Chapter 25

“LOOK, I NEEDto talk to you.”

We were down at the beach waiting for Conor and Zana to wake up and bring us the morning water ration, but for once, thirsty as I was, I wasn’t counting down the seconds until Conor came across the jetty, water bottle in hand. Because I wanted to speak to Angel and Santana before he got here.

“To me? Or Angel?” Santana turned to me, her face listless and incurious. She was like a different person since Dan’s death, as if all the vitality and laughter had drained out of her.

“To both of you.” I dug in my pocket and held out the vial of insulin I had found in Dan’s hand. “I found this yesterday.”

Angel peered at the tiny bottle, her face uncomprehending, but Santana’s gasp was instant, and she snatched the insulin out of my hand.

“What? Where did you find this?”

“In Dan’s hand. I think…” I swallowed. “I think he was holding it when he died.”

“That is your insulin?” Angel asked, comprehension dawning. She took a long sucking breath between pursed lips, and then seemed to realize what this meant—or could mean. “Wait, are you saying Dan was the thief?”

“Bullshit!” Santana cried, at the same time as I said, “I don’t think so, no.”

“But if he had the insulin—” Angel began, but Santana cut her off.

“No. No, I don’t believe it. It’s bullshit, Dan would never. He would never! He knows what that means to me. It was Conor. It was Conor punishing him for standing up to him. I know it was!”

“It wasn’t Conor,” Angel said patiently. “We have been through this, Santana.”

“I’m pretty sure it was Joel,” I said. “I showed him the vial last night—”

“You did what?” interjected Angel, but I kept going, doggedly, speaking over her.

“—and his reaction was really off. He looked guilty as hell. But he also looked… stricken. In a way I didn’t completely understand. But I think I do now.”

“What do you mean?” Santana cried. “And more to the point, where’s the rest of my bloody insulin? That vial is half-full.” She pointed at the little bottle in my hand, which had a pinprick in its lid.

I took a deep breath, marshalling all the clarity I could. The sequence of events had seemed so clear when I was running through them up at the villa, but now I was doubting my own logic. It made sense though. I knew it made sense. I just had to convey it to Angel and Santana.

“I think Joel took the insulin and gave it to Conor. I don’t know why. Probably Conor asked him to steal it because he knew we’d suspect him and would be on our guard if he started sniffing around our villa. Maybe he came up with some argument about Dan being a loose cannon, and it being safer for everyone to have a hold over him. Or maybe he just straight-up bribed Joel with some water. I don’t know about you, but there’s not a lot I wouldn’t do for an extra liter right now.”

“I wouldn’t fucking steal someone’s medication,” Santana growled, but I saw Angel run her tongue unconsciously over her cracked lips, and I thought she knew what I meant, and was honest enough to know that we might all have been tempted, with the right ask.

“But how did it end up in Dan’s hand?” Angel asked. “Are you saying it was… comment on dit, mise-en-scène—staged? That Conor put it there when he found the body?”

“I don’t think so,” I said, shaking my head. “Dan had rigor mortis. His hand was completely clamped around the bottle. No, I think Dan did go and see Conor the other night.”

“But you said Conor and Zana were alone?” Santana objected. “You said you would have seen Dan coming back.”

“I think I was wrong. I think Dan went out to the water villa, and he got hold of a vial somehow. I don’t know how—maybe he found it, or maybe Conor offered it to him, to try to placate him, and it backfired. Either way, I think they ended up fighting and Conor drowned him, and then pushed his body into the riptide to be carried out to sea. It was just his bad luck that the currents carried it back—with the insulin.”

“You cannot know any of that,” Angel said skeptically, and I shook my head.

“No, I can’t. But going on what little data we do have, it’s the only way I can make sense of Dan holding the insulin the moment he died. He must have taken it from whoever killed him—and we know that wasn’t Joel. Joel was in the villa with us all night. And there’s something else. Conor’s hair was wet when I went out to the water villa that night.”

“Wet?” Santana said blankly. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, wet. Like he’d had a shower. He was wearing a towel as well. Now, it’s possible he went for a last-minute swim before bed to cool down….”

“But it’s far more likely he got wet drowning Dan,” Santana said. Her voice cracked. “Oh, darling Dan, you stupid fucker. I begged him. I begged him not to go out there.”

