The green light on Wolf’s lock chirrups and the door clicks open.
I go inside and take it all in. The dresser covered in expensive-looking cosmetics with minimalist, masculine packaging over-compensating for their contents. Two ring lights of different sizes, a state-of-the-art laptop, trailing cables to drives. And, lying awkwardly on the floor, a compact top-of-the-range HD video recorder mounted on a tripod.
The place reeks of him – a fragrance he’s used ever since I met him. He was that kind of man, seeing himself as a brand even before he was one, needing a signature fragrance, a catchphrase. All these identical combat trousers, too, folded and waiting. The curling tongs, off but still plugged in. He had a uniform: everything down to the tone of the highlights in his hair, the length of his stubble, the square cut of his fingernails.
I never felt sorry for him. But now pity is like a ball in my throat.
He was the first celebrity who’d bothered to speak to me. It was a Christmas party at my first production company – I’d been there a couple of weeks, just work experience and still in that awkward phase of being given tasks I barely understood, by people who had neither the time nor the inclination to explain them to me. I’d almost not gone that evening, but they’d needed someone to set up. I was going down for a cigarette when Wolf buzzed to be let in. Right from the off, he was rude, abrasive. Funny. I didn’t like him. I’m not going to pretend that I’m heartbroken by his death.
But the truth of it is that by mistrusting him, I have missed something crucial. What if he needed listening to, without me constantly pointing the finger, oscillating between laughing at him and despising him? Even that last time Wolf ever properly spoke to me – especially then – I wouldn’t even let him finish.
I go to the corner of the room and set the tripod onto its feet. I release the camcorder from the plate, clear a space to sit on the bed and power it up. It’s massively over-spec for what he used it for, bulky and professional and, if I’m not mistaken, worth a couple of grand even without all the add-ons. I switch it from record mode into playback and it tells me the memory card is full, with a little over thirty-five minutes of footage, thanks to the insanely high resolution he’d set it at. I run it backwards about five minutes, then hit Play.
On the flip-out screen, there he is. Dishevelled, exactly as he was the last time I saw him alive: the manic eyes, the man-bun falling out.
The shot begins with his face huge and looming as he starts the camera rolling. The he sits back, his eyeline drifting to the right, watching himself on the flip-out screen. He clears his throat. ‘You wouldn’t hear me out, Dee, so here it is on tape for you instead.’ The anger from our conversation is clearly still fizzing.
Then the screen is obscured by something too close, out of focus. Blocky.
‘Know what this is?’ He brings the object closer to his face, grinning darkly.
It’s a phone, nondescript, black.
He turns it over, tilts his head. ‘See, I thought something was off. You know how you do sometimes? Meet someone and think,’ he creases up his face, the universal expression for not quite right, ‘something weird about them. But I thought it could be me. Maybe I’m not such a good judge of character. Certainly had Tori wrong, didn’t I?’ He laughs as he says it, but it drops straight off. ‘So anyway I went to see her.’
‘Who?’ I whisper aloud, exasperated. But as I say it, I realise something about the phrasing. Whoever he’d wanted to talk to me about, it wasn’t Tori.
‘And it was something she said about the Northern Lights. How pretty they were. And I knew straight away, that’s not right.’
He punctuates what he says next with the phone, using it like the jab of a finger in the air.
‘Because I’ve been trying to get a shot of the light show for the channel since I got here. But, nothing. So I asked the captain, and he told me they’d been visible on the first night, really late. But apart from that, the conditions hadn’t been right. Now, Tori saw them that first night, when everyone else was in bed, right?’ A manic grin splits his face now, and he shakes his head. ‘Except not everyone was in bed. Because here was Annabel, saying she’d seen them, too.’
I find my breath has gone very shallow.
Annabel. It’s Annabel’s phone he’s holding.
He waggles it, then moves it out of sight. ‘So I got hold of this. Just sneaked it off the desk in your office when she was distracted. And I had a little look.’ He lifts the screen again, and this time it’s lit up. ‘And I found some very interesting things. Pictures. Bit hidden, but like I said: I had time.’
But he doesn’t open the gallery app. He taps something too quickly for me to see, then again a couple more times. When Wolf faces the lens again, he shakes back his hair and leans in, half twisted towards the camera, like he’s sharing selfies with a friend.
‘Here, see? They go back months. Tori at her house. You at Tori’s house. The two of you at a bar. Tori’s back garden. Look.’
I do. I sit very still, my mouth suddenly arid, and I look. He pauses on each photo for a second, not even long enough to read the captions that Annabel has written underneath each one. Time, date, place. He flicks back and back and back. In every single photo is either me or Tori, or my car, or Tori’s house. Every single one. And there are dozens. Hundreds.
Time reverses on the screen. My hair gets shorter as the pictures get older. Wolf pauses on one image and sighs as he looks at it. It’s me, leaving a building.
‘Now this one, this one made me worry.’ He expands it until my face fills the screen. I look – awful. Haggard. Thin, pale, years older than I am. He zooms out again and I see the red neon sign above the door I’m coming through.
SyncHole Productions, in west London. And a caption underneath the image, two words: Sophie’s work?
