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93

Elin

Parque Nacional, Portugal, October 2021

When Elin finally looks back at them, Maggie smiles, resigned, a sense of understanding passing between them. ‘You’ve seen it, haven’t you?’

Elin nods. ‘It’s been bothering me ever since I first saw the camp,’ she says softly. ‘That van.’ Her gaze settles on it. ‘It’s not yours, is it?’

Maggie doesn’t reply, and Elin can see from the look on her face that this is a part of the story she either isn’t prepared for, or is frightened to tell, and so she keeps talking, keeps moving this story on, because it’s important that it has an ending. That after all this time, they know it all.

‘That van is Kier’s, painted over to look like yours. Someone’s made some changes to the exterior too. We found your actual van, hidden in the forest. You swapped them out, didn’t you?’ Still, Maggie says nothing, her fingers playing with a fold in the fabric of her skirt. ‘That makes sense on one level, after what you said about Kier going to Italy, that you wouldn’t want her van out in the open, but then, why not? It’s plausible she might have dumped it, hitched a ride. Why go to all the trouble of swapping the vans unless there’s something about Kier’s van itself that you didn’t want anyone to see?’

Bridie sharply inhales, but Elin continues. ‘The inside of your van here … it’s new, a bit slapdash. Fresh paint, new flooring – cheap flooring – that doesn’t fit with your old one and the others here. The redecoration has been done to hide something, hasn’t it? Something that happened there, in Kier’s van.’

A heaviness settles across Maggie’s features, and Elin senses that she’s going to need to brace herself for whatever’s coming next, but when a voice sounds out it isn’t Maggie’s, but Bridie’s.

‘You’re right, it is Kier’s van.’ Bridie’s face is pale as she brings up her eyes to meet Elin’s. ‘Zeph found us,’ she says dully. ‘Tracked Kier down, put a camera in her van. We think he was watching her for a while, came and went a few times, stayed in the cabin up at the clearing, then went back to the US. But all the while, because of the camera, he had eyes on her.’ Her voice cracks. ‘We found the hard drives in his bag. What he’d done – it was deranged. He’d divided the footage up and isolated some of the clips. We think he watched them over and over – got it in his head that Kier was involved with Ned.’ She shakes her head. ‘It was obsessive. Like the photos he took of me in New York.’

‘We saw some of the footage.’ Elin swallows, thinking about how they’d interpreted it: in a negative light, but they’d never imagined anything as sinister as this.

Bridie nods. ‘I think Kier always knew, deep down, that Zeph wouldn’t let it lie. You know, he said the same thing to her that he used to say to me. He used to whisper it when he hurt me. He used to say, without me, there can be no you.’ Tears are shining in her eyes. ‘I never really believed it until he came here and found us.’