The Hunting Party

by Lucy Foley

  It’s even cooler now; our mingled breath clouds the air. There are ribbons of mist hanging over the loch, but around us the air is very clear, and when I look up it’s as though the cold has somehow sharpened the light of the stars. As we stumble along the path to the Lodge, I happen to look over towards the sauna, where I saw the second statue, earlier, the one that had been facing towards us. But, funny thing, though I search for it in the light thrown from the building, assuming it must be hidden in shadow, I can’t see it. The statue is gone.

  NOW

  2nd January 2019

  HEATHER

  As I tramp through the snow, trying to step in Doug’s big footprints, I’m thinking of the guests, sitting about in their cabins and wondering: not knowing yet.

  Unless … I push the thought away. I can’t let my mind race to conclusions. But if Doug is right, there’s something more sinister at play. And something had gone wrong between them all, that was clear. There had been a ‘disagreement’, that was how they all put it when they came to tell me about the disappearance.

  It would be easy to say, with hindsight, that I had a sense of foreboding three days ago, when they all arrived. I didn’t see this coming. But I did feel something.

  My Jamie was fascinated by the idea of the ‘lizard brain’. Maybe it was something to do with his job. He saw people on the edge, acting purely on instinct: the father who ran from a burning house before saving his children, or, conversely, the one who shielded his wife and baby from a blaze and suffered third-degree burns over half of his body. It’s all down to the amygdala – a tiny nodule, hidden amongst the little grey cells, the root of our most instinctive actions. It’s behind the selfish urge to grab for the biggest cookie, the comfiest seat. It’s what alerts you to danger, before you even consciously know of a threat. Without it, a laboratory mouse will run straight into the jaws of a cat.

  Jamie believed that people are basically civilised animals. That the essential urges are hidden beneath a layer of social gloss; stifled, controlled. But at times of even fairly minor stress, the animal within has a go at breaking through. Once he was stuck just outside Edinburgh on a train for four hours, because of an electrical fault. ‘You saw straight away which people would eat you,’ he told me, ‘without any hesitation, if you were stuck on a lifeboat together. There was a man who was hammering on the driver’s cabin after only a few minutes, bright red in the face. He was like a caged animal. He looked at the rest of us like he was just waiting for one of us to tell him to shut up … then he’d have an excuse to lose it completely.’

  That’s the thing, you see. Some people, given just the right amount of pressure, taken out of their usual, comfortable environments, don’t need much encouragement at all to become monsters. And sometimes you just get a strong sense about people, and you can’t explain it; you simply know it, in some deeper part of yourself. That’s the lizard brain, too.

  So I find myself, now, returning to three days ago, the evening they all arrived. My first, animal impressions.

  The Highland Dinner on the first night of the stay is one of the promises made by the brochure. But every time we host it, I think the guests would be quite happy to do without. It always seems to take on the atmosphere of an enforced occasion, like a state dinner. I’m sure it’s just another means of extracting money from them. The mark-up on the food, even accounting for the fact that the ‘best local ingredients’ are used, is huge. I’ve also wondered if it’s a way of keeping the community onside, because local lads and lasses are employed as the waiting staff, and all the ingredients are bought from nearby suppliers; save the venison, which comes from here.

  I have read the headlines from when the boss first bought the place – from the family who had owned it for generations – articles complaining about the ‘elitist prices’, the ‘barring of local people from their own land’ – there’s a right to roam in the Highlands, which the old laird had always upheld, but the boss had fences and threatening signs put up. He claims they are to deter poachers but, funny thing, apparently that wasn’t so much of a problem under the previous owner. Maybe the poachers hadn’t got themselves organised, weaponised, hadn’t realised the healthy demand for venison and mounted stags’ heads. But I think there might be another angle to the deer killings that happen now. In the vein of a lesson taught, something taken back.

