The Hunting Party: Get ready for the most gripping, hotly-anticipated crime thriller of 2018

The first time he stayed at our house – Miranda, Samira and I all lived together in the second year – I bumped into him coming out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped around his waist. I was so conscious of trying to be normal, not to look at the bare expanse of his chest, at his broad, well-muscled shoulders gleaming wet from the shower, that I said, ‘Hi, Julien.’

He seemed to clutch the towel a little tighter around his waist. ‘Hello.’ He frowned. ‘Ah – this is a bit embarrassing. I’m afraid I don’t know your name.’

I saw my mistake. He had completely forgotten who I was, had probably forgotten ever having met me. ‘Oh,’ I said, putting out my hand, ‘I’m Katie.’

He didn’t take my hand, and I realised that this was another mistake – too formal, too weird. Then it occurred to me it might also have been that he was keeping the towel up with that hand, clutching a toothbrush with the other.

‘Sorry.’ He smiled then, his charming smile, and took pity on me. ‘So. What did you do, Katie?’

I stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’

He laughed. ‘Like the novel,’ he said. ‘What Katie Did. I always liked that book. Though I’m not sure boys are supposed to.’ For the second time he smiled that smile of his, and I suddenly thought I could see something of what Miranda saw in him.

This is the thing about people like Julien. In an American romcom someone as good-looking as him might be cast as a bastard, perhaps to be reformed, to repent of his sins later on. Miranda would be a bitchy Prom Queen, with a dark secret. The mousey nobody – me – would be the kind, clever, pitifully misunderstood character who would ultimately save the day. But real life isn’t like that. People like them don’t need to be unpleasant. Why would they make their lives difficult? They can afford to be their own spectacularly charming selves. And the ones like me, the mousey nobodies, we don’t always turn out to be the heroes of the tale. Sometimes we have our own dark secrets.

What little light there was has left the day now. You can hardly make out anything other than the black mass of trees on either side. The dark has the effect of making them look thicker, closer: almost as though they’re pressing in towards us. Other than the thrum of the Land Rover’s engine there is no noise at all; perhaps the trees muffle sound, too.

Up front, Miranda is asking the gamekeeper about access. This place is truly remote. ‘It’s an hour’s drive to the road,’ the gamekeeper tells us. ‘In good weather.’

‘An hour?’ Samira asks. She casts a nervous glance at Priya, who is staring out at the twilit landscape, the flicker of moonlight between the trees reflected in her big dark eyes.

I glance out through the back window. All I can see is a tunnel of trees, diminishing in the distance to a black point.

‘More than an hour,’ the gamekeeper says, ‘if the visibility is poor or the conditions are bad.’ Is he enjoying this?

It takes me an hour to get down to my mum’s in Surrey. That’s some sixty miles from London. It seems incredible that this place is even in the United Kingdom. I have always thought of this small island we call home as somewhat overcrowded. The way my stepdad likes to talk about immigrants, you’d think it was in very real danger of sinking beneath the weight of all the bodies squeezed onto it.

‘Sometimes,’ the gamekeeper says, ‘at this time of year, you can’t use the road at all. If there’s a dump of snow, say – it would have been in the email you got from Heather.’

Emma nods. ‘It was.’

‘What do you mean?’ Samira’s voice has an unmistakable shrillness now. ‘We won’t be able to leave?’

‘It’s possible,’ he says. ‘If we get enough snow the track becomes impassable – it’s too dangerous, even for snow tyres. We get at least a couple of weeks a year, in total, when Corrin is cut off from the rest of the world.’

‘That could be quite cosy,’ Emma says quickly, perhaps to fend off any more worried interjections from Samira. ‘Exciting. And I’ve ordered enough groceries in—’

‘And wine,’ Miranda supplies.

‘—and wine,’ Emma agrees, ‘to last us for a couple of weeks if we need it to. I probably went a bit overboard. I’ve planned a bit of a feast for New Year’s Eve.’

No one’s really listening to her. I think we’re all preoccupied by this new understanding of the place in which we’re going to spend the next few days. Because there is something unnerving about the isolation, knowing how far we are from everything.

