Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © Lost and Found Books Ltd 2018

Jacket design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Jacket images © plainpicture/Cavan Images (trees), Shutterstock.com (animal skull)

Lucy Foley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008297114

Ebook Edition © December 2018 ISBN: 9780008297138

Version: 2018-11-01

Dedication

For AC, my partner in crime.

Epigraph

Should old acquaintance be forgot

And never brought to mind?

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Now: 2nd January 2019 – Heather

Three days earlier: 30th December 2018 – Emma

Katie

Doug

Now: 2nd January 2019 – Heather

Three days earlier: 30th December 2018 – Miranda

Emma

Katie

Now: 2nd January 2019 – Heather

Three days earlier: 30th December 2018 – Miranda

Emma

Doug

Now: 2nd January 2019 – Heather

Three days earlier: 30th December 2018 – Emma

Miranda

Katie

Doug

Now: 2nd January 2019 – Heather

Three days earlier: 30th December 2018 – Katie

Miranda

Doug

Now: 2nd January 2019 – Heather

Two days earlier: New Year’s Eve 2018 – Emma

Miranda

Katie

Now: 2nd January 2019 – Heather

Two days earlier: New Year’s Eve 2018 – Miranda

Katie

Doug

Emma

Now: 2nd January 2019 – Heather

Two days earlier: New Year’s Eve 2018 – Katie

Emma

Miranda

Doug

Now: 2nd January 2019 – Heather

One day earlier: New Year’s Day 2019 – Emma

Miranda

Now: 2nd January 2019 – Heather

One day earlier: New Year’s Day 2019 – Miranda

Katie

Miranda

Now: 2nd January 2019 – Heather

One day earlier: New Year’s Day 2019 – Katie

Doug

Now: 2nd January 2019 – Heather

One day earlier: New Year’s Day 2019 – Katie

Now: 2nd January 2019 – Heather

One day earlier: New Year’s Day 2019 – Miranda

Now: 2nd January 2019 – Heather

One day earlier: New Year’s Day 2019 – Miranda

Emma

Now: 2nd January 2019 – Heather

One day earlier: New Year’s Day 2019 – Miranda

Emma

Now: 2nd January 2019 – Heather

Emma

Katie

Doug

Epilogue

Heather

Katie

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Lucy Foley

About the Publisher

NOW
2nd January 2019
HEATHER

I see a man coming through the falling snow. From a distance through the curtain of white he looks hardly human, like a shadow figure.

As he nears me I see that it is Doug, the gamekeeper.

He is hurrying towards the Lodge, I realise, trying to run. But the fallen, falling snow hampers him. He stumbles with each step. Something bad. I know this without being able to see his face.

As he comes closer I see that his features are frozen with shock. I know this look. I have seen it before. This is the expression of someone who has witnessed something horrific, beyond the bounds of normal human experience.

I open the door of the Lodge, let him in. He brings with him a rush of freezing air, a spill of snow.

‘What’s happened?’ I ask him.

There is a moment – a long pause – in which he tries to catch his breath. But his eyes tell the story before he can, a mute communication of horror.

Finally, he speaks. ‘I’ve found the missing guest.’

‘Well, that’s great,’ I say. ‘Where—’

He shakes his head, and I feel the question expire on my lips.

‘I found a body.’

Three days earlier
30th December 2018
EMMA

New Year. All of us together for the first time in ages. Me and Mark, Miranda and Julien, Nick and Bo, Samira and Giles, their six-month old baby, Priya. And Katie.

Four days in a winter Highland wilderness. Loch Corrin, it’s called. Very exclusive: they only let four parties stay there each year – the rest of the time it’s kept as a private residence. This time of year, as you might guess, is the most popular. I had to reserve it pretty much the day after New Year last year, as soon as the bookings opened up. The woman I spoke with assured me that with our group taking over most of the accommodation we should have the whole place to ourselves.

I take the brochure out of my bag again. A thick card, expensive affair. It shows a fir-lined loch, heather-red peaks rising behind; though they may well be snow-covered now. According to the photographs, the Lodge itself – the ‘New Lodge’, as the brochure describes it – is a big glass construction, über-modern, designed by a top architect who recently constructed the summer pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery. I think the idea is that it’s meant to blend seamlessly with the still waters of the loch, reflecting the landscape and the uncompromising lines of the big peak, the Munro, rising behind.

Near the Lodge, dwarfed by it, you can make out a small cluster of dwellings that look as though they are huddling together to keep warm. These are the cabins; there’s one for each couple, but we’ll come together to have meals in the shooting lodge, the bigger building in the middle. Apart from the Highland Dinner on the first night – ‘a showcase of local, seasonal produce’ – we’ll be cooking for ourselves. They’ve ordered food in for me. I sent a long list in advance – fresh truffles, foie gras, oysters. I’m planning a real feast for New Year’s Eve, which I’m very excited about. I love to cook. Food brings people together, doesn’t it?

This part of the journey is particularly dramatic. We have the sea on one side of us, and every so often the land sheers away so that it feels as if one wrong move might send us careering over the edge. The water is slate-grey, violent-looking. In one cliff-top field the sheep huddle together in a group as though trying to keep warm. You can hear the wind; every so often it throws itself against the windows, and the train shudders.

All of the others seem to have fallen asleep, even baby Priya. Giles is actually snoring.

‘Look,’ I want to say, ‘look how beautiful it is!’

I’ve planned this trip, so I feel a certain ownership of it – the anxiety that people won’t enjoy themselves, that things might go wrong. And also a sense of pride, already, in its small successes … like this, the wild beauty outside the window.

It’s hardly a surprise that they’re all asleep. We got up so early this morning to catch the train – Miranda looked particularly cross at the hour. And then everyone got on the booze, of course. Mark, Giles and Julien hit the drinks trolley early, somewhere around Doncaster, even though it was only eleven. They got happily tipsy, affectionate and loud (the next few seats along did not look impressed). They seem to be able to fall back into the easy camaraderie of years gone by no matter how much time has passed since they last saw each other, especially with the help of a couple of beers.

Nick and Bo, Nick’s American boyfriend, aren’t so much a feature of this boys’ club, because Nick wasn’t part of their group at Oxford … although Katie has claimed in the past that there’s more to it than that, some tacit homophobia on the part of the other boys. Nick is Katie’s friend, first and foremost. Sometimes I have the distinct impression that he doesn’t particularly like the rest of us, that he tolerates us only because of Katie. I’ve always suspected a bit of coolness between Nick and Miranda, probably because they’re both such strong characters. And yet this morning the two of them seemed thick as thieves, hurrying off across the station concourse, arm in arm, to buy ‘sustenance’ for the trip. This turned out to be a perfectly chilled bottle of Sancerre, which Nick pulled from the cool-bag to slightly envious looks from the beer drinkers. ‘He was trying to get those G&Ts in cans,’ Miranda told us, ‘but I wouldn’t let him. We have to start as we mean to go on.’

Miranda, Nick, Bo and I each had some wine. Even Samira decided to have a small one too, at the last minute: ‘There’s all this new evidence that says you can drink when you’re breastfeeding.’

Katie shook her head at first; she had a bottle of fizzy water. ‘Oh come on, Kay-tee,’ Miranda pleaded, with a winning smile, proffering a glass. ‘We’re on holiday!’ It’s difficult to refuse Miranda anything when she’s trying to persuade you to do something, so Katie took it, of course, and had a tentative sip.

The booze helped lighten the atmosphere a bit; we’d had a bit of a mix-up with the seating when we first got on. Everyone was tired and cross, half-heartedly trying to work it out. It turned out that one of the nine seats on the booking had somehow ended up in the next carriage, completely on its own. The train was packed, for the holidays, so there was no possibility of shuffling things around.

‘Obviously that’s my one,’ Katie said. Katie, you see, is the odd one out, not being in a couple. In a way, I suppose you could say that she is more of an interloper than I am these days.

‘Oh, Katie,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry – I feel like an idiot. I don’t know how that happened. I was sure I’d reserved them all in the middle, to try to make sure we’d all be together. The system must have changed it. Look, you come and sit here … I’ll go there.’

‘No,’ Katie said, hefting her suitcase awkwardly over the heads of the passengers already in their seats. ‘That doesn’t make any sense. I don’t mind.’

Her tone suggested otherwise. For goodness’ sake, I found myself thinking. It’s only a train journey. Does it really matter?

The other eight seats were facing each other around two tables in the middle of the carriage. Just beyond, there was an elderly woman sitting next to a pierced teenager – two solitary travellers. It didn’t look likely that we’d be able to do anything about the mess-up. But then Miranda bent across to speak to the elderly woman, her curtain of hair shining like gold, and worked her magic. I could see how charmed the woman was by her: the looks, the cut-glass – almost antique – accent. Miranda, when she wants to, can exert serious charm. Anyone who knows her has been on the receiving end of it.

Oh yes, the woman said, of course she would move. It would probably be more peaceful in the next carriage anyway: ‘You young people, aha!’ – though none of us are all that young any more – ‘And I prefer sitting forwards as it is.’

‘Thanks Manda,’ Katie said, with a brief smile. (She sounded grateful, but she didn’t look it, exactly.) Katie and Miranda are best friends from way back. I know they haven’t seen as much of each other lately, those two; Miranda says Katie has been busy with work. And because Samira and Giles have been tied up in baby land, Miranda and I have spent more time together than ever before. We’ve been shopping, we’ve gone for drinks. We’ve gossiped together. I have begun to feel that she’s accepted me as her friend, rather than merely Mark’s girlfriend, last to the group by almost a decade.

Katie has always been there to usurp me, in the past. She and Miranda have always been so tight-knit. So much so that they’re almost more like sisters than friends. In the past I’ve felt excluded by this, all that closeness and history. It doesn’t leave any new friendship with room to breathe. So a secret part of me is – well, rather pleased.

I really want everyone to have a good time on this trip, for it all to be a success. The New Year’s Eve getaway is a big deal. They’ve done it every year, this group. They’ve been doing it for long before I came onto the scene. And I suppose, in a way, planning this trip is a rather pitiful attempt at proving that I am really one of them. At saying I should be properly accepted into the ‘inner circle’ at last. You’d think that three years – which is the time it has been since Mark and I got together – would be long enough. But it’s not. They all go back a very long way, you see: to Oxford, where they first became friends.

It’s tricky – as anyone who has been in this situation will know – to be the latest addition to a group of old friends. It seems that I will always be the new girl, however many years pass. I will always be the last in, the trespasser.

I look again at the brochure in my lap. Perhaps this trip – so carefully planned – will change things. Prove that I am one of them. I’m so excited.

