by Alex Day
The footsteps came closer, crunching through the dry undergrowth. It was definitely more than one person although it was impossible to tell how many more. The blood stilled in her veins. A branch snapped beneath her feet with a retort as loud as a firework. A barked command rang out and the footsteps came to an abrupt halt.
‘Who’s there?’ It was a man’s voice, speaking the local language, and its tone was icily threatening. Vlad’s voice? Edie wasn’t sure. She waited, frozen in terror.
The silence and the waiting seemed to last forever. Eventually, just as Edie thought she was going to faint with holding her breath, the footsteps brushing through the undergrowth resumed.
Emboldened by having evaded discovery, Edie crept a few steps closer, slinking along the line of oleander bushes, bent down low. The hut, as she thought, was ahead of her and moving towards it were vague figures in the blackness, bowed and hunched. Two were small, child-sized and somehow pitiful-looking. They had already cleared a trio of olive trees that stood to the left of the hut and were approaching the ruined threshold, following the gradually receding shadow of a man of a similar size and height to Vuk and tailed by a slighter person behind, whose movements were light and fleet. And then a man carrying someone over his shoulder, firefighter style, emerged from behind the olive trees. This man, though not tall, appeared strong and was bearing the weight with ease. Something about him reminded Edie of Zayn.
In just a few seconds the little group had disappeared inside the stone walls of the hut. The cicadas’ constant roar was deafening in the now complete silence. And then a faint sound of voices floated across the clearing in front of the hut, and became louder and louder until the air was torn apart by a howling, heart-rending scream. A white-hot flash of terror subsumed Edie’s body and stilled her blood in her veins. The noise was animalistic, raw, hideous. It had seemed to be wrenched from the heart of whatever poor woman – Edie was sure it was a woman – was making it. And then Edie heard the slap of flesh against flesh, a growling bark and a dragging, scuffling noise that seemed to indicate someone being pulled across the sand and dirt floor.
Edie’s head was reeling, her eyes aching from straining in the darkness. So there were people using the hut and they didn’t seem to be there entirely willingly. Should she go up there and try to help them, to rescue them? But how could she; where would she take them, what succour could she offer? Could Laura have been taken here, too? It was possible but that didn’t explain why or what had happened to her after. And had that really been Vuk at the front and Zayn at the back of the group? If so, what were they doing? Where was Vlad, whose voice she was sure she had recognised. There were too many unknowns tumbling around her mind and not a single certainty anywhere.
Edie’s veins were pulsating with heat. It had got a lot hotter whilst they had been in the mountains, or perhaps she had already got out of the habit of the kind of heat that sapped your energy and prevented you from thinking straight. Because that was how she felt right now. Her mind was full of suspicions that ran through her bones and her blood and chilled her despite the forty-degree heat.
It was the feeling of terror.
***
Having fled back to her room, Edie stared sleeplessly at the ceiling. Laura was missing, and someone pretending to be her was sending Edie messages. There were strange people hiding out at the hut on the hills and despite Vuk’s assertion that they were tramps or gypsies, Edie wasn’t so sure. Every hideous story she had ever heard or read or seen in a film, of kidnap or murder or slavery or trafficking, flitted across her mind. She wanted to help but at the same time was scared of getting involved. And what could a foreign girl who couldn’t speak the language and had no friends, other than the ones who now didn’t seem so friendly after all, possibly accomplish? Even going to the police, which might be thought to be the sensible, not to mention obvious, course of action looked dubious; what had they done so far? Were they, as Vuk asserted, corrupt? Maybe they were in on what was going on, too – that would explain their laconic lack of interest. You just never knew in places like this.
With so much going around and around her head, Edie was not aware of falling asleep. But she must have done, because at some time towards dawn, she jerked violently awake.
Someone was turning the door handle, trying to get into her room. Hardly daring to move, she rolled her eyes towards the source of the sound. The handle was still. The door remained closed. She listened intently. It was light outside, but too early for the other staff members to already be up and going about their business. She remained stock still for minutes that felt like hours and then, when she didn’t hear anything else, forced her shoulders to relax, pushing her body down onto the bed. Every muscle was stiff with tension.
She turned over and felt a twinge of pain in her right arm, presumably from when Vuk had grabbed her back from the abyss at the canyon. Although he had been standing on her left, she realised now. This was puzzling and Edie couldn’t work out how it could have been that he had got hold of her right arm.
Another noise from outside, from the back this time, by the window, sent fear surging through her again. She huddled into the bedclothes, wrapping herself up in the sheet as if in swaddling clothes, trying to make herself invisible to any intruder like a little child who’s afraid of ghosts and thinks that if she can’t see them, they can’t see her. Her mind, however, could not be so easily stilled. Vuk had let her go down that precarious path with its precipitous drop with a dangling shoelace. The shoelace that he had trodden on and caused to come undone. Zayn had urged her to do it up.
