The Hunting Party

by Lucy Foley

  Then there was a sound that ripped through everything else. A scream, high-pitched, desperate: horrible, the sound of a person in terrible pain. The air rang with the echo of it for several seconds afterwards. I sat up in bed, all the drowsiness from the wine leaving me. My ears felt sensitive as an animal’s, the whole of me prickling, waiting for another scream. None came.

  I waited for a response: surely someone else must have heard it? Then I remembered that it was just me and the gamekeeper: no one else for miles around … apart from, presumably, whoever it was that had screamed. I imagined Doug pulling on those big boots of his, taking one of the rifles from the barn. He would be the right person to go, I told myself. Not five-foot-two drunk me. But the night seemed even quieter now than before.

  I pulled the shutter open a little way and looked out. I couldn’t see any lights. I checked my watch. Two a.m. The hours had blurred; I had not realised how much time had passed. Wine does that, I suppose. It began to occur to me that Doug might be sleeping. That I might be the only one of the two of us awake to have heard the scream.

  I started to believe that I had imagined it. Perhaps I had dropped off to sleep for those two minutes, without realising. I couldn’t even quite remember how it sounded, though there was still the reverberation of it in my ears.

  Then, as if to remind me, it came again, and this time it was more terrible than the last. It was the sound of purest agony, something almost animal in it. I climbed out of bed, felt for my slippers. I had to go and see – I could not pretend now. Someone out there was in trouble.

  I crept downstairs, shrugged on my coat and boots, took the cast-iron poker from the fireplace and the torch from the windowsill.

  The night outside was black and still. I remember noticing that above me the sky had a depth I had never seen before, how at that moment it looked sinister, like a void.

  I peered into the shadows, trying to discern any sign of movement. ‘Hello?’ I called. My hands were shaking so much that the light from my torch bounced everywhere, illuminating indifferent patches of earth. The silence around me felt like a held breath. ‘Hello?’

  Perhaps it was inevitable that I felt I was being watched, haloed as I was by light from the door. I realised that in calling out I had exposed myself, made myself visible and audible. I might just have put myself in danger.

  I took a few steps. And somewhere in the direction of the loch I caught a movement. Not with the torch beam, rather with some animal sense I didn’t know I had: a mixture of sight and sound. ‘Who’s there?’ Fear had stifled my voice – it came out as a tiny, strangled squeak. I directed the torch beam towards where I thought I had caught the movement. Nothing. Then another flicker, much closer at hand.

  ‘Heather?’

  I swung my arm and illuminated a face. In the torchlight the figure was ghoulish, and I almost shrieked; was glad as realisation dawned that I did not. It was Doug.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked. There was no urgency in his voice, just the deep, unhurried tone he always spoke in.

  ‘I heard someone scream. Did you hear it?’

  But he frowned. ‘A scream?’

  ‘Yes. Very high-pitched. Whoever it was sounded terrified. I came out to see …’ In the face of his evident incredulity I faltered. ‘You didn’t hear it?’

  ‘Was it,’ he asked, ‘like this?’ And then, to my amazement, he mimicked the sound almost perfectly. I felt the same cold flood of dread down the backs of my legs.

  ‘Yes. That’s it exactly.’

  ‘Ah. In that case, you heard a fox. A vixen, to be precise.’

  ‘I don’t understand. It sounded like a woman.’

  ‘It’s a terrible sound – and an easy mistake to make. You certainly aren’t the first to have done so. There was a story, quite recently, about a man killing himself on a train track outside Edinburgh trying to help what he thought was a woman in distress.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘You didn’t hear that story, living in the city?’

  ‘No,’ I said. I was beginning to be embarrassed by the tremor in my voice, and wished I could bring it under my control.

  ‘It’s when they’re—’ he grimaced. ‘—the male’s … you-know-what, is barbed. So it’s not exactly a pleasant experience for the female.’

  I couldn’t prevent my wince.

