Chapter 50 Elin

50

Elin

Parque Nacional, Portugal, October 2021

Sitting at the table in the van, a glass of wine beside her, Elin pores over the notes she's made about Kier's disappearance so far. Scrawled one-word thoughts together with more detailed ideas. After what they've just seen, she's looking for new connections, theories that will start to hold weight.

Starting on a fresh page, she strips everything back to the four core points.

Kier. The camp. The map. The pira.

Elin writes each down, then circles them, leaving space between each to draw connections, annotate.

Flip-flopping for a moment, she decides to start with the easiest in terms of notes – something that's still an enigma – the pira. Reaching over to the counter, she picks up the small pira they'd found at the falls. She holds it up, blowing at the dirt and dust caught between the wood, really looking this time, turning the small structure between her fingers. Probing, searching .

Elin stiffens. Details she hadn't noticed before: tiny pinheads of glue turned cold and hard where the wood met at the tip, the smooth surface of the branches where someone's lightly sanded them. The care taken gives her the overwhelming sense that it really meant something to the person who'd created it.

Picturing the pira in the wood, Elin thinks about the dirt on Leah's knees, the almost reverent way she'd looked at the space the pira had vacated.

Could the pira play a part in this? Is the camp involved in making them? Do they link to what they're hiding?

Grabbing her phone, she taps the word pira into her search app, then pira Portugal , but there are no references to it, local or otherwise.

Etching a tentative line between the pira and the camp, Elin moves on to the camp itself, marking a bold line between the camp and Kier.

Mind racing, she jots everything down: what Penn had told them about the camp, the explosion and subsequent removal of something from the site. As she gets to what she saw at the falls between Ned and Leah, she pauses, disecting the theory that Ned had overheard her and Isaac speaking to Leah in the woods. Could what they'd witnessed at the falls been a way of warning Leah not to talk?

It's a theory, but only that. Although what they'd seen looked like something sinister, given the evidence of Leah's self-harm, her obvious fragility, they can't discount the possibility that Ned might have been helping her. Talking her down.

Elin's thoughts shift to Leah's words as they'd left the falls. The words still chill her.

He's right, you know. It should have been me, not her.

Was there a chance she was referring to Kier?

She bites her lip, frustrated. It's impossible to know at this point. All she can do is note it down, hope she can make sense of it further down the line.

‘That isn't everything,' Elin murmurs aloud, looking over what she's written .

She's still unable to shake the feeling of lingering unease that she'd missed something vital about the vans themselves, her subconscious picking up on something at the camp that her conscious mind hadn't yet got to grips with.

Rolling her shoulders, she loosens her neck, playing images of the camp in her mind, teasing them back and forth, but nothing leaps out at her.

Elin takes a sip of wine and decides to leave it there, moving on to the map. Marking a line from the map to Kier and then to the camp, she notes that while there's nothing on the map that references the camp directly, the points seem to roughly circle it.

Locations next: they'll need to visit more before concluding anything definitive, but both the viewpoint and the darkness pervading the map point to something troubling about Kier's experience in the park as a whole. It bothers her, but there's no way of getting to the root of it at the moment.

Her gaze finally settles on the question she's most daunted by.

Kier. Still so many unanswered questions.

Elin swallows, her eyes travelling along the lines she's made between Kier and the camp. Kier and the map. All they have is what Penn told Isaac: that Kier had travelled to Portugal with no obvious reason why . No connection to the place, no friends here.

Sliding her finger along the line she's drawn to the camp, Elin jots down their earlier observations: Penn's evidence of Kier staying at the camp – the photos of her van – as well as the fact that it looks like she's left the dog with them.

Is she missing something about the vans themselves?

Elin pulls up the photo Isaac shared of Kier's van when it was initially sighted at the camp, comparing it with what they've seen since being here. Aside from the obvious difference – Kier's van now gone – it all looks pretty much identical.

Same vans. Same positions. Nothing out of place.

The element that's still eluding them was why and how Kier joined the camp – whether it was a random invite to join or if she'd known someone there .

From this point, things get even murkier – the camp's lie about Kier staying with them.

Was the lie because the camp was covering something up?

Something that potentially could be linked to the videos they'd found on the hard drive, the person Luísa's colleague thought was following Kier?

It's likely, given where they'd found the hard drive and what was on it, that whoever followed her was from the camp.

But who?

Elin runs over the possibilities in her head: Maggie. Ned. Bridie. Even Leah .

Given what they'd witnessed up at the falls, Ned's the most obvious suspect, but she doesn't know enough about any of them yet to rule anyone out.

Her thoughts move to Maggie. She'd seemed open enough when they'd initially met, but in truth, they knew next to nothing about her. A total enigma. A strong character, that much is clear – mentally and physically robust enough to be living a life on the road, but what else might that strength be concealing?

At this point, Elin's not confident they'll be able to find out. Something told her that Maggie was very much a closed book and intended to stay that way. There would be no easy in-roads in getting to know her.

It might be possible to get more of a read on Bridie and Leah given what she'd gleaned so far, but there would be no guarantee. They'll have to play it carefully.

That leaves her with why .

Why would someone want to secretly film and follow Kier?

For kicks, or a more specific reason: were they suspicious of her? Worried she'd stumbled on something, perhaps the same secret Leah might have been about to share?

What they'd discovered about the viewpoint on the map lends weight to this idea – maybe someone in camp had become aware that Kier was watching them, was worried that she'd discovered exactly what they were hiding .

Her mind shifts to something bothering her ever since they'd first viewed the videos: the gaps in the footage.

Thinking it through again, she still believes their earlier theory holds: that the gaps might be a result of deleted footage that revealed something someone wanted hidden.

The only thing she's missing are the precise dates of that missing footage.

Elin knew roughly when the gaps started – in March 2020, about a month after the clips began – but nothing more. Worth noting, she thinks, as it might correlate with something else down the line.

Stretching across the table for the hard drive, she plugs it into her laptop and scrolls through the clips to where the gaps began. Elin records this first date and starts searching.

It's clear from the off that there's no real pattern to the gaps in either regularity or extent. Some are one day, others longer.

The last gap is one of the longest. Nearly a week.

Scribbling it down, Elin scrolls through the footage before and after the missing days, wondering if there's anything else that might give a clue as to what was happening during that time, but the clips show nothing but Kier in the van. Her usual routine.

Putting her pen down, she's about to close the laptop when a movement on the screen catches her eye.

Kier, coming into the van.

Elin immediately sits up a little straighter, noticing that Kier's not entering in her usual way – dropping her bag, kicking off her shoes – and as she steps inside, she abruptly turns, looking back through the door before coming to stand in the doorway itself.

Her face is mostly out of shot, but she's gesticulating.

Someone's stood outside the van. Kier's talking to someone.

Pulse picking up, Elin's about to wind it on to see if the other person comes inside, when she stops.

Another movement .

Not inside the van itself, but in the mirror on the wall opposite to the door.

She can see the back of Kier in the mirror and someone else too – arms wrapping tightly around her, pulling her into an embrace.

A face becomes visible, resting briefly on Kier's shoulder.

Elin zooms in, then zooms in again, her pulse ratcheting up another notch.

Ned.

Letting the footage run on, she keeps watching, but Ned and Kier soon move out of the camera's view, to the side of the van. She continues to scroll, hoping they might come inside, but the screen remains static, still.

Staring at the screen, Elin pulls in a deep breath, trying to process it: whoever deleted the footage had missed this, and after what she's just witnessed, it's likely that person was Ned.