She pushes me away. ‘Aren’t you listening? I already told you why! There’s no way you’d have gone along with it. I wanted to do it so that I could get rid of him without casting suspicion on myself. If I am in theory dead, that means I can’t be a suspect! Don’t you see? It’s perfect. And you wouldn’t have helped me kill him, I knew that. You’d have talked me out of it. But this way we can have it all. And seeing how weird you’re being about it even now it’s done and you can’t do anything about it, I can see I was right not to tell you from the start.’

She is screaming and crying now and part of me wants to leave her to it because I still can’t believe she killed someone, and it feels like she is angry at me because she knows I wouldn’t have done it for her. But then I think about what he put her through, how he used her all those years ago and all my anger is directed towards him instead.

How dare he hurt her like that! How fucking dare he! She was right to kill him.

‘It’s OK, Lola,’ I soothe. ‘It’s all going to be OK. I’m going to help you.’

PART NINE

60

Alice

28 January 2022, 12:00

The Caribbean

Someone is stealing food from the fridge. When the guests are on board, the food stores are very carefully regulated and detailed inventories kept – it’s the only way you can operate when you have to prepare several thousand meals a day for around six thousand guests, and that’s before you’re even thinking about the crew.

But with so few of us here right now, while I need to make sure there are enough supplies to keep us going until the next bunkering, it’s not necessary to be so exact about it all. However, I like to think that I keep everyone pretty well-fed on the limited budget available, and there should be no reason for anyone to go hungry. There are 24-hour snack stations for the crew so they can help themselves to things like fruit and crisps. There’s no reason for people to be in my fridges and store cupboards, but it seems that someone has been. Whereas many of the kitchens are staffed almost 24/7 during a cruise, to provide a constant flow of delicious offerings for our gluttonous clients, on a lay-up, crew meals are served at set times only. This means there are large tranches of the day when the kitchens are deserted.