The Hunting Party

by Lucy Foley

  ‘I didn’t kill that woman. Why would I?’

  ‘If she saw something,’ I say. ‘Like I saw something – you were prepared to kill me. You were going to shoot me.’

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘no – I wasn’t. I hardly even know how to use that thing.’ He gestures to the rifle, where it lies on the floor. Doug hefts his own rifle in his hand – a warning. I do, the movement says. I know how to use it. Iain sees this, swallows.

  ‘But you took it from the storeroom,’ I say, ‘so you must have thought you might use it.’

  He looks genuinely perplexed. ‘No,’ he says, weakly, ‘no, I didn’t.’

  ‘What do you mean, you didn’t? You’ve had it pointed at my head for the last hour.’

  He looks at me as if I’m going mad. ‘That’s the rifle you had when you came up here. I pointed it at you to stop you from going anywhere.’ He moves slightly, and winces against the pain. He is sweating horribly. ‘Look, I was the one that saw something. That was why I moved the stash – from the pumphouse to up here.’

  I’m caught by those words. I saw something. ‘What do you mean?’ I ask, urgently. ‘What did you see?’

  ‘I saw her get killed. The girl. And then I thought, Oh, fuck, the police are going to be all over this by the morning. They’ll be searching the whole place. They’ll find everything. I knew I had to move the stuff further away from the Lodge, and get it off the estate by the time they arrived. But I hadn’t realised about the snow. They couldn’t get here – but we couldn’t get away, either. The train—’ He stops, as though he knows he’s given too much away. That we interests me, but there isn’t time to ponder it now.

  ‘You’ve been using the trains?’ Doug asks at the same time as I say, ‘How did she die? The woman. You said you saw it. I suppose you’re going to say she fell?’

  ‘No,’ he shakes his head. ‘Of course not. She was murdered. I saw it all. I was there, near the pumphouse. Early in the morning, about four a.m., checking on the stuff, like I told you. She killed her.’

  ‘She?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes. The other woman. One of the guests. They had an argument, I think – I couldn’t hear what about, exactly. But I did hear her saying, “You were never really my friend. Friends don’t do that to each other.” And I thought, oh, classic woman’s tiff, about some love affair or something. Inconvenient, but no matter. I’ll lie low, I thought, wait for it to blow over, wait for them to get out of the area. But then I saw the other one grab her by the neck, like she was trying to choke the words out of her. And then push her, right in the centre of the chest. Just watched as she fell. Cold as anything.’

  One day earlier

  New Year’s Day 2019

  MIRANDA

  This is the only thing that brings me some relief: the thought of Julien’s horror at the idea of me telling the world about him. He’ll be thinking, I won’t try her yet. I’ll try in an hour or so, when she’s had a chance to calm down. But he’ll be too late. I’m going to hide out until I can get the first train down to London. I think of Julien going to the cabin, finding it empty, panic setting in properly. My note, left for him: There is nothing you can say. I should never have kept your secret for you in the first place.

  ‘There.’ I put the pen down, satisfied by my work. The dressing table is neatly ordered. A hairbrush, a small wooden box, a couple of lipsticks. One of them is Chanel. I turn it upside down, read the little label. Pirate: the same shade I wear. I thought I’d recognised it on Emma last night, but it’s so difficult to tell: everyone wears colour differently.

  ‘I have this one,’ I say. ‘It’s my favourite.’ Actually, I need to buy another. I’ve lost my old one somewhere, probably in the lining of one of my handbags.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Emma says. ‘I love it.’ I open it up, and focus on applying it perfectly to my mouth in the mirror, a waxy crimson bow. I read somewhere once that sales of lipsticks go up when times are tough. I pout at myself in the mirror. Never has ‘war paint’ seemed like a more appropriate term. My face is pale, sunken-eyed, but the lipstick transforms it. It gives my face resolution, context, like a piece of punctuation. I try a smile, and quickly stop. I look deranged, like Heath Ledger’s Joker.

  ‘Lipstick looks so good on you,’ Julien told me once. ‘On other women it always looks like they’re trying a bit too hard. But you’re – what’s that saying – you’re born to wear it.’

