The Hunting Party Read online

  NOW

  2nd January 2019

  HEATHER

  A body. I stare at Doug.

  No, no. This isn’t right. Not here. This is my refuge, my escape. I can’t be expected to deal with this, I can’t, I just can’t … With an effort of will, I stopper the flood of thoughts. You can, Heather. Because, actually, you don’t have a choice.

  Of course I had known it was a possibility. Very likely, even, considering the length of time missing – over twenty-four hours – and the conditions out there. They would be a challenge even to someone who knew the terrain, who had any sort of survival skills. The missing guest, as far as I know, had nothing of the sort. As the hours went by, with no sign, the probability became greater.

  As soon as we knew of the disappearance we had called Mountain Rescue. The response hadn’t been quite what I’d hoped for.

  ‘At the moment,’ the operator told me, ‘it’s looking unlikely we can get to you at all.’

  ‘But there must be some way you can get here—’

  ‘Conditions are too difficult. We’ve haven’t seen anything like this amount of snow for a long time. It’s a one-in-a-thousand weather event. Visibility is so poor we can’t even land a chopper.’

  ‘Are you saying that we’re on our own?’ As I said it I felt the full meaning of it. No help. I felt my stomach turn over.

  There was a long pause at the other end of the line. I could almost hear her thinking of the best way to respond to me. ‘Only as long as the snow continues like this,’ she said at last. ‘Soon as we have some visibility, we’ll try and get out to you.’

  ‘I need a bit more than “try”,’ I said.

  ‘I hear you madam, and we’ll get to you as soon as we are able. There are other people in the same situation: we have a whole team of climbers stuck on Ben Nevis, and another situation nearer Fort William. If you could just describe exactly your problem, madam, so I have all the details down.’

  ‘The guest was last seen at the Lodge, here,’ I said, ‘at … about four a.m. yesterday morning.’

  ‘And how big is the area?’

  ‘The estate?’ I groped for the figure learned in my first few weeks here. ‘A little over fifty thousand acres.’

  I heard her intake of breath in my ear. Then there was another long pause on the end of the line, so long that I almost wondered if it had gone dead, whether the snow had cut off this last connection to the outside world.

  ‘Right,’ she said, finally. ‘Fifty thousand acres. Well. We’ll get someone out there as soon as we can.’ But her tone had changed: there was more uncertainty. I could hear a question as clearly as if she had spoken it aloud: Even if we get to you, how can we be certain of finding someone in all that wilderness?

  For the past twenty-four hours we have searched as far as we can. It hasn’t been easy, with the snow coming down like this, relentlessly. I’ve only been here a year, so I’ve never actually experienced a snow-in. We must be one of the few places in the UK – bar a few barely inhabited islands – where inclement weather can completely prohibit the access of the emergency services. We always warn the guests that they might not be able to leave the estate if conditions are bad. It’s even in the waiver they have to sign. And yet it is still hard to process, the fact that no one can get in. Or out. But that’s exactly the situation we find ourselves in now. Everything is clogged with snow, meaning driving’s impossible – even with winter tyres, or chains – so our search has all been done on foot. It has just been Doug and me. I am beyond exhausted – both mentally and physically. We don’t even have Iain, who comes most days to perform odd jobs about the place. He’ll have been spending New Year’s Eve with his family: stuck outside with the rest of them, no use to us. The Mountain Rescue woman was at least some help with her advice. She suggested checking first the sites that could have been used for shelter. Doug and I searched every potential hideout on the estate, the cold stinging our faces and the snow hampering our progress at every turn, until I was so tired I felt drunk.

  I trudged the whole way to the station, which took me a good three hours, and checked there. Apparently there had been some talk amongst the guests of getting a train back to London.

  ‘One of the guests has gone missing,’ I told the station master, Alec. He’s a hulk of a man with a saturnine face: low eyebrows. ‘We’re looking all over the estate.’ I gave him a description of the missing guest.

  ‘They couldn’t have got on a train?’ I knew it was ridiculous, but felt it had to be asked.

  He laughed in my face. ‘A train? In this? Are you mad, lass? Even if it weren’t like this, there’s no trains on New Year’s Day.’

