The Last Resort(53)

She glances at him, but he’s still looking straight ahead. There’s a small pulsing in his cheek. She’s seen it before, in some of her consultants. When everything’s about to hit the fan. When they’re trying to avoid the inevitable. ‘Scott?’

He keeps walking, practically dragging her along beside him. She’d always thought she was in decent shape for her age, but now she feels every one of her sixty-two years. Like one of those awful women she refuses to look at in the high street, gossipy and doddery and buying the latest cardigan from Per Una and thinking it makes them look young. Yes, she lied on her information form – but what difference was it going to make? Do they think for a minute that she’s too old to do something like this? She’s still running her business like a woman half her age, while most people she’s encountered along the way have burned out, or lost it all and thrown themselves off a tall building.

She sucks in a breath and tries to remember the mantra her long-term counsellor told her: Mind over matter, take the first choice – not the latter, too much sleep makes you fatter. She smiles to herself. It’s a stupid mantra. A parody of a mantra. But it still holds true. She can do this. She can take control. And that enforced sleep she had can only stand her in good stead to get through the rest of this horrendous day.

The rain comes then, the real rain. Not that pathetic hair-frizzing pretence at rain. This is hard rain, coming at them from all angles in their exposed position on the cliff. They’re drenched within seconds. There’s no point hurrying now. A bright flash of lightning shatters the sky, followed a few seconds later by a loud crack of thunder. It’s this they need to take shelter from. She’s always hated electrical storms. Always been secretly terrified of being burned from the inside out.

Scott speaks at last. ‘There,’ he says, pointing ahead. A cluster of rocks juts out from the side of the central hill of the island. She’d realised earlier, after the quick look at the map, that the whole thing is shaped like a figure eight. The airport at the bottom, the lighthouse at the top. The tiki hut bay at one side, the big house on the other. It would have been helpful if they’d been shown this map right at the start – but thinking back, none of them asked for a map; they just followed that first arrow, then things took their own course: stage-managed, no doubt, by their elusive ‘host’.

However, she knows the layout now, and she knows they are close.

They just need to get out of this storm.

‘There,’ he says again. ‘Do you see it?’

She’s struggling to see anything, now that the rain is hitting them in sheets. She puts a hand to her forehead, trying to shelter her eyes enough to see what he’s pointing at. Other than the rocks, there’s . . . then she sees it.

The overhanging rock is the entrance to a cave.

Scott takes a firmer grip on her arm and starts to run as best he can. She tries to follow, slipping and sliding on the wet path. Stumbling more than once as her leg gives way. But then somehow they’re there. He drags her under the overhanging rock and into the mouth of the cave, then he switches on the torch on his phone, directing it inside.

Sitting inside, wrapped in blankets, faces frozen in surprise, are Lucy, Amelia and James.





Amelia

Amelia jumps to her feet. ‘Oh, thank God! Are you OK? Where have you been? You’re drenched!’ She grabs her blanket from where it has dropped to the ground and rushes towards Brenda, draping it around her shoulders and ushering her into the dry warmth. Brenda is pale and shaking quite violently. Scott, apart from being soaked to the skin, seems to be OK. He lays his phone on the ground, leaving the torch on to give them some light.

James gets up and hands a blanket to Scott. ‘Jeez, you two don’t look like you’re having much fun.’ He gestures to a wooden crate just inside the mouth of the cave. ‘We haven’t got a lot to offer, but we seem to have unlimited blankets.’

Scott starts laughing. He can’t stop. James joins in, but Amelia can’t bring herself to, not with Brenda looking like this. She picks up another blanket and uses it to try and get the worst of the rain off, drying her hair, dabbing her face. Brenda lets her, almost childlike in her demeanour now. She looks older too – with the rain having washed off her make-up, it’s clear to Amelia that she is a lot older than they thought.

It’s also clear that there is something very wrong with her.

‘Brenda? Are you OK? Talk to me. Are you in pain?’ She turns round to the others. Lucy is still sitting on the floor, red-faced from crying and apparently in a bit of a trance. She hasn’t reacted at all to Brenda and Scott’s arrival. Amelia has seen this before, when people have fallen into a semi-catatonic state from shock. Clearly Lucy’s video-memory and her subsequent recall of the story to her and James has pushed her somewhere deep inside herself. She’d blurted the story out in a wash of tears the minute they’d entered the cave. All she and James could do was sit there in shock, while trying to comfort her – and she still needs comforting. But for now, Amelia knows she has to focus on Brenda, whose needs are more physical.

‘Can’t really feel it now,’ Brenda says. ‘Red and white and yellow and pink.’ She giggles. Then her legs seem to collapse from under her. Amelia makes a grab for her, but she’s a dead weight. ‘James—’

James is there in a flash, grabbing Brenda under the armpits, half dragging, half walking her over towards Lucy, to the area where they’ve kept themselves warm wrapped in the blankets. As he lays her on the floor, her shorts ride up her legs and she starts to scream.