my aching head, to think logically. Was she a member of the crew? She had access to the staff door, after all. But then I remembered Nilsson punching in the code, me standing behind him as he did. He’d made no effort to shield the keypad. If I’d wanted to, it would have been child’s play to note down the numbers as he entered them. And after that, once you were below decks, there were not many further locked doors.
She’d had access to the empty cabin, though—and that did require a passkey, either a guest one, programmed to that door specifically, or a staff one that opened all the cabin doors. I thought of the cleaners I’d seen in their little hutches below decks, their scared faces looking out at me before the door swung shut. How much would one of them sell a passkey for? A hundred kroner? A thousand? They wouldn’t even need to sell it—I was certain there were places you could get key cards copied. They would just have had to loan it out for an hour or two, no questions asked. I thought of Karla—she had practically told me that it went on, that someone might have lent the cabin to a friend.
But it didn’t have to be that. The passkey could have been stolen, for all I knew, or bought off the Internet—I had no idea how those electronic locks worked. There might have been no one else involved at all.
Was it possible that all this time I had been looking for an accomplice—a perpetrator among the crew or passengers—and they’d been innocent all along? I thought of the accusations I’d hurled at Ben, the suspicions I’d had of Cole, of Nilsson, of everyone, and I felt sick.
But the fact that this girl existed and was alive, that didn’t automatically rule out someone else’s involvement. The more I thought about it, the more I was sure that someone had been helping her above decks—someone had written that message on the spa wall, had tipped Cole’s camera into the hot tub, had stolen my phone. They couldn’t all have been her. Someone would have seen and recognized the girl I had been shouting about for two days if she’d been wandering around the ship.
Ugh, this was making my head hurt. Why? That was the question I couldn’t answer. Why go to such lengths to hide on board the ship, to stop me from asking questions? If the girl had died, the cover-up made sense. But she was alive and well. It must be who she was that was important. Someone’s wife? Someone’s daughter? Lover? Someone trying to get out of the country with no questions asked?
I thought of Cole and his ex-wife, Archer and his mysterious “Jess.” I thought of the way the photograph had disappeared from the camera.
None of it made sense.
I rolled over, feeling the weight of the darkness all around. Wherever we were, it was very deep beneath the ship, I was sure of that now. The engine was loud, much louder than on the passenger deck, louder even than I remembered it being on the staff deck. I was somewhere else, on an engine deck, perhaps, far below the waterline, deep in the hull.
At that thought, I felt again the horror begin to creep over me, the tons and tons of water weighing on my head and shoulders, pressing against the hull, the air in the cabin circulating, circulating, and me here suffocating in my own panic. . . .
My legs shaking, I climbed cautiously off the bunk and made my way slowly across the floor, my arms stretched out in front of me, cringing from what might be in here with me in the absolute darkness. My imagination conjured up horrors from my childhood nightmares—giant spiderwebs across my face, men with clutching arms, even the girl herself, lidless, lipless, tongueless. But another part of me knew that there was no one here but myself—that I would have been able to hear, smell, sense another human being in such a confined space.
After a few moments of cautious inching, my fingers encountered the door, and I felt my way across it. The first thing I tried was the handle, but it was still locked—I hadn’t expected anything else. I felt for a spy hole, but there was none, or none that I could find on the blank expanse of plastic. I didn’t remember seeing one earlier, anyway. What I did remember, and