I suddenly feel exposed out here. The dark surrounds me, fathomless, inscrutable. The only movement I can see is my breath leaving me in little huffs of vapour. It has just occurred to me that Miranda could be out here somewhere with me, watching from some hiding place. I think of that room from earlier, with the rifles. I must keep my wits about me. I wouldn’t put that much past her at this point. As a friend she can be bad enough. The thought of having her as an enemy is frankly terrifying.
I knock on the door of her cabin. No answer. I look up at the dark windows, and imagine her looking out, seeing me, smiling to herself.
‘Miranda,’ I call, ‘we need to talk.’ The cabin looks back at me blankly, mocking me.
‘I need to explain everything to you,’ I call. My voice seems to echo in the silence, reverberations coming back at me from far away, from the encircling mountains. ‘I’ll be waiting, in my cabin, if you want to talk.’
There’s no answer. Silence, like a held breath.
Back in my cabin Julien is sitting wrapped in a towel, huddled on the sofa, sipping neat from a bottle of Scotch. I think it might have been the complimentary one provided by the estate. I hadn’t touched it at all, but it is now more than half empty.
‘Julien.’ I try to prise it out of his grasp. He clings onto it, like a child to a toy. ‘Julien, you need to stop. You’re going to kill yourself if you drink any more.’
He shakes his head. ‘She’ll kill me first. She’ll take everything I’ve worked for. She’ll destroy me … you don’t understand.’
He looks completely pathetic, curled in the towel. Suddenly I’m almost repulsed by him. His broad, muscled chest looks ridiculous. Who has a body like that unless they’re incredibly vain? Before it had seemed exotic, so different to the men I had been with. And the flattery of him wanting me – that had been perhaps the biggest turn-on of all. Over the last six months I have been able to overlook the little things that rankled with me: his selfishness after we’d had sex, always running to the shower first, or always demanding that we did things his way, or failing to respond to any of my messages for several days and then becoming irate if I left one of his unreplied to for more than an hour. The excitement of it all – the subterfuge, the illicit rendezvous, and yes, the quality of the sex, had made them palatable.
Was that all it was? I ask myself, now. The real source of the excitement, beyond any chemistry, or physical attraction? The sheer disbelief that he wanted me, and not Miranda? Did I really envy her that much? Yes, a little voice says. Maybe I did.
NOW
2nd January 2019
HEATHER
Doug is right. It doesn’t look good for him. It seems that he may have been the last person here to see the guest alive. But I now feel oddly invested in his innocence. I just don’t think he did it.
It’s funny, a couple of days ago I knew so little of him. I wouldn’t have known whether I could trust him. Seeing those news results load, the horror of the headlines about him, had briefly seemed as good as a guilty sentence. But for some reason, since the vulnerability and honesty of his confessions about himself, I feel differently. He has bared his innermost, most shameful secrets to me, and yet, somehow, I find I can’t judge him too harshly for it.
And then there was that conversation overheard in the hallway. Two of the guests, at least, may not be as innocent in this as they appear. I only wish I hadn’t dislodged that sodding picture, that I had been able to hear more.
I enter the living room, and they all look up.
‘Are the police here yet?’ the woman called Samira asks, jostling the baby on her lap. Could it have been her in the corridor, the woman’s voice? I’m not sure. She was the one who alerted us to the disappearance in the first place. But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.
‘No,’ I say, ‘though they’re hoping it may be clearer by this afternoon.’
She nods, sullenly. They are all watching me, I know. I’d give a good deal to have the situation be reversed, so that I could observe them instead, watch them for any betraying anomalies, flickers of guilt. I go to the kettle, on autopilot, to make more tea, and I see we’ve run out already. At a rough calculation, that’s some fifty teabags in a day. There are more in the store. I shrug on my down jacket, my red hat, my hiking boots, and tramp out into the world of white, the snow squeaking with each step.
I unlock the big doors of the barn, unleashing a scent of dust and wood shavings and turpentine. On one side are all of our supplies: bottled water in case of a supply fault (it has happened more than once), sugar and packs of Nespresso pods and loo rolls and crates of beer. Life’s little necessities, even in this place.
Out here’s also where we have the feed from the CCTV camera on the gate, humming away on an ancient TV screen. There’s much better technology out there nowadays – I could get it all streamed to my computer in the office – but the boss is oddly stingy about some things. I glance at the display: the familiar image of the track. There’s so much snow that there’s barely any definition to the picture – everything it shows is white.
On the other side is all the stalking equipment: the camouflage gear, the walking boots, the binoculars. The neat row of hunting rifles. Doug’s military precision.
Except …
I blink, look again. Recount.
… Except that one of the rifles seems to be missing. One of the brackets is empty. I think there are normally ten. And now there are only nine.
I turn on the radio, still in the pocket of my jacket. My hand hovers over the transmit button – I’m about to call Doug, to ask him if there’s any reason for this absence. Has he, say, taken one of the rifles for something? Then I stop and think: Can I trust him? Should I really draw his attention to what I’ve noticed? Because perhaps he already knows. Perhaps he was the one who took it.
After all, whoever took the rifle must have had access to the store, which pretty much rules out one of the guests. There are only two other people who know the passcode. And the other left the estate on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve to spend it with his family.
I’m trying to decide what to do with this new knowledge. It’s not a reassuring thought, precisely, but it occurs to me that I’m not sure Doug would even need to take a rifle from here – I think he has his own. And maybe there have only ever been nine rifles. I rub my eyes, which are sore, gritty with tiredness. I’m so, so tired. Maybe I’m simply conjuring chimeras out of my own mind.
I grab the big box of tea. I won’t say anything to Doug, I decide. But I’ll keep it in mind, too. Just in case. As I pass the old CCTV monitor I glance at the screen displaying its unchanging snowy scene: the view from the gates. Our recordings might well be the most uneventful in the UK. It might as well be showing me a fixed image, if it weren’t for the flakes of snow falling listlessly past the lens, the seconds ticking over in the top-right-hand corner. An identical scene to when I checked it for any sign of the missing guest, seeing nothing more than a time lapse of the snow. I remember fast-forwarding through the frames: nothing, nothing, nothing, dizzy with the sameness of it all. And yet … a sudden quickening of my heartbeat, my body seeming to understand something even before my mind does. Nothing. But shouldn’t there have been … something? Shouldn’t I have seen, for example, a red truck – Iain’s truck – leaving the property on New Year’s Eve? He left on New Year’s Eve: this is what I’ve assumed the whole time. This is what I told the police.
But if I didn’t see him leave …
… Then he must be here. Somewhere, on the estate. It’s the only explanation.
My radio crackles. It’s Doug. ‘Where are you?’ he asks.
I think of that light I saw on New Year’s Eve, travelling up the flank of the Munro, towards the Old Lodge.
I think of the one other viable shelter on the estate, which Doug and I didn’t even bother checking because no one goes in there, because it’s locked. I suddenly know where I have to go. I think of how emphatically Iain has always told me never to go near it because of the danger. I think, too, of how he told me not to let the guests outside at night.