by Lucy Foley
I don’t have any particular plan. I just want her to stop talking, to stop her from saying these horrible things that I know she can’t mean. I am so disappointed in her. How can she see those little gifts – the well thought-out notes – as the work of a psychopath?
She’s like one of them, one of the adults who tried to diagnose me, so long ago. Not a psychopath, actually. Personality disorder. That’s the ‘official’ term for what I supposedly have.
But I know the real definition. The feeling behind all that effort. All those little thefts and returns, all that work in tracking her down, in getting Mark to like me, to become part of the gang.
Love. That’s all it is.
I don’t know when it is that I realise there’s no longer any sound coming from her. She has become strangely heavy, limp, in my arms, slumped forward on me so that I am bearing all her weight. It is with a kind of unthinking horror that I push her away from me, with quite a lot of force. Like I once pushed that girl, at the first school – the one who taunted me for dressing like her, for following her back home. No real damage done, just a shattered elbow. Enough, though, for the headmistress to call my parents into the office and for them to announce I was leaving before she could even utter the word: ‘expulsion’. Better for everyone’s reputation if no one made too much fuss about the whole thing.
Except, that time she fell backwards into a sandpit.
I had forgotten. I swear it. I had forgotten that we were standing on the edge of the bridge, some forty feet above the frozen waterfall. When she fell, her head went back and her limbs were loose like a rag doll’s – almost comical, windmilling. Then she disappeared into thin air and there was a long silence.
‘Manda?’ I called, softly. But I think I already knew there was no way she would answer. ‘Manda?’
Only silence.
When I look, there she is. She might almost be sleeping. Except for the fact that her legs are at funny angles, splayed looking – and she is so graceful, my Miranda. And there is the red bloom around her head where it has struck the rocks – a starburst, a supernova of red – and something else, paler, mixed in with the blood, that I don’t want to think about.
I look about me. Has anyone seen? The landscape is completely deserted. There is no one, anywhere. I don’t like the look of the little building, perched just above the waterfall. But there is no one in there, of course, it is just the way it has looked all weekend: the dark windows like blank eyes.
The snow continues to fall, like the curtain coming down after the final act. Or a white shroud – to cover the beautiful broken body in the waterfall below. It covers my footprints, filling them as I step away, as though they had never been.
I begin to cry. For her, for myself, for what I have lost.
NOW
2nd January 2019
HEATHER
‘Doug,’ I say, ‘I’ve got to get back to the Lodge, now. You stay here, make sure he’s all right.’
‘No chance,’ he says. ‘I’m not going to let you go haring off to try to kill yourself again. We’re going together.’
His choice of words stalls me. Kill yourself. It summons an idea that has been on the edge of thought. Because, when I decided to go up to the Old Lodge, I knew I would be in danger. At that point, I was fairly certain Iain had a gun. I knew that there was a chance I might be killed. I was gambling on that chance. Yes, it was as bad as a suicide mission. And no, I don’t want to examine too closely what that means.
Doug helps me to my feet. The sudden movement makes everything lurch – I’d forgotten about the head injury – and I stagger against him. He wraps an arm about me, to prop me up. I can feel the warmth of his body, even through our clothes. I take a step back.
‘What about him?’ I motion to Iain.
‘He’s all right. Let’s leave him here to think about what he’s done.’
‘He doesn’t look so good, Doug.’ He doesn’t – though it’s also true that he’s not looking much worse. The bleeding seems, largely, to have been staunched by Doug’s homemade gauze.
‘I’m not,’ Iain says. ‘I’m not doing so well. Take me with you.’
‘If it were that bad,’ Doug says, brutally, ‘you’d have lost consciousness half an hour ago. You can stay here until we come back to find you, guarding your precious stash.’
It occurs to me that there might be a chance to get a signal on my phone. Every so often, up on the peaks, it flickers into life. I take it out, wave it in the air, turn airplane mode off and on – and finally, with a cry of triumph, I manage to raise a solitary bar.
‘Who are you calling?’ Doug asks.
‘The police.’
Iain shudders, as though someone has just prodded the wound in his shoulder.
In the time we’ve been in here, I notice, it has stopped snowing. The police helicopter can reach us now. But they are not aware of the new urgency of the situation.
‘Please,’ I say to the operator, ‘put me through to DCI John MacBride. I have something very important to tell him.’
EMMA
Who did you think took that rifle from the storeroom? Me, of course! Tada!
I’ve become pretty adept at noticing things, over the years. And I have a memory that might as well be photographic. That passcode was stored in the neat little filing cabinet inside my mind from the second that big oaf of a gamekeeper punched it in.