KATIE

So we’re finally here. And yet I have a sudden longing to be back in the city. Even my office desk would do it. The Loch Corrin station is laughably tiny. A solitary platform, with the steel-covered slope of a mountain shearing up behind, the top lost in cloud. The signpost, the National Rail standard, looks like a practical joke. The platform is covered in a thin dusting of snow, not a single footprint marring the perfect white. I think of London snow – how it’s dirty almost as soon as it has fallen, trodden underfoot by thousands. If I needed any further proof of how far we are from the city it is this, that no one has been here to step in it, let alone clear it. Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more. We passed through miles and miles of this wild-looking countryside on the train. I can’t remember the last time I saw a human structure before this one, let alone a person.

We walk gingerly along the frozen platform – you can see the glint of black ice through the fallen snow – past the tiny station building. It looks completely deserted. I wonder how often the ‘Waiting Room’, with its painted sign and optimistic shelf of books, gets used. Now we’re passing a small cubicle with a pane of dirty glass: a ticket booth, or tiny office. I peer in, fascinated by the idea of an office here in the middle of all this wilderness, and feel a small shock as I realise it isn’t empty. There’s actually someone sitting there, in the gloom. I can only make out the shape of him: broad-shouldered, hunched, and then the brief gleam of eyes, watching us as we pass.

‘What is it?’ Giles, in front of me, turns around. I must have made a noise of surprise.

‘There’s someone in there,’ I whisper. ‘A train guard or something – it just gave me a shock.’

Giles peers through the window. ‘You’re right.’ He pretends to tip an imaginary cap from his bald head. ‘Top o’ the morning to ya,’ he says, with a grin. Giles is the clown of our group: loveable, silly – sometimes to a fault.

‘That’s Irish, idiot,’ says Samira, affectionately. Those two do everything affectionately. I never feel more aware of my single status than when I’m in their company.

The man in the booth does not respond at first. And then, slowly, he raises one hand, a greeting of sorts.

There’s a Land Rover waiting to pick us up: splattered with mud, one of the old kind. I see the door open, and a tall man unfolds himself.

‘That must be the gamekeeper,’ Emma says. ‘The email said he’d pick us up.’

He doesn’t look like a gamekeeper, I think. What had I imagined, though? I think, mainly, I’d expected him to be old. He’s probably only about our age. There’s the bulk, I suppose: the shoulders, the height, that speak of a life lived outdoors, and the rather wild dark hair. As he welcomes us, in a low mumble, his voice has a cracked quality to it, as though it doesn’t get put to much use.

I see him look us over. I don’t think he likes what he sees. Is that a sneer, as he takes in Nick’s spotless Barbour, Samira’s Hunter wellies, Miranda’s fox fur collar? If so, who knows what he makes of my city dweller’s clothes and wheeled Samsonite. I hardly thought about what I was packing, because I was so distracted.

I see Julien, Bo and Mark try to help him with the bags, but he brushes them aside. Beside him they look as neat as schoolboys on the first day of the new term. I bet they don’t love the contrast.

‘I suppose it will have to be two lots,’ Giles says, ‘can’t get all of us in there safely.’

The gamekeeper raises his eyebrows. ‘Whatever you like.’

‘You girls go first,’ Mark says, with an attempt at chivalry, ‘us lads will stay behind.’ I wait, cringing, for him to make a joke about Nick and Bo being honorary girls. Luckily it doesn’t seem to have occurred to him – or he’s managed to hold his tongue. We’re all on our best behaviour today, in tolerant holiday-with-friends mode.

It’s been ages since we’ve all been together like this – not since last New Year’s Eve, probably. I always forget what it’s like. We fit back so quickly, so easily, into our old roles, the ones we have always occupied in this group. I’m the quiet one – to Miranda and Samira, my old housemates, the group extroverts. I revert. We all do. I’m sure Giles, say, isn’t nearly such a clown in the A&E department where he’s a senior registrar. We clamber into the Land Rover. It smells of wet dog and earth in here. I imagine that’s what the gamekeeper would smell like, too, if you got close enough. Miranda is up front, next to him. Every so often I catch a whiff of her perfume: heavy, smoky, mingling oddly with the earthiness. Only she could get away with it. I turn my head to breathe in the fresh air coming through the cracked window.

On one side of us now a rather steep bank falls away to the loch. On the other, though it’s not quite dark, the forest is already impenetrably black. The road is nothing more than a track, pitted and very thin, so a false move would send us plunging down towards the water, or crashing into the thickets. We see-saw our way along and then suddenly the brakes come on, hard. All of us are thrown forward into our seats and then slammed back into them.

‘Fuck!’ Miranda shouts, as Priya – so quiet for the journey up – begins to howl in Samira’s arms.

A stag is lit up in the track in front of us. It must have detached itself from the shadow of the trees without any of us noticing. The huge head looks almost too big for the slender reddish body, crowned by a vast bristle of antlers, both majestic and lethal-looking. In the headlights its eyes gleam a weird, alien green. Finally it stops staring at us and moves away with an unhurried grace, into the trees. I put a hand to my chest and feel the fast drumbeat of my heart.

‘Wow,’ Miranda breathes. ‘What was that?’

The gamekeeper turns to her and says, deadpan, ‘A deer.’

‘I mean,’ she says, a little flustered – unusually for her – ‘I mean, what sort of deer?’

‘Red,’ the gamekeeper says, ‘A red stag.’ He turns back to the road. Exchange over.

Miranda twists around to face us over the back of the seats, and mouths, ‘He’s hot, no?’ Samira and Emma nod their agreement. Then, aloud, she says, ‘Don’t you think so, Katie?’ She leans over and pokes me in the shoulder, a tiny bit too hard.

‘I don’t know,’ I say. I look at the gamekeeper’s impassive expression in the rear-view mirror. Has he guessed we’re talking about him? If so he gives no indication that he’s listening, but all the same, it’s embarrassing.

‘Oh, but you’ve always had strange taste in men, Katie,’ Miranda says, laughing.

Miranda has never really liked my boyfriends. The feeling has, funnily enough, generally been mutual – I’ve often had to defend her to them. ‘I think you pick them,’ she said once, ‘so that they’ll be like the angel on your shoulder, telling you: she’s not a good’un, that one. Steer clear.’ But Miranda is my oldest friend. And our friendship has always outlasted any romantic relationship – on my side, that is. Miranda and Julien have been together since Oxford.

I wasn’t sure what to make of Julien when he came on the scene, at the end of our first year. Neither was Miranda. He was a bit of an anomaly, compared to the boyfriends she’d had before. Admittedly, there were only a couple for comparison, both of them projects like me, not nearly as good-looking or as sociable as her, guys who seemed to exist in a permanent state of disbelief that they had been chosen. But then, Miranda has always liked a project.

So Julien seemed too obvious for her, with her love of waifs and strays. He was too brashly good-looking, too self-confident. And those were her words, not mine. ‘He’s so arrogant,’ she’d say. ‘I can’t wait to hand him his balls next time he tries it on.’ I wondered if she really couldn’t see how closely he mirrored her own arrogance, her own self-confidence.

Julien kept trying. And each time, she rebuffed him. He’d come over to chat to us – her – in a pub. Or he’d just happen to ‘bump into’ her after a lecture. Or he’d casually be dropping in to the bar of our college’s Junior Common Room, ostensibly to see some friends, but would spend most of the night sitting at our table, wooing Miranda with an embarrassing frankness.

Later I came to understand that when Julien wants something badly enough he won’t let anything stand in the way of his getting it. And he wanted Miranda. Badly.

Eventually, she gave in to the reality of the situation: she wanted him back. Who wouldn’t? He was beautiful then, still is, perhaps even more so now that life has roughed a little of the perfection off him, the glibness. I wonder if it would be biologically impossible not to want a man like Julien, at least in the physical sense.

I remember Miranda introducing us, at the Summer Ball – when they finally got together. I knew exactly who he was, of course. I had borne witness to the whole saga: his pursuit of Miranda, her throwing him off, him trying and trying – her, finally, giving in to the inevitable. I knew so much about him. Which college he was at, what subject he was studying, the fact that he was a rugby Blue. I knew so much that I had almost forgotten he wouldn’t have a clue who I was. So when he kissed me on the cheek and said, solemnly, ‘Nice to meet you, Katie,’ – quite politely, despite being drunk – it felt like a big joke.

The first time he stayed at our house – Miranda, Samira and I all lived together in the second year – I bumped into him coming out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped around his waist. I was so conscious of trying to be normal, not to look at the bare expanse of his chest, at his broad, well-muscled shoulders gleaming wet from the shower, that I said, ‘Hi, Julien.’

He seemed to clutch the towel a little tighter around his waist. ‘Hello.’ He frowned. ‘Ah – this is a bit embarrassing. I’m afraid I don’t know your name.’

I saw my mistake. He had completely forgotten who I was, had probably forgotten ever having met me. ‘Oh,’ I said, putting out my hand, ‘I’m Katie.’

He didn’t take my hand, and I realised that this was another mistake – too formal, too weird. Then it occurred to me it might also have been that he was keeping the towel up with that hand, clutching a toothbrush with the other.

‘Sorry.’ He smiled then, his charming smile, and took pity on me. ‘So. What did you do, Katie?’

I stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’

He laughed. ‘Like the novel,’ he said. ‘What Katie Did. I always liked that book. Though I’m not sure boys are supposed to.’ For the second time he smiled that smile of his, and I suddenly thought I could see something of what Miranda saw in him.

This is the thing about people like Julien. In an American romcom someone as good-looking as him might be cast as a bastard, perhaps to be reformed, to repent of his sins later on. Miranda would be a bitchy Prom Queen, with a dark secret. The mousey nobody – me – would be the kind, clever, pitifully misunderstood character who would ultimately save the day. But real life isn’t like that. People like them don’t need to be unpleasant. Why would they make their lives difficult? They can afford to be their own spectacularly charming selves. And the ones like me, the mousey nobodies, we don’t always turn out to be the heroes of the tale. Sometimes we have our own dark secrets.

What little light there was has left the day now. You can hardly make out anything other than the black mass of trees on either side. The dark has the effect of making them look thicker, closer: almost as though they’re pressing in towards us. Other than the thrum of the Land Rover’s engine there is no noise at all; perhaps the trees muffle sound, too.

Up front, Miranda is asking the gamekeeper about access. This place is truly remote. ‘It’s an hour’s drive to the road,’ the gamekeeper tells us. ‘In good weather.’

‘An hour?’ Samira asks. She casts a nervous glance at Priya, who is staring out at the twilit landscape, the flicker of moonlight between the trees reflected in her big dark eyes.

I glance out through the back window. All I can see is a tunnel of trees, diminishing in the distance to a black point.

‘More than an hour,’ the gamekeeper says, ‘if the visibility is poor or the conditions are bad.’ Is he enjoying this?

It takes me an hour to get down to my mum’s in Surrey. That’s some sixty miles from London. It seems incredible that this place is even in the United Kingdom. I have always thought of this small island we call home as somewhat overcrowded. The way my stepdad likes to talk about immigrants, you’d think it was in very real danger of sinking beneath the weight of all the bodies squeezed onto it.