‘What about the station?’ Miranda asks, with a sort of ‘gotcha!’ triumph. ‘Surely you could just get a train?’

The gamekeeper gives her a look. He is quite attractive, I realise. Or at least he would be, only there’s something haunted about his eyes. ‘Trains don’t run so well on a metre of snow, either,’ he says. ‘So they wouldn’t be stopping here.’

And, just like that, the landscape, for all its space, seems to shrink around us.

DOUG

If it weren’t for the guests, this place would be perfect. But he supposes he wouldn’t have a job without them.

It had been everything he could do, when he picked them up, not to sneer. They reek of money, this lot – like all those who come here. As they approached the Lodge, the shorter, dark-haired man – Jethro? Joshua? – had turned to him in a man-to-man way, holding up a shiny silver phone. ‘I’m searching for the Wi-Fi,’ he said, ‘but nothing is coming up. Obviously there’s no 3G: I get that. You can’t have 3G without a signal … Ha! But I would have thought I’d start picking up on the Wi-Fi. Or do you have to be closer to the Lodge?’

He told the man that they didn’t turn the Wi-Fi on unless someone asked for it specifically. ‘And you can sometimes catch a signal, but you have to climb up there’ – he pointed to the slope of the Munro – ‘in order to get it.’

The man’s face had fallen. He had looked for a moment almost frightened. His wife had said, swiftly, ‘I’m sure you can survive without Wi-Fi for a few days, darling.’ And she smothered any further protest with a kiss, her tongue darting out. Doug had looked away.

The same woman, Miranda – the beautiful one – had sat up in front with him in the Land Rover, her knee angled close to his own. She had laid an unnecessary hand on his arm as she climbed into the car. He caught a gust of her perfume every time she turned to speak to him, rich and smoky. He had almost forgotten that there are women like this in the world: complex, flirtatious, the sort who have to seduce everyone they meet. Dangerous, in a very particular way. Heather is so different. Does she even wear perfume? He can’t remember noticing it. Certainly not make-up. She has the sort of looks that work better without any adornment from cosmetics. He likes her face, heart-shaped, dark-eyed, the elegant parentheses of her eyebrows. Someone who hadn’t spent time with Heather might think that there was a simplicity to her, but he suspects otherwise; that with her it is very much a case of still waters running deep. He has a vague idea that she lived in Edinburgh before, that she had a proper career there. He has not tried to find out what her story is, though. It might mean revealing too much of his own.

Heather is a good person. He is not. Before he came here, he did a terrible thing. More than one thing, actually. A person like her should be protected from someone like him.

The guests are now in Heather’s charge, for the moment – and that’s a relief. It took no small effort to conceal his dislike of them. The dark-haired man – Julien, that was the name – is typical of the people that stay here. Moneyed, spoiled, wanting wilderness, but secretly expecting the luxury of the hotels they’re used to staying in. It always takes them a while to process what they have actually signed up for, the remoteness, the simplicity, the priceless beauty of the surroundings. Often they undergo a kind of conversion, they are seduced by this place – who wouldn’t be? But he knows they don’t understand it, not properly. They think that they’re roughing it, in their beautiful cabins with their four-poster beds and fireplaces and underfloor heating and the fucking sauna they can trot over to if they really want to exert themselves. And the ones he takes deer-stalking act as if they’ve suddenly become DiCaprio in The Revenant, battling with nature red in tooth and claw. They don’t realise how easy he has made it for them, doing all the difficult work himself: the observation of the herd’s activities, the careful tracking and plotting … so that all they have to do is squeeze the bloody trigger.

Even the shooting itself they rarely get right. If they shoot badly they could cause a wound that, if left, might cause the animal to suffer for days in unimaginable pain. A misfired headshot for example (they often aim for the head even though he tells them: never go for it, too easy to miss) could cleave away the animal’s jaw and leave it alive in deepest agony, unable to eat, slowly bleeding to death. So he is there to finish it off with an expert shot, clean through the sternum, allowing them to go home boasting of themselves as hunters, as heroes. The taking of a life. The baptism in blood. Something to post on Facebook or Instagram – images of themselves smeared in gore and grinning like lunatics.

