Perhaps sensing that this was the wrong choice of words, he rubbed his eyes.
“It’s since been replaced for safety reasons,” he added. “Considering what had happened in there, we didn’t want anyone else hurt.”
Maybe it was all the time she’d spent around tour guides in the last week, but Stevie could now feel in her bones when the tour was coming to an end.
“Would you mind,” she said as Sebastian went to the door. “I have this school thing I have to do. I need to take some pictures, and it would be great if I could pose on the hay bales? Would it be okay to use one or two? I’ll put them back.”
Sebastian accepted this and left them, perhaps thinking that American schools gave out vague, hay-adjacent assignments and hoped for the best. It wasn’t entirely wrong.
“Hay?” David said as soon as Sebastian was gone. “What are you doing?”
Stevie closed the woodshed door, leaving them in darkness. She pulled her phone out and turned on the flashlight, pointing it toward the ceiling. She reached for the rope pull, but it was just an inch or two out of her grasp.
“Grab that,” she said to David. “Pull it.”
“Buy me dinner first.”
She elbowed him in the ribs, maybe a touch too hard, because he started coughing. He reached up and pulled on the rope, opening the hatch. There was a folding ladder, which Stevie indicated he should pull down.
“It’s a nice change,” he said. “Usually, we go into creepy holes in the ground. I’ve enjoyed going up into creepy holes instead.”
Once the ladder was down, Stevie wasted no time climbing up. She expected that she might be about to stick her head into the home of a million billion spiders, that would immediately swarm her. Instead, she got a strong smell of old leaves and dirt. There was nothing up there, really. Just a bit of dead space, about four feet high, containing nothing but dirt and a few broken-down cardboard boxes. She banged on the floorboards a few times with her fist, both to test their sturdiness and to shake out any mice or other creatures that might be around. No visible movement.
Stevie got as high on the ladder as she could, while resting her body on the crawl space floor and sliding along. She elbow-crawled forward. She pushed herself up to a crouch and went over to the window. It was even smaller than it looked from below. She tried to raise it up, but the wood had warped, and she was barely able to move it more than a few inches.
David hoisted himself up and into the crawl space to join her.
“This is nice,” he said. “What are we doing?”
Stevie scanned through the photos on her phone.
“Look,” she said. “Here’s the photo Sooz took when they arrived on the night of the murder. This window . . .”
She pointed at the window behind them.
“。 . . was closed. But then look at this police photo from the next day.”
Stevie had, of course, taken pictures of all the documents on the train. She pulled up the police photo that most clearly showed the outside of the shed.
“It’s open,” she says, pointing at the window. “Sometime between the night they arrived and the time the police were here the next day, this window was opened. Sebastian just said the floor up here was rotted away and there was no access. And look . . .”
She pulled up another crime scene photo, one that showed the blood splatter on the ceiling. It also clearly showed the hole where the rope pull should have been.
“No rope,” she said. “So how does someone come up to this supposedly inaccessible place to open a window a few inches after a murder?”
“Does it matter?” David asked. “Nobody could get through that.”
“Well, not nobody. There are people who can disjoint their collarbones and squeeze through dog doors. Or people who can do certain contortions.”
“So, creepy people. Or circus folk.”
“Also, why? They busted the lock off the door. Why dislocate your collarbones and crawl through an impossible opening when you can go through the door? Which is what happened.”
“Maybe the police opened it?”
Stevie frowned.
“Policing was different then,” she said. “Crime scenes weren’t handled as well. But I feel like they wouldn’t open the crime scene window and then photograph it that way. There’s nothing in these reports about coming up here. I mean, I read them pretty quickly on the train, but I would have seen something about a crawl space above the murder site. That’s kind of critical. No. The police had no idea this space was here. They never looked.”
“What does that mean?” David asked. “Someone came to a place that seems to be inaccessible, to do something that has no point?”
“It means,” she said, “that this matters. This crawl space. That window. This whole woodshed. It’s locked, it’s unlocked. The floor is rotted and there was no way to get up here, yet someone was up here.”
“You make it sound like Sebastian was lying about the rotted floor.”
Stevie was silent for a moment, as the last of the daylight ebbed away.
“Maybe he was,” she said.
“But Sebastian was the one person everyone could see the whole time, right? Up at the folly? So why lie about this? I don’t get it.”
“I don’t either,” she said. “We better get back inside. I think we may have left our friends with a murderer.”
20
DINNER, AS THEY SAY, WAS SERVED.
Merryweather’s dining room was the kind of place that could accommodate eleven people for dinner and have plenty of room to spare. Because it was used for weddings and events, there were multiple tables and chairs folded along one of the sides of the room. There was a massive silver mirror over a marble-tiled fireplace. The walls were papered in a buttery yellow silk with a painted pattern of crawling vines, birds, and flowers.
“Forgive the simplicity,” Sebastian said as everyone was seated. “I just had time to put together a basic menu.”
A woman appeared from a hidden door that blended right in with the rest of the wall. She was short, with close-cropped black hair and an intricate tattoo sleeve of twisted ivy, flowers, and barbed wire.
“This is Debbie,” he said. “She’s the events manager. I asked her to pop round and give me a hand.”
A general round of hellos for Debbie.
The basic menu started with a cauliflower and chive soup, served up in plain white catering china, along with baskets of warm bread. Debbie served these to each person as Sebastian wound around the table with bottles, pouring drinks.
“White or red?” he asked as he got to Stevie. “I have sparkling elderflower as well.”
Stevie had had wine before, but no one with an English accent in a long dining room in a country house had ever approached her before to offer her wine like she was an actual goddamned fancy adult. Because she was not one. An adult. Or fancy. She didn’t come from the kind of family that had wine with dinner. They had Diet Coke, like decent Americans. If her parents had been offered red or white wine with dinner, they’d probably have pulled a gun in surprise.
“Uhhhhhh,” she explained.
Sebastian gracefully turned to Izzy to give Stevie time to compose further remarks.