  ‘But perhaps you saw something—’

  ‘Haven’t seen anyone,’ he told me. ‘Not since I saw that lot arrive a couple a days ago. No. Woulda noticed if there were a stranger pokin’ about.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘perhaps I could have a look around?’

  He spread his hands wide, a sarcastic invitation. ‘Be ma guest.’

  There wasn’t much to search: the waiting room, a single caretaker’s closet that appeared at one point to have been a toilet. And the ticket office I could see into through the window: a small, paper-strewn cubicle from which, through the money and ticket gap, came the scent of something sweetish, slightly rotten. Three crushed cans of soda decorated one corner of the desk. I saw Iain in there once with Alec, having a smoke. Iain often takes the train to collect supplies; they must have struck up something of a friendship, even if only of convenience.

  Just beyond the office was a door. I opened it to discover a flight of stairs. ‘That,’ Alec said, ‘leads up to ma flat. Ma private residence’ – with a little flourish on ‘residence’.

  ‘I don’t suppose—’ I began. He cut me off.

  ‘Two rooms,’ he said. ‘And a lavvy. Ah think Ah’d know if someone were hidin’ themselves away in there.’ His voice had got a little louder, and he’d moved between me and the doorway. He was too close; I could smell stale sweat.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, suddenly eager to leave. ‘Of course.’

  As I began my tortuous journey back towards the Lodge I turned, once, and saw him standing there, watching me leave.

  Doug and I found nothing, in all the hours of searching. Not a footprint, not a strand of hair. The only tracks we came across were the small sharp impressions left by the hooves of the deer herd. The guest, it seemed, had not been active since the snow started coming down.

  There’s CCTV in one place on the estate: the front gate, where the long track from the Lodge heads towards the road. The boss had it put up to both deter and catch poachers. Sometimes, frustratingly, the feed cuts out. But the whole lot was there to watch this time: from the evening before – New Year’s Eve – to yesterday, New Year’s Day, when the guest was reported missing. I fast-forwarded through the grainy footage, looking for any sign of a vehicle. If the guest had somehow left by taxi – or even on foot – the evidence would be here. There was nothing. All it showed me was a documentation of the beginning of this heavy snowfall, as on the screen the track became obliterated by a sea of white.

  Perhaps a body had begun to seem like a possibility. But the confirmation of that is something so much worse.

  Doug pushes a hand through his hair, which has fallen, snow-wet, into his eyes. As he does, I see that his hand – his arm, the whole of him – is trembling. It is a strange thing to see a man as tough-looking as Doug, built like a rugby player, in such a state. He used to be in the Marines, so he must have seen his fair share of death. But then so did I, in my old line of work. I know that it never quite leaves you, the existential horror of it. Besides, being the one to find a dead person – that is something else completely.

  ‘I think you should come and take a look too,’ he says. ‘At the body.’

  ‘Do you think that’s necessary?’ I don’t want it to be necessary. I don’t want to see. I have come all this way to escape death. ‘Shouldn’t we just wait
for the police to get here?’

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘They’re not going to be able to make it for a while, are they? And I think you need to see this now.’

  ‘Why?’ I ask. I can hear how it sounds: plaintive, squeamish.

  ‘Because,’ he draws a hand over his face; the gesture tugs his eye sockets down in a ghoulish mask. ‘Because … of the body. How it looks. I don’t think it was an accident.’

  I feel my skin go cold in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with the weather.

  When we step outside, the snow is still coming down so thickly that you can only see a few feet from the door. The loch is almost invisible. I have shrugged on the clothes that are my de facto outdoor uniform in this place: the big, down Michelin-man jacket, my hiking boots, my red hat. I tramp after Doug, trying to keep up with his long stride, which isn’t easy, because he’s well over six foot, and I’m only a whisker over five. At one point I stumble; Doug shoots out a big, gloved hand to catch my arm, and hefts me back onto my feet as easily as if I were a child. Even through the down of my sleeve I can feel the strength of his fingers, like iron bands.

