“Rosie,” Peter said, making his way through the orchard. “She needs you.”
A faint sound from somewhere above.
“Rosie needs you, Noel,” Peter said. “She needs your help.”
The rustling grew louder. Noel slithered out of a tree just behind him.
“What’s wrong with Rosie?” Noel asked, dropping from the lowest branch.
“There you are,” Peter said with real relief in his voice. He switched off his torch. “She’s asked for you. Come on.”
“But what’s wrong?” Noel said, allowing himself to be led through the darkness.
“Have to be quiet,” Peter replied. “Come on. You’ll see.”
They almost ran into Sooz on the way, but they managed to stay hidden. Peter found that he was almost looking forward to what was about to happen. It was so terrible and huge that it bred a queasy, wild anticipation. He was aware that something odd was happening in his mind, that he was so swamped with adrenaline and champagne that he had developed an intense focus. The life-or-death moment brought forth the heaviest chemicals the body could produce.
Peter unlocked the shed while Noel hid behind. He had one hand on the axe as he waved Noel into the darkness with the other.
Noel never knew what happened. Of that, Peter was sure. The first swing seemed to land somewhere around his ear, his face, probably. Knocked him sideways. Confused him. Peter swung and swung again.
He covered Noel with the same care that he had shown to Rosie.
He was back outside at two fifteen. The storm was getting worse. He moved away from the woodshed in the fulsome darkness, crossing around to the opposite side of the house. Then, as if on some celestial cue, the power cut out.
Everyone retreated back inside, shivering, pulling off wet slickers and clothes, wrapping themselves in the woolen throw blankets, opening more champagne. And there was Sebastian, crawling along the floor with a candle in his hand, trying to get to some bottle of whisky that his father loved so much. He would need a key to open the cabinet.
It was like the universe gave him a path, or perhaps it was that life becomes simple when your choices are few. Here was his chance. Peter dropped to the floor and joined Sebastian’s little play while fumbling with the set of stolen keys, looking for the one that might open the cabinet door. Triumph. The cabinet was opened, the whisky procured, and the keys put back into Sebastian’s hand as if they had never been gone.
Just one more thing to do. This required being seen going to bed. He claimed that he might be sick, which was true enough, and retired to his room. He waited over an hour on his bathroom floor, trying to hold himself together and finding that he was doing all right. Theo would come around with water like she always did after a long night. He wanted to be in the room when she made her rounds. It was a good thing to know your friends so well. Within the hour, he heard Theo enter his room and call out for him. He answered from behind the bathroom door that he was fine.
She left the water.
Once Theo was gone, he did a quiet creep around the upstairs, checking rooms and mentally marking where everyone was. Angela, Yash, and Theo had retired to their rooms. That left Sooz, Julian, and Sebastian. He took the back stairs down to the main floor and lurked by the sitting room door for a moment to count the voices he heard inside. Sooz was having a go at Julian. Good for Sooz. Sebastian sounded bored by the discussion.
Everyone accounted for. He could now complete the cleanup.
First, he would need clothes. The Nine swapped and shared clothes, so it was an easy enough matter to get some from someone else. Noel would have been ideal—he wasn’t around to notice—but Noel was very slender and wore vintage clothes, usually from the 70s. It seemed like a bad idea to clean up his murder scene in a tight pair of flares. He needed something less distinctive that wouldn’t be missed. Julian, then. He was downstairs, and surely he had a pair of track bottoms and a T-shirt that would do the job. And if the clothes were discovered to be missing? Not a bad thing. Next Peter went back to the mudroom, where he slipped on a pair of wellies and a pair of gardening gloves and grabbed a garden spade from a shelf. He took a careful path to the woodshed, using the house and garden walls for cover. He had to work quickly. The birds were starting their dawn chorus and the sun would soon rise. The reality of what he had done would come down, crashing, falling scenery. It would all be real. He forced himself to carry on. Just a little more and it would all be over. First job: force the door open to make it look like a robbery. It was, after all, an outbuilding full of cannabis. He used the spade for this. It took a few tries and he almost broke it in the process, but the wood finally gave and the door snapped open. While it was partially a relief not to be able to see much inside, he had to check the scene. He swung the torchlight over the piles of wood, the broken bulb, the blood on the floor. He pulled the wheelbarrow out and tipped in on the ground outside the shed, making it look like someone had been disturbed in the process of taking it.
The axe was a more difficult matter. Peter felt a rising nausea as he picked it up. The blade was covered in blood and . . . things he could not force himself to look at. He replaced it where it was usually kept by the door. In a final attempt to literally muddy the evidence, he bucketed some of the rainwater from the barrel outside onto the floor, destroying footprints and washing blood into the cracks and corners. He poured more on the strip of grass and mud that ran between the shed and the gravel drive to confuse any footprints outside of the shed as well. Those wouldn’t really matter anyway—all of those would be standard wellie footprints anyway, and the grounds would be littered with them. They’d all been wearing wellies that night.
He was about to return inside when he had a final idea. Why not add one more thing to confuse the timeline? He crept along to the front of the house and saw that there were still lights on in the sitting room. A few people were still awake. He got as close as he dared, turned on the torch, flashed it straight ahead, then turned it off and ran back the way he came. As he entered, he could hear Sooz calling out for Rosie and Noel.
Peter went up the back stairs and into his room. He removed his clothes and shoved them under a curio cabinet to get rid of in the morning. Taking a bath or a shower would be too loud; he washed himself quietly at the sink. Then he threw up in the basin. He got into his bed.
He drank the water Theo had brought for him.
Of course, the police would come in the morning. They’d find evidence of a break-in interrupted. They’d find all that cannabis. Sebastian might go down for that, and he was sorry.
It was over now. Nothing else to be done. He would be a good person to his friends. He would help them through this. Peter felt nothing but goodwill and charity toward everyone and everything. He would make something of himself. None of this would be in vain.
He sank into a deep and dreamless sleep.
31
THE GLASS TOWERS OF THE CITY OF LONDON TWINKLED BEHIND them. The pod juddered. The Nine sat, an attentive if confused audience.
“I’m going to tell you a story,” Stevie said. “That’s all I’ve got for you right now is a story. But it’s a story that makes a lot of sense. It’s a story that fits the evidence. It begins with an American named Samantha Gravis, who was visiting England and pretending to be a Canadian. You all met her. Julian and Yash hooked up with her. She had your address, and she had some of Yash’s CDs. She was likely on the way to your house when she died in the early morning of the fifteenth of June, 1995. It seemed to be a case of a tourist who got drunk and was screwing around on a boat on the river in the dark, fell, and drowned. You said your house was on the river, and you said there was something in the backyard—the garden, whatever—a tent?”