He has taken lives, many of them in fact. And not just animal. He knows better than anyone that it is not something to boast about. It is a dark place from which you can never quite return. It does something to you, the first time. An essential change somewhere deep in the soul, the amputation of something important. The first time is the worst, but with each death the soul is wounded further. After a while there is nothing left but scar tissue.

He has been here for long enough to know all the different ‘types’ of guests, has become as much of an expert in them as he is in the wildlife. But he isn’t sure which variety he hates more. The ‘into the wild’ sort, the ones who think they have in a few short days of luxury become ‘at one’ with nature. Or the other kind, the ones who just don’t get it, who think they have been tricked … worse, robbed. They forget what it is they booked. They find problems with everything that deviates from the sort of places they are used to staying in, with their indoor swimming pools and Michelin-starred restaurants. Usually, in Doug’s opinion, they are the ones who have the most problems with themselves. Remove all of the distractions, and here, in the silence and solitude, the demons they have kept at bay catch up with them.

For Doug, it is different. His demons are always with him, wherever he is. At least here they have space to roam. This place attracted him for a rather different reason, he suspects, than it does the guests. They come for its beauty – he comes for its hostility, the sheer brutality of its weather. It is at its most uncompromising now, in the midst of its long winter. A few weeks ago, up on the Munro, he saw a fox slinking through the snow, the desiccated carcass of some small creature clamped in its jaws. Its fur was thin and scabrous, its ribs showing. When it spotted him it did not bolt immediately. There was a moment when it stared back at him, hostile, challenging him to try to take its feast. He felt a kinship with it, a stronger sense of identification than he has had with any human, at least for a long time. Surviving, existing – just. Not living. That is a word for those who seek entertainment, pleasure, comfort out of each day.

He was lucky to get this job, he knows that. Not just because it suits him, his frame of mind, his desire to be as far from the rest of humanity as possible. But also because it is very likely that no one else would have had him. Not with his past. The man sent to interview him by the boss had seen the line on his record, shrugged, and said, ‘Well, we definitely know you’ll be good for dealing with any poachers, then. Just try not to attack any of the guests.’ And then he had grinned, to show that he was joking. ‘I think you’ll be perfect for the job, actually.’

That had been it. He hadn’t even had to try to excuse or explain himself – though there was no excuse, not really. A moment of violent madness? Not really: he had known exactly what he was doing.

When he thinks about that night, now, hardly any of it seems real. It seems like something glimpsed on the TV, as though he were watching his own actions from a long way away. But he remembers the anger, the punch of it in his chest, and then the brief release. That stupid, grinning face. Then the sound of something shattering. Inside his own mind? The sense of feeling himself unshackled from the codes of normal behaviour and loosed into some animal space. The feel of his fingers, gripping tightly about yielding flesh. Tighter, tighter, as though the flesh was something he was trying to mould with sheer brute force into a new, more pleasing shape. The smile finally wiped away. Then that warped sense of satisfaction, lasting for several moments before the shame arrived.

Yes, it would have been difficult to get a job doing much of anything after that.

NOW

2nd January 2019

HEATHER

A body. I stare at Doug.

No, no. This isn’t right. Not here. This is my refuge, my escape. I can’t be expected to deal with this, I can’t, I just can’t … With an effort of will, I stopper the flood of thoughts. You can, Heather. Because, actually, you don’t have a choice.

Of course I had known it was a possibility. Very likely, even, considering the length of time missing – over twenty-four hours – and the conditions out there. They would be a challenge even to someone who knew the terrain, who had any sort of survival skills. The missing guest, as far as I know, had nothing of the sort. As the hours went by, with no sign, the probability became greater.

As soon as we knew of the disappearance we had called Mountain Rescue. The response hadn’t been quite what I’d hoped for.

‘At the moment,’ the operator told me, ‘it’s looking unlikely we can get to you at all.’

‘But there must be some way you can get here—’

‘Conditions are too difficult. We’ve haven’t seen anything like this amount of snow for a long time. It’s a one-in-a-thousand weather event. Visibility is so poor we can’t even land a chopper.’

‘Are you saying that we’re on our own?’ As I said it I felt the full meaning of it. No help. I felt my stomach turn over.

