How to Kill Your Family(18)

CHAPTER FIVE


I didn’t much want to kill Andrew Artemis. It had to be done, of course, I knew that and held firm, but I wasn’t prepared for one of them to be so, well, nice. The research I’d done on his relatives had been thorough, meticulous, I suppose one could argue obsessive. And from that, I’d come to know just how morally rotten this family was. It made it easier to focus on the task at hand, knowing that I wasn’t taking anything decent away from the world. In my head, I had even begun to explain away my wholly personal pursuit as a public good. The Artemis family were the embodiment of toxic capitalism, a vacuum of morality, a totem of greed. God, I was insufferably young.

The ease with which I offed Jeremy and Kathleen emboldened me. It was luck really – one dramatic swerve of a wheel and they whooshed off a cliff, not even a scratch left on Amir’s car to cause suspicion. So many things could’ve gone wrong, so many things that make me wince when I look back on it. And if anything had gone differently, I might have lost my nerve, reassessed my plans, or worse – been caught. But I wasn’t. I had a full house that night. Frankly, the considerate way my grandparents died so fast meant that I carried on. I can thank them for something at least.

Andrew was the son of Simon’s brother Lee and possibly the hardest to glean any reliable information about. He wasn’t present at any of the grotesque family parties, where waitresses dressed up like peacocks (thank you gossip columns for that titbit) and neat lines of cocaine laid out on silver platters were offered about by dwarves in top hats. He wasn’t on the family yacht come summer, oiled up and lying out on the deck with Bryony and her thin, bronzed friends. He didn’t even have a token job at Artemis HQ, the looming building off Great Portland Street where an immaculate grey Bentley idled outside whenever Simon was at the office, the nouveau version of raising the flag whenever the queen is at home. Even Tina, my Artemis informant – someone I’d begrudgingly befriended when I worked there (I’ll get to that) – couldn’t help me much when I cast around for information about him, vaguely saying that she thought Andrew ‘might have followed his own path’ when I texted her to ask why he wasn’t mentioned in the magazine coverage of the annual Artemis charity ball. As usual, I couldn’t push her too far on these matters. I had to let her lead, so as not to raise any red flags, and my cousin clearly didn’t interest her at all.

I knew something was really up when Andrew was a no-show at his grandparents’ funeral (that was a deliciously strange event to witness from a respectful distance). I persevered. When Facebook failed to locate him, I set up a Google alert on my young cousin and waited patiently. Eventually I found a mention of him in a local online freesheet, a profile of the work some old crusty was doing on marsh frogs in an area of wetlands in East London. Once I’d boned up on what exactly a wetland was, I realised that Andrew, perhaps more than me, had strayed far and away from the family Artemis. Saying something, when you consider that my very existence had been denied since birth.

Andrew wasn’t trying to bulldoze the wetland and build a factory for small children to make flammable polyester clothes, nor was he intent on rounding up the marsh frogs to use their skin for designer handbags like most in his family would have suggested if the profit margins were good enough. No, he was volunteering, helping to observe mating behaviour, ensuring that these hideous creatures had a place to live and thrive. And for next to no money. Honestly, if I’d not driven his grandparents off that dusty Marbella road, I think they’d have done it themselves upon hearing what their grandson was doing with his life.

It quickly became clear that the work I’d put in at the Artemis company would count for nothing if I wanted to try to get close to Andrew. In fact, I suspected it would actively count against me. From the casual enquiries I had made when I worked at Artemis HQ (depressingly few given my decidedly junior role), it seemed that my cousin had cut himself off from the family some years ago, barely speaking to his parents from year to year. Ironic really, in the Alanis Morissette definition (who really understands what irony is anyway?), that I’d spent so long trying to smuggle my way into the Artemis inner circle and my cousin had broken out just as determinedly.

But despite his obvious intentions to lead a different life, he was still one of them. Still likely to be welcomed back with open arms if he got bored of helping disgusting frogs gentrify East London – which, let’s face it, seemed likely. And crucially, still a potential beneficiary when the rest of the family died (and as you know, I was helpfully hastening that day along). So I did what I had to do. I researched frogs, bought a hideous windbreaker and signed up to a volunteer scheme at the Walthamstow marsh project.

I once watched one of those ‘based on a true story’ movies on Channel 5 late one Sunday night. It was about a high-flying city woman who packed it all in to live the simple life tending to goats in the hills. She renounced her designer bags and (the obviously male director’s eye played heavy here) her vapid life. She saw the purity in earth, in nature, in getting back to the land. It was glossy and the leading lady wore pristine overalls and the sun shone – and for a brief minute I was seduced (before I remembered my pressing family extermination goals). My tenuous point is, the Walthamstow marsh project will never be the setting for anything remotely similar. Nobody is coming away from this particular section of nature with an inspirational tale. Nobody will ever learn that the greatest love in life is loving yourself while wearing a hairnet and rubber gloves, so as not to contaminate the sacred frog area.