Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone

CHAPTER 33

Gavin took us up to the top of the chairlift, high on the ridge. A giant, hulking column raised thick black wires into the sky, dotted with three-seater benches hanging underneath, which dropped away from my window into the churning clouds. Out Andy’s side of the vehicle, the wires fed uphill into a corrugated metal shed. Gavin stopped to allow Juliette to jump out and check inside, thinking perhaps Lucy had stumbled into it for shelter, but she came back quickly, shaking her head.

Gavin set off again, following the path of the wires down the hill. I thought it was a good idea; the pillars of the lift stood out among the maelstrom as looming shadows and, if I were stuck out there, I would have followed them too. That was, of course, assuming Lucy was trying to get anywhere. The chairs swung above us in the wind, turning almost ninety degrees. I was glad I wasn’t on one. Gavin slalomed around the pillars as he came to them, crunching the gearstick with a gusto that could have given him tennis elbow. In the back, we iced our brows against the glass, pitching forward with the steepness of the slope and squinting into the whiteout. But no Lucy.

As the ground levelled out, we passed another tin shed fed by the descending wire. Juliette ran out again and returned just as quickly. Our thin ration of hope was siphoning out. The further we went, the less likely it was that she’d have made it this far.

A few more minutes and a collection of buildings came into view; we’d made it to the resort.

‘Damn it,’ Andy muttered, jabbing at his phone. ‘Piece of junk.’

‘Reception any better here?’ I asked.

‘Nah, battery’s had it. You?’

‘Phone took a dive in the lake, remember.’

SuperShred Resort looked more like a military base than a holiday retreat, populated by giant square sheds that, I assumed, consisted of dorms a tenth the price of Sky Lodge’s chalets and, as a consequence, had ten times the occupancy. It was deserted, with the creepy air of an abandoned amusement park. (I guessed people were huddled inside; the weather was grim but not apocalyptic, so unless they had corpses of their own to deal with there’d be no reason to leave.) I could almost feel the ghosts of activity in the flutter of the fluoro triangular flags set out to guide crowds, the well-trampled thoroughfare that, even with a heavy dumping of fresh snow, was packed down underfoot. The signs heralding HIRE or FOOD seemed rueful in the emptiness, a promise of a different place. We glided through it on our rumbling beast the way you would dive through a shipwreck. It was quiet, eerie: alive and dead at the same time.

It was the opposite of Sky Lodge, designed to excite instead of rejuvenate, with the money scrounged on sleeping arrangements poured into lift tickets and gear hire. Shared bathrooms and tinea were part of the package, and I’m sure they would have gotten away with removing the beds entirely if people didn’t need somewhere to put themselves between 3 am when the bar closed and 6 am when the lifts opened.

Gavin brought us to a stop next to a gigantic map, where underneath a layer of ice I could see lines of varied colours tracing their way down the mountain. The right side of the map was all iced, except for a series of glowing red lights that I knew were next to the names of the chairlifts. It meant all lifts closed.

‘Sorry, folks.’ He swivelled in his chair like a bus driver. ‘I’ll take you back around, but why don’t you grab a warm drink first? Jules and I have some business to discuss.’ He swung open his door.

‘Really, Gav?’ Juliette stayed put.

‘If she’s here, she’ll be inside,’ Gavin said. ‘Your mate can check the room list, too, though everyone’s accounted for.’

‘It might be useful,’ I wondered aloud. ‘I might recognise a name you’ve missed.’

‘I’ll take a coffee. Irish, if it’s going. And a phone charger.’ Andy lifted himself off the steel bench, standing hunched in the back and rubbing his hands over his backside. ‘If I don’t get a break, I’m a shoe-in for haemorrhoids.’ He caught Juliette’s impatient scowl. ‘What? She could have made it up here.’

He pushed open the back door and jumped into the snow with a crunch. I followed, figuring that he had a point: even if Lucy was unlikely to be here, we may as well ask a few questions. Someone might know who Green Boots was. Not to mention, Marcelo had been up here the night before this all started. Juliette, resigned to our visit, hopped out and followed Gavin to the largest shed, which looked like an aircraft hangar.

The storm wasn’t any lighter on this side of the mountain. I could hear the wires of the chairlifts creaking under the battering wind. Cars turned into huge white termite mounds lined the road. Skis and boards were stabbed into snowdrifts, I assumed once neatly, but now splayed or knocked over like bad teeth. Gloves had been slotted on top of ski poles, evidence that many who had retreated indoors were hopeful of getting back on the slopes quickly, but they were now frozen through. It was like an avalanche-struck version of Chernobyl.

‘This is some seriously creepy shit.’ Andy spoke low beside me as we approached the building, a throbbing orange glow in one of the windows the only sign of life. My cheeks were so cold they tingled with his hot breath. ‘It’s like a ghost ship. Is anybody even at this resort?’

As Gavin led us closer, I thought I heard, from deep inside, the blaring klaxon of an air-raid siren or a fire alarm, as well as a series of distant thuds, loud enough to make the ground vibrate underfoot. Unease festered in my stomach. I started to dissect things. Gavin had certainly seemed more concerned with getting us, or at least Juliette, up here than finding Lucy. And, while Lucy was missing and we were worried, she wasn’t dead. In books like this, you should never believe someone is dead until you’ve actually seen a body. They tend to show up. We’ve all read And Then There Were None.

On the other hand, suspicious as I was of Gavin, it’s simply unfair to introduce the killer this far past the mid-point. Knox would have me drawn and quartered – that’s his first rule. And, reader, your ‘percentage read’ should tell you there is just too much to go.

Regardless, there should have been hundreds of people around: it was peak season and this was a resort for hardcore thrill-seekers, unlikely to be scared off by some wind and ice. Where were they?

My question was answered when Gavin opened the door.

The roar of the storm was nothing compared to the roar that greeted us as we stepped over the threshold. Electronic music was blaring, flashing colours assaulted my eyes, and the bass rumbled the walls in deep, repetitive thuds. Rotating spotlights illuminated writhing bodies, glowsticks hanging off their necks and wrists. A man on a platform surrounded by green lasers bounced one arm in the air. Chairs and tables were pushed alongside the walls, cleared from the dining hall to make way for the dance floor. We’d walked straight into the middle of a rave.

Gavin plucked his way through the crowd and we tried to stay as close as we could. It was hot, hotter than I’d felt in days, the air laden with sweat. People feasted on each other’s faces. Andy was in awe, transfixed by flesh and fantasy. People wore ski-goggles with underwear, boardshorts with snow jackets, towels as capes, helmets, gloves and t-shirts tied around heads. One woman wore a Hawaiian lei, a balaclava, a bikini and a huge multicoloured sombrero. My oven mitt fit right in.

I was nearly decapitated by a line of shirtless men drinking from a horizontal ski, six shot glasses screwed into the wood. The crowd was thickest by the bar, where the menu had prices hastily crossed out and rewritten, enormously inflated, in thick black texta alongside a large CASH ONLY sign. Gavin reached another door and held it open for us. We filtered into the corridor. I had to yank Andy the last few steps.