Seriously, what did Miranda see in him? She always did have terrible taste in men.
There is a phone ringing incessantly in the office across the hallway from the living room.
‘Why doesn’t she pick it up?’ Mark asks. ‘Or him? It could be something important. It could be the police, or something.’
We wait, as the ringing stops, only to pick up again a minute later.
‘I’m going to go and have a look,’ I say, ‘see what’s going on.’
The rest of the Lodge seems particularly quiet. It is the silence of emptiness. Even before I push open the door to the office I’m sure that the knock I give is redundant. They’re not here. Not Heather, not the idiot gamekeeper. The phone is on the desk, still ringing. The sound is so loud it almost seems to vibrate in the silence.
I lift the receiver. ‘Hello?’
‘Is that Heather Macintyre?’ The voice on the other end is almost pre-pubescently youthful. ‘DCI John MacBride asked me to give you a call. I’ve been trying your mobile, too, but it’s just going through to voicemail.’
Some instinct now persuades me to say, modulating my voice to a gentle, Edinburgh burr (I told you I’ve always been a good actress): ‘Yes. It’s Heather here. How can I help?’
‘The DCI is on his way to you, in the chopper.’ There is an unmistakable delight in the way he says this, like he’s enjoying the drama of it.
‘Finally,’ I say. ‘Well, that’s excellent news.’ They have no way of tracing it to me, I think. Even if they can work their CSI magic with DNA and fibres – well, I was wearing Mark’s coat, and our DNA will be all over one another. There would be nothing strange about Miranda having flakes of my own skin on hers, or my hairs on her person. We’ve travelled on a train together, eaten together, danced and hugged over the last few days. I owe it to Miranda not to get myself caught, you see. Because I still have my chance to avenge her.
‘He also,’ the operator coughs. I swear I hear a squeak in his voice as if it’s only just breaking (God, if they’re practically employing children to man their phones I have even less to fear from these goons than I thought), ‘he also asked that you do nothing to alarm the … suspect.’
‘The suspect?’ I ask.
‘Yes … well, of course’ – he’s speaking quickly, anxiously now, as though he knows he’s made a mistake – ‘she won’t officially be that until we have assessed the situation. But the one you say was seen, that night, with the victim.’
She.
I want to ask him to repeat himself, just to be certain … even though I know what I heard. To do
so, though, would be to arouse suspicion.
But no one saw. I just stop myself from saying it. My shock is a momentary lapse of control. They might be talking about Katie, I think, wildly. Yes – that must be it. Perhaps Julien dropped her in it to save his own bacon, or something to that effect …
Except, I’m not sure I can afford to think that way.
It’s not prison I’m afraid of. I deserve to pay for what I have done. Though no punishment will be worse than the one I have already had meted upon me, the loss of Miranda: my idol, my lodestar. What I fear is not having time to take revenge on her behalf. Well, I’ll just have to speed things up.
KATIE
‘Katie,’ Emma says. ‘Can I have a word, outside?’ There’s an odd urgency to her tone. I wonder what it was about that phone call she just took. Miranda’s death seems to have hit her, if possible, the hardest of any of us. I suppose Julien and I have our guilt to contend with, which complicates things. I haven’t yet been able to work out which of the two emotions I feel more strongly: grief, or self-hatred. Somehow, this has all felt like our fault. But Emma has spent the day staring at the floor, hardly saying anything. She rushed to that phone as if she was hoping it was someone ringing to say there’d been a terrible misunderstanding: that Miranda had been found alive, after all – that everything else has been a big mistake.
‘Please,’ she says, ‘it’s important.’
‘OK.’ I get up and follow her. She leads me along the corridor, out towards the front of the Lodge, where the snow lies pristine and white as an eiderdown beside the loch. It has stopped falling, I notice. That’s good news, isn’t it?
‘Who was that on the phone?’ I ask Emma. ‘Was it the police?’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘It turns out they have a suspect.’
‘Who?’ I ask.
‘Come over here,’ she says. Her face is contorted with some powerful emotion that I can’t quite read. She beckons with a hand. ‘I don’t want one of the others to overhear us.’
This can only mean one thing. It’s one of us. Mark, I think. I know it can’t be Julien – when I woke up from a fitful sleep he was beside me on the sofa, his mouth hanging open. I actually had to double-check he was alive. It has to be Mark. Oh God, that explains Emma’s weird expression.
‘Emma,’ I say, walking towards her. ‘Is it … is it who I think it is?’ He has always been obsessed with her. I warned Miranda, and she laughed it off. She always thought she could handle herself.
Now Emma does something odd. She bends and sweeps her hand through the snow, as though she is searching for something.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask.