  I’m thinking of the guests, stuck in their cabins. The inactivity must be horrible, the waiting. We had to forbid them from joining us in the search, or risk having another missing person on our hands. No one should be out in these conditions. It is the sort of weather that people die in: ‘danger to life’, the warnings say. But the problem is that to most of the guests, a place like this is as alien as another planet. These are people who live charmed existences. Life has helped them to feel untouchable. They’re so used to having that invisible safety net around them in their normal lives – connectivity, rapid emergency services, health and safety guidelines – that they assume they carry it around with them everywhere. They sign the waiver happily, because they don’t really think about it. They don’t believe in it. They do not expect the worst to happen to them. If they really stopped to consider it, to understand it, they probably wouldn’t stay here at all. They’d be too scared. When you learn how isolated an environment this really is, you realise that only freaks would choose to live in a place like this. People running from something, or with nothing left to lose. People like me.

  Now Doug is leading me around to the left shore of the loch, towards the trees.

  ‘Doug?’ I realise that I am whispering. It’s the silence here, made more profound by the snow. It makes your voice very loud. It makes you feel as though you are under observation. That just behind that thick wall of trees, perhaps, or this pervasive curtain of white, there might be someone listening. ‘What makes you think it wasn’t an accident?’

  ‘You’ll see when we get there,’ he says. He does not bother turning back to look at me, nor does he break his stride. And then he says, over his shoulder, ‘I don’t “think”, Heather. I know.’

  Three days earlier

  30th December 2018

  MIRANDA

  Of course, I didn’t bother looking at the email Emma sent, with that brochure attached. I can never get excited about a trip in advance – just seeing photos of turquoise seas or snow-capped mountains doesn’t interest me. I have to actually be there to feel anything, for it to be real. When Emma mentioned this place, the Lodge, I’d vaguely imagined something old-timey, wooden beams and flagstones. So the building itself comes as a bit of a surprise. Fucking hell. It’s all modernist glass and chrome, like something out of The Wizard of Oz. Light spills from it. It’s like a giant lantern against the darkness.

  ‘Christ!’ Julien says, when the blokes finally arrive in the Land Rover. ‘It’s a bit hideous, isn’t it?’ He would say that. For all his intelligence, Julien has zero artistic sensibility. He’s the sort of person who’ll walk around a Cy Twombly exhibition saying, ‘I could have drawn that when I was five,’ just a bit too loudly. He likes to claim it’s because he’s a ‘bit of rough’: his background too grim for anything like the development of aesthetic tastes. I used to find it charming. He was different: I liked that roughness, beside all those clean-behind-the-ears public schoolboys.

  ‘I like it,’ I say. I do. It’s like a spaceship has just touched down on the bank of the loch.

  ‘So do I,’ Emma says. She would say that – even if she really thinks it’s hideous. Sometimes I find myself testing her, saying the most outrageous things, almost goading her to challenge me. She never does – she’s so keen just to be accepted. All the same, she’s reliable – and Katie and Samira have been AWOL of late. Emma’s always up for going to the cinema, or a trip shopping, or drinks. I always suggest the venue, or the activity, she always agrees. To be honest, it’s quite refreshing: Katie’s so bloody busy with work it’s always been me going to her, to some lousy identikit city slicker bar, just to grab three minutes of her time.

  With Emma it’s a bit what I imagine having a little sister would be like. I feel almost as though she is looking up to me. It gives me a rather delicious sense of power. Last time we went shopping I took her into Myla. ‘Let’s pick out something that will really make Mark’s jaw fall open,’ I told her. We found exactly the right set – a sweetly slutty bra, open knickers and suspender combo. I suddenly had an image of her telling Mark that it was me who helped to pick it out, and I felt an unexpected prickle of desire at the thought of him knowing that it was all my work. It’s not Mark, of course, never has been. I’ve always found his unspoken attraction nicely ego-stroking, yes. But never a turn-on.

  With Katie absent and Samira busy all the time with Priya – she is a bit obsessed with that child, it can’t be healthy to share quite so many photos on social media – I have found myself falling back on Emma’s company instead. A definite third choice.

