I stop only to get my coat, then I go out into the biting cold.
Fat gobs of snow are falling from miles and miles of unbroken cloud, melting instantly on my face, the threat of the storm still hanging over us. Gripping the grab-rail, I go around the superstructure of the ship until I come to the aft deck and crouch by the hatch to the hold. It’s marked with something in a language I can’t read – Finnish, I’m assuming. It probably says No entry.
It’s not locked. I heave it open, climb down, then pull it shut after me. At the bottom of the steep steps I find the light switch and flick it on, thinking of only one thing.
Eino’s response in the cabin, when we first discovered John dead. How the first thing he did was open the window.
He knew.
And I’m fairly sure I know how.
The hold is painted a bright white. There are a few feet of open standing room ahead of the entrance, but then it narrows to a central passageway between two banks of floor-to-ceiling cages that run towards the prow. Cases and crates line the walls, but I find what I’m looking for in a matter of seconds.
A moulded plastic stretcher on a shelf at waist height, on top of which lies a long, shrouded object. John’s body.
It takes some heaving, but I pull it out by about a foot. I don’t need to see everything, but I need to be sure. From a side pocket of my cargo pants I get out my Swiss Army knife and start to cut.
Soon the shroud hangs on either side of his shoulders. There’s a slackness to his skin that makes him look unreal, like a model. His eyes are still open. I inhale sharply and quickly place my index and middle fingers on his eyelids, before I can spook myself out of it. The skin feels uncannily rubbery, and though it catches slightly on the drying eyeball, I get the lids closed.
I need to see more of his skin. I start cutting the fabric of his T-shirt, following the line of the side seam. I snip through millimetres at a time: the slightest nick to his skin will be picked up when he finally gets a proper autopsy. But although my eyes are on the job, my mind is elsewhere.
Three years ago I worked on an investigation into a series of deaths at an oil plant. It wasn’t a ship, but the principle was the same. An old heating system was replaced around the same time the deaths occurred. I found that the main reason systems like those need upgrading is because they’re run straight off an engine – and when you’re pumping hot gases around living quarters, sometimes they can leak out.
The deaths were eventually attributed to carbon monoxide. The silent killer. And carbon monoxide, as it turns out, has some quite distinctive signs, post-mortem.
My skin tightens with the cold. When I’ve made a cut of maybe eight inches I put the scissors away, steel myself and open the fabric.
I exhale and take it in. The proof I was looking for.
The process of livor mortis has pooled the blood at the lowest points of John’s body. But where it would usually be the colour of a dark bruise, here it’s a vivid red. All the way down his back, the backs of his arms and – if I chose to look – presumably his buttocks and the backs of his legs too. It’s the kind of cherry colour you might see on a person of limited fitness who’d recently exerted themselves. Except that John has been dead for hours.
The death of this otherwise healthy man was down to that damaged pipe in the cabin.
But John wasn’t even meant to be in that room. He swapped in the middle of the night, so it follows that he wasn’t the target.
I wasn’t imagining what I saw on that first night. Someone on this ship wants Tori dead.