‘Jesus Christ, Gav,’ Juliette gasped, leaning with relief against the wall. The floor still shook with the bass, but at least the air was breathable. ‘That’s out of control.’

‘That was insane!’ Andy’s eyes lit up with repressed youth. ‘We picked the wrong resort!’ I thought it was a pity Katherine wasn’t here to react to that.

‘It started small. Some guy said he’d brought his DJ kit and asked if he could set it up – we’ve had bands and stuff before, so I said sure. I thought it would be a bit of fun while the storm passed. But as the weather got wilder outside, it got wilder inside, and it’s turned into a bit of a bender.’ He shrugged. ‘Everyone’s having fun. No harm in it.’

‘We can’t even get help to Sky Lodge,’ Juliette cautioned. ‘If something goes wrong, who will come to help you?’

‘You’ve got two dead and one missing, and how many parties did you throw?’ Gavin shot back as he guided us further down the corridor. ‘Look, I can’t shut it down. It’s too far gone. I cut the power and they’ll have a sing-a-long. I cut off the bar and then I’m going to get my fridges smashed and ransacked. Once the storm passes and they can get back out there, they’ll filter out on their own. I’ve just got to let them wear themselves out.’ He chuckled. ‘Gosh, I do feel sorry for the old couple though. Bet they wish they’d booked over the ridge.’

‘I bet the mark-up on the bar doesn’t hurt your end.’

‘You wouldn’t have me starve?’ He smiled.

We threaded our way through the bowels of the hotel. As predicted, it was the polar opposite of Sky Lodge: closer to a university dormitory than a hotel, with breakout spaces such as communal kitchens instead of libraries, and flat-screen TVs in place of log fires. Stainless steel was abundant. Gavin’s office was not that much more sophisticated: he had a pool table with a scar ripped through the felt and bottle rings on the oak perimeter, a standing desk adorned with a much more expensive computer than Juliette’s and two monitors, and a corkboard with an A3 map of the whole mountain, Sky Lodge included, and various weather and satellite images. Gavin walked around his desk to what I at first thought was a small black safe, but instead turned out to be a fridge. He plucked out a few Corona beers, hanging them between his fingers, and offered them as if he were Edward Scissorhands. Andy grabbed one quickly, but I shook my head.

‘We’re in a hurry, Gavin.’ Juliette waved a bottle away. Andy, on realising we’d both declined, held his bottle awkwardly, figuring it too treacherous to drink.

Gavin held out surrendering hands. ‘I know, I know.’ He tapped a few keys on his computer and the monitor came to life. The screen had a thick coating of dust over it. He clicked a few things and gestured to Andy and me to look. He’d brought up an Excel spreadsheet. For a second I thought Aunt Katherine had invited him to the reunion, but I’ll chalk that up to PTSD: Post Traumatic Spreadsheet Disorder. ‘There’s the room list,’ he said to me. ‘You’ve got internet too. Five minutes?’ This last part was appealed back to Juliette; he wanted her attention. He was offering Andy and me his computer to occupy us the same way you’d give a videogame to a child. ‘It’s worth your time.’

‘I already told you. It’s not about the money.’ Juliette marched to the door, held it open. ‘Let’s talk out here.’

Gavin’s grin exploded. Andy surrendered and took a guilty sip of his beer.

I turned to the computer screen. The Excel spreadsheet was, in contrast to the rest of SuperShred, quite organised. There was one tab labelled Room List and another labelled Room Check. I was keen to read through it, but the ability to use the internet indoors for once was too tempting, so I opened a browser.

If Ronald Knox had been born one hundred years later, I’m sure his eleventh commandment would have forbade any Google searching. But what can I say: he’s long dead and I was trying not to join him. The more information I had the better.

I understand googling news articles is not quite the high drama one reads books for. I’ll save you the scene of me clicking and scrolling as I googled ‘the Black Tongue’ and ‘the Black Tongue victims’, and I hate it when news articles are reprinted verbatim in books. And, look, it’s the twenty-first century and I hadn’t had internet for two days, so forgive a bit of extra surfing. Here is what I learned:

I confirmed what I knew second-hand from Lucy and Sofia. Ash; suffocation; ancient Persian torture. As Lucy had said, the information was readily available. Anyone could have copied it.

In fact, when I typed ‘the Bl . . .’, Google autofilled ‘the Black Tongue’ from its own history. Gavin had been searching too, so word had spread a little further than I’d thought.

The reported murders were actually very spread out, with the first occurring three years ago (after Alan’s death), and the second eighteen months later.

Andy asked me to take a quick look at cryptocurrency values.

The first victims, Mark and Janine Williams, were from Brisbane. Mark was sixty-seven and Janine was seventy-one. They had been retired after having run a fish and chip shop in Brisbane for thirty years. The article took the ‘Life’s unfair’ angle, describing them as pillars of the community – volunteers, board members, fostering countless children because they were unable to have their own – which made their deaths all the more depressing. One article included a photo of their funeral, queues out the door. They’d been much loved. Not really A-grade gang member material, is my point. Sofia’s description of their deaths was accurate: they’d been zip-tied to the steering wheel of their car in their own garage, with ash circulated by the killer standing over the sunroof with a leaf-blower.

The second victim, Alison Humphreys, was found still alive in her Sydney apartment, in a bathroom with the window taped shut, ash poured through the ceiling fan. She’d died after five days in the hospital where Sofia worked (I noted this matched her information from the maintenance shed), when the decision had been made to turn off Alison’s life support systems. People had linked her death to Mark and Janine’s, and suddenly the task of naming a serial killer had fallen on a sub-editor, and the Black Tongue was born.

I checked my Facebook quickly.

According to Alison’s LinkedIn (there is nothing sadder than a posthumous LinkedIn account: employed 2010 – present), she was a former detective turned ‘consultant’. On what she had been consulting was unclear.

The listing price of Sky Lodge (I’d remembered the name of the real estate company I’d seen on the contracts) was by enquiry only. TripAdvisor gave the resort a 3.4, which I thought, corpses excepted, was a bit harsh.

I opened Lucy’s Instagram account, figuring if she’d gotten all the way up to the roof last night, the temptation of phone reception and social media would have been too high for her to resist. Sure enough, there was a new post: a screenshot of a deposit to her bank account, a few thousand and change, with the rest of the identifying details blurred out. The caption read: It’s hard work but it’s worth it in the end – contact me if you want to learn about financial independence. Swipe to see what this amazing company has provided for me #dailygrind #earningandlearning #corporateretreat #bossbabe. Swiping showed a second photo – a gorgeous mountain vista, taken from the rooftop – and a third – a photo of everyone (except me, running late) around the lunch table from the first day. I didn’t even have it in me to mock how she was pretending our reunion was a company retreat (#fakeittillyoumakeit would have been a better hashtag); I was too disappointed by the bright, sunny sky above the rocky peak. The photos had been posted the afternoon before the storm. It gave me no new information.

