Nine Liars (Truly Devious, #5)(35)

“I know,” Izzy said quickly. “It’s very hard for you, but . . . since Stevie is . . . well, an expert in these things, and it was never solved . . .”

Again, she waited for Angela to take the lead, but she did not. Despite what Izzy had told them, Angela clearly had no idea this was going to happen. Angela didn’t know they were coming, didn’t know she would be giving a history lesson, didn’t know about dinner, and hadn’t expected to talk about what must have been one of the most terrible days of her life.

“Izzy . . .”

“It really is all right,” Izzy said, even though it was not for her to say what was or wasn’t right for Angela. Janelle shifted in deep discomfort. Vi stared into the remains of the chickpea curry on their plate. Nate was so utterly expressionless that he was no longer with them in spirit. He had moved on to some other plane of existence. Even David gave Stevie a bit of concerned side-eye.

“When I was leaving uni,” Angela explained, “two friends of mine were killed. It was horrible. It was a burglary. They never found out who did it. For obvious reasons I don’t like talking about it.”

Which was fair. But there was something in her manner that suggested otherwise. She had moved to the edge of her seat on the sofa. She wanted desperately to talk, but she was stopping herself. Was Stevie the only one seeing this?

The surefire way to get someone to tell you something you want to know isn’t to ask them about it. What you do is start telling the story yourself, say what you think happened, and say it wrong. People may not want to discuss things, but they will correct you, every time.

“I think I read about this,” Stevie said.

“You did?” Angela said. “It didn’t turn up much in the news. I doubt you’ve heard about it.”

“Something about a game? At a manor? Hide-and-seek? And someone drowned?”

Izzy opened her mouth to correct Stevie, then seemed to realize what was going on and shut it.

“No,” Angela said. “Well, there was a game. It happened at a manor. But . . .”

“In a pool?” Stevie went on.

This was intolerable to Angela, both as the friend of the victims and as a professional historian. She couldn’t sit there and let this wrongness go on. She got up and went up the steps.

“Uh-oh,” Vi said.

Angela returned half a minute later with a small framed item, which she passed to Stevie. It was a poster, hand-lettered, photocopied on mustard-colored paper:

THE NINE PRESENTS

BINGO HALL SEX PARTY

45 MINUTES OF SKETCH COMEDY THAT YOUR AUNTIE WOULDN’T LIKE

There was a photo on the page—obviously a print photo that had been photocopied, so it was in black and white and not very sharp. Still, Stevie could make out clearly enough that these were nine people who wanted you to know this was comedy. They each wore a costume, but none that related to any of the others. There was a tall woman in a dirty formal dress. One was wearing a top hat. One of the guys was wearing nothing at all and had a bingo ball turner strategically placed over his groin.

“What happened was this,” Angela said. “When I was at Cambridge, I was in a theatrical group. There were nine of us. We met during freshers’ week and at some auditions in our first year, and we all became friends. We wrote and performed shows together.”

“The Nine?” Stevie asked.

“That was what we were called,” Angela said. “Despite how this looks, we weren’t bad. We weren’t the Footlights or anything like that, but we had a good following. We went to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival twice and did well. Sooz . . .”

She pointed to the tall woman dressed in the tattered evening gown.

“. . . is an actress. She does quite a lot of Shakespeare, occasional television. She’s always working. She’s an amazing impressionist. And Yash and Peter . . .”

She pointed at the guy wearing nothing and holding up the bingo balls, along with the guy in the cowboy outfit.

“That’s Peter, the naked one. And that’s Yash in the hat. They’re a writing team, and they work on loads of shows—comedy panel shows, sitcoms, all kinds of things. In fact, Peter and Yash just won an award for their latest show the other week. They’re always doing that. So at least three of us ended up performing. And I do some television work, so that’s four, I suppose. Anyway, we got a house together in our third year, all nine of us. We were each other’s entire lives, really. Sebastian’s family had a big house in the country called Merryweather. We would go there sometimes, after term. Our final year, after exams, Sebastian invited us there for a graduation party week. His family had gone away to their other house in Greece so the house was all ours. On the night we arrived, we were playing a game—a group hide-and-seek. We played it all the time. One person would start as the seeker, and as each person was found, they’d join the seeker team until only one person was left. We played until the early morning hours, but we went inside after the storm became too intense. Two of my friends—Rosie and Noel . . . we didn’t realize they were missing at first. We assumed they were . . . that they wanted time to themselves. In the morning, we found them in the woodshed. They’d disturbed burglars in the night, or the burglars disturbed them. Either way, they were killed, with a wood axe from the shed. They never found who did it. That is the story.”