed.
“I knew he was married, of course—he was completely honest about that. So we could never see each other in public, and I couldn’t tell anyone about him. Their marriage had been over almost before it started—she was horribly cold and controlling, and they lived separate lives, her in Norway and him in London. He hasn’t had an easy life, you know—his mother left when he was a baby, and his father died when he was barely out of school. It seemed so unfair that Anne, the person who should have loved him most of all, couldn’t even bear to be with him! But she was dying, and he couldn’t bring himself to divorce a woman with just months to live—it seemed too cruel, and he kept talking about afterwards, when she died, when we’d be together . . .” Her voice trailed off, and for a minute I thought that was it, she was going to get up and go, but she started speaking again, the words coming faster now, as if she was unable to stop herself.