“I thought of that. She sends the texts, realizes she’s made a mistake, then takes off. But . . .” Stevie shook her head. “Did you see how many cat toys were in that house? The pictures? She loves that cat. She’s not going to leave her cat, not without telling anyone. She’s not going to leave that mess. She’s not going to go without mentioning something to Izzy—anything, just to keep her from worrying.
David leaned back against the headboard.
“So what does it mean that her phone last pinged by the river on the night she vanished?”
“What do you mean?” Stevie said. “I thought it was near Waterloo Station?”
“Which is directly on the river. It’s near where we were the other night, close to the Eye.”
See, this was the kind of thing Stevie needed to know to figure out what the hell was going on here.
“Well, that’s not good,” Stevie said. “I think we can say that Angela is not safe right now. If we want to find Angela, we have to figure out what happened here.”
Stevie felt like the answer was dangling nearby, in her peripheral vision. If she turned her head too quickly, it would move. Maybe if she stayed very still, it would float into view. She went over to the window, opened it, and got a face full of cold, autumnal air, loamy and refreshing. It was so dark here. She could see so many stars flecking the sky, and there was a fat moon, glowing white.
Another knock on the door. Even softer. David called for them to come in.
“Sorry,” Izzy said. “Am I disturbing you?”
“No,” David said. “We were just talking.”
Izzy came inside like an embarrassed ghost and shut the door. She took a seat in one of the lavender-colored armchairs in the middle of the room.
“They’re in the sitting room talking about shows they used to do,” Izzy said. “Julian seems to be the only one doing anything. And the thing with her phone . . . should we go back to London right now, to where her phone last was? Why isn’t her phone on?”
“So many things could be going on,” David was saying to Izzy, trying to reassure her. “She could have just dropped her phone. Or gotten rid of it.”
“Why would she get rid of her phone?”
“If she’s investigating,” David said. “She doesn’t want to be found. She’s working the case. Right? She could be working the case.”
This was to Stevie, who was too distracted by leaning out the window to answer.
“Do you think we should go back to London?” Izzy said. “It’s late for a train, but maybe we could borrow a car.”
Such an easy fall out this window. Why had she come to the window? Something made her want to come to the window. The window. The garden.
“Stop,” she said, holding up her hand.
This was a weird and dramatic way to break into a conversation, but it had to be done.
She slid the fire safe out from under the bed. Even though she had scanned the documents, she wanted to see the original photo for a moment. Feel it in her hand. She dumped all the pictures on the bed, all those scenes printed up in a large, glossy format. She shuffled through them, pulling out the one of the exterior of the woodshed and the one of the missing rope pull. She had snapped a picture of it from the inside before they left the crawl space. She pulled it up and stared at it.
“What did your aunt say to you again?” Stevie asked Izzy. “What exactly did she say?”
“What I told you. She said the lock was off the door. She said she thought someone—”
“About the planted evidence. What exactly did she say? This is where you need to think carefully, remember what you can. Did she say evidence? Or did she just say planted? Or . . .”
Izzy sat neatly on the edge of the bed and concentrated.
“I can’t remember precisely. Let me see. The day she told me, I’d been down to Sainsbury’s. I’d gotten her a bunch of soups, and I made her a leek and potato. She was on the sofa in the lounge, watching telly. I think she was watching the Channel 4 news. And . . . that’s right. There was something about a murder. That must have been what made her say it.”
Izzy did what Stevie did—link events, make a story in her mind.
One continuous picture . . .
“And she said, something along the lines of, ‘My friends were murdered, did you know that?’ And I said I did. And she said something about how it was all wrong. It was wrong because the lock was off the door. That she thought someone she knew committed murder. And then . . . she mumbled about the planted things.”
“Did she say planted? Or did she say plants?”
Stevie had locked in on Izzy now, watching her expression. Izzy’s eyes were drifting in a way that all the body language books she’d read suggested that she was remembering or trying to recall.
“Planted. Plants. Planting? I don’t know. I thought she said planted, because that made sense, but . . . now that I’m saying it . . . maybe she was saying plants?”
Plant-based. Planted. Planting. Plants in the garden below the window . . .
“Plants,” Stevie said.
She had no immediate follow-up to that.
“Plants,” David repeated.
Stevie remained silent.
“What’s happening right now?” Izzy asked.
David motioned for her to wait.
Stevie felt the thing that had evaded her creep into the corner of her vision.
“The window doesn’t need to fit people,” she said out loud. “It’s the Orient Express. God, they said it. They practically told us.”
“What’s happening?” Izzy asked again.
“Something,” David replied. “We never know until it happens.”
Oh yes. Something was finally happening.
The six of the Nine were still exactly as Stevie had left them, though some had moved on to glasses of whisky. Sebastian was pouring himself a cup of tea. Stevie, Izzy, and David joined them and they were all welcomed graciously and offered tea or whisky. David helped himself to the whisky, while Izzy sat down next to Theo and tucked herself in tightly. Stevie went straight across the room to the fire.
“Everything all right?” Sebastian asked.
“We need to ask you about something,” Stevie said.
From this position in front of the fire, she could be seen by everyone. This made her butt very hot. She tried not to think about this. She reached into her hoodie and produced one of the crime scene photos.
“What is that?” Yash said, leaning forward. “Is that one of Sooz’s pictures?”
“It’s a police photo.”
“How did you get a police photo?” Julian said.
“This,” Stevie went on, “is a photo of the exterior of the woodshed on the afternoon after the murder. This photo shows the scene as it was found. Notice the window is open . . .”
She passed the photo to the nearest person, who happened to be Sebastian. He took the photo in silence and stared at it before passing it on.
“But something doesn’t make sense about that,” Stevie said, “because in the photo you all took when you arrived, the window is closed. Why was the window closed before the murder but open the day after?”
“The burglars must have done it,” Theo said, barely glancing at the picture as it went past her.