Cole

Cole is a photographer among the guests aboard the Aurora Borealis, but his importance extends beyond documenting the voyage: his camera becomes a potential threat to the carefully maintained impersonation of Anne Bullmer. Although Cole is only briefly present in the supplied scenes, the later revelations show that his photographs could have distinguished the real Anne from the woman replacing her and could have connected Richard Bullmer and Carrie to the crime.

Identity and Role

Cole is identified as Mr. Lederer, the photographer associated with a planned presentation on the northern lights. The presentation was intended to combine Lord Bullmer’s talk with Cole’s photographs, but it was postponed after Richard Bullmer was called away to an emergency and Cole injured his hand. His professional role places him among the selected guests and makes his camera a natural source of visual records aboard the ship.

Cole is also described as absent from a later dinner gathering, alongside Richard Bullmer. His absence is treated as part of the shifting pattern of missing guests: Chloe Jenssen is said to be ill in her room, while Anne Bullmer is present and attempts to explain a conspicuous bruise as a consequence of chemotherapy. Within this atmosphere of illness, absence, and managed appearances, Cole’s missing presence matters because his photographic work could preserve details that the conspirators needed to erase or control.

Photography and the Cover-Up

Richard Bullmer had explicitly told Cole not to take photographs of Anne. At first, this restriction could be interpreted as consideration for a woman who was self-conscious about her appearance after cancer treatment. Anne is presented publicly as gaunt, pale, bald beneath a scarf, and visibly altered by illness; her drawn face, absent eyebrows, and skull-like fragility invite both pity and the assumption that she would not want to be photographed.

The later explanation transforms that apparent courtesy into evidence of deliberate concealment. Richard did not want compromising photographs for Anne’s friends and family to examine after the voyage. Since no one aboard had known Anne before the trip, the impersonator could rely on strangers remembering only a general impression rather than exact facial features. A photograph, however, would make the substitution materially testable. Cole’s camera therefore represents a form of unwanted memory: it could hold an image after the people who witnessed it had been persuaded to doubt their own recollections.

Cole’s photograph was especially dangerous because it captured Carrie in Anne’s clothes. Carrie later explains that Richard told her Cole had such a photograph, and used it to persuade her that the only safe course was to dispose of Anne’s body and continue the deception. The photograph thus becomes part of Richard’s coercive story to Carrie: he presents its existence as proof that both of them would be exposed as participants in a premeditated plot. Whether or not the image itself is shown, its presence in the explanation reveals why Cole’s work had to be restricted and why the camera became an object of criminal significance.

Connection to Anne Bullmer’s Identity

Cole’s importance is sharpened by the contrast between Anne’s public appearance and Carrie’s transformed appearance. When the two women are compared, Anne’s dark eyes and high, jutting cheekbones remain recognizable, but the scarf, bald scalp, pale skin, and missing eyebrows make her seem prematurely aged and sick. Hair and pencilled eyebrows radically alter Carrie’s face, making the woman who had looked ill and near death appear young, healthy, and alive.

The deception depends on the assumption that the passengers had not studied Anne closely. Richard had even arranged for her features not to be preserved in photographs. Cole’s camera could defeat that assumption by fixing the visual difference between the real woman and her substitute. In this sense, Cole is not merely a background guest with a technical assignment; he is an unwitting custodian of the identity that the conspiracy is trying to manufacture.

Narrative Significance

Cole’s role illustrates the novel’s broader concern with the erasure of evidence and the instability of perception. Anne’s illness supplies a convincing social explanation for her altered appearance, while the absence of photographs prevents others from comparing the suffering woman seen publicly with the healthier-looking figure produced through disguise. The same medical signs that attract sympathy also become resources for impersonation, and the camera stands on the opposite side of that process as a potentially objective record.

Cole is consequently important less through direct action than through what his presence makes possible. His photograph gives Richard a means of frightening Carrie, while the prohibition against photographing Anne helps preserve the fiction that she is still alive. Once the truth is understood—that Anne died before the voyage had properly begun and that Carrie impersonated her—the earlier instruction to Cole is reclassified from social tact to an element of the cover-up. Photography becomes the silent witness that the conspirators most need to prevent from speaking.