I make an immediate bolt for the door.
‘Tor. Stop. Stop!’ Dee is saying behind me. But I don’t stop, even though I barely know where I’m going. Down the companionway from the bridge, along the central passage. Away. Away from her. Away from all of it.
She catches up with me at the metal hatch to the aft deck. Through the thick circle of glass I can see the storm is still blowing. But she’s right behind me – all the questions I’ve run from, for twenty years, queuing up on her face. I’m cornered. So there’s only one place to go. I twist the handle down hard and lean into the wind.
Dee cries out behind me as the blast of ice blows in. It cuts instantly through my double layer of fleece and the thermals underneath, but I grab onto the handrail, dragging myself further from her.
‘For Christ’s sake, stop!’ she shouts behind me. ‘You’ll die out there!’
I don’t care. I can’t talk to her. I can’t give her the answers she wants. I can’t even hear the questions. The vicious cold bites into my skin and still she follows me, grabbing my sleeve, pulling me back.
‘You knew him!’ she screams at me, her face screwed up against the wind. ‘All that time, you knew him, and you didn’t tell me! What the hell did you do, Tori?’
‘Get away!’
Barely able to see what I’m doing or where she is, the muscle-memory of my years of self-defence classes kicks in and I twist myself from her grasp. Dee staggers back, falls. Then she’s on her feet again, launching herself at me.
She takes hold of my fleece. ‘You brought me out here!’ Her eyes are savage slits, bright with rage. Snow clinging to her lashes, her cheeks, her hair. ‘You brought all of us out here! You brought him out here, and lied to everyone about why.’ She shakes me, her frustration coming out like a scream. ‘Tell me!’
Suddenly she jerks back, upwards almost, but doesn’t release me quickly enough. I crash forward, my knees hitting the gritted metal deck. The pain knocks the air out of me, but I spring back up. Quick enough to see Marco dragging Dee backwards into the open doorway. A second later he’s back, hauling me up too, moving me ahead of him through the door. Back into the ship, where there are people who will want answers. I struggle, but he holds me firm.
And I see it as clearly as if it were a physical thing right there in front of me. The thin line of a lie that has trailed around with me, with every step, every passing minute and day and year, since I was fourteen years old.
I’ve tried so hard to keep it from tying me up. But I’d always known there would come a time when I became so tangled in it that I couldn’t get free. It looks like today is that day.
Marco swings an arm out towards the passageway. ‘Get in the saloon, now. You need to warm up. Fuck’s sake!’
‘No.’ I get to my feet. ‘Dee, let’s go. My cabin.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Marco says, herding us along. ‘We’re sitting down and having this out.’
He ushers us angrily through the door. Nish and Helen look up from where they’re sitting, behind mugs of tea.
Marco plants his feet and folds his arms. ‘Go on then. What were you doing, fighting in the storm of the century?’
‘It’s hardly the storm of the—’ Craig says, coming out of the galley and drying his hands. The room is back to the way it was, the cloths and sheets and cut-up clothes nowhere to be seen.
‘What’s happening?’ Craig asks, sitting down wearily.
‘Tori’s got something to tell us,’ Dee says over me. ‘About John.’ She hasn’t looked at me once since we got inside.
There’s a long, long silence. The heating ticks. But I’ve run out of road.
So I take a deep breath, choose a spot to focus on in the middle of the room. And I tell them.
‘Look. John was … he was someone whose path I’d crossed before. It was once, decades ago. I was camping with my family, and somewhere else on the site there was an accident. A boy, a teenager, got hurt. Really badly, a head injury. He didn’t survive. It was nothing to do with me: the police interviewed everyone who was there, and they let us all go. But it was still horrible, knowing this kid had … died. But I didn’t know him. I didn’t even know who he was. So I tried to forget all about it. And then a year or so ago, it …’ I search for the right phrase. Take my time. ‘It reared its head. There had been a man there, at the site, who’d been in charge of the boys.’