  ‘Exactly. So not pleasant. But not someone being murdered, either.’ He paused. ‘You’re sure you’re OK?’

  ‘Yes.’ Even to my own ears it didn’t sound quite convincing. I tried to bolster it by saying, ‘Honestly, I’m fine.’

  ‘In that case, I’ll let you get back to bed.’

  I remember that his eyes swept over me then, so quickly that I might almost have imagined it. But not quite. I was wearing pyjamas. But I felt more exposed, suddenly, than if I had been standing there completely naked.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  He doffed an imaginary cap. ‘You’re welcome.’

  I closed the door, stepped inside, and pressed a hand to my chest. My brain did not seem to have told my heart that the danger had passed. It was beating so hard and fast it seemed to be trying to leap out of my ribcage. It was only when I finally climbed back into bed, and pulled the duvet over myself, that it occurred to me to think properly about what had just happened. If it wasn’t the scream that had woken Doug, as it had me, then what on earth was he doing wandering the grounds in the dead of night?

  I think of his hand; how he’s been so vague about the way in which he injured it. I think of the boss’s mention of how good he would be at fighting off any poachers, the intimation of violence. It isn’t enough that I don’t want him to have had anything to do with any of this. And that’s just because you fancy him, a little voice says. Just because you made yourself come thinking about him. With some effort, I mute this train of thought.

  I remember my mother’s words about googling him. It suddenly seems important, necessary.

  With a quick step I move to the door of the office and lock it. If Doug tries to come in I’ll pretend I’ve done it accidentally, ‘force of habit’. Still, I don’t have long, unless I want to raise suspicion. I open the doors to the cabinet where I keep all the filing. The two personnel files: my own, Doug’s. Iain’s only a contractor, and I think he worked for the boss before, didn’t need to apply for his job the way Doug and I did ours.

  I open Doug’s file. There’s a short CV, detailing a period in the Marines: six years. Nothing more. What exactly am I looking for? I move to the computer, plug Doug’s full name into the search engine, and wait for the results to load via the creakingly slow Internet connection. It is only when my chest starts to burn that I realise I have been holding my breath. There won’t be anything, I think. There won’t … and I’ll feel terrible for doing it, because I’ll have breached his trust without him ever knowing, but it will stop there. He will never know. And I will be able to lay any suspicions – if that is even what they are – to rest.

  Finally, the page blinks into life.

  I can see immediately that there are a lot of hits. For a normal person, someone who isn’t a celebrity or notorious in some other way, you’d expect to get, what? Three hits, at most? A few social media profiles, including those of anyone sharing the same name, perhaps the odd mention of a sporting achievement or a part in the college play. But Doug’s unusual name takes up the entire first page of hits. And none of it is very nice. In fact, it’s all pretty horrible.

  I wish I hadn’t looked. I wish I had never seen any of this.

  Two days earlier

  New Year’s Eve 2018

  MIRANDA

  We traipse after Doug to the yard behind the Lodge, where his Land Rover sits parked next to a big old red truck – maybe that’s what Heather gets around in. The thought of her, all five-foot-nothing, behind the wheel of that big old vehicle makes me laugh.

  Doug opens the barn for us with a state-of-the-art keypad that looks completely bizarre against the old wood. I suppose they need it,
if there are guns in here. As he yanks the heavy wooden door back I enjoy watching his muscles move beneath the old shirt he wears (just a shirt – in this weather!). He would make, I think, an excellent candidate for Lady Chatterley’s lover, so tall and broad and tousled. Bit of an unflattering contrast for Julien, I can’t help thinking, whose various ointments and tinctures jostle for space on the bathroom shelf beside my own.

  He kits us up in the barn: over-trousers and jackets, even walking boots for Katie, who has failed to bring anything remotely sensible. Mark asks for one of the hats, which are ridiculous Sherlock-Holmes affairs.

  ‘If you want one, mate,’ Doug says, with something that might be mistaken for a sneer.