  Once, in our nearest shop in Kinlochlaggan (still over an hour away), I happened to tell the shopkeeper where it was that I worked. ‘You seem nice enough, lass,’ she said, ‘but it’s a nasty place. Foreign money.’ (By which she meant, I presume, the boss’s Englishness, and the fact that the guests often come up from England, or from further afield.) ‘One of these days,’ she told me, ‘they’ll pay the proper price for keeping people from what’s theirs.’ I remembered then the theory I’d heard about the Old Lodge, the one I don’t tell guests: that the fire hadn’t been started by the gamekeeper, but by a disgruntled local, slighted by the laird.

  If the Highland Dinner is meant to stem this ill will towards the place, I’m not sure it has worked. If anything, the waiting staff probably return home with tales of the guests’ bad behaviour. I remember a stag party where a drunk – but not that drunk – best man groped a very young waitress as she bent to retrieve a dropped napkin. Guests have passed out in their plates, succumbing to too much of the Glencorrin single malt. Some have vomited at the table, in full view of the staff.

  The London group of guests would be better behaved than the stag party, I was sure. There was a baby among them, so surely that meant something, even if the parents weren’t joining us (the mother had asked for their food to be brought to them in their cabin). That left seven of them. The dark-haired man, the tall blonde. Julien and Miranda. A perfectly matched pair, the most beautiful, even the poshest names of the lot. Then there was the thin, sleek, auburn-haired man with the architect’s glasses – Nick – and his American boyfriend, Bo. The third couple: Mark, and Emma. He might almost have been good-looking, but his eyes were too close together, like a small predator’s, and his top half was disproportionately heavy, lending him the unnatural appearance of an action figure. I found myself thinking she was like a budget version of the taller blonde; dark hair at the roots, a roll of flesh showing at the top of her jeans where her top had ridden up. I was surprised at myself. I’m not, as a rule, a judgemental person. But even if you don’t have much interaction with other human beings – as I do not – it turns out that the instinct to judge one another, that basic human trait, does not leave us. And the resemblance was un-ignorable. Her hair was dyed the same shade, the clothes were of a type, and she’d even made up her eyes in the same way, little flecks of black at the corners. While they made her friend’s eyes look large and catlike, they only served to emphasise the smallness of her own.

  Then there was the last one, Katie. The odd one out. I almost missed her at first. She was standing so still, so quiet, in the shadows at the corner of the room – almost as though she wanted to disappear into them. She didn’t match the others, somehow. Her skin was sallow, and there were large purple shadows beneath her eyes. Her clothes were too formal, as though she were going on a business trip and had turned up here by mistake.

  Normally, though I have to learn the names, I prefer to think of the people who stay here as simply the ‘guests’: guest 1, guest 2, et cetera. I’d prefer not to think of them as individual people with lives outside this place. Perhaps this sounds odd. I suppose I could argue it’s a survival tactic. Don’t get involved in their lives. Don’t let their happiness – or otherwise – touch you. Don’t compare yourself to their wholeness, those couples who come for a romantic retreat, the happy families.

  The last twenty-four hours has meant a closer acquaintance with this group – a forced intimacy that I could well have done without.

  But I suppose, if I’m honest, even from the beginning I was curious about them. Perhaps because they were roughly the same age as me: early-to mid-thirties, at a guess.
I could have been like them, if I had found a high-paying job in the city, like some friends did after university. This is what you could have had, it felt like the universe was saying to me. This is where you could have been, what you could have been doing, at the loneliest time of the year (because New Year’s Eve is, isn’t it?).

  I might have been envious. And yet I didn’t feel it. Because I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was an unease, a discontent, that seemed to surround them. Even as they laughed and jostled and teased one another, I could sense something underneath it – something off. They seemed almost at times like actors, I thought, making a great show of what a wonderful time they were having. They laughed a little too hard. They drank a great deal too much. And at the same time, despite all this evidence of merriment, they seemed to watch each other. Perhaps it’s hindsight, making this impression seem like more than it was. I suppose there are probably tensions in most groups of friends. But I was struck by the thought that they did not seem completely comfortable in one another’s company. Which was odd, as they’d told me right at the beginning that they were very old friends. But that’s the thing about old friends, isn’t it? Sometimes they don’t even realise that they no longer have anything in common. That maybe they don’t even like each other any more.