“I know,” I said quietly. Angel put her arm around Santana’s shoulders and she wept, dry, racking sobs. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“So we confront him?” Angel said now, her voice fierce. “We get Joel to confess what he did, the little worm, and then we confront the psychopath?”

“Well…” I said reluctantly. “That’s the other thing I’m worried about. I asked Joel about it last night.”

“And?”

“And he looked… sucker punched. More shocked than I would have expected. I didn’t accuse him in so many words, but it was pretty clear what I was saying. But I don’t think that was what shocked him. I mean, he knew what he’d done—he must have known that there was a chance we’d put two and two together. No, I think he was shocked because when I told him Dan had been holding a vial of insulin, he realized what I did—that if Dan was holding the bottle when he died, that meant he did see Conor the other night. And it probably meant that Conor had murdered him.”

“So he is forced to reckon with the true nature of his psycho friend. And now he is gone to have some midlife crisis moment in the forest?” Angel said scornfully. Her voice was full of disgust. I shrugged.

“I mean… it’s possible. And it’s what I hope.”

“It’s what you hope?” Santana looked up. Her eyes were red with unshed tears.

“It’s what I hope because the alternative is worse.” The problem was, it was also more plausible. I didn’t think Joel was the type to go hang out in the jungle with the snakes.

“What are you saying?” Santana looked taken aback. “Are you saying Joel’s gone over to Conor’s side?”

I shook my head. Though I didn’t want to say it aloud, the truth was, Joel had already been on Conor’s side, we just hadn’t realized it. But that wasn’t what I’d meant.

“The alternative is… Joel didn’t want to believe what I was suggesting. Didn’t want to believe that the man he’d put his trust in had murdered someone in cold blood. The alternative is, he went to confront Conor. And Conor killed him, too.”

There was a long, long silence. Three pairs of eyes turned to the water villa. And then we saw the door crack open, and Conor begin to walk across the jetty.

I stood up, off the sand. My heart was pounding.

Conor had killed Dan, I was sure of that. And it seemed increasingly likely with every moment that Joel didn’t appear that he’d killed Joel too.

Which meant, we were on an island with a murderer. A murderer who was viciously strong and who, increasingly, appeared to be without a conscience. The question was, what should we do about it? We had less than five minutes to decide.

Santana and Angel were clearly going through the same thought process. As Conor began to pick his way across the planks, Santana turned to us, her eyes wide and panicked.

“What are we going to do? Should we say something?”

“Dieu.” Angel spat the word out like a curse. “As if this situation could not get worse. No, we should not say anything. The man is a psychopath. Do you want him to kill us too?”

“But we have to get back my insulin! How can we do that without confronting him about Dan? About Joel?”

“You think if the man stole your insulin and murdered your boyfriend he will give it back upon request?” Angel demanded. I resisted the urge to put my hands over my ears, shut out their bickering while I tried to think. Because the truth was, it wasn’t bickering. This was a life-or-death decision, and Conor was almost at the beach.

“How many days’ insulin do you have?” I asked Santana. “Here, I mean—not counting the vials Conor’s got.”

Santana blinked.

“Fuck. I don’t know. Two, maybe three in my pump. Maybe five days in the vial you found. But I don’t know if it’s usable—it could have got seawater in it.”

“Look”—I made a rapid decision—“let’s not burn any bridges now. If we say something we can’t take back… that might not end well.” Conor was on the sand. I was speaking quickly now, my voice low. “We have to make him want to give back the insulin. We have to make it easy for him. If we tie him having the insulin to an accusation that he murdered Dan and Joel… do you see what I’m saying? He’ll never be able to admit that he has it. We need to find a way of getting the insulin back that lets him maintain plausible deniability.”

“Okay,” Santana said, but her face was pale, and I wasn’t sure she was convinced by my argument. “So… we ask where Joel is?”

“Yes. We stick to facts. We ask where Joel is and we ask—”

But Conor was almost up to the group, and now I realized something else. He wasn’t carrying the water.

“Hi, Conor,” I said as he approached. He smiled, pleasantly enough, and I saw that his lips weren’t dry and chapped like the rest of us, but full and moist.

“Good morning, ladies. Where’s Joel?”