There was a long pause at the other end of the line. I could almost hear her thinking of the best way to respond to me. ‘Only as long as the snow continues like this,’ she said at last. ‘Soon as we have some visibility, we’ll try and get out to you.’

‘I need a bit more than “try”,’ I said.

‘I hear you madam, and we’ll get to you as soon as we are able. There are other people in the same situation: we have a whole team of climbers stuck on Ben Nevis, and another situation nearer Fort William. If you could just describe exactly your problem, madam, so I have all the details down.’

‘The guest was last seen at the Lodge, here,’ I said, ‘at … about four a.m. yesterday morning.’

‘And how big is the area?’

‘The estate?’ I groped for the figure learned in my first few weeks here. ‘A little over fifty thousand acres.’

I heard her intake of breath in my ear. Then there was another long pause on the end of the line, so long that I almost wondered if it had gone dead, whether the snow had cut off this last connection to the outside world.

‘Right,’ she said, finally. ‘Fifty thousand acres. Well. We’ll get someone out there as soon as we can.’ But her tone had changed: there was more uncertainty. I could hear a question as clearly as if she had spoken it aloud: Even if we get to you, how can we be certain of finding someone in all that wilderness?

For the past twenty-four hours we have searched as far as we can. It hasn’t been easy, with the snow coming down like this, relentlessly. I’ve only been here a year, so I’ve never actually experienced a snow-in. We must be one of the few places in the UK – bar a few barely inhabited islands – where inclement weather can completely prohibit the access of the emergency services. We always warn the guests that they might not be able to leave the estate if conditions are bad. It’s even in the waiver they have to sign. And yet it is still hard to process, the fact that no one can get in. Or out. But that’s exactly the situation we find ourselves in now. Everything is clogged with snow, meaning driving’s impossible – even with winter tyres, or chains – so our search has all been done on foot. It has just been Doug and me. I am beyond exhausted – both mentally and physically. We don’t even have Iain, who comes most days to perform odd jobs about the place. He’ll have been spending New Year’s Eve with his family: stuck outside with the rest of them, no use to us. The Mountain Rescue woman was at least some help with her advice. She suggested checking first the sites that could have been used for shelter. Doug and I searched every potential hideout on the estate, the cold stinging our faces and the snow hampering our progress at every turn, until I was so tired I felt drunk.

I trudged the whole way to the station, which took me a good three hours, and checked there. Apparently there had been some talk amongst the guests of getting a train back to London.

‘One of the guests has gone missing,’ I told the station master, Alec. He’s a hulk of a man with a saturnine face: low eyebrows. ‘We’re looking all over the estate.’ I gave him a description of the missing guest.

‘They couldn’t have got on a train?’ I knew it was ridiculous, but felt it had to be asked.

He laughed in my face. ‘A train? In this? Are you mad, lass? Even if it weren’t like this, there’s no trains on New Year’s Day.’

‘But perhaps you saw something—’

‘Haven’t seen anyone,’ he told me. ‘Not since I saw that lot arrive a couple a days ago. No. Woulda noticed if there were a stranger pokin’ about.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘perhaps I could have a look around?’

He spread his hands wide, a sarcastic invitation. ‘Be ma guest.’

There wasn’t much to search: the waiting room, a single caretaker’s closet that appeared at one point to have been a toilet. And the ticket office I could see into through the window: a small, paper-strewn cubicle from which, through the money and ticket gap, came the scent of something sweetish, slightly rotten. Three crushed cans of soda decorated one corner of the desk. I saw Iain in there once with Alec, having a smoke. Iain often takes the train to collect supplies; they must have struck up something of a friendship, even if only of convenience.

Just beyond the office was a door. I opened it to discover a flight of stairs. ‘That,’ Alec said, ‘leads up to ma flat. Ma private residence’ – with a little flourish on ‘residence’.

‘I don’t suppose—’ I began. He cut me off.

‘Two rooms,’ he said. ‘And a lavvy. Ah think Ah’d know if someone were hidin’ themselves away in there.’ His voice had got a little louder, and he’d moved between me and the doorway. He was too close; I could smell stale sweat.

