wasn’t stupid. But I’d seen this kind of willful blindness before, women who insisted their boyfriends weren’t cheating in the face of all the evidence, people working for horrendous employers who’d persuaded themselves they were just following orders and doing what was necessary. There seemed to be no limit to the capacity of people to believe what they wanted to see, and if Carrie had argued herself into accepting Richard’s twisted version of the facts in the face of all logic, she wasn’t likely to listen to me.
Instead, I took a deep breath, pushed back the protests clamoring in my head, and asked the question that everything hinged on.
“What’s going to happen to me?”
“Fuck!” Carrie stood up, raking her hands across her head so that the headscarf slipped, showing the shaven scalp beneath. “I don’t know. Stop asking me, please.”
“He’s going to kill me, Carrie.” He was going to kill us both, I was fairly sure of that now, but I wasn’t sure if she was ready to hear that. “Please, please, you can get us both out of here, you know you can. I’ll give evidence—I’ll say that you saved me, that—”
“First”—she broke in, face hard—“I’d never betray him. I love him. You don’t seem to get that. And second, even if I went along with you, I’d end up on a murder charge.”
“But if you testified against him—”
“No.” She cut me off. “No. That’s not going to happen. I love him. And he loves me. I know he does.”
She turned away, towards the door, and I knew that it was now or never, that I had to try to make her see the truth of what she was involved in, even if she walked away and I ended up starving to death down here in my metal coffin.
“He’s going to kill you, Carrie,” I spoke to the back of her head as she reached the door. “You know that, right? He’s going to kill me, and then kill you. This is your last chance.”
“I love him,” she said. There was a crack in her voice.
“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.