The Hunting Party

by Lucy Foley

  My skin prickles with cold, even though the heating in the Lodge is turned right up. Attempted strangulation. I remember the bruising around the guest’s neck, the black and blue collar.

  And yet what possible reason could Doug have had to kill the guest? She had only been here for two days. She was a complete stranger.

  Maybe, a little voice says, he didn’t need a reason. The man in the pub, according to these articles, was also believed to be a complete stranger.

  There is at least one thing that doesn’t fit, I tell myself. Doug’s discovery of the body. Why show me the whereabouts of the body, rather than conceal it somehow? In order to control the situation? Maybe … but then it would only make sense to do that if it were still possible to make it look like an accident. It is fairly obvious, even to someone who is not a doctor, that she was strangled.

  There’s a knock on the door. I freeze, then slam the laptop closed. With a few swift steps I’m at the door, have unlocked it. When I open it, on the other side – as I had somehow known he would be – is Doug.

  Two days earlier

  New Year’s Eve 2018

  KATIE

  Everyone is heading to their own cabins to get ready for the evening. Miranda wants us all to dress up. ‘It’s ridiculous,’ Samira muttered to Emma and me, ‘we’re in the middle of nowhere, in the countryside. Funnily enough, I have other priorities besides tarting myself up – I thought we all came here to relax?’

  ‘Oh, but I suppose it’ll give it all a sense of occasion,’ Emma said, loyally.

  Besides, in matters like this there is no point in putting up any resistance. Miranda will get what she wants.

  I don’t spend the time before supper getting ready, however. I spend it in my bathroom, crouched over a little plastic stick, and then pacing the length of my cabin, wondering what I am going to do. I want to scream. But this place is so bloody quiet they’d all hear me.

  Maybe, I tell myself, trying to breathe, the test was faulty somehow. I wish I had got a spare. I was too flustered in the Boots at King’s Cross, though, too afraid that one of the others would see me buying it. Besides, the little sheet of instructions suggests that while it’s possible for the test not to pick up on a positive result, the reverse pretty much never happens.

  It’s eight o’clock before I know it, and I pull on a black dress I just remembered to throw in the case, an old office-to-cocktails affair, and pull a brush through my hair, so hard I hurt myself.

  I am not sure whether it is my imagination or not, but the dress feels tighter than it was at the office Christmas party, and when I study my reflection sideways in the mirror, I am certain that I can see a tiny protuberance where I have had nothing before. Oh God. I turn, this way and that. It’s definitely there. Dread rises in me.

  Now that I have noticed it, it seems unmistakable; I’m amazed that Miranda hasn’t commented on it. Add this to the fact that I’ve noticed a little more tenderness in my breasts – and that my appetite has been up and down. And yet: how the hell did this happen? I thought I’d been so careful. Clearly not careful enough. And I don’t know what I am going to do about it.

  I sit back on the bed. I don’t want to go. I can’t do this – I can’t go out there and face them all. I sit for maybe half an hour. Wondering … hoping … maybe they’ve forgotten all about me?

  There’s a knock on the door. For a moment I can almost pretend I imagined it.

  ‘Katie? What are you doing in there? I can see you sitting on the bed!’

  I go to the door and open it – what choice do I have? I feel like an animal, routed in its den. Miranda stands there, a hand on one hip. She looks incredible, of course: she’s gone for a skin-tight gold sheath dress; the sort of thing you can only get away with if you look like Miranda, and even then probably only on New Year’s Eve.

  ‘Well,’ she looks me up and down. Can she see it? I’m standing front on, so probably not. ‘Not very festive,’ she says. Then she opens the little evening bag she has slung over one arm. ‘Here, this will help.’ In a kind of daze I feel her press the lipstick onto my lips; the waxy scent of it almost overpowering.

  She stands back. ‘There. That’s better. Come on, then.’ She grasps my wrist, her nails grazing my skin – half drags me through the open doorway, forces my arm through hers.

  I can’t take this close contact right now. I extract my arm from hers. ‘I’m fine, thanks,’ I say – it comes out sharper than I had intended. ‘I think I can just about manage to walk there on my own.’