‘Yes,’ I said, suddenly eager to leave. ‘Of course.’

As I began my tortuous journey back towards the Lodge I turned, once, and saw him standing there, watching me leave.

Doug and I found nothing, in all the hours of searching. Not a footprint, not a strand of hair. The only tracks we came across were the small sharp impressions left by the hooves of the deer herd. The guest, it seemed, had not been active since the snow started coming down.

There’s CCTV in one place on the estate: the front gate, where the long track from the Lodge heads towards the road. The boss had it put up to both deter and catch poachers. Sometimes, frustratingly, the feed cuts out. But the whole lot was there to watch this time: from the evening before – New Year’s Eve – to yesterday, New Year’s Day, when the guest was reported missing. I fast-forwarded through the grainy footage, looking for any sign of a vehicle. If the guest had somehow left by taxi – or even on foot – the evidence would be here. There was nothing. All it showed me was a documentation of the beginning of this heavy snowfall, as on the screen the track became obliterated by a sea of white.

Perhaps a body had begun to seem like a possibility. But the confirmation of that is something so much worse.

Doug pushes a hand through his hair, which has fallen, snow-wet, into his eyes. As he does, I see that his hand – his arm, the whole of him – is trembling. It is a strange thing to see a man as tough-looking as Doug, built like a rugby player, in such a state. He used to be in the Marines, so he must have seen his fair share of death. But then so did I, in my old line of work. I know that it never quite leaves you, the existential horror of it. Besides, being the one to find a dead person – that is something else completely.

‘I think you should come and take a look too,’ he says. ‘At the body.’

‘Do you think that’s necessary?’ I don’t want it to be necessary. I don’t want to see. I have come all this way to escape death. ‘Shouldn’t we just wait for the police to get here?’

‘No,’ he says, ‘They’re not going to be able to make it for a while, are they? And I think you need to see this now.’

‘Why?’ I ask. I can hear how it sounds: plaintive, squeamish.

‘Because,’ he draws a hand over his face; the gesture tugs his eye sockets down in a ghoulish mask. ‘Because … of the body. How it looks. I don’t think it was an accident.’

I feel my skin go cold in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with the weather.

When we step outside, the snow is still coming down so thickly that you can only see a few feet from the door. The loch is almost invisible. I have shrugged on the clothes that are my de facto outdoor uniform in this place: the big, down Michelin-man jacket, my hiking boots, my red hat. I tramp after Doug, trying to keep up with his long stride, which isn’t easy, because he’s well over six foot, and I’m only a whisker over five. At one point I stumble; Doug shoots out a big, gloved hand to catch my arm, and hefts me back onto my feet as easily as if I were a child. Even through the down of my sleeve I can feel the strength of his fingers, like iron bands.

I’m thinking of the guests, stuck in their cabins. The inactivity must be horrible, the waiting. We had to forbid them from joining us in the search, or risk having another missing person on our hands. No one should be out in these conditions. It is the sort of weather that people die in: ‘danger to life’, the warnings say. But the problem is that to most of the guests, a place like this is as alien as another planet. These are people who live charmed existences. Life has helped them to feel untouchable. They’re so used to having that invisible safety net around them in their normal lives – connectivity, rapid emergency services, health and safety guidelines – that they assume they carry it around with them everywhere. They sign the waiver happily, because they don’t really think about it. They don’t believe in it. They do not expect the worst to happen to them. If they really stopped to consider it, to understand it, they probably wouldn’t stay here at all. They’d be too scared. When you learn how isolated an environment this really is, you realise that only freaks would choose to live in a place like this. People running from something, or with nothing left to lose. People like me.

Now Doug is leading me around to the left shore of the loch, towards the trees.

‘Doug?’ I realise that I am whispering. It’s the silence here, made more profound by the snow. It makes your voice very loud. It makes you feel as though you are under observation. That just behind that thick wall of trees, perhaps, or this pervasive curtain of white, there might be someone listening. ‘What makes you think it wasn’t an accident?’

‘You’ll see when we get there,’ he says. He does not bother turning back to look at me, nor does he break his stride. And then he says, over his shoulder, ‘I don’t “think”, Heather. I know.’