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46

Elin

Parque Nacional, Portugal, October 2021

It’s only when they’re out of sight that Elin realises she’s holding her breath. She blows out a long, shuddering exhalation. Her mouth is dry, her throat thick.

‘You’re shivering,’ Isaac says, watching her.

Adrenaline ebbing away, the thin layers of clothing are now damp against her skin. ‘Yeah, I’m freezing.’

‘Let’s get back.’

Elin steps forwards, making the mistake of looking at the falls properly this time, not just the water in front of her, but the full column, thundering downwards. A wave of vertigo washes over her, but she can’t drag her eyes away, her gaze pulling even lower to the seething mass of water at the base of the falls.

The sound, sight … it triggers something.

Blinking, she’s back there, after the boat murders, cave water sloshing over her nose, mouth. Hayler’s hand on her face .

She feels dizzied, disorientated. She has a sudden urge to get down, away, but as she moves forwards, her foot goes out from under her.

Isaac springs forwards, reaching out a hand to steady her. ‘Careful. Let’s give it a moment.’

They stand for a minute in silence, and as her breathing settles, he leads her over the plateau, onto the larger grassy plain behind the falls. ‘Want to wait a bit, before we get going?’

‘Yeah. All the water … just hit me suddenly. Took me back.’

‘The Hayler case?’

She nods. ‘Thought I was past it.’

But as soon as she says the words, she knows that’s not strictly the truth.

Part of her knew that the Hayler case – the case that had triggered her career break – will always haunt her.

A case plagued by errors. A case that almost broke her.

‘Look,’ Isaac says finally, ‘something like that, it’ll probably always be there, and I think that’s … okay. People always say you’re meant to move on when something traumatic happens, but I reckon it’s more of a roller coaster. There’ll be times when you don’t even think about it, then times when it’s still raw.’ He pauses. ‘Probably didn’t help up there, putting all that on you. I froze. When Ned reached out to her like that—’ Swallowing hard, he shakes his head. ‘And what she said, at the end …’

Elin nods, playing out her words again in her mind.

He’s right, you know. It should have been me, not her.

What exactly was she referring to?

Isaac’s expression is grim. ‘Reckon we disturbed something?’

‘It’s possible, but he did a decent job of making it seem like he was playing hero. He—’ She stops, her gaze latching on to something a few feet away, snagged in a patch of tall grass.

Standing up, she reaches over and tugs it loose.

The hairs on the back of her arms stand up.

Pira. The pyre.

An intricate miniature of the wooden structure they’d seen in the clearing, no bigger than a closed fist, tiny branches shaped to the same severe point.

‘You reckon one of them dropped it?’ Isaac leans over and takes it from her, turning it over in his hands.

‘Looks like it. Hardly any dirt on it. If it had been there for a while, there’s no way it would look like this.’ Glancing at the pira again, her thoughts pull in a different direction.

Isaac’s studying her. ‘What are you thinking?’

‘About Leah in the woods yesterday.’ She pictures it: Leah’s clenched fists full of dirt, the panicked look on her face as the mobile trilled out into the silence. ‘How frightened she was when the phone went off. I’m wondering who might have been out there with us.’

‘Ned?’

Elin nods. ‘It’s plausible, isn’t it? It’s the timing that’s getting me … seeing her yesterday, how she’d implied she wanted to talk, and then this. If it was him out there in the woods yesterday, and he overheard us talking to Leah, what we’ve just seen up there might have been some kind of warning.’ She thinks about the blank look on Leah’s face. ‘And probably a good one at that.’