“We were just about to ask you that.” I tried to keep my voice even—anxious, but not overly so. “He left the villa last night. Did he come to see you?”

“No.” Conor was either truly concerned or doing a very good acting job. He looked genuinely surprised and more than a little alarmed. “What time did he leave?”

“Midnight, maybe? We haven’t seen him since.”

“Well, I’m afraid I know what you do.” Conor spread his hands. “Nothing.”

“Well, now that we agree on that.” Angel’s voice was full of a contempt she wasn’t bothering to hide. “Perhaps we could have our water?”

“Ah.” Conor put his hands behind his back, linking his fingers and stretching so that his joints clicked, and the powerful muscles in his shoulders bunched. “Well, yes. There’s a problem.”

“A problem?” Angel’s voice could have taken the nonstick off a pan. The rolled r in problem sounded like a tiger with its temper barely under control. “There is a problem?”

“Yes, it’s February twenty-fifth, by my reckoning. Which means we’ve been here just over ten days.”

“And?”

“And we’ve got through almost half the water. We have to face facts, in another ten days, we could be looking at single-digit liters.”

“But wait—” I put out a hand. “There were eight of us when we calculated the water ration. There’s only six now.” Maybe five if Joel was gone, though I wasn’t ready to say that out loud. “That gives us an extra twenty-five percent leeway.”

“Okay, then.” Conor spoke impatiently. “An extra twelve days. What does it matter? The point is, we’re running out of water. We’re all going to have to work a bit harder for our liquid allowance.”

“What does that mean?” Santana looked at him through narrowed eyes. I saw that her shoulders were peeling viciously where the sun had caught them yesterday.

“It means that in order to qualify for liquid allowance, everyone is going to have to bring two green coconuts to the table each morning.”

“What?” It was Angel who exploded with the question we were all suppressing. “C’est quoi, ces conneries? You know perfectly that there are no green coconuts left. We searched all the island for them—all the fallen are dry.”

“Then you’ll have to climb the trees,” Conor said pleasantly.

“Climb the trees? Are you insane? We climbed everything possible. The ones left are forty meters high!”

“Or knock the coconuts down. I don’t care how you do it—that’s your business. But if you don’t contribute, you don’t drink.”

“And what about you?” Santana demanded. “Where are your coconuts?”

“I’ll be fishing. Assuming you want to eat.”

“Conor, look,” I put in, trying to keep the desperation out of my voice. My throat was suddenly very dry—drier even than it had been a few minutes ago. I swallowed painfully. “We take your point—we need to find other sources of liquid. But give us our allowance now, and we can go out and figure out how to get the coconuts down.”

“I don’t think so,” Conor said. “I find most people work better with a little bit of incentivization.”

“Conor…” The soft voice came from behind him, and we all turned, surprised to see Zana padding along the beach. She looked pale and even thinner than when she had first come to the island, but there was a kind of resolve about her. “Conor… I think Lyla has a point.”

“Oh you do, do you?” Conor said. His voice was mild, but there was a kind of underlying menace in it. Zana took a step back, and then seemed to catch herself and stood up taller, nodding.

“Yes, I do. Give everyone their water now, and they can earn the supper allowance.”

“Come here,” Conor said with a smile. He held out his hand. Zana looked puzzled, but she put her hand in his, and he drew her closer. For a moment I thought he was bringing her in for a hug and remembered the way Zana had stood up for Angel over the food, after Bayer’s death, and the way Conor had backed down. But then, Zana began to squirm, and then she gave a cry, and then a full-on whimper of pain. At first I didn’t understand, and then I realized she was trying to pull her hand away from Conor. I looked down, and I saw that Conor had her hand in his and was digging his nail into the white half-moon at the base of Zana’s thumbnail, so hard that she was literally buckling at the knees with pain.

I had a sharp, agonizing flashback to a time when I had been pinning up the hem of Nico’s trousers for an alteration and he had taken a step back and trodden, in his dress shoes, on the flat of my thumbnail. He hadn’t stamped hard, just shifted his weight, but it had all rested on exactly the place where Conor was pressing into Zana’s nail. It had been—no exaggeration—one of the most painful things I had ever experienced. I had screamed, and Nico had startled, fallen off the stool, and afterwards he had accused me of being a drama queen. “There’s not even a mark!” he’d said, although that wasn’t totally true. Later on a faint purplish bruise had spread across the base of my nail.

