They wouldn’t hear of Fiona leaving. There was a sofa in the living room and she was welcome to stay there. Iris would drive her out to Langmire and together they could pick up her things. Fiona was clearly in no fit state to drive herself.
Tomorrow they would take her back to her own car in Kirkwall before they started work on the dig.
Fiona assented to all of this, with the numb misery of being trapped in a nightmare. She was given a cup of tea, which she did not drink.
It had been Callum who spotted the bulletin on the local news, but Iris who had spoken with the police and somehow managed to garner a few more details. The GPS on Madison’s rental car had led the police to it (how did Iris get the police to tell her these things? Star power, Fiona supposed. Iris had that in spades) after there had been reports of tyre tracks going off the cliffs by a member of the public.
The others discussed this in hushed, shocked voices while Fiona sat silent, thinking.
Dom would know about GPS. He understood GPS and phones and emails and hacking texts and being a disgusting creepy inadequate bully, all right.
If he’s hurt her. Oh God, if he has …
Then somehow a decision about Fiona had been reached, and she was shepherded into Iris’s rental car, a white Taurus with leather seats. They were going to Langmire, to collect her things.
She supposed she should text Adi, tell him all this, but somehow the thought appalled, seemed to make it all more real, and the effort involved to do it, to explain it all again, was more than she could face.
She was relieved when Iris did not attempt to make small talk on the journey to the cottage or try to cheer her up with platitudes. Fiona simply stared out of the window into the darkness until it was time for her to get out of the car.
‘I’m going up to the Fletts’,’ Iris called out to her from the driver’s side window once they arrived. By the swimming lights of the dashboard, she looked drawn, older than her years, her jaw heavy and blunt. ‘I need to tell them what’s happened, and that we won’t be needing the cottage any more.’ She shook her head, her eyes huge. ‘I can’t believe this is happening.’
‘Me neither,’ mumbled Fiona.
Iris simply reached out, squeezed her arm. ‘I’ll be no more than ten minutes. Did you have something to eat today?’
Fiona shook her head. ‘I’m … I’m fine. I’m not hungry.’
Iris gave her a thin-lipped smile. ‘Ten minutes, Fiona.’
Kind though Iris had been, Fiona felt a little flare of miserable relief as the red tail lights of her car retreated up the hill to the Fletts’ house.
She wanted to be alone, to think; just for a few minutes.
Though now she was alone, staring out across the sea to the lighthouse blooming then vanishing on Helly Holm, she was not sure what she wanted to think about.
All seemed hopeless. Madison’s car was at the bottom of the sea. She was not answering her phone or emails.
And most damning of all, Fiona understood why there had been no more of the horrible messages on social media. It was because whoever was sending them must have known that Madison was dead and would not be reading them.
Dom Tate had probably killed Madison, perhaps after forcing her to send out her final texts to put everyone off the scent. Then he’d driven her car off the cliffs, with any luck with himself inside.
You knew this. You worked that out days ago.
You just didn’t want to acknowledge it.
The cottage was in darkness, except for a faint yellow glow from the back of the guest bedroom upstairs. Fiona had showered in there that morning. She must have left the light on.
The light wind ruffled her hair as it poked out from underneath Madison’s trapper hat while she produced the key for the cottage and let herself in. The smell of the sea wrack fluttered in and out over the quiet murmur of the waves.
She breathed it in, closed her eyes, tried to pull herself together. She needed to pack, and quickly. As desperate as she’d been for a little peace, Fiona had no real desire to be alone tonight. She would stay with the archaeologists, and in the morning try to come up with a plan. Perhaps the police would need her.
And tomorrow she would steel herself to try to approach Hugo, find out how Judy was doing.
Find out what the police intended to do about Madison’s car.
Find out if they had caught up with Dom Tate yet.
She let herself into the little house, quickly switching on the hall lights, throwing her jacket on to a chair in the hallway, swiping off Mads’ hat.
The bedroom was exactly as she had left it – strewn with clothes and books, the striped blue duvet hastily pulled over the exposed sheets. The mirrored wardrobe doors with their shattered central panel greeted her as she let herself slump down on the bed, suddenly unable to move, to act.
The spiderwebbed cracks threw her reflection into a thousand splinters.
You know, a cozening voice murmured to her, you don’t know Mads is … is gone. She might be being held captive somewhere. That crazy, fucking, obsessed bastard may have her trapped. He may have got rid of the car because he couldn’t hide it or take it off the island.
