Pitch-black.
My head screams, the pain so intense I can barely form a thought through it. I bring my fingers to my scalp and they come away wet.
I try to cry out, but something in my throat is wrong, crushed. Every breath drags. Shifting my weight comes with a blinding white burst of pain: my leg, right above the ankle. I move my fingers down. I touch bone.
A minute passes, another. The pain doesn’t subside, but I make myself breathe slow, bitterly cold mouthfuls of air. I move, a fraction at a time, unfolding myself out of the crumpled heap I landed in. I can’t see them, but I know from coming down here before that I must have fallen ten, twelve steps, so steep they’re more like rungs. Eight feet at least, an almost unbroken drop, straight onto the bare metal of the empty aft hold.
Not quite empty. I give a shudder, remembering what – who – else is down here, only feet from where I’m huddled.
But I can’t think about that. Because I can hear footsteps overhead, the thud of people on the ice and, now, the muffled rumble of an outboard a little way off. They’re evacuating, but not all of them.
Voices. I listen hard.
‘ … said I’d stay behind with you and get the equipment.’ It’s Annabel’s voice. Every word brimming with synthesised concern. A flawless performance.
I try again to shout, but it’s useless. Even slamming a fist into the thick steel of the hull barely makes a thud.
‘You should have gone with the rest of them!’ Eino says above me.
I scrabble about blindly, looking for anything I can use to bang against the side, but there’s nothing.
‘ … have to find her,’ Annabel is saying to him.
There are footsteps again, moving away. One pair. Eino’s voice is indistinct, then shouts, ‘Signal to abandon is three blasts.’
A few seconds of silence, then the screech of an unoiled metal hinge. A column of light streams in and Annabel climbs down, flicking on the strip light as she does. Thick red streaks cross my vision as she closes the hatch above her. I try to scramble back, away from her, but pain explodes in my ankle. She crouches next to me. Touches her fingertips to my cheek.
‘I did wonder how it would end,’ she says, tilting her head, her voice soft. ‘I suppose I had thought it would be …’ She rolls her hand at the general area. ‘More special, somehow. But it’s fine. As long as we get to have our chat.’
I spit into her face. A bubbly glob of it trickles down the side of her nose before she wipes it away, disgusted.
‘You know when I first saw you, I thought you were incredible. I was coming out of his building, after a piano lesson, and you were just going in. And he forgot even to say goodbye to me.’ She laughs at this, like it’s a fond moment we’re sharing. ‘Because he was watching you. Captivated, like you were some – I don’t know – goddess.’ She rocks back onto her heels, looks me over.
It takes everything I’ve got, but I manage three scratchy words. ‘Who. Are. You?’
‘Me? I’m the one who told Leo who you were,’ she hisses, her eyes narrowing, hateful. At his name, something in my chest gives. ‘You never saw me, did you? I saw you, though. I worked it all out: where you lived, the office you’d go to, your favourite coffee shop. Americano, an almond croissant, but only on a Friday. You never noticed me. I was invisible.’
Except she wasn’t. I remember her. I gasp, seeing it now, a slight woman in the queue behind me, hood up, eyes averted, nervous fingers ticking at the edge of a phone as I went to leave. I saw her. More than once. I assumed she was a regular.
Because I was so used to being the watcher. It never occurred to me that I was being watched myself.
‘I wanted to see what was so special about you,’ she says. ‘See if I could be that, too. But the more I looked, the less I could see it. You were … nothing. Basic. And devious. Sneaking around, pretending to be someone he’d actually like. When all the time you were lying to him. Digging up nasty little stories about him. So he helped a few students with their coursework. That was worth losing everything for, was it? A bad enough crime to have some sneering little bitch like you following him around, filming him. And fucking him, too?’ She waits.
I breathe short, hard breaths through my nose, not looking away.
She raises a hand, and before I know what’s happening she swings it flat against my face. ‘You didn’t even like him. Did you? You destroyed him, and you didn’t even give him a backward glance.’
It’s not true. I try to say it, but I can’t, and this time it’s not because of the pain. It’s because it’s what Leo thought, too, once he realised who I was. He thought I didn’t care about him at all, that all he was to me was a mark for a show. He wouldn’t listen that it had become more than that. I didn’t have time to tell him.
She took that all away from me.
Outside, the siren screams. There are voices again, and Annabel leans over suddenly, clamping a hand over my mouth. I bite her instinctively and she pulls back, then grasps my throat. It hurts so much that I retch, and she shoves me away.
‘I played nice, you see,’ she says now, swiping indignantly at tears. ‘I was polite, kept my distance. I worked out where he went, what he liked to do. I had a plan, you see. People like me,’ she says, but a sob breaks over her and she pauses, takes a breath, comes back angrier. ‘People like me have to work differently, when we want someone. But I would have got him. I knew everything about him.’
A memory surfaces, faint at first. A walk home from a bar, Leo’s jumpiness. Sure you’re not imagining things? I asked him. Sure you’re not watching too many scary films and getting paranoid?
He wasn’t, though, was he? He was right. It was her.
‘And that’s what isn’t fair. You got him, even though you didn’t deserve him. And then when I told him who you were, it was my turn, but I didn’t get a chance. All because of you. He died, because of you. He was driving too fast that night, because of what you did.’
I meet Annabel’s eyes now. I blink, the weight of what she’s just said settling on me like a blanket of silent snow.
He was driving too fast.
She can’t have known. There were no witnesses. I was the last person to see him alive – that awful confrontation in his car. Leo throwing every ugly accusation at me: that I’d lied to him, that I’d tricked him. And then, after he’d demanded that I leave and I stumbled out into the deserted street, he’d driven off.
The next anyone knew, he’d skidded off the road and, when the police got there, he was already dead. It was the rain, they said. Adverse weather conditions. And my bag – the bag with the recording unit running – was nowhere to be found.
Except: someone called the ambulance. Someone was there.
I meet her eyes and make myself speak.
‘What. Did. You. Do?’