Page 106 of A Game of Lies

Pam’s eyes are shrewd. ‘It’s a recording, isn’t it?’

‘Was Miles’s death fake?’ Ceri looks at the others. ‘Is he still alive?’

Jason gives a humourless laugh. ‘He won’t stay that way for long, if he is.’

Aliyah gasps. ‘Is this all part of the show? Are we still being filmed?’ She looks at Owen, but he’s not holding a camera.

‘Officer.’ Lucas steps forward. ‘Will someone please tell us what’s going on?’

Leo ignores them all. ‘Where’s Henry?’

Everyone looks around.

‘He’s in the room next to mine,’ Pam offers. ‘But I haven’t seen him.’

Aliyah cries out again. ‘Has Henry been murdered?’

Leo doesn’t answer. He reaches Henry’s door in six long strides and, for the second time in a week, kicks open a stable door.

It’s empty. Henry’s gone.

FORTY-THREE

TUESDAY | FFION

Ffion’s chest is tight. She forces herself to slow her breathing. It’s claustrophobia, that’s all; there’s plenty of air. Plenty, she tells herself, over and over, because her body doesn’t seem to be getting the message. It’s hammering her heart and squeezing her throat shut so she has to drag each shallow breath past the blockage.

She tries the door again. She thinks back to watching the contestants enter the confession pod and she doesn’t recall seeing a lock, so the door must have jammed somehow; perhaps a log fell across the door or a clump of earth or … On and on Ffion runs with this stream of thoughts, because that way she doesn’t have to face up to what she knows is the truth.

Henry has trapped her.

‘Hey!’ Ffion shouts.

Was that a sound she just heard? A rustle, like an animal in the trees. Like a hunter, watching his prey.

Why has he shut her in here? Perhaps he’s just buying himself time to make his escape, in which case she just has to sit tight and wait. And it might be a while, and she’ll have to keep telling herself that tightness in her chest is panic, not a heart attack, but eventually, they’ll find her.

Or does Henry have other plans for her? Now that he has her trapped, does he plan to silence her?

In which case, Ffion needs to get out. Fast. She takes out her phone and dials 999, ignoring the lack of signal, hoping that somehow the call will get through. Even if the operator can’t hear her, if the call connects they can trace the number, they’ll know it’s Ffion and—

The call fails. She tries again and again, but it’s no good.

She looks at the narrow band of glass that runs around the top of the pod. It’s too high to reach, but if she climbs on to the back of the chair … She looks around for something she can use to break the glass, but there’s nothing. Even the camera is just a lens, embedded in the smooth walls. She climbs anyway, taking a second to weigh up the usefulness of her phone, before smashing it against the glass. The phone shatters instantly, but the band of toughened glass doesn’t so much as chip.

What was that noise?

A whirring – no, more mechanical, like someone turning a handle. Ffion jumps off the chair and looks around for the source of the noise. She catches something out of the corner of her eye and turns to see a piece of wall moving. The section is circular, about the size of a fist.

The size of a drain, Ffion sees now, as the circle completes its hundred-and eighty-degree turn to reveal a black pipe. That’s where they came from, she realises: the spiders, the rats, the snakes. Poured in, tumbling over each other and falling into the dark, coffin-like room. Forcing confessions.

Ffion backs into the corner furthest away from the pipe. Pointless, of course, because whatever Henry is about to inflict on her won’t confine itself to the opposite side, but it’s giving her space, it’s giving her time in which to compose herself.

And Ffion can handle this. She’s not frightened of spiders, and granted, she’d prefer not to be covered in rats, but it’s all about mental strength, right? She breathes deeply –in, out, in, out– and tries to remember the contestants’ discussion about their phobias.

I hate spiders, Aliyah had said, and sure enough she’d been faced with them when her turn in the confession pod came. Pam was rats; Lucas was snakes …

What were the others?

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