Tori manages to get to her feet, and I help her inside to the saloon, where it’s warm. Ulla is still up and immediately goes to summon Stefan.
‘And the medic, too. Craig,’ I tell her as she hurries from the room.
I make Tori comfortable and take her hands, my heart doing horrible things against my ribs. If I hadn’t found her, if whoever it was had pushed a little harder, what then?
‘Did you see their face, Tor?’
She looks at me, blood dripping into one eye from a cut to her head, but blinks and looks away.
‘There was no one out there,’ she croaks. ‘I slipped.’
‘What?’ I duck my head to get into her eyeline. ‘No, I saw it. I saw someone, behind you—’
But then Craig hurries in, and I let him check her over.
I make a loop of the ship to see if anyone else is up. The doors are all airtight, so I can’t check beneath them for lights or movement, but I listen at every one. I start at the bottom, where Wolf is, but his cabin is silent. Helen, John, Marco, Gaia, Nish: all of their cabins are in the same long passageway as mine, and there’s not a sound from any of them.
I knock for Annabel, and after a couple of moments she opens up. Her hair is dripping and she’s wrapped in a towel.
‘Get dressed,’ I tell her. ‘It’s Tori. She’s hurt.’
I pass Eino in the passage, pulling on a jacket. He’s been summoned too and is going out to check the railings, he says, but he confirms my suspicion that there’s no CCTV.
When I get back to the saloon, Craig’s crouching in front of Tori, who’s been covered with blankets. He’s flashing a light into her eyes, but gets up as I enter the room.
‘She’s all right, remarkably,’ he says, coming over. ‘Bit bruised, and there’s a cut above her hairline, which I’ve cleaned and patched up with some strips. Won’t need stitches. There’s a chance of some mild concussion. You good to check on her every couple of hours?’
I nod. ‘Does she know who it was?’
He frowns, not understanding the question.
‘Who it was who did what?’
‘Pushed her!’
He glances at Tori, then back to me. ‘She says she slipped.’
I go and crouch beside her. ‘You must have felt it, Tor. I saw someone shove you.’
She shakes her head. ‘You can’t have done. Honestly, it was a stupid accident.’ She seems so certain.
Craig comes back with some biscuits from the kitchen for her. She’s still shivering uncontrollably, and the cut has matted her black hair with blood.
To him I say, ‘Could she just have forgotten that she was pushed? Like a concussion thing?’
‘I didn’t forget!’ Tori says, to Craig and then to me. ‘There wasn’t anyone else out there. I’m telling you the truth – if someone pushed me, why would I say they hadn’t?’
‘What happened?’ Annabel asks, rushing in.
‘Someone pushed Tori off the deck.’
Tori groans. ‘I slipped.’
‘Fuck’s sake!’ I sigh, get up, take Annabel aside and give her the summary in a hushed voice.
‘You went out on the ice? On your own?’
‘That’s not the fucking headline here, Annabel!’
‘Okay, I’m sorry. So – is there CCTV?’
‘No, nothing.’
‘But she could have slipped, right?’ Annabel says. ‘Maybe there’s a loose bit of railing?’
I glare at her. ‘How is that your first thought, when I’m standing right here telling you what I saw?’
Annabel swallows. ‘So … who was it, then, that you saw?’
‘I don’t know.’ I try to replay it, analyse the shape behind her, make it into someone recognisable, but I know I’d be forcing it.
‘You’re sure?’ she asks. ‘And no one else saw?’
I throw my arms up, annoyed. ‘Obviously I’d tell you!’
There’s the briefest flicker in her eyes, but then she goes over and kneels next to Tori.
‘You didn’t see anyone at all? Or tell anyone you were heading outside?’
Tori meets her eye. For the slightest moment I think she’s going to tell. But then she leans away from me, shakes her head and closes her eyes.
‘‘Like I said: I slipped. End of story.’
‘What do you want to do? Should we head back?’ Craig asks her.
‘What? No!’ she says, trying to sit up. ‘No way whatsoever. We’re not turning back for anything.’
‘You can’t be serious!’ I say, looking from her to Craig. ‘We need to contact the police.’
