The Woman in Cabin 10 (2 page)

- CHAPTER 2 -

I
t took me two hours to prize my way out of my bedroom. I didn’t have a landline, so I had no way of calling for help, and the window was covered by security bars. I broke my best nail file, hammering away at the latch, but at last I got the door open and I ventured out into the narrow hallway. There are only four rooms in my flat—kitchen, living room, bedroom, and tiny bathroom—and you can pretty much see the full extent of it from outside my bedroom, but I couldn’t stop myself from peering into each doorway, even checking the cupboard in the hallway where I keep my hoover. Making sure he was really gone.

My head was pounding and my hands were shaking as I made my way outside and up the steps to my neighbor’s front door, and I found myself looking over my shoulder into the dark street as I waited for her to answer. It was around four a.m., I guessed, and it took a long time and a lot of banging to wake her up. I heard grumbling, over the sound of Mrs. Johnson’s feet clumping down her stairs, and her face when she cracked open the door was a mixture of bleary confusion and fright, but when she saw me huddled on the doorstep in my dressing gown, with blood on my face and on my hands, her expression changed in an instant and she took off the chain.

“Oh my days! Whatever’s happened?”

“I got burgled.” It was hard to talk. I don’t know if it was the chilly autumn air, or the shock, but I had started shivering convulsively and my teeth chattered so hard I had a momentary horrible image of them shattering in my head. I pushed the thought away.

“You’re bleedin’!” Her face was full of distress. “Oh, bless my soul, come in, come in!”

She led the way into the paisley-carpeted entrance to her maisonette, which was small and dark and grimly overheated, but right now felt like a sanctuary.

“Sit down, sit down.” She pointed to a red plush sofa and then went creakily to her knees and began to fiddle with the gas fire. The gas popped and flared, and I felt the heat rise a degree as she got painfully to her feet again. “I’ll make you some hot tea.”

“I’m fine, honestly, Mrs. Johnson. Do you think—”

But she was shaking her head sternly.

“There’s nothin’ to beat hot sweet tea when you’ve had a shock.”

So I sat, my shaky hands clasped around my knees, while she rattled around in the tiny kitchen and then came back with two mugs on a tray. I reached out for the closest and took a sip, wincing at the heat against the cut on my hand. It was so sweet I could barely taste the dissolving blood in my mouth, which I supposed was a blessing.

Mrs. Johnson didn’t drink but just watched me, her forehead wrinkled in distress.

“Did he . . .” Her voice faltered. “Did he
hurt
you?”

I knew what she meant. I shook my head, but I took another scalding sip before I could trust myself to speak.

“No. He didn’t touch me. He slammed a door in my face—that’s the cut on my cheek. And then I cut my hand trying to get out of the bedroom. He’d locked me in.”

I had a jolting flash of myself battering at the lock with a nail file and a pair of scissors. Judah was always teasing about using the proper tools for the job—you know, not undoing a screw with the tip of a dinner knife, or prizing off a bike tire using a garden trowel. Only last weekend he’d laughed at my attempt to fix my showerhead with duct tape, and spent a whole afternoon painstakingly mending it with epoxy resin. He was away in Ukraine and I couldn’t think about him right now. If I did, I’d cry, and if I cried now, I might never stop.

“Oh, you poor love.”

I swallowed.

“Mrs. Johnson, thank you for the tea—but I really came to ask, can I use your phone? He took my mobile, so I’ve got no way of calling the police.”

“Of course, of course. Drink your tea, and then it’s over there.” She indicated a doily-covered side table, with what was probably the last turn-dial phone in London outside an Islington vintage-retro boutique. Obediently I finished my tea and then I picked up the phone. For a moment my finger hovered over the nine, but then I sighed. He was gone. What could they reasonably do now? It was no longer an emergency, after all.

Instead, I dialed 101 for nonemergency response and waited to be put through.

And I sat and thought about the insurance I didn’t have, and the reinforced lock I hadn’t installed, and the mess tonight had become.

I
was still thinking about that, hours later, as I watched the emergency locksmith replace the crappy bolt-on latch of my front door with a proper deadlock, and listened to his lecture on home security and the joke that was my back door.

“That panel’s nuffing but MDF, love. It’d take one kick to bash it in. Want me to show you?”