I remember that day. Maybe a week after Leo’s death. A meeting with the lawyers, the execs. The decision to terminate my employment there. Not that I cared. It was only mid-morning, but I was already several drinks in. I laughed in their faces, and they asked me to leave. They didn’t know, or didn’t care, that I’d already sworn blind I would never, ever shoot a single frame of undercover footage again as long as I lived.
He flicks back and back. Me at the shops, me going into Tori’s house in London again, Tori getting out of my car.
Rain. Me in my yellow coat – the one I’m wearing right now – standing at Tori’s door.
This is the day I arrived at her home.
Wolf keeps flicking, then lifts his finger to tap the X, closing the file. ‘That’s the end of the Tori ones—’
But I lurch forward. Hit Stop on the camera, scrub back. I don’t even breathe as I play it again, at quarter-speed. Because there on the screen, right before he closes it down, is a picture of me outside Leo’s place in Bath. Getting into Leo’s car.
Beneath the image is a caption, but this time the freeze-frame gives me long enough to read it. Just a single name, and a time of day.
Sophie 8.38 p.m.
She was there. Annabel was there. And less than an hour later, Leo was dead.
And I put it all together. It wasn’t Tori she was following at all. It was me. The pictures of Tori were incidental – she was only at Tori’s because I was there, too.
I close my eyes as it falls into place. When Tori was pushed, she was wearing my jacket, the hood right up. From the back, we’re the same.
It was never supposed to be Tori who fell. It was meant to be me.
That letter Tori got – it wasn’t for her. It was nothing to do with John, nothing to do with the boy at the campsite. It was from Annabel. For me.
I leave the image quivering on the screen. The picture of me and Leo on the phone, Wolf’s face caught in freeze-frame next to it, his eyes half closed. I find I’m on my feet, walking away. I turn back, already at the door, watching this horror with my hand over my mouth.
How was Annabel there? I don’t understand. She was in America; she said she’d been in America for the last year. We did checks, references. She couldn’t have been in those places, flitting between Bath and London, following me.
Except, she was.
Don’t I know – aren’t I the one person who should know – how easy it is to pretend to be someone else? To lie about your past? To reinvent it?
Here is the evidence that Annabel did exactly what I did. Not for a job though. And, not exactly like me, either.
No. She did it better.
She’s not what you think she is. The last thing Wolf ever said to me. I thought he was talking about Tori. But I was wrong.
I trusted what Annabel told me. I even trusted her more than—
My shoulders drop.
I trusted her more than Tori. Annabel told me that Wolf had come looking for Tori out on the ice. It was only her word, against everything I knew about Tori. And I’d let all those years of friendship, all that loyalty, just evaporate, and had taken Annabel at her word.
It takes a force of will to go back. But when I reach up to restart Wolf’s video, my hands don’t shake. I hit Play. I don’t look away.
‘But there’s some video files too,’ he’s saying. He moves out of the folder and into another one. ‘Loads, here. I mean, I haven’t watched them all. But look, take this one.’
His camera struggles with the autofocus on the phone screen, and it takes me a moment to work out what I’m looking at.
A busy bar. Low light. The bassy thrum of music, overtones of people talking, the brief familiar sound of a cocktail being made, ice knocking against the shaker. Then there’s a high, light laugh, and I recognise the glossy black veil of Tori’s hair, a couple of tables from where the shot is taken. And next to her, me.
‘See?’ Wolf says over it. ‘Fucking obsessed! But you didn’t want to hear me out, did you?’ There’s a part of him, I realise now, that’s enjoying this discovery. Righteous indignation glints in his eyes as he scrolls down the thumbnails of videos. Tens of them fly past at a time. He hits another one, but the screen is angled too far now. I can’t see what he’s looking at.
But then his face completely changes. It shifts to confusion, to concern, to horror. Under his breath, he mutters, ‘What the fuck?’ He seems to forget what he’s doing.
I hear the muted sound of another video playing, but I can’t see a thing. And then the shot changes: Wolf’s up, the fabric of his shirt filling the screen.
His voice, further away, is oddly high. ‘Fucking hell!’
Then everything is movement. He’s too close to the lens to see properly, but I can just make out him pulling on a coat – that bright-green coat – and zipping the phone up inside. For a moment he pauses, his breath panicky and loud, and then he leaves the frame. The shot totters, swings to the side and crashes down.
Out of shot, he hammers on the door. ‘Stefan. Stefan! Are you there? You need to let me out! Stefan!’ He keeps that up for a little under a minute. There’s a pause, a clunk of the lock, then Stefan saying something I can’t make out. Wolf’s shouted apology, as his heavy footsteps thunder away; Stefan’s pleas for him to return. The door clicking shut. And that’s it.
I scrub forward, double speed, four times speed, eight times. I watch the empty, sideways shot of the patch of carpet beside his bed, willing something else to happen, for Wolf to come back. I pause, listen, restart. There’s nothing. The time-code rolls on and I run it even faster, fitting together what would have been happening. The final challenge getting under way. The storm bearing down on us.
By the time the tape ran out, Wolf would have been struggling out across the ice, driven out by a desperation to tell someone something. Maybe only minutes later, he was dying in the snow – the secret of what he wanted to say, and what happened to him when he tried to say it, dying with him.
Then I’m on my feet.
Because maybe there’s a way to find out, after all.