  I take a tissue from the dispenser, wipe it off. Now my mouth just appears raw-looking, bloody.

  ‘Look,’ Emma says now. ‘Shall we go over to the Lodge? It’s more comfortable there. Mark’s passed out in the living room, but still …’

  ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘no thanks. I don’t want to see anyone else. I’m getting the first train in the morning, and that’s going to be it. I don’t ever want to see Julien or Katie again, if I don’t have to.’

  Her eyes go wide. ‘Manda – oh my God … what’s happened?’

  I have an idea of myself delivering the news with the cool panache of a thirties movie star. But to my horror, I realise that the tears are coming; I can feel them rising within me, like an unstoppable tide. I haven’t cried in so long – not since I got my Third, while just across from me Katie opened her envelope to reveal a big, shiny First.

  I clench my hands into fists, dig my nails into the soft flesh of my palms. ‘Julien and Katie have been sleeping together.’ I still can’t bring myself to say: Having an affair. Not yet. It sounds so intimate, so sordid.

  ‘Oh my God.’ She puts a hand to her mouth. But she’s not quite meeting my eyes. The whole performance rings false.

  I don’t believe it. Emma, of all people, knew that my husband was screwing around while I didn’t? What the fuck? ‘You knew?’

  ‘Only since yesterday night, I swear, Miranda. Mark told me.’

  Mark, I think – the little secret of Julien’s he’d warned me about. This was it. This is what he was trying to tell me. No wonder he looked confused when I told him I wasn’t interested in hearing.

  ‘I didn’t want to just tell you, you know,’ she says. ‘I suppose I wanted to give Katie or Julien a chance to tell you themselves. I didn’t want to presume I had any right.’

  ‘What, to tell me my husband and my best friend are fucking?’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Manda. I should have told you … I’ll never forgive myself—’

  She looks so tragic that I wave her away with a hand – I can’t be bothered. ‘You know what … whatever. It isn’t about you. I know now. And I know what I’m going to do about it.’ I hand her the note. ‘Look,’ I say, ‘I want you to make sure Julien gets this. I can’t bring myself to give it to him.’

  ‘OK,’ she says, taking it. ‘But why—’

  ‘Could I have another?’ I say, at the same time, holding out my glass.

  ‘Of course.’ She smiles. ‘It’s medicinal, you know.’

  She turns away and busies herself with pouring the measures, the ice.

  For something to do, more than anything, I pick up the little box on the dressing table. It’s a pretty, painted thing, one of those Chinese puzzle boxes. My granny used to have one. I turn it upside down. It’s the same style, I think, as hers. I used to play with it – once she showed me the secret, the way to open it, I was obsessed. Can I still remember? I’m not sure. Tentatively, I push at one of the bottom panels; it doesn’t budge. I turn it around and do the same on the other side. It moves. I feel a sense of simple satisfaction. What’s the next bit? Oh yes, the panel on the shorter side. My fingers move of their own accord, pushing, twisting. Almost there – I just need to find that lever, pull it out. If it’s the same, it will spring open. Aha! Here it is.

  ‘Oh,’ Emma says, in a strange voice. She’s turned towards me, holding both whiskies. ‘Oh, no – don’t do that!’

  It’s too late. The box has sprung open, disgorging its contents onto the floor with a clatter. There’s so much, it’s amazing to think it’s all been inside there, that little box.


  I hear the crash of breaking glass and look up, confused. Emma has dropped both of the whiskies. Shards of broken glass scatter the floorboards, the liquid spilling around her feet.

  ‘Oh shit,’ I say, ‘I’m such an idiot.’

  But she hardly seems to hear. She hardly seems to notice the whisky. Instead she’s on the ground, scrabbling at the fallen objects among the shards of glass, half-shielding the mess with her body.

  ‘Careful,’ I say, ‘You’ll—’ and then the words leave me.

  She does not want me to see. But I have seen. Several items I recognise. An earring, lost at the Summer Ball some eleven years ago: the evening I finally got together with Julien. I remember him reaching up to my earlobe, giving it a tug. ‘Is this a new look? The single earring? Only you could pull it off.’ It feels now as if it happened to someone else.

