Chapter 30
THIRTY
This is only my second dead body, and the stillness is frightening.
It was different with Mick. He was the focus of a typical junkie tableau that I’d seen plenty of times before.
Ryan looks so out of place, lying behind the bar, staring up at nothing.
Even without the knife that’s sticking out of his chest, his presence here would be proof that something’s gone badly wrong.
I try to imagine how the killer lured him down here – how he felt in his last moments – but it turns my stomach, and I close my eyes instead.
The now irrefutable knowledge that there’s a killer on board the ship colours every thought in my head.
I find the same images looping through my brain.
The same feelings recur like the peaks and falls on a rollercoaster that goes round and round on a track that never ends.
The fact there’s an obvious culprit does little to slow it down.
When I can move again, I call to Ade to come.
“It could be suicide,” he says a minute later in a last, desperate attempt to ignore the truth. “He was kind of a sad guy.”
“Stop looking for easy solutions. Do you really think that Mick had an overdose, Sasha accidentally slipped overboard and Ryan couldn’t take it any longer and stabbed himself in the heart?”
He doesn’t answer the question. He just points to the handle sticking from Ryan’s chest and says, “That’s the ham knife from dinner.”
Why this would be the detail he latches on to, I can’t say.
The line isn’t delivered with any great feeling, and it reminds me of the clips I saw on the internet from the bad film he made.
I think about the weapons and combat training he would have had for it, and I’m very aware that he had just as much chance to kill Sasha and Ryan as anyone else.
Of course, I have no desire to confront him without witnesses present.
“We need to find Tom.” Ade pulls on my arm, as I’ve become frozen once more. “We’ll lock him away somewhere safe so that he can’t hurt anyone again, and then we can wait until the coastguard or whoever comes. No one else needs to die.”
“Do you think that…?” I try to keep the steady tone in my voice, but it’s all too much now.
“It’s probably safest for everyone if we leave the staff where they are for the moment, even if Ryan’s murder comes close to proving they weren’t involved in anything that’s happened.” He pauses a moment, then asks, “Are you all right, Jake?”
“That’s not important,” I tell him. “Let’s just find the others and shelter together.”
It’s not that I’ve recovered from the bloody sight we’ve just witnessed – when I saw the corpse, it made it feel as if the blood in my veins had been replaced with concrete.
I don’t know how long I took between stepping around the bar and leaving to fetch Ade, but I did what I had to do, and I’m trying to keep my head.
The problem is that we don’t know where Tom could be, and I’m not desperate to find him if he has another weapon. I look about for something to grab as we leave the bar, but there’s no handy ice pick or a safety axe. There’s no heavy ornament or conveniently placed Kalashnikov.
“The crossbows,” Ade says before my brain makes the obvious jump, and presumably his thoughts have followed a similar pattern to mine.
We walk back out to the platform, but I’ve learnt my lesson and grip the railing while Ade opens the store cupboard that’s set into the wall.
He hands out a bunch of arrows, and part of me thinks, I knew this would happen as soon as I saw there were unnecessarily dangerous weapons on board.
I feel like a total idiot stashing the projectiles in the big pockets of my oversized yellow waterproof, but then he hands the crossbow to me, and it doesn’t matter so much.
The image comes back to me of Tom standing with the two weapons in his hands when we were swimming here yesterday.
You could see the thought enter his mind that he was now officially dangerous.
Perhaps that was when he decided to kill his wife and do whatever it took to cover it up.
Was that why Ryan was murdered? To make it look as though something more complex was happening?
When we didn’t buy into the idea that Mick and Sasha’s deaths were both accidents, Tom went full serial killer.
“There’s one missing,” Ade sticks his head out of the cupboard to tell me. “There were two yesterday. Even if the crew had taken it to be fixed, it would end up back here.”
I flex my fingers as I adjust to the idea that someone may be hunting us. “You know how to handle a bow, though, right?”
We carefully mount the stairs, Ade with his bow and arrow, and me with my medieval upgrade.
It feels like the end of a Predator movie when all the big weapons have been depleted, and the scrappy hero is left to fight a supreme killer with little more than sticks and stones (and perhaps a big hole covered with leaves).
It’s hard to know whether we should split up or stay together, but Ade makes the decision for us.
In full commando mode, he points me along the right-hand corridor with two fingers, just like he did in that bad film of his.
If I do have to be trapped in my own private action movie, I’m glad there’s someone alongside me who has a little experience.
We rule out the lower deck, peeking through each door we come to before moving up a floor.
We find no sign of Tom, but there’s an obvious explanation we haven’t considered.
This time I’m the one making military hand signals as, using all the training I received playing Call of Duty, I strafe up the stairs to the main deck.
I already know which one is Tom’s suite, but I’m not so dumb as to pull the door open and take a crossbow bolt to the face.
I signal to Ade to cover me, then lie down on the floor with my weapon poised.
I thought I was afraid when I crept into the beach club, but that was nothing.
I never imagined there was a killer lying in wait for me there – never pictured myself being cut in two by an arrow, but that’s a far more likely outcome now.
As I ready myself, I realise that, if by some miracle I survive, I am going to cry and laugh so much at the idea of what we’re trying to do that I will need therapy for the rest of my life.
I take a deep breath and motion for Ade to push the sliding door aside. He nods, flicks it open, then stands away from the doorframe with his back to the wall. I have to admit that he’s pretty good at this.
My finger is on the trigger, my breath suspended. Nothing comes shooting out of the darkness at head height, and so I point to Ade to tell him he’s up.
