He crossed his long legs and sat back in the position of a person who is about to tell a tale.
“My father, the late and unlamented fifth viscount, was a bit of a bastard. He had one child, me, and he did not want a gay son. He made that very clear. So I took that as a challenge to become the most flamboyant, most lively person I could be. I drank. It was university. Everyone drank. That’s how it is. But I really drank. I took all the prizes. I also smoked a remarkable amount of cannabis. I read chemistry, believe it or not. Always been good at it. That may be why Theo and I have always been so close—we’re the science-y ones. Of course, she worked bloody hard and I worked as little as possible.
“There are four grades when you take your exams and leave Cambridge. You can get a first—that’s for the brilliant people who kept their pencils sharp and put in the hours. That’s what Theo got. Then there’s a two-one and a two-two. Those are the middle grades. The two-one means you did quite well indeed. The two-two is acceptable and maybe you enjoyed a little too much sport and time at the pub, but good enough. A third means you made it through somehow. And because the exam results are ranked, I worked out in advance how to do the absolute bare minimum and still pass. I wanted the bottom grade. I got the exam paper, did precisely what I needed to do, then was the first one to walk out of the exam room and make it down to the pub. I took great pride in that. It didn’t matter anyway because I wanted to act. But then, it happened. The events of June 1995.”
He looked up at a massive black bird that had landed on the head of the figure on the fountain and was cawing at them relentlessly.
“I do not handle complaints in person,” he said to the bird. “Please contact us via our website.”
This seemed to satisfy the bird. It flew away.
“So,” he said, “I went to London. I had some money—a little something that came to me from a relative. Not a lot, but enough to get a grubby flat, which I shared with Sooz. She put her all into auditioning and performing. I put everything I had into being the very best lout I could be. Things got very, very bad indeed. I started taking any drug I could get my hands on. I never wanted to think or remember. Sooz tried to help me, but I think I could get away with some of it making it seem like I was just a bon vivant. A year and a half after the incident, it all came to an end. I found myself on the floor in the toilets of some club, the paramedics over me. Who even knows what I’d taken. I wound up in the hospital getting my stomach pumped. Apparently, it was quite a close call. My family wasn’t speaking to me at the time, because of the drugs. It was this lot . . .”
He pointed in the direction of the house, but Stevie knew he meant his friends.
“。 . . who came to my side. It was Theo who was there when I opened my eyes. They talked to me. They got me into a program. They supported me every step of the way. I got clean and sober and I remain clean and sober. But I think it’s because I went down very low and got quite a lot of therapy that I overcame the horror of it. Or I learned to live with it. I came out the best of all, but I had to go all the way down before I came back up. And I was gifted with this place. I’m the lucky one, and I never, ever forget it. The others are . . . lonely. Theo is an emergency doctor, so she barely has time for herself, let alone anyone else. Sooz has partners who come and go. Angela was married to Marvin, but . . . I never saw that lasting, and it didn’t. Peter’s been married twice, and both times it ended badly. Yash never seemed to have any luck in the romance department, though I think there’s someone he’s been pining for, for many years. Julian, well . . .”
He shrugged apologetically.
“Julian is the textbook politician. The one who gets caught cheating and has to give a speech about the mistakes he’s made. But he is very good at what he does, so his constituents vote him back in. Which is the right thing to do if you ask me. He works very hard. But I think it . . . if I say it cursed us, that sounds diabolical and supernatural. I mean that it broke us all in some way. We’re still the Nine. We’re still in many ways the most important people in each other’s lives. As long as we have each other, that’s all that matters.”
Those words struck her. His friends—they were all that mattered.
She had lied to her friends. She was in the state of lying at this very second.
“Come on,” Sebastian said, standing up and breaking the mood. He led them back the way they’d come, out of the back gardens and off to the side of the house, where there was a garage and two parked cars.
“Over here,” he said, leading them through a few trees.
And there it was. The woodshed. It was bigger than it looked in the photos.
“I should tear the damn thing down, but it feels wrong,” he said. “I can’t do it.”
The door of the woodshed was new, and it locked with a normal door key, not a padlock. Sebastian opened this, revealing a plain box of a space, containing a rider mower and dozens of hay bales. The windows were coated with old cobwebs that had stuck together and formed gray strips, and the windowsills were lined with cans of WD-40 and other cans and bottles of oils and garden sprays. It smelled of sweet hay and gasoline. This was not the first time Stevie had stood at the site of a murder. What struck her here, as it had in the past, was how ordinary it was. No neon sign. No arrow. No statue or marker. It was a shed—a big shed, but a shed. She walked its perimeter to get the size of it. It looked to be about ten feet by fifteen feet or thereabouts, something about the size of two cars. It appeared to be in the same condition as it was in the photographs, not freshly painted, but in a similar state of faded gray and brown. She examined the door. The latch had been replaced, of course, but upon close inspection she could see minute scars in the wood where the old latch had been ripped away.
There was something else in what Sebastian had just said—the thing about the death cap mushroom. It looked so innocent. So dull. So ordinary.
“Just a nasty old outbuilding,” he said, looking around. “I don’t use it for firewood anymore. Built a new shed for that. Now it’s mowers and these hay bales, which we use for event seating outside. Sit around the fire on an autumn evening, have a hot chocolate or a nice glass of port.”
Stevie looked up and around. Something was confusing her. Something she’d just seen, or hadn’t seen, in those crime scene photos. The shed had a window, high up, near the peak of the roof. When she looked up now, there was no high window, no peak. The ceiling was flat, and now that she thought about it, it was lower than the overall height of the building. Which meant there was something above them. A quick scan of the ceiling revealed a rope pull and the faint outline of a pull-down opening.
“What’s up there?” she asked.
“Just a crawl space,” he said.
When you want someone to tell you something—don’t ask, tell it wrong.
“Oh,” Stevie said. “That’s where the robbers hid, right?”
“Oh no,” he said. “No. No, that wasn’t used. The floor was rotted away.”
“So no one could have hidden up there?”
“No.” Sebastian shook his head. “My parents sealed it up. It was a deathtrap.”