Except for Heather. He doesn’t hate her. But she’s different. She doesn’t move around in a cloud of blithe obliviousness. He doesn’t know her well, true, but he senses that she has seen the dark side of things.
He climbs out of bed. No point in pretending he’s ever going to sleep. As he opens the door to the living room he rouses the dogs, who look at him from their bed in sleepy confusion at first, then dawning excitement, leaping up at him, tails wagging furiously. Maybe he will take them for a walk, he thinks. He likes the more profound silence of this place at night. He knows the paths nearest to the Lodge just as well by darkness as he does by day.
‘Not yet girls,’ he says, reaching for the bottle of single malt and sloshing some – and a bit more – into a glass. Perhaps this will take the edge off things.
NOW
2nd January 2019
HEATHER
I call the police, to tell them about the body.
The operator (who can’t be older than nineteen or so) sounds ghoulishly animated.
‘It doesn’t look accidental,’ I say.
‘And how did you work that out, ma’am?’ There’s a faint but definite note of facetiousness to his tone – I’m half-tempted to tell him who I used to be, what I used to do.
‘Because,’ I say, as patiently as I can, ‘there is a ring of bruising around the neck. I’m … no expert, but that would suggest to me a sign of something, some force.’ Such as strangulation, I think, and do not say. I do not want to give him another chance to think I’m getting ahead of myself.
There’s a longish pause on the other end of the line, which I imagine is the sound of him working out that this is something above his pay grade. Then he comes back on. His tone has lost all of its former levity. ‘If you’d wait a few moments, madam, I’m going to go and get someone else to speak to you.’
I wait, and then a woman comes on the line. ‘Hello, Heather. This is DCI Alison Querry.’ She sounds somehow too assured for a little local station. Her accent isn’t local, either: a light Edinburgh burr. ‘I’ve been seconded to the station to assist in the investigation of another case.’ Ah, I think. That explains it. ‘I understand that what we have is a missing person situation that has now, unfortunately, turned out to be a death.’
‘Yes.’
‘Could you describe to me the state of the deceased?’
I give the same description I did to her junior, with a little more detail. I mention the odd angle of the body, the spray of gore across the rocks.
‘Right,’ she says. ‘OK. I understand that access is currently proving impossible, due to the conditions and the remoteness of the estate. But we’re going to be working hard on a way to get to you; probably via helicopter.’
Please, I want to beg her, this Alison Querry with her calm, measured tones, get out here as quickly as you can. I can’t do this on my own.
‘When,’ I ask, instead, ‘do you think that will be?’
‘I’m afraid we’re still not sure. As long as it keeps snowing like this, it’s rather out of our hands. But soon, I’m sure of that. And in the meantime, I’d like you to keep all of the guests indoors. Tell them what you need to, obviously, but please keep any of the details you gave to me out of the picture. We don’t want to alarm anyone unduly. Who’s there at the moment?’
I struggle to count past the tide of tiredness – I haven’t slept now for twenty-four hours. I have spent that time veering between exhaustion and surges of adrenaline. Now my thoughts feel treacle-slow. ‘There are … eleven guests,’ I say, finally, ‘nine in one group from London, and a couple from Iceland. And the gamekeeper, Doug, and myself.’
‘Just the two of you, to manage that big place? That must be a bit of a strain, mustn’t it?’
She says it sympathetically, but it feels as though there’s something behind the enquiry – something sharp and probing. Or maybe it’s just my sleep-deprived mind, playing tricks on me.
‘Well,’ I say, ‘we manage. And, there’s one other employee, Iain, but he left on New Year’s Eve after finishing his work for the day. He doesn’t live here, you see – it’s just Doug and me.’
‘OK. So as far as you know the only people on the estate that night were you, your colleague the gamekeeper, and the eleven guests? So: thirteen.’
Unlucky for some … I seem to hear.
‘Well, that keeps it simple, I suppose.’
Simple how? I wonder. Simple, I realise, because if it really was a murder, the culprit is probably among us. Twelve suspects. Of which presumably, undoubtedly, I must be one. The realisation shouldn’t surprise me. But it does, because of DCI Querry’s easy manner, the sense she has given – the pretence, I realise now – of putting me in charge in her absence.
‘So,’ she says, ‘to summarise: keep everyone where they are. In the meantime, it would be a great help to me if you could have a good hard think about anything you might have noticed over the last forty-eight hours. Anything that struck you as odd. Maybe you saw something, maybe you heard something – maybe you even noticed someone about the place that you didn’t recognise? Any detail could be significant.’
‘OK,’ I say. ‘I’ll think.’
‘Anything that comes to mind now?’
‘No.’
‘Please. Just take a moment. You might surprise yourself.’
‘I can’t think of anything.’ But as I say it, I do remember something. Perhaps it’s because of where I am standing while I speak to her: at the office window, looking out across the loch to the dark peak of the Munro and the Old Lodge, crouched there like some malignant creature. I get a sudden mental image, almost the same scene I see before me but in blackness, viewed from my window at some ungodly hour in the morning – if you could call it that – of New Year’s Day. I shut my eyes, try to clarify the image. Something had woken me: I couldn’t work out what at first. Then I heard the guests’ baby wail. That might have been it. I staggered to the loo, to splash some water on my face. As I looked out of the little bathroom window there was the towering shape of the Munro like a cut-out against the night sky, blotting out the starlight. And then something odd. A light, moving around like a solitary firefly – a wayward star. It was moving in the direction, I thought, of the Old Lodge. Traversing its way slowly across the side of the dark slope.
But I can’t tell her this. I’m not even sure it was real. It’s all so nebulous, so uncertain. I can’t even be sure exactly when I saw it, just that it was at some point in the early morning. As I try to sharpen the memory in my mind, interrogate it for anything else I might have forgotten, it fades from me until I’m almost certain it was nothing more than my imagination.
‘And one more thing. Just informally, for my picture of things so far. It would be so helpful. Do you remember what you were doing, the night the guest went missing?’
‘I was – well, I was in bed.’ Not quite true, Heather. It isn’t a lie, exactly – but it’s not the whole truth, either. But as you’ve just remembered, you were stumbling around at God knows what time of night.