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“Probably,” Michael put in. “Fergus was hardly a Thanksgiving turkey… more of a spare rib.”

Steph shuddered.

“Jesus Christ!” Kelvin growled, tilting his head to the ceiling. “Fine! You two bring them in… no! No. Just go and make themaware of what is going on and tell them to stay indoors for the next forty-eight hours. I don’t want people getting panicked.”

“So who else knows?” Davey asked.

“Martina and Daniel,” he replied. “Right, Davey, Michael, get out there and let the other cabins know. Steph, rest up as I will need you to go back out there to work out exactly what it is that the cave lion learnt that led to this mess in the first place.”

Did Steph want to go back to the cabin to find out? It was the only place she could think of to go to first, other than locating the animal itself. Then again, there was chaos at the moment. It was trying to be controlled, but it was there. If there was one thing her father had taught her – he had tried to teach her many things, but she was a headstrong pupil – it was that opportunity was born in chaos.

“I will need to restock,” she said.

“Not a problem!” Kelvin replied. Then he nodded and left the room.

NINETEEN

Steph took some time to gather herself in her room. She grabbed her notebook and tried to put her thoughts down on paper. It was easier to make sense of them that way. It was a struggle. With so much crashing around the walls of her mind, she had expected everything to pour out. However, after nearly twenty minutes, she had written just two things and circled them repeatedly: ‘the territory is unnaturally small’ and ‘the project iseverythingto Kelvin’.

She wondered how this helped her. Did it help her? She got up and looked out of the window. She could see trees and not much else.

She sat back on the bed. Her aims, she supposed, had become somewhat multi-faceted. Her book researchhadbeen padded out with discovering what was going on in an insanely rich man’s ecological experiment asking how rewilded animals cope in Scotland, finding out how extinct hybrids mix with present-day species and whether humans could cope with it all? Some of those areas felt like they had obvious conclusions. Yet it was when scientists felt overconfident, that they generally made their biggest mistakes.

After a few hours of lying on the bed and letting her thoughts simmer until they were reduced to their strongest essence, Steph left the room. She was taken aback when she opened the door and saw Daniel. His fist was clenched and raised in a knocking motion. Steph stared at him. He stood frozen for a moment, then smiled.

“I was just coming to get you,” he said.

“So I can see,” Steph replied. “Why?”

“Well, I know you need to try and work out what happened toFergus, and I would like to come with you… rather than wait for Michael and Davey to get back…”

“Ah, I see,” Steph said, allowing herself a small smile.

“Yeah, I just feel that maybe a bit of time without them to really look at things might be useful… you know.”

Steph suspected she did know. Daniel was playing with the bottom of his t-shirt, rolling it between his finger and thumb. She held out an ushering arm. Daniel smiled and led the way.

It was not long before the pair were in a buggy heading towards Fergus’s cabin. For the first time in a while, Steph had a tranquillizer rifle across her lap. She had used one a few years ago when working with a park ranger and a vet. It had been an odd experience then. She felt like a fraud holding one. It was the type of tool an individual who was actively engaged on the frontline of animal welfare might use, not some conspiracy theory flame feeder from Sheffield who was yet to really start the career her university degree suggested she should. She still considered herself a fraud now if she was honest. Even so, she was glad she was holding the tranquillizer rifle and not Daniel. As they drove, however, a thought suddenly struck her.

“How long will it take to develop another cave lion?” she asked.

Daniel bit his bottom lip. For a moment Steph thought he was going to pretend he hadn’t heard but he eventually said,

“It is more a case of how far along the next specimen is.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, this might be where the environmental experiment takes place, so to speak – it is even where the first scientific steps take place in terms of embryos and all that stuff Martina does – but it’s not where the animals were raised.”

“No?”

“No. Kelvin has a private manor further north. To an outsider it might just seem like the private zoo of someone with too muchmoney, but really it is a nursery for this. I went there once. Cool place. Of course, I went when the current crop of specimens was there: the bear and the lion – the other animals can generally be imported. I think they are working on backups. They were not really sure how they would all act once out together so needed spares.”

Steph grimaced.

“The idea is, of course, to do away with the nursery and eventually have mating pairs living out in the experimental enclosure.”

Steph nodded, allowing her head to process everything. It was interesting that nobody really used any consistent label for the fenced-off area where the animals ran wild. What was the real aim of the whole thing? Did Kelvin genuinely believe in rewilding and a drop in the human population? Did the others really share his vision?