“So you think Maya may have done this out of spite?” Steed asks, dropping his voice a notch.
“I don’t know.” Jo shrugs. “I feel stupid now, saying it. Maya’s probably got nothing to do with it. I mean, there was stuff about his dad, too, and Maya doesn’t even know him. Please don’t say anything.”
Elin looks at Steed, her first thought: So why mention it? Why even contemplate the possibility if you didn’t think there was a chance it might be true?
“I won’t, but we’ll need to speak to both Maya and Hana before we go.”
“Okay,” Jo replies, but Elin’s not sure if she’s even heard her, her eyes fixed on Steed as he picks up the money and the carabiner, slips them into his bag.
* * *
—
Once they’ve left the villa, Steed shakes his head. “What do you make of that?”
“Interesting. The cash we found starts to make the drugs angle look pretty spot-on.”
“And the carabiner?” He gives her a sideways glance. “You’ve got a theory, haven’t you?”
Elin nods, wary about voicing it yet, bursting the bubble before she’s had a chance to ascertain whether it’s even a possibility. “It’s to do with where we found Bea Leger’s body. If it’s all right, I’m going to check it out while you speak to Hana, Maya, and Caleb.”
Steed nods, but Elin senses his unease, the unanswered questions in his eyes.
43
Stopping a few feet from where Bea Leger’s body had lain, Elin drags her gaze from the residual bloodstains to the cliff wall itself. It soars upward, as dizzying as before, ragged lines scored in the limestone, dips and hollows carved out by the elements.
Where had she been standing when she’d seen it?
But it’s almost impossible to pinpoint; all she’s certain of is that she’d glimpsed it after Rachel had started photographing Bea’s body.
Perhaps she’d been slightly higher, she muses, to Rachel’s left—she’d been able to see the cliff face as it curved around to the cove.
Climbing left, Elin tries different positions and angles, but all she can see are signs of natural life: pockets of vegetation, grasses, tiny ferns protruding through crevices in the rock. A cormorant, wings outstretched, is perched on one of the crags.
Stepping back, she’s frustrated, starting to doubt herself. But as she shifts her head to the side, Elin blinks, suddenly blinded.
Another dazzling flash, identical to the one she’d seen before.
This time she knows what she’s looking for, so she doesn’t make any dramatic steps back and risk losing sight of what might be causing the reflection. Instead, she tips her head slightly, enough to lose the glare.
There. Her pulse picks up. There it is, protruding from the rock.
A loop of metal, sunlight bouncing off the smooth silver ring.
A climbing bolt.
Elin’s hand wavers as she pulls out her phone and takes a photograph.
Interrogating the site, she puts the pieces together one by one in her mind: the carabiner in Seth’s bag, Maya’s belief that someone left the lodge, and now this: a bolt, directly below where Bea fell.
Is it possible that Bea’s fall wasn’t an accident?
She’d had the sense that something was niggling her about the CCTV footage of the fall.
Closing her eyes, she replays it in her mind. As the images spool, she realizes that what she saw—the wrap falling, Bea leaning over to retrieve it—might not necessarily be the right narrative. She’d put the two together because it made sense. Cause and effect.
But it didn’t have to be the case. The wrap may have fallen, but Bea might have leaned over for a different reason. A human reason.
Elin analyzes the bolt, its location. A chill works up her spine. The idea is wild, but plausible; Seth might have been on that cliff face, somehow caught Bea’s attention. She thinks about the indentation in the grass that Leon observed.
Perhaps it wasn’t Bea who’d dropped something, but Seth, using it as an excuse for a fake fall. He could have called for help, Bea would have seen whatever it was he’d dropped, trusted him, and then as she reached down . . .
Her mind doesn’t want to make the next leap, but it does: He could have pulled her over. The CCTV, already grainy, didn’t show anything below the top half of the glass balustrade, and Bea’s body was obscuring most of the glass—so his hand, reaching up, wouldn’t have been seen.
But as she churns it over, she stumbles on the logistics; in order to trick Bea, he’d have had to disguise the climbing equipment. Easy enough, she thinks, with some kind of baggy sweatshirt, especially at night, but he can’t simply have been hanging there. He’d have had to position himself in a plausible position for a fall.