I opened the Sky Lodge homepage on the second monitor and clicked on the snow cam. It was almost a complete whiteout, but Juliette and Gavin returned, so I returned my attention to the room spreadsheets. Looking through the names of the guests was as fruitless as I’d expected. They were all generic names that blurred together and, even if there was something to jump out, the odds of me simply scrolling past it were high. I searched, on a whim, for Williams and Humphreys, Holton and Clarke. Nothing. My only real thought was that were too many people named Dylan. Snowboarders. Eventually I swapped to the Room Check tab. There was a column for room numbers, a column for the number of beds booked, and a column titled ‘Accounted For’ filled with a corresponding Y/N, seemingly in an attempt to verify who was present and identify any potentially missing person. I scanned the columns. They were all Y, everyone ticked off.

Juliette busied herself looking at the map of the mountain on the corkboard, but I could tell she was impatient, anxious to leave. Lucy was still missing, after all. ‘Anything?’ she said eventually, deciding I’d had enough time. She leaned over my shoulder. ‘I had a friend in one of those schemes.’ I realised she was looking at Lucy’s Instagram account on the other monitor; I’d left it showing the screenshot of her bank account. ‘It’s all fake. They encourage people to photoshop these and post them so they look like they’re making money. Even if the money’s real, it never shows you how much they spend to get it. It’s almost all their own coin, just coming back to them at a loss.’

Erin had said that Michael shared Lucy’s financial problems with her, that it was part of what had brought them closer. Then again, he’d summoned $267,000 from somewhere. Maybe they were both keeping their debts secret from each other.

I had one final scroll through the room list, hoping I’d land on something that would set off a spark. Dylans abounded. I reminded myself again that this was the party resort, the opposite to Sky Lodge. It was futile hunting for anyone associated with an historic crime from thirty-five years ago: no one over forty would dare set foot in this resort. It would be like taking a retirement cruise to Cancun.

Except . . .

‘Gavin.’ Now I was hurriedly scrolling through the room spreadsheet. ‘You said there was an older couple here?’

‘Yeah. They’ve holed up in their room. I think they booked the wrong resort, because, honestly, we get all sorts, but they’re not really our clientele. We’ve been doing them room service, which we don’t usually do, because I feel a bit bad, you know?’

‘And I’ll bet they tip,’ said Juliette.

‘Like I said, not really our clientele.’

‘Room 1214?’ I asked, already striding out of the office. ‘Can you show me?’

‘Yeah, that’s right actually,’ Gavin puffed, catching up both physically and mentally. Juliette and Andy followed. ‘Do you know them or something?’

I doubted the name on the spreadsheet meant anything to any of them. Twelve hours ago, it would have meant nothing to me too. But there are no coincidences, and it was written in the spreadsheet, plain as day.

We arrived at the door. To think, a spreadsheet had started this whole thing and now one was about to crack it wide open.

Room 1214, McAuley.

‘Not yet,’ I said, knocking.

CHAPTER 34

Edgar and Siobhan McAuley were all too eager to invite me in when I introduced myself as a Cunningham. They were older than my mother but appeared more sprightly. Edgar had a bulbous whiskey drinker’s nose and was wearing a lime-green polo shirt tucked into belted brown slacks. Siobhan was short, with a gleaming silver pixie cut and thin arms that reminded me of the frost-stripped tree branches on my drive up. She was wrapped in a Burberry scarf. Not Gavin’s usual clientele indeed.

The room was narrow: one set of bunk beds on the left and a clothes rack (there was no room for a wardrobe) on the right, next to a lone chair, no desk. A suitcase, placed on top of a stack of books between the chair and the lower bunk bed acted as a table, playing cards scattered on it. Nearer the entrance, there was a closet-sized bathroom. This resort had been built like a cruise ship: maximum occupancy in minimal space. The room smelled like everything else here: wet and damp. No ash in the air, as far as I could tell.

They fussed over us as we got settled, Edgar chattering about the storm, Siobhan clattering around with an electric kettle, apologising that they only had two cups and so one of us would have to go without. Andy, who still had his beer bottle hanging from his fingertips, had raised it slightly to decline her offer. Juliette, Andy and I took an awkward seat on the sagging bottom bunk, our knees near our chests. Gavin stood in the doorway.

Edgar took the solitary chair and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. ‘We weren’t sure we’d see anyone, with the storm and everything, so I can’t tell you how thankful we are that you made it up here.’ His accent seemed like it was British trying to chase away Australian. Upper class, but trained to be so. ‘We hadn’t heard from Michael – we thought you might be as stuck as we were, so we’ve just been waiting. Not our usual accommodation, obviously, but it’s been a thrill, actually. Isn’t that right, sweetie?’ he called.

‘Oh yes, love.’ She poked her head out of the bathroom, glasses fogged with steam from the kettle. ‘Sky Lodge’s main house was booked out, and I’m getting on a bit to trudge through the snow from those lovely chalets. Michael thought it would be better if we stayed over here anyway, though it’s been a while since I slept in a bunk bed. But why not? I suppose with what we’re doing and everything, that makes it feel like more of an adventure.’

I was thrown by the fact they were expecting Michael, and even more so by their attitude. I was expecting hostility, or even fear, but not . . . excitement? No one else in this room knew who the McAuleys were, so it was up to me to keep the conversation going, but I didn’t know how. I could hardly come out with the fact the body of their long-dead daughter was just over the ridge.

‘Well’—Edgar did it for me—‘did you find her?’

That was enough for me to form a pretty good idea of what was going on. I thought I’d try to play along as best I could and see if my guesswork was correct. ‘Yes, we found her,’ I said, ignoring Andy’s bulging eyes beside me. I could tell what he was thinking: Who was she? ‘There have been some complications, though.’

‘He wants more money again,’ Siobhan announced, emerging from the bathroom with two cups of scalding tea. But she didn’t seem put off or offended at all, calmly handing us the mugs. ‘It’s okay, love, we thought Michael might. We brought extra.’ She nudged their makeshift table-suitcase.

‘Can you just . . .’ I hesitated, not sure what to tell them. They seemed to not know Michael was dead. In fact, they thought I was here on his behalf. Then again, it could have been an act, in which case it would serve me better to keep some cards close to my chest and try to catch them in a lie. ‘Would you mind just helping me out with a few of the details first?’ They looked confused at that, so I hurried an explanation, making my smile as relaxed and welcoming as I could, laughing it off. ‘It’s just . . . family, you know? My brother gets me into stuff. Sends me up here without telling me much. I’m just trying to see that the price is fair. Not’—I waved my hand towards the suitcase, hoping to make them feel comfortable that I wasn’t extorting them—‘from you. Just family stuff, you know?’ They still didn’t look convinced, swapping side eyes at each other, so I threw in, ‘Like I said, we have found her.’

That seemed to be a carrot well enough dangled, because Edgar said, ‘What do you want to know?’

I gambled. ‘How much have you given him so far?’

‘Half,’ said Edgar.

I wanted to start with questions I thought I’d already guessed the answers to. Michael had clearly been the middleman between the McAuleys and Alan Holton – I’d figured that much out. It would have been the McAuleys’ money in the bag, which was the reason no one – Lucy, Marcelo, the cops – had noticed it missing from Michael’s accounts. I also suspected Michael was selling the McAuleys something he didn’t have: he was going to use their down payment to pay Alan, get what he needed to sell on, and then collect the second half as his profit. But he’d gone to jail after the buy, and so hadn’t been able to complete the deal until now. That was why he’d brought the bodies up the mountain. It was a trade.