  Beside the jackets and the trousers hang ten rifles. There is something lethal-looking about just the shape of the weapons, as though they could somehow kill you without ever being fired.

  Then there’s a long talk on safety, and on where we’re going today: up the steep hillside past the Old Lodge, because apparently that’s where the deer have been congregating lately: though we’re only looking for the hinds, the females, because it’s the wrong time of year for shooting stags. At the end, I say, ‘So, let me get this right. We might well not actually get a deer today. And even if we do shoot a deer it won’t have antlers, because it’s not the right season. But we’re paying hundreds of pounds for the privilege.’

  ‘Yep,’ Doug nods. ‘That’s pretty much the size of it.’ His tone is direct, but I notice he can’t quite make eye-contact. I feel a little thrill of triumph. I recognise that particular symptom, you see. I have always been faithful to Julien – well, with that one exception, right at the beginning. But it would be a lie to say I do not enjoy flexing my power, dropping a lure. My own sort of hunting, I suppose. Much more fun than freezing wet heather and hideous waterproof over-trousers.

  Doug locks the door behind him with a seamless click of metal. Now he has us lie on the ground to shoot at a box with a target. Julien, Giles, Bo and Mark are terrible, laughably so. With the exception of Bo, who is always so light-hearted (though surely, with that druggie past, he can’t always have been?) they aren’t finding it at all funny. Mark – I can just about bring myself to watch him – wears his mouth in a snarl as he shoots. When Julien has his sixth attempt, I see that muscle in the side of his jaw draw tight in the way that it does when he’s angry about something, and with each report his eye twitches. He cares, I realise. They all care. Even mild-mannered Giles seems to have undergone a personality transplant. Perhaps they’re imagining themselves in some action film or video game. I’m sure that’s it: men reverting to little boys. All the same, it’s a bit weird.

  Katie is awful too, but I’m not sure she’s even bothering to try – just as she seems to have stopped bothering to pretend she’s having a good time. Samira – who, after much persuading left Priya with the manager, Heather, for a couple of hours – is not great, but she makes up for it with lots of intensity. I’m reminded of her rowing blue past. Give her a week with this and she’d probably be Olympian standard. It’s a glimmer of the old Samira, the girl I knew before, and I’m glad of it. This, after all, is the woman who once set fire to the dining table in our house, in imitation of a bar in Ibiza, and had a formal reprimand from the college dean for her behaviour.

  I’m not bad, but I’m not quite as good as I had thought I would be: I’ve always had a knack for sports. Doug tells me I’m being too ‘vigorous’ with the trigger. ‘You just need to coax it with your finger,’ he says. He’s straight-faced – but … is it just me, or does that sound a bit filthy?

  Nick is pretty good, as he’d told us he would be. No surprise there, funnily enough. He was always good at sport, and he’s so precise about things, so intense, sometimes. But it’s Emma, of all people, who excels. Doug says she is a ‘natural’, and she smiles and shakes her head, typically modest. ‘Women are often better,’ he says. ‘They’re more accurate, more deadly. This sport isn’t about testosterone or brute strength.’

  I wish I didn’t mind so much that it’s not me earning his praise.

  We begin our ascent up the hillside. We’re walking towards the Old Lodge, the building Heather pointed out to us yesterday afternoon. I hate walking. It’s so boring, and purposeless. Give me a run any day, something that burns double the number of calories in half the time. Mark, Julien and Nick jostle for position at the front, as though each is determined that they will be the one to take the shot. Katie, meanwhile, is a few feet ahead of me, talking to Bo. I feel slighted that she hasn’t chosen to walk with me. I could go and join them, but I’m not going to grovel for her to pay me attention. It seems like I offended her at breakfast, asking if she had a new man. Fine, I could have been a little more subtle about it – she’s intensely private about that sort of thing – but I was only trying to show an interest. And, frankly, after all this time apart it wouldn’t fucking kill her to ask me about my life. That’s not like her: in the past she’s always been such a good listener. Julien once – not too kindly – joked it was a lucky thing that I’d found a friend who likes to listen as much as I like to talk. But he wasn’t totally wrong. I’ve always thought of her as my opposite, my complementary part.

