He makes a pleading, feeble gesture with his hands. ‘I just wanted to try to explain.’
‘Well. It’s not going to do any good. Can’t you see that? I’m not buying any more of your utter bullshit.’ I think that if I had a weapon now I would kill him. If I knew the combination to that store with the rifles I think there would be very little stopping me from taking one, going back to the sauna, and shooting both of them dead. Do people still get lighter sentences for crimes of passion? Any sentence, right now, seems worthwhile. No one screws Miranda Adams over like this.
I don’t have a rifle. But perhaps the weapon I do have is more powerful than any gun.
The insider trading. I’ve been involved, of course. But I could get a good lawyer. My parents would help me out. And however bad it might be for me, it would be a tiny fraction of the shit that would descend on Julien. In this moment, it seems worth it.
‘Actually,’ I say, ‘I do know what I’m going to do. I’ll log on to your precious bloody Wi-Fi and send a sodding email right now. It will take a click of a button. Just one fucking click. I may not have a career, but I have friends, Julien – you know them too. Olivia, you know she’s now at The Times? Or Henry, my ex from before uni? He’s at the Mail now – I can just imagine the headline they’ll dream up for you. And you know what? I reckon I could do pretty well from it myself.’
He takes a step back. His face is in shadow. I can hardly make out his features, let alone his expression. And, not for the first time – but with much better reason now – I think: I do not know this person at all. I do not know what he is capable of.
NOW
2nd January 2019
HEATHER
I walk back into the office. Doug’s sitting there – and I’m about to tell him what I heard just now in the bathroom, when the phone rings. I pick it up. ‘Yes?’
‘Hello, Heather, it’s DCI Alison Querry here.’
‘Have you found a way to get here?’ I can feel Doug’s eyes on me.
‘Well,’ Querry says. ‘We’re still working hard on that, of course. The forecast suggests that the snow should be easing off in the next few hours, then we can make an attempt with a chopper. But there’s something else. I just wanted to let you know that unfortunately I’m being called away: DCI John MacBride is going to take my place. He’s extremely capable, I need not add. I’ll put you on the phone to him now.’
My brain is racing. Alison Querry is the lead on the Highland Ripper investigation. If she’s been called away from this one, that means …
As DCI John MacBride introduces himself I am hardly listening. I am googling with one hand, Highland Ripper, then the NEWS tab. The headlines triumph out at me from the screen: ‘Suspect arrested in Glasgow hideaway’, ‘Raid on Glasgow Lair of the Ripper’, ‘Ripper Routed?’ They’ve found someone. Glasgow is over two hours’ drive from here, more in bad conditions. This can only mean one thing. If they have indeed found the man who killed those other women, he can have had nothing to do with this particular murder. It was someone else. It was someone here.
One day earlier
New Year’s Day 2019
KATIE
Julien comes back into the sauna. Dimly, I register how absurd he looks: completely naked, his cock curled up from the cold, his feet covered in mud. And just for a moment, with perhaps the greatest force since we first started seeing each other, I ask myself, What am I doing?
Has it all been about Julien? The secret longing I have harboured for him for all these years? Or has it also been about Miranda? I could never have admitted this to myself, not before. But for all the remorse I felt, looking at her standing there, staring in horror, for all the shame … was there not something else? The tiniest hint of Schadenfreude? About, for once, having one up on her?
I’d like to point out that I originally went to the sauna just to try and warm up from that horrible icy bath in the loch, not with an assignation in mind. I’d probably been in there for about ten minutes when there was a knock on the door.
I opened it, and saw Julien. He grinned at me, came in, quickly, furtively. Immediately, he began to shrug out of his clothes.
In spite myself I felt a shiver of excitement. Of anticipation.
‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I’ve put her to bed – she’s completely out of it. And Mark’s passed out in the Lodge, and Emma’s back at her cabin. It’s just us. I was actually on my way to your cabin when I saw the light on here and thought … well, what a good idea.’
‘What if Miranda wakes up and finds you gone?’
‘She’s going nowhere. So it’ll be like last night. I’ll just tell her I’ve been for a walk.’
Sometimes it has made me uneasy, the speed at which the lies come to him. ‘And you think she’d believe you? Julien, it’s three in the morning.’
‘Yes, I know. But you see … she knows I’ve had a lot on my mind recently.’
‘The thing you’d like to share with me but can’t possibly tell me about?’
‘Yes. That.’
I don’t know why it stung, that he had persistently refused to talk about it. ‘We seem to have shared quite a bit recently,’ I said. ‘I suppose I just can’t understand why you wouldn’t talk about this particular thing.’
‘I don’t want to burden you with it,’ he said. ‘There’s no need for you to know. Like I’ve said, if I told you, too, it would make you guilty by association – complicit.’
‘But I am guilty,’ I said.
‘I know,’ he said, and reached for me – but not without a backward glance, as though anyone could possibly see anything through the locked shutters. ‘So deliciously guilty.’
‘Julien,’ I said. ‘What are you … I thought we had agreed—’
He silenced my protest with his mouth. He ran his hands up and down my arms, then down my back, cupping my ass, lifting me up so that I had no choice other than to lock my legs around his back. All my resistance had melted, instantly.
‘That was before,’ he said. ‘We agreed that before.’
‘Before what?’
‘Before I realised that I’m completely obsessed with you. These last few weeks, not seeing you – Christmas at Miranda’s parents …’
‘I’ve felt sick with guilt,’ I said. ‘Physically sick, Julien. I literally was – on the train, I had to go and throw up in the toilet.’
Although, actually, that might have been due to the thing I discovered this morning.
‘Poor Katie-did.’
‘No, don’t give me that. We can’t go on like this. It isn’t fair on Miranda.’
He nodded. ‘It isn’t fair on Miranda,’ he said, ‘and that’s why I think we should tell her.’ I opened my mouth to protest, but he shook his head. ‘Hear me out. We were just kids when we got together. She seemed so certain of herself. She was dazzling. I wanted a bit of that. And yes, I fancied the pants off her. But then, over the years … all that drive seemed to go. Everything she wanted changed. She didn’t want to do or be something amazing. She just wants things now, all the time: holidays and clothes and a new car and, well, a baby. But she hates kids. I’m not even sure she doesn’t want a baby just because everyone else has one – because it’s “Life Goals”.
‘And with you, Katie-did … it’s different. It’s more complex. It’s deeper. It’s so much … freer.’
I thought of that little plus on the stick. I’d wait, I thought. I’d find the right moment.
‘You know who you are. You have a career, a life. You don’t need me to validate who you are.’
I felt a strange, unexpected wave of sympathy for Miranda: over ten years, they have been together. In what world could that not be called deep? But beneath the sympathy, despite all the guilt … yes, I realised there was some dark, complex pleasure. All those years of playing the wing woman, the second fiddle, the understudy. Now, finally, I had bested her at something.
DOUG