  Miranda stares at me, as shocked as if I’d just yelled at her. You see, I never answer back. She likes to tell people that, as friends, ‘we just don’t fight’. But that’s not down to her, for God’s sake. It’s because I’ve never, in the past, put up any resistance.

  ‘Look,’ she says, her voice low, dangerous, ‘I don’t know what’s up with you, Katie. You’ve been a total misery ever since we got here. It’s like you’re too good for us suddenly. Like you can’t be bothered to take part. But, well, tonight you’re going to. You’re bloody well going to have a good time.’ She turns on her heel. And I find myself following her as meekly as if she had a rope around my neck, as I have done so many times before. What other choice do I have?

  There’s different feeling this evening. Last night it was high spirits, a sense of camaraderie, togetherness. Tonight, the atmosphere carries a dangerous edge. It’s as though that time out there, in all that wilderness, has put us on our guard. I wonder if the others can still see the deer, like me: buckling to her knees. It has become a dark thing between us, with the freighted quality of a guilty secret. We killed something together. We were all complicit, even if Emma was the one who took the shot. We did it for ‘fun’.

  Everyone – apart from me – seems to have fractured into their proper pairs, drawing back into their primary allegiances: Nick and Bo, Emma and Mark, Miranda snaking an arm around Julien’s waist. At a little remove, Giles and Samira stand talking to each other in a low murmur. Miranda has persuaded them to leave Priya in the cabin tonight so we could ‘all be grown-ups’ this evening, but judging by Samira’s mutinous expression she isn’t exactly happy about it.

  There’s some enforced jollity as Julien carries a bottle of champagne around, pouring liberally, but everyone seems to be gulping it down, hardly tasting it, as though they are trying to drink themselves into the spirit of things. Of course, perhaps I’m imagining this: projecting onto them a tension that really exists only in my own mind. But I’m not so sure. Because I see the quick, animal, darting looks they are all giving one another – I am not alone in that. We are looking for something in each other’s faces. But what is it? Familiarity? A reassuring reminder of all that holds us close? Or are we fearfully searching for some new element, glimpsed out there on that bleak mountainside? Something new and strange and violent.

  ‘Dinner is served!’ Emma calls from the kitchen. It’s a relief to have a new focus, not to have to stand around making small talk – that suddenly feels as strained and difficult as it might with complete strangers.

  It’s venison Wellington: although not made with the deer from earlier, I’m relieved to hear. Emma is a wonderful cook. It goes hand in hand with her incredible organisation, I suppose. She has planned this whole trip, down to the very last detail. And she at least seems unchanged by whatever strange spirit has possessed everyone else: brisk and energetic as she carries the dish to the table with a flourish.

  ‘God,’ Miranda says, ‘I’m in awe of you, Emma. Half the time, if you look in our fridge, you’ll just find a bottle of champagne and half a jar of olives. It’s like you’re a proper adult.’

  Emma flushes with pleasure. Except … I don’t think it was a compliment. It makes her look homey, sort of dull. Whereas Miranda comes out of it looking glamorous, in an unpredictable, rock ’n’ roll way.

  It’s not even true. Yes, she’s not a good cook, but she does do it. But she’ll never let an opportunity slip to look superio
r to Emma in some way.

  What a bitch. I catch myself, stifle the thought. What has got into me? And, after all, I am a fine one to talk.

  We all applaud and exclaim over the venison: the golden sheen of the pastry, the neatness of the compact parcel of meat.

  I cut a morsel. It’s perfectly cooked: the pastry flaky, the venison miraculously pink in the middle. But, as I prod it with my fork, a little bloody stream seeps out. I think of that deer today, staggering to her knees, the terrible groan that seemed to echo from the surrounding peaks as she went down, and I feel my stomach turn over. I take a bite, anyway, and sit there struggling to swallow. For a brief, panicked moment the food seems to catch at the back of my throat, and I think I might really choke. It takes a big gulp of my water to send it on its way, and I find myself coughing hoarsely in the aftermath.

  Samira, next to me, gives me a nudge. ‘Are you all right?’

  I nod. Emma, I see, has turned to look at me. ‘I hope it’s OK?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, my throat raw, ‘it’s absolutely delicious.’