  A pendant. A present from Katie for my twenty-first. It had given me such a pang to lose it, because it was the one she knew I really wanted from Tiffany’s, and it must have cost her so much money.

  A Parker fountain pen. I don’t recognise that. Oh no, wait, I think I do. I’d lost it somewhere, in the first few weeks of university. I wasn’t very good with my belongings, but I had been sure one morning it had been in my bag, and by the afternoon it was missing. I spent a few fruitless hours retracing my steps. Someone must have picked it up, I thought. Well: someone had.

  Even my lighter – the one with the crest, lost only the other night.

  ‘Emma,’ I say. ‘Why do you have all this stuff? It’s all my stuff. Why is it here?’ I’m thinking of the little notes left in my cubbyhole. The odd item being returned. But not these: these were clearly considered too precious for that.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Emma says, not looking up at me. ‘I don’t know why all this is here. I had no idea what was in that box – it’s Mark’s.’

  Set aside the fact that I can’t for a moment imagine Mark owning such a thing. I’m looking at the way she’s cradling the things to her chest – the pen, the earring, the necklace. I’m thinking of the look on her face – the sheer terror, that’s what it was – when she saw me playing with the box, just before I pulled it open. Her shouted warning. The dropped whisky glasses.

  I’m thinking, too, of the other night.

  ‘Manda,’ she says, ‘It’s so silly. I can explain.’

  ‘No, Emma. I don’t think you can.’

  I’m just working out what it was that unsettled me so much, in what she said the other night. When she talked about that party – the one where I got stuck in the toilet. When she claimed it must’ve happened in London, when she was there, or that one of the others must have told her. But none of them could have. None of them were there. Because it didn’t happen in London; it happened in Oxford.

  It was the very first week. Now I remember it very clearly. That’s why I was so mortified by it – I needed to make a good impression on everyone – and why I never told any of the others. But Emma, somehow, was in Oxford. At that party. There is no other explanation for it.

  I take my phone out of my pocket.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asks, looking up from where she’s scrabbling on the floor.

  ‘Finding proof.’

  For a moment an expression flashes across her face – something violent and urgent – and I think she’s about to lunge forward and knock the phone out of my hands. Then she seems to get herself under control.

  ‘What proof?’ she asks. She might be faking calm, but her voice is strange – high, shrill.

  I don’t answer. I’m briefly almost grateful to Julien for insisting that the Lodge’s Wi-Fi be switched on. Still, it takes a while to open Facebook, and all the while I can see Emma, looking ready to lunge for my mobile. Eventually, when it loads, I click on ‘photos of you’. I scroll through the photographs. I can’t believe how many there are, and how many terrible ones, as I plumb the depths. After all this, when I’m starting afresh, I will have a cull. As I scroll, my face gets younger and younger – my cheeks are fuller, my eyes seem larger. I can’t believe how much I’ve changed; I didn’t realise. How much all of us have changed. There is Julien, the beautiful boy I fell in love with, the boy who became the man who has just ruined my life. But I don’t have time for that. I’m looking for something else. I must have swiped through hundreds of photographs, half of them failing to load. It doesn’t matter. It’s further back than this. And then, finally, I’m in the right territory. First year freshers’ week. A week of strangers, of trying to pick among them the people who might be your friends. Every face unknown, so that it would be difficult to remember any one face in particular. This is how she has hidden from me. I’m suddenly certain of what I’m going to find. And there, there it is: a photograph from that very party, I’m certain now, the one where I got stuck in the loo. A sea of milling almost-adults. Terrible quality, but it will do. Because there is a face among them, looking right at me, that I would never have noticed had Emma not given me her prompt. Mousey-haired, rounder-cheeked, the features less decided, the eyes obscured by Harry Potter glasses. Much younger looking, much dowdier looking. I look up and compare her to the woman in front of me. And despite all of the changes, it is her, it is unmistakably her.

  ‘It wasn’t Mark,’ I say. ‘It was you, Emma. You took these things.’ I can’t work out how, but this much is clear. ‘My lighter,’ I say, seeing it gleam in her fingers. ‘Give me my fucking lighter, Emma.’