‘Sometimes,’ the gamekeeper says, ‘at this time of year, you can’t use the road at all. If there’s a dump of snow, say – it would have been in the email you got from Heather.’

Emma nods. ‘It was.’

‘What do you mean?’ Samira’s voice has an unmistakable shrillness now. ‘We won’t be able to leave?’

‘It’s possible,’ he says. ‘If we get enough snow the track becomes impassable – it’s too dangerous, even for snow tyres. We get at least a couple of weeks a year, in total, when Corrin is cut off from the rest of the world.’

‘That could be quite cosy,’ Emma says quickly, perhaps to fend off any more worried interjections from Samira. ‘Exciting. And I’ve ordered enough groceries in—’

‘And wine,’ Miranda supplies.

‘—and wine,’ Emma agrees, ‘to last us for a couple of weeks if we need it to. I probably went a bit overboard. I’ve planned a bit of a feast for New Year’s Eve.’

No one’s really listening to her. I think we’re all preoccupied by this new understanding of the place in which we’re going to spend the next few days. Because there is something unnerving about the isolation, knowing how far we are from everything.

‘What about the station?’ Miranda asks, with a sort of ‘gotcha!’ triumph. ‘Surely you could just get a train?’

The gamekeeper gives her a look. He is quite attractive, I realise. Or at least he would be, only there’s something haunted about his eyes. ‘Trains don’t run so well on a metre of snow, either,’ he says. ‘So they wouldn’t be stopping here.’

And, just like that, the landscape, for all its space, seems to shrink around us.

DOUG

If it weren’t for the guests, this place would be perfect. But he supposes he wouldn’t have a job without them.

It had been everything he could do, when he picked them up, not to sneer. They reek of money, this lot – like all those who come here. As they approached the Lodge, the shorter, dark-haired man – Jethro? Joshua? – had turned to him in a man-to-man way, holding up a shiny silver phone. ‘I’m searching for the Wi-Fi,’ he said, ‘but nothing is coming up. Obviously there’s no 3G: I get that. You can’t have 3G without a signal … Ha! But I would have thought I’d start picking up on the Wi-Fi. Or do you have to be closer to the Lodge?’

He told the man that they didn’t turn the Wi-Fi on unless someone asked for it specifically. ‘And you can sometimes catch a signal, but you have to climb up there’ – he pointed to the slope of the Munro – ‘in order to get it.’

The man’s face had fallen. He had looked for a moment almost frightened. His wife had said, swiftly, ‘I’m sure you can survive without Wi-Fi for a few days, darling.’ And she smothered any further protest with a kiss, her tongue darting out. Doug had looked away.

The same woman, Miranda – the beautiful one – had sat up in front with him in the Land Rover, her knee angled close to his own. She had laid an unnecessary hand on his arm as she climbed into the car. He caught a gust of her perfume every time she turned to speak to him, rich and smoky. He had almost forgotten that there are women like this in the world: complex, flirtatious, the sort who have to seduce everyone they meet. Dangerous, in a very particular way. Heather is so different. Does she even wear perfume? He can’t remember noticing it. Certainly not make-up. She has the sort of looks that work better without any adornment from cosmetics. He likes her face, heart-shaped, dark-eyed, the elegant parentheses of her eyebrows. Someone who hadn’t spent time with Heather might think that there was a simplicity to her, but he suspects otherwise; that with her it is very much a case of still waters running deep. He has a vague idea that she lived in Edinburgh before, that she had a proper career there. He has not tried to find out what her story is, though. It might mean revealing too much of his own.

Heather is a good person. He is not. Before he came here, he did a terrible thing. More than one thing, actually. A person like her should be protected from someone like him.

The guests are now in Heather’s charge, for the moment – and that’s a relief. It took no small effort to conceal his dislike of them. The dark-haired man – Julien, that was the name – is typical of the people that stay here. Moneyed, spoiled, wanting wilderness, but secretly expecting the luxury of the hotels they’re used to staying in. It always takes them a while to process what they have actually signed up for, the remoteness, the simplicity, the priceless beauty of the surroundings. Often they undergo a kind of conversion, they are seduced by this place – who wouldn’t be? But he knows they don’t understand it, not properly. They think that they’re roughing it, in their beautiful cabins with their four-poster beds and fireplaces and underfloor heating and the fucking sauna they can trot over to if they really want to exert themselves. And the ones he takes deer-stalking act as if they’ve suddenly become DiCaprio in The Revenant, battling with nature red in tooth and claw. They don’t realise how easy he has made it for them, doing all the difficult work himself: the observation of the herd’s activities, the careful tracking and plotting … so that all they have to do is squeeze the bloody trigger.

Even the shooting itself they rarely get right. If they shoot badly they could cause a wound that, if left, might cause the animal to suffer for days in unimaginable pain. A misfired headshot for example (they often aim for the head even though he tells them: never go for it, too easy to miss) could cleave away the animal’s jaw and leave it alive in deepest agony, unable to eat, slowly bleeding to death. So he is there to finish it off with an expert shot, clean through the sternum, allowing them to go home boasting of themselves as hunters, as heroes. The taking of a life. The baptism in blood. Something to post on Facebook or Instagram – images of themselves smeared in gore and grinning like lunatics.

He has taken lives, many of them in fact. And not just animal. He knows better than anyone that it is not something to boast about. It is a dark place from which you can never quite return. It does something to you, the first time. An essential change somewhere deep in the soul, the amputation of something important. The first time is the worst, but with each death the soul is wounded further. After a while there is nothing left but scar tissue.

He has been here for long enough to know all the different ‘types’ of guests, has become as much of an expert in them as he is in the wildlife. But he isn’t sure which variety he hates more. The ‘into the wild’ sort, the ones who think they have in a few short days of luxury become ‘at one’ with nature. Or the other kind, the ones who just don’t get it, who think they have been tricked … worse, robbed. They forget what it is they booked. They find problems with everything that deviates from the sort of places they are used to staying in, with their indoor swimming pools and Michelin-starred restaurants. Usually, in Doug’s opinion, they are the ones who have the most problems with themselves. Remove all of the distractions, and here, in the silence and solitude, the demons they have kept at bay catch up with them.

For Doug, it is different. His demons are always with him, wherever he is. At least here they have space to roam. This place attracted him for a rather different reason, he suspects, than it does the guests. They come for its beauty – he comes for its hostility, the sheer brutality of its weather. It is at its most uncompromising now, in the midst of its long winter. A few weeks ago, up on the Munro, he saw a fox slinking through the snow, the desiccated carcass of some small creature clamped in its jaws. Its fur was thin and scabrous, its ribs showing. When it spotted him it did not bolt immediately. There was a moment when it stared back at him, hostile, challenging him to try to take its feast. He felt a kinship with it, a stronger sense of identification than he has had with any human, at least for a long time. Surviving, existing – just. Not living. That is a word for those who seek entertainment, pleasure, comfort out of each day.

He was lucky to get this job, he knows that. Not just because it suits him, his frame of mind, his desire to be as far from the rest of humanity as possible. But also because it is very likely that no one else would have had him. Not with his past. The man sent to interview him by the boss had seen the line on his record, shrugged, and said, ‘Well, we definitely know you’ll be good for dealing with any poachers, then. Just try not to attack any of the guests.’ And then he had grinned, to show that he was joking. ‘I think you’ll be perfect for the job, actually.’

That had been it. He hadn’t even had to try to excuse or explain himself – though there was no excuse, not really. A moment of violent madness? Not really: he had known exactly what he was doing.

When he thinks about that night, now, hardly any of it seems real. It seems like something glimpsed on the TV, as though he were watching his own actions from a long way away. But he remembers the anger, the punch of it in his chest, and then the brief release. That stupid, grinning face. Then the sound of something shattering. Inside his own mind? The sense of feeling himself unshackled from the codes of normal behaviour and loosed into some animal space. The feel of his fingers, gripping tightly about yielding flesh. Tighter, tighter, as though the flesh was something he was trying to mould with sheer brute force into a new, more pleasing shape. The smile finally wiped away. Then that warped sense of satisfaction, lasting for several moments before the shame arrived.

Yes, it would have been difficult to get a job doing much of anything after that.

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 yourselves”, 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.

I see that Julien’s offering Heather a glass, even though you can tell she doesn’t want one. For goodness’ sake. We had a tiny bit of a disagreement over the champagne yesterday, in the vintner’s. Twelve bottles of Dom Pérignon: over a grand’s worth of champagne. ‘Why couldn’t you just have got Moët,’ I asked him, ‘like a normal person?’

‘Because you would have complained. Last time you told me it gave you a headache, because of “all the sugar” added in the standard brands. Only the finest stuff for Miranda Adams.’

Talk about pot calling bloody kettle black. It always has to be a bit extra with him, that’s the thing. A bit more extravagance, a bit more cash. A hunger to have more than his fair share … and his job hasn’t helped with that. If in doubt, throw money at it: that is Julien’s go-to solution. Fine … mine too, if I’m being completely honest. I often like to joke that we bring out the worst in each other. But it’s probably truer than I let on.

I let him buy the bloody champagne. I know how much he wants to forget the stress of this year.

As I expected, the woman, Heather, isn’t drinking it. She’s taken one tiny sip, to be polite, and put it back down on the tray. I imagine she thinks it’s unprofessional to have more than that, and she’s right. So, thanks to Julien’s ‘generosity’ we’re going to be left with a wasted glass, tainted by this stranger’s spit.

Heather runs us through arrangements for the weekend. We’re going deer-stalking tomorrow: ‘Doug will be taking you, he’ll come and collect you early in the morning.’

Doug. I’m rather fascinated by him. I could tell he didn’t like us much. I could also tell that I made him uncomfortable. That knowledge is a kind of power.

Giles is asking Heather something about walking routes now. She takes out an OS map and spreads it across the coffee table.

‘You have lots of options,’ she’s saying. ‘It really depends on what you’re looking for – and what sort of equipment you’ve brought. Some people have arrived with all the gear: ice picks, crampons and carabiners.’

‘Er, I’m not sure that’s really us,’ Bo says, grinning. Too bloody right.

‘Well, if you want something very sedate, there’s the path around the loch, of course’ – she traces it on the map with a finger – ‘it’s a few miles, completely flat. There are a few waterfalls – but they have sturdy bridges over them, so there’s nothing to tax you too much. You could practically do it in the dark. At the other end of the scale you’ve got the Munro, which you may be interested in if you’re planning on “bagging” one.’

‘What do you mean?’ Julien asks.

‘Oh,’ she says, ‘like a trophy, I suppose. That’s what it’s called when you climb one. You claim it.’

‘Oh yes,’ he says, with a quick grin. ‘Of course – maybe I did know that.’ No, he didn’t. But Julien doesn’t like to be shown up. Even if he has no artistic sensibilities to speak of, appearances are important to my husband. The face you present to the world. What other people think of you. I know that better than anyone.