  The other guests, the Icelandic couple, walked in just as the starter was being served – ‘locally-caught salmon with wild herbs’ – to a frisson of hostility from the others.

  Iain had booked them in. I’d been on one of my rare trips to the local shop, so he’d had to take the call. He could see that the bunkhouse was free on the system, he said, and he’d checked with the boss, who’d okayed it all. I was annoyed he hadn’t written their names down in the book: if I had known, I wouldn’t have promised the other group they’d have the run of the place.

  I wasn’t sure what sort of behaviour to expect from these two. They weren’t the usual, well-heeled sort. Both had wind burned complexions, the roughened look of people who spend a lot of time in harsher elements. The man had very pale blue eyes, like a wolf’s, and stringy blond hair tied back with a leather thong. The woman had a double-ended stud passing through the septum of her nose and a tangled dark ponytail.

  They arrived at the station with huge backpacks, half the size of themselves. They explained that they had caught a passage on a fishing trawler from Iceland to Mallaig further up the coast – I saw the beautiful blonde wrinkle her nose at this – where Iain collected them and brought them to the estate in his truck. They came with proper gear – Gore-Tex jackets and heavy boots – making the Barbours and Hunter wellies the other lot wore look slightly ridiculous. They hadn’t changed out of their outdoor gear for dinner, so that even Doug and Iain, in their special Loch Corrin kilts, looked rather tarted up next to them, as did the serving staff, the two girls and the boy in their white shirts and plaid aprons. The beautiful blonde looked at the two new arrivals as though they were creatures that had just emerged from the bottom of the loch. Luckily, they were either side of me; she was seated opposite, next to Doug, and fairly quickly seemed to decide that she would waste no more of her attention on them, and give it wholeheartedly to Doug instead. I looked at her, with all that gloss: the fine silk shirt, the earrings set with sparkling – diamond? – studs. She watched him as though whatever he was saying was the most fascinating thing she had heard all evening, her lips curved in a half smile, her chin in her palm. Doug wouldn’t go for someone like her – would he? She wouldn’t be his type, surely? Then I remembered that I had absolutely no idea what his type would be, because I didn’t really know anything about him.

  I focused my attention back on the Icelandic guests either side of me. They spoke almost perfect English, with just a slight musicality that betrayed their foreignness.

  ‘You’ve worked here long?’ the woman – Kristin – asked me.

  ‘Just under a year.’

  ‘And you live here all by yourself?’ This was from the man, Ingvar.

  ‘Well, not quite. Doug … over there, lives here too. Iain lives in town, Fort William, with his family.’

  ‘He’s the one who collected us?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘he seems like a nice man.’

  ‘Yes.’ Though I thought: really? Iain’s so taciturn. He arrives, does his work – upon orders received from the boss – and leaves. He keeps very much to himself. Of course, he could say exactly the same of me.

  Ingvar said, almost thoughtfully, ‘What makes someone like you come to live in a place like this?’ The way he asked it – so knowing – almost as though he had guessed at something.

  ‘I like it here,’ I told him. Even to my own ears it sounded defensive. ‘The natural beauty, the peace …’

  ‘But it must get lonely for you here, no?’

  ‘Not particularly,’ I said.

  ‘Not frightening?’ He smiled when he said this, and I felt a slight chill run through me.

  ‘No,’ I said, curtly.

  ‘I suppose you get used to it,’ he said, either not noticing or ignoring my rudeness. ‘Where we come from, one understands what it is to be alone, you see. Though, if you’re not careful, it can send you a little crazy.’ He made a boring motion with a finger at his temple. ‘All that darkness in the winter, all the solitude.’