Once in position and admiring the view, Vuk had been standing on her left, Zayn on her right. It was her right arm that was bruised from being hung onto with enough strength to prevent her from descending to her certain death. The thought slowly emerged from the fog of truth and untruth, fact and fiction, that clouded her mind - the thought that Vuk had tripped her up and Zayn had saved her – But no, that could not conceivably be true. Whatever love was, or was not, lost between her and Vuk he was hardly a murderer. Was he?
She lay, every fibre of her being straining for further sounds of someone trying to enter her room. There was nothing but silence, and the cicadas’ relentless strumming. Stupid, stupid girl, she snapped at herself. Of course there was no one there; this was as much nonsense as the figures by the hut resembling Zayn and Vuk; just a figment of her overactive and increasingly paranoid imagination.
What wasn’t nonsense was that she had absolutely no idea what in hell was really going on. And, in addition to the fear and the uncertainty, was the sneaking realisation that there was no one who seemed to be above reproach and beyond suspicion.
There was no one she could trust.
***
The next morning, Edie cleaned on autopilot. In the sleepless hours until daybreak, she had decided that she must not draw any attention to herself, must not do anything out of the ordinary and most certainly must not risk angering Vlad to the point that he might suspect that she knew something. So she had to complete her chores, do what she was asked and quietly, under the radar, take steps to solve the ever-increasing number of mysteries that surrounded her.
The time she was working could anyway be thinking time, given that everything she was required to do was utterly mindless. Cabana 19, then 8, then 3 … She counted cutlery, replenished loo roll, stripped and changed bed linen, all the while churning over in her mind a plan of action. In cabana number 5, she cursed guests who had left it in such a mess it took her much longer than normal to sort out. She could never understand how people could leave the sink piled high with dirty dishes, or dump their wet towels on the bed so the mattress got damp. Did they think some elf came along to magic everything right? She was sure that if they associated the cleaning with a real person, they would take more care. They bloody well should do, anyway.
These guests had clearly had a few picnics and there were several teaspoons and forks missing, plus a sharp knife. There was also an ext
ra item – one of the corkscrews Edie and the other staff used at the bar. The guests must have borrowed it, or more likely swiped it when someone inadvertently left it on the counter rather than putting it away. Edie tucked it into her pocket to take back later.
Despite her disaffection, for the first time ever she was disappointed when she’d finished cleaning for the day. Disappointment that was born out of the fact that she now had to confront her worries and do something about them. During the night, she had dismissed the police as useless – or worse. But now it was day time and the sun was shining so brightly, she considered it once more. The problem was that she still had little more than conjecture and suspicion to convince them with, plus her own sixth sense that all was not well. None of that would win over an officer of the law.
On the other hand, they were precisely that – officers of the law – and should get involved if there were potential infringements of said law going on. Unless they were in on the wrong-doing, taking backhanders or whatever … Edie wanted to scream out loud. It was all just going round and round with no end and no beginning and certainly no resolution.
Locking the door on her final cabana, Edie stepped out into the glare. The brightness of the day, the fresh breeze that was blowing, the cheery shouts of children that came drifting up from plunge pools and the beach, somehow coloured her fears as unfounded and overblown. It seemed impossible that there could be darkness amidst such an abundance of sunshine. Suddenly, she knew what to do. The truth was most likely there, right in front of her – she just had to ask for it.
From her room, she collected a bottle of vodka and a net of oranges. As far as she knew, Vuk was on the resort so she’d go to his cabin on the pretext of a lovely afternoon drink and, once he was nice and relaxed and in a good mood, she’d bring up the subject of the hut on the hill. Just discuss it, all casual-like, giving no hint of any untoward notions about what was happening there, merely innocently stating the facts so that he could no longer fob her off with stories about Roma. She’d give him the chance to come up with some reasonable, believable explanation and see what transpired. Then, once that was done she could take the final decision about whether to go back to the police or not.
She used the key she’d taken on her last visit to get into Vuk’s cabin. He’d left the air conditioning on, something the resort asked guests not to do, and the temperature was beautiful. Edie waved the front of her T-shirt up and down a few times to aid the cooling effect. The heat outside was punishing. Vuk’s cabin was as bare and bland as ever. It lacked colour, and soft things, was all hard edges and white surfaces. In the past, Edie had sometimes amused herself by imagining what feminine touches she could bring to it to make it more homely. Now she laughed at herself for her naivety. Vuk couldn’t care less about his living quarters – or her – and so why should she? His recent, rather transparent, pretences at showing affection for her were proof of his dissemblance.
Edie roved the kitchen, pulling out drawers and opening cupboards until she found a juicer and a knife to cut the oranges. She squeezed them and poured generous slugs of vodka into two glasses. Searching for ice, she found the top two drawers of the freezer empty but the bottom one contained two bags of cubes. Edie plunged her hand into the nearest bag, grappling around trying to secure a handful. As she did so, the bag slipped to the side, revealing a plastic container buried beneath it. Inside the container was a pile of small, dark red notebooks and some things that looked like credit cards or driving licences.
