Page 74

73

Elin

Parque Nacional, Portugal, October 2021

‘It was odd, the way he turned to look at me,’ Elin says, catching sight of her warped reflection in the windows of the van, the shock still etched into her expression.

‘Deliberate?’ Isaac is looking through the window, his eyes drilling into the darkness outside.

‘Must have been.’ There’s no reason, as far as she can work out, for Ned to look her way as he’d run off. He’d made a conscious decision to. ‘Maybe I’m reading into it, but it felt like some kind of warning. That he wanted me to know he can get to us.’

‘Either way, it means that the invite tonight—’

‘Was a ruse.’ Elin swallows. ‘The whole thought you could both do with letting off steam was a way of getting us away from the Airstream.’

And they’d fallen for it , she thinks. She’d taken Bridie at her word.

‘You definitely reckon Bridie and everyone knew? It wasn’t Ned playing lone ranger?’

‘They knew,’ she says heavily, thinking it over, about Maggie stopping her from going into her van. ‘They were jumpy, all of them. I put it down to them walking on eggshells around Leah, but it was this.’

‘We’ve got them rattled somehow, haven’t we? No way they’d come and do this otherwise. They think we’re onto something.’

‘Yeah, and that means we need to keep digging, but we’re going to have to be careful.’ If Ned had intended his presence at the clearing to be some kind of warning, it had the opposite effect. All it had done was galvanise her. Cement her feeling that they’re going in the right direction.

‘The map?’

Elin nods, her thoughts shifting not just to the river beach, but to the clearing.

It’s bothering her.

The discovery of Kier’s clothing up there and the ring are important, but neither explain why she’d painted the clearing on the map, or the pattern Elin had glimpsed in the grass.

She needs to take another look. They’ve missed something up there, she’s certain of it. Missed something vital.