There were still questions. I’d assumed Alan had been selling my father’s final message, some incriminating evidence of Rebecca’s kidnap and murder that Dad had died trying to pass to his handler, Alison Humphreys. It made sense that the McAuleys would want that, and would pay handsomely for it, but my father’s message couldn’t be the location of Rebecca’s body, as my father had died before she’d been buried.

‘Well, there’s four hundred in there,’ Siobhan said unprompted, pointing to the suitcase and removing the need for me to ask for specifics. She gave Edgar an apologetic grimace, clearly not great at negotiating, and too impatient to hear about their daughter. ‘We added a hundred. For the photos.’

The amounts added up. If the three hundred in the suitcase was the second half of the payment, it matched what I’d expected Alan’s price would have been: the original ransom amount of $300,000. But my thoughts ran on with more questions: if Michael had gotten the money from the McAuleys, why had he been short? If they were able to offer an extra hundred grand for the photos, they’d have no incentive to stiff . . . Hang on . . . what photos?

‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘What photos?’

Siobhan stuttered. ‘Michael said—’

‘I’m sorry.’ Edgar leaned forward and dragged the suitcase towards him, the playing cards cascading off it. He kept one hand on it protectively, but I could see in his eyes a sliver of fear. He knew that if we wanted to take it, we would. And his wife had just told us how much was in it. They weren’t used to dealing with criminals. Or Cunninghams. ‘Who did you say you were again?’

Siobhan straightened her back, to prove she wasn’t intimidated. ‘Who are these people with you? And where’s Michael?’

‘Michael’s dead.’

That shocked them into silence.

‘But he did find your daughter’s body. I’ll tell you where she is.’

‘Oh, thank God.’ Siobhan’s relief was so physical that she gripped the side of the clothes rack to steady herself. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to . . .’

‘It’s fine. You can even keep the money’—I felt Andy nudge me as I said this: Are you sure, man?—‘but Michael’s dead because of what he found. Whatever he dug up . . . someone else is trying to bury it. What you can do for me is help me fill in the blanks. Because whoever knows too much about your daughter seems to be in danger, and that includes me and my family. And now you, I suppose.’

‘Tell us how we can help,’ Edgar said. Siobhan nodded behind him. I could tell she didn’t care about the risk, she just wanted to know about her daughter.

I desperately wanted to ask about the photographs, but knew I should start at the most logical place. ‘How did you meet Michael?’

‘He came to us, actually,’ Edgar said. ‘He had some big story he was spinning and, honestly, it was nothing we hadn’t seen before. For years we tried some private investigators, a few different ones with varying levels of legality, but they all got the same results: useless. We tried offering rewards, too, and, believe me, our phone rang then, so we know a con when we see one.’

‘But we haven’t done that for twenty-eight years,’ Siobhan added. It struck me as a very specific number. ‘Now it’s mostly people who want to make a movie, or a podcast, or write a book.’

Edgar took over from his wife. ‘Michael was different, though. We knew that immediately. He told us some things about a policeman who worked on the original money drop, the one that went wrong. A guy named Alan Holton. Your brother said he knew where Rebecca was buried, and not only that, he had proof of who killed her.’

‘Photographs,’ I whispered, half to myself. Marcelo had thought my father had witnessed a murder, but, I realised now, he’d also recorded it. No wonder someone wanted the photos covered up.

‘Of the murder. That’s what he told us, anyway. He was supposed to bring them. Have you seen them?’

‘Go back a bit. Alan Holton worked on your daughter’s kidnapping?’

Siobhan nodded. ‘There were around fifty police officers. Plus the detective. I don’t mean to be condescending, but this wasn’t just any kidnapping.’

I knew what she meant by that. Rich kids make the news.

‘Did Michael show you the photos?’ Edgar repeated himself, annoyed that I’d skipped his question the first time.

‘No. I haven’t seen them. But I think Michael has them, or had them, I guess. He was a careful man, my brother. He’ll have put them somewhere safe – I just don’t know where that is yet.’ I turned back to Siobhan. ‘Why now? You’re willing to lay out seven hundred thousand dollars for this, so why not just pay the three hundred at the time? She might still be alive.’

‘He doesn’t mean to be brash – we’re short on time,’ Juliette chipped in apologetically.

‘It’s all right,’ Edgar said over his wife, frowning. ‘Time helps you value things differently. It’s easy to see now that we made a mistake. Back then, we trusted the detective when she said that withholding payment was the right thing to do. And we – well, it seemed like a lot of money at the time. The thing is, we could have paid it. Should have paid it. We’d pay anything now.’

‘The detective, this was Alison Humphreys?’

Edgar and Siobhan both nodded. Andy tried to take a subtle sip of his beer, but missed his mouth and dribbled it down his front. He glowed red with embarrassment.

‘Why didn’t Alan just sell you the information directly?’

‘We didn’t know Michael had anything to do with Alan. He just told us Alan had screwed it up from the inside. We were buying what Michael knew.’

‘We didn’t pay him to kill Alan, if that’s what you mean,’ Siobhan cut in. ‘We read about that in the news. We’re not like that.’

‘We guessed they were partners or something,’ Edgar explained. ‘Alan knew we were vulnerable, and he gave Michael enough information about our daughter to appeal to our sentimentality, which worked. But they had a falling out over the money, as people tend to do. We figured our investment was probably down the drain.’ The word ‘investment’ was a strange choice, but then so was a green polo shirt at the snow, so I thought it fit Edgar well enough.

‘Until Michael wrote to us from prison,’ Siobhan said. ‘He said he had the photographs and, by the time he got up here, he’d have the body too. And so we’re here.’

‘Honouring our end,’ Edgar said, the gravitas in his voice making it clear that he wanted me to respect this.

Credit to Michael; it seemed like pretty easy money. The only problem was, he had showed up to meet Alan thirty-three thousand dollars light. He’d told me it was the reason that Alan pulled a gun. I thought I might just understand that part, and it didn’t involve the McAuleys. I tucked the thought away to examine later and turned my mind to the other players.

Detective Humphreys, for her part, had led an operation that had resulted in Rebecca’s death, a high-profile case. She must have been clutching at straws to keep her job, that’s why she’d pushed Robert Cunningham so hard, reneging on the original deal and asking, as Marcelo put it, two more questions for every answer. Alison was desperate to find out which officer had been double-crossing her team. The answer was Alan Holton and his partner Brian Clarke. My father had found that out the hard way. Maybe Alison had opened up the cold case, eighteen months ago. Maybe that was why she’d been attacked?

There were still gaps in my narrative – Alan and Brian were dead, so they couldn’t be killing anyone over the photographs – but something was emerging, like a chairlift pillar through the fog.