  Not quite true, I thought. Sometimes solitude is the only way to regain your sanity. But it also got me thinking. If you lived in Iceland – with its long winter nights – wouldn’t you go a little further from the cold and dark than Scotland? For the price of the cabins at this place you could get all the way to the relative warmth of Southern Europe. And for that matter, I wondered how two people who got here by hitch-hiking on a fishing trawler could have afforded our rates. But perhaps they did it simply for the adventure. We get all sorts, here.

  ‘Should we be worried?’ Ingvar asked, next. ‘About the news?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You don’t know? The Highland Ripper.’

  Of course I knew. I’d been hoping the guests didn’t. I’d seen the pictures in the paper the day before: the faces of the six victims. All youngish, pretty. You might bump into a hundred girls like that walking down Princes Street in Edinburgh – and yet the images had the ominous look of all victim photos, as though there was something about each innocuous smiling snap that would have foretold their fate, if you had known what to search for. They looked, somehow, as though they had been marked for death.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, carefully. ‘I’ve seen the papers. But Scotland is a pretty big place, you know, I don’t think you’ve got anything—’

  ‘I thought it was the Western Highlands, where they found the victims?’

  ‘Still,’ I said, ‘It’s a pretty large area. You’d be as likely to bump into the Loch Ness monster.’

  I sounded a little more blasé than I felt. That morning, Iain had said, ‘You should tell the guests to stay indoors at night, Heather. On account of the news.’ It rather put me on edge that Iain – who hardly ever mentioned the guests – had expressed concern for their welfare.

  I didn’t think this man, Ingvar, was really scared of anything. I sensed, instead, that he was having a bit of fun with the whole thing; a smile still seemed to be playing around the corners of his mouth. It was a relief when he asked about hunting, and I could escape the scrutiny of those pale blue eyes. I remember thinking that there was something unnerving about them: they didn’t seem quite human.

  ‘Oh, you’re better off asking Doug about hunting,’ I said. ‘That’s definitely his side of things. Doug?’

  Doug glanced over. The blonde looked up too, clearly annoyed at the interruption.

  ‘Do you ever shoot the animals at night,’ Ingvar asked, ‘using lamps and dogs?’

  ‘No,’ Doug said, very quickly and surprisingly loudly.

  ‘Why not?’ Ingvar asked, with that odd smile again. ‘I know it’s very effective.’

  Doug’s reply was bal
d. ‘Because it’s dangerous and cruel. I’d never use lamping.’

  ‘Lamping?’ the blonde guest asked.

  ‘Spotlights,’ he said, barely glancing in her direction, ‘shining them at the deer, so they freeze. It confuses them – and it terrifies them. Often it means you shoot the wrong deer: females with young calves, for example. Sometimes they use dogs, which tear the animal apart. It’s barbaric.’

  There was a rather taut silence, afterwards. I reflected that it might have been the most I had ever heard Doug say in one go.

  The two Icelandic guests have been very eager to help with the search. They’re probably the only two that I’d trust in these conditions: they must see similar weather all the time. But they are still guests, and I am still responsible for their well-being. Besides, I know nothing about them. They are an unknown quantity. All of the guests are. So my lizard brain is saying, loud and clear: Trust no one.

  I wonder what the guests all make of me. Perhaps they see someone organised, slightly dull, absolutely in charge of everything. At least, that is what they will have seen if I have pulled it off, this clever disguise I have built for myself, like a tough outer shell. Inside this shell, the reality is very different. Here is a person held together by tape and glue and prescription-strength sleeping pills – the only thing I can be persuaded to make a foray into civilisation for, these days. Washed down sometimes, often, with a little too much wine. I’m not saying that I have a drinking problem; I don’t. But I don’t ever drink for pleasure. I do it out of necessity. I use it as another painkiller: to blunt the edge of things, to alleviate the chronic, aching torment of memory.