“What happened was this,” Angela said. “When I was at Cambridge, I was in a theatrical group. There were nine of us. We met during freshers’ week and at some auditions in our first year, and we all became friends. We wrote and performed shows together.”
“The Nine?” Stevie asked.
“That was what we were called,” Angela said. “Despite how this looks, we weren’t bad. We weren’t the Footlights or anything like that, but we had a good following. We went to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival twice and did well. Sooz . . .”
She pointed to the tall woman dressed in the tattered evening gown.
“。 . . is an actress. She does quite a lot of Shakespeare, occasional television. She’s always working. She’s an amazing impressionist. And Yash and Peter . . .”
She pointed at the guy wearing nothing and holding up the bingo balls, along with the guy in the cowboy outfit.
“That’s Peter, the naked one. And that’s Yash in the hat. They’re a writing team, and they work on loads of shows—comedy panel shows, sitcoms, all kinds of things. In fact, Peter and Yash just won an award for their latest show the other week. They’re always doing that. So at least three of us ended up performing. And I do some television work, so that’s four, I suppose. Anyway, we got a house together in our third year, all nine of us. We were each other’s entire lives, really. Sebastian’s family had a big house in the country called Merryweather. We would go there sometimes, after term. Our final year, after exams, Sebastian invited us there for a graduation party week. His family had gone away to their other house in Greece so the house was all ours. On the night we arrived, we were playing a game—a group hide-and-seek. We played it all the time. One person would start as the seeker, and as each person was found, they’d join the seeker team until only one person was left. We played until the early morning hours, but we went inside after the storm became too intense. Two of my friends—Rosie and Noel . . . we didn’t realize they were missing at first. We assumed they were . . . that they wanted time to themselves. In the morning, we found them in the woodshed. They’d disturbed burglars in the night, or the burglars disturbed them. Either way, they were killed, with a wood axe from the shed. They never found who did it. That is the story.”
“But what about the lock?” Izzy said.
Angela didn’t exactly scream or throw a plate across the room, but the word lock had a chilling effect on her. She cocked her head to the side. For a moment, she made no reply, before coughing out a “What?”
“The lock,” Izzy repeated. “Your friends were found in a woodshed that was supposed to be locked. You told me, you said the lock was off the door in the night.”
The color was draining from Angela’s face.
“When did I ever say that?”
“When I was staying with you after you had that surgery on your knee, earlier this year.”
The mood in the room changed completely.
“There’s nothing about a lock,” Angela replied in a way that made it clear that there was something going on with the lock.
“You said something about planted evidence, and that . . .”
Angela was no longer trying to disguise her discomfort.
“It was strong medication, Izzy.”
“You said you thought one of your friends was a murderer. I know this is terrible for you, but it was real. I could see it was real. Stevie can help. She’s done this before.”
Doorknob worked the ankles of the assembled as the awkward silence fell over the group. That had effectively cut the conversation off. There would be no more talk of murder.
“I hate to be rude,” Angela said, “but I have an early call in the morning and more work to finish up tonight.”
“What did you think?” Izzy said when they were back on the street and walking toward the Tube entrance.
“It was . . .”
What had it been? Evasive, for sure, but evasion was a reasonable response to a group of foreign teenagers showing up at your door unannounced and then being asked to talk about the greatest trauma in your life. But there was something there—a look in Angela’s eye when that lock was mentioned. The lock had not been conjured out of prescription opiates. The lock was real, or it was a genuine memory. The memory might be faulty, it might be irrelevant, but it was one she’d had long before she took her pain medication, and it was one she had right now. It had conjured something in Angela that Stevie couldn’t place.
“It was odd, wasn’t it?” Izzy went on. “She didn’t want to talk about that lock. There’s something there, isn’t there? I wish you saw what I did when she was on those painkillers.”
The ride back was less crowded, but Stevie found that the food had settled happily in her belly and now her body was sedate. The train rocked. London whipped past in a series of Tube stop names and flashes of tile and tunnel and people. She sat on one of the upholstered train seats （fabric seats on a subway? That seemed risky. What lived on these seats?）。 She put her head on David’s shoulder and began to drift.
“Hey.”
The shoulder bumped, and Stevie snapped up her head with an audible snort.
“We’re here.”
Stevie had heard of jet lag, but she didn’t really jet that much, so was not sure what the lag was supposed to feel like. Apparently, this was it. You just fell asleep. She was in a stupor, dragging herself along, back to Craven House.
“You’re toast,” David said, running a finger along the edge of her chin when they got back. “You’re going to crash. Jet lag is worse the second day. I have some work to do tonight. You should sleep.”
She didn’t want to be tired. She wanted to go somewhere with him now. But it wasn’t happening. Her body was turning out the lights for the night.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “After you’re done. Want to go on a date?”
“A what?”
“I know, right? A real date.”
“Gross,” she said.
He smiled, kissed her, and she dragged herself into the elevator with the others. Once in her room, she pulled off her clothes as she walked and flopped onto the bed. She listened to the squeak of the plastic against the frame, looked at the corona of light coming from the streetlamp outside. Someone kicked a glass bottle on the street, and people were laughing. Her stomach was full of curry. Her hormones were dancing and her vision was blurring from exhaustion.
There’s nothing about a lock. It was strong medication, Izzy.
Angela was lying to them. Why? Why bother lying when she could have been dismissive? Why say there’s nothing about a lock when everything about your voice and body says there was definitely something about a lock, and that the lock was important?
As she winked out of consciousness, Stevie caught the tail end of a realization. She knew the emotion she’d seen playing over Angela’s features as she’d been telling her story. It wasn’t sadness about what had happened, or annoyance that she was being prodded to tell a traumatic story to a bunch of strange teenagers in her house.
It was fear.
EXCERPT FROM THE WITNESS STATEMENT OF ANGELA GILL
24 June 1995
Q: Can you describe the nature of the group here at the manor right now?