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“Hunter,” Santana said. “Hunter and Lucy. I’d never heard of him, but I actually know her slightly. She’s a friend of my cousin, and I when I realized they weren’t on the boat, I texted her to find out what happened.”
“And what did happen?” I asked.
“Apparently her boyfriend pulled out when he got the dossier. He had a massive problem with one of the other contestants. Lucy didn’t say which one.”
“I know which one,” Zana said in a low voice. She looked at me. “It was Conor, right?”
I nodded.
“I think so. Did you know Hunter, Zana?”
Zana shook her head.
“No, but Conor did. He saw his name in the dossier, and I got the impression he was looking forward to seeing him. In fact, he was the first person he asked about when we got to the boat. He asked Camille whether Hunter was here yet. When Camille said Hunter and Lucy had dropped out, Conor laughed. He said something about it, something like, Hunter always was a pussy.”
“I do not see the point of this,” Angel said, but not dismissively. She sounded puzzled. “You have lost my thread.”
“Think about it,” I said softly. I was answering Angel, but I was looking at Zana. “Think about what all the couples have in common. Everyone except me and Nico. Really think.”
Angel looked surprised.
“Chérie, we have nothing in common. Isn’t that the point? We are all so very different. Models. Actors. Fitness coaches. Teachers. Scientists. The whole idea was to have a diverse cast.”
“No.” I shook my head. “Everyone had one thing in common. At least, one person in each couple did. You all had some kind of history with Conor.”
Santana frowned, and I pressed on.
“Santana, you were at school with his ex-girlfriend, the one who killed herself. You could speak to his past as an abuser. Romi was a victim of his YouTube channel, all his followers descending on her to call her a body-shamer or problematic, or whatever it was. Hunter—well, I don’t know what happened there, but clearly there was something. Maybe Conor had screwed up someone he loved.”
“And what about me?” Angel said. She sounded skeptical. “I had never met the guy.”
“No, but you did have personal experience of being in an abusive relationship. Is there any way Baz could have known about that?”
“I mean… I have tweeted about it,” Angel said with a shrug. “I did a thread about relationship red flags that went viral.”
“Well there you go,” I said. “You were the ideal person to recognize Conor for what he was. And Bayer—well, he was the perfect person to rile Conor up, to get him to drop the nice-guy act and show his true colors. Which was exactly what he did, the first moment there was any kind of tension. You, Santana, Bayer, Romi—practically everyone on the island was hand-picked to either speak to Conor’s past or make him come clean about his present. Nico and I—well, we were dropped in at short notice, so there was no time to research someone with a link as good as Santana’s. The best they could do was find someone like me, someone who might clash with him politically.” I remembered Baz’s questions at the interview, the ones that had puzzled me so much. Would you call yourself a feminist? And your politics. Would you say they’re left of center? Now I understood. He’d been trying to find someone Conor would butt heads with—and ideally a woman. “Add in plenty of booze to oil the wheels, and some stressful tasks designed to make everyone lose their rag… The storm was never part of the plan, of course. That was just horribly bad luck.”
“But why?” Santana said, her voice bewildered. “Why would Baz go to all this trouble to take down a total stranger, however much of a shit?”
I shook my head again.
“I don’t think they were strangers. Dan told me, right back at the beginning of all this, that Baz knew Conor. He said that Conor had dated Baz’s niece. And I started to wonder… What if she didn’t walk away unscathed either?”
There was a long pause. I could see the other three thinking about my words, turning them over in their heads. Then Santana’s face changed. A kind of horror came over her expression.
“Wait a minute, what was his name?”
“Baz’s?” Angel asked, puzzled.
“Yes.” Santana was tapping frantically on her new phone—part of the emergency package the British Embassy official had arranged for us, so we could contact our families. “What was his surname? He only ever introduced himself as Baz to me. Baz from Effing Productions.”
I pulled out mine too and began searching back through the emails from Ari. It was true that Baz only ever signed off with his first name—his surname wasn’t even in his email address. But finally, deep down in one of the contracts, I found it.
“Basil Ferrier,” I read out. “Sounds kind of posh, doesn’t it? Not really in keeping with his man of the people act. No wonder he preferred going by Baz.” And then, as I realized the connection. “Oh, I get it now. Effing Productions. F for Ferrier.”
“Exactly. And—that was her name. The girl I went to school with—Cally. The one who killed herself. Her full name was Calista Ferrier. She told me once she had an uncle in Australia. She was Baz’s niece.”
I stared at her, and Santana stared back—holding each other’s gaze as the final pieces slotted into place and I felt a profound, terrible compassion for Baz sweep over me, in spite of his stupidity, in spite of the way he’d lied to us all.