  I have been looking forward to this, to catching up with everyone. There’s a security to it, how when we’re together we fall back into our old roles. We can have been apart for months, and then when we’re in each other’s company everything is back to how it always was, almost like it was when we were at Oxford, our glory days. The person I most want to catch up with is Katie, of course. Seeing her this morning at the train station with her new hair, in clothes I didn’t recognise, I realised quite how long it’s been since I last saw her … and how much I have missed her.

  Inside the Lodge, it’s beautiful – but I’m glad we’re only going to be having meals in here, not sleeping. The glass emphasises the contrast between the bright space in here and the dark outside. I’m suddenly aware of how visible we would be from outside, lit up like insects in a jar … or actors on a stage, blinded by the floodlights to the watching audience. Anyone could be out there, hidden in the blackness, looking in without our knowing.

  For a moment the old dark feeling threatens to surface, that sense of being watched. The feeling I have carried with me for a decade, now, since it all began. I remind myself that the whole point is that there is no one out there. That we are pretty much completely alone; save for the gamekeeper and the manager – Heather – who’s come in to welcome us.

  Heather is early-thirties, short, prettyish – though a decent haircut and some make-up would make a vast improvement. I wonder what on earth someone like her is doing living alone in a place like this; because she does actually live here – she tells us that her cottage is ‘just over there, a little nearer to the trees’. To be here permanently must be pretty bloody lonely. I would go completely mental with only my thoughts for company. Sometimes, on days at home, I turn on the TV and the radio, just to drown out the silence.

  ‘And you,’ she says to us, ‘have all of the cabins nearest to the Lodge. The other guests are staying in the bunkhouse at the other end of the loch.’

  ‘The other guests?’ Emma asks. There is a taut silence. ‘What other guests?’

  Heather nods. ‘Yes. An Icelandic couple – they arrived yesterday.’

  Emma frowns. ‘But I don’t understand. I was certain we had the place to ourselves. That was what you told me, when we spoke. “You should have the whole place to y
ourselves”, you said.’

  Heather coughs. ‘I’m afraid there has been a … slight misunderstanding. I did understand that to be the case, when we spoke. We don’t always rent out the bunkhouse. But I’m afraid I was unaware that my colleague had booked them in and – ah – hadn’t yet got around to filling it out in the register.’

  The mood has definitely been killed. Just the phrase ‘the other guests’ has an unpleasant ring to it, a sense of infiltration, of trespass. If we were in a hotel, that would be one thing, you’d expect to be surrounded by strangers. But the idea of these other people here in the middle of nowhere with us suddenly makes all this wilderness seem a little overcrowded.

  ‘They’ll be at the Highland Dinner tonight,’ Heather says, apologetically, ‘but the bunkhouse has its own kitchen, so otherwise they won’t be using the Lodge at all.’

  ‘Thank God,’ Giles says.

  Emma looks as cross as I have ever seen her, her hands are clenched into tight fists at her sides, the knucklebones white through the skin.

  There’s a sudden Bang! behind us. Everyone turns, to see Julien, holding a just-opened bottle of champagne, vapour rising from the neck like smoke.

  ‘Thought this would liven up the gloom a bit,’ he says. The liquid foams out of the top of the bottle and splashes onto the carpet by his feet: Bo holds out a glass to rescue some. ‘Hey, who knows … maybe the other guests will be fun. Maybe they’ll want to come and celebrate New Year’s Eve with us tomorrow.’

  I can’t think of anything worse than some randoms coming and spoiling our party; I’m sure Julien can’t, either. But this is his Mr-Nice-Guy act. He always wants so badly to be liked, to seem fun, for other people to think well of him. I suppose that is one of the things I fell in love with.

  Heather has helped Emma bring glasses from the kitchen. The others take them, smiling again, drawn by the sense of occasion that has just been created by the champagne. I feel a rush of warmth. It’s so good to see them again. It has been too long. It’s so special, these days, all being together like this. Samira and Katie are either side of me. I hug them to me. ‘The three musketeers,’ I whisper. The innermost ring of the inner circle. I don’t even mind when I hear Samira swear, softly – my hug has jolted her into spilling a little champagne on her shirt.