“No,” I said hastily. “No, thanks. I’ll get it fixed. You don’t do doors, do you?”

“Nah, but I got a mate who does. I’ll give you his number before I go. Meantime, you get your hubby to whack a good piece of eighteen-mil plywood over that panel. You don’t want a repeat of last night.”

“No,” I agreed. Understatement of the century.

“Mate in the police says a quarter of all burglaries are repeats. Same guys come back for more.”

“Great,” I said thinly. Just what I needed to hear.

“Eighteen-mil. Want me to write it down for your husband?”

“No, thanks. I’m not married.” And even in spite of my ovaries, I
can
remember a simple two-digit number.

“Aaaah, right, gotcha. Well, there you go, then,” he said, as if that proved something. “This doorframe ain’t nothing to write home about, neither. You want one of them London bars to reinforce it. Otherwise you can have the best lock in the business, but if they kick it out the frame you’re back in the same place as before. I got one in the van that might fit. Do you know them things I’m talking about?”

“I know what they are,” I said wearily. “A piece of metal that goes over the lock, right?” I suspected he was milking me for all the business he could get, but I didn’t care at this point.

“Tell you what”—he stood up, shoving his chisel in his back pocket—“I’ll do the London bar, and I’ll chuck in a piece of ply over the back door for free. I got a bit in the van about the right size. Chin up, love. He ain’t getting back in
this
way, at any rate.”

For some reason the words weren’t reassuring.

A
fter he’d gone, I made myself a tea and paced the flat. I felt like Delilah after a tomcat broke in through the cat flap and pissed in the hallway—she had prowled every room for hours, rubbing herself up against bits of furniture, peeing into corners, reclaiming her space.

I didn’t go as far as peeing on the bed, but I felt the same sense of space invaded, a need to reclaim what had been violated.
Violated?
said a sarcastic little voice in my head.
Puh-lease, you drama queen.

But I did feel violated. My little flat felt ruined—soiled and unsafe. Even describing it to the police had felt like an ordeal—yes, I saw the intruder; no, I can’t describe him. What was in the bag? Oh, just, you know, my life: money, mobile phone, driver’s license, medication, pretty much everything of use from my mascara right through to my travel card.

The brisk impersonal tone of the police operator’s voice still echoed in my head.

“What kind of phone?”

“Nothing valuable,” I said wearily. “Just an old iPhone. I can’t remember the model, but I can find out.”

“Thanks. Anything you can remember in terms of the exact make and serial number might help. And you mentioned medication—what kind, if you don’t mind me asking?”

I was instantly on the defensive.

“What’s my medical history got to do with this?”

“Nothing.” The operator was patient, irritatingly so. “It’s just some pills have got a street value.”

I knew the anger that flooded through me at his questions was unreasonable—he was only doing his job. But the burglar was the person who’d committed the crime. So why did I feel like I was the one being interrogated?

I was halfway to the living room with my tea when there was a banging at the door—so loud in the silent, echoing flat that I tripped and then froze, half standing, half crouching in the doorway.

I had a horrible jarring flash of a hooded face, of hands in latex gloves.

It was only when the door thudded again that I looked down and realized that my cup of tea was now lying smashed on the hallway tiles and that my feet were soaked in rapidly cooling liquid.

The door banged again.

“Just a minute!” I yelled, suddenly furious and close to tears. “I’m coming! Will you stop banging the bloody door!”

“Sorry, miss,” the policeman said when I finally opened the door. “Wasn’t sure if you’d heard.” And then, seeing the puddle of tea and the smashed shards of my cup: “Crikey, what’s been going on here then? Another break-in? Ha-ha!”

I
t was the afternoon by the time the policeman finished taking his report, and when he left, I opened up my laptop. It had been in the bedroom with me, and it was the only bit of tech the burglar hadn’t taken. Aside from my work, which was mostly not backed up, it had all my passwords on it, including—and I cringed as I thought about it—a file helpfully named “Banking stuff.” I didn’t actually have my pin numbers listed. But pretty much everything else was there.

As the usual deluge of e-mails dropped into my in-box, I caught sight of one headed “Planning on showing up today ;)?” and I realized with a jolt that I’d completely forgotten to contact
Velocity
.

