“So much that you helped him kill his wife?”
“I didn’t kill her!” she shouted, the anguished cry painfully loud in the cramped space. She stood with her back to me, her hand on the door handle, and her whole narrow body shook, like a child racked by sobs. “She was already dead—at least, that’s what he said. He left her body in the cabin in a suitcase, and I wheeled it to cabin ten when you were all at dinner. All I had to do was throw the whole thing over the side while he was playing poker. But . . .”
She stopped, turned back round, slumped to the ground, her head bowed to her knees.
“But what?”
“But the case was incredibly heavy. I think he’d weighted it with something, and I banged it against the doorframe getting it into the suite. The lid sprang open and that’s when”—she gave a sob—“oh God, I don’t know anymore! Her face—it was all bloody, but just for a second—I—I thought her eyelids fluttered.”
“Jesus.” I went cold with horror. “You mean—you didn’t throw her over alive, did you?”
“I don’t know.” She buried her face in her hands. Her voice was cracked, high and reedy, with a tremor like someone on the verge of hysteria. “I screamed—I couldn’t help it. But I touched the blood on her face, and it was cold. If she’d been alive, the blood would have been warm, wouldn’t it? I thought perhaps I’d just imagined it, or it was some kind of involuntary movement—they say that happens, don’t they? In morgues and stuff. I didn’t know what to do—I just shut the case! But I can’t have fastened it properly, because when I threw it over the side, the catch burst open and I saw her face—her face in the water— Oh God!”
She stopped, her breath coming fast and choking, but just as I was trying to grapple with the horror of what she might have done, think of what I could possibly say in reply to her confession, she spoke.
“I haven’t been able to sleep, ever since, you know? Every night I lie there, thinking about her, thinking about how she could have been alive.”
She looked up at me, and for the first time I saw her feelings naked in her eyes—the guilt and fear she’d been trying so desperately to hide ever since that first night.
“This isn’t what was supposed to happen,” she said brokenly. “She was supposed to die at home, in her own bed—and I—and I—”
“You don’t have to do this.” I spoke urgently. “Whatever happened with Anne’s death, you can stop this now. Can you really live with killing me? One death on your conscience has driven you half-crazy, Carrie. Don’t make it two—I’m begging you—for both of us. Please, let me go. I won’t say anything, I swear. I’ll—I’ll tell Judah I got off in Trondheim and must have blacked out. No one would believe me anyway! They didn’t believe me when I said a body went over the side—why would this be any different?”
I knew why: because of DNA. Fingerprints. Dental records. The traces of Anne’s blood that must remain on the glass screen and somewhere in Richard’s cabin.
But I didn’t say any of that, and Carrie didn’t seem to have thought of it. Her panic seemed to have been excised along with her tumbling, spewed-out confession, and her breathing had slowed. Now, her face, as she stared at me, was tearstained but calm, and oddly beautiful now that her hysteria had passed.
“Carrie?” I said timidly, hardly daring to hope.
“I’ll think about it,” she said. She got to her knees, picked up the tray, and turned for the door. As she did, her foot knocked against the copy of Winnie-the-Pooh, and she looked down. Something in her face changed, and she picked it up, riffling the pages with her free hand.
“I loved that book as a kid,” she said. I nodded.
“Me too. I must have read it a hundred times. That bit at the end, with the ring of trees . . . it always makes me sob.”
“My mum used to call me Tigger,” she said. “She used to say, you’re like Tigger, you are, no matter how hard you fall, you always bounce back.” She gave a shaky laugh and then tossed the book onto the foot of the bunk, making an obvious effort to snap back to practicalities. “Listen, I might not be able to bring you supper tonight. The cook’s getting suspicious. I’ll do my best, but if I can’t, then I’ll bring you something extra for breakfast, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, and then, moved by some impulse, “thank you.”
I thought about it after she left—the stupidity of thanking a woman who was keeping you captive, buying your compliance by withholding food and drugs. Was I developing Stockholm syndrome?
Maybe. Although if I was, she had a considerably more advanced case than I did. Maybe that was closer to the truth—we weren’t captor and captive, but two animals in different compartments of the same cage. Hers was just slightly larger.