felt a pang of unease. Surely, surely this outage had gone on too long? I should have mentioned it to Bullmer, but it was too late now. He had gone—slipping into one of those unsettling concealed exits behind a screen, presumably to talk to the captain or radio land.
What if Jude had e-mailed? Rung, even, though I doubted we’d be close enough to land yet for a signal. Was he still ignoring me? For a minute I had a sharp flash of his hands on my back, my face against his chest, the feel of his warm T-shirt beneath my cheek, and it hit me with such force that I almost staggered beneath the weight of longing for his presence.
We would be in Trondheim tomorrow, at least. No one could prevent me from accessing the Internet then.
“Lo!” said a voice from behind me, and I turned to see Ben walking along the narrow corridor. He wasn’t a big man, but he seemed to fill it entirely, an Alice in Wonderland trick of the perspective that made the corridor seem to shrink down to nothing and Ben grow bigger and bigger as he came nearer.
“Ben,” I said, trying to make my voice convincingly cheerful.
“How did it go?” He began to walk alongside me towards our cabins. “Did you see Bullmer?”
“Yes . . . I think it went okay. He seemed to believe me, anyway.” I didn’t say what I had started thinking after Richard left, which was that he had not got as far as he had by showing all the cards in his hand. I’d come out of the meeting feeling confident and appeased, but as I ran back through his words, I realized he hadn’t promised anything; in fact, he hadn’t really said anything that could be quoted out of context as unqualified support for my story. There had been a lot of if this is true . . . and if what you say . . . nothing very concrete, when you came down to it.
“Great news,” Ben said. “Is he diverting the boat?”
“I don’t know. He seemed to think it wouldn’t make any difference to divert now, that we’d do better to push on to Trondheim and get there as early as possible tomorrow.”
We had reached our cabins, and I pulled my room key out of my pocket.
“God, I hope this dinner isn’t another eight-course one tonight,” I said wearily as I unlocked and opened my door. “I want to get enough sleep to be coherent for the police in Trondheim tomorrow.
“That’s still your plan, then?” Ben asked. He leaned his hand on the doorframe, effectively preventing me from either leaving or closing the door, though I assumed it wasn’t that calculated.
“Yes. As soon as the boat docks I’m going there.”
“Doesn’t it depend on what the captain says about the boat’s position?”
“Probably. I think Bullmer’s speaking to him about it now. But regardless, I want to get this on record with someone official, even if they can’t investigate.” The sooner my words were down in some official file, the safer I’d feel.
“Fair enough,” Ben said easily. “Well, whatever happens tomorrow, you’ve got a clean slate with the police. Stick to the facts—be clear and unemotional, like you sound like you were with Bullmer. They’ll believe you. You’ve got no reason to lie.” He dropped his arm and took a step back. “You know where I am if you need me, yeah?”
“Yeah.” I gave him a tired smile and was about to shut the door when he put his hand back on the frame so that I couldn’t shut it without trapping his fingers.
“Oh, I nearly forgot,” he said casually. “Did you hear about Cole?”
“His hand?” I’d almost forgotten, but it came back to me now with shocking vividness, the slow drip of blood on to the decking, Chloe’s greenish face. “Poor guy. Will he need stitches?”
“I don’t know, but it’s not just that. He managed to knock his camera into the hot tub at the same time—he’s beside himself, says he can’t understand how he came to leave it so close to the edge.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Nope. He reckons the lens will be okay, but says the body and the SD card’s fucked.”
I felt the room shift and move a little, as if everything were going in and out of perspective, and I had a prickling flash of the photo of the girl on the little screen—a photo that was most likely gone forever now.