‘Or,’ she says, ‘you could do something in the middle. There’s the hike up to the Old Lodge, for example.’

‘The Old Lodge?’ Bo asks.

‘Yes. The original lodge burned down just under a century ago. Almost everything went. So not a great deal to see, but it makes a good point to aim for, and there are fantastic views over the estate.’

‘Can’t imagine anyone survived that?’ Giles says.

‘No,’ she says. ‘Twenty-four people died. No one survived apart from a couple of the stable hands, who slept in the stable block with the animals. One of the old stable blocks is still there, but it’s probably not structurally sound: you shouldn’t go too near it.’

‘And no one knows what started it?’ Bo asks. We’re all ghoulishly interested – you could hear a pin drop in here – but he looks genuinely alarmed, his glance flitting to the roaring log fire in the grate. He’s such a city boy. I bet the nearest Bo normally gets to a real fire is a flaming sambuca shot.

‘No,’ Heather says. ‘We don’t know. Perhaps a fire left unattended in one of the grates. But there is a theory …’ Heather pauses, as if not sure she should continue, then goes on. ‘There’s a theory that one of the staff, a gamekeeper, was so damaged by his experiences in the war that he set fire to the building on purpose. A kind of murder–suicide. They say the fire could be seen as far away as Fort William. It took more than a day for help to come … by which time it was too late.’

‘That’s fucked-up,’ Mark says, and grins.

I notice that Heather does not look impressed by Mark’s grin. She’s probably wondering how on earth someone could be amused by the idea of two dozen people burning to death. You have to know Mark pretty well to understand that he has a fairly dark – but on the whole harmless – sense of humour. You learn to forgive him for it. Just like we’ve all learned that Giles – while he likes to seem like Mr Easy-going – can be a bit tight when it comes to buying the next round … and not to speak to Bo until he’s had at least two cups of coffee in the morning. Or how Samira, all sweetness and light on the surface, can hold a grudge like no one else. That’s the thing about old friends. You just know these things about them. You have learned to love them. This is the glue that binds us together. It’s like family, I suppose. All that history. We know everything there is to know about one another.

Heather pulls a clipboard from under her arm, all business, suddenly. ‘Which one of you is Emma Taylor? I’ve got your credit card down as the one that paid the deposit.’

‘That’s me.’ Emma raises a hand.

‘Great. You should find all the ingredients you’ve asked for in the fridge. I have the list here. Beef fillet, unshucked oysters – Iain got them from Mallaig this morning – smoked salmon, smoked mackerel, caviar, endive, Roquefort, walnuts, one hundred per cent chocolate, eighty five per cent chocolate, quails’ eggs’– she pauses to take a breath – ‘double cream, potatoes, on-vine tomatoes …’

Christ. My own secret contribution to proceedings suddenly looks rather meagre. I try to catch Katie’s eye to share an amused look. But I haven’t seen her for so long that I suppose we’re a bit out of sync. She’s just staring out of the big windows, apparently lost in thought.

EMMA

I check the list. I don’t think they’ve got the right tomatoes – they’re not baby ones – but I can probably make do. It could be worse. I suppose I’m a bit particular about my cooking: I got into it at university, and it’s been a passion of mine ever since.

‘Thank you,’ Heather says, as I hand the list back.

‘Where’d you get all this stuff?’ Bo asks. ‘Can’t be many shops around here?’

‘No. Iain went and got most of it from Inverness and brought it back on the train – it was easier.’

‘But why bother having a train station?’ Giles asks. ‘I know we got off there, but there can’t be many people using it otherwise?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘Nor have there ever. It’s a funny story, that one. The laird, in the nineteenth century, insisted that the rail company build the station, when they came to him with a proposal to put a track through his land.’

‘It must have been almost like his own private platform,’ Nick says.

The woman smiles. ‘Yes, and no. Because there were some … unintended consequences. This is whisky country. And there was a great deal of illegal distilling going on back in the day – and robbery from the big distilleries. The old Glencorrin plant, for example, is pretty nearby. Before the railway, the smugglers around here had to rely on wagons, which were very slow, and very likely to be stopped on the long journey down south by the authorities. But the train was another matter. Suddenly, they could get their product down to London in a day. Legend has it that some of the train guards were in their pay, ready to turn a blind eye when necessary. And some’ – she stops, poised for the coup de grâce – ‘say that the old laird himself was in on it, that he had planned it from the day he asked for his railway station.’ She sits forward. ‘If you’re interested, there are whisky bothies all over the estate. They’re marked on the map. Discovering them is something of a hobby of mine.’

Over the top of her head, I see Julien roll his eyes. But Nick is intrigued. ‘What do you mean?’ he asks. ‘They haven’t all been found? How many are there?’

‘Oh, we’re not sure. Every time I think I must have discovered the last one, I come across another. Fifteen in total at the last count. They’re very cleverly made, small cairns really, built out of the rocks, covered with gorse and heather. Unless you’re right on top of them they’re practically invisible. They disappear into the hillside. I could show you a couple if you like.’

‘Yes please,’ Katie says – at the same time as Julien says, ‘No thanks.’ There is a slightly awkward pause.

‘Well,’ Heather gives a small, polite smile, but there’s a flash of steel in the look she gives Julien. ‘It’s not compulsory, of course.’

I have the impression that she may not be quite as sweet and retiring as she looks. Good on her. Julien gets away with a little too much, as far as I’m concerned. People seem prepared to let him act as he likes, partly because he’s so good-looking, and partly because he can turn on the charm like throwing a switch. Often he does the latter after he’s just said something particularly controversial, or cruel – so that he can immediately take the sting out of it … make you think that he can’t really mean it.

This might sound like sour grapes. After all, Mark is always blundering around offending people just by being himself: laughing inappropriately, or making jokes in bad taste. I know who most people would prefer to have dinner with. But at least Mark is, in his way, authentic – even if that sometimes means authentically dull (I am not blind to his faults). Julien is so much surface. It has made me wonder what’s going on beneath.

My thoughts are interrupted by Bo. ‘This is incredible,’ he says, staring about. It is. It’s better than any of the places anyone else has picked in the last few years, no question. I feel myself relax properly for the first time all day, and allow myself just to enjoy being here, to be proud of my work in finding it.

The room we’re standing in is the living room: two huge, squashy sofas and a selection of armchairs, beautiful old rugs on the floor, a vast fireplace with a stack of freshly-chopped wood next to it – ‘We use peat with the wood,’ Heather says, ‘to give it a nice smokiness.’ The upper bookshelves are stuffed with antiquarian books, emerald and red spines embossed with gold, and the lower with all the old board-game classics: Monopoly, Scrabble, Twister, Cluedo.

On the inner wall – the outer wall being made entirely of glass – are mounted several stags’ heads. The shadows thrown by their antlers are huge, as though cast by old dead trees. The glass eyes have the effect some paintings have; they seem to follow you wherever you go, staring balefully down. I see Katie look at them and shiver.

You’d think that the modernist style of the building wouldn’t work with the homey interior, but, somehow, it does. In fact, the exterior glass seems to melt away so that it’s as though there is no barrier between us and the landscape outside. It’s as though you could simply walk from the rug straight into the loch, huge and silver in the evening light, framed by that black staccato of trees. It’s all perfect.

‘Right,’ Heather says, ‘I’m going to leave you now, to get settled in. I’ll let you decide which of the cottages suits each of you best.’

As she begins to walk away she stops dead, and turns on her heel. She smacks a palm against her head, a pantomime of forgetfulness. ‘It must be the champagne,’ she says, though I hardly think so; she has only had a couple of sips. ‘There are a couple of very important safety things I should say to you. We ask that if you are planning on going for a hike beyond our immediate surroundings – the loch, say – you let us know. It may look benign out there, but at this time of year the state of play can change within hours, sometimes minutes.’

‘In what way?’ Bo asks. This all must be very alien for him: I once heard him say he lived in New York for five years with only one trip out of the city, because he ‘didn’t want to miss anything’. I don’t think he’s one for the great outdoors.

‘Snowstorms, sudden fogs, a rapid drop in temperature. It’s what makes this landscape so exciting … but also lethal, if it chooses to be. If a storm should come in, say, we want to know whether you are out hiking, or whether you are safe in your cottages. And,’ she grimaces slightly, ‘we’ve had a little trouble with poachers in the past—’

‘That sounds pretty Victorian,’ Julien says.

Heather raises an eyebrow. ‘Well, these people unfortunately aren’t. These aren’t your old romantic folk heroes taking one home for the pot. They carry stalking equipment and hunting rifles. Sometimes they work in the day, wearing the best camouflage gear money can buy. Sometimes they work at night. They’re not doing it for fun. They sell the meat on the black market to restauranteurs, or the antlers on eBay, or abroad. There’s a big market in Germany. We have CCTV on the main gate to the property now, so that’s helped, but it hasn’t prevented them getting in.’

‘Should we be worried?’ Samira asks.

‘Oh, no,’ Heather says quickly, perhaps realising for the first time how all of this might sound to guests who have come for the unthreatening peace and quiet of the Scottish Highlands. ‘No, not at all. We haven’t actually had any proper poaching incidents for … a while, now. Doug is very much on the case. I just wanted you to be aware. If you see anyone you do not recognise on the estate, let either of us know. Do not approach them.’

I can feel how all this talk of peril has dampened the atmosphere slightly. ‘We haven’t toasted being here,’ I say, quickly, seizing my champagne glass. ‘Cheers!’ I clash it against Giles’s, with slightly too much force, and he jumps back to avoid the spillage. Then he gets the idea, turns to Miranda, and does the same. It seems to work: a little chain reaction is set off around the room, the familiarity of the ritual raising smiles. Reminding us of the fact that we are celebrating. That it is good – no, wonderful – to be here.

KATIE

There’s no point in my expressing any preference over which cabin I get. I am the singleton of the group, and it’s been tacitly agreed by all that my cabin should be the smallest of the lot. There’s a bit of good-natured wrangling over who is going to get which of the others. One is slightly bigger than the rest, and Samira – probably rightly – thinks that she and Giles should have it, because of Priya. And then both Nick and Miranda clearly want the one with the best view of the loch – I suspect for a moment that Nick is saying so just to rile Miranda, but then he defers, graciously. Everyone is on best behaviour.

‘Let’s go for a walk now,’ Miranda says, once it’s all decided. ‘Explore a bit.’

‘But it’s completely dark,’ Samira says.

‘Well, that will make it even better. We can take some of the champagne down to the loch.’

This is classic Miranda. Anyone else would be content simply to lounge in the Lodge until dinner, but she’s always looking for adventure. When she first came into my life, some twenty years ago, everything instantly became more exciting.

‘I have to put Priya to bed,’ Samira says, glancing over to where the baby has fallen asleep in her carrier. ‘It’s late for her already.’

‘Fine,’ Miranda says, offhandedly, with barely a glance in Samira’s direction.

