They left Albert’s room and walked back up the corridor to their own rooms to collect their coats.
‘You know,’ Colin said as they reached their doors, ‘it’s kind of a one-man job, isn’t it?’
‘Is it?’ Adam asked.
‘Well, all one of us has to do is go and have a look at the trellis.’
‘One of us…’
‘Well, yeah.’
‘And which one of us would that be?’
‘Allow me to put my case forward for it being you. I was the first on scene at the murder. I helped with the first aid on Albert and I was the one who did the dirty work near the body, while you looked at some muck on the floor.’
Colin cocked an eyebrow at Adam, challenging him; though his friend couldn’t muster much of a counter-argument. Instead, Adam nodded his head solemnly and reached for his door handle.
‘Seriously, though,’ Colin said. ‘We’ve been up half the night, so it might be wise for each of us to have a rest. I’ll get some sleep now while you do this, and in a while, we’ll talk about our next move.’
‘Sounds like a plan,’ Adam said.
Colin disappeared into his room with a swift goodbye. Adam opened his own door and entered the room. He made use of the bathroom and then grabbed his still-wet coat from the hook by the door. He looked out his window, at the darkness that lay beyond, sighed, and closed the door again.
He walked down the hall, his eyes poring over the doors that lined the corridor as he went.
He thought about what awaited the occupants upon awakening, if they were asleep at all. Tragedy loomed; some, like sober Sophie, would awake knowing that she had played a small part in trying to save a life. She might feel like a hero, knowing she’d at least done something. Or, she might feel the total opposite; a failure who had been unable to prevent a soul from drifting away into the ether.
The other presenters might awake to the news like it’s the first they’ve heard of it, despite all four of them standing in the doorway. Some might remember nothing at all, thanks to the amount of alcohol consumed. Some might rouse, snatching at a half-remembered dream until the reality came rushing in at the sight of Albert.
His injured arm.
His dead wife.
One person would wake with an expensive necklace secreted somewhere in their room, checking their hiding place nervously as they waited for the storm to abate.
Adam walked slowly down the stairs and across the foyer to the porch. Inside the porch, to the left of the door, was a shoe rack. On it, and next to it, were several pairs of shoes and the green wellies kept by the hotel for those travellers who had come ill-prepared for a walking tour.
Currently, there was a pair of wellies for each of the party who had been for the walk last night, save for Damien who had brought his own, and Gavin who was wearing a pair of huge Doc Martens as part of his wrestling get-up.
Adam found the pair he had discarded last night upon arriving back from the ghost walk, and winced as the wet soles immediately soaked his socks.
He pulled open the door and peeked outside. There was no sign of Albert. He must’ve finished his cigarette and gone back to his room, or, more likely, thought better of going outside when faced with the cold and rain.
Adam pulled the hood over his head, pulled the drawstrings so tight that he resembled Kenny from South Park, and stepped into the storm.
Within seconds of closing the door behind him, his cheeks were numb and his nose was bright red, though not luminous enough to make a dent in the darkness that surrounded him.
The wind felt like it was zeroing in on him and him alone; the gusts catching his hood like a parachute and forcing him backwards. He reckoned if anyone was looking out a window at him now, it wouldn’t look too dissimilar to the video for Michael Jackson’s Earth Song.
He fished his phone from his pocket and turned the torch on. He held it out in front of him, trying to protect the screen from the downpour as much as he could, and set off. He tried to hug the building as closely as possible, though it afforded little protection.
He edged past windows, slipping occasionally in the flowerbeds and grass which had more of the consistency of quicksand to it. Thankfully, childhood had always placed quite an importance on how to evade such granular matter, so it didn’t hold him up for too long.
Finally, he arrived under Albert’s window. Luckily, the light was still on and the curtains open, as they had been when he and Colin had left. This meant he could put his phone away and use the light from the room. It made him feel like he was on some divine quest, bathed in ethereal light from above.
Though, there was nothing divine about what he was doing, slinking about in the darkness and the mud, looking for clues that could lead to them finding a killer. If anything, it was a quest sent from Beelzebub.
He reached out and pulled at the trellis. It was made from a heavy wood and painted white, though a long time ago. The original oak colouring was shining through where the white had started to peel. Ivy crept up the wooden structure, spreading in a triangular shape as it stretched past the window and reached for the roof. The leaves dropped water on Adam’s exposed hand like a waterfall, and he uttered a few curse words under his breath as his skin turned to ice.
The trellis was attached securely to the wall, barely moving at all when Adam shook it. He figured that it could easily support someone who wanted to climb it.
Adam was half-temped to try and climb it himself, but the wooden trellis and the ivy were slick with water and, if he fell, there was no telling how much damage he’d do to himself. And anyway, the door to Albert’s bedroom had been locked from the inside and all the evidence pointed to the killer entering via the window above Adam’s head.
Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t need to climb the trellis to reach that conclusion, so neither did he.
Instead, he cast his eyes to the ground. The area underneath Albert’s window was partially protected from the rain by an overhanging triangular section of roof. It hadn’t done a lot to keep the ground dry, it was only slightly less marshy than the rest of the island, but it had helped with one thing.
In amongst the drowning flowers, was a footprint. It was facing towards the wall and looked like the print of a welly boot. The heel area had a firm imprint on the soil, though the toe area was not as defined.
Adam tried putting his foot beside it to gauge what size it might be in comparison to his size nine, though it was impossible to tell due to the front section that faded without an end. Glass crunched under the sole of his shoe, and for a second he was worried he’d impaled himself.
Still, at least he could tell conclusively that someone had come through the flowerbed, ascended the trellis, broken the window and killed, before making their escape the same way.
Adam got out his phone again and opened the camera app. He pressed the button to take a photo, and as the flash blossomed, something in the treeline opposite moved.
Adam killed the phone light and flattened himself hard against the wall, trying with all his might to sink through the brickwork like some sort of character from The X-Files.
He peered into the darkness, searching for any flicker of evidence that whatever had moved was coming his way. After a few minutes, when he had convinced himself that he had imagined it, or that it was simply an animal he had startled with his burst of light, he started to breathe audibly again.
Damien’s stories swirled around his head. Branches and wind morphed into ghouls and banshee’s wails. Adam counted to three in his head and ran as fast as he could to the front door, only pausing for breath once he was safely entrenched in the entrance hall.
His eyes briefly lingered on the wellies again, realising that he was no safer in here than out there. Though, in here, the monsters were real.
He set off again at full pace, up the stairs and down the corridor. He fumbled for his keys with his frozen hands, shoving them in the keyhole at the third time of asking.
He locked the door behind him and slid down the back of it.
Finally, he allowed himself a laugh.
What had they got themselves involved in this time?