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Elin

Parque Nacional, Portugal, October 2021

Isaac still has his coat on as he flips open his laptop, attaches the hard drive.

‘Video clips,’ he murmurs as the contents fill the screen.

Elin watches with a sense of disquiet as Isaac opens the first, sets it to play.

A static shot of the interior of a van.

The camera is pointed from somewhere near the driver’s area, giving a full view of the kitchen area, seating, the bed behind. No one there, but nevertheless, there is a sense of a scene disturbed. Clothing on the floor. Cafetière. Leaflets strewn across the bed.

Scrutinising the screen, Elin’s pulse picks up, the sense of disquiet building to something more acute. Alarm.

‘Pause it for a moment.’ Picking up one of the photographs of Kier that Isaac found, she holds it up to the screen, eyes flicking between the two. ‘The interiors … they match. ’

No doubting it. It’s the same van.

‘Looks like it was parked up somewhere here.’ Isaac points to the back window.

‘Yeah, but not at the camp. Wherever this is, it’s more open. A different backdrop.’

‘I agree, I—’ He breaks off. A sudden movement on the screen. A door opening.

A woman enters.

Isaac takes a sharp breath. ‘That’s her. Kier.’

Elin peers at the screen. Kier is dressed casually, in comfy clothes: joggers tucked into a pair of socks, an oversize white hoodie, one of those faux US college ones, YALE emblazoned across the front in dark letters.

Her gaze moves up to Kier’s face, the hairs on the back of her arms rising as she studies her features. The sense of recognition – it’s even more acute seeing her in the flesh. Racking her brains, Elin tries to place her, but nothing pulls out at her.

She watches as Kier clambers onto the bed and flops down on her front. Grabbing one of the leaflets, she starts reading, hoodie rucking up to reveal the hem of her underwear.

All at once, the camera zooms in, a sudden, smooth motion. Zooms in until Kier, sprawled on the bed, nearly takes up the whole frame.

Elin’s stomach rolls. It feels invasive, makes her want to look away, like she’s a voyeur. ‘Someone was secretly filming her.’ Her voice catches.

It’s hard to watch as Isaac methodically clicks from recording to recording. They work their way through entire weeks, skipping over the sections where the van is empty.

They keep scrolling.

Kier stretching, cooking, painting. Kier, damp from the shower, hair wrapped in a turban. Kier reading.

Elin swallows hard. Echoes of the past few months. She wonders if Kier had felt it, like she had. The heavy, dragging weight of an unwanted, intrusive gaze.

Isaac looks at her a little closer. ‘Something wrong? ’

‘It’s just hard to watch, seeing someone invade her privacy like that.’

‘Close to home …?’

‘Yeah. The last case.’ She exhales. ‘Most of the messages I got were just random stuff, saying I’m not good at my job, that kind of thing, but one …’ Elin rubs her eyes. ‘It was this photo of me in hospital, like they were letting me know they were watching.’

He softens his voice. ‘Sounds pretty frightening.’

‘It was.’ Elin blinks.

Isaac is quiet for a moment. ‘Hearing you say that, I feel crap now, asking you to look at this. You need a proper break, and I go and ruin it by dumping this on you.’ He pauses. ‘We can leave it if you want. I can explain to Penn, ask him to take it from here. He’ll understand.’

‘No,’ she says quickly. ‘Seeing this … I want to. Knowing she’s gone through the same thing …’

He nods. ‘I get it. Feels personal.’

‘Yeah.’ It’s also something else too, something she isn’t quite ready to share.

Recognising Kier but being unable to place her – it has echoes of Sam. Of not remembering. Knowing her mind had blocked the episode out, and her role in it, is terrifying. A fear she’s been harbouring ever since: Could it happen again? If her mind had done it once, was it possible it had before? Were there other things she couldn’t remember?

No matter how hard it feels, she can’t leave this here, not with any kind of doubt hanging over her.

‘Look.’ Isaac’s finger jerks to the screen, breaking her reverie. ‘A dog.’

It walks away from the camera, from the driver’s side, leaping onto the bed. Kier makes a fuss of it, rubbing its belly.

Elin stares, her pulse picking up. ‘Is that—?’

‘Yeah, it’s Ned’s dog, I’m pretty sure.’

‘Did Penn mention Kier had a dog?’

‘I think so.’

‘Puts the dog going crazy in camp yesterday in a different light. ’

Isaac nods, his face pale.

‘If it is the same dog,’ she says, thinking aloud, ‘we can’t rule out that there might be a legitimate reason why they’ve got it. Maybe Kier felt like she couldn’t look after it any more.’

‘Possible, but it doesn’t tally with the idea that she didn’t know the camp well or didn’t stay there very long. No way you’d entrust your dog to a total stranger.’

‘Speaking of strangers,’ Elin says, biting down on her lip. ‘Have you noticed there’s no one else in any of these clips? Strangers or otherwise?’

‘Perhaps she didn’t like inviting people back. Probably wise, in a place like this, when you’re on your own.’

‘That makes sense at the beginning, maybe, but what about later on, once she got to know people?’

‘Unless we’re not seeing everything.’ Isaac types something and then scrolls. He nods. ‘There are gaps in the footage. Some a day, a few days. Others closer to a week.’

She thinks it over, her pulse now racing. ‘Is it possible someone’s gone through the footage, deleting stuff?’

‘It is, but you’d have to be motivated – something happening that they don’t want eyes on.’

‘When does the footage stop?’

‘Looks like October-time, 2020.’

Without any time line, there’s no way of knowing if that’s particularly significant, but the gaps in the footage definitely are. Too much to be an error.

‘So what do you want to do?’ Isaac looks at her, his features tense. ‘We can’t speak to the camp about this, but we could mention the dog at least in passing, couldn’t we? See their reaction. We don’t have to link it to Kier.’

‘I’m not sure … The minute we start asking questions, there’s every chance they up and leave. I reckon the best approach for now is to watch and wait, give everything a chance to breathe.’ Elin looks back to the screen. ‘These recordings give us something to work with in the meantime. The leaflets we saw Kier reading on the bed, my guess is they came from the tourist office.’

‘Start there?’

‘Yeah. Won’t hurt to ask a few questions.’ Elin’s eyes move back to the image of the dog on the bed. She overlays it in her mind with one of the dog, scrabbling fruitlessly in the soil, his haunting howl echoing into the silence as Ned had dragged him away.