Gravis, 18, was from Portland, in the state of Maine. She had recently graduated from secondary school and was visiting England for the first time. She had been staying with a friend studying at Magdalene College. Gravis spent the week sightseeing and socializing. She was last seen by her friends at 2.00 a.m. on the morning of 15 June. The friends had been having a small party for Samantha’s last night in Cambridge. She was planning to move on to London to continue her trip. Her friends said that Samantha was moderately inebriated and in very good spirits that night. She told them she had something she needed to do and refused the offer of company on her errand. When she failed to return by the next morning, her friends went looking for her and then alerted the police.
Gravis had expressed to her friends the desire to go punt running—the local Cambridge tradition of running along punts as they are tied up at dock. They had dissuaded her from doing so on previous occasions.
“From our conversations with her companions, we believe the deceased may have been inebriated and punt running,” said Detective Chief Constable Nigel Rose. “She had a small wound on the side of her face, consistent with a fall. We believe she was temporarily knocked unconscious, and she drowned. Her body drifted and her foot became stuck on a shopping trolley that was on the bottom of the river. We must emphasize that punt running is extremely dangerous and results in many injuries. This tragic event is evidence of that.”
“I assume this was what she means by the thing in the paper,” Stevie said. “Does this mean anything to you?”
Izzy read through the article and shook her head.
“No,” she replied. “No idea. I mean, aside from the fact that it’s dated the same day as the murders.”
Stevie took the page back. She had missed that. Sloppy. She couldn’t be sloppy.
It didn’t seem likely that Angela just collected newspaper articles from the day of the Merryweather murders. This person, Samantha Gravis, had something to do with the case. A quick Google search turned up very little—nothing more than the article had provided. She was American. She was visiting Cambridge. She hit her head and fell into the river and died.
“An American girl falls into a river in Cambridge and dies,” Stevie said. “A week later, there’s a story about it in the paper. That same day, the Nine leave for Merryweather and two of them are murdered that night. Whoever Samantha Gravis is, she has something to do with this case.” Stevie tapped her nails on the table. It was so much to take in. “Okay . . .” She looked at the pile of information. “We need to read through all of this.”
They passed the documents around. Stevie began with the crime scene photos. The woodshed was a plain wooden structure with a peaked roof. The wood was variegated, brown in some places and an ashy black in others. It had a solid wooden door with peeling gray paint, partially open. Directly above it was a small ventilation window, much too small for a person, which was propped open a few inches. There were close-up photos of the door and the handle. The door had a rough wooden handle, and the lock system was a metal latch with a padlock. This had been ripped away with a crowbar or some other tool, splinting the wood. The lock was still intact. Just outside the woodshed, about four feet away, there was an overturned wheelbarrow and a bucket in the mud. The interior of the shed was dark in some photos. These revealed a plain, rough space, the back of which was covered in stacks of wood, which also spilled onto the floor. There were scattered tools on the ground—a rake, a shovel. Stevie had to squint to see the form of a human leg coming out of one of the piles.
She did not have to squint in the next few photographs. These were illuminated by police lights, and they showed the true horror of what had taken place. She set the photos down and Izzy reached for them.
“Just so you know,” Stevie said, “they’re rough.”
Izzy picked them up anyway and winced as she sifted through them.
With the picture of the scene in her head, Stevie glanced through the autopsy report, not that there was much of a mystery as to what had killed Rosie and Noel. She exhaled slowly and looked out the window. The backs of houses were gone. Suddenly, they were somewhere entirely different, an open place, with great spreads of land, cut through and quilted into patches by lines of trees or high hedges. Some of these patches of land had horses or sheep or cows grazing. They were in the country now. London was gone, and a different England presented itself. The spaces were wide and wild. And for the first time since this started, she felt a real sense of the danger here.
Angela had not gone off to be by herself. Someone had taken her. Because of this case, because of something she knew or might have been on the verge of knowing. And they were all going right into the heart of the beast. To Merryweather. To the Nine.
18
THEY DISEMBARKED AT CHELTENHAM.
There were several cabs waiting by the station, none of which were the fancy black cabs. They were just normal cars with decals on the side. David, Izzy, and Stevie got into the one, with Janelle, Nate, and Vi following right behind.
“We’re going to Merryweather,” Izzy said to the driver. “It’s . . .”
“I know where it is, love,” the driver replied. “I drive people there all the time for weddings.”
They were off, down tight roads lined with cottages. Then they were out of the town, driving past fields neatly checkerboarded by hedgerows and rustic fences. The turns were many, and tight, and came without warning. Stevie let out an involuntary low scream as a van came barreling right at them. Izzy smiled and patted her arm. The taxi driver, completely unfazed, pulled as far off to the side as humanly possible, the hedges scraping the car. The van squeezed by, inches from the cab.
“He just went the wrong way?” Stevie said, turning around to watch it drive off.
“This is a two-way road,” the driver said. “You’re American? You have quite wide roads in America, don’t you?”
This was not a two-lane road. This was a tiny, tiny, tiny path surrounded by a high wall of greenery that blocked the view. It was a deathtrap, a meandering thread of madness. It suggested that there was something about English people that she may never understand.
She looked to David, who had the decency to look a little startled himself, though he had not actually screamed.
They turned down an even more narrow road, which ran along a low stone wall and ended in a gate. The driver, seemingly used to this, accessed a button that was concealed on a panel in the overgrowth. After a polite pause, the gate swung inward. They drove down a track between a higher brick wall and trees, and then the vista on the left opened onto something that was right out of any one of the many period dramas or mysteries that Stevie had seen. There was a vast house of sand-gold stone that seemed to be alive with climbing vines of a shocking autumnal red.
“Can’t pull up the front,” the driver said, guiding the car into a gravel parking area off to the side. Moments later, the second car stopped next to them.
“I’m never doing that again,” Nate said, stepping woozily out of the back of the car. “Whatever that Six Flags reject ride was.”
“It was a small road,” Janelle said, looking equally uncomfortable. Only Vi seemed to have enjoyed the experience.