But the white-hot pain of it had stayed with me ever since, and now the thought of Conor doing that to Zana deliberately, holding her while she twisted and tried to get away, while her knees gave way with the pain…

“What the fuck are you doing?” I yelled, and Conor let go of Zana’s hand and turned around on me, and for a moment his cold calm was gone, and his face was full of an anger that made me step back.

“Holding my girlfriend’s hand, what are you doing?” he snarled.

“You were hurting her.” My heart was thudding, and my hand was drawn back, although to do what, I could not have said. I didn’t think my punch would do more than irritate Conor.

“She’s fine,” Conor ground out. “Aren’t you?”

But Zana was curled over, cradling her hand, and didn’t answer.

“Get back to the villa,” he said now, but I moved to stand in between them, and now I found Angel and Santana were there too, side by side with me.

“Leave her alone,” Angel said. She said the words very quietly, but each one was spat out like something poisonous. For a long moment Conor stood there, towering over Angel, the muscles in his shoulders standing out like a bull about to charge—and then he smiled.

“I’ll be fishing. If you need me, Zana. And remember… two coconuts each, ladies. If you want to drink.”

“Oh, we’ll remember,” Angel said. Her voice was shaking with rage. Conor turned on his heel with a little wave and walked back to the water villa, presumably to get his fishing spear. Beside me, I heard Santana’s shaky exhalation of breath, and I realized that I was trembling, my muscles quivering like someone who’s tried to hold a yoga pose too long.

It wasn’t just fear of Conor—though that was part of it. It had been fear of what Angel might do, and how Conor might retaliate. We couldn’t lose another person. We couldn’t. I found I was holding Angel’s wrist, as if I could somehow hold her back from going after Conor, and I let go and gave a shaky laugh.

“Wow. Okay. Zana, are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she said, but her voice was wobbling as if she was trying to hold back tears. “He—he isn’t normally like that.”

“Nor was my last boyfriend,” Angel said bitterly. “Until the first time he was. And then the second time. And then every time he drank or his team lost or he had a bad day at work.”

“You were in an abusive relationship?” I asked, taken aback. I don’t know why I was surprised—except that Angel was so extraordinarily beautiful, it seemed as though she would be untouchable, would have the pick of only the best and kindest men. I knew that was ridiculous, that abusers often went for the trophy girlfriend, and then ground them down. Perhaps half the triumph was in slashing down the tallest poppy. But Angel—she was so beautiful. So very take-no-shit and zero tolerance. Maybe I was just starting to understand why.

“For two years,” Angel said matter-of-factly. “It is part of the reason why I left France. He was very convincing, even some of my friends picked him when we split up. He was very good at leaving no marks.”

It took me a moment to understand what she was saying, and then I did a full-body shudder in spite of the heat of the day. I remembered the way she had stared down at the mark on Zana’s wrist, as if she was seeing a ghost from her own past—and now I understood why.

“He won’t stop, you know,” she said to Zana in a conversational tone. “It will only get worse.”

Zana shook her head.

“It’s not like that. He’s not like that.”

Angel said nothing. She only smiled, but not mockingly, or patronizingly. She looked sad, as if she knew exactly where Zana was at—and where she would end up.

“Well…” Santana said after a long, awkward pause. “Those coconuts aren’t going to get themselves. And I don’t know about you, but I’m bloody thirsty. Shall we make a start? Or should we look for Joel first?”

Angel and I exchanged a look over Zana’s head, and I knew what we were both thinking: either Joel was hiding of his own accord, in which case, frankly, fuck him for leaving the four of us to deal with Conor alone. Or something had happened to him. Probably at Conor’s hands. In which case no search was going to change anything.

“I feel…” Angel said, delicately, “that perhaps the coconuts are our priority, non? We are all very thirsty. If Joel is hiding, well, he will return when he is ready. And if he’s not…”

There was a long pause.

“If he’s not, then we can keep an eye out for him while we look for coconuts,” I said, trying for brisk optimism, but I wasn’t sure I hit the mark.

Zana nodded, and then slowly, Santana did too, but there was a sorrow in her face that made me think that she knew what Angel and I had been trying not to say. Then the four of us stood up and began walking up the beach towards the forest.