When she stands up she is holding something. It takes me a beat to work out what it is. My body seems to have done so before my mind has caught up: suddenly my limbs are frozen, my spine rigid.
‘Emma. What are you doing with that?’
She doesn’t seem to register the question. Her entire face has changed. She looks like a stranger, not the woman I have known for three years. ‘It’s your fault,’ she hisses. ‘Everything that happened to her. If she hadn’t found out about you two, and your disgusting affair, she wouldn’t have been so upset. She wouldn’t have said the terrible things she did. It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t mine. It was yours.’
At first, when I try to speak, I can only form the words silently with my mouth, releasing nothing but a bubble of air. I am aware of a strange thundering noise, staggeringly loud, all around us – the sound of something drumming, whoomp, whoomp, whoomp, like a giant heartbeat. I can’t see anything to make sense of it, though. And perhaps, after all, it is only the rushing of the blood in my ears.
‘I don’t understand, Emma. I don’t understand what you’re saying.’
‘Of course not,’ she says. ‘Because you’re too stupid.’ She spits the word. ‘You never deserved her for a friend.’
I see something change in her expression; a spasm of pain. I understand. ‘It was you,’ I say.
She doesn’t answer. She just raises her eyebrows, and does something to the rifle, making an ominous clicking sound. It is raised, level with my sternum.
Don’t shoot for the head, I can hear the gamekeeper saying. Shoot for the body, where all the internal organs are clustered together. A shot like that is much more likely to be fatal.
I see Emma’s face as it was after she shot the deer, anointed in gore, marked out as a killer.
I don’t have time to do anything before I hear the sound of the report, familiar from before. I feel something shunt into me with terrible force. As I hit the ground, everything goes black.
DOUG
It seems an incredible distance back to the Lodge, much further down than it had seemed, perversely, on the way up. Beneath the snow are tangles of heather that snag at their ankles and threaten to trip them with every step. But it is also the new knowledge they now possess, the new understanding of how dangerous the situation at the Lodge might prove to be. They have made a huge mistake, leaving the guests to their own devices. But knowing what Iain could have done to Heather had Doug not shown up, he cannot be sorry he chose as he did.
Finally they are on the path back to the Lodge. And then above them a vast metal bird begins to descend from the clouds, blades whirring with a deafening throb. For a moment Doug is thrown back nine years to a place of fear and darkness – in spite of the blinding desert light – and the helicopter becomes an instrument of war: an apache circling overhead, trying to pick out enemy positions. He reminds himself that it is the police, that this is a good thing. The great Scots pines are shedding their covering of snow, thrashing in the draught created by the blades.
Then Heather gives a horrified cry and picks up her pace. Incredibly, it is he who is struggling to keep up with her. Now he sees what she has seen. The two women, one blonde, one dark, stand facing one another in front of the Lodge. The blonde is stooping to unearth something in the snow. He knows what it is even before he sees it emerge in her hand. The long, elegant barrel, lethal from some distance – but from three metres, the gap between the two figures: catastrophic.
They have finally reached flat ground. And before he can tell her to stop, Heather is sprinting towards them. Neither of the women sees her, so intent are they on one another. He is running, too, towards the one with the rifle. He is too late. As the gun discharges he sees Heather leap towards the dark-haired woman, knocking her out of the way.
He sees an explosion in a faraway place, that terrible moment – the men, his friends, all dead because of his hesitation. He wrenches himself back to the present. He throws himself down next to her, where the snow is splattered with her blood.
EPILOGUE
HEATHER
When I first came round from an opiated sleep I had no idea who I was, let alone where. The first person I saw was Doug.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I hope you don’t mind me being here.’
Before the nurse left the room she said, ‘You’ve got a great man here. He’s been sitting in that same spot the whole time you were in surgery, waiting for you to come round.’
I looked at Doug. He seemed embarrassed, as though he had been caught out in something. ‘I had to tell them we were together,’ he said, in an undertone. ‘Otherwise they would have sent me away. I hope you don’t mind.’
His hand was only a few centimetres from mine, resting on the sheet. I lifted mine, with some effort, to cover his. It seemed miraculously warm and alive. It was the first time I had touched another human being, in any significant way, in a long, long time.
Over the next couple of hours they all arrived after the long drive from Edinburgh: the friends whose happiness and wholeness I have been avoiding for a year. And, of course, my family: my mum repeating that she ‘knew that place had something bad in it’. And what I realised was: I am loved. I love. I have lost the great love, the one that for years defined me, that had come to be the sum total of who I was. So much so, that when it was gone, I was cert
ain there was nothing left to salvage.
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.
