‘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 certain there was nothing left to salvage.