‘Michael was the second death at Sky Lodge,’ I said, returning from my thoughts to see Edgar and Siobhan gazing expectantly at me. ‘Maybe, if they’re linked, you’ll recognise the first victim too. Perhaps someone else who helped with the kidnapping negotiations. Juliette, would you mind showing them the photo?’

‘I don’t have the photo,’ Juliette apologised. ‘I haven’t even seen it – after I checked everyone off my guest list, there wasn’t any need, as none of our staff or guests were missing. Crawford was only showing select guests who’d cause the least panic. I was not on that list, apparently.’

I turned back to the McAuleys. ‘Did you have anyone up here with you? Friends? Hired security?’

‘Just us,’ Edgar said.

‘That’s enough. Where’s our daughter?’ Siobhan finally let it all out in a wail, unable to wait any longer for me to answer. ‘Take it. Take it!’ She thrust the suitcase at me, but I pushed it back a little too hard and she stumbled backwards. She didn’t fall (the room was too small for that), but she bounced lightly off the wall and then cradled the case to her chest, deflated. ‘That’s all we know, we swear. We just want to put her to rest. Even if we never find who did this to her, we just want to bury her. Please.’

‘She was buried in a policeman’s coffin – that’s how they hid her. They must have paid off the coroner.’ I knew this was hard for them to hear, so I let them have a moment to digest it, and for me to build up the courage to tell them the bad news. ‘Unfortunately, that coffin is now at the bottom of Sky Lodge lake.’

Siobhan gasped, tears brimming.

‘We can hire divers, honey,’ Edgar consoled her.

‘Pretty morbid, buying your daughter’s corpse,’ Juliette said, unprompted.

‘Pretty morbid selling it,’ Edgar replied.

I gestured for Andy and Juliette to stand up. We hauled ourselves off the bunk bed. Edgar and Siobhan had collapsed into a hug. I was loath to interrupt them, and after Juliette’s comment they’d surely want us out, but there was still something I needed to know. ‘I’m sorry to put you through this, but I have one more question for you. Did my stepfather come to visit you, two nights ago? A heavy-set South American man? His name’s Marcelo.’

‘No.’ Edgar shook his head. ‘But a woman named Audrey did.’

CHAPTER 35

Andy took the front seat as we bounced back over the ridge. Juliette sat across from me in the back, like we’d been arrested. Gavin was driving for speed this time, which made it a teeth-rattling ride. None of us bothered to look out the windows.

‘So your mother knows more than she’s saying,’ Juliette surmised.

Before we left, I’d asked Gavin if I could check the security cameras in case there was anything in the footage. He’d said, ‘Mate, my bar’s cash only,’ as if it explained the lack of technology, and left it at that.

‘I don’t understand it,’ I replied.

‘Add it to the list.’ She tapped a finger to her lips. ‘I downloaded your book last night. Your mum got a twin?’

Was she trying to impress me? That was Rule 10: identical twins must be duly prepared for. ‘Knox would kill me.’

Juliette laughed, then rested her forehead against the window, her eyes darting across the blinding snow. Her breath was foggy in front of her. ‘We should leave.’

I knew what she was really saying. If Lucy was out in the storm, she was already dead. People die in horror movies by splitting up, but that’s not how people die on mountains: they die by going back for each other. We were at the point where we had to save ourselves.

I leaned forward. I didn’t have to keep my voice that low – the roar of the Oversnow would drown me out unless I deliberately shouted at the driver, but I wanted the physical hint of secrecy. ‘Is Gavin trying to buy Sky Lodge?’

Juliette frowned. ‘How did you know that?’

‘I saw a real estate agreement on your desk, but it’s unsigned. Gavin has a map of your resort pinned to his corkboard. No one’s hiding it. But if you’ll excuse the guesswork, I figure you guys have, let’s say, different business ideals, judging by the dust on his expensive computer and the look on your face walking through the party. It seems to me that he works less hard but makes more money. That pisses you off, so you’re holding out on the sale.’

I’d overplayed my hand to show off my deductions. Maybe I was trying to impress her too.

‘He doesn’t want Sky Lodge,’ she said. ‘He just wants the land. He’ll knock it down just to put another SuperShred on this side of the ridge. That way he has both valleys. It sounds stupid when we’re talking about mill— well, a lot of money, but it’s got no charm.’ She looked out the window again.

The lights of the guesthouse were coming into view. I weighed up how I felt returning to this advent calendar house versus driving through the collection of airport hangars that made up SuperShred. It didn’t sound so stupid after all.

She was clearly thinking the same thing. ‘I told you I came back after my family died, and I wound up getting stuck here. That happens in this life, you know? The mountain kind of holds on. And business was booming, but then we had a couple of warm winters – everyone’s saying we’re going to have more than a couple more.’ She paused. ‘I can’t afford to put in those big ice blasters Gav has. So when he made an offer, a good offer, I was glad of it. Gav and I go way back. We’re both kids of resort families.’

‘Whistler?’

‘Whistler.’ She smiled in memory. ‘He’s a good guy, you know? And he was offering me a lifeline.’ She read my thoughts and raised an eyebrow. ‘He wants my land, but it’s not like he’d do anything to get it.’

Money is, of course, all too common a motive. I hadn’t focused too hard on Sofia, as fifty thousand seemed a small amount to kill over, but if this land was worth millions . . .

‘So I agreed,’ she continued. ‘Back when I thought he’d just keep running the hotel. It was exciting – I was free of this . . . legacy, I guess. But when it came time to sign and I learned that he wanted to knock it all down, well, legacy is the right word after all, isn’t it?’ Her breath plumed as she sighed. ‘That building is a lot of history to walk away from. My family’s in those walls.’

I considered why Gavin had been so keen to get Juliette to his office. Him telling her it would be worth her while. ‘He’s upped his offer? Just now?’

She nodded. ‘He’s got a new investor.’

‘I’ll bet he does,’ I said. ‘You’re considering it?’

‘After this weekend . . .’ She looked out the window again and the sentence finished itself in her silence.

‘Holy shit,’ Andy piped up from the front. He was rubbing his forearm against the fog on the front windscreen. Through the whorl, I could see a large smudge, the size of which could only be Marcelo, waving his arms above his head like he was landing a plane. Behind him shimmered a bright red flare, lodged into the snow around the side of the building. There were more shadows huddled around it. One crouching. ‘I think they’ve found her.’

Lucy must have been there all night, given several feet of snow had banked up on top of her. I could only see her hand, pale white and cold, reaching out from the mound.

No one had tried to dig her out. There was a small excavation above her torso, a hole just big enough to look into, reach in and check a pulse. That showed how quickly the dig was abandoned. If there’d have been any hope at all, the hole would have been bigger.

The flicker of the red flare blooded the snow around us. I leaned forward, saw a quick glimpse of Lucy and pulled away. Her fluoro lipstick was even brighter against her blood-drained face. She was still wearing the yellow turtleneck she’d worn yesterday. Nothing that would keep her warm outside. There was a crown of crimson-stained ice behind and above her head. Crucially, there was no ash on her face. I felt sick. Did anyone tell her the Drying Room wasn’t locked?