  She gives a very small nod of her head. But she doesn’t smile. I wonder if she saw the difficulty I had forcing it down: worse, my grimace of slight disgust at the sight of the bloodied meat. But I think it’s more than that. Emma has never really seemed to like me much. I’ve tried so hard with her – perversely I’ve tried much harder than I might have done if she had seemed to like me. And, it should be the other way around, shouldn’t it? She should make the effort with me. She should be the one looking for some kind of acceptance with Mark’s oldest friends. She’s certainly made the effort with Miranda, despite Miranda being an absolute bitch to her, at times.

  I definitely felt a bit sorry for Emma, when she joined our group. There was so much to catch up on, so many in-jokes, so much history. It was different for Bo. His Americanness, somehow, set him apart. He was exotic – a New Yorker – and besides, he studied at Stanford, so there wasn’t exactly going to be an inferiority complex there. Whereas Emma went to Bath, and Miranda has always seemed determined to find little ways to lord Oxford over her, to show her up as not being quite as good as the rest of us. I don’t think she wants Emma to feel bad, per se, she just wants a kind of serf-like acknowledgement of her superiority.

  To her credit, Emma barely seems to notice when Miranda has a go at her. She has a robustness about her, a self-containment. I feel like she’s one of those people it’s easy to be friends with, because she has no baggage … but she’s not the kind of person who would be my best friend. She doesn’t seem to have a deeper layer; or if she does, she hides it well. Refreshing, yes, but also perhaps just a tiny bit dull. God, I’m starting to sound like Miranda.

  ‘You know,’ I’d told Emma, two New Years ago, when she was very new to the group, ‘you really shouldn’t put up with Miranda’s crap.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, wide-eyed.

  ‘The way she talks to you. She’s like it with all of us, to be honest. I sometimes think she has this idea that everyone was put on earth to serve her.’ I knew how that felt, well enough. ‘I love her dearly, because she has her many good qualities too – but it’s definitely one of her less admirable ones. You don’t want to play up to her idea of her own superiority.’

  Emma frowned. ‘I really don’t mind, Katie.’ There was a sharpness to her tone that I had never heard before.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I only thought—’

  ‘You don’t need to worry about me,’ she repeated, ‘I really don’t mind.’

  And she genuinely doesn’t seem to. I watch her now, grinning away at everyone, asking Miranda where she bought her dress. Maybe I’m being oversensitive, but I have sometimes got the impression that she is just barely tolerating me, for the sake of group harmony. That under the surface, there might be real dislike. Or as close as someone like Emma comes to dislike.

  It’s quite upsetting, to feel yourself disliked by someone as straightforward and good – ‘good’, yes that’s exactly the word – as Emma. Sometimes, in my more paranoid moods, I have wondered if she recognises that there is something ‘off’ about me. That she saw the destructiveness and the selfishness in me even before I recognised them myself.

  Miranda is picking through her meal, carefully separating the fillet from the pastry, and then only eating half of that. She has always been very careful about her weight. Which is ridiculous, because she has pretty much the perfect figure, at least according to the glossies and the Daily Mail. But I remember meals at her house, and her mother taking away her plate before she had finished. ‘A lady,’ she would say, ‘leaves her plate unfinished and keeps her waist under twenty-five inches.’ And I thought I came from a dysfunctional family. For a couple of years Miranda went vegan, then she did the 5:2 for a while. And on top of that every Pilates, ballet barre and soul cycle class offered at her upscale gym. She’s obviously gorgeous, but if you ask me she’d look better with a little more weight, more softness. Already, in her thirties, she’s starting to get that brittle ageing Hollywood starlet look. Oh, and I’m certain she’s had Botox. You would imagine, as her best friend, I might know this for a fact either way. But she’s oddly private about such things. The fact that she gets regular fake tans, for example: she’ll turn up to a wedding looking as though she’s spent three weeks in St Barts. But when I comment on it she’ll say something like, ‘Oh yes, I spent a lot of time in the sun recently – I tan so easily’ and abruptly change the subject.

