I crash into my cabin and drag the cameras out from under my bed, and power up Annabel’s first. But the batteries die straight away. I go out, racing up the companionway two steps at a time, heading for the office.
Inside, I find the spare power bank and click it into place, then pull on a pair of headphones and switch it to playback.
The scene opens in the abandoned village. I skip through the establishing shots – the incredible landscape, footage of the whole group, set-ups panning across all their faces. And although I didn’t give it my attention at the time, all the while that dense, concrete-heavy bank of cloud is getting closer overhead. Heading straight for us, like the menace of death.
I keep spinning forward. Even at speed, I can see the storm building in the footage. People lean more and more steeply into the wind, the snow travelling too fast, heavier with every minute. Then the shot changes. I switch back to normal speed.
It’s a big, wide shot. The foreground settles – the edge of a dilapidated building – in time for Craig to come around the edge of it, passing through the frame from left to right in a couple of seconds. The white closing in, thickening like a fog. But the shot lingers, and every few moments there’s a blink of a view all the way out to where the promontory that edges the fjord claws at the ice. Beyond that, the yellow-and-white shape of the Skidbladnir.
And in front of that, flashes of green. Wolf, coming slowly but determinedly towards the camera. The shot shudders for a while – Annabel is running with the camera on her shoulder. Then she stops, right behind a building. The camera is put down, the view tilting, the bottom half obscured now but snow right up to the lens, and then immediately I see feet – hers – pass the shot. Then there’s nothing.
Obviously there’s nothing. Growling in frustration, I close my eyes, concentrating hard on the audio. Though the noise of the wind almost obliterates everything else, there are thumps and thuds too. A voice shouting – Craig, I think – then only the wind again.
But here, faintly, is another voice. Where is she?
I open my eyes. There’s nothing on the screen – the shot’s filling up with snow – but it’s unmistakably Wolf. I run it back, adjusting the playback setting to try to clear some of the ambient noise. Things are made worse by a crackle on the radio mic – the same issue as with the one I replaced immediately before the challenge. I remember a detail: when I came back out after replacing that mic, after seeing Wolf, how I’d thought for a moment Annabel had overheard my conversation with him. How relieved I’d been to realise I was wrong.
But what if I’d been right? What if she knew what he’d found on her phone?
That he might be about to spill her secret?
With the settings adjusted, I hit Play again and this time the sound is much clearer. Cutting through the noise of the storm is Wolf’s voice.
Where is she? he’s saying.
I open my eyes. He says it again, yelling it into the wind. And then, straight afterwards, he says something different.
Where’s Annabel?
A hand on my shoulder makes me jump. I whip off the headphones and turn. And there is Annabel, standing over me, head tilted. Watching me with a cold glare.