Chapter Twenty-One

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Glasgow

May 2024

CLEM

In the family room, Clem sits with Quinn and Stephanie, shaking with anger and confusion.

“You shouldn’t have filmed her,” she tells Stephanie. “You don’t know how paranoid she might be feeling, how traumatized.”

“I did ask for her consent,” Stephanie says, at which Quinn makes a loud pfft .

“I told you it was too early for her to answer questions,” he says. “Erin is still on a heavy dose of morphine, so I think it’s fair to say that whatever she said is not an accurate representation of how she feels about Arlo, or Senna. And we’d appreciate it if you could delete whatever you recorded of our daughter in there.”

“I understand,” Stephanie says, though she makes no effort to take out her phone and delete the video file. “We will take into account that Erin’s a vulnerable patient and that she’s heavily medicated. I’m sure you can both appreciate how urgent it is that we find Senna.” She pulls her iPad from her briefcase.

“I think we need to be looking at ferry passenger lists,” Quinn says. “Finding out who else was on the island that night.”

“We have done that, actually,” Stephanie says, and Clem senses she doesn’t like Quinn. She flicks through her notebook. “We have another team currently reviewing any persons of interest on the two main ferry passenger lists. Another team are looking at all the boat traffic in and out of Orkney. What we do know already is that the Isle of Gunn isn’t serviced by a ferry.”

“You said they might have waded. How far is it from Gairsay?” Clem asks, pulling a map of Orkney up on her phone.

“It’s half a mile,” Stephanie says. “But I’m told that the tidal window is about an hour. So there’s no messing about, otherwise you risk drowning. And Gairsay’s ferry schedules mean that you need to camp overnight in order to cross.”

Stephanie pulls out her own phone and brings up the timetable for Orkney Ferries.

“You see?” she says, pointing at the column for weekday sailings over the summer.

“The evening ferry from Gairsay arrives at six minutes past six, and the morning ferry is eight fifteen. There is also an afternoon ferry that runs at four o’clock. The low tide is at quarter to six in the morning. So if you want to get to Gunn, either you travel by boat or you get a ferry, camp out overnight, and then wade across before dawn.”

“And why would anyone do that?” Clem asks. “What’s so special about this place?”

“Well, that’s what we’re trying to work out,” Stephanie says.

“Did they camp out?” Quinn says. “Did they have a tent?”

Stephanie shakes her head. “Senna had a three-man tent but it was found stowed away. But there are caves on both Gairsay and Gunn.” She taps the map with her fingernails. “The fire happened inside a cave on Gunn, right here in the middle of the bay. So possibly they waded across at dawn then had a nap inside the cave.”

“And maybe they disturbed a fellow explorer,” Quinn says grimly.

“Possibly,” Stephanie says. “Except we’ve checked the ferry passenger list for Gairsay. We know that’s how Arlo, Erin, and Senna got to Gairsay. But they were the only people who stayed overnight. All the others got the return ferry.”

Clem rubs her face and lets out a deep sigh. It is more exhausting than she can put into words, figuring it all out.

“What time was the fire?” she asks.

“Around midnight,” Stephanie says. “Though the ranger found Erin and Arlo just before dawn. Arlo’s phone conversation with his friend was the last contact they had with anyone.”

“So they stayed overnight on Gairsay, waded across Wednesday morning, then spent the whole day there?”

“They would have had to,” Stephanie says. “Unless they went over and came straight back, the next tidal window wouldn’t be until Thursday morning.”

Quinn studies the map. “And we still don’t know who else was on the island?”

“No one else traveled by ferry to Gairsay,” Stephanie says. “But we don’t know if someone else traveled by boat to the Isle of Gunn. We’re reviewing drone footage that should help create a visual map of the island.”

“What about Gairsay?” Clem asks, making notes on her phone. “Is that island inhabited?”

“There’s a population of about seventy.”

“Well, surely we ought to be speaking to those seventy people?”

“We are.”

“And?”

“No leads as yet.”

“No suspects? No one saw three townie teenagers camping on their beaches?”

“They did,” Stephanie says. “But beyond times and dates, we have nothing to follow up on. And no, no one is a suspect.”

Clem looks down at her notes, feeling disappointed that nothing adds up. Gairsay, tidal window, Gunn, cave .

“What do you think Arlo couldn’t find?” Quinn asks Stephanie.

“I really don’t know,” Stephanie says, but Clem’s stomach drops.

This is no longer about a missing girl, she thinks. They’re looking for a dead body.

···

Clem’s heart is tightening again in that sickening way that means her body is too stressed, and she rises to her feet, feeling the room spin.

“Sorry,” she tells Stephanie and Quinn. “I need to take my medication.”

“She has a heart condition,” Quinn explains when Stephanie looks alarmed. He straightens then, reaching out to steady her.

“I’m fine,” she says tersely.

“You sure?”

She doesn’t answer. The hospital corridor lists and churns, but she makes her way into the small kitchen and presses two pills into her hand before swallowing them back. It all feels too much, the last nineteen years. She really thought things had come together when she married Quinn and had Erin, her perfect little girl. The sword that seemed to be hanging overhead with her heart condition was easy to ignore, what with her daughter and husband, and her parents living nearby. But then, her marriage ended abruptly, and both her parents died within three months of each other—her father in a mechanical accident, when he went to help an old friend, her mother of a heart attack. Their house swallowed up by debts that her father had concealed. Then Erin’s pregnancy, and now this.

