“I’m—I’m actually not very hungry,” I said to Chloe. “And I’m supposed to be meeting Ben Howard.”
“Oh, I forgot,” she said casually. “He was in here looking for you. I met him coming up out of the spa. He said he had something important to tell you.”
“Did he say where he was going?”
“Back to his cabin to do some work, I think.”
“Thanks.”
Bjorn appeared again like a genie from behind the concealed screen.
“May I get you a drink, Miss Blacklock?”
I shook my head.
“No, I’ve remembered I’m supposed to be meeting someone. Could you please send a sandwich to my suite?”
“Certainly.” He nodded, and I slipped out of the room with an apologetic nod to Cole and Chloe.
I was hurrying along the corridor that led towards the aft cabins when I rounded a corner and ran slap into Ben himself—literally. We collided with a crash that knocked the breath out of me.
“Lo!” He grabbed my arm. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
“I know. What were you doing down in the spa?”
“Didn’t you just hear me? Looking for you.”
I stared at him, at his face, the picture of innocence, his eyes above his dark beard round and full of urgency. Could I trust him? I had absolutely no idea. A few years ago I would have said I knew Ben inside out—right up until the moment he walked out. Now I had learned that I couldn’t even totally trust myself, let alone another person.
“Did you come into my treatment room?” I asked abruptly.
“What?” He looked momentarily confused. “No, of course not. They said you were getting a mud wrap. I didn’t think you’d want me barging in. I was told to look for some girl called Ulla, but she wasn’t there, so I pushed a note under your door and came back up.”
“I didn’t see any note.”
“Well, I left one. What’s this about?”
Something in my chest felt like bursting—a mixture of fear and frustration. How could I possibly know if Ben were telling the truth? The note would be a stupid thing to lie about anyway—even if he’d written the message in the steam, why fib about leaving me a note? Perhaps it had been there, and I’d just overlooked it in my panic.
“Someone else left me a message,” I said at last. “Written in steam on the mirror of the shower next door while I was having the treatment. It said Stop digging.”
“What?” His pink face went slack with shock, his mouth hanging open. If he was acting, it was the best performance I’d ever seen him give. “Are you serious?”
“One hundred percent.”
“But—but didn’t you see them go in? Is there another entrance to the bathroom?”
“No. They must have come through the room. I . . .” I felt oddly ashamed saying it, but I put my chin up, refusing to be apologetic. “I fell asleep. There’s only one entrance to the spa, and Eva says no one went down except for Tina and Chloe . . . and you.”
“And the spa staff,” Ben reminded me. “Plus, surely there must be a fire exit down there?”
“There’s an exit, but it’s one-way. It leads into the staff quarters, but you can’t open it from the other side. I asked.”
Ben looked unconvinced.
“Not that hard for someone to wedge it open, though, right?”
“No, but it’s alarmed. There would have been sirens going off all over the place.”
“Well, I guess it’s possible if you knew enough about the system you could fiddle with the alarm settings. But Eva wasn’t there the whole time, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“She wasn’t there when I came back up. Anne Bullmer was—she was waiting for her nail varnish to dry. But Eva was gone. So if she says she was there for the whole time, she’s not telling the truth.”
Oh God. I thought about myself, lying there, half-naked beneath the thin film wraps and towels, and how someone—anyone—could have come in and placed a hand over my mouth, wound a sheet of plastic around my head . . .
“So what did you want to see me about?” I said, trying to sound normal. Ben looked uneasy.
“Oh . . . that. Well, you know we were on a tour of the bridge and so on?”
I nodded.
“Archer was trying to text someone, I think, and he dropped his phone. I picked it up, and it was open on the contacts page.”
“And?”
“The name just said Jess, but the preview picture was a girl, a lot like the one you described. Late twenties,