‘I only found her because I stood on her hand . . .’ Katherine started. It was her, Sofia and Crawford standing around the body. Audrey was keeping warm inside and, after Marcelo had flagged us down, he had gone to join her. I wasn’t sure where Erin was.

‘Fill in the hole,’ Juliette said.

Everyone looked at her strangely; it seemed such a callous thing to say.

‘We have to leave. We can’t take the bodies with us – we can come back when the snow’s cleared. So we should cover her up, to protect her from animals.’ She leaned over and scooped a mound of snow into Lucy’s impromptu grave with her forearm. I helped cascade in more. ‘Gavin, how long until we can leave?’

It was unfair of her to ask him to take us all down the mountain, but I knew Gavin was obliged to do Juliette a couple of favours if he wanted her to consider his offer on her hotel.

‘I’ll need to refuel. Will take a few,’ he said.

‘Are you saying—’ Andy began.

‘Everyone start packing your stuff. We’re leaving.’

I was grateful for Juliette’s firmness. Searching for Lucy had been the only thing stopping us leaving. We weren’t really trapped by the storm, as happens so frequently in these types of novels. We weren’t trapped at all. But we were chained by our own egos, our regrets, our shame, and our stubbornness. It was time to swallow that. This is about the right time for an exodus anyway, I figure, being six chapters from the end.

I patted down another armful of snow. That would be enough to shield Lucy from the elements. She hadn’t deserved this. She’d only come on this trip to try and win Michael back. She’d wanted to be a Cunningham. That was why she was here. Divorce or not, she was family, but we hadn’t treated her like it. We’d ignored her for the first half of the weekend. Then Audrey had let her take the blame for Michael’s death, loaded the guilt on her. And none of us had followed her to the roof. She had died alone. Some family. It’s hard to cry when tears freeze on your face.

Lucy’s hand stretched out from the snowdrift, palm to the sky, and I realised she was still wearing her wedding ring. I couldn’t decide whether it was more respectful to take it off and keep it, or to leave it on her. I decided I didn’t want to grapple with her frozen fingers, so I scooped a mound of snow over her hand. Then I took off my beanie, bracing against the chill that scraped my scalp, and stole an abandoned ski-pole leaning against the side of the lodge. I staked it on top of the snow, the beanie on top, so that we could find her again when the storm had passed.

‘We’ll come back and get you,’ I said to the mound. Someone put an arm around me, but in the wind, I didn’t even see who it was.

We all headed inside. I knew I’d have to go and get the bag of money from my chalet before we left, and I should have been thinking about how to get my mother alone to question her about the McAuleys, but at that moment I didn’t really care: I just wanted to leave. I needed to warm up, find another painkiller somewhere. I finally understood what it was like to be an addict; I would have given the whole bag of cash for something to dull my thoughts and my hand. I trudged after everyone else into the restaurant.

Erin, it turned out, had been inside the whole time, replacing the staff Juliette had sent home. She’d cooked us all lunch. I took a bowl of chicken and corn soup with desperate gratitude and sat down next to Sofia at an empty table. Someone had gone to find my mother, to convince her we were leaving. Before eating, I held my face over the soup, thawing myself in the steam until the tip of my nose singed.

‘There’s no ash,’ I said to Sofia after a few mouthfuls, shaking my head. ‘Not like the others.’

Sofia grimaced, understanding my question even though I hadn’t asked it. She explained simply: ‘She would’ve broken a lot of bones.’

Sofia looked out the restaurant doors into the foyer, and I saw her eyes trail up the staircase. I’d been wrong about Juliette’s dark suspicion in the rattling Oversnow. Andy had said, ‘In this weather . . . that would be suicide.’ The photo of Green Boots that Sofia had shown Lucy was a detailed depiction of what had happened to Michael, and Lucy had already been struggling with the knowledge that she had put him in a room he couldn’t get out of. Crucially, Lucy had stormed out of the bar before Audrey had interrogated Crawford on specifics. The last time anyone had seen Lucy, she was climbing the stairs, guilt-ridden. To the roof. Juliette had meant that we needed to catch her before she hurt herself in the storm. But Lucy hadn’t needed a storm. The guesthouse roof was high enough.

Sofia and I let the sad understanding settle over us: no one had told Lucy that Michael’s room wasn’t locked. That it wasn’t her fault.

The title of this book is true: everyone in my family has killed someone.

It’s just that not all of them killed other people.

CHAPTER 36

I assume my mother was quite the thorn in many a bulldozer’s side in the 1970s, if the gusto with which she chained herself to her bedpost was anything to go by. Marcelo had come into the restaurant, where we’d all spent the last hour piling our bags in the centre of the room (I had braved the storm once more, and folded the sports bag inside my wheelie case), and shaken his head. Katherine and I, volunteered by virtue of being the closest remaining relatives, had trudged up to the third floor to find Audrey propped up on pillows, one arm chained to the bedpost. I say chained: she’d flogged the gormless Crawford’s handcuffs from his hip. It looked a very comfortable protest.

It was an unspoken agreement that Katherine, being the less hated, would take the lead. She held out a hand. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Audrey. Where’s the key?’

My mother shrugged.

‘The guy with the snow-truck can take us now or not at all. You’re putting all of us in danger.’

‘So go.’

‘You know that’s not fair. We can’t leave you here. What if the storm gets worse? Your family’s in danger. People are dying.’

‘It sounds to me like you’ll be taking the killer down the mountain with you. I’m not leaving Michael here to rot.’

‘We’ll come back and get him when we’re safe, when the weather’s settled.’

Marcelo hovered behind us, assumedly having already tried most of Katherine’s arguments himself. Katherine was getting more frustrated, her voice rising in pitch, leaving behind the rational arguments and pulling out words like selfish and difficult and silly woman while yanking at the bedpost to see if it came apart at the joints. In normal circumstances, calling my mother a ‘right bitch’ would have been cataclysmic, but Audrey simply turned her head. From the grimace on Marcelo’s face, he’d tried that approach too.

‘I need a screwdriver or, hang on’—she squinted at the frame— ‘an allen key,’ Katherine said to Marcelo, turning from the bedpost, disgusted. ‘Four hundred bucks a night and it’s IKEA.’ Then to Audrey, a threat: ‘We’ll carry you out of here.’

Marcelo, glad of the escape, left to find the tool.

‘My son is dead,’ was all Audrey said. ‘I won’t leave him.’

That it was the same thing she’d said in the bar, when Sofia and Crawford had been explaining the murder, made me snap. I’d begged to be considered a real Cunningham since we’d got here. I’d cared more about that than Green Boots, than Michael even. Finding the killer was not about justice: it was a chance to prove myself, a sycophantic appeal to my mother that I was worthy of my own name. But my mother, in her oft-repeated distress over Michael’s death, didn’t even consider that there was a woman, dead in the snow outside, who was a part of this family too. Regardless of names or divorce contracts, Marcelo had acknowledged that: it’s all of us or none of us. My mother, for all her insistence, didn’t know what family meant.