She gowns up and heads into Erin’s room, where Constable Byers is standing in his usual spot.

“Can you give me a minute?” she asks him.

He nods. “Sure.”

Erin is sleeping, silvery light from the window streaking across her forehead. The bruises are vivid, a fresh shade of yellow beginning to pool in the dip of her cheekbones, but the swelling is going down, the familiar lines of Erin’s face beginning to reappear. She looks peaceful, and delicate. She looks like a child again.

Clem sits down in the chair beside the bed, feeling Stephanie’s words roll like boulders in the wounded space of her mind.

She cries quietly, and there is the sudden urge to sleep, too, her body more pummeled than she can ever imagine feeling. As though the endless bad news is landing on her flesh like physical blows.

“Mum?”

The voice is so familiar that it makes Clem jerk upright, eyes wide. She turns to Erin and finds her awake, her head turned to her. Did Erin just call her “Mum,” the way she used to? She sees that Erin’s expression has changed, her face wide and searching.

“Erin?”

Clem moves closer to Erin, seeing that she is growing distressed. The heart monitor begins to race, her pulse hitting ninety, a hundred beats a minute. She lifts the wires around her, looking at them as though she’s never seen them before.

“Mum?” she says again in a shrill voice, a series of questions folded in that one word, uttered with alarm. Clem stares, noticing how everything about Erin’s demeanor has changed. Even the lines of her face have softened, her eye holding a familiar look. The girl dissolving into a panic attack on the bed in front of her is absolutely, 100 percent Erin, and Clem finds she is as relieved as she is confused.

“Let me get a doctor,” she says, rising to her feet, but suddenly Erin lunges forward and grabs her arm.

“No!” she shouts. “Don’t leave me!”

Clem sinks back down on the bed beside her, watching, frantic, as Erin’s wide eye scans the room fearfully, her lips trembling.

“W…what’s g…going on?” Erin says, stumbling over her words. “Where am I?”

Clem barely knows how to answer. She is desperately searching Erin’s face to understand what she needs, why she has suddenly transformed into this sobbing, disoriented version of her daughter, the pendulum swung so far from the version that claims she is Nyx to this.

“You’re in hospital, remember?” she says. “You were…you were hiking in Orkney, and there was an accident…”

“An accident?” Erin says, deeply puzzled. “Where’s Arlo? Where’s Senna?” She looks down at her bandaged hands, shock pummeling her as she seems to see the injuries there for the first time. “Oh God. Mum?!”

Clem is seized by the terrible awareness that Erin is beginning to hyperventilate, that she has at last asked for Arlo. A week ago, when Stephanie broke the news of Arlo’s death, she couldn’t care less.

“Mum, something terrible happened,” Erin says, the words spilling out in a shrill tone, her whole body beginning to tremble.

“I know,” Clem says soothingly. “I know it has.”

Erin shakes her head. “No, no. No, you don’t. We were on the beach…no, we went inside the cave and lit the fire. And it just…It went up, like an explosion. There was a black flash…I saw a face , Mum. And then it just…”

Her face crumples, her words dissolving into huge, gulping sobs of horror. Clem watches on, her mouth open and her thoughts racing. She doesn’t know what to do, how to make sense of what she’s saying.

“What happened at the beach, Erin?” she says, as gentle and as firm as she can. “Please, tell me. We need to know. We need to know what happened to Senna, and to Arlo. Can you tell me?”

Erin takes a gulp of air, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Oh God, Mum. Arlo was on fire…”

“I know he was, darling. I know…”

“Where is he? Where is he?”

“He’s…” Clem can’t bring herself to say it. She can see in Erin’s eye that everything that Clem has already told her has somehow been rinsed from her memory, that she’ll be shattered by this news. The strangeness of Erin’s apathy when they first told her about Arlo seems welcome now. She can’t face breaking her daughter’s heart.

But in the time that she has hesitated telling Erin, it’s as though another switch has flipped in Erin’s mind. The racking sobs stop abruptly, and Erin falls silent. At first, Clem thinks she’s in pain, or going to be sick, and she moves away. “Sorry, love,” she says. “Are you okay?”

Erin looks up, and Clem flinches at the expression on her face. It is like flint, her eyes hard. “Don’t touch me,” she says.

Clem blinks, startled by the shift in her daughter’s state. The room, too, seems to have chilled, as though a breeze has swept in from an open window. The windows are shut, as is the door. Clem steps back from the bed, watching, not sure what’s happening to Erin. The heart monitor reports a drastically reduced pulse, too, dropping from the high nineties to low seventies.

“Are you okay?” she asks again, but Erin doesn’t answer. She stares blankly ahead, her tears gone, her face like stone. The heart monitor slows. Sixty-four.

Clem sits down on the chair next to her, wondering if she can take Erin’s hand. She decides not to touch her as she asked. “You were asking about Arlo, love,” she says.

“Arlo’s dead,” Erin says.

“I know,” Clem says. “And I’m so sorry.”

“You’re not my mother,” Erin says. Clem jerks her head up with a gasp.

“You don’t mean that.”

“I do mean it.”

“Erin?”

“I told you,” Erin says, her expression fearful. “I am Nyx.”