  The path has melted away now, so we’re just trekking upwards through the heather, and it’s hard, hard work. Every so often it tangles around an ankle, yanking me back as though reminding me who’s in charge. Because this landscape is definitely in charge. It’s brutal. The temperature has dropped even more, and the air is raw, stinging any exposed flesh. Even my teeth hurt when I open my mouth to speak. It feels like the cold has got inside the jacket I’ve been lent, and the beautiful – and I’d thought very warm – cashmere jumper I’m wearing under it, and is pressing against my skin.

  The ground is boggy in places too, there must be streams under the soil. Every so often I step into a particularly soft patch, and freezing water comes up over my boots, soaking my socks. They’ll be ruined. They’re cashmere too – a present in the autumn from Julien. There was a period when every week he seemed to come home with some sort of gift – guilt over what he’d made me a part of, I’m sure, though he claimed he just wanted to spoil me.

  Nick, Mark and Julien can’t go fast enough. They’re almost elbowing each other in their haste to get ahead, to be first up the hill. That can’t be very safe while carrying loaded rifles, can it? At one point Mark turns and seems to shove Julien. Lightly, but unmistakably. He makes a joke of it, and I see Julien force a laugh … but I can see he’s not really amused.

  It’s a relief when we pause at the Old Lodge: a sad, fire-blackened old ruin. Doug gets out a hip flask and passes it around. When he hands it to me I let my fingertips touch his, for just a moment too long. His eyes are such a dark brown that you can hardly make out the pupils. I want Julien to see this, to register this man desiring me.

  I’m not a big fan of whisky but somehow it feels right here, in this wild place. And the warmth of it helps, too, seems to soothe this weird mood I seem to have found myself in since last night. I take another swig, and when I pass it back to Doug I see that my mouth has left a pleasing stain of lipstick around the neck.

  It looks as though someone might have been up here before us. It’s just the remains of a few cigarettes, scattered here and there. But Doug picks up one of the stubs and looks at it, intently, as though there might be a secret message written on the side. I notice that he pockets it. Bizarre. Why would you pick up someone’s old cigarette butt? Then I look at his battered jacket, his worn boots, and feel an unexpected tug of pity. Perhaps, I realise, he’s going to keep it and smoke it later.

  KATIE

  The Old Lodge, when we get to it, is a horrible place. It’s probably the only ugly thing in this landscape, a burned shell, with just one blackened block still standing. It’s somehow colder here than anywhere else, perhaps because it’s so exposed to the elements. Why on earth would you build something here? So far from shelter, and from help. I think of the
fire. It must have been seen for miles around – like the beacons they lit for the millennium up and down the country.

  There is a silence here that is different to the silence on the rest of the estate. It’s like a held breath. It feels – as clichéd as this might sound – as though we are not alone. As though something, someone, is watching us. The stones are like old bones: a skeleton of someone who has died and been left out in the open, denied the dignity of a burial. When we get near enough I am sure the air smells of burning. That’s impossible, isn’t it? Or could there be some way in which the smoke has gone deep within the stone, remained locked in there? It wouldn’t be hard to believe that the fire happened a few years ago, not nearly a century in the past.

  The stable block – the bit that survived because the flames couldn’t make the leap – is almost obscene in its wholeness. They’ve put a keypad lock on it too, I realise – like the one on the barn – presumably to stop guests just wandering in, if it’s not safe. The sky is a very pale violet. Doesn’t that mean snow? What would we even do if it did start to snow, properly, while we’re stuck out here? We’re completely exposed here, on the flank of a mountain. The Lodge – the New Lodge, I suppose – looks like a small shard of glass from here, beside the loch, which looks grey and opaque as lead in the strange light, the trees ringing it a charcoal bristle. The station, roughly the same distance from us here as the Lodge is on the other side, looks like a toy town model.