I thought about e-mailing, but in the end, I fetched out the twenty-pound note I kept in the tea caddy for emergency cab money and walked to the dodgy phone shop at the tube station. It took some haggling, but eventually the guy sold me a cheap pay-as-you-go plus SIM card for fifteen pounds and I sat in the café opposite and phoned the assistant features editor, Jenn, who has the desk opposite mine.

I told her what happened, making it sound funnier and more farcical than it really had been. I dwelled heavily on the image of me chipping away at the lock with a nail file and didn’t tell her about the gloves, or the general sense of powerless terror, or the horribly vivid flashbacks that kept ambushing me just as I was rummaging for change, or stirring tea, or thinking of something else completely.

“Shit.” Her voice at the end of the crackly line was full of horror. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, more or less. But I won’t be in today, I’ve got to clear up the flat.” Although, in actual fact, it wasn’t that bad. He’d been commendably neat. For, you know, a criminal.

“God, Lo, you poor thing. Listen, do you want me to get someone else to cover you on this northern lights thing?”

For a minute I had no idea what she was talking about—then I remembered. The
Aurora
. A boutique super-luxury cruise liner traveling around the Norwegian fjords, and somehow, I still wasn’t quite sure how, I had been lucky enough to snag one of the handful of press passes on its maiden voyage.

It was a huge perk—in spite of working for a travel magazine, my normal beat was cutting and pasting press releases and finding images for articles sent back from luxury destinations by my boss, Rowan. It was Rowan who had been supposed to go, but unfortunately, after saying yes she had discovered that pregnancy didn’t agree with her—hyperemesis, apparently—and the cruise had landed in my lap like a big present, fraught with responsibility and possibilities. It was a vote of confidence from her, giving it to me when there were more senior people she could have buttered up, and I knew if I played my cards right on this trip, it would be a big point in my favor when it came to jockeying for Rowan’s maternity cover and maybe—just maybe—getting that promotion she’d been promising for the last few years.

It was also this weekend. Sunday, in fact. I’d be leaving in two days.

“
No
,” I said, surprising myself with the firmness in my voice. “No, I definitely don’t want to pull out. I’m fine.”

“Are you sure? What about your passport?”

“It was in my bedroom; he didn’t find it.” Thank God.

“Are you
absolutely
sure?” she said again, and I could hear the concern in her voice. “This is a big deal—not just for you, for the mag I mean. If you don’t feel up to it, Rowan wouldn’t want you—”

“I am up to it,” I said, cutting her off. There was no way I was letting this opportunity slip through my fingers. If I did, it might be the last one I had. “I promise. I really want to do this, Jenn.”

“Okay . . .” she said, almost reluctantly. “Well, in that case, full steam ahead, eh? They sent through a press pack this morning, so I’ll courier that across along with your train tickets. I’ve got Rowan’s notes somewhere; I think the main thing is to do a really nice puff piece on the boat, because she’s hoping to get them on board as advertisers, but there should be some interesting people among the other guests, so if you can get anything else done in the way of profiles, so much the better.”

“Sure.” I grabbed a pen from the counter of the café and began taking notes on a paper napkin. “And remind me what time it leaves?”

“You’re catching the ten thirty train from King’s Cross—but I’ll put it all in the press pack.”

“That’s fine. And thanks, Jenn.”

“No worries,” she said. Her voice was a little wistful, and I wondered if she’d been planning to step into the breach herself. “Take care, Lo. And ’bye.”

I
t was still just about light as I trudged slowly home. My feet hurt, my cheek ached, and I wanted to go home and sink into a long, hot bath.

The door of my basement flat was bathed in shadow as it always was, and I thought once again that I must get a security light, if only so that I could see my own keys in my handbag, but even in the dimness I could see the splintered wood where he’d forced the lock. The miracle was that I hadn’t heard him.
Well, what do you expect, you were drunk, after all
, said the nasty little voice in my head.

But the new deadlock felt reassuringly solid as it clunked back, and inside I locked it shut again, kicked off my shoes, and walked wearily down the hall to the bathroom, stifling a yawn as I set the taps running and slumped onto the toilet to pull off my tights. Next I began to unbutton my top . . . but then I stopped.