‘John,’ Dee says. I can feel her eyes on me. I don’t meet them.
‘John. Yeah. And I remember seeing him, remember him talking to the police when they were all there. His face – I mean, you know what he looked like, he was distinctive. So years later, when I saw him at an event I was doing, I recognised him straight away.’
When it happened, I was already on the stage. Hosting a live panel about women in the media industry. I’d opened up to questions and the microphone was being passed back to someone in the crowd. And I saw him. Staring straight ahead, not smiling. It lifts the hairs on my arms even now, thinking about it.
And as whoever it was started asking their question into the microphone, my world gave way. This confident adult persona I’d spent years curating and polishing and turning into something people believed in, something even I believed in: somehow, it splintered.
And suddenly I was fourteen years old again. Standing on a hillside, exiled from my childhood without warning, without help.
How I finished the event I have no idea. But I did my job, relayed the questions. Worked and smiled and engaged with the audience the way I always do, gave it everything. But seeing John made me realise that it wasn’t a matter of if any more, but when. My secret wasn’t going to stay a secret. It was too big. And the fear that I’d managed to suppress into a low rumble all these years became a cacophony again. The fear that I’d be found out. That everyone would know what I did. Who I really am.
‘I thought, to start with, that it was a coincidence – it wouldn’t have been that impossible to cross paths again after decades, like that. But then he just stared at me, like … I don’t know.’
I do know. It was like he hated me.
I take a deep breath and go on.
‘And then I knew it wasn’t a coincidence. John was there for me. I was a bit alarmed, I suppose, and I looked out for him after the event, but he was gone.’
Helen clears her throat. ‘Goodness me, that hardly seems like something to fight about—’
‘It’s not,’ Dee says. ‘It wouldn’t be, I mean. The issue is,’ and now she lifts her head, drills right into me with her eyes, ‘the issue is that you hid it. And you insisted on having him on the show,’ she says. There’s a pause. ‘And now John’s dead.’
‘Okay.’ I lift my hands, drop them, defeated. ‘Okay. Fine. He came back. Two other live events, I saw him. He wanted me to see him. Made it so that he was right there in my eyeline. It was a threat.’
‘A threat of what?’ Dee asks, incredulous. ‘What did you think he was going to do?’
‘I didn’t know. But pretty soon I found out. He sent me this letter.’
‘Saying what?’
I see the words in my mind in their thick, blocky capitals as clearly as if they were written on the wall in front of me.
‘It said, “You killed him. You’re going to pay.” And shortly after I got it, there was his application to the show, too, on the desk. John was trying to get close to me. And now he had his chance.’
‘So you thought he wanted you dead,’ Dee says, menacingly calm. ‘And rather than go to the police, you engineered a way to spend two weeks with him in the middle of nowhere?’
‘I know how it looks,’ I turn to Dee. ‘I do. But I thought – I know you won’t believe me, but I thought I could change his mind. That we could talk about it.’
I don’t tell them how I’d spent the weeks and months leading up to the expedition wondering whether I’d survive it.
Dee closes her eyes. ‘So you were pushed then. On that first night?’
I can’t look at her.
‘And you didn’t want to say, because you knew who it was. You thought if you admitted it was John, all of this would come out.’
‘But you said you didn’t hurt this kid,’ Craig says. ‘So if that’s true, why didn’t you go to the police in the first place? If you had nothing to hide?’
‘Because that’s not what happened,’ comes a voice from behind me.
Gaia, looking drawn and pale, is standing in the doorway. Eyes on me.
‘Wait,’ Dee says, hands up. ‘You knew him, too? John?’
But Gaia ignores her.
‘What you’re saying,’ she continues, ‘about John wanting his revenge on you? Sending you some note? Pushing you over the railings? That couldn’t be further from it.’
I swallow. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I do, actually.’ Gaia comes in and takes a seat against the wall, crossing her legs.
‘You changed his life. But not in the way you think.’