‘Your son?’ I shocked Audrey and Katherine by yelling. Marcelo told me later he’d heard me down the hall. My anger was more pent up than I’d realised. ‘Your son? How about my sister – your daughter. In-law’s just a word. You know Lucy’s outside in the snow? You know that she died because of how you made her feel. Because of how you loaded her up with guilt over Michael’s death. She’s dead the same as he is, and all you can say is your son.’

‘Ern.’ Katherine tried to step in front of me, but I was advancing on my mother, incensed. My mother, for her part, didn’t flinch.

‘No, Katherine. We’ve indulged this for too long.’ I turned to my mother. ‘You put your hurt above everyone else’s. You raised us in pain because your husband died. You cast me aside because of what I did to your family. Well, it’s my family too.’ I softened, because despite my anger, I had come to understand her better. I sat on the bed. ‘I know it was hard. After you lost Dad, you had to do it all on your own. And I know you started to define yourself because of your name, because of what people thought of Dad, and I know that the only way to deal with that was to turn inwards, to make that name your own. But in doing so, you started to live up to the label that other people made for you. Cunningham doesn’t mean what you think it does. I know’—I surprised myself by picking up her hand; she let me take it, limp—‘what Dad was trying to do when he died.’

My mother’s eyes were glassy, but her jaw was firm. It was hard to tell whether she felt threatened or understood. I held her gaze, refusing to break first. ‘You do?’ she said.

‘I know about Rebecca McAuley. I know Dad had photographs implicating someone in her kidnapping, and probably her murder. I know Alan Holton was crooked. I know why you were so hurt that I took the law’s side over Michael’s. It took me a long time to see it through your eyes, but now I can. I know you went to visit Rebecca’s parents, two nights ago, when you cancelled dinner claiming to be sick. You told them to go home.’ I recited everything the McAuleys had told me, about my mother appearing at their door two nights ago. ‘You threatened them, Audrey. You asked if they had more children, if those children had grandchildren. Those people lost a child. How dare you use what happened to Rebecca as a threat. How dare you.’

‘I didn’t threaten them,’ Audrey said quietly. ‘I explained what the risks were.’

‘They know the risks. They lost a daughter.’ I took a deep breath, and then took the plunge with something I thought I’d figured out. ‘Just like you lost Jeremy.’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said through gritted teeth.

‘It was something Siobhan McAuley said,’ I ploughed on. ‘That they hadn’t hired private investigators for the last twenty-eight years. That struck me as a very specific number. Rebecca was kidnapped thirty-five years ago, which means the difference is seven years. That’s the same amount of time you waited to have Jeremy’s funeral. Seven years. There are no coincidences – those timings are the same for a reason. That’s how long it takes to declare a person legally dead, isn’t it?’

‘What are you saying, Ern?’ Katherine said over my shoulder.

Audrey stared at me, jaw trembling, but stayed silent.

‘You let something else slip too, when we last talked in the library.’ I ignored Katherine and held my mother’s gaze. ‘You said our family had to pay the price for Dad’s actions. But you also said that he’d left us without a weapon to fight with. Your exact words were “nothing in the bank”. I thought you meant money, but you didn’t, did you? You know about the photographs – that was the weapon you were talking about. If the Sabres, or whoever the Sabres were protecting, didn’t get them from Dad the night he died, it makes sense that they might assume that you had them. That they might target, say, the bank you worked at, where it was likely Dad kept a safety box.’

‘You don’t understand. They will do anything to keep this quiet. Robert’s photographs – no one ever found them. I wish they’d found what they were looking for, some yellow envelope stamped with “In the event of my death please send to the media”, some kind of clue. Anything. I wanted them to find it. I really did. I searched everywhere for those goddamn photos.’

‘But the Sabres didn’t come up empty from the bank, did they? They might not have found the photographs, but as they escaped from the rooftop car park, I think they found the next best thing: sitting in a car. They decided there was only one way to be sure you didn’t have the photographs. Leverage. A guarantee that, if you had the photos, you’d give them up in a heartbeat. And we all knew they had no problem taking children – Rebecca is proof of that. Seven years, Audrey.’

My mother hung her head. Gave up.

‘They took Jeremy from the car,’ she whispered. I heard Katherine inhale sharply behind me. I let the quiet expand until my mother was ready to continue. She spoke into her lap. ‘Alan was their messenger. All they wanted was the photographs, he said, not money. And I couldn’t tell the police, because that Humphreys woman had gotten Robert and Rebecca killed already, hadn’t she? And Alan was clearly playing both sides – who knew who else was? I had to protect you and Michael.’

‘There must have been an investigation, though?’ I prompted gently, worried that even the slightest rise in volume might break my mother’s confessional trance. Nobody was moving. Katherine had stopped looking for the handcuff key.

‘Of course. They treated it as a missing person. Whether it was because they were in on it, I don’t know, but it looked like Jeremy had gotten out of the car to go and get help for you and Michael. I had to play along with it. I cut my forehead on the glass but the window was already broken. A five-year-old wouldn’t get far, they kept saying. And then, as more days passed, I could tell they’d changed their thinking from not getting far to not lasting long and they’re running a search that I know is a dead-end. Meanwhile Alan keeps on asking me for the photographs, and I tell him I don’t have them, that I can’t find them. And he says he believes me . . .’ She looked up at me, and her eyes were red rimmed. ‘He says he believes me, but there’s only one way to be sure I wasn’t keeping the photos to myself. They had to know for sure . . .’

She trailed off, but her meaning was clear. The only way to be sure Audrey wasn’t hiding the photos was to carry through on their threat, and to leave the threat lingering for her two remaining children. I felt sick at the thought of Jeremy buried in another policeman’s coffin. It occurred to me that I didn’t know for sure the child’s body I’d found was Rebecca’s.

‘I never meant to take sides, Mum.’ I reflected on her telling me I’d been making the same mistakes my father had, and I understood her a little better now. I felt her hand, until now only resting on mine, clasp tightly. ‘I was trying to do what was right. But there’s right and then there’s right for us. I didn’t know you’d had to pay so high a price.’

It’s all well and good for the heroes to play cops and robbers in novels and on TV, but in real life it’s the side characters, the Cunninghams, who take the blows, who bear the pain, so someone else can raise their arms aloft in victory. My father had tried to do the ‘right thing’. And it had cost him. It hadn’t cost the rich couple grieving their stolen child. It hadn’t cost the detective, pushing her informant with a promotion in mind. And so, for Audrey, there was no longer right or wrong. There was family, and there was everything else. Maybe she did know what it meant after all. I squeezed her hand back.

‘Marcelo knows?’ I asked.

‘Only later.’

‘You never told me,’ Katherine said. It was hard to tell if she was offended at being left out or trying to defend herself from an interrogation.

‘I don’t remember much of that morning.’ I kept my attention on Audrey.

‘You were too young. There was something in there, all scrambled up, but you’d listen to what I told you. And I told everyone, including you, Katherine, that Jeremy died in the car because it was easiest, and because I worried if there were too many questions Alan would come back for you or Michael. I’ll be honest – I didn’t mind the blame. Ironically, if the Sabres hadn’t broken the window to take Jeremy, all three of you might have died. So it felt like I deserved it.’