Edie’s heart missed a beat. She dropped the ice, her hand already numb with cold. She knew she shouldn’t pry, just as one knows not to open someone else’s mail or read their diary but she couldn’t stop herself. She picked up the plastic container, held it firm against her body and took off the lid. Inside, individually wrapped in thin plastic bags, were the credit cards. But they were, in fact, ID cards. Vuk seemed to have an awful lot of them. Or rather, an awful lot of someone else’s. The woman who stared sightlessly out of the picture of the top one was young and beautiful, and wearing a headscarf. The notebooks were in fact passports. The first was German. Edie opened it. The photo inside was of a man. He bore no resemblance to Vuk.
Edie could almost hear her brain whirring into action, slowly and creakily, trying to comprehend what she was seeing and make some kind of sense out of it. She leafed through the other four passports and ID cards. None of them were Vuk’s. An utter silence descended on the small kitchen in the bare cabin. Time seemed to stand still.
A high-pitched, screeching sound rent the air and reverberated around the cabin walls. Edie’s heart leapt and juddered, beating wildly, incoherently, and she broke into a cold sweat.
The beat of flapping wings brought her to her sense. It was just a bird, squawking on the terrace outside. But still she stood, motionless, listening.
Vuk could arrive at any time. A lightning flash of terror slithered through her bowels. She slipped the first card she had picked up into her shorts pocket, fastened the lid back onto the container and busied herself gathering up a fresh handful of ice, humming light-heartedly all the while, as if nothing untoward had gone on at all. She slammed the freezer drawer closed, then kicked shut the door whilst already leaning towards the jug on the side into which she threw the ice. The glugging of the juice as she poured it helped to slow her thumping heart.
And then something made her stop pouring; put the jug back down. The saliva gathered at the back of her throat and icicles of fear, as cold as the cubes in the jug, crept through her veins. She turned to the front door. It was tight shut. There was no one there. She breathed hard and fast, struggling to quell the inexplicable thud of foreboding that was engulfing her. Goosebumps prickled her flesh. Dread enveloped her like a shroud.
She could not see anyone. But she was definitely not alone.
Very, very slowly, her heart in her mouth, her legs weak and shaky, she turned towards the French windows which had been firmly shut on her arrival. They were wide open.
THIRTY
Edie
‘Edie.’
She screamed and jumped out of her skin, her hand clapped to her mouth, sweat breaking out on her neck and back and under her breasts despite the air con. Vuk emerged from where he had been partially hidden by the edge of the curtain. He crossed the threshold, a strange half-smile on his face. As Edie recovered from the shock and the turbulence of her mind began to settle, she was able to inwardly name Vuk’s expression. It was mocking.
‘Hi, Vuk.’ She just about managed to make the sounds come out in a way that approximated normal. She had no idea how long he had been there. Whether he had seen her examining the contents of the freezer.
‘Are you okay?’ His steady gaze was unnerving. He couldn’t have been watching her, surely she’d have heard him open the French windows?
‘Why are you staring at me like that?’ She laughed to make light of it, turn it into a joke. ‘Have I got dirt on my face or something?’
Vuk shut the French windows, turned the key in the lock and put it in his pocket. He took a few paces towards her across the sparsely furnished room, his footsteps echoing against the tiles. ‘You look very pretty, as always,’ he said, stopping a metre or so away from her. And then added, abruptly, ‘I wasn’t expecting you. You really should let me know when you are coming to visit. I thought I made that clear last time.’
Edie skipped to the tall cupboard where the few glasses that Vuk possessed were kept. ‘It was such a hot day and I thought, I know what Vuk would like right now. He’d like a nice, long vodka and orange.’ She gurned at him like a geeky sixteen-year-old.
‘So – I came to give you one. And the drink.’ She giggled. Out of the corner of her eye she could see that Vuk did not crack so much as a hint of a smile.
She took the glasses to the table and put them down.
‘Sit,’ she gestured.
Vuk didn’t move. Edie paused, her resolve momentarily deserting her. He was going to challenge her about what she’
d found and she didn’t know whether to ’fess up or deny it. She picked up one of the glasses and drank heftily. Dutch courage; it couldn’t make things any worse.
‘You know I don’t drink during working hours.’ Vuk’s tone was even, displaying no emotion.
‘Well, maybe you should start.’ Edie smirked playfully. ‘It’s fun!’ She took another slug of her drink, then licked her lips seductively. Distraction was the only strategy she could think of. She went over to him and ran her hands over his torso. If she behaved exactly as she normally would, perhaps he wouldn’t suspect anything.
Vuk pushed her away. ‘Edie, I don’t have time for this now. What did you come here for?’
Edie could feel the ID card in her pocket, flat and stiff behind the corkscrew that she’d forgotten to take back to the bar. ‘I came for you, as I already told you. But if you’re not up for it …’ she wandered airily towards the window and looked outside. ‘… I’m sure I can find something else to do. Or perhaps I should say “someone”.’
He needed to believe she was as vapid and lustful as she made herself out to be.
Vuk shrugged. He went over to the counter where the coffee maker sat and turned it on, opened the cupboard to retrieve the coffee, took a spoon out of a drawer. Then stopped, poised to pour the grounds into the filter paper. ‘How did you get in?’
‘I took a key last time I was here. Don’t you remember?’