“You can’t prove any of that!” Lorna said. “So his hand got loose? So what? There’s no sign that he was about to attack. Just your word for it. Fuck. Do you ever think at all? Someone’s been trying to prove we’re murderers, so what do you do? You murder someone!”
Lorna wrapped her arms tight around her chest, afraid she might fall apart. She needed to think, but she couldn’t. She needed to run away, but she couldn’t. She needed to cry, but she couldn’t. All she could do was stand there and try not to lose it until she could figure out what to do next, which she couldn’t do until she could think.
Oliver leaned on the bar, staring at the corkscrew. “Lorna’s right. Forget going to the police.”
“But it was self-defense.” The whine in Ellie’s voice made Lorna want to scream. Oliver did it for her.
“Shut up, Ellie! You stupid—Even if Lorna and I lied and said we saw everything you just described, and I mean everything, it’s too suspicious. And even if we untied him now and said he got completely free, they’d do all this forensic shit to prove he was tied up when he died. The long and the short of it is we tied a man to a chair and you stabbed him to death. And—here’s another even if—even if we could sell it, which is a fucking big if, they’d want to know more about what he was doing to us. Why we were so desperate to silence him. Too many questions I don’t want to answer. This isn’t like Callum. We can’t cover this one up.” Oliver paused and drummed his fingers on the bar. “I suppose, though, that there is an upside to all of this.”
“Please,” said Lorna. “Share with the class.”
“Ellie got info. Caskie really was our mystery benefactor. No more Caskie means no more someone trying to kill us. We can take our time figuring out what to—”
Maeve burst through the study door.
“Someone’s been living in the closed wing!” She saw Caskie’s body. “Shit!”
“You’re alive?” Oliver asked. Lorna couldn’t tell if he was pleased or disappointed. She felt nothing. She hadn’t expected Maeve to be dead, so to her, Maeve’s return felt expected. They were all together again, the way it should be, but Lorna felt nothing.
“Of course I’m—Who the fuck is that?”
“What do you mean, someone’s been living in the closed wing?” Lorna asked. The words tasted like cardboard against her tongue. “Where have you been?”
Maeve couldn’t draw her eyes away from the body. “There’s a passage down there, in the cellar. To the other wing. The door opens onto a ballroom, or what looks like one. There’s not much furniture, but the walls are covered in pictures. Of us. And a sleeping bag. Old clothes. Tins of food. It’s pretty creepy to be honest. Is that . . . is that Mr. Caskie? Is he dead?”
Oliver rubbed his hands together. “That’s it then. Further proof, if you needed it, Lorna. Caskie hid in the other wing, waiting for the right moment to pop out and surprise us. I bet there are other passages like the one Maeve found. Servant’s entrances. Old houses are full of shit like that.”
“If it was him living there, he wasn’t alone,” Maeve said.
“Give us a break, love! I thought even you could put two and two together and get four. Let us have a win.”
“Yeah, well, here’s some math for you, Oliver. If Mr. Caskie was the one living in that ballroom, then tell me what he needed a bra and a box of tampons for.”
Normally Lorna loved seeing Oliver taken down a few pegs, his confidence draining away, the slouch in his shoulders showing he was beaten. But she couldn’t muster any schadenfreude as her own world tilted beneath her feet. She gripped the bar counter to keep herself steady.
“You’re lying,” said Oliver.
“Go see for yourself.”
“Why would she lie?” Lorna asked.
Ellie laughed, and the others stared. It was high and nervous, like someone embarrassed at being scared. “How stupid are we?”
Lorna couldn’t tell if she was somehow referring to Maeve or to something else, but Ellie wasn’t looking at Maeve as she lowered herself to a barstool, holding a freshly filled glass with both hands.
“I can’t remember her name. What was her name?”
“Ellie?” Oliver asked.
“The pregnancy test wasn’t mine.”
Lorna didn’t understand what she was talking about, and neither, it appeared, did Oliver. But Maeve grimaced.
“And I know it wasn’t yours,” Ellie admitted, looking at Maeve. “You’ve waited two decades for me to say it, so there it is. It wasn’t yours. But I swear it wasn’t mine.”
“What pregnancy test?” Oliver asked.
“The box Lorna found in the bathroom bin,” Maeve said. “The night of the snowstorm.”
“We are such idiots,” Ellie said. “We forgot about her. I don’t remember her name. Can’t even picture her face. But I remember thinking she was too pretty for him. Sometimes I’d see her coming in and out of the house. Don’t you remember? Callum’s girlfriend.”
Lorna watched Oliver and Maeve’s reactions, wondered what her own face showed, while in her head she looked at Caskie’s body and did some math.
“Shit. I remember. I would hear them arguing,” Oliver said. “Even though they didn’t shout, the sound would travel across the hall into my room.”
“I did, too,” Lorna chimed in. “From my side of the wall.”
“Terrible insulation, Caldwell Street.” Ellie sipped her wine. “Maeve, don’t cry. We all forgot things about those days.”
Maeve wiped a sleeve across her eyes. “It’s not that I forgot. I really never knew.”
“So,” Oliver said, his brain ticking slower than the rest. “Callum had a girlfriend. She’s the one who used the pregnancy test and . . .” He looked at Caskie’s body. As Lorna had already done, he now did the math on Caskie’s age. “Fuck. Oh, fuck me!”
“We were wondering what Caskie’s motive was,” Ellie said.
“They . . .” Maeve stammered. “They have the same hair.”
Oliver kept cursing. “Some crazy bitch went to all this trouble because she thinks we killed Callum, and Ellie’s gone and gutted her son?” He threw a barstool across the room. No one flinched. “We’re so fucking dead!”
“Unless we get out of here,” Ellie said.
“You want to run?” Maeve asked.
“As fast as I can. We can figure out the rest later. But first we have to get out of this house. Get to the quay. Caskie said he left a boat there. Even if that was a lie and we have to wait a day for a ferry, we’ll have the water at our backs and a clear view of the land in front. She can’t sneak up on us. Out there in the open, four against one, those are chances I’d take. Oliver’s right. If we stay here another night, we’re dead. No matter who killed Callum, she’ll hold us all responsible for this. I checked him already, and he didn’t have the keys on him. Maeve, did you see a way out through the other wing?”
Maeve was chewing so hard on a hangnail, Lorna thought she might tear her whole thumb off. She took her finger from her mouth and wiped it on her jeans.