‘And then seven years later, Marcelo helped you privately take care of the legal side of things. When you had the funeral. You let him in on the secret. Is that right?’

‘Yes. He sorted that out, helped finalise Robert’s will, all that stuff. I have some more things I need to tell you, I suspect. But not here. I can’t think straight. Let’s get off this mountain. The key’s in the bible.’

Katherine rummaged in the bedside table for the bible, flicking open the pages until a small silver key fell out. She unlocked my mother from the bedframe and was helping her up off the bed, when Audrey shooed her away and instead reached out for my assistance. I leaned in, offering my shoulder as she stood, her weight pressing down on me.

‘I just wanted to warn the McAuleys,’ she said. ‘These people have no problem killing kids. It doesn’t matter if they want ransom or leverage. I’m sorry they took it as a threat.’

I didn’t reply, just gave her a hug that I hoped conveyed my understanding. I was glad we could now leave, and once we were down the mountain, we could begin to heal. Apart from the murders, it had been a successful reunion after all.

Illuminating as hearing Audrey’s side of the story was, I was still plagued by niggling questions.

If Rebecca McAuley wasn’t the Sabre’s only victim, how could I be sure it was her body in the coffin? And how the hell did Alan Holton get a hold of something my mother couldn’t find for him thirty-five years ago?

I told Katherine I’d meet them downstairs after she helped Audrey pack, and headed after Marcelo, questions brewing. I was distracted passing the library on the first floor. The fire still sizzled in the hearth at the back of the room, the warmth bracing my cheeks, beading sweat on my brow. Or maybe the heat was coming from my stomach, crawling up my neck. Because intuition was telling me that little pieces of the mystery were coming together, but not yet into a whole. I browsed the shelves of Golden Age mysteries. Audrey had put Mary Westmacott in the wrong spot, hiding under a different name in the Ws, so I moved her back to the Cs. I ran my thumb over the spines, perhaps seeking inspiration for a denouement. Knox didn’t have a rule against it, but in all the books in front of me, it was implied that the detective didn’t simply give up and head down the mountain at the end.

But those detectives were smarter than I was. I had no author pulling my marionette strings, no gifts bestowed upon me. I would not qualify for the Detection Club. I remember thinking the only thing I was sure of was that I was missing something. Something small. That there’s always one thing in these books that unlocks everything else, and it is so often the smallest of things. There was something I couldn’t see. Not without a good old-fashioned Holmesian magnifying glass, anyway. Or a loupe.

And then I solved it.

In these kinds of books, there’s often some impressive metaphorical illustration of the deductive moment. The detective will be sitting and thinking, and maybe the jigsaw in their head slowly locks into place, or maybe it’s fireworks, or dominoes; maybe they’re stumbling down a dark corridor and they finally find the switch. Either way, the information collides in a fascinating waterfall of discovery that compels them to the Eureka moment. I promise you it is not so dramatic in reality. One second I didn’t know the answer, and the next I did. I checked my suspicion by walking to the mantle, and then I was sure.

To keep Ronald Knox happy – since all clues lighted upon must be presented to the reader – here are the clues I used to put it together: Mary Westmacott; fifty-thousand dollars; my jaw; my hand; Sky Lodge’s snow cams; Sofia’s malpractice suit; a Brisbane PO box; Lucy cocking an imaginary gun against her head; a double-occupancy coffin; vomit; a speeding fine; a handbrake; a loupe; physiotherapy; an unsolved assault; a chivalrous and shivering husband; ‘the boss’; a jacket; footprints; Lucy’s nervous wait; a pyramid scheme; sore toes; my chalet’s phone; my dreams of choking; Michael’s new-found pacifism; and F-287: a dead pigeon with a medal for bravery.

Katherine announced her arrival with the multiple thunks of a suitcase being dragged down stairs. She noticed me and stopped, suitcase and my mother tailing her, either to ask for a hand or to tell me to stop lollygagging, but I never found out because I cut her off.

‘Will you gather everyone?’ I asked. ‘I need to tell them something. I need everyone, because I still have questions for some of them. And so no one runs.’

Katherine nodded, picking up on my tone. ‘Where?’

I looked around at the bookshelves, the crackling fire and the plush red leather chairs. ‘If we get out of here alive enough to sell our story, I’d say Hollywood would be pretty pissed if we didn’t use the library, don’t you think?’

CHAPTER 37

Marcelo and Audrey took the leather chairs, like royalty in thrones. Crawford and Juliette stood at the back, either side of the fireplace, having learned, from spending a weekend amid Cunningham family affairs, the meaning of the phrase ‘safe distance’. Katherine stood, leaning her arm against the back of Audrey’s chair. Andy sat on a side table, though he seemed to lack structural confidence in it, keeping his knees high and holding most of his weight on the balls of his feet. Sofia sat on the floor. It was like another wedding tableau, similar to yesterday morning on the steps outside, except later in the night when the party has thinned out, everyone’s nose is booze-red, their clothes a little tattered, their hands smashed and stuffed into oven mitts. Gavin had been excused, innocent by virtue of Rule 1, and was loading our bags into the Oversnow. I made sure to block the doorway, because the killer always tries to make a break for it once they’ve been revealed.

The rush of discovery had faded somewhat, and now I had to figure out how best to present my accusations so that they made logical sense. It was hard to find a place to start: there were plenty of killers in the room, but only one murderer.

‘Well?’ Marcelo spoke first, his impatience betraying his curiosity. That gave him the short straw. I’d start with him.

‘It’s time we all came clean about why we’re here,’ I said. I took the GPS out of my pocket and tossed it to Marcelo.

It took him a moment to realise what it was. I could tell he was about to ask me where I got it, but then he remembered meeting me out in the snow, handing me the device in front of his broken window.

‘You’re Gavin’s new investor for buying this place. Of course you are – you’re the only one here with enough money, and how else could Katherine convince you to come and spend a weekend here? You hate the cold more than Sofia does; you’ve been grumbling about it the whole time. That’s part of the reason you were so annoyed at Katherine putting us all up in the chalets: you knew Gavin wanted to knock down the guesthouse, but you wanted to see what the rooms were like, to figure out if it was worth keeping.’

‘I am working on a business relationship while I’m here, sure. I noticed the place was for sale when Katherine booked it in. Does it matter?’ Marcelo barked his defence, so accustomed to doing the accusing instead of being the accused. He was staunch, chest puffed in outrage.

‘It doesn’t. But your first lie was that Audrey was ill for dinner two nights ago,’ I said. ‘Did it seem strange that she asked you to lie about it and then asked to come with you for your meeting with Gavin?’ I already knew it was because Audrey wanted an alibi to give to Michael, after she’d, hopefully, convinced the McAuleys to flee. Marcelo would back up her claims of being sick, and she would be able to skip away from dinner. I could see the doubt in Marcelo’s eyes as he looked at his wife.

Eventually he cleared his throat and said, ‘I haven’t killed anybody.’

‘Well, that’s another lie, isn’t it?’

‘I never touched Michael. Or Lucy. Or that bloke in the snow.’

‘That’s not what I said.’

‘Enlighten me then. Who am I supposed to have killed?’

‘Me.’