I’m not sure what compelled me to do what I did. I saw the whole scene playing out before me, as though at half the speed, and I realised that there was time, and that I had the element of surprise. I could do something. I didn’t even really think about the danger to myself, there wasn’t time for it. I didn’t even think about it as the bullet entered my abdomen. It was only when I lay on the ground, winded, and the pain arrived in a wave so intense that I was convinced I had to be dying. But now I’m wondering if it was some memory of Jamie always putting the lives of strangers before his own that impelled me.
Iain is all right. In fact, apparently he’s on the same ward as me, somewhere. With a police escort, naturally. According to Doug he was in so much pain that he sobbed out his confession when Doug brought the police up to the Old Lodge. It seems he was a cog in a much larger machine: the drugs came from a lab in Iceland. Ingvar and Kristin? Not their real names, obviously. Those backpacks had been filled with something much more valuable than hiking equipment. The train guard at the station was paid more than double his own salary to turn a blind eye. A few innocuous suitcases unloaded at the other end, delivered to the boss’s members’ clubs. And New Year’s Eve the best time to do it: everyone distracted, emergency services stretched to capacity.
The one turning these cogs, of course, was the boss. It turned out he and Iain went a long way back. As a young man, Iain had served a long sentence in prison for car theft, and had come out without any options. Finally he had managed to get a job as the bouncer of a rather upmarket club in London. The owner of the club had approached him with an offer: a cushy job, better pay, a new start. The drugs, it turned out, had been the boss’s main source of money all along. Not the members’ clubs, nor the Lodge – though both had provided a nice blind, and both were integral to the product’s journey from Icelandic lab to the well-heeled end users. They caught him sipping an orange juice in the first-class lounge at Heathrow, en route to skipping the country.
Quite a coup for the Fort William police station. A murder and a drugs bust, all from the same serene almost-wilderness. A wilderness that, I’ve decided (and not just because of the murder and the drugs bust), isn’t for me. I’ll miss my morning swim in the loch, of course. And – a surprise even to me, this – I’ll miss my taciturn co-worker. Doug’s agreed to come and spend the weekend with me once I’ve settled back in to life in Edinburgh. I’ve bought myself a guest sofa bed, which may or may not be used. He has his own stuff to work out first, his own journey to go on. Both of us, I think, have been living in limbo. Both of us running from death, and in so doing fleeing from everything else. Now it is time to get on with the difficult business of living.
KATIE
I’m due to give birth in a few weeks. There was a worry that I might lose the baby, after being tackled to the ground like that – but she was fine. She: I’m going to have a girl. I’m working right up to my due date. I’ve been working hard, putting in longer hours and operating on less sleep than I should have had in my condition. But it’s been a distraction. My whole pregnancy has been tangled up with my grief for Miranda. Yes, grief. I know it might be almost hard to believe, considering what a terrible friend I had been to her of late. And the way she could be with me. It’s true, I didn’t always like Miranda. Sometimes I positively hated her. But I did love her. That’s what happens when you have known someone for such a long time. You see all their faults, yes, but you know their best qualities too – and Miranda had so many of those. No one could light up a party like her. No one would offer her best dress to borrow at the drop of a hat. And there aren’t many popular girls of thirteen who will stake all their social credit on the rescue of an outsider. She was, in her way, utterly unique. No one could be a fiercer ally. And yes, no one could be a more formidable enemy.
Apart from, perhaps, one person.
Emma was spectacular at the trial, very contrite and grief-stricken and very – though not too – well-dressed. Gone was the resemblance to Miranda, the seductive blonde, the femme fatale. I suppose you don’t particularly want to go for the fatale look when you’re on trial for murder. Her hair had been dyed back to a very modest shade of mouse, she wore a high-necked, almost Victorian pie-crust blouse: she looked like something between a choir girl and a schoolteacher. She wept as she explained that Miranda had started taunting her about her condition, despite her attempts to explain. Oh, she hadn’t meant to strangle Miranda, she said. There had been a tussle, yes, after Miranda had said some terrible – unforgivable – things. It was self-defence. Miranda had been drunk and vengeful, had come at her fighting tooth and nail. She’d shoved her away, and then, realising the consequences of the push, had tried to save Miranda by grabbing onto the nearest thing within reach … her neck.
No, doesn’t sound very likely to me – and the prosecution didn’t think so either. It should be impossible not to convict on the basis of so much evidence. But we live in a post-truth world. The jury lapped it up. They simply could not convict her of murder. Not this well-spoken, quiet, meek person who looked just like the daughter of a friend, or a girl they remembered from school. People like her didn’t commit murder. Not proper murder. They simply had unfortunate accidents.
The papers compared it to the case of that other Oxford alumnus, a few years ago, who stabbed her boyfriend with a breadknife. People like them just don’t serve time. The defence, meanwhile, gleefully painted a picture of Miranda as an unhappy person: someone whose life was falling apart beneath a glossy facade. A big drinker. A drug-taker – she, after all, had supplied our group with drugs on the first night of the holiday. Emma, importantly, had abstained from taking anything. And Miranda was prone to erratic, bullying behaviour, the defence claimed: the way she’d forced Mark to drink that champagne, coerced me into the freezing loch. Controlling, manic, unstable – she’d been seeing a psychotherapist, hadn’t she?
Manslaughter, that was the charge. And a four-year sentence. She – this woman who pushed my oldest friend to her death and who tried to kill me – will be out in four years’ time. I try not to think about it.
As for the rest of them – apart from Nick and Bo, of course – I was right in suspecting we had nothing in common. Miranda had really been the link. And history, I suppose: the laziness of habit. I am not here to try to acquit myself. I behaved no better than any of them, and far worse than some. But isn’t that just part of the problem? Old friends don’t challenge us on our faults. I have not been a good person. I needed something to show me that. I just wish it hadn’t been this.
The group has fragmented now. The inner circle has imploded from within. There is no centre to it, no high priestess. Samira and Giles are, I imagine, getting along very happily in Balham with all their NCT-class friends, who don’t take drugs or down bottles of champagne, or, for that matter, kill each other.
Nick and Bo are moving back to New York. Mark has already – make of this what you will – met another almost-but-not-quite Miranda substitute at the agency where he works. Julien’s path has been the most radical. He has gone off for a detox in Goa for a month – though with the lithe yoga instructor at the City gym he used to visit, so perhaps there’s more to it than a desire to become a Zen master. He’s told me he’ll be back in time for my due date … worse luck. If I could have this baby without ever having to see him again I don’t think I’d particularly mind. I’ll be for ever linked to him, now. My child’s father. Not quite the clean break I would have wanted – from him, and, by association, from the whole group. Still, at least I never have to go on another bloody holiday with any of them.