But it is all too late. I can hear it in the background like a Greek chorus: lie, lie, lie.
It doesn’t seem to matter, anyway. It’s like she hasn’t even heard me. She is saying, ‘I can see it all now. The stalker stopped almost around the time you and Mark got together. I thought it was him for a bit – I thought so again recently. He’s always had a bit of a thing for me, but then I’m sure you know that. Now, I understand.’ She pauses, then says, ‘You know I used to feel sorry for you? I thought Mark was just using you, for your passing resemblance to me. Katie pointed it out – I would never have noticed it myself. But it was the other way around, wasn’t it?’
‘I just want to be your friend.’ I know how it sounds – I can hear it. Desperate … pathetic. But there’s no point in lying. She knows it all now. It might as well all come out.
NOW
2nd January 2019
HEATHER
‘What did she look like?’ I ask. ‘You’re sure it was a woman?’
Iain screws up his eyes. He has gone very pale. I hope it’s just the pain, not the loss of blood – but I suspect it is the latter. I’ve seen too many people die in an ambulance from wounds not much worse.
‘Iain, what did she look like?’
‘Just a woman,’ he says. ‘Just two women.’
‘You must have seen more than that,’ I say. ‘What colour was her hair? The killer?’
‘Don’t know,’ he says, and gives another groan. ‘… I suppose it was light coloured. Maybe blonde. Not sure. Difficult to see properly. But definitely not dark.’ He seems certain of this. The other two female guests – Samira and Katie – have unmistakably dark hair. He might not know the exact shade of the woman’s hair, but neither of theirs could be described as ‘light’.
And then something else occurs to me. ‘Iain, are you telling the truth when you say you didn’t take the rifle?’
‘Why would I lie?’ he groans. ‘You know everything else now. Why would I lie about that?’
He has a point. But I don’t want it to be true. Because, if it is, she has the rifle. And in coming up here, we’ve made a horrible mistake.
One day earlier
New Year’s Day 2019
MIRANDA
I shove my way out of the cabin. I can hear the clatter of Emma’s feet on the steps behind me. ‘Miranda,’ she says, ‘please – please listen. I never meant any of it to upset you.’
I don’t answer. I can’t look at her, or speak to her. I have no idea where I’m headed. Not to my own cabin, not to the Lodge. Instead I realise that I’m running in the direction of the path that stretches around the side of the loch. I have the dim idea of getting to the train station, waiting for a train. What time did Heather say they leave? Six a.m. That can’t be too far from now. I’m aware that I’m still drunk, drunker than I thought, and that there are probably a number of problems with this plan, but my brain is too fuzzy to think of them. I’ll work them out when I get there. For now, I just have to get away.
I plunge into the trees. It’s darker here, but the gleam of the moon penetrates the branches, flickering over me like a strobe light. It’s a long way to the station, says a little sober voice, from somewhere deep in the recesses of my brain. I push it away. I could run like this for ever. Nothing hurts when you’re drunk.
The only obstacle – I see it looming in front of me – is the bridge over the waterfall. I’ll have to be careful there.
And then, suddenly, there’s a black figure on the path just ahead. A man. He looks like something that has just uncut itself from the fabric of the night. He has a hood pulled up, like death personified. Inside I can just make out the white gleam of his eyes. Then he is scrambling away from me, up the side of the slope above the path into the trees, disappearing into a little building that is almost hidden there.
I teeter for a second, on the edge of the bridge. Is he going to rush out and attack me? He didn’t like being seen, I know that much. I suddenly feel much more sober than before. It’s the fear that has done it.
‘Manda.’
I turn. Oh Christ. Emma is just rounding the bend in the path. My hesitation has given her time to catch up with me.
‘Manda,’ she says, breathlessly, walking towards me. ‘I just wanted to be your friend. Is that such a terrible thing?’
EMMA
‘You were never really my friend,’ she says now. ‘Friends don’t do that to each other.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘And you were only my friend before because of your connection to Mark. I would never have chosen you as a friend. I’ve always thought you’re a bit dull, to be honest. I always thought you lacked depth. And I always thought you were trying too hard. It all makes sense now.’
There is a terrible pain beneath my ribcage, as if she has reached into the cavity with her bare hands and is squeezing, crushing. ‘You don’t mean that,’ I say.
‘No?’ she says. ‘No – I do.’ She is actually smiling. Her face is beautiful and cruel. ‘I prefer this version of you. Much more interesting. Even if you are a fucking weirdo.’
That stings. ‘Don’t call me that.’
‘What?’ Her manner is playground bully now. ‘A fucking weirdo?’
Memories are surfacing from some dark, long-buried place, a classroom, the most popular girl in a year who looks – yes, I can see it now, rather like Miranda. I hadn’t realised it before. The two faces: the remembered one and the one in front of me, seem to converge upon one another. Back then I gave that girl a shove, a hard shove in the middle of her chest, and she toppled back into the sandpit.
‘God,’ Miranda says, ‘we call ourselves the inner circle. The best friends – the ones who remained while all the other ones fell away. But those other people were the sensible ones. They saw that the only thing holding us together was some tenuous history. Well, I’m going to get on the train, and start a new life – one in which I don’t have to see any of you lot again. Especially not you.’
‘Don’t say that, Manda.’
‘Don’t call me that. You have no right to call me that. Can you get off the bridge please? I don’t think it’s meant for two people at the same time.’
I don’t move. ‘You can’t mean that, Manda. All I have ever wanted is to be close to you, to be part of your life.’
She puts out her hands, as if to fend off my words. ‘Just leave me alone, you fucking psychopath.’
That word. It’s the action of a moment. I put out my own hands, and grab her neck. She’s taller than me, stronger, probably – from all that boxercise and Pilates. But I have the element of surprise. I’ve got there first.
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.