Before

‘What the hell’s going on?’ Rebekah said, her voice betraying her.

But the man pretending to be Karl Stelzik didn’t respond: he stepped off the platform of mud and roots, and onto the slope of the gully, never taking his eyes off Rebekah. It was the first time she’d appreciated how green they were, and how incongruous they seemed in his face: like bright gems buried deep in the dirt.

He kept coming, step by careful step, until he reached the trail. As soon as he did, his gaze switched to the dead body Rebekah had discovered in the tree roots.

Skin crawling, heart racing, she looked at the man’s wrist, at the blood that had soaked through from the bite marks, and put it together: Roxie had attacked the fake Stelzik at the dig site because he’d killed the real one – and the real one was her owner. The only thing that didn’t make sense was why, when Rebekah and Johnny had first arrived, they’d found the man out cold, because it hadn’t been an act.

She didn’t need to be a doctor to know that.

‘Look, I’m not sure what you think we’ve done,’ Johnny started saying, sidestepping closer to Rebekah instinctively, ‘but we’re just tourists. We don’t know anything about …’ He stopped, glancing at Karl Stelzik’s dead body, and Rebekah thought she could see the rest of the sentence, unspoken, in his face: about this, about violence, about murder. This is so far from our world, it’s a different universe. Until now, Johnny had been surprisingly still, outwardly calm, but now he began blinking nervously.

‘This is a mistake,’ Rebekah said to the man, a hand up.

‘You’re damn right it’s a mistake,’ he replied.

He was from New York. He’d suppressed his accent when they’d first met: Rebekah had even thought she’d heard a hint of eastern European in line with Stelzik’s name. But if she had, it had been a performance, part of the lie.

The man came a step closer.

They were maybe ten feet apart now. Rebekah had never been so close to a gun before. Her brothers had occasionally gone to ranges growing up, learning how to use weaponry. Their dad had thought it was a useful thing to know in America, and holstering a gun was as natural a part of his daily routine as buttoning up the blue uniform and pinning the badge to his chest.

But Rebekah had been in England until she was eighteen, a country where people were shot and killed sixty times a year, not sixty times a day, and she’d had no interest in learning once she arrived in New York. Guns scared her. They scared her even more now than when she was younger because she’d seen the effects of them in the OR: the way they shattered bone and punctured tissue, the way they lacerated, ruptured, destroyed.

‘We won’t say anything to anyone.’ The frenzy in Johnny’s voice returned her to the forest. ‘Whatever it is you think we’ve done here, we haven’t. I swear. So if you just let us go, we’ll walk away from this –’ he glanced briefly at Stelzik, at the grotesque angles of his body ‘– and we won’t say anything.’

The man just looked at them.

‘Please,’ Johnny muttered. ‘This is crazy.’

‘You must have made a mistake,’ Rebekah said, trying to back Johnny up, her words coming out as quickly as his. ‘You must have us mixed up with someone else. We’re nobodies. We don’t have any idea what’s going on.’

This time, the man gave a hint of a smile, as if entertained by what he was seeing. ‘You look – what’s the word? Befuddled.’ He said befuddled in an English accent, in an obvious approximation of how Rebekah spoke.

‘This is insane,’ she replied. ‘I don’t even know you.’

‘You don’t need to know me, sweetheart.’

The man looked between them both.

‘I messed up.’ He gestured with the gun in the vague direction of the dig site. ‘I’ve been trying to find that friggin’ dog since I offed Stelzik and, this morning, I see it in the trees, and I go after it, and I slip like some old man.’

He looked at them both again, a Can you believe that? expression on his face, as if he was talking about some minor mishap. The fear ripped through Rebekah, her entire body trembling. He didn’t care what he was saying to them, didn’t care what he admitted to, and the casual way in which he talked about killing, about hunting, told her why: they were going to die out here.

‘I hit my head on this old piece of rock Stelzik was digging up, and – boom – blackout.’ He rubbed his skull, fingers at the point of impact. ‘Anyway, it could have been a problem, because it could have meant I didn’t get to do what I came all the way out to this dumb fucking rock to do. I mean, look at this shithole.’ He waved the gun at the trees. ‘What sort of backward-ass place doesn’t even have the internet or working phone lines? I’m surprised they’ve got a cell tower. Hell, I’m surprised they’ve even got running water. But whatever. When I woke up, and there you both were, you know what I felt?’ He shook his head. ‘Just relief. Pure relief. You never realized I was after you because you’d come to me. I didn’t have to go chasing round trying to find you. I didn’t have to spend one second longer in this cesspit than I needed to.’

Rebekah dragged her eyes back to the body of Stelzik.

‘I don’t understand.’ Her voice was breaking up, the words getting lost in her throat. ‘What have we done? What did Stelzik do?’

‘Stelzik? He’s just a loose end.’

His expression changed instantly. It was like a light going out. Rebekah noticed again how green the man’s eyes were, but the rest of his face was as opaque as night. Rebekah looked at Johnny, saw that he was on the verge of tears, and immediately started to sob too. ‘Please,’ she begged, ‘I don’t know what you thin–’

‘Shut up,’ the man hissed. He jabbed the gun towards the tree roots. ‘Climb up there, both of you. Let’s get this over with.’