Me? he mouths, and he’s suddenly not so much of a hero after all.
I shrug back, as there’s no particular reason for him to go first.
He puts his finger to his lips, and we listen. It takes me a moment to separate the waves breaking against the hull from the soft sound of breathing, but then I hear a noise that’s more like a snort, and it sounds like Tom is asleep in there.
My brain does a short calculation to work out the possibility that, if he’s faking it and waiting for us to come in, he’ll have thought to cover the ground.
There’s little light in front of the door, so I cross my fingers that he won’t notice me slithering inside.
I wonder if real soldiers ever feel a bit silly doing this sort of thing as they carry out a mission.
Perhaps that’s what their years of training are really all about: gaining the ability to take themselves seriously.
Elbow in front of elbow, I pull myself forward while trying to make sure I don’t accidentally fire the crossbow.
It’s more difficult than I imagined, and as soon as I’m inside, my fear goes shooting higher.
I wish I knew a mantra to keep myself calm.
I hope I don’t get murdered. I hope I don’t get murdered.
I hope I don’t get murdered, doesn’t quite cut it.
Hidden in the shadows a few feet from the bed, I stop to listen again.
I’m glad that the killer under the covers doesn’t stir, but I should have told Ade to flick on the light switch on my signal so that we could get a good sense of Tom’s position when he wasn’t expecting it.
I can make out a shape rising and falling under the duvet, but my eyes haven’t adjusted to the darkness, and it’s hard to know whether I’m just seeing what I want to.
There’s no such thing as silence on a diesel-powered yacht, but between each breath, it comes pretty close.
“Ade, light!” I bark as I jump to my feet and prepare to fire.
With the room bathed in a warm amber glow, Tom is curled up on his side beneath the quilted cover and barely stirs.
Ade waits a few seconds before peeking around the doorframe.
He steps inside with his bow pointed at the lump under the duvet.
I’m still not convinced that we’re safe, and so I walk to the opposite side of the bed and tug the blankets off in a magician’s reveal.
There is no hidden weapon there: no crossbow or knife stashed for an attack, but it does wake the sleeping beast.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Tom turns to grab the duvet back, then notices what I’m holding. “No, Jake, don’t do this. Please.”
His voice is high and, guilty or not, he’s clearly terrified.
“Did you kill Ryan?” Ade demands, and Tom turns to discover that there’s more than one weapon trained on him.
“Ryan?” He pushes himself up to sitting, and I can tell that he’s still barely awake. “Ryan’s dead?”
Ade doesn’t glance across at me or doubt himself. He fires off another question and inhabits the role of a vengeful Robin Hood that, were he to be cast as such in a film, would seriously irritate massive swathes of the internet.
“What are you doing in here?”
“I was sleeping!” Tom tries to shout, but the words emerge as a self-pitying moan. “I couldn’t stand out in the rain any longer. I tried to find Sasha and failed. I let her down as I always do, so I came back here and cried like a pathetic little kid.”
“Why should we believe you?” I try, but there’s no real answer to this, so he continues what he was saying.
“I wanted to believe that she was still alive…” Before he can finish this sentence, the tears return, and his voice becomes chopped and indistinct. “I already miss her so much.”
He looks from one to the other of us, and I lower the crossbow as his pleading gaze reaches me.
“Fine.” Ade follows suit. “Get up. The only thing left to do is stay together in one place and wait until someone comes to rescue us. At least that way the killer can’t get us alone.
” He sounds perfectly miserable, but the tension has drained away, and I can relax just a little.
It feels as if I’m breathing normally for the first time in hours, but we’re not out of danger yet.
“Where’s Clara?” Tom reluctantly swings his feet off the bed and onto the floor. “I haven’t seen her since she left the staff dining room.”
“She said on the phone that she was going to hide somewhere safe,” Ade responds, but he sounds less sure of himself now.
“I’ll try her room again. You look around upstairs,” I tell them from the doorway. “Whatever you do, stay together. If one of you killed Ryan, I have no desire to be next.”
I expect them to say the same thing back to me, but they’re oddly meek for once and trundle off to do as instructed.
I watch them go and realise that my doubt has returned.
If Tom didn’t kill Ryan, then Ade could be to blame.
He was gone long enough to have run to the end of the boat and stabbed his former fan to death.
But then Clara could just as easily be scuttling about the place murdering our friends out of some secret grudge she’s never revealed.
As if I’ve woken from a dream, I realise there’s something even more important that I’ve been neglecting for the last hour.
I reach the corridor where we have our rooms and turn to the door before mine.
It slides across just fine, but the ridiculously heavy mattress is blocking the way.
It’s wedged in at an awkward angle, which makes it difficult to get past, but I eventually manage to push the top forward just enough to squeeze my body through the gap.
I tell myself that this would have prevented the killer from taking Bridget by surprise, but my hope doesn’t last long.
She is laid out on her side with an empty bottle of vodka and a popped pack of pills right beside her.
Everything inside me starts to scream. From the voice in my head to the muscles in the soles of my feet, my body is suddenly in pain and mourning at the same time.
And as I drop to my knees, my breathing sounds as if it is coming from somewhere else – from someone else.
I doubt I’ve felt true panic before, not like this. I have no control over my body, nor the will to move ever again. I fall to my knees, and a pitiful moan escapes my lips. My arm extends of its own volition, but I can do nothing else.
I want to go to her. I want to save the girl I’ve always loved, but she’s not breathing. I can see from the way she’s lying there that I came too late. The one person here I would have given my life to protect is gone.