Page 73 of The Perfect Guests
“LeonoralovedMarkus,” Beth said to Sadie afterward. “He meant everything to her. He was the love of her life.”
“Was he?” Sadie replied. “Or did he always come second to Raven Hall?”
Beth had frowned. “Well, there’s no way she could have known he’d fall through, anyway... No. Much as I’m happy to believe a lot of bad things about Leonora, I can’t believe she’d stoop that low.”
Sadie wants to believe her mum is right, but she still finds the very suggestion unsettling. While Nina awaits her trial in a cell, Leonora is out on bail for the historic poisoning of her daughter; she’s still, as far as Sadie’s aware, holed up in her little seasidecottage, brooding on the loss of her ancestral home. And in an ironic twist, Leonora is providing evidence for the other major development in the far-reaching investigation.
When the police collected the game cards that the dinner guests had been given, they noticed that the comments on them were uniquely personal. Sadie can still remember the gist of hers:You must have been a great disappointment to your mother, unable to hold down a job...
But in among the other sly, mean-spirited jibes, one guest’s card—its gravy-stained quarters carefully pieced back together—stood out for the specific and serious nature of its accusations. Nina’s attempt to unsettle her guests and prick their consciences has resulted in a fierce spotlight being turned onto Roy Everett.
At the same time that the police began investigating the thinly veiled accusations on Roy Everett’s card, several women who’d seen him on news footage of the incident at Raven Hall came forward to put on record that he’d behaved inappropriately toward them. Some of the allegations are worse, but Sadie and Beth aren’t privy to the details. However, Roy Everett will be facing his own trial in due course, and Sadie trusts that justice will be served.
“Okay,” Wendy says, dabbing crumbs from around her mouth. “I can see your mind’s on other things. Have a brilliant time in America, won’t you? Give me a ring when you get back.”
Sadie gives her a quick hug good-bye. Hendrik has bought tickets for Sadie and Beth to fly out tomorrow, to visit him for a couple of weeks. Beth nearly declined the offer—not least, Sadie suspects, because she doesn’t like the idea of being away from Joe for that long. But Sadie talked her into accepting it; the timing is perfect—they’ll be back just before Sadie starts her new job. And she’s looking forward to seeing her great-grandfather again in person. They Skype every few days, but it isn’t the same.
But before they fly out, there’s one more invitation that Sadie has talked Beth into accepting. The new owner of Raven Hall—a Mr. El Daly, former investment banker and inventor of an encryption process that made him a fortune—has offered to show them around the newly repaired and refurbished Raven Hall. Beth was hesitant at first, but she surprised Sadie by warming to the idea.
“I think it might help, actually,” Beth had said, once she’d thought about it. “I’m done with trying to block out the past. This might make it easier to move on.”
Sadie knows that Joe—or Jonas, as Beth still insists on calling him—has played a large role in Beth’s newfound positivity. Beth has been staying with Sadie in Sadie’s flat for the last few months, but the arrangement will come to an end soon, because Beth and Jonas are going traveling. They’ve planned a six-month round-the-world trip together, making up for the years they lost. It makes Sadie smile every time she thinks of it.
As Sadie climbs into her car, her mind drifts back to Wendy’s other question:“Have you seen any of the other guests?”
She did, in fact, meet up with Nazleen and her wife for drinks a couple of months ago. They skirted around the subject of Raven Hall, and they made vague promises to meet again, but she’s not convinced they’ll follow through.
Genevieve, she saw in the distance at the police station a few weeks ago, when she and Beth went in to discuss their statements. Sadie pointed Genevieve out to Beth, but the young woman was too far away for them to attract her attention and say hello.
Zach, Sadie hasn’t seen at all. Even Jonas commented that the doctor’s son has been lying low since the accusations against his father began to rumble around the village.
Sadie finds it sad that, after those intense few hours they spent together at Raven Hall, Nina’s seven intended victims have beenscattered apart. Of course, Sadie and Jonas are connected now, by Beth, so they have each other to talk to when they need to off-load about the events of that night. But Sadie worries about the other innocent guests—Nazleen, Genevieve, and Zach. The police told her about Nina’s daisy notebook, filled with observations Nina had made when she was spying on Beth’s house and, it transpires, on the homes of Sadie, Everett, and Jonas too. Is it worse to be a targeted victim, like they were, or to be collateral damage, like the others?
Sadie puts all such questions out of her mind as she arrives at her flat to pick up Beth. It’s time to return to Raven Hall.
Leonora
She follows the same routine every morning. Takes a brisk walk to the beach and back. Makes a black coffee. Fires up the laptop she bought at great expense from the soft-spoken man in the computer shop. Checks the day’s news headlines. Then she types in her usual search term:“Raven Hall.”
After weeks of pulling up the same old news reports and photos, today she sees a new article at the top of the list. Her heart beats faster as she clicks on the link and waits for her feeble broadband to respond to her command. She’s only sixty-four, but her joints are aching today, despite all the ginger tea she’s been drinking and her frequent dips in the sea.
Finally, the article loads.
“Take an exclusive peek at the magnificent interior of newly refurbished Raven Hall,”it says. “Mr. El Daly, thirty-seven, shows us the grand new staircase and the luxuriously refitted reception rooms, all completed with carefully sourced materials and ethically produced furniture to delight any guest.”
She winces as she scrolls down.
“Following the devastating fire and near loss of life at RavenHall a mere six months ago, many locals feared the house would once again fall into disrepair. But under the meticulous guidance of its proud new owner, the transformation is truly remarkable.”
Leonora’s smile is sour as she scrolls through the photos. How has it come to this? Nina, her only daughter, is languishing in a prison cell. And this stranger is now the legal owner of Raven Hall.
Leonora knows how hard Nina will be finding her loss of freedom. After Markus died, Nina never did settle at the seaside cottage. She moved out as soon as she turned sixteen, and she led an itinerant lifestyle for years: traveling with a loose group of friends, picking up temporary work, visiting Leonora only when it happened to suit her.
Sometimes, on those unannounced visits, Nina would bring gifts that hinted at where she might have been living—punnets of strawberries, baskets of apples, trugs of parsnips with the soil still clinging to them. Occasionally, she brought people with her, and Leonora would feed them all a hearty meal while sneaking glances at their matted hair and unwashed clothes. On one memorable occasion, Nina set down an apple basket in the hall as she came in, and it took Leonora twenty minutes to realize there was a baby inside it. Leonora dashed to the shop for formula milk, and the infant guzzled it as if it hadn’t been fed for days.
Hoping to encourage Nina to settle down, Leonora transferred a hefty chunk of her inheritance into Nina’s bank account. But if Nina ever spent more than a bare minimum of it on herself, Leonora saw no evidence of it, and Nina continued to disappear for months at a time.
Until last year.
