Page 6 of The Perfect Guests
“I do. Mum says everything happens for a reason, and I think you came into our lives for a reason. I really do think we’re going to be best friends.”
I couldn’t help but return her smile. “Yeah, well, that sounds good to me.” I glanced at the alarm clock on her bedside table. “But, um—can I have a bath before dinner? I feel a bit...” I picked up a lank strand of hair and dropped it again.
Nina laughed. “I’ll show you where your bathroom is.”
I followed her back down the spiral staircase with a cautious, unfamiliar sense of optimism unfurling inside me. Perhaps it was true—perhaps Nina and I might end up being best friends after all.
Sadie
January 2019
Wendy is as good as her word, and the Raven Hall invitation is delivered to Sadie’s flat the next day, along with an incredibly chic old-fashioned suitcase withSadie Langtonprinted on the luggage label. Sadie studies the front of the heavily embossed card:You are cordially invited to play a Game at Raven Hall.She flips it over to read the details:Chauffeur to collect you 5:00 p.m. Drinks in the drawing room from 7:00 p.m. Dinner and the Game to commence 7:30 p.m. in the dining hall.Beneath this is a handwritten line in looping blue ink:Thank you so much for agreeing to join us—it will be a weekend to remember!
Sadie carries the case through to her tiny sitting room, and she blinks around, looking for a clear surface to lay it down on. The coffee table is covered in paperwork—lists of auditions, bank statements, budget plans, job adverts, a half-written letter... She plucks a couple of empty mugs out of the way and sets the suitcase on top of the layers of paper.
She’s hoping the case contains clothes, and she’s not disappointed. There’s a choice of three vintage evening dresses, each in a different shade of cream or off-white, for the dinner on the Saturday night. A cream woolen skirt suit and a blouse, for wearing at breakfast on the Sunday morning. Two pairs of ivory shoes, one with high heels, the other low. A string of lustrous pearls in a velvet-lined box. A silver brooch shaped like a bird in flight. And, to top it all off, a beautiful white faux-fur coat. She examines each item in turn before laying them out on the sofa behind her.
Underneath all that is a folder of instructions, which begins with a character description for Sadie’s part in the game. She will be Miss Lamb, “newly arrived in the area and seeking employment at Raven Hall.” The mystery central to the game won’t be revealed until the guests sit down to dinner, the folder tells her. Miss Lamb’s preliminary alibi is enclosed in a separate envelope, but Sadie is instructed not to open this envelope until after she’s arrived at Raven Hall, just before she goes down to the drawing room for the predinner drinks.
Sadie hesitates. She’s never been good at obeying rules, and this tendency has lost her two jobs in the past year alone, and on each occasion, she vowed to herself that she would turn over a new leaf. A memory of her mother’s pained expression flashes into her mind—“Not again, Sadie. What did you do this time?”
Reluctantly, Sadie sets the alibi envelope to one side. She still feels perfectly justified in what she did, as it happens. She’d hated pestering her customers at the department store to take out the store’s credit card, and her refusal to try to improve her take-up figures led to sharp words in the manager’s office, followed eventually by her being told not to bother coming back. And then, the corner-shop job—all that expired food she was supposed to throw into the bins when there was nothing really wrong with it... Whenthe owner realized she was leaving some of it out by the back door for hard-up locals to help themselves to, she was instantly fired.
Sadie sighs.
But on the other hand, this murder mystery weekend isn’t an ordinary, rule-bound job, is it? At its heart, it’s just a game, and she’s pretty sure the other guests will cheat too...
She squeezes her eyes shut in a silent apology to her mother, and then she snatches up the envelope and tears it open.
A small square card informs her:Miss Lamb,you spent the morning alone in your bedroom, writing letters. You took a walk around the garden with Colonel Otter before lunch. At some point between two and three o’clock in the afternoon, you visited Lord Nightingale in his study. You can’t remember the exact time, but you were in there for less than five minutes.
Sadie smiles to herself. This is going to be fun.
She tries on each of the dresses in turn, twirling in front of the full-length mirror by her front door to assess their fit. Most of Sadie’s own clothes are secondhand—she loves hunting down bargains in charity shops—so she has an idea of what these vintage items might be worth, and she feels flattered to be trusted with them. They’re all beautiful, but the ivory silk dress is the best; it’s so smooth against her skin, she could close her eyes and forget she’s wearing it. The pearl necklace adds the final touch of sophistication. Rather more upmarket than the mermaid costume, she thinks wryly.
She sends a quick text to Wendy to confirm she’ll accept the job. Then she starts up her laptop, and types in“Raven Hall, Fens.”
Within seconds, she’s gazing at a grainy photo of a neglected-looking country house with a tower at one end. Ivy hugs its walls, and for a moment, she envisions it surrounded by a thick forest, like a Sleeping Beauty castle, and the image makes her smile. But asecond view, from farther away, shows only a bleak, empty landscape all around, with a glint of dark water in the foreground.
She skims down the other search results, but there isn’t much. A ramblers’ group blog entry from a couple of years ago describes the house as having been“abandoned and uncared for since a tragedy befell a local family in the late 1980s.”Sadie clicks back to the photo and peers at the hazy smudging on the pale walls around one of the upstairs windows. It looks like soot—perhaps there was a fire there. How awful. And how sad that the house then sat empty for thirty years—but what a perfect location it makes for a murder mystery event.
If the glossy invitation and the attention to detail in the suitcase of clothes are anything to go by, the company has the funds to have turned Raven Hall back into a comfortable, welcoming place, Sadie thinks. But even if it hasn’t been restored—even if she turns up and discovers it’s still a crumbling wreck—she’ll follow through with the job anyway. Her mother’s landlord hasn’t yet returned the house deposit, and Sadie can’t push her overdraft any higher; she doesn’t have any other options. She’ll cheerfully camp out in a soot-blackened room in a mansion heaving with ghosts if it means she’ll get paid this month before her rent’s overdue. Besides, the game sounds like it will be fun.
Beth
July 1988
Nina gave me the beginnings of a house tour before dinner. We started downstairs, in the drawing room, and I could have spent ages in there alone, looking at the paintings and the grand piano and the black marble fireplace. My fingers itched to stroke everything, but I clasped my hands firmly behind me. Nina was already marching back out to the hall, and I hurried to follow her.
The dining room felt as big as the entire footprint of my old house. The kitchen was similarly huge, with a rich aroma drifting from the enormous oven. I could see no evidence of meal preparation on the long wooden work tops, and I wondered fleetingly whether the Raven Hall family did the same as the children’s home, buying in meals that had been prepared off-site. Nina went straight to the open French doors and stepped out onto the terrace, and she gestured at the wide lawn in front of her.
“What would you like to see first? Do you like raspberries? We could go and pick some.”
My stomach rumbled, but Leonora bustled into the kitchen behind us and interrupted.
“Dinner in ten minutes, girls. Leave the raspberries ’til tomorrow, okay?”
So, instead of heading outside, Nina led me down a short corridor from the back of the kitchen to a long, narrow room that I guessed was meant to be used for laundry. A wooden work top ran all the way along one wall, with a huge double sink at one end, but there were no clothes or drying racks to be seen. Instead, the whole of the work surface and much of the tiled floor were covered in piles of paper. Drawings, paintings, and sketches were stacked haphazardly on every surface.