  She hands it to me, wordlessly. Now she is looking at me – intently, as though trying to read my mind, work out what I’m going to do next.

  Again, I think, I’d quite like to be cool in this moment. To light a fag with this very lighter, and sit back, and ask her to explain it all. How she, Emma, Mark’s drippy little girlfriend, who I’ve only known for three years, came to be my stalker. But I can’t. Two revelations in one night. It’s too much. I feel, suddenly, like everything I thought I knew has been ripped from under me.

  EMMA

  So. Miranda and I do go back quite a way, after all. No, not as long as Miranda and Katie, her utterly false ‘best’ friend. But further than Julien or Mark, certainly. To explain, I have to take you back more than a decade.

  Oxford interviews. Autumn. The Academic interview I’d be fine on, I knew. No worries there. I knew the slight concern, held by my parents, certainly, was the Personal interview. What if they had in some way got hold of my record: the trouble at my previous school? If so, I had been drilled. It had all been a terrible misunderstanding, you know how teenage girls can be – et cetera. No mention of the psychiatrist (it wasn’t their right to ask about that, apparently), or his diagnosis.

  Would they, essentially, see past the brilliance of my academic record, and see the real me (whoever that was)? And would that be a problem? Because, in actual fact, you don’t get seven As at A level without having certain – one could say – obsessive qualities. The academic output was the positive manifestation of it. The other thing, with that stupid girl, was the negative.

  When it came to the dreaded interview I got away with it. I got the ‘interests’ question, of course. As I answered – tennis, French cinema of the Nouvelle Vague period (all borrowed from interviews with various film directors and learned, rote), cooking – I wondered what they would make of it if I told them my real hobbies. Observation, close study, collection. The only issue was that the things I had liked to collect were rather unusual. I liked to collect personalities.

  Here’s the thing. I have never really felt like a real person. Not in the proper sense, the way other people seemed to feel it. From quite a young age I had discovered I was very good at certain things – particularly learning, academia. But a machine can learn. What I seemed to lack was a personality of my own. I lacked any sense of ‘me’. But that’s OK. What you don’t have you can always borrow, or steal.

  So I was always on the lookout for particularly colourful personalities, like a parasite searching for a host. There was the
girl at the first school, which ended in a rather unfortunate way when she told her parents that I followed her home from school and sometimes sat in the treehouse opposite her window, watching her. This was rather unfair. I was only doing my homework, just like any other child. I could do all of my real homework on the short bus journey from school. The real swotting for me was in learning her habits, studying the way she was when she was on her own, what her bedroom looked like, what music she listened to. Then I would go home and emulate these tastes and habits: buy the same CDs, the same clothes.

  I was moved to a different school, after the meeting with the headmistress. Then another, when the same thing happened at the next. ‘Oh,’ I said, blithely, in the interview, ‘my father’s job changed a lot, so we moved around the country following him.’ She gave me an unconvinced look at this, but – as I suspected – my academic performance far outweighed any other concerns.

  It was in the Junior Common Room of the college that I met Miranda. She seemed lit up from within. Had absolute confidence in who she was. She drank a beer with some of the guys, and played pool with them, and then seemed to get bored – perhaps it was the slavish adoration with which they were looking at her. Then her gaze landed, incredibly, on me.

  She came and sat down next to me in the empty seat across the table. ‘Hi. How did your interviews go?’

  I was so stunned I couldn’t speak for a second. Looking at her was like looking directly at the sun. It wasn’t just that she was beautiful. It was that she was so very much herself – complex and contradictory and multi-layered, as I would learn – but absolutely, uniquely, triumphantly her own person.

  ‘I have the same feeling,’ she says. ‘I mean, I think the first went really well, of course’ – I remember the fabulous arrogance of that, even now – ‘but I’m not at all sure about the second one. There were some horrible questions about the use of metaphors in Donne’s Holy Sonnets and I totally froze up – I don’t think they seemed very impressed. But maybe I winged it. That happens sometimes, doesn’t it?’