Beach Bodies: Part Three. Ross Armstrong

London, Waterloo, Rennie Street…

       01.33 a.m.

       02.10 a.m.

       02.52 a.m.

       04.44 a.m.: London, Waterloo, Rennie Street…

       Far away. But not so, so far…

       Acknowledgements

       Dear Reader

       About the Publisher

Previously in Beach Bodies…

       - Tommy’s head hits the sun-lounger, while his body leans against the Love Nest window high above.

       - Every single contestant on the show is in some way accounted for when it happens.

       - To further the mystery, Tommy is said to be the most universally loved of the group.

       - The only other person in the villa, Simon, their handler and psychiatrist, finally appears from his office below the building to tell them the show is over and they will be picked up in fourteen hours. They just had to see out the night. He explains that because the motion-intuitive cameras were still feeding back to London, the villa is, as strange as it may seem, the safest place to be.

       - However, during a session with Justine, she sees that the feed is actually down. But has he sold them this lie to keep them safe, or is he making excuses to keep them here? And what’s the cause of the meltdown he has when a local fisherman brings them wood for the fire?

       - During this episode a tense Liv brandishes a knife, which has a whisper of blood on it. She also has a small cut on her hand. Liv claims the wound got there when she cut herself on a different knife while chopping vegetables with Tabs, but others think this is the murder weapon and Liv could’ve injured herself on it in the act of killing Tommy.

       - Lance, however, has turned his attentions from Zack to Simon, whom he accompanies to his office, along with Dawn, to review camera footage depicting Liv’s story about the knife.

       - In the living room above, Liv tries to rally Sly and Summer to take a look at the body upstairs. But Sly in particular is reticent to do this. Not least because the only place there are no cameras, which he believes are still on and keeping them safe, is the Love Nest.

       - In the basement office, footage seems to indict Liv, but when they rewind the images and watch a second time, they do indeed show her cutting herself. Now Dawn definitely thinks that something ‘surreal’ is going on.

       - Zack heads out into the storm to try and locate the police on the island, as the group grow increasingly nervous that Simon hasn’t contacted anyone about the murder at all.

       - Liv’s suspicions about Lance deepen when she, Sly and Summer find no trace of a body in the Love Nest.

       - Far below, Lance, still suspicious of Simon after he seems to be trying to get the women alone, comes within an inch of strangling the doctor to death. As he lies on the carpet of the office, they find a piece of footage that shows Sly arguing with Tommy shortly before Tommy was killed.

       - When the power goes out, Sly goes missing.

       - We learn about Sly telling Simon stories about his military background.

       - Down in the office, Simon reveals he is not technically a doctor. He and Lance fight over a moleskin Simon has been using to take notes on them all. But it is Lance that gets shut out behind a thick panic room door, leaving Simon and Dawn alone together.

       - Justine finds Lance at the foot of the door exhausted from trying to get in. She slaps him hard and takes him back upstairs.

       - When the group come back to find Tabs alone breathing heavily and apparently in trauma, she reacts wildly to being patronised or cast as weak.

       - Simon and Dawn have sex in the office below. They have, in a bizarre twist of love and logic, been having an affair for some time.

       - The lights come back on. Sly’s body lies on a broken sun-lounger in the garden, his body thrown from a height and his throat slashed with what looks like the same serrated knife as the one in the kitchen drawer.

       - The group find fresh blood on it, but have no idea how anyone managed to spirit it away, let alone sneak it back into the drawer, without anyone seeing.

       - Out in the storm, Zack sees that there is no dormant volcano on the island, as Simon had claimed.

       - We learn that Tommy secretly kissed Liv late one night.

       - When we last left the villa, one of the group had woken up in a strange white room.

       - Lance had rallied Roberto and Summer to help him locate a low window to Simon’s office outside, so they can save Dawn from whatever Simon is doing to her.

       - And as the rain lashed down outside, they were coming for him…

8.41 p.m.

      Outside, Lance smashes the side gate in with one big kick of his size twelves, gaining some manliness back after he failed to even make Simon’s office door aware of his existence.

      He leads Summer and Roberto, who are engaged in another whispered argument, down the corridor-like path the window looks out on.

      The window that has metal shutters, just in case. Shutters that Simon took pains to close lest anyone see Dawn and he ensconced in that secret of their own. But, these three bodies, beaten by wind and rain, terrified by the volume of the thunder cracks violating the clouds, don’t know that yet.

      While Zack at least managed to grab his yellow mac from the hallway, these three are making do with the thin maxi dresses and tight T-shirts they were wearing when the day began, before any of this was even vaguely foreseeable, to all but one of them.

      The bedroom where their warmer clothes lie is exactly where Tabs, Liv and Justine are heading, having instantly opted to stay pro-active, and stay together. The three women turn the opposite way at the top of the stairs, away from the Love Nest, and down a slim corridor.

      As sheet lightning continues in the distance, Tabs proceeds to remind them how little she wanted to come up here, but not wanting to be left on her own again, felt she had no option.

      Cold air hits even before they get to the bedroom. Air they are all in need of; the extent to which smoke had filled the room from the fire was only visible when the power came on again. They’re thankful the dark is no longer adding to their high anxiety, but the foreboding of the cold shooting at them as they enter the bedroom confirms their suspicions.

      These are strange days when the world turns upside down. When day becomes night. Black becomes white. When the sun turns cold. And it rains indoors.

      The swirling rain pours onto them through the broken window. Liv is drawn to it immediately, joined by Justine, who whispers to herself in French as together they look down at the trajectory the body took and its landing point.

      The wind claws at Liv, beckoning her out to join him. But Justine holds her hand, as they look out to the