There still might be a chance she was not gone forever, gone into the deep, vanished into the roaring abyss of the Atlantic.
Some faint, impossible chance that she was alive.
Fiona looked down at Mads’ hat in her hands. The soft feel of the dappled grey fur beneath her fingers, the smoothness of the leather, seemed to throw wide some ancient doors of undisclosed grief that held back a vast, impossible tide.
She did not even attempt to resist the tears, letting her anguish rage through her like a river in spate, wet and ugly and with jagged, painful sobs – grief for her lost father, grief for her absent, stunted, inadequate mother, and finally grief for this, her one constant, Madison – who despite her reckless selfishnesses and little storms of envy, had always been there for her when it truly mattered.
The men in Fiona’s life had come and gone. Even now she and Adi shifted uncomfortably around one another, like teenagers at a dance. But she had never once doubted that Madison loved her.
And in the wake of her grief came fury, molten-red and hot like the iron she worked with, and it pulsed through her like hammer blows.
He is going to pay for this, she thought, her fingers scything into the furred hat on her lap, her teeth clenching, the backs of her hands soaked with her own tears.
He’s going to pay, and how.
And then, above her, the floor creaked.
She froze.
Utter silence reigned. Not even the weather or the sea was audible.
She dropped the hat beside her, stood up. She strained to listen, but the sound was not repeated.
What was up there? Just the guest bedroom with its stripped beds, and the en suite shower which she’d used that morning, before rushing out to meet Judy’s plane.
All of that seemed a lifetime ago, to have happened to another Fiona.
She’d been sure she’d switched everything off when she left.
She swiped at her hot, wet face with her sleeve, still listening, but there was nothing more. A velvet quiet lay over the whole house like a cloak.
But Fiona was not fooled. Her breath hitched in her chest.
Get out, she told herself. Get out and wait for Iris. Better yet, start running up that hill to the Fletts’. I don’t care how it looks. I don’t care how dark it is. Just do it. Grab your phone out of your jacket as you go.
Yet she felt a terror, a reluctance – within the house she was in the light at least, but outside there was only freezing darkness, the nearest building at least ten minutes away.
Whoever was up there had not confronted her. They must know she was here, have heard the front door being opened, but they hadn’t moved.
At least not yet.
Could it be Madison? she wondered suddenly, with a throb of hope.
Do you want to bet your life on that?
She swallowed hard, thinking, trying to be rational in the face of her rising panic. There was nothing in the bedroom that could remotely function as a weapon – even her aerosol deodorant was upstairs, lying on one of the guest beds where she’d thrown it after her shower.
Through the open bedroom door, the hallway was exactly as she’d left it, with its innocuous carpet and pale walls, the chair half in shadow, her jacket lying over it. But the stairs were dark. She had an impulse to change this and she raised her hand to the light switch, dropped it again.
Better to just go. Go now. Just walk, quickly and quietly grabbing the jacket, and head out of the front door, and then the minute she was out to start running. She’d be halfway up the hill by the time they – he – realised she’d flown.
Because that was the answer. It could only be Dom up there.
That was it. Walk, don’t run. Do nothing that will set him off. Not until you get outside, at least.
She never made it as far as the hallway. Sudden, clumping footfalls, someone heavy, someone coming down the stairs fast. She knew it was him before she even saw his face.
He was running at her.
A spike then, of hatred, of pure adrenaline. She screamed as she lashed out at him, backed into the bedroom, stumbling over the edge of the bed and falling gracelessly on to her back in her shock and terror.
‘Fiona …’ he shouted.
‘Stay the fuck away from me!’ she shrieked, scrambling backwards over the fawn-coloured carpet, until her head struck the little oak night table by the bed.
‘Fiona … Fiona, stop screaming …’
‘People are coming!’ She was hysterical, gibbering with fear. ‘Iris is going to be here any minute – don’t you dare come near me!’
‘Shut up! FUCKING SHUT UP FOR A MINUTE!’
He stood at the foot of the bed, his hands raised high, but his palms outwards, as though she was the aggressor, as though she was about to shoot him. His face was mottled, pale, and his eyes red. His thin hair was greasy and he had not shaved in days.
‘CALM. DOWN!’
Silence. Nothing but the sound of both of them breathing hard in the little room, as Fiona wrestled with her growing confusion.
And then he said, the whites of his eyes shining with terror:
‘I have to talk to you.’