I don’t know if she sees Samira’s wounded look. For most of today Miranda has acted as though Priya is a piece of excess baggage. I remember, a couple of years ago, her talk of ‘when Julien and I have kids’. I haven’t seen her enough lately, so I’m not sure whether her indifference is genuine or masking some real personal suffering. Miranda has always been a champion bluffer.

The rest of us – including Giles – traipse outside into the dark. Samira gives him a look as she stalks off towards their cabin – presumably he, too, was meant to go and help with Priya’s bedtime. It’s probably the closest I’ve ever seen them come to a disagreement. They’re such a perfect couple, those two – so respectful, so in sync, so loving – it’s almost sickening.

We walk, stumbling over the uneven ground, down the path towards the water, Bo, Julien and Emma using the torches provided in the Lodge to light the way. In the warmth indoors I’d forgotten how brutal it is outside. It’s so cold it feels as though the skin on my face is shrinking against my skull, in protest against the raw air. Someone grabs my arm and I jump, then realise it’s Miranda.

‘Hello, stranger,’ she says. ‘It’s so good to see you. God I’ve missed you.’ It’s so unusual for her to make that sort of admission – and there is something in the way she says it, too. I glance at her, but it’s too dark to make out her expression.

‘You too,’ I say.

‘And you’ve had your hair cut differently, haven’t you?’ I feel her hand come up to play with the strands framing my face. It is all I can do not to prickle away from her. Miranda has always been touchy-feely – I have always been whatever the opposite of that is.

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I went to Daniel Galvin, like you told me to.’

‘Without me?’

‘Oh – I didn’t think. I suddenly had a spare couple of hours … we’d closed on something earlier than expected.’

‘Well,’ she says, ‘next time you go, let me know, OK? We’ll make a date of it. It’s like you’ve fallen off the planet lately.’ She lowers her voice. ‘I’ve had to resort to Emma … God, Katie, she’s so nice it does my nut in.’

‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘it’s just that I’ve been so busy at work. You know, trying for partnership.’

‘But it won’t always be like that, will it?’

‘No,’ I say, ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Because I’ve been thinking, recently … remember how it used to be? In our twenties? We’d see each other every week, you and I, without fail. Even if it was just to go out and get drunk on Friday night.’

I nod. I’m not sure she can see though. ‘Yes,’ I say – my voice comes out a little hoarse.

‘Oh God, and the night bus? Both of us falling asleep and going to the end of the line … Kingston, wasn’t it? And that time we went to that twenty-four-hour Tesco and you suddenly decided you had to make an omelette when you got home and you dropped that carton of eggs and it went everywhere – I mean everywhere – and we just decided to run off, in our big stupid heels …’ She laughs, and then she stops. ‘I miss all of that … that messiness.’ There’s so much wistfulness in her tone. I’m glad I can’t see her expression now.

‘So do I,’ I say.

‘Look at you two,’ Julien turns back to us. ‘Thick as thieves. What are you gossiping about?’

‘Come on,’ Giles says, ‘share with the rest of us!’

‘Well,’ Miranda says quickly, leaning into me, ‘I’m glad we have this – to catch up. I’ve really missed you, K.’ She gives my arm a little squeeze and, again, I think I hear the tiniest catch in her voice. A pins-and-needles prickling of guilt; I’ve been a bad friend.

And then she transforms, producing a new bottle of champagne from under her arm and yelling to the others, ‘Look what I’ve got!’

There are whoops and cheers. Giles does a silly dance of delight; he’s like a little boy, letting off pent-up energy. And it seems to be infectious … suddenly everyone is making a lot of noise, talking excitedly, voices echoing in the empty landscape.

Then Emma stops short in front of us, with a quiet exclamation. ‘Oh!’

I see what’s halted her. There’s a figure standing on the jetty that we’re heading for, silhouetted by moonlight. He is quite tall, and standing surprisingly, almost inhumanly, still. The gamekeeper, I think. He’s about the right height. Or maybe one of the other guests we’ve just heard about?

Bo casts his torch up at the figure, and we wait for the man to turn, or at least move. And then Bo begins to laugh. Now we see what he has. It isn’t a man at all. It’s a statue of a man, staring out contemplatively, Antony Gormley-esque.

We all sit down on the jetty and look out across the loch. Every so often there’s a tiny disturbance in the surface, despite there being very little wind. The ripples must be caused by something underneath, the glassy surface withholding these secrets.

Despite the champagne, everyone suddenly seems a bit subdued. Perhaps it’s just the enormity of our surroundings – the vast black peaks rising in the distance, the huge stretch of night sky above, the pervasive quiet – that has awed us into silence.

The quiet isn’t quite all-pervasive, though. Sitting here for long enough you begin to hear other sounds: rustles and scufflings in the undergrowth, mysterious liquid echoes from the loch. Heather told us about the giant pike that live in it – their existence confirmed by the monstrous one mounted on the wall of the Lodge. Huge jaws, sharp teeth, like leftover Jurassic monsters.

I hear the shush-shush of the tall Scots pines above us, swaying in the breeze, and every so often a soft thud: a gust strong enough to disturb a cargo of old snow. Somewhere, quite near, there is the mournful call of an owl. It’s such a recognisable yet strange sound that it’s hard to believe it’s real, not some sort of special effect.

Giles tries to echo the sound: ‘Ter-wit, ter-woo!’

We all laugh, dutifully, but it strikes me that there’s something uneasy in the sound. The call of the owl, such an unusual noise for city dwellers like us, has just emphasised quite how unfamiliar this place is.

‘I didn’t even know there were places like this in the UK,’ Bo says, as if he can read my thoughts.

‘Ah Bo,’ Miranda says, ‘you’re such a Yank. It’s not all London and little chocolate box villages here.’

‘I didn’t realise you got outside the M25 much yourself, Miranda,’ Nick says.

‘Oi!’ She punches his arm. ‘I do, occasionally. We went to Soho Farmhouse before Christmas, didn’t we Julien?’ We all laugh – including Miranda. People think she can’t laugh at herself, but she can … just as long as she doesn’t come out of it looking too bad.

‘Come on, open that bottle, Manda,’ Bo says.

‘Yes … open it, open it—’ Giles begins to shout, and everyone joins in … it’s almost impossible not to. It becomes a chant, something oddly tribal in it. I’m put in mind of some pagan sect; the effect of the landscape, probably – mysterious and ancient.

Miranda stands up and fires the cork into the loch, where it makes its own series of ripples, widening out in shining rings across the water. We drink straight from the bottle, passing it around like Girl Guides, the cold, densely fizzing liquid stinging our throats.

‘It’s like Oxford,’ Mark says. ‘Sitting down by the river, getting pissed after finals at three p.m.’

‘Except then it was cava,’ Miranda says. ‘Christ – we drank gallons of that stuff. How did we not notice that it tastes like vomit?’

‘And there was that party you held down by the river,’ Mark says. ‘You two’ – he gestures to Miranda and me – ‘and Samira.’

‘Oh yes,’ Giles says. ‘What was the theme again?’

‘The Beautiful and Damned,’ I say. Everyone had to come in twenties’ gear, so we could all pretend we were Bright Young Things, like Evelyn Waugh and friends. God, we were pretentious. The thought of it is like reading an old diary entry, cringeworthy … but fond, too. Because it was a wonderful evening, even magical. We’d lit candles and put them in lanterns, all along the bank. Everyone had gone to so much effort with their costumes, and they were universally flattering: the girls in spangled flappers and the boys in black tie. Miranda looked the most stunning, of course, in a long metallic sheath. I remember a drunken moment of complete euphoria, looking about the party. How had little old me ended up at a place like this? With all these people as my friends? And most particularly with that girl – so glamorous, so radiant – as my best friend?

As we walk back towards the lights of the Lodge and the cabins, I spot another statue, a little way to our left, silhouetted in the light thrown from the sauna building. This one is facing away from the loch, towards us. It gives me the same uncanny little shock that the other did; I suppose this is exactly the effect they are meant to achieve.

The privacy of my cabin is a welcome respite. We’ve spent close to eight hours in each other’s company now. Mine is the furthest away from the Lodge on this side, just beyond the moss-roofed sauna. It’s also the smallest. Neither of these things particularly bothers me. I linger over my unpacking, though I’ve brought very little with me. The aftertaste of the champagne is sour on my tongue now, I can feel what little I drank listing in my stomach. I have a drink of water. Then I take a long, hot bath in the freestanding metal tub in the bathroom using the organic bath oil provided, which creates a thick aromatherapeutic fug of rosemary and geranium. There’s a high window facing towards the loch, though the view out is half-obscured by a wild growth of ivy, like something from a pre-Raphaelite painting. It’s also high enough that someone could look in and watch me in the bath for a while before I noticed them – if I ever did. I’m not sure why that has occurred to me – especially as there’s hardly anyone here to look – but once the thought is in my mind I can’t seem to get rid of it. I draw the little square of linen across the view. As I do I catch sight of my reflection in the mirror above the sink. The light isn’t good, but I think I look terrible: pale and ill, my eyes dark pits.

I’ll admit, I half-wondered about not coming this year. Just pretending I hadn’t seen the email from Emma in my inbox until it was ‘too late’ to do anything about it. A sudden, rebellious thought: Perhaps I’ve done my part? I could just stay hidden here for the three days, and the others would make enough noise and drama without actually noticing that I had disappeared. Nick and Bo and Samira are loud enough when they get going, but Miranda can make enough noise and drama for an entire party on her own.

Of course, it would help that I’m known as the quiet one. The observer, melting into the background. That was the dynamic when we lived together, Miranda, Samira and me. They were the performers, I their audience.

If you told all this to the people I work with I reckon they’d be surprised. I’m one of the more senior associates at the firm now. I’m hopefully not far off making partner. People listen to what I say. I give presentations, I’m pretty comfortable with the sound of my own voice, ringing out in a silent meeting room. I like the feeling, in fact … seeing the faces upturned towards me, listening carefully to what I have to say. I command respect. I run a whole team. And I have found that I like being in charge. I suppose we all carry around different versions of ourselves.

With this group I have always been an also-ran. People have often wondered, I’m sure, what someone like me is doing with a friend like Miranda. But in friendship, as in love, opposites often attract. Extrovert and introvert, yin and yang.

It would be very easy to dislike Miranda. She has been blessed by the Gods of beauty and fortune. She has the sort of absurd figure you see held up as a ‘bad, unrealistic example to young girls’ – as though she has been personally Photoshopped. It doesn’t really seem fair that someone so thin should have breasts that size; aren’t they made up largely of fat? And the thick, infuriatingly shiny blonde hair, and green eyes … no one in real life seems to have properly green eyes, except Miranda. She is the sort of person you would immediately assume was probably a bitch. Which she can be, absolutely.

