Stevie found that a lump of bile had surfaced in her throat, and she was balling her hands into tight, nervous fists.
“Hey,” she said.
“One second, Iz,” David said, slipping Izzy off his chest gently. She dropped down onto the pillows, all dead weight, and turned her face into their depths. David came over and motioned for Stevie to join him in the hall.
“She doesn’t seem . . . good.”
“No,” David said. “She’s not.”
“The car is coming in a few minutes,” Stevie said. “Do you want me to get your stuff together for you?”
“Izzy needs to stay here for a little while,” he said in a low voice. “She wants to be here. I feel like I should . . . stay with her.”
“Stay?” Stevie asked.
“Only for a few hours. There’s a train later this afternoon. And you have stuff today, right? Tea and a show or something? I can meet you after that.”
He was accurate—they did have plans all that afternoon. And sure, Izzy had suffered a huge loss and needed support. He was doing the right thing. But she had just entered the final twenty-four hours of her trip. Everything counted now. The car ride, sitting together on the train—all these moments she couldn’t have again, because she was leaving England.
She forced her face into something that was appropriate for the occasion—something serious, understanding. A heavy sadness started to fall over her limbs.
A few minutes later, a car came crunching up the drive, and then they were on their way back to London. Stevie turned to look at Merryweather as they went. It shrank in the distance before winking away through the trees.
“Have a nice visit?” the driver asked cheerfully.
The train ride back to London was subdued. Janelle and Vi sat on one side of a table and Stevie and Nate on the other. After Stevie recounted what she had learned from Julian, no one said much of anything for some time. Because what could be said? The trip had resulted in nothing but bad news. The weather was dreary. Rain spat at the train windows.
“Tea is at four,” Janelle finally said. “We should make it on time.”
Of course. Their final day. Tea and theater. Normal tourist things. This was supposed to be the celebration—the cherry on the sundae.
“What were you doing at breakfast?” Nate asked. “With the wine bottle. The whisky. What was that about?”
“I don’t know,” Stevie said. “I saw the empty wine bottle on the table, and I thought about how they were drinking that night. There’s this point in the night that almost everyone mentions—they come back in and have the fancy bottle of whisky. Everything kind of stops after that.”
“You think they were drugged or something?” Janelle asked.
Stevie shook her head noncommittally.
“I don’t know what I think. Just . . . something about it. It matters somehow.”
“Can I say something awkward?” Vi cut in. “You think one of your friends is a murderer. You accidentally say this out loud to your niece while you’re on painkillers. Your niece tells a bunch of Americans she’s just met, one of whom has solved a murder before. You tell your friends you should meet at the place where the murder happened. And then you leave the house, take a bunch of sleeping pills, and jump into the river.”
“And you leave one in the package in your purse,” Stevie said, “just in case anyone has any questions.”
“She was drugged and dumped in the river,” Nate said. “That’s what we’re all thinking, right?”
“Definitely,” Stevie said. “Probably.”
“But what can you do about it?” Janelle said. It wasn’t meant unkindly—it was a practical question. And the answer seemed to be, not much.
27
THE TEA WAS AT A HOTEL IN SOHO—SOME FANCY BOUTIQUE PLACE known for elaborate afternoon tea. They had all agreed to this, but as they approached the hotel doors, Nate started to backtrack.
“Maybe we could get actual food?” he asked. “It’s fifty pounds a person, and it’s just tea.”
“It’s tea, and sandwiches, and desserts,” Janelle said. “We have to do a British tea. Come on. We agreed to this. This is the last day of our trip, and we have . . . to make something of it.”
Instead of a fizzy, fun atmosphere, it was a somewhat grim group around the gaily laid table, with its lush arrangement of fresh flowers and a cheerful set of green-and-white china cups. Before them was placed a three-tiered selection of small sandwiches, cut into delicate, crustless rectangles. The waiter pointed at them in turn, introducing the smoked salmon with the filled cream cheese, the Stilton with apple and mayonnaise, the coronation chicken and celeriac, the Yorkshire ham and mustard. Another tiered dish came laden with scones and Cornish clotted cream, lemon curd and jam, tiny chocolate cakes, tarts of winter fruits and bramble jelly, spiced carrot cakes with cardamom. More and more things arrived at the table—all the little plates required for the little foods, the dish of brown and white sugar lumps, rough and uneven, the silver utensils and tea strainers and the tea strainer holders and the special knives for spreading the cream . . .
So many things.
It only served to remind Stevie of that dinner at Angela’s—the many bowls of curry, the rice on the side with the flecks of yellow on top, the half dozen or so chutneys and accompaniments, the breads and the popadams . . .
Angela talking about Anne Boleyn. The swordsman standing there, calling to an imaginary assistant to get the victim to turn their head to better meet the needs of the sword.
A ruse so you could murder them.
“Is anything wrong?” the server asked, concerned by the many untouched sandwiches and cakes. They all made for the food to show that they were fine, just normal tourists being normal at tea. Stevie ate a little chocolate cake. It landed in her stomach like a lump of wet sand. She checked her messages. Nothing from David.
How’s it going? she wrote. Do you know when you’ll be back?
No dots appeared. It was almost five o’clock. Their show started at seven. Richard III. Stevie felt like watching a play about as much as she felt like tipping this pot of scalding-hot tea into her own lap, but what else was there to do? Angela was dead. She’d failed, and she would be leaving England tomorrow.
The show was at the Barbican, which was a complex built of concrete—a fortress, sort of like the Tower of London, it was made of bare concrete lumps instead of stone towers. More brutalism, Janelle told them.
“How did anyone make something this ugly?” Vi asked. “They could have made anything at all, and they decided to make this.”
“I kind of love it,” Nate said, looking around. “It looks like the moisture farm that Luke Skywalker lives on.”
“Me too,” Janelle added. “It feels like a machine.”
“Two different ways of looking at a big concrete block,” Vi replied.
If you’d asked Stevie what Richard III was about, she would have said two and a half hours, with a few minutes in the middle to get some expensive M&M’s from the lobby and shove them down her face near a concrete pole. There were a lot of people in tunics running on and offstage, seemingly all of them named Richard or Edward or Lord this or that, with the occasional Catesby thrown in to keep things confusing. Stevie had her phone in her lap for the entire performance, checking for texts from David that did not come, much to the annoyance of the woman sitting beside her, who huffed and tutted until Stevie got up and sat in the lobby for the final fifteen minutes. She must have missed the scene where Richard begged for a horse. She could guess that he wasn’t going to get one. No horse for you, Richard.