Page 85 of Deep Blue Lies

EIGHTY-FOUR

“We’d all heard the rumour.” Duncan sniffs as he continues. “That Jason had a gun. I don’t know where he got it from – the man who was selling the drugs, I suppose.”

It’s as if he’s forgotten that Sophia and I are here. His words are painting a story so horrible, so obvious now, that it’s all we can do to sit dumbstruck and let him finish this.

“If you’d asked me then, I probably wouldn’t have believed it. He was alright, Jason was. He was tough, that part is true, but if you worked hard, if you turned up on time, he didn’t mind if you had a drink every now or then…” He shakes his head.

“They said he kept it under his bed. I guess it must have been true.”

I feel myself swallowing. I’m not able to say anything. I feel my eyelids blinking at the unreal world that’s just replaced the one I thought I knew.

“Imogen didn’t say, in her video file,” Duncan explains. Suddenly he seems to remember where he is. “But they must have found it somewhere in his room.”

“What exactly happened next?” Sophia manages to ask. She sounds totally shaken, I’ve never seen her like this. Duncan puffs out his cheeks.

“I don’t know the details exactly. Now that she’s…” – he shakes his head again – “Now she’s dead, we’ll maybe never know. But Karen returned to her and Imogen’s room. They weren’t that far apart, both up towards the mountain, behind where the guests stayed.”

“And?”

“Well, she told Imogen what had happened.”

“And then what?”

He puffs his cheeks a second time. “Imogen says it was Karen’s idea. After that. And I believe her, I do.”

I wait.

“They went back to Mandy and Jason’s room. Obviously Mandy was still there, dead on the floor, and they had the gun…

“We had these walkie-talkies. Around the hotel. Jason was never without his, always on duty. And there was one in reception, of course. This is before people had mobile phones you understand.”

“Yes, I understand.”

“Karen told Imogen to get the walkie-talkie from reception, and they used it to put a call out for Jason, asking him to come to his room, his and Mandy’s room.

That was normal, no one would have thought it strange, not even the next day when they found them both dead.

I don’t think anyone would have even remembered it. ”

“What did they do then?” I swallow.

“They dragged Mandy’s body so he wouldn’t see it when he walked in the room, and they called him, and they waited behind the door.

And when he came in they jumped out at him.

Apparently Karen had the presence of mind to put the gun up under his chin before she fired it, they wanted to make it look like a suicide. They blew the top of his head off.”

There’s a silence in the kitchen. A very long silence.

“Imogen used the reception computer to print out a suicide note. They made him confess to hitting Mandy, then say he couldn’t live with himself.

I’ve thought about the gunshot, over the years, wondered how come nobody ever heard it, but it’s easily explained.

They used to go hunting in the hills behind the resort.

You still hear them today.” He shrugs. “It would have been late for hunting, but no one would have suspected what it really was.”

Somehow, there are elements of the story that I can’t connect with, that won’t process. But then I see it.

“What about the baby?”

Duncan looks at me sharply. “Which one?”

“The…Imogen’s baby. What happened to it?”

He frowns, like the question is irrelevant.

“They left it there. I guess they couldn’t bring themselves to kill it.

Or maybe they didn’t think it would survive the night.

I don’t know. It hardly matters. Either way, when the bodies were found the next morning, everything went crazy.

We had over a hundred guests that week. The resort manager and his girlfriend both dead. Total disaster.”

Gregory looks at me suddenly and shrugs, like the whole thing was just a really bad day at work.