The thing is, beneath her occasionally despotic ways, Miranda can be very kind. There was the time my parents’ marriage was falling apart, for example – when I had a standing invitation to stay at her house whenever I felt like it, to escape the shouting matches at home. Or when my sixth-form boyfriend, Matt, dumped me unceremoniously for the prettier, more popular Freya, and Miranda not only lent me a shoulder to cry on, but put about the rumour that he had chlamydia. Or when I couldn’t afford a dress for the college Summer Ball and, without making a thing of it at all, she gave me one of hers: a column of silver silk.

When I opened my eyes at one point on the train journey up here I caught Miranda watching me. Those green eyes of hers. So sharp, so assessing. A slight frown, as though she was trying to work something out. I pretended to sleep again, quickly. Sometimes I genuinely believe that Miranda has known me for so long that somewhere along the way she might have acquired the ability to read my mind, if she looks hard enough.

We go back even further than the rest of the group, she and I. All the way back to a little school in Sussex. The two new girls. One already golden, the sheen of money on her – she’d been moved from a private school nearby as her parents wanted her ‘to strive’ (and they thought a comprehensive education would help her chances of getting into Oxford). The other girl mousey-haired, too thin in her large uniform bought from the school’s second-hand collection. The golden girl (already popular, within the first morning) taking pity on her, insisting they sit next to each other at assembly. Making her her project, making her feel accepted, less alone.

I never knew why it was that she chose me to be her best friend. Because she did choose me: I had very little to do with it. But then she has always liked to do the unexpected thing, has Miranda, has always liked to challenge other people’s expectations of her. The other girls were lining up to be her friend, I still remember that. All that hair – so blonde and shiny it didn’t look quite real. Eyelashes so long she was once told off by a teacher for wearing mascara: the injustice! Real breasts – at twelve. She was good at sport, clever but not too clever (though at an all-girls’ school, academic prowess is not quite the handicap it is at a mixed one).

The other girls couldn’t understand it. Why would she be friends with me when she could have them, any of them? There had to be something weird about her, if her taste in people was so ‘off’. She could have ruled that school like a queen. But because of this, her friendship with me, she was probably never quite as popular as she might have been. But that didn’t matter to the boys at the parties we began to go to in our teens. I never got the invites to houses of pupils from the boys’ grammar up the road, or parties on the beach. Miranda could have left me behind then. But she took me with her.

When I think of this, I feel all the more ashamed. This feeling is the same one I used to get when I stayed over at her beautiful Edwardian house and was tempted to take some little trophy home for myself. Something small, something she’d hardly notice: a hairclip, or a pair of lace-trimmed socks. Just so I’d have something pretty to look at in my little beige bedroom in my dingy two-up two-down with stains on the walls and broken blinds.

There’s a knock on the front door at about eight: Nick and Bo, thank God. For a moment I had thought it might be Miranda. Nick and I met in freshers’ week, and have been friends ever since. He was there through all the ups and downs of uni.

The two of them come in, checking out the place. ‘Your cabin is just like ours,’ Nick says, when I let them in, ‘except a bit smaller. And a lot tidier … Bo has already covered the whole place with his stuff.’

‘Hey,’ Bo says. ‘Just because I don’t travel with only three versions of the same outfit.’

It’s not even an exaggeration. Nick’s one of those people who have a self-imposed uniform: a crisp white shirt, those dark selvedge jeans, and chukka boots. Maybe a smart blazer, and always, of course, his signature tortoiseshell Cutler and Gross glasses. Somehow he makes it work. On him it’s stylish, authoritative – whereas on a lesser mortal it might seem a bit plain.

We sit down together on the collection of squashy armchairs in front of the bed.

Bo sniffs the air. ‘Smells amazing in here, too. What is that?’

‘I had a bath.’

‘Oh, I thought that oil looked nice. Don’t do things by halves here, do they? Emma’s really knocked it out of the park. It’s awesome.’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘it is.’ But it doesn’t come out quite as enthusiastically as I’d meant it to.

‘Are you all right?’ Nick jostles me with his shoulder. ‘I hope you don’t mind my saying this, but you seem a bit … off. Ever since this morning. You know, that thing on the train earlier, with you being put in the other carriage, I’m sure it wasn’t intentional. If it had been Miranda, that would be a different story …’ He raises his eyebrows at Bo, and Bo nods in agreement. ‘I wouldn’t necessarily make the same assumption. But it was Emma. I just don’t think she’s like that.’

‘I’m not sure she’s my biggest fan, though.’ Emma’s so decent, and I’ve wondered in the past if it’s that she’s seen something she doesn’t like in me and recoiled from it.

Bo frowns. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘I suppose it’s just a feeling …’

‘I really wouldn’t take it so personally,’ Nick says.

‘No,’ I say. ‘Maybe it’s just that I haven’t seen everyone in such a long time. And I shouldn’t drink in the day – it always makes me feel weird. Especially when I haven’t had enough to eat.’

‘Totally,’ Bo nods. But Nick doesn’t say anything. He’s just looking at me.

Then he asks, ‘Is there something else?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘No, there isn’t.’

‘You sure?’

I nod my head.

‘Well, come on then,’ Nick says, ‘let’s go fuel you up at this dinner. There better be at least some combination of bagpipes, venison, and kilts, otherwise I’m going to ask for my money back.’

Nick, Bo and I walk over to the Lodge for the dinner, arm in arm. Nick smells, as ever, of citrus and perhaps a hint of incense. It’s such a familiar, comforting scent that I want to bury my face in his shoulder and tell him what’s on my mind.

I was a bit in love with Nick Manson at Oxford, at first. I think most of my seminar group was. He was beautiful, but in a new, grown-up way entirely different from every other first-year male – so many of them still acne-plagued and gawky, or completely unable to talk to girls. His was a much more sophisticated beauty to, say, Julien’s gym-honed handsomeness. Nick might have been beamed in from another planet, which in a way he had. He’d taken the baccalaureate in Paris (his parents were diplomats) where he had also learned fluent French and a fondness for Gitanes cigarettes. Nick laughs now at how pretentious he was – but most undergraduates were pretentious back then … only his version seemed authentic, justified.

He came out to a select few friends in the middle of our second year. It wasn’t exactly a surprise. He hadn’t gone out with any of the girls who threw themselves at him with embarrassing eagerness, so there had perhaps been a bit of a question mark there. I had chosen not to see it, as I had my own explanation for his apparent celibacy: he was saving himself for the right woman.

It was a bit of a blow, his coming out, I’m not going to pretend otherwise. My crush on him had had all the intensity that one at that age often does. But over time I learned to love him as a friend.

When he met Bo he fell off the radar. Suddenly I saw and heard a lot less of him. It was hard not to feel resentful. Of Nick, for dropping me – because that’s how it felt at the time. Of Bo, as the usurper. And then Bo had his issues. He was an addict, or still is, as he puts it, just one who never takes drugs any more. Nick became pretty much his full-time carer for a few years. I suspect Bo resented me in turn, as a close friend of Nick’s. I think now he’s more secure of himself and their relationship these days … or perhaps we’ve all just grown up a bit. Even so, with Bo, I sometimes feel as though I’m overdoing things a bit. Being a little too ingratiating. Because if I’m totally honest I still feel that with his neediness – because he is needy, even now – he’s the reason Nick and I aren’t such good friends any more. We’re close, yes. But nothing like we once were.

It’s even cooler now; our mingled breath clouds the air. There are ribbons of mist hanging over the loch, but around us the air is very clear, and when I look up it’s as though the cold has somehow sharpened the light of the stars. As we stumble along the path to the Lodge, I happen to look over towards the sauna, where I saw the second statue, earlier, the one that had been facing towards us. But, funny thing, though I search for it in the light thrown from the building, assuming it must be hidden in shadow, I can’t see it. The statue is gone.

NOW
2nd January 2019
HEATHER

As I tramp through the snow, trying to step in Doug’s big footprints, I’m thinking of the guests, sitting about in their cabins and wondering: not knowing yet.

Unless … I push the thought away. I can’t let my mind race to conclusions. But if Doug is right, there’s something more sinister at play. And something had gone wrong between them all, that was clear. There had been a ‘disagreement’, that was how they all put it when they came to tell me about the disappearance.

It would be easy to say, with hindsight, that I had a sense of foreboding three days ago, when they all arrived. I didn’t see this coming. But I did feel something.

My Jamie was fascinated by the idea of the ‘lizard brain’. Maybe it was something to do with his job. He saw people on the edge, acting purely on instinct: the father who ran from a burning house before saving his children, or, conversely, the one who shielded his wife and baby from a blaze and suffered third-degree burns over half of his body. It’s all down to the amygdala – a tiny nodule, hidden amongst the little grey cells, the root of our most instinctive actions. It’s behind the selfish urge to grab for the biggest cookie, the comfiest seat. It’s what alerts you to danger, before you even consciously know of a threat. Without it, a laboratory mouse will run straight into the jaws of a cat.

Jamie believed that people are basically civilised animals. That the essential urges are hidden beneath a layer of social gloss; stifled, controlled. But at times of even fairly minor stress, the animal within has a go at breaking through. Once he was stuck just outside Edinburgh on a train for four hours, because of an electrical fault. ‘You saw straight away which people would eat you,’ he told me, ‘without any hesitation, if you were stuck on a lifeboat together. There was a man who was hammering on the driver’s cabin after only a few minutes, bright red in the face. He was like a caged animal. He looked at the rest of us like he was just waiting for one of us to tell him to shut up … then he’d have an excuse to lose it completely.’

That’s the thing, you see. Some people, given just the right amount of pressure, taken out of their usual, comfortable environments, don’t need much encouragement at all to become monsters. And sometimes you just get a strong sense about people, and you can’t explain it; you simply know it, in some deeper part of yourself. That’s the lizard brain, too.

So I find myself, now, returning to three days ago, the evening they all arrived. My first, animal impressions.

The Highland Dinner on the first night of the stay is one of the promises made by the brochure. But every time we host it, I think the guests would be quite happy to do without. It always seems to take on the atmosphere of an enforced occasion, like a state dinner. I’m sure it’s just another means of extracting money from them. The mark-up on the food, even accounting for the fact that the ‘best local ingredients’ are used, is huge. I’ve also wondered if it’s a way of keeping the community onside, because local lads and lasses are employed as the waiting staff, and all the ingredients are bought from nearby suppliers; save the venison, which comes from here.

I have read the headlines from when the boss first bought the place – from the family who had owned it for generations – articles complaining about the ‘elitist prices’, the ‘barring of local people from their own land’ – there’s a right to roam in the Highlands, which the old laird had always upheld, but the boss had fences and threatening signs put up. He claims they are to deter poachers but, funny thing, apparently that wasn’t so much of a problem under the previous owner. Maybe the poachers hadn’t got themselves organised, weaponised, hadn’t realised the healthy demand for venison and mounted stags’ heads. But I think there might be another angle to the deer killings that happen now. In the vein of a lesson taught, something taken back.

