‘Do you think she’s leaving a trail?’ Orla asked, rushing forward.
Jacques put out his arm. ‘Do not run. You will disturb the ground and anything else we might find.’
‘I just want… to find her,’ Orla said, a tremble to her voice.
‘I know,’ he answered. ‘And we will.’
‘I can’t lose her.’
He took her arm then, caught between steadying her and wanting to give her solidarity. ‘You are not going to lose her.’
She was struggling. He could see it in her eyes. He wanted to draw her closer, wrap his arms around her, tell her it would all be OK…
Suddenly there was a whistle. One blast. Then another. And next a third.
‘What’s that?’ Orla asked, wearing a haunted look now.
‘The team ahead of us have found something.’
‘Something?’ Orla said, looking more terrified than relieved. ‘Like what?’
He knew the instructions he had given. Three blasts was serious.
‘Like what, Jacques?’ Orla repeated.
‘Come on,’ he urged. ‘Come, Hunter. Let’s go.’
Orla’s heart was hammering against her chest as Jacques tried to call the team ahead of them on a walkie-talkie. Why they couldn’t communicate with mobile phones she didn’t know. All the white noise and garbled voices were unintelligible. She was powering as fast as she could over the snow, Hunter running close then getting in her way as if he was stopping her from being in front. She wanted to be ahead. She wanted to be the first person to get to whatever this was that had necessitated three loud blasts of a whistle.
‘I cannot hear you. Repeat. Over.’
Jacques was still trying to get sense out of the two-way radio and Orla was starting to realise just how desolate the area was around Saint-Chambéry. All the trees looked the same. All the snow looked the same. You could only differentiate the sky from the ground now because it was night. And there were spooky sounds from the forest – the call of owls, the howl of goodness knows what, cracks of branches.
‘Can we just hurry up? There was only one team in front of us, right?’ Orla said, side-stepping Hunter again and elongating her stride.
‘Orla, wait,’ Jacques said. ‘There is no use rushing. And if we have to backtrack, if we do not know what the other team has found, we will tear up this area and then there will be no further clues.’
‘I don’t care right now! If they haven’t found my sister then they’ve found somethingrelatingto my sister and I want to know what it is.’
She stopped talking the second she heard Jacques’s walkie-talkie crackle into life.
‘Nous avons trouvé quelqu’un. Sur.’
‘What does that mean?’ Orla asked.
‘They have found someone,’ Jacques informed.
Orla gasped and grabbed for the radio in Jacques’s hands. ‘Who is it? Who have you found? Over.’
Jacques grabbed the radio back. ‘You have to press this button.’ He pressed it and spoke.‘Est-ce la fille? Érin?’
Orla was holding her breath so hard her ribs were tightening like she was wearing aBridgerton-style corset. Why was it taking so long to get a response?
‘C’est un homme. Il dit qu’il est Albanais.’
She knew the French for ‘man’. It wasn’t Erin. But as her heart began to plummet, the sound of the last word began to morph in her mind. Before she could ask the question, Jacques had translated.
‘It is a man. He says he is Albanian.’
