My body seizes, knowing before I do that maybe this place is still unsafe, that someone might still be here. The thought shakes me and I immediately check under the beds, beneath the covers. I check the hanging light, beneath the shade; someone in a movie I saw once found a bug there.

Once I’m satisfied there’s no active danger I shut the door, press my back against it and let myself fall to the floor.

I’m not safe now. This proves it.

And if I wasn’t sure whether there was a killer on the island before – if I thought maybe it was someone who’d gone, or died, and that I was reopening a case that had croaked long before I had laid eyes on it – then I certainly don’t think that now. There’s still a killer on Sandown Bay, and they’ve been in my room. Our room. They know about what I’m really doing here and aren’t happy about it.

In a panic I try Peyton’s phone but it goes to voicemail.

But it’s not that the killer was trying to prevent me from telling – they can’t be that dumb. I can get new equipment, obviously, and even if I couldn’t there’re ways of information-sharing unencumbered by whether I own a microphone. This wasn’t strictly prevention – this is a message meant to frighten me.

I realize I’m muttering to myself, a steady chorus of shits that I make an effort to stop to focus my thoughts. I feel like I’ve been playing pretend this whole time and only now am I being tested, and I’m alarmingly underprepared. Not just unprepared. I didn’t even know there’d be a test.

Idiot. Did you think you could waltz on to an island and piss everyone off and solve the mystery with flying colours? You have no idea what you’re doing. You’re a historian. Not even that. You’re a record-keeper. You’re a leech.

Sylvia was right; Peyton was right. I shouldn’t have done any of this.

I take a picture of the mess with my phone before moving anything, just in case.

There’s nothing out of place on the front door – handle on, lock works, door clicks when it shuts. I check the window and the balcony door – both shut, and there aren’t any footprints along the side of the building, on our balcony. I doubt whether anyone would even be able to scale the wall in the first place.

If the windows are fine and the door isn’t marked then they must have had a key. Or Peyton left the door open, but I don’t think she’d do that, and they would have had no way of knowing definitively that she would have.

We can go with the key for now.