Once, in our nearest shop in Kinlochlaggan (still over an hour away), I happened to tell the shopkeeper where it was that I worked. ‘You seem nice enough, lass,’ she said, ‘but it’s a nasty place. Foreign money.’ (By which she meant, I presume, the boss’s Englishness, and the fact that the guests often come up from England, or from further afield.) ‘One of these days,’ she told me, ‘they’ll pay the proper price for keeping people from what’s theirs.’ I remembered then the theory I’d heard about the Old Lodge, the one I don’t tell guests: that the fire hadn’t been started by the gamekeeper, but by a disgruntled local, slighted by the laird.

If the Highland Dinner is meant to stem this ill will towards the place, I’m not sure it has worked. If anything, the waiting staff probably return home with tales of the guests’ bad behaviour. I remember a stag party where a drunk – but not that drunk – best man groped a very young waitress as she bent to retrieve a dropped napkin. Guests have passed out in their plates, succumbing to too much of the Glencorrin single malt. Some have vomited at the table, in full view of the staff.

The London group of guests would be better behaved than the stag party, I was sure. There was a baby among them, so surely that meant something, even if the parents weren’t joining us (the mother had asked for their food to be brought to them in their cabin). That left seven of them. The dark-haired man, the tall blonde. Julien and Miranda. A perfectly matched pair, the most beautiful, even the poshest names of the lot. Then there was the thin, sleek, auburn-haired man with the architect’s glasses – Nick – and his American boyfriend, Bo. The third couple: Mark, and Emma. He might almost have been good-looking, but his eyes were too close together, like a small predator’s, and his top half was disproportionately heavy, lending him the unnatural appearance of an action figure. I found myself thinking she was like a budget version of the taller blonde; dark hair at the roots, a roll of flesh showing at the top of her jeans where her top had ridden up. I was surprised at myself. I’m not, as a rule, a judgemental person. But even if you don’t have much interaction with other human beings – as I do not – it turns out that the instinct to judge one another, that basic human trait, does not leave us. And the resemblance was un-ignorable. Her hair was dyed the same shade, the clothes were of a type, and she’d even made up her eyes in the same way, little flecks of black at the corners. While they made her friend’s eyes look large and catlike, they only served to emphasise the smallness of her own.

Then there was the last one, Katie. The odd one out. I almost missed her at first. She was standing so still, so quiet, in the shadows at the corner of the room – almost as though she wanted to disappear into them. She didn’t match the others, somehow. Her skin was sallow, and there were large purple shadows beneath her eyes. Her clothes were too formal, as though she were going on a business trip and had turned up here by mistake.

Normally, though I have to learn the names, I prefer to think of the people who stay here as simply the ‘guests’: guest 1, guest 2, et cetera. I’d prefer not to think of them as individual people with lives outside this place. Perhaps this sounds odd. I suppose I could argue it’s a survival tactic. Don’t get involved in their lives. Don’t let their happiness – or otherwise – touch you. Don’t compare yourself to their wholeness, those couples who come for a romantic retreat, the happy families.

The last twenty-four hours has meant a closer acquaintance with this group – a forced intimacy that I could well have done without.

But I suppose, if I’m honest, even from the beginning I was curious about them. Perhaps because they were roughly the same age as me: early-to mid-thirties, at a guess. I could have been like them, if I had found a high-paying job in the city, like some friends did after university. This is what you could have had, it felt like the universe was saying to me. This is where you could have been, what you could have been doing, at the loneliest time of the year (because New Year’s Eve is, isn’t it?).

I might have been envious. And yet I didn’t feel it. Because I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was an unease, a discontent, that seemed to surround them. Even as they laughed and jostled and teased one another, I could sense something underneath it – something off. They seemed almost at times like actors, I thought, making a great show of what a wonderful time they were having. They laughed a little too hard. They drank a great deal too much. And at the same time, despite all this evidence of merriment, they seemed to watch each other. Perhaps it’s hindsight, making this impression seem like more than it was. I suppose there are probably tensions in most groups of friends. But I was struck by the thought that they did not seem completely comfortable in one another’s company. Which was odd, as they’d told me right at the beginning that they were very old friends. But that’s the thing about old friends, isn’t it? Sometimes they don’t even realise that they no longer have anything in common. That maybe they don’t even like each other any more.

The other guests, the Icelandic couple, walked in just as the starter was being served – ‘locally-caught salmon with wild herbs’ – to a frisson of hostility from the others.

Iain had booked them in. I’d been on one of my rare trips to the local shop, so he’d had to take the call. He could see that the bunkhouse was free on the system, he said, and he’d checked with the boss, who’d okayed it all. I was annoyed he hadn’t written their names down in the book: if I had known, I wouldn’t have promised the other group they’d have the run of the place.

I wasn’t sure what sort of behaviour to expect from these two. They weren’t the usual, well-heeled sort. Both had wind burned complexions, the roughened look of people who spend a lot of time in harsher elements. The man had very pale blue eyes, like a wolf’s, and stringy blond hair tied back with a leather thong. The woman had a double-ended stud passing through the septum of her nose and a tangled dark ponytail.

They arrived at the station with huge backpacks, half the size of themselves. They explained that they had caught a passage on a fishing trawler from Iceland to Mallaig further up the coast – I saw the beautiful blonde wrinkle her nose at this – where Iain collected them and brought them to the estate in his truck. They came with proper gear – Gore-Tex jackets and heavy boots – making the Barbours and Hunter wellies the other lot wore look slightly ridiculous. They hadn’t changed out of their outdoor gear for dinner, so that even Doug and Iain, in their special Loch Corrin kilts, looked rather tarted up next to them, as did the serving staff, the two girls and the boy in their white shirts and plaid aprons. The beautiful blonde looked at the two new arrivals as though they were creatures that had just emerged from the bottom of the loch. Luckily, they were either side of me; she was seated opposite, next to Doug, and fairly quickly seemed to decide that she would waste no more of her attention on them, and give it wholeheartedly to Doug instead. I looked at her, with all that gloss: the fine silk shirt, the earrings set with sparkling – diamond? – studs. She watched him as though whatever he was saying was the most fascinating thing she had heard all evening, her lips curved in a half smile, her chin in her palm. Doug wouldn’t go for someone like her – would he? She wouldn’t be his type, surely? Then I remembered that I had absolutely no idea what his type would be, because I didn’t really know anything about him.

I focused my attention back on the Icelandic guests either side of me. They spoke almost perfect English, with just a slight musicality that betrayed their foreignness.

‘You’ve worked here long?’ the woman – Kristin – asked me.

‘Just under a year.’

‘And you live here all by yourself?’ This was from the man, Ingvar.

‘Well, not quite. Doug … over there, lives here too. Iain lives in town, Fort William, with his family.’

‘He’s the one who collected us?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘he seems like a nice man.’

‘Yes.’ Though I thought: really? Iain’s so taciturn. He arrives, does his work – upon orders received from the boss – and leaves. He keeps very much to himself. Of course, he could say exactly the same of me.

Ingvar said, almost thoughtfully, ‘What makes someone like you come to live in a place like this?’ The way he asked it – so knowing – almost as though he had guessed at something.

‘I like it here,’ I told him. Even to my own ears it sounded defensive. ‘The natural beauty, the peace …’

‘But it must get lonely for you here, no?’

‘Not particularly,’ I said.

‘Not frightening?’ He smiled when he said this, and I felt a slight chill run through me.

‘No,’ I said, curtly.

‘I suppose you get used to it,’ he said, either not noticing or ignoring my rudeness. ‘Where we come from, one understands what it is to be alone, you see. Though, if you’re not careful, it can send you a little crazy.’ He made a boring motion with a finger at his temple. ‘All that darkness in the winter, all the solitude.’

Not quite true, I thought. Sometimes solitude is the only way to regain your sanity. But it also got me thinking. If you lived in Iceland – with its long winter nights – wouldn’t you go a little further from the cold and dark than Scotland? For the price of the cabins at this place you could get all the way to the relative warmth of Southern Europe. And for that matter, I wondered how two people who got here by hitch-hiking on a fishing trawler could have afforded our rates. But perhaps they did it simply for the adventure. We get all sorts, here.

‘Should we be worried?’ Ingvar asked, next. ‘About the news?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You don’t know? The Highland Ripper.’

Of course I knew. I’d been hoping the guests didn’t. I’d seen the pictures in the paper the day before: the faces of the six victims. All youngish, pretty. You might bump into a hundred girls like that walking down Princes Street in Edinburgh – and yet the images had the ominous look of all victim photos, as though there was something about each innocuous smiling snap that would have foretold their fate, if you had known what to search for. They looked, somehow, as though they had been marked for death.

‘Yes,’ I said, carefully. ‘I’ve seen the papers. But Scotland is a pretty big place, you know, I don’t think you’ve got anything—’

‘I thought it was the Western Highlands, where they found the victims?’

‘Still,’ I said, ‘It’s a pretty large area. You’d be as likely to bump into the Loch Ness monster.’

I sounded a little more blasé than I felt. That morning, Iain had said, ‘You should tell the guests to stay indoors at night, Heather. On account of the news.’ It rather put me on edge that Iain – who hardly ever mentioned the guests – had expressed concern for their welfare.

I didn’t think this man, Ingvar, was really scared of anything. I sensed, instead, that he was having a bit of fun with the whole thing; a smile still seemed to be playing around the corners of his mouth. It was a relief when he asked about hunting, and I could escape the scrutiny of those pale blue eyes. I remember thinking that there was something unnerving about them: they didn’t seem quite human.

‘Oh, you’re better off asking Doug about hunting,’ I said. ‘That’s definitely his side of things. Doug?’

Doug glanced over. The blonde looked up too, clearly annoyed at the interruption.

‘Do you ever shoot the animals at night,’ Ingvar asked, ‘using lamps and dogs?’

‘No,’ Doug said, very quickly and surprisingly loudly.

‘Why not?’ Ingvar asked, with that odd smile again. ‘I know it’s very effective.’

Doug’s reply was bald. ‘Because it’s dangerous and cruel. I’d never use lamping.’

‘Lamping?’ the blonde guest asked.

‘Spotlights,’ he said, barely glancing in her direction, ‘shining them at the deer, so they freeze. It confuses them – and it terrifies them. Often it means you shoot the wrong deer: females with young calves, for example. Sometimes they use dogs, which tear the animal apart. It’s barbaric.’

There was a rather taut silence, afterwards. I reflected that it might have been the most I had ever heard Doug say in one go.

The two Icelandic guests have been very eager to help with the search. They’re probably the only two that I’d trust in these conditions: they must see similar weather all the time. But they are still guests, and I am still responsible for their well-being. Besides, I know nothing about them. They are an unknown quantity. All of the guests are. So my lizard brain is saying, loud and clear: Trust no one.

