Chapter 55

55

Flashlight held aloft, Elin runs back the way they came, following the wall of the cave through to the space they first entered.

She turns this way and that, stumbling as she tries to find her way out, flashlight beam cutting erratic lines through the darkness. All she can see in her mind's eye is a frenzy of images: the cloak, the stones, the photographs. She takes in nothing but the exit in front, thin slices of sunlight from the opening streaking the walls a brilliant silver.

Elin bursts through the gap, jumping back down into the quarry. The sun is ferocious after the dim light of the cave, but she doesn't stop, feverishly running across the quarry floor toward the path.

Footsteps sound out behind her, Steed's voice calling her name, but it barely registers. She scrambles upward, half on the path and half on the crumbling scree, clumps of rock coming loose beneath her fingers.

There's already a burning deep in her lungs from the exertion, but she keeps moving.

Eventually, she reaches the lip of the quarry. The rough imprint of the path pulls clear from the overgrowth—the foliage they'd trampled on their way here. Drawing on her last reserves of strength, she starts running again, but within minutes, every part of her body is screaming, sweat pooling beneath her top.

She stops, crouching low, and puts her hands to her head, her father's words ringing in her ears.

You're a coward, Elin. A coward.

"Hey..." Steed's caught up with her, still clutching his flashlight in his hand. "What's wrong? You need your inhaler?"

Elin shakes her head, once again hearing her own rasping breath. "I couldn't stay in there, I..." She trails off, realizing that her hands and forearms are stinging. Fine scratches zigzag across her skin, tiny speckles of blood, from climbing up the scree.

"You don't have to explain. It was terrifying." Steed's voice wavers. "Give me half a chance, and I'd have run too." He shakes his head, and as she looks at him, she can see it in his face: fear.

He'd felt it too. That sense of something malevolent within the cave.

"But I think," he says carefully, composing himself, "that when you're faced with something like that, you can't help but read into it..."

Elin nods, playing along, because it's easier to, easier for the both of them to stick to that narrative. It's drilled into them. Rationality. Logic. Mind over matter.

Steed pulls out a can of Coke from his bag, passes it to her. "Don't know about you, but I'm running on empty." He glances at his watch. "Past two now."

"Thanks," she says softly, and as she meets his gaze, she smiles. "You were right with the whole Boy Scout thing..."

"Got all my badges." Steed busies himself pulling another can out, but not before she catches his smile too.

As Elin tears back the ring pull, she's warmed by the sheer normality of the act, can start to feel some of the terror slowly ebbing away. She hasn't even opened the can fully before Coke spurts out, gushing in a foaming streak down the metal. Tipping the can to the side, she slurps, catching the worst of it.

Steed laughs. "Should have warned you. Had to run pretty fast to catch up."

Mouth still bitter with bile, she gulps it back. The sugar hits her instantly, steadies her.

A few more glugs. She feels her breathing return to normal.

"Better?"

She nods. "Before we call the Control Room, I want to get your take on what we found. It was a bit of a blur in there."

"Walk and talk?"

Elin nods, but she soon finds that it's hard work doing both. Despite the rough path they'd trampled on their way in, it feels like they're having to fight their way through the undergrowth all over again. The sugar's triggered something: she can feel the first stirring of hunger pangs as she clambers over a fallen log.

"What was the evidence against Creacher?" Steed takes a long slug from his can.

"Can't remember, not off the top of my head, but a guy I know, who worked the case, said it was a tough one at the start. They didn't get much."

"Who was the detective?"

"Johnson. Retired now. Before your time." A career DS with a copper-colored helmet of hair, Johnson had an earnestness about him that pissed people off, but he was diligent, hardworking, a details man who still put his hand up for jobs that others, including her, avoided at all costs. Elin remembers his palpable frustration as she'd talked over the Creacher case with him one day after work in the pub. The case had clearly got to him. "He said there was a lot of pressure for a conviction."

"That kind of case, there always is."

"Yeah." They lapse into silence, neither needing to voice what that means. Teenagers killed while they were on a school trip. The pressure to find someone would have been off the scale. That's when mistakes are made. Shortcuts taken. Elin swallows hard, struggling with the idea that someone's shortcut might have left the real offender free to kill again.

Steed takes another audible slug of his drink. "I think that's my worst nightmare, you know, putting the wrong person away. It'd haunt me..."

"Me too. I'll give Johnson a call when we get back to the main lodge, see what insight he can give us." It isn't strictly how she should go about getting information, but not only had Johnson been vocal in his concerns about the Creacher case, they already have a relationship of sorts, meaning she is less likely to be fobbed off. If there was any real doubt over Creacher's conviction, he'll have the inside track.

Trudging forward, there's a rustling in the trees. Only a bird, flitting between the branches, but Elin stumbles, ankle turning. Steed reaches out. "Hey... watch out..."

Elin nods. "Tired." She can feel the adrenaline slipping away, the quick sugar pick-me-up replaced by a horrible flatness, the light hunger pangs settling into something more pressing, insistent.

"The timing's still bothering me," Steed says as they continue. "If whoever killed Bea and Seth is the same person who killed those teenagers, then there's got to have been a trigger to act again after all these years. Not exactly the norm for a serial offender to decide to take a couple of decades off."

"Maybe someone who was put away and only just got out. I think we need to do background checks on everyone here. See if there's anyone who was on the island around the same time as the Creacher murders. Any names that correlate with anyone from that case. Kids, teachers, camp leaders. Any connections at all."

He nods. "I'll get on it. And no one strikes you?"

Elin's thoughts immediately shift to Michael Zimmerman, but what does she have to go on? The fact that he'd looked at her strangely a few times? "No, but given what we found in the shack, we can't discount someone not actually staying at the retreat, but accessing the resort illegally." She hesitates. "The one thing that is clear is that whoever we're looking for has a fascination with the rock, the curse. I'm no profiling expert, but I'd say it's likely that they're delusional, perhaps suffering from psychosis. In one of those kinds of episodes, someone can get hallucinations, hear voices instructing them to do something."

"The reaper?" Steed muses.

"Not out of the realm of possibility, particularly after finding that cloak. The visionary theory is plausible motivation, someone killing because they think they're being told to do it."

Steed pushes his empty can into the side pocket of his backpack. "I get it, but surely anyone delusional wouldn't be capable of planning to the degree we saw in Bea's and Seth's deaths?"

"You're right." She considers. "They would usually be more chaotic. That fits with the MO of the teenagers' killer, which was pretty frenzied from all accounts, but not with Bea and Seth."

"What if it is a copycat, someone inspired by Creacher? Might explain the anomalies." He shrugs. "Or more than one person."

Elin mulls it over, still unsure. Everything in that cave points to continuity. Someone carrying on with what they started during the Creacher murders. "Maybe, but I'm wondering if perhaps it's not how they've been killed that's important, but the fact they've done it, recorded it, and celebrated it."

"Either way," Steed adds, "the one thing we do know is that whoever's doing this carefully planned Bea's and Seth's deaths to lead us in a different direction."

She nods. "To give them time to act again."

Neither of them speaks for a moment, the awareness of what this means weighing heavy.

The killer isn't done.