‘Hang on a second. Are you...’ said Mira. ‘Are you suggesting someone might have killed her? That Hannah wasmurdered?’
‘No... no, we can’t be sure that something... something like that happened to her,’ said Ben, stumbling over his words. ‘Obviously, the injury to her head, that must be how she died, but... did she have an accident out here, fall somehow? Hit her head on a rock as she landed?’ He choked out the last few words, then dissolved into quiet sobs.
Mira nodded. ‘Rainforests are dangerous places – just look at what happened to me earlier. Or you can trip over a vine that you never saw, or the base of a tree... especially off the main track like this.’ But even as she said it, she was frowning, as if trying to make sense of something that logically wouldn’t fit together.
‘That’s true,’ said Scott. ‘It could have been an accident, I guess. It’s just... see, how she’s got those leaves and twigs all over her? I don’t understand how she could have done that to herself.’
At that, Mira stumbled slightly; Naya moved to catch her before she could fall.Hold on, Mira.We don’t want to lose you too.
‘We need to get help – Mira can barely walk, and the police need to come out here and take Hannah away,’ said Scott. His face had crumpled around the edges, a pallor replacing his usual tan. ‘The staff – Paola and Luisa – do you think they might have called for help yet? We should have been back by now, maybe they’ve raised the alarm.’ He looked desperate as he said it, clinging to hope.
‘Yes, maybe they have,’ said Naya. She wanted to reassure him, even if she didn’t entirely believe it. ‘And if they haven’t yet, then they will do soon. They’ll come and find us themselves, or send a search party for us. Of course they will.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Ben dully. He’d stopped crying now, and his eyes were blank, vacant. ‘They might just think we spent longer at the waterfall or something. I can’t imagine they’re panicking yet.’
Scott buried his face in his hands. ‘Oh God, I feel sick.’ He took a long, shuddering breath. ‘We need to get going, then – back to our phones – to Paola... to Hannah’s house... fucking hell,Hannah.’ He broke off, made a gasping sound.
Naya forced herself to turn and look him square in the face; tears were pooling under his chin now, the grief etched into the lines of his cheeks; he looked heartbroken and he wasn’t trying to hide his pain.
She wanted to reach out to him, pull him towards her, for him to let her rock him and sway him in her arms like a child, like she did with her own children. She wanted to make the pain of the world go away. For him, for her. For both of them. But she couldn’t; she couldn’t do it for her children, as much as she wanted to, as much as she’d tried. She couldn’t change the world – she couldn’t make it better. And she couldn’t do it for Scott either.
She could hold him for hours, for days, and Hannah would still be dead, lying here, most likely murdered, left to rot in the wet heat of the jungle. Nothing would be different; the world would still be tilted on its axis for him. Just like it was for the rest of them.
Mira, still leaning on Naya, was shaking her head now, taking short, sharp breaths, but trying to speak. Her next words emerged in a stilted burst. ‘I still can’t understand how she could have got here so quickly. How this could have happened since this morning. It doesn’t make sense. The timing, I mean. Something is very wrong here, with all of this.’
Ben shook his head slowly. ‘I guess it’s not impossible,’ he said quietly. ‘She could have got a boat back right after she sent us the video, then if she came straight out into the jungle to look for us and then this happened to her...’ He turned to look at Hannah again, then covered his eyes with his hands.
Naya swallowed. She had to say something now, but how could she? A part of her wished she didn’t know what she knew, because of how much more impossible it made everything. Post-mortem care was something she had to do from time to time, in her role as a nurse. It was rare for her to have to deal with a body other than straight after death. But she knew that rigor mortis set in within a few hours of someone dying and lasted for several more, maybe even a full twenty-four hours.
Hannah’s body had already passed that point: based on Naya’s quick assessment of her body, her face – what she could see of it – her muscles were no longer stiff; they were becoming flaccid. Her facial muscles had begun to relax; her arms were loose; her fingers were unclenched.
And yes, while the searing temperature and the rainfall andthe humidity of the jungle could speed up the process, there was physically no way that Hannah could have died, her body gone into rigor mortis and then come out the other side in the few hours since they’d got those messages from her – it just wasn’t possible. Naya’s mind had been putting it together since the second they saw her body.
She looked at Ben, at all of them, and shook her head. ‘That’s the thing,’ she said. ‘To me, it looks—’
She couldn’t say it. Even if they’d worked it out themselves, saying it out loud would make it too real. And the truth was unbearable:
To me, it looks as if she’s been dead, and left here, for as long as twenty-four hours.
Because if that was true, it could mean only one thing: one inescapable, horrifying truth that Naya needed to face, that they would all need to.
It would mean that their time here so far had been built around a lie. A clever but terrible lie.
And it would mean that perhaps none of them were safe out here at all.
SCOTT
Oh my God, Hannah. Poor, poor Hannah.
Scott blinked, squeezed his eyes closed, trying to stem the flow. He shouldn’t have bothered; his tears wouldn’t be held back. His body seemed to keep moving of its own accord, bending at the middle until he was doubled over, head resting almost against his legs, arms wrapped around his stomach, sobbing, then lurching back upwards again to take great, gulping breaths. He felt small, about half of his usual size – hunched over, shrunk with heartbreak. He must look insane; he felt it, that was for sure.
But he didn’t care how he looked; he wasn’t the only one bowled over by the shock. For the past few moments, the sound of the group’s grief had been as loud as the calls and cries of the rainforest. They were all in the grip of this; he was not alone.
‘That’s the thing.’ Naya’s voice drifted to his ears, the fear in it making him turn away from Hannah’s body for a moment and look towards her. Flecks of dried mud were still splayed down the side of her face, her neck, her arms. Her hair had escaped its tie and tight curls were now flying in all directions,some framing her cheeks, some sticking upright. She would look ferocious – if it weren’t for the complicated mixture of terror and bafflement etched into her expression. ‘To me, it looks—’
Abruptly, she stopped talking. Scott’s eyes moved from Naya’s face back to Hannah’s body in an absurd, repetitive motion. He couldn’t place why, but he felt afraid of whatever had been on the tip of Naya’s tongue just then; he had a sense that whatever she was about to say would send him freefalling even further into the abyss he’d already tumbled into.
Come on, Naya, just say it.He needed to know; they all did.