I wonder what the guests all make of me. Perhaps they see someone organised, slightly dull, absolutely in charge of everything. At least, that is what they will have seen if I have pulled it off, this clever disguise I have built for myself, like a tough outer shell. Inside this shell, the reality is very different. Here is a person held together by tape and glue and prescription-strength sleeping pills – the only thing I can be persuaded to make a foray into civilisation for, these days. Washed down sometimes, often, with a little too much wine. I’m not saying that I have a drinking problem; I don’t. But I don’t ever drink for pleasure. I do it out of necessity. I use it as another painkiller: to blunt the edge of things, to alleviate the chronic, aching torment of memory.

Three days earlier
30th December 2018
MIRANDA

Dinner is served in the big dining room in the Lodge, off the living room, which has been lit with what appear to be hundreds of candles, and staffed by a few spotty teenagers in plaid aprons. We’re two short: Samira and Giles are having supper in their cabin. Samira said she’s heard too many stories about parents ‘just leaving their kids for an hour or so’ when everything goes horribly wrong. Yes, I told her, patiently – but not in the middle of nowhere. Besides, Priya’s hardly going to be wandering off on her own at six months, for God’s sake. Still, Samira wasn’t having any of it.

I almost can’t believe this woman is Samira, who at one party in our early twenties decided to jump the two-foot gap between the house building and the building next to it, just for a laugh. She was always one of the wild ones, the party girl, the one you could rely on to raise the tempo of things on a night out. If Katie’s the one who I go way back with, Samira’s probably much more like me: the one I’ve always felt most akin to. Now I feel I hardly recognise her. Perhaps that’s just because she’s been so busy with Priya. I’m sure the real Samira is in there somewhere. I’m hoping this will be our chance to catch up, to remember that we’re partners in crime. But honestly, when some people have kids it’s like they’ve had a personality transplant. Or a lobotomy. Maybe I should count myself lucky that I don’t seem to be able to get pregnant. At least I’ll remain myself for Christ’s Sake.

I’ve got the gamekeeper, Doug, on one side of me and the other guy, Iain, on the other. Both of them are wearing identikit green kilts and sporrans. Neither looks particularly happy about it. As you might imagine, the gamekeeper wears his outfit best. He really is quite attractive. I am reminded of the fact that, before Julien, I was sometimes drawn to men like this. The reticent, brooding sort: the challenge of drawing them out, making them care.

I turn to him and ask: ‘Have you always been a gamekeeper?’

He frowns. ‘No.’

‘Oh, and what did you do before?’

‘The Marines.’

I picture him with a short back and sides, in uniform. It’s an appealing image. He looks good scrubbed-up, even if I’m sure his hair hasn’t seen a brush any time in the last five years. I’m glad I made an effort: my silk shirt, undone perhaps one button lower than strictly necessary, my new jeans.

‘Did you have to kill anyone?’ I ask, leaning forward, putting my chin in my hand.

‘Yes.’ As he says it his expression is neutral, betraying no emotion whatsoever. I experience a small shiver of what might be disquiet … or desire.

Julien is sitting directly opposite us, with a front and centre view of things. There is nothing like stirring a bit of jealousy to fire things up in a relationship – especially ours. It could be an over-familiar waiter in a restaurant, or the guy on the next sunlounger who Julien’s convinced has been checking me out (he’s probably right). ‘Would you want him to do this to you?’ he’d pant in my ear later, ‘or this?’

If I’m honest, sex has become, lately, a mechanism for a specific end rather than pleasure. I’ve got this app that Samira told me about, which identifies your most fertile days. And then, of course, there are certain positions that work best. I’ve explained this to Julien so many times, but he doesn’t seem to get it. I suppose he’s stopped trying, recently. So yes, we could do with things being spiced up a little.

I turn back to Doug, keeping Julien in my peripheral vision. He’s talking to the Icelandic woman, so I touch a hand against Doug’s, just for fun. I’ve had a couple of glasses too many, maybe. I feel his fingers flinch against mine.

‘Sorry,’ I say, all innocence. ‘Would you mind passing me the jus?’ I think it’s working. Certainly Julien’s looking pretty pissed off about something. To all intents and purposes he might be having a whale of a time – always so important to present the right face to the world – but I know him too well. It’s that particular tension in the side of the neck, the gritting of the teeth.

I glance over to where poor Katie, across the table from me, is seated next to the Icelandic man with the strange eyes, who seems to have taken a bit of a shine to her. It’s a bloody nightmare, them being here too. Are we going to have to share the sauna with them? Judging by the state of the clothes they’re wearing I’d have to disinfect myself afterwards.

The man, now, is leaning towards Katie as though he has never seen anything so fascinating or beautiful in his life. Clearly – judging by his partner – he has unconventional taste.

Though … there is definitely something different about Katie. She looks tired and pale, as per, but there’s that new haircut for a start. At the place she normally goes to, they style her hair à la Mrs Williams, our old school hockey teacher. You would have thought that with her corporate lawyer’s salary, she might try a bit harder sometimes. I’ve been telling her to go to Daniel Galvin for ages – I go for highlights every six weeks – so I don’t know why I feel so put out about her finally having listened to me. Perhaps because she hasn’t given me any credit for it, and I feel I deserve some. And perhaps because I had sort of imagined we might go together. Make a morning of it, the two of us.

I still remember the girl she was back then: flat-chested when everyone else was starting to develop. Lank-haired, knock-kneed, the maroon of the school uniform emphasising the sallowness of her complexion.

I have always liked a project.

Look at her now. It’s difficult to be objective, as I’ve known her so long that she’s practically a sister, but I can see how some men might find her attractive. Sure: she’ll never be pretty, but she has learned to make the best of herself. That new hair. Her teeth have been straightened and whitened. Her clothes are beautifully cut to make the most of her slight frame (I could never wear a shirt like that without my boobs creating the kind of shelf that makes you look bigger than you really are). She had her ears pinned back as a present to herself when she qualified at her law firm. She looks almost … chic. You might think she was French: the way she’s made the best of those difficult features. What’s that expression the French have for it? Jolie laide: ugly beautiful.

Katie would never be wolf-whistled at by builders or white-van men. I never understand why some people think you might be flattered by that. Look, OK, I know I’m attractive. Very attractive. There, I’ve said it. Do you hate me now? Anyway, I don’t need it confirmed by some pot-bellied construction workers who would catcall anyone with a short skirt or tight top. If anything, they cheapen it.

They wouldn’t shout at Katie, though. Well, they might shout at her to ‘Smile love!’ But they wouldn’t fancy her. They wouldn’t understand her. I’m almost envious of it. It’s something that I’ll never have, that look-twice subtlety.

Anyway. Maybe now we’re finally together, I can find out what’s been going on in her life – what it is that has prompted this mysterious change in her.

EMMA

It’s hard not to spend the whole of the meal looking around the table, checking that everyone’s enjoying themselves. I really wish I’d opted us out of this dinner when I’d booked – it seemed like a great idea at the time, but with the Icelandic couple here as well there’s an odd dynamic. And this close proximity to the other guests just emphasises the mess-up over our not having the place to ourselves. I know I should be able to let it go: que sera sera, and all that, but I so wanted it to be perfect for everyone. It doesn’t help that the other guests are so weird-looking and unkempt: I can see how unimpressed Miranda, in particular, is by them. Katie’s sitting next to the man, Ingvar – who is looking at her as though he wishes she were on the plate in front of him, not the over-scented meat.

I, meanwhile, am sitting next to Iain. He doesn’t say very much, and when he does his accent is so thick it’s hard to understand everything.

‘Do you live here too?’ I ask him.

‘No,’ he says. ‘Fort William – with my wife and kids.’

‘Ah,’ I say. ‘Have you worked here long?’

He nods. ‘Since the current owner first bought the place.’

‘What do you do?’

‘Whatever needs doing. Odd jobs, here and there: working on the pumphouse, at the moment, down by the loch. I bring the supplies in too: food, the bits for the cabins.’

‘What’s the owner like?’ I ask, intrigued. I imagine a whiskery old Scottish laird, so I’m a bit surprised when Iain says, ‘He’s all right, for an Englishman.’ I wait for him to say more, but he either doesn’t have anything to add, or is reluctant to do so.

I seem to have run out of questions, so it’s a relief when the Icelandic man asks about the deer-stalking, and the whole table’s attention is turned to that. It’s as if the idea of a hunt, a kill, has exerted a magnetic pull upon everyone’s attention.

‘We don’t hunt the deer just for the sake of it,’ the gamekeeper says. ‘We do it to keep the numbers down – otherwise they’d get out of control. So it’s necessary.’

‘But I think it’s necessary for another reason,’ the man – Ingvar – says. ‘Humans are hunters, it’s in our very DNA. We need to find an outlet for those needs. The blood lust.’ He says the last two words as though they have a particularly delicious flavour to them, and there’s a pause in which no one quite seems to know what to say, a heightening of the awkward tension that’s plagued this meal. I see Miranda raise her eyebrows. Perhaps we can all laugh about this later – it’ll become a funny anecdote. Every holiday has these moments, doesn’t it? ‘Well, I don’t know about all that,’ says Bo, spearing a piece of venison, ‘but it’s delicious. Amazing to think it came from right here.’

I’m not so sure. It’s not terrible, exactly, but I could have done so much better. The venison is overly flavoured with juniper, you can hardly taste the meat, and there isn’t nearly enough jus. The vegetables are limp: the cavolo nero a slimy over-steamed mush.

I’ll make up for it tomorrow evening. I have my wonderful feast planned: smoked salmon blinis to go with the first couple of bottles of champagne, then beef Wellington with foie gras, followed by a perfect chocolate soufflé. Soufflés, as everyone knows, are not easy. You have to be a bit obsessive about them. The separation of the eggs, the perfect beating of the whites – the timings at the end, making sure you serve them before the beautiful risen crest falls. Most people don’t have the patience for it. But that’s exactly the sort of cooking I like.

It’s a relief, to be honest, when the dessert (a rather limp raspberry pavlova) is finally cleared away.

As everyone is readying to leave, Julien motions us all to sit back down. He’s had a bit too much to drink; he sways slightly as he stands.

‘Darling,’ Miranda says, in her most silken tones, ‘what are you doing?’ I wonder if she’s remembering last New Year – in the exclusive environs of Fera at Claridge’s restaurant – when he stood up out of his seat without looking, only to send a waiter’s entire tray of food crashing to the ground.

‘I want to say a few words,’ he says. ‘I want to thank Emma …’ he raises his glass at me, ‘for picking such a fantastic place—’

‘Oh,’ I say, ‘I haven’t really done anything …’

‘And I want to say how special it is to have everyone here, together. It’s nice to know that some things never change, that some friends are always there for you. It hasn’t been the easiest year—’

‘Darling,’ Miranda says again, with a laugh, ‘I think everyone gets the idea. But I absolutely agree. Here’s to old friends—’ she raises her glass. Then she remembers, and turns to me. ‘And new, of course. Cheers!’

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