Craig lets out a quiet laugh. ‘Yeah, no, that’s not going to help. Once you’re out of range of the closest town, anything goes wrong and your captain is like your king. There are police in Nuuk, and a handful scattered up the coast, but they’d need a helicopter and a bloody good reason.’ He dips the corners of his mouth. ‘And she’s saying a crime hasn’t even been committed. They’d laugh you off the radio.’
‘Fuck’s sake.’
‘Dee.’ Tori’s giving me a look I don’t like.
‘What?’
She jerks her chin at Craig and Annabel, who throw me a quizzical glance, but give us some space. ‘Dee, I don’t know why you’re doing this—’
‘I’m not doing anything. I saw someone on the deck.’
I know before it leaves her mouth what she’s going to say. ‘We’ve been here before.’
It lands like a punch to the gut. ‘This is not like that.’
She raises her eyebrows.
‘It was depression,’ I say, keeping my voice very steady, my eyes on her. She swore we wouldn’t bring this up again. ‘I have never suffered from hallucinations. I’m not paranoid.’
The honest truth is that, now, I couldn’t swear to the fact that I did ever see anyone outside my flat in the days after Leo died. I’d been living out of an Airbnb in Bath for months, and going back to London jobless and devastated by grief was … it was hard. Very. But what I saw, at the time, it was so real: a figure, always half hidden, who’d disappear every time I spotted them. Not only outside my flat, but in the days after I turned up at Tori’s place, too. Being there felt safer, though, and it didn’t take much for her to convince me to stay at hers for a while, and to rent my own place out until I started feeling better.
But I know that she was worried, even though she wanted me to believe at the time that it was all in my mind. Why else would Tori have installed that alarm system and CCTV? She said she’d been meaning to get round to it, but there was an urgency, even I could see that.
And whether or not I imagined that, back home in London: this, here, is different. There was someone up there on the deck. Tori knows it. And so do I.
She holds my gaze until I look away. I can tell from the way Craig glances at me that he’s overheard the whole conversation. I go over to where he’s packing away his kit.
He keeps his eyes on what he’s doing. ‘So you’ve had some mental-health issues? In the past, I mean?’
I fold my arms. ‘I know what I saw.’
He nods, but I can see he’s not convinced. ‘I’ll see you in the morning – remember to check her every couple of hours. Anything amiss, come and wake me.’
Annabel waits for him to leave. ‘So,’ she says, turning to me, ‘what are you going to do?’
‘Not much I can do, is there? I can’t find anyone else up and about, and even if I did, no one’s going to come over and say, “Oh hey, by the way, it was me.”’
Annabel bites her lip. ‘So who do you think it could have been?’ I ignore the unspoken part of the sentence, inferred by the inability to meet my eye – the bit that says, if it was anyone at all. ‘I mean, Tori’s not exactly the kind of person to have a load of enemies, is she?’ Annabel goes on. ‘The whole hashtag-be-kind thing? All those TV personality awards?’
I raise an eyebrow.
‘What?’ she says.
‘Annabel. Everyone has enemies.’
She shrugs. ‘I don’t.’
‘Right,’ I laugh.
‘I don’t.’
‘Well, believe me, when you get to our age, you will.’ If there’s one thing I learned from undercover work, it’s that everyone has things they’d rather stayed hidden. ‘Don’t look so shocked.’
‘I’m not shocked. It’s just a little dark,’ she says, with half a smile. ‘Even from you.’
I tell her she might as well go to bed. Over on the sofa, Tori is pulling herself upright. She touches her fingertips to the damage to her head, and I think again of the way she covered her face when I went to her cabin before we all assembled in the saloon for the evening.
Wolf’s name has already crossed my mind. The vitriol he showed towards her after the meal, and the anger coming off him in waves when he left her cabin earlier on. Had something happened?
It takes no time at all in his company to pick Wolf out as a narcissist. He’s manipulative, chauvinistic and goes out of his way to wind people up. But underneath that, he’s also someone who would do anything to keep one particular part of himself hidden.
Pushing Tori off the edge of a ship could have made him a killer. Would he really go that far to keep her quiet?