Day four. But it feels like I’ve been out here for weeks.
I get out of bed and go to fill a beaker from the tap. It spits, the pressure pathetic, and when I knock back my pills and swallow, the water tastes bitter, metallic. In the mirror above the sink, my face is pulled tight with anger.
I’ve slept on it, what happened in the saloon last night. But rest hasn’t blunted a thing – I could still kill Wolf.
How he knew about Leo I have no idea, but dropping it in like that, in front of everyone? I could wring his fucking neck.
I’m not just furious, I’m jittery as hell. I think of the bottle of rum I bought at the airport, currently lying unopened in the bottom of the wardrobe. But where would that end? Half a bottle down, a whole one? I can tell you exactly where: with me in a ball in the corner of the bed, watching those clips of Leo over and over again. Just me and the biting grief, and then a hangover.
And he’ll still be dead.
And it’ll still be my fault.
The cogs spin and spin in my head – what I need is something to jam them. I get down on the floor, settle my feet at hip-width and start a set of crunches. After twenty I switch to leg lifts, then up for lunges, then squats. Repeat.
Pretty soon I’ve hit a rhythm, my thoughts taking on a liquidity that makes them less easy, less appealing to hold on to. I replay the conversations with Tori and find them already robbed of their power.
Then, with no trigger, as I straighten from a squat, the image of John’s body floats up again. Blotchy, cold, the eyeballs dried. Everything collapsing slowly into itself.
I sink onto the floor, elbows on my knees, head in my hands. I sit there watching the sweat dripping from my forehead onto the carpet tiles, my heart banging loudly in my throat.
I need to talk to Wolf. Because, yes, he might be a narcissist, but is he violent? Tori never said so, though I know his temper can get out of control. And if it takes us days to get back to civilisation, I need him to cooperate. We all do.
I weave through the ship towards his cabin, but the door to his passage is locked. I peer through the circle of glass set into the metal. On the other side is Ulla, running something that looks like a vacuum cleaner over one spot on the carpet.
I rap on the glass, startling her. She comes over, but rather than letting me though, she comes out to the stairs and closes the door behind her.
‘What’s going on?’ I ask. ‘Why’s the door locked?’
‘Sorry, madam. It’s the carpet. Best to keep guests away when cleaning. Man in cabin one is already up,’ she says, gesturing to Wolf’s door, ‘so I clean now.’
‘But why does the carpet need cleaning?’ I’m not feeling patient.
‘It is … dirty. Dirtied?’ she tries, uncomfortable, like there’s more to it.
‘What kind of dirty? Where?’
She sighs. ‘Come,’ she says, then opens the door and beckons for me to follow.
In the passage there’s a strong scent of industrial cleaning, and the air is heavy and humid. The patch on the floor, dark with whatever fluid she’s been using, is right outside cabin two.
‘What was it?’ I ask. I bend to touch my fingers to the patch, sniff them. There’s a faint sourness that I can’t instantly place.
She puts her hands in her pockets. ‘We find it when we were at anchor. When you are out with the small boats,’ she says, meaning on our ice-hole trip. ‘Before you come back to the ship, I am down here and find the smell. Someone has tried to clean up, but not good. Not well? But then—’ Her eyes drift to the door of the cabin. ‘The poor man was found and everyone here so … But now I do the full clean.’
‘What was on the carpet, Ulla?’
She rubs her chin, searching for the word.
‘Spilled food?’ I offer. ‘Coffee? Mud? What?’
She’s flustered now, but she makes a gesture, moving her hand from her mouth to demonstrate. Making a face like gagging.
‘You found vomit?’
‘Yes,’ she says, serious. ‘Yes, vomit.’
‘Outside the room where we found a dead man?’
She nods.
But John was lying in bed, with no sign of any sickness. So it follows that if there was vomit outside his room – and someone had tried to clean up – it must have been someone else’s.
Someone who knew what was inside.