  ‘He’s so hot, isn’t he,’ she’s saying now, ‘that gamekeeper? The strong and silent type … Like something from a Mills & Boon novel. So skilled. I didn’t realise stalking a deer was so difficult. And so tall. Couldn’t you just climb that?’

  ‘God yes,’ Samira says, to a wounded ‘Oi!’ from Giles.

  But Miranda hardly seems to notice that she’s spoken. She is looking at Julien. The ‘tall’ part seems a particularly pointed barb. Julien is many things; the one thing he is not, and never will be, is tall. ‘Such a masculine sort of man,’ Miranda adds. ‘There’s something almost dangerous about him … But that makes him all the more attractive. You just know he’d be able to fix anything, or build you a shelter in the middle of a wood. No one has those sorts of skills any more.’

  ‘You know what you two sound like?’ Giles says. His tone is light, but I think he’s a bit pissed off too.

  ‘What?’ Miranda says, playfully.

  ‘A couple of desperate old spinsters.’

  I do not miss the glances at me – even Nick, for God’s sake. Because if anyone is a desperate old spinster here then it is, well: yours truly. I concentrate on getting a perfect morsel of venison and pastry onto the end of my fork.

  ‘I think,’ Miranda says, undeterred, ‘on behalf of women everywhere, that you should try and seduce him, Katie.’ She says it playfully, but there’s an edge to it, and I wonder what it means. She seems slightly too much this evening: the gold dress, her hair piled into a kind of warrior’s headdress, the gleam in her eyes, her laugh just a fraction too loud.

  ‘And get herself murdered?’ Giles says, laughing. ‘Well, you’ve got to wonder, haven’t you? What’s a chap like that doing all alone somewhere like this? I mean, it’s beautiful and tranquil and everything for a few days, but it would be pretty creepy living here all the time on your own. You’d go mad even if you weren’t already.’

  ‘He’s not on his own,’ I say. ‘There’s that woman in the office, Heather.’

  ‘Yes,’ Miranda says, ‘but they’re not together, are they? And she’s probably a bit cuckoo too. If you’ve chosen this life you’re obviously a bit of a weirdo, or you have something to run away from.’

  ‘I think she seems perfectly normal,’ I say. I don’t know why I’m defending them. It isn’t a good idea to disagree with Miranda when she’s in this sort of mood. ‘And he seemed perfectly harmless. And yes, I suppose he is good-looking.’

  ‘I see,’ Julien says, in the unconvincing manner
of a kindly uncle. ‘That’s your type is it, Katie?’

  I can feel them all peering at me, as though I am a specimen at the bottom of a jar. I swallow the morsel of Wellington, take a long draught of my water, though I long for the wine. ‘Maybe it is.’

  After we’ve eaten supper it’s still quite early. Emma is doing her best to keep everyone well-lubricated. She keeps insisting on getting up and topping up glasses – which is faintly embarrassing, as though she’s our waitress for the evening. In spite of her efforts, conversation around the table seems to have run dry. There’s a strange pause. What to do, what to fill the time with? With the ease of last night mysteriously vanished, it doesn’t seem enough to sit around and reminisce together. I remind myself it always feels like this on New Year’s Eve, because of all the enforced celebration. Midnight – not particularly late on any given night – suddenly seems like a faraway milestone.

  ‘I was wondering,’ Samira says, ‘and I know it’s a bit teenage … But we could play Truth or Dare?’

  There are mingled groans.

  ‘We’re in our thirties, Samira,’ Nick says, raising an eyebrow. ‘I think we’re a bit beyond Truth or Dare.’

  ‘Oh come on,’ Miranda says, ‘some of us here like to consider ourselves as young.’

  ‘And it could be fun?’ Emma says. She’s the only one whose mood doesn’t seem to have changed from yesterday morning: she’s all enthusiasm, flushed with pleasure from the meal’s success. She’s made a proper effort this evening – she can’t match Miranda’s glamour, but her off-the-shoulder gunmetal dress has a bit of a shimmer to it, and she’s coloured her lips in bright red. It’s almost a perfect match for the tiny smear of blood that she’s missed, up above her ear next to the hairline, a leftover from this afternoon’s hunt.