me.”
“Who is it up to? Ben?”
She gave a derisory snort at that.
“Enjoy.”
As she turned to leave, she caught sight of herself in the little mirror on the back of the en suite door.
“Fuck, I’ve got blood on my face. Why didn’t you say? If he knows you attacked me . . .” She went into the little toilet to splash and wipe her face.
But it wasn’t just the blood she wiped away. When she came out, I froze. With that one simple act, I realized who she was.
In wiping away the blood she had wiped both her eyebrows clean off, leaving a smooth, skull-like forehead that was instantly, unbearably recognizable.
The woman in cabin 10 was Anne Bullmer.
- CHAPTER 26 -
I was too stunned to say anything. I just sat there, openmouthed with shock.
The girl looked from me, back to her reflection in the en suite mirror, and realized what she’d done. An expression of annoyance crossed her face for a moment, but then she seemed to shrug it off and stalked out of the room, letting the door swing shut behind her. I heard a key scrape in a lock, and then another door bang farther away.
Anne Bullmer.
Anne Bullmer?
It seemed impossible that she could be the same gaunt, gray, prematurely aged woman I’d seen and spoken to. And yet—her face was unmistakable. The same dark eyes. The same high, jutting cheekbones. The only thing I couldn’t understand was how I’d missed it before.
If I hadn’t seen her, midtransformation, I would never have believed how much her hair and the delicately penciled eyebrows changed her face. Without them she looked oddly featureless and smooth. It was impossible not to think of death and illness when you looked at that bone-pale sweep of skin, and the scarf tied tight around her skull only emphasized that fragility—painfully underscoring the lines of her neck and the shape of the bones beneath.
But her sleek black brows and the vibrant mass of dark hair changed all that beyond recognition. With it she became young, healthy, alive.
I realized, when I’d spoken to Anne Bullmer before, I had been so mesmerized by the trappings of her illness that I’d never really looked at the woman beneath. I had tried not to look in fact. I had just seen the distinctive, draping clothes, the missing eyebrows, the distractingly smooth skull beneath those delicate scarves . . .
The hair must be a wig—I had no doubt about that. There was no room under those thin silk scarves Anne wore for those thick dark tresses.
But was she sick? Well? Dying? Faking? It didn’t make sense.
I tried to think back to what Ben had told me—four years of chemo and radiotherapy. Could you really fake that, even with private doctors in your pay and enough money to enable you to hop from one health system to another every few months? Maybe.
At least this explained one thing—how she had got on board, and what had happened to her after that splash in the night. She’d simply pulled off her wig, put on her scarf, and resumed her life as Anne Bullmer. It also explained how she had access to every part of the ship—to the passkeys and the staff areas, and this secret locked vault down in the belly of the boat. When your husband was the owner, nothing was out of bounds, presumably.
But the thing that puzzled me most was why? Why dress up in a wig and a Pink Floyd T-shirt and spend the afternoon hanging out in an empty cabin? What was she doing there? And if it was so secret, why answer the door at all?
As the last question ran through my head, I had a sudden flash of myself knocking on the door—one, two, three . . . pause, and another bang, and the way the door had been snatched open as if someone had been waiting for that final knock. It was an odd knock, idiosyncratic. The kind of knock you might use if you were arranging a code. Was it possible I had, completely accidentally, stumbled on a prearranged signal for the woman in the cabin—Anne Bullmer—to open the door?
If only. If only I’d just knocked twice like any normal person—or even once. I would never have known she was there, never have put myself in this position where I had to be locked up—silenced . . .
Silenced. It was an uncomfortable thought, and the word stuck in my head, reverberating there like an echo.
I had