“I have spoken to Mr. Howard,” he said, more wearily. “Ben Howard.”
“So?” I said, but my heart was thumping fast. “What can Ben possibly know about this?”
“His cabin is on the other side of the empty one. I went to see him, to find out if he could have heard anything, if he could corroborate your account of a splash.”
“He wasn’t there,” I said. “He was playing poker.”
“I know that. But he told me . . .” Nilsson trailed off.
Oh, Ben, I thought, and there was a sinking sensation in my stomach. Ben, you traitor. What have you done?
I knew what he’d said. I knew it from Nilsson’s face, but I wasn’t going to let him off the hook that easily.
“Yes?” I said through gritted teeth. I was going to force him to do this properly. He was going to have to spell this out, one excruciating syllable at a time.
“He told me about the man in your flat. The burglar.”
“That has nothing to do with this.”
“It, um—” He coughed and folded first his arms, then his legs. The picture of a man his size, perched uncomfortably on a sofa, trying to efface himself into nothing, was almost ludicrously comic. I said nothing. The sensation of watching him squirm was almost exquisite. You know, I thought viciously, you know what a shit you’re being.
“Mr. Howard tells me that you, er, you haven’t been sleeping well, since the, er, the break-in,” he managed.
I said nothing. I sat there cold and hard with rage against Nilsson, but mostly against Ben Howard. That was the last time I confided in him. Would I never learn?
“And then there is the alcohol,” he said. His fair, crumpled face was unhappy. “It, um . . . it doesn’t mix well with . . .”
He trailed off. His head turned towards the bathroom door, to the pathetic pile of personal belongings.
“With what?” I said, my voice low and hard and totally unlike my own. Nilsson raised his eyes to the ceiling, his discomfort radiating through the room.
“With . . . antidepressants,” he said, his voice almost a whisper, and his gaze flicked again to the crumpled half-used packet of pills beside the sink, and then back to me, every inch of him apologetic.
But the words were said. They could not be unsaid, and we both knew it.
I sat, saying nothing, but my cheeks were burning as if I’d been slapped. So this was it. Ben Howard really had told him everything, the little shit. A few minutes, he’d talked to Nilsson. One conversation, and in that time he’d not only failed to support my story—he’d spilled every detail of my biography that he had at hand, and made me look like an unreliable, chemically imbalanced neurotic in the process.
Yes. Yes, I take antidepressants. So what?
No matter that I’ve been taking—and drinking on—those pills for years. No matter that I had anxiety attacks, not delusions.
But even if I’d had full-blown psychosis, that didn’t detract from the fact that, pills or no pills, I saw what I saw.
“So that’s it, then,” I spoke, finally, the words clipped and flat. “You think, just because of a handful of pills, I’m a paranoid nutjob who can’t tell fact from fiction? You do know that there are hundreds of thousands of people on the same medication I take?”
“That is absolutely not what I was trying to say,” Nilsson said awkwardly. “But it is a fact that we have no evidence to support your account and, Miss Blacklock, with respect, what you believe happened is very close to your own exper—”
“NO!” I shouted, standing up, towering over his unhappily crouched body, in spite of the fact that he must have half a foot on me ordinarily. “I told you, you do not get to do this. You don’t get to call me obsequious names and then dismiss what I’ve told you. Yes, I haven’t been sleeping. Yes, I’d been drinking. Yes, someone broke into my flat. It has nothing to do with what I saw.”
“But that is the problem, isn’t it?” He stood, too, now, nettled, a flush across his broad cheeks. “You didn’t see anything. You saw a girl, of which there are many on this boat, and then much later you heard a splash. From that you have jumped to conclusions which are very close to the traumatic event you yourself experienced a few nights ago—a case of two and two making five.