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“Said he wants forty-eight hours,” Michael replied. “In forty-eight hours, we go back and make the call. I assume some money exchanges hands between someone, but who is to say whose hands.”

Steph listened carefully to all of this. At first it made little sense to her. It was not until she was back at the house and quickly ushered into a room by Kelvin himself, that she worked out what Michael and Davey had been on about.

The room looked like a small library. There were a couple of big armchairs in one corner, a hammock in another set between a free-standing post and two large bookshelves along two walls. Kelvin directed Steph and Davey into the two seats. Michael lazily went over to the hammock and sat in the middle of it, using it as a sort of canvas chair.

“The body?” Kelvin asked, looking at Davey.

“Not there. Mostly not there.”

“Fuck!”

Steph watched him carefully. His facial expressions continued to change slightly as he stared at nothing in particular. It was as if he were reacting to some sort of internal conversation in his own head.

“Right, here’s what we do: we give ourselves forty-eight hours to get things in order – it was the cave lion, wasn’t it?”

“Almost certainly.”

“Good, that makes things easier with paperwork. Anyway, we give ourselves forty-eight hours to make sure we find what is left of Fergus, work out what the hell happened and then act as if we have only just found out. Probably say it was a bear.”

“What?” Steph said, looking towards Davey and Michael for support. They ignored her and looked directly at Kelvin. “We can’t do that?”

“We can and we will,” Kelvin replied, putting his hands in his pockets.

“What about any family Fergus had or… or the fact someone has been killed? The police will need to conduct an investigation!”

“Exactly!” Kelvin sniffed. “They’ll want to investigate my property – our property! Investigations outside are fine, but anything inside could jeopardise what we have been working on here. Remember, you’ve signed paperwork, so you are as much a part of this as anyone; it doesn’t matter how new you are. They’ll be asking you all sorts of questions – especially when they do a bit of research into who you are and what you do.”

“Probably good for book sales,” Davey smirked. Michael barked with laughter.

Steph glared at him.

“Someone has just died! We cannot act like it hasn’t happened!”

“Only for forty-eight hours,” Michael shrugged.

“Believe me, we’re not going to act as if it hasn’t happened,” Kelvin said, frowning at Michael. “We are going to get to the bottom of this shitshow.”

Steph didn’t reply; she couldn’t really fathom what was going on.

“As for Fergus,” Kelvin continued, “I would not worry too much over his death.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, there won’t be many people who would miss him. I won’t say why – one should respect the dead – but he was here for a reason and, unlike one or two of the others in the cabins, he had not fallen on hard times.”

“What do we do about the others?” Michael asked leaning back slightly to see whether he could balance in his hammock chair.

Kelvin ran a hand through his hair, exhaling as he pondered the question.

“Do we need to do anything?”

“Probably,” Steph sighed. She could sense that, despite her better judgement, she was going to be caught up in whatever messy whirlwind was about to tear through. Maybe she needed to be. Perhaps this was what she had been hoping for on some subconscious level, why she had taken the job.

The others looked at her.

“As you realised earlier,” she began, turning to Davey, “once a predator picks up on a new technique that works, they will try again.”

“Will it